Honoring Black History Month
Photo courtesy of The History Channel
Since 1970, the U.S. has observed Black History Month each February, but its cultural origins date back 108 years — to 1915 — when a man named Carter G. Woodson created an organization dedicated to African-American life and history, and later initiated Black History Week in 1926. This became the underpinning of the month-long celebration honoring a key part of American society and history.
What happened in the past shapes and informs where we are headed in the future. Setting aside a month to learn about black history can enhance our empathy and understanding as we promote the values and principles of the Unification movement, whose founders dedicated their lives to establishing peace and unity beyond barriers of race, culture, religion, and ideology through numerous global initiatives and campaigns, including the cross-cultural Marriage Blessing.
The lessons of Black History Month provide us with a way forward by examining our past. Below are three major turning points in black history that can educate and help America chart its course to a more enlightened age for everyone.
The Transatlantic Slave Trade
From the 15th to 19th century, more than 12 million African men, women, and children were taken from their homeland and sold into slavery following a triangular route involving Europe, Africa, and the Americas. An estimated 388,000 Africans were transported to the New World. Stripped of their culture and identity, millions of captives died during transit.
In January 2018, True Mother visited Gorée Island, which served as the largest slave-trading center on the African coast for 400 years. At the island’s Door of No Return – a final exit point – she tearfully prayed for the island’s ancestors and a new heavenly Africa. “An intense pain arose in my heart,” she wrote in her 2020 memoir. “I was already feeling that the bitter tears of grief shed by thousands of captives in transit through the island could fill the world’s oceans.”
In 1808, the U.S. officially banned the importation of enslaved people from Africa and the West Indies; however, some smuggling of captives continued up until the Civil War in 1861. The Emancipation Proclamation effectively ended slavery in 1863, and was codified in the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1865.
Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad
Born into U.S. slavery in 1820, Harriet Tubman escaped at age 27 and became an abolitionist and social activist. She led some 13 rescue missions and freed about 70 enslaved people using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. As a railroad “conductor” in Philadelphia, Tubman helped African-Americans gain their freedom traveling routes from the Deep South all the way up to Canada. Between 1810 and 1860, as the network grew, the Underground Railroad helped guide 100,000 enslaved people to freedom before the Civil War began.
In summer 2020, the Unification movement’s Peace Road team of young adults traveled to historical sites across America, including a stop at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, where they prayed for the liberation and healing of all who were enslaved.
The Harlem Renaissance
Departing the South, many African-Americans traveled to Harlem, New York, in the 1920s and 30s where it became an epicenter providing a space for black identity and community reclamation in a country that was still so racially divided. The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural revival of African-American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater, politics, and scholarship. Creatives like Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, and Claude McKay were speaking for their time, depicting the black experience in post-Civil War America. Their efforts rippled out, bringing mainstream recognition of black culture and ideas that continue to touch lives today through jazz, films, and other creative works of that era.
You can learn more about Black History Month here.