Examining real meaning behind Black History Month
Marty's old home at Flint Public Library contains historical messages of history
Thursday, Feb. 12, 2025
This column started out as a Black History post on Facebook, but it kind of morphed into somewhat of a black history testimonial or sorts on an old conversation with my daughter.
The Flint Public Library at 1026 East Kearsley Street had seen me grow from an elementary school nerd of a kid, to a man who grew to love what the library truly meant to me and Flint.
Now, on a cold February morning during a past Black History Month, I stood in the newly renovated building, transformed with $30 million in improvements.
My daughter pushed through the glass doors, escaping the winter wind. She'd been coming here with me since she was small, through the water crisis, through the family's struggles, through every homework assignment and summer reading program. But today she had a question that had been weighing on her. "Dad?" She approached me, as I was admiring the African American Sports Hall of Fame display on the second floor, which I am now enshrined in as well. I turned with a warm smile. I'd helped her find her first chapter book, had watched her grow into a thoughtful young woman who asked hard questions. "What's on your mind, Paps?" That was my nickname for her, short for Paprika, the last Spice Girl. "Years ago, my teacher said... she said some people in the government want to stop teaching Black history. That seems to be happening now. She said that they might take it black history out of our textbooks. How can they just erase it? Erase us? How can they pretend like we were never here, like we didn't do anything, like we don't matter?"
If you know me, you know that I always think before I speak. I was quiet for a moment, the way I always am when something mattered. I gestured for her to sit, and settled into the chair beside her, not across from her like an authority figure, but beside her like an adoring dad.
"Let me tell you a story. When I was young, this building looked different. It was darker and more closed in. But even then, it was a sanctuary for us. You know why?" Paps shook her head, befuddled, like she was waiting for the punchline of a bad joke! "Because libraries are memory keepers. And memory is the one thing that they can never fully take from us, not unless we let them and that will never happen." I stood and walked over to the genealogy section, the second largest open-stack genealogy collection in Michigan. "Your godfather, Ray, spent thirty-plus years helping people trace their roots. Black families trying to find ancestors whose records were destroyed or never kept because enslaved people weren't considered fully human. Families trying to understand how they ended up in Flint from Mississippi or Alabama or Georgia during the Great Migration." I pulled down a worn volume. "Every one of these books is an act of defiance and resistance.
Every name preserved, every story documented, every piece of evidence that says, "We existed. We've lost. We mattered. We matter. We built this." "But what if they remove it from schools?" Paps pressed. "What if kids don't learn about it?" "Then we teach it. We teach it in churches. We teach it at kitchen tables. We teach it wherever two or three are gathered. You know what I've learned in my life as an adult?
Governments change. Administrations come and go. But stories endure. Truth endures. The question is: are we willing to be the ones who carry it forward?" Flint taught me that. This library taught me that. Black history taught me that, because Black history is the story of people who kept going when every rational reason said to give up.
It's the story of enslaved people who learned to read when it was illegal and they could be killed for it. It's Harriet Tubman making nineteen trips back into slave territory. It's Ida B. Wells documenting lynchings when white newspapers pretended they weren't happening. It's Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. It's the Tuskegee Airmen proving Black men could fly when the military said they couldn't.
It's also the story of Flint. Black families who came here for auto jobs and built neighborhoods and churches and businesses. Who stayed when the factories closed. Who fought through white flight and disinvestment and emergency management and poisoned water. We're still here, Paps. We're still here. My daughter felt something rising in her chest. "But if they continue to erase Black history from schools, won't people forget? Maybe not this generation but generations long after we're gone? Won't it be like it never happened?" "Only if we let them," I said.
See, that's their strategy; make it seem inevitable. Make us feel powerless. But here's what they don't understand: Black history isn't just in textbooks. It's in our bones. It's in the music we create, like jazz, blues, gospel, hip-hop, rock and roll. It's in our inventions like the traffic light, the gas mask, the blood bank, the home security system. It's in our literature, our art, our science, our sports. It's everywhere, woven into the fabric of American life so thoroughly that they can't remove it without unraveling everything. I walked to the display case holding memorabilia from Flint's Black athletes and community leaders. They can remove lessons from curricula, but they can't remove the fact that Black people have always been central to this nation's story.
They were here before the Declaration of Independence, Crispus Attucks died in the Boston Massacre. They were here through every war, every movement, every crisis. We fought in the Revolution, the Civil War, both World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam. We fought for a country that didn't always fight for us. Hell, we fight for a country that in many ways still doesn't fight for us.
When they try to erase that, they're not just erasing Black history. They're erasing American history. They forgot that they are living on stolen land themselves. But they're trying to create a false narrative that this nation was built by white people alone, that progress just happened, that rights were given rather than fought for and won with blood and sacrifice. Just think about the films that you may have watched; Selma, Hidden Figures, 13th, Just Mercy. Movies that had shown us truths that our textbooks have reduced to a paragraph or two. What do we do? We do what we've always done. We remember. We teach. We document. We create. We refuse to be erased.
The Flint Public Library survived the Great Depression. It survived white flight. It survived deindustrialization. It survived emergency management and the water crisis. You know why? Because the people of Flint kept voting to fund it. They kept coming here. They kept believing in it. That's the power of Black History Month. It's not just twenty-eight days of celebration, though we should always reflect and celebrate it. It's a reminder that our history is an act of survival.
Every year in February, we say, "We remember. We honor. We continue." We refuse to forget Sojourner Truth and W.E.B. DuBois and Fannie Lou Hamer and Medgar Evers and Malcolm X and Ella Baker and Bayard Rustin and all the names that never made it into any book but who mattered just as much. What happens if they erase Black history from schools. Here's my answer: They can try. But we've survived worse than curriculum changes. We've survived slavery. We've survived Jim Crow.
We've survived redlining and mass incarceration and voter suppression and everything else designed to break us. And we're still here. Still creating. Still inventing. Still organizing. Still fighting. Still loving. Still being excellent despite every obstacle.
So folks, tell your kids that if they want to fight erasure, they must learn. Read everything they can get their hands on; James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Isabel Wilkerson, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Me! Watch the documentaries and visit the museums. Listen to their elders. Ask questions.
And then, this is crucial, share what you've learned.
You become a link in the chain of memory.
I love Flint. I love its people. I love its history, the beautiful parts and the painful parts, because you can't have one without the other.
Black History Month reminds us that our history is America's history. That you can't tell the story of this nation without telling our story. And no matter what any administration tries to do, that truth remains. Because memory, once awakened, cannot be put back to sleep.
And in Flint, Michigan, a city that had survived everything, the memory was very much awake.
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Marty Embry is a former administrator in the Flint school district and an author of 10 books. He was the star center on two of the old Flint Central's state championship teams under legendary Coach Stan Gooch, then went on to star at DePaul University before playing professionally overseas.
