I asked a group of children, Bb children, why Black History Month is celebrated during the month of February. None of them knew…then I realized, many do not know why. Our history and culture has been caricatured so much that the memes and messages about our heroes and contributions to societal strength are unknown.

I draw from a well that runs deep

Deep like the rivers

Of Mississippi, Hudson, Passaic, Raritan and Delaware

Emptied from the Senegal, the Congo or maybe the Nile

Whose soils and softened shores I have never known...

Uncertain and yet I care

To know and wonder.

I wrote an essay on February 2nd 2020 called Why We Need BHM in Times of BLM, unsuspectingly, days before the world shut down. I wrote it as a model for students to demonstrate how to tie “old texts” into new contexts and document important perspectives. Reflecting on it now, I still love it but I realize it is not enough. 

This entry is a love letter to them…a reminder to the children of BB, Bb, and bb genotypic character who find themselves in an America that would be oddly familiar to our ancestors that we have a history and a heritage of excellence in the United States. To the Black and Brown children, adult and young, we have heroes, super and elegantly normal, who deserve to be celebrated and re-membered in our times and forever.

Look at what AI will do with a style guide and prompt…do you see us? In this moment, is this us?

Here are some of our heroes…now ancestors whose love for us shines brightly…

Frederick Douglass

Sojourner Truth

Ida B. Wells

Anna Julia Cooper

Charles Henry Turner

Percy Julian

George Washington Carver

James Weldon Johnson

Booker T. Washington

Madam C.J. Walker

W.E.B. DuBois

Pauli Murray

Thurghood Marshall

Walter White

Katherine Dunham

Josephine Baker

Barbara Jordan

Gwendolyn Brooks

Toni Morrison

Ralph Bunche

Bayard Rustin

Mary McLeod Bethune

Henrietta Lacks

John H. Johnson

Robert S. Abbott

Nikki Giovanni

Ella Baker

Septima Clark

Fannie Lou Hamer

Carter G. Woodson

These are just a few of my heroes, restoring their legacies in my memory and right-now consciousness. There are many people who have made US better; lifting every voice in this moment, I hear and see our past and celebrate how it made US, how it made me. Their stories help guide US in this moment because we have been here before. Their DNA is ours. Their stories are our own. We are not our ancestors, we are surely not better than them…we are them.