Do you remember what Frederick Douglass wrote regarding the Fourth of July?
“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim,” he wrote.
“To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy.”
We should remember that 2013 marks the eightieth anniversary of the publication of Dr. Carter G. Woodson’s book The Mis-Education of the Negro. It was first published in 1933, and what Dr. Woodson wrote 80 years ago is relevant to this day.
Dr. Woodson argued that African Americans of his day were being culturally indoctrinated in American schools. This conditioning causes African Americans to become dependent and to seek out inferior places in society. He challenges his readers to “do for themselves,” regardless of what they were taught.
Dr. Woodson stated, “When you control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his ‘proper place’ and will stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told. In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one for his special benefit. His education makes it necessary.”
Dr. Woodson also noted, “Negroes have no control over their education and have little voice in their other affairs pertaining thereto. In a few cases Negroes have been chosen as members of public boards of education, and some have been appointed members of private boards, but these Negroes are always such a small minority that they do not figure in the final working out of the educational program.
“The education of the Negroes, the most important thing in the uplifting of Negroes, is almost entirely in the hands of those who have enslaved them and now segregate them.”
Dr. Woodson told us that we must learn our own history, even if we have to educate ourselves at home. We are not in control of our children’s education, and therefore we are partly responsible for their lack of knowledge of their history.
Please watch the Bernie Hayes TV program Saturday Night at 10pm and Friday Morning at 9 am and Sunday Evenings at 5:30 pm on KNLC-TV Ch. 24. I can be reached by fax at (314) 837-3369 or e-mail at: berhay@swbell.net.
