The bLACK History Issue.

 

To the African American Library and Cultural Center, I hope that you all take my words into consideration for not just the future, but our today. Please charge this letter to my head and not my heart if I come off strongly.

We are the problem now. We are no longer safeguarding our history, but preventing others, specifically Black youth from learning it. We hide behind our mistrust of European Americans and encourage ourselves to believe that we’re doing good noble work, when we are actually a large part of the problem we complain about.

Our first issue lies in the area of finances while trying to preserve our history and archives. To digitize these archives and upkeep them in an off-site facility has proven to be an expensive and daunting task. As you all know, there is much care required to handle history and preserve it. While our passion is commendable, there are professionals who are better equipped to preserve and disseminate our stories. This brings another issue to hand; we don’t like WHO preserves our history. I share the same sentiments of wanting to handle and disseminate archives, photos, and history. However, there is now technologyin place to make sure that communities share their own stories through different mediums. Our stories will still be told with the paragraphs we wrote and the pictures we created, unchanged, but viewed. Every European American is not Donald Trump nor do they share his same evil and racist sentiments. The biggest issue at hand is us not having a space to store BLACK HISTORY, and not enough Black archivists and historians to upkeep it.

I believe our next and one of our most important missions should be to stop encouraging our daughters and sons to become doctors, lawyers, and business personnel to help uphold the capitalistic idea of “black excellence”, but we should encourage our youth to study art, history, English, and other liberal arts. Our congresswomen nor our doctors know how to preserve our archives, but the European Americans we so greatly distrust do. The issue has proffered itself to many museums, non-profits, and historical societies nationwide. Where are our Black historians? Black archivists? Black curators? We made them engineers, doctors, lawyers, and business owners and now we have no one to turn to, to keep our history. Yet, the question remains the same. Where is our Black history?

I respect my elders, some of their beliefs, and our traditions, yet a new day presents itself with the same problems because we keep using the same solutions that still leaves problems unsolved. We complain that Black stories are not being shared, students are not learning about Black history in school, and nobody is talking to the children. Where are the Black stories to share?

I’ve written this paper to present a call to action and to also encourage us to share our history with others. I believe it in our best interest to temporarily donate our archives and history to The Palm Beach County Historical Society until our African American museum, research library, and cultural center is built. We are currently a counterproductive people, holding onto archives, and condemning the young folks who know nothing about the history that we’ve held underneath our bottoms.

Temporarily donating our archives relieves the financial burden of costly digitization and storing archives in a storage unit that may not have the correct temperature to preserve our history. With our donations, people have public access to view our history. While they view it, they cannot change it, no amount of clicking will give them access to change, destroy, nor erase our history. People young, old, Asian, or European can learn about Palm Beach County’s African American history. We will not have to worry about conserving archives that may have been damaged because they’ll be stored safely. Most importantly, with a written temporary agreement the historical society MUST give us back our history and they will gladly do so. This is bigger than Black vs. White, this is allowing history to be the powerful, transformative tool it is. People will be able to type, click, and research Palm Beach County’s Black History online. I hope our goal is not to be the first to share information, but to make sure that it is shared authentically and widely. As I conclude, we are sitting on unshared history in the name of protection, but we’re actually the problem. We cannot continue to allow the media to share stories about our people, Blackpeople, and condemn systems for changing the narratives when we have the power to change the narrative ourselves.

Systems will never save us, only we can save ourselves.