#black-history-month

#black-history-month

If you know anything about the basic origins of Black History Month then you know that we weren't given' anything. The question of who owns and authorizes Black History Month holds particular relevance now, in its centennial year, and at a time when efforts to celebrate, preserve, and acknowledge Black people's past in this country are under attack.

The people carrying the heaviest weight are often the ones least likely to speak up. They're balancing Q1 deliverables with questions that never make it to a staff meeting: Does anyone see what's happening? Will anyone acknowledge it? If I speak up, what does it cost me?

On March 2, 1955, nine months before Rosa Parks' more famous act of defiance, Claudette Colvin, a Black high school student in Montgomery, Alabama, was arrested after refusing to give up her seat on a public bus to a white passenger.

They offered a rare window into the lives, struggles and aspirations of African Americans, and a way for me to feel connected to a community far beyond my immediate environment. Through Ebony, I was introduced to towering figures such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Their courage, moral clarity and commitment to justice shaped how I thought leadership and service.

In any liberal morality play, Democrats always get to be the shivering, oppressed black people, while Republicans have to play the part of Bull Connor, Birmingham, AL's racist commissioner of public safety. Except the facts are exactly the opposite. I'm sure you're bored of hearing this, but Connor was a Democrat, as were all the politicians promising "massive resistance" to racial integration. Republicans were the ones forcing Democrats to abide by federal law, along with a few John Fetterman- style Democrats.

For it is in examining the people like Dr. King, that we can see how yoga can not just make us feel calmer and more peaceful, but can really affect change in a world that is in deep need of healing. By his words, and more importantly his actions, Martin Luther King Jr. showed many of the principles that are central to and deeply embedded in yoga philosophy.

She remembers walking with her big brothers down a sidewalk fractured by the roots of old oak trees while children played hopscotch on the playground. She remembers going outside and clapping erasers together so that plumes of chalk dust rose above her head. And she remembers being told that she was attending a school that many white parents had taken their children out of just a few years earlier because they didn't want them sitting in class with Negroes.

The park will "honor our greatest Americans, including black icons like Booker T. Washington, Jackie Robinson, Aretha Franklin, Coretta Scott King, Muhammad Ali, and many others," the action reads.

February is Black History Month, and we've put together a list of ways to commemorate the occasion. From new exhibits and films, to history tours and Black-owned tastings, there are a number of ways to celebrate Black culture this month.

King's intuition was that white people with lower incomes would support this type of policy because they could also benefit from it. In 1967, King argued, "It seems to me that the Civil Rights Movement must now begin to organize for the guaranteed annual income . . . which I believe will go a long, long way toward dealing with the Negro's economic problem and the economic problem with many other poor people confronting our nation."

To be Black in the U.S. has such an expansive meaning that traces back to Europeans deciding who got to be "white." While some people, like the Italians and Irish, earned their way into "white-ness," those with even a drop of Black in their heritage were relegated to the lower rungs of the racial ladder.