Written by Dr. Conrad W. Worrill
Tuesday, 31 January 2012 22:18
The African Centered Education Movement has brought a new meaning to the annual African American History Month celebrations that have become so popular. Through the African Centered Education Movement, African American History Month has now become the catalyst for the intense study of Africa and the history of African people throughout the world 365 days a year.
Dr. Carter G. Woodson, who founded, in February of 1926, what at that time was called, "Negro History Week," would indeed be inspired by the continuing discussion and debate over the infusion of the contributions of African people in all subjects. Dr. Woodson was deeply concerned that the contributions of African people to this society and the world were not given their proper recognition. Dr. Woodson's great book, "The Miseducation of the Negro," written in 1933, described in the first chapter titled, "The Seat of the Trouble," the essence of what the African Centered Curriculum Movement is battling against today 68 years later.
Dr. Woodson explained that "of the hundreds of Negro high schools recently examined (1933) by an expert in the United States Bureau of Education, only eighteen offer a course taking up the history of the Negro, and in most of the Negro colleges and universities where the Negro is thought of, the race is studied only as a problem or dismissed as of little consequence."
Continuing on, Dr. Woodson gave an example: "An officer of a Negro university, thinking that an additional course on the Negro should be given there, called upon a Negro Doctor of Philosophy on the faculty to offer such work. He promptly informed the officer that he knew nothing about the Negro. He did not go to school to waste his time that way. He went to be educated in a system which dismissed the Negro as a nonentity."
Obviously, since the writing of this great book, we have come a long way in our battle against challenging the white supremacy foundation of the American public school curriculum. However, we still have a long way to go!
The Black Movement of the 1960s gave us an impetus to reexamine our history and its impact on this country and the world. This movement brought on renewed interest, on the part of our people, to study our history. We moved from the use of the term "Negro" in referring to ourselves and began to use "Black" as the more appropriate way to describe who we are. We went from Black History Week to Black History Month. In fact, some of us began to refer to the month of February as Black Liberation Month. It was through the movement of the 1960s, particularly the Black Power Phase, that we began to reidentify with our homeland, Africa and the interconnection of African people throughout the world.
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