I’m Showing Love To My Personal Heroes This Black History Month

Every year, I imagine that I will take a proactive approach to honor the legacy of our African-American ancestors and celebrate our heritage during Black History Month. But here I am, on February 1st, my Chromebook popped open, doing my best to start the month off right, knowing that I’m a little late to the party.

As much as I’d like to beat myself up for not taking earlier proactive steps to celebrate Black history month, I can’t do that. Black History happens every single day, and February just happens to be the month that America formally recognizes the contributions of our ancestors.

When I was growing up, we celebrated Black History week. Year after year, our teachers gave us the assignment of writing and sharing a report on an accomplished Black American. I don’t recall the title, but if my memory serves correctly — and it’s highly possible that it doesn’t — our family had a large paperback book with a torn, brown front cover that sat on the shelf next to our World Book Encyclopedia set that highlighted famous Black Americans. Each year my sister and I would flip through the pages trying to find someone different to write about other than Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., George Washington Carver, Rosa Parks, or Harriet Tubman.

I usually insert here that my family wasn’t particularly woke, and didn’t have any Black history traditions, but I’ll give them credit for having that book. I don’t know that I had the equivalent in our home and that my children — now young adults — had as much. And as much as I could wish that I had done better, I have long learned to accept my failures and work to improve. I hope that this late foray into remembering black history is a step in the right direction.

Honoring our personal heroes

Instead of focusing on the famous, I would like to start by honoring the Black people who have influenced my life directly. These are people whose stories go unheard, but continue to forge forward — despite the backdrop of a country where the people who most loudly debate the existence of systemic racism are its greatest perpetrators. These are the people who sit down at the poker table regardless of the imbalance of chips being played. We continue to get in the game to collect whatever chips we can pass along to the next generation.

In December of 2020, my godbrother, Michael, passed away. It was a sudden, unexpected loss. Cancer, not COVID. Whenever we would talk, the conversations were long and meaningful. Our last conversation was distanced, but in person in July 2020. I’m glad that I was able to see him in person.

Michael was present in my life from the beginning. My grandmother raised him for a short time, and this meant that he was family, although not blood-related. In an odd coincidence, my father was nearly twenty years older than him, and he was about the same twenty years older than me. He was the bridge to my past, to my father, and to the grandmother that I barely remember.

Through him, I witnessed the constant improvement of humanity. When I was young, I thought he was too strict, having once punished me unfairly. On the other hand, he set the example of how adults too continued to grow, as I saw him mature, acknowledge his mistakes, and make changes for the better even into his advanced age. He was a great father to his sons, demonstrating a grace that I cannot imagine when his oldest son died while we were in high school. When he remarried and had a daughter, I watched how he raised her with pride — a pride that I share when I talked with her and marvel at her intelligence and maturity.

He proudly shared the accomplishments of his grandchildren, especially the one that he and his wife raised full-time. He never let my siblings and me drift apart from him because the relationship that he had with our father was important.

As for his career, he demonstrated stability and tenacity, working for 40 something years at UCLA and then taking advantage of free courses after his retirement. He was active in his community, socially and in local politics, in more ways than I know or could document here. He was never hesitant to share his opinion, and he loved talking on the phone. He a devout Catholic who once reminded me that you couldn’t take communion without first having gone to confession.

This small tribute could never do him justice, but suffice it to say, his was a life that was worth celebrating. I will consider my life well-lived if I can lead a life like his. Sometimes, it seems that we strive to make a noisy splash not realizing the mark that we’re leaving every day through simple encounters. I feel that with his passing, a torch has been passed.

I have tried more than once to craft a story to share the grief that I felt after his death, but I haven’t quite found the words. I can find no more fitting way to begin the journey of celebrating Black history than to honor his contribution to my life.

I believe it is important to acknowledge the Black people who are living life well on a day-to-day basis. Let’s sing the songs of our unsung heroes. These aren’t the people who line the anthologies of Black Americans, but they line the compilations of our memories and collective experiences. These are the people who craft our stories — the tipping of the domino we share with the next.

I am thankful for that paperback Black history book and the well-known Black heroes that are celebrated with holidays and on the face of money (c’mon Harriet). But I am significantly more thankful for the lives of people who step into the arena and fight the good fight on a daily basis.

So — through this tribute, and with each step, we shall continue to overcome.

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Previously published on medium

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