I remember the walls of my third-grade classroom in Durham, North Carolina. It was 1963 and I was one year away from discovering that White folks lived in Durham—that was how strict the color line was in even this more liberal area of North Carolina. My teacher, Mrs. Carter and lined the upper part of the classroom walls with Black exemplars—Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Mary McLeod Bethune, Ida B. Wells, Martin Luther King, Jr., Jesse Owens, Charles Drew. From their high perch near the ceiling, it felt like they were watching over us as we learned. Rather than being imposing, I felt like they were angels watching over me and my classmates, encouraging us on in our studies and applauding us for our successes while casting a side-eye at our misbehaviors. They were both comfort and standard bearers for us. Folks we should both respect and seek to emulate. This was, as I look back now, my teacher’s response to all the negative and vile images we saw about folks who looked like me on the southern news. This was also the age of Jesse Helms who was an executive at WRAL-TV who did nightly editorials about the northern Negroes (his pronunciation was more akin to niggras) and communists trying to stir up the happy lives of the good colored people of North Carolina who were just fine with color lines, inability to vote, unequal educational systems, third tier health care, and living segregated lives.
The amazing promise of living in a country that declares, “We the people,” must be our moral guide as we take up the challenge of a democracy that calls us to our better selves.
These memories come back to me in 2025 as I read about all the ways the federal government is either ignoring Black History Month or outright seeking to cancel it because it represents a threat to the tranquility of those who either cannot or do not believe in recognizing the rich diversity that makes up the cultures of the United States. Yes, plural cultures, not a singular one. And it is not just reading these things that gives me pause, it is feeling deeply that a call to right-sizing the US narrative means erasing the history and lives of those who have stood firm in saying that our lives matter—black, brown, beige, the poor, women—all the ways that we show up in creation as signs of the expansiveness of God’s creation. Now is the time that we must take our places as the exemplars did in my third-grade classroom. However, we are now doing so in our larger society, and we must stand firm in the belief that narrow constricting views of what it looks like to be an American, to be patriotic, to love our country is not what we should embrace this month or any month. The amazing promise of living in a country that declares, “We the people,” must be our moral guide as we take up the challenge of a democracy that calls us to our better selves.
– emilie m. townes, Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of Religion and Black Studies