The 2011 wish for the
AmericanStudies Elves with which I inaugurated my calendar of American Memory Days.
In the Roman Catholic community,
almost every day is dedicated
to a particular saint, allowing for each of these significant and inspiring
figures and lives to be remembered in his or her turn. The saints’ lives mean
and symbolize many different possible things, of course, and so I’m sure that
each Catholic, each family, and each church have their particularly significant
saints and days, as well as their unique and contextualized ways of remembering
and celebrating. Yet the calendar of saints’ days nonetheless serves as a
broadly communal connecting thread, a manner of linking all Catholics through
this shared set of exemplary historical and cultural figures.
I understand why we Americans only
currently celebrate the birthdays of a few particularly influential presidents
and one very unique and impressive Civil
Rights leader, and as I argued in both of those posts I think we can and
should keep and build on the meanings of those holidays. But the truth, as I
hope this blog has frequently demonstrated, is that there are many other
inspiring Americans, and most of them are not as already-prominent in our
national memories and narratives as the Washingtons, Lincolns, and Kings. And
so, AS Elves, I propose that each day Americans memorialize and celebrate one
inspiring fellow citizen who was born on that day—no possible such subject, of
course, is a saint, and I don’t mean to imply that we should sanctify any of
these complex historical figures or the issues and events to which they
connect; but I do believe that we can and should focus on their best and most
inspiring work and meanings, to remember not only the darker historical
realities but how Americans have powerfully built upon and yet transcended
them.
The man I’d like to nominate for
today, December 19th, is a particularly good example of what I mean,
on two distinct levels. Carter G.
Woodson (1875-1950) was born to freed slaves working as sharecroppers in
Virginia, as Reconstruction ended and the era that came to be known as the
nadir of African American life commenced; but his path took him forward to
Harvard (where in 1912 he became one of the first African Americans to receive
a Harvard PhD, in History) and back into our past (as he founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and
History and the Journal of Negro History, among many other efforts). And
Woodson’s most lasting legacy directly models my goals here: he is known as the
“Father of Black History
Month,” as his multi-decade advocacy for an educational commemoration of
African American histories led in 1926 to February’s Negro History Week (the
direct precursor to our contemporary Black History Month).
Next bday
special tomorrow,
Ben
PS.
Anything you’d add (bday wishes or otherwise)?
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