A White man's awakening [View all]

On this last day of Black History Month, I feel moved to share my own realization of how Blacks were purposely left out of local histories.
I am a white man, raised in the North, who moved to a rural county in Tennessee only 5 years ago. I wound up becoming the caretaker for what I believe is a 140 year-old Black cemetery. There are very few engraved stone markers, especially for the older graves. I know from the research I have done, and from speaking with some of the older Black residents of the town, that many of the individuals buried there were former slaves (a nearby iron mill had nearly 400 slaves in 1860).
My research is mostly confined to going through death certificates to try to identify who is buried in this cemetery -- but the death certificates often neglect to state the place of burial. If it were a cemetery of Whites, I could look up obituaries in local newspapers. But, prior to the 1970's, the local newspapers completely ignored the Black citizens, unless it was to report a murder or robbery committed BY a Black. Larger cities in the South had Black-owned newspapers, but for small towns, the Black population was completely invisible as far as their newspapers were concerned.
While Black History Month was started to try to educate our society about the contributions of African Americans to the Sciences and the Arts, no number of History Months will give Black families the histories of their ancestors that were stolen from them.