Long before there was Black History Month, those of us who lived in segregated school systems in places like Baltimore, Maryland, lived Black History every single day. Black History was not an isolated week or month. Black History was a daily reality.
I attended Charles Hamilton Houston Junior High School, PS 181 from 1961-1963, just before the March on Washington in 1963 and the US Civil Rights Act of 1964. The school was named after the Harvard-trained former dean of Howard University Law School. A brilliant lawyer and constitutional scholar, Houston was US Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall’s mentor and teacher. Just as we memorized the school song and essential poems, we were enmeshed in the life and legacy of our school’s namesake. We learned about Brown v. Board of Education and the legal theories that Charles Hamilton Houston and his protégés used to launch a full-fledged constitutional argument in favor of desegregation of schools.
As middle schoolers, we had a Latin teacher whose graduate degree was in Classics from Harvard University and a mathematics curriculum that included axiomatic set theory and Boolean algebra. These ironies were not lost on us. Every day, we studied Black History as an integral component of our world history and US History courses. We learned about Plessy v. Ferguson as middle schoolers because segregation meant that the best and brightest Black teachers were assigned not to prestigious, well-financed schools but a small number of overcrowded, all-Black schools. Learning Black History every day meant that we knew to be proud of our heritage. We learned to embrace science, mathematics, and technology because we were introduced to the inventions and intellectual contributions of ancient African astronomers and mathematicians. We understood the significant contributions that African Americans made to industrialization and innovations in America.
To me, then, Black History Month was learning every single day about the accomplishments, advances, and significant contributions that African Americans have made. Discovering the rich history of Blacks was a counterpoint to the dominant educational paradigm that simultaneously ignored those contributions and painted a false portrait of Black inferiority and incompetence.
I feel very privileged to have lived a life where Black History Month was every day of the year.
Samuel L. Myers, Jr., is the Director and Professor, Roy Wilkins Center for Human Relations and Social Justice at the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota. Myers holds concurrent appointments in the Applied Economics Ph.D. Program and the graduate minor in population studies in the Minnesota Population Center. He maintains an affiliation with the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (Beijing, China).
Myers has published extensively on applied microeconomic and policy issues in leading economics and interdisciplinary journals and books and monographs. He is a pioneer in the use of applied econometric techniques to examine racial disparities in crime, to detect illegal discrimination in home mortgage lending and consumer credit markets, to assess the impacts of welfare on family stability, to evaluate the effectiveness of government transfers in reducing poverty, and to detect disparities and discrimination in government contracting. He is the co-editor of a special edition of the Journal of Economic Literature focusing race and economic modeling and the co-author of a recent paper on the marginalization of race in the economics of crime literature.
Myers is an elected Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration; a past president of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM); and a former president of the National Economic Association (NEA). Myers is the former chair of the National Science Foundation’s Committee on Equal Opportunity in Science and Engineering (CEOSE); a past member of the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs (OJP) Science Advisory Board and a recently appointed member of the Committee on Law and Justice, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.
He received his Ph.D. in economics from MIT where his dissertation on the economics of crime was supervised by Nobel-laurate, Robert M. Solow, Michael Piore and Lester Thurow. His BA in economics was awarded by Morgan State University.
Myers' latest co-authored book, Race Neutrality: Rationalizing Remedies to Racial Inequality (2018) explores the phenomenon of racial discrimination where there are no racists. He is currently a Russell Sage Foundation Visiting Scholar writing a new book, Minnesota Paradox: Racial Inequality and Progressive Public Policies that provides a definitive historical account of how one of the most liberal and progressive states in the nation became a state with some of the largest racial disparities in social and economic outcomes in the nation.