Black History Month

[ghoti_mhic_uait]

One of the things that suddenly confused me wrt Black History Month - is it meant to be the interaction of black people with history, or is it meant to be the history of people who happen to be black? Because that's a hell of a lot of differing histories, either way. ETA: I've also seen it suggested that it's the history of Africans/people of African descent. Which is all of us ultimately, but never mind that.

In any case, what it practically means in school is that we talk about MLK/Rosa Parks and Mary Seacole. All of whom are fine people to talk about, and Mary Seacole has relevance to a British school by virtue of being Scottish. Also, she did a lot to combat growing colour-based racism in England (and presumably Scotland and Wales) by just getting on with being an excellent person. (Basically, at the beginning of her stint in the Crimea, she was 'that weirdo who looks weird and what the hell does she hink she's doing?' and at the end she was 'Mother Seacole who saved a lot of the lives of our brave boys'.)

However, I'm sure we could branch out. How about the first black pope? Actually, Victor I is quite important in Catholic history - he was the geezer who brought the Latin Mass to Rome, where previously they used Greek (but Latin was used in Africa). How about St Augustine? I know they might not be main-stream enough for general consumption, but I work in a Catholic school so Catholic history seems relevant.

Comments

Re: ask a historian

[tenthmedieval.wordpress.com (from livejournal.com)]

And the Internet's power of coincidence strikes again: someone has, just this week, posted online a translation of Possidius's biography of Augustine which is the main source for him except for the Confessions: it can be found here.

Re: ask a historian

[tenthmedieval.wordpress.com (from livejournal.com)]

Online edition of the Confessions here, and there is a little bit of discussion of origins in the first note of all, which points out that his, and his mother's name, are both vanishingly rare in Roman Africa, which may suggest either, as the commentator says, "aristocratic pretensions" or, as I suspect, Italian descent. But again, names usually come from mothers; who was the father, and why were they in Africa?

There's also an old English translation of the Confessions here. That gives you approximately all the source material yourself, so I'm going to leave this now...