Bernard: Black History Month

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(Host)
Commentator Emily Bernard is an associate professor of English and
Ethnic Studies at UVM. She says that back when she was preparing the
syllabus for her fall semester course "Race and the Literature of the
American South," the irony of teaching The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn during black history month didn’t occur to her.

(Bernard)
As you may know by now, Black History Month was initiated by African
American scientist Carter G. Woodson in 1926. Originally, it was Negro
History Week. Today, it is officially called African American History
Month.

This is a month to celebrate black heroes, and this year
the theme is "Black Women in American Culture and History." Featured on
the Black History Month website are images of Phillis Wheatley, a slave
wrote poetry and challenged the common concept that black people did not
have the capacity to make art.

Another image features the
singer Marian Anderson who famously performed on the steps of the
Lincoln Memorial in 1939 after the Daughters of the American R evolution
refused her permission to sing in Constitution Hall.

Then
there’s the elegantly dressed Mary Church Terrell , a daughter of
slaves, who became one of the first African American women to earn a
college degree.

These images remind us that this celebration was
created to counteract the popular black stereotypes that once dominated
our cultural landscape, like Toms, Coons, Mulattoes Mammies and Bucks,
to quote from the title of a book by Donald Bogle – in other words, the
very stereotypes that Mark Twain employed in creating the character of
the slave, Jim, in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn .

If Black
History Month is the time to celebrate heroes and positive images of
African Americans, then where does Jim, a slave, fit in? He’s often
referred to the book by the racial epithet we call the "n word." He’s
been called a minstrel figure, there to amuse the reader and to serve as
the butt of Huck’s jokes. Some say he has the only noble role in the
novel. But enough people find his portrayal so offensive, and the
epithet he’s called so painful, that the book continues to be banned
from libraries and classrooms across the country.

Still, I think
it’s possible that Jim stands at the very heart of why we have Black
History Month at all. If African American abolitionist Sojourner Truth
represents freedom; Jim represents our yearning for it. While W. E. B.
Du Bois was an articulate scholar, writer and political activist, Jim,
the slave, was, for the most part, voiceless. The heroes we remember
during African American History month were exceptions to the rule that
Jim represents.

African Americans have made tremendous progress
since 1885, the year that Huck Finn was published in the United States .
But the simple fact is that the book is still difficult for many
African Americans to read without re-living, in some part, the painful
experience of the past that continue to echo into the present. When we
think of Jim, we recognize just how great our progress has been – but we
also can’t help but realize just how far we still have to go.

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