The Importance of Black History Month. A Young Reporters article

When someone mentions October, we usually think of Halloween or the time of year when we begin to enter Autumn. But there’s another importance of our tenth calendar month – Black History Month. Black History Month highlights the history forgotten from our school textbooks and the significance of African, Asian, and Caribbean people.

First celebrated in 1987, it was created by a Ghanian man called Akyabba Addai-Sebo who organised the month’s celebrations alongside the Greater London Council. The month consists of different events and productions that highlight Black history. For example, many radio stations this year such as BBC Radio 1Xtra that enabled viewers to watch documentaries, interviews, and listen to playlists by black artists. This was apparent by Jeremiah’s mix of black music, an interview from Rudolph Walker OBE who plays Patrick in EastEnders as well as Ian Wright, an ex-footballer. The promise for more black representation on TV was also done in September with Channel 4’s Black To Front.

But when the country entered lockdown and COVID-19 circled, individuals became more aware of the racial injustice that often goes unnoticed in the UK and worldwide. Waking up to the murder of George Floyd by Derek Chauvin on the 25th of May last year, seemed unimaginable. To see a police officer, of whom we are supposed to trust, kneeling on someone’s neck upon arrest was terrifying. The murder sparked a movement internationally – Black Lives Matter. A group made up of those from African, Asian, and Caribbean backgrounds and almost everyone who supported them and also sympathised with the injustice they face such as everyday racism, unnecessary stop and searches as well as police bias. Sociological theories suggest that police engage in racial through indirect racial discrimination through ethnic minorities mistrusting the police and having a lower social position alongside direct racial discrimination. Direct racial discrimination is evident with the fact that African Caribbeans were six times more likely to be stopped and searched in 2013 and institutionalised racism shown by the Macpherson Report and the unfortunate Stephen Lawrence case. The George Floyd murder only demonstrated how times still haven’t changed from then and how we can all help and challenge racism at the first sign of it.

Reminiscing on the murder of George Floyd in America, also led to me wanting to see how far the UK had progressed with their civil rights too. Taken from the conversation.com, Black and Muslim minorities are twice as likely to experience unemployment and live-in crowded housing resulting in deteriorating mental health. COVID-19 was seen to significantly affect minorities too and this was because ethnic minorities were more at risk of poverty due to educational failure and unemployment as well as racial disparities such as lower-quality healthcare.

Personally, it was studying A-Level History that brought my interest into African American history, something of which I never would have learned before. Being taught civil rights, my favourite event was the first migration to the UK on Windrush in 1930 when hundreds of African, Asian, and Caribbean migrants travelled to support the UK with jobs such as cleaning and building post-war. Learning about the injustice that people faced both politically and physically with the Jim Crow Laws (1877-1950) that segregated white and black people and the lynching of a 14-year-old called Emmett Till in 1955, helped me ally with friends and support them. Gaining knowledge on people such as Bayard Rustin, a gay man who helped Martin Luther King organise the Washington march, Bessie Coleman, the first black pilot in the world and a black trans woman, Martha P Johnson who was at the forefront of the LGBTQ+ movement, gave me the history that I never would have known if not taught. Largely, despite COVID, the last two years presented how racial discrimination is still apparent in society and how important challenging and allying against racism really is.

Article by Young Reporter Beth Downes
First appeared in Grimsby Telegraph 12th October 2021