Every February, America celebrates Black History Month. This year was no different. We always see images of Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X, Frederick Douglas, Harriet Tubman, Marcus Garvey, Ida B. Wells Barnett, Jackie Robinson, Jim Crow segregation culture, “Whites Only” and “Coloreds Only” signs on public doors and services, Civil Rights protesters, and slave ships.
The job titles of popular Black History icons range from Civil Rights activists, athletes, inventors, slave abolitionists, politicians, entertainers, and writers.
It’s good to celebrate those amazing Black people who fought against racial injustice and slavery. It’s also good to celebrate athletes, entertainers, writers and inventors who overcome racism to rise to prominence in their chosen field.
But we need to keep in mind that slavery and Jim Crow is not Black History. Slavery and Jim Crow only interrupted Black History. Mainstream thought will keep America on a Jim Crow and slavery mindset when it comes to the subject of Black History. The thought-influence agenda is to make Black people and other ethnicities think that Black people’s whole existence is fighting the big bad oppressor.
But Black people were citizens of the world long before the relatively recent and even short-spanned global colonization, slavery and Jim Crow.
It was Blacks In Kemet and northern Africa who taught European Greeks agriculture, farming, math science, astrology, writing, hygiene, religion, and supernatural topics. The Greeks passed this on to the Romans, the Romans lost this knowledge, and their Dark Ages lasted for 500 years, while Black empires were still prospering. It was the Black Moors who brought an end to the Dark Ages of the Romans. Western, White, Greek, and Roman civilizations are merely the disrespectful child of African Nile Valley civilization.
Black people built and ran wealthy dynasties and empires of Mali, Songhai, the Kingdom of Kush, the Land of Punt, the Kingdom of Kush, Aksum, ancient Kemet, now renamed to Egypt by European Greek colonizers, and a host of other dynasties. There was no need for a Black first in a high-level position in any of the multiple Black-ran institutions that were apart of these multiple Black-built and ran dynasties, considering Blacks ran and built them to begin with.
The Kingdom of Kush stood as a regional power in Africa for over a thousand years. It reached it’s peak in the second millennium and operated a lucrative market of ivory, incense, iron and gold. The Land of Punt dates back to 2500 B.C. and was rich in resources like, ebony, gold, myrrh and exotic animals. The Kingdom of Carthage was a North African commercial hub that flourished for over 500 years. This city-state started in the 8th and 9th century B.C. as a Phoenician settlement and is now called Tunisia. This grew into a sprawling, seafaring empire that dominated trades in textiles, gold, silver, and copper. It had a million citizens with docking bays for 220 ships. By the 2nd and 3rd dynasty, the Kingdom of Aksum was an elite trader of ivory and gold and had a distinctive architectural style that involved building massive stone obelisks, some of which stood over 100 feet tall.
The Mali Empire dates back to the 1200s. The city of Timbuktu’s Sankore University included a library with over 700,000 manuscripts. The Mali empire was known for its wealth and luxury. Mansa Musa was a ruler in Mali and is the wealthiest person in history with an estimated net worth reported at $400 billion.
And guess what. These empires were ran by Blacks, African descended, and Indigenous descended people. I will reiterate this evert Black History Month.
Make sure you subscribe to the premium section of 3dnorthstar.com for more exclusive content.
