Black History Month

Via TJC

"Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path." — Psalm 119:105

Prove me wrong, but what makes us American is this: outrageous beginnings and unyielding tenacity in a world that was not yet home. Most of us share that origin story: ancestors who arrived under circumstances no reasonable person would choose. Some fled persecution. Some chased promises. Some were conscripted into wars the moment they stepped off the boat.

And then some came in chains, with no choice at all. 

If outrageous beginnings and unyielding tenacity is the measure of American, then some stories are so deeply American they demand to be honored. 

Imagine this scene: 

The house had gone quiet. The last creak of the boots on the stairs had faded an hour ago. Now came the waiting, that particular stillness where even breath felt dangerous.

A hand touched a shoulder in the dark. A nod no one could see but everyone understood. They rose, all five of them, bare feet finding the places in the floorboards that wouldn't creak. The youngest, perhaps seven, knew to grip her mother's hem.

Up through the house they climbed, past the second floor where the children slept, which alone would get them killed. Up they went to where the roof slanted low and summer heat lingered even in November. In the corner, beneath a board that looked no different from any other, lay the thing worth dying for.

The father's fingers found the edge, lifted it, and reached into the darkness below. What emerged was wrapped in cloth and handled so carefully you'd think it was made of glass.

A Bible. The Word of God. 

They could not all read, but one could. An old woman, her hands bent from decades of labor, traced the words by the stub of a candle. They leaned in. She read low, barely above breath, with the others close as if the words themselves gave warmth.

She read of Israel in Egypt. The people who made bricks without straw. The Pharaoh whose heart turned to stone. She read about the cries that rose to heaven and a God who heard. She read about Samson and David and Isaiah, who stood when strength seemed gone.

She read the declaration: The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit. - Psalm 34:18. 

And she read about Jesus Christ. 

They knew the penalty if discovered: the lash for certain, sale perhaps, maybe worse. The laws of the land declared this gathering a crime: reading, assembling, daring to find themselves in holy scripture. Yet here they were, risking everything for the same Book that was displayed in the parlor below.

When the old woman closed the cover, no one moved. They sat in the dark, holding something no law could confiscate. They hid the bible under the floor board. Then, one by one, they crept back down to their quarters, carrying within them words that would outlast the institution, outlast times when the whole world seemed like it was on fire.

That's quite an American beginning. Across the sea, they don't understand us and they never will.

Black History Month

This month, we honor African American history and the people who built, invented and believed: George Washington Carver, who transformed the peanut into an empire of innovation. Harriet Tubman, who walked back into hell to bring others out. Frederick Douglass, who made his voice a weapon. Rosa Parks, who sat down so a movement could stand up. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who dreamed in public. Thurgood Marshall, who argued justice into law. Katherine Johnson, who calculated trajectories to the moon. John Lewis, who crossed a bridge and kept crossing bridges until the day he died.

In 1926, a historian named Carter G. Woodson set aside one week in February, chosen for the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, to remember what America had been trying to forget. Fifty years later, that week became a month.

The real remembering never stopped: the God of the Exodus is still in the deliverance business. 

Black History Month gave the nation permission to say out loud what those gathered around forbidden candlelight always knew: this American story matters.