Beyond Monumental Figures

Back in 2018, when Jarvis R. Givens was researching the book that became I’ll Make Me a World: The 100-Year Journey of Black History Month, he came across a bound set of letters in the Jackson State University archives. All dated 1949, they had been written by African American teachers who described school life in Mississippi, revealing “stories from their social worlds that went beyond the names of monumental figures or details about iconic events,” rendering “vivid descriptions that would otherwise be forgotten.”

That Givens, a professor of education and founding director of the Black Teacher Archive at Harvard, would be intrigued by letters written by ordinary teachers is unsurprising. In both I’ll Make Me a World and one of his previous books, American Grammar: Race, Education, and the Building of a Nation, he privileges those who are not famous, pursuing “deeper knowledge of human complexity” found in “lesser known scenes in history.”

It’s this focus on “lesser known scenes” that distinguishes I’ll Make Me a World from more traditional scholarly approaches to documenting the past. Judging from its subtitle, one might expect the book to present a chronological story of how historian Carter G. Woodson established “Negro History Week” in February 1926 and how it became “Black History Month” during the American bicentennial in 1976 — “dreamed up, pieced together, and sustained by a narratively condemned people” who recognized “how racist storylines based on whitewashed conceptions of history were used to justify their oppression.”

One might also expect the book to be infused with well-known names: Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks. They’re here, but so is Givens’ beloved preschool teacher, Miss Butterfield, who taught Givens and his classmates to recite excerpts from King’s “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech, using methods she had been taught growing up in the Jim Crow South to convey “her memory of a feeling associated with the words” to students too young to read.

Givens puts “black memory workers” at the heart of his story, referring to those who “bear witness” through “a collective process, a historical enterprise forged by and through community.” This work began during slavery, when those who could do so wrote about their lives, while others passed down stories orally and through ritual, ensuring that “historical perspectives emerged from the terrain of black consciousness” as a counternarrative to histories that maligned them.

Much of I’ll Make Me a World interrogates the various forms memory work has taken. This includes artistic endeavors, such as When Truth Gets a Hearing, a play written by educator and historian Nannie Helen Burroughs in the 1920s. In the play, a character named Justice presides over a courtroom where “the Negro” — a term more commonly used then — is to be judged. Those testifying in support include Truth, Grace, Mercy, and History, while the opposing side is presented by a character called Prejudice. The play “provided an entryway to black history for those who might not engage other forms, such as essays and traditional history books” around the time Black History Week was first introduced, Givens says. Originally presented at Burroughs’ National Training School for Women and Girls in Washington, D.C., When Truth Gets a Hearing was later produced elsewhere to wide acclaim, with Du Bois traveling to see it inside a packed theater in Philadelphia.

Givens is particularly good at letting unexpected connections between details guide his insights. Before reading the Mississippi teachers’ letters from 1949, he knew that segregated schools often shared buildings with churches, but until he read one by a teacher named Miss Jones, he hadn’t realized what that meant. Not only was weekly cleaning and rearranging of desks expected of teachers, but they had to make accommodations when a funeral was held during the school week. “Miss Jones’s story forced me to sit with the deeper meaning of the history I was pursuing, namely that there was and continues to be a distinctive intimacy between death and black memory work in African American social life,” Givens writes.

This insight had meaning in his own life. Not long after the small boy recited King’s “mountaintop” speech at his preschool, he was called upon to use the skills he’d learned in Miss Butterfield’s class to recite the Lord’s Prayer at the funeral for his 22-year-old father, who had been shot and killed in Long Beach, California. “Like many before me, my first lessons in black history became equipment for living.”

Givens ends the book with a chapter titled “Where Do We Go from Here?” His answer to the question is largely historiographical, focusing on the ways that history is conceived and articulated. The path forward, he concludes, is for ordinary people to develop a historical consciousness based as much on everyday life as iconic names and events. It’s an insight he attributes indirectly to Miss Butterfield, whose gold wristwatch fascinated him. “As a preschool student I could not tell time, but I was marked by time nonetheless; marked by social relations and events of the past even before my name had ever been spoken.”