By Rev. Dorothy S. Boulware
(WIB) – In January, after Claudette Colvin died, she was probably talked about in more churches than in her lifetime. Her passing propelled her into a wave of news coverage, making her courageous stand in 1955 more widely known than at any other time in history. Many admitted they’d never heard of her.
Most schools still don’t teach Colvin’s story — or the stories of countless other Black Americans whose courage, intellect, and creativity shaped this country. Which means the work of telling those stories has always fallen somewhere else: to families, to faith communities, to the grandparents who understood, with a clarity borne of experience, that a child who doesn’t know where she comes from is a child who can be told she came from nowhere.
It is historically, socially, and spiritually important work. Black history did not begin with slavery. It begins — and continues — with a people of deep heritage, whose contributions to science, medicine, art, music, and the architecture of this nation stretch back to the beginnings of recorded time.
The scriptures understood this imperative long before modern educators did. “Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart,” reads Deuteronomy 6:6-7. “Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise.”
Which is why parents, grandparents, and churches have expanded their efforts to tell Black stories year-round. Nowadays, church plays, dance, concerts, vignettes and sermons bring this history to life in ways that reach across generations.
Family: Our First Black History Teachers
Many parents, grandparents, aunties and uncles became the first and greatest history teachers — ensuring children know they descend from kings and queens, scientists and physicians, artists and sculptures, composers and performers of all genres and that they know who they are and who they have the capacity to become in this world.
“Our grandparents were our history books and taught us who we are, what we could become and that no one is better than we are,” says Lucille Singletary, now a grandmother. “They taught us that we should always do our best and God will bless us, to respect your elders and yourself, and most importantly, we are unstoppable.”
Actor and singer Damon Evans says he grew up in a family of strong Black women, some of whom were teachers, and they believed their mission was to save all the little Black kids. “My grandmother was a strong and true matriarch who’d overcome a lot to teach school with a two-year certificate,” he says. “Then one day, the state of Maryland demanded a four-year bachelor’s degree. Three children later, she returned to Morgan State with her youngest daughter and received her degree in education.”
But it was his grandfather, a prolific reader, who taught their family the achievements of Black people.
“He taught me about Paul Robeson, Roland Hayes and Marian Anderson,” Evans says. “And one day in 1954 or ‘55, he called to me while I was playing on our marble steps, ‘Boy, come in this house and hear the colored girl singing opera.’”
He said the opera happened to be “Tosha” and the colored girl was none other than the great Leontyne Price.
“You Come Out of Somebody’s House”
Knowing our history also ensures we understand the sacrifices and work of generations of Black folks to help us get where we are today.
“We stand on the shoulders of someone else. Stop trying to act like you’re so cute and holy today,” Rev. Dr. Otis Moss III told the congregation at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago in early March.
Moss noted that someone always made a way. “There was somebody before me, who made a way for me. It’s my responsibility to tap into their genius and their intelligence,” he said.
Then he got specific: People have “got to know they come out of the house of Jesse Louis Jackson, Harold Washington, Barbara Jordon, Shirley Chisholm, Fanny Lou Hamer, W.E.B. DuBois, Ida B. Wells, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Fred Hampton, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass. Do not act like some bougie Negro who did it all by yourself. You come out of somebody’s house. Tap into your ancestral intelligence.”
His message was less a rebuke than a reminder: no one arrives fully formed.
What the Research Confirms
Studies show that children with a strong sense of cultural pride demonstrate higher academic engagement and lower vulnerability to internalized bias. Cultural affirmation correlates with confidence, leadership capacity, and social-emotional health. When identity is affirmed early, children are less likely to be destabilized by negative societal messaging later.
“If young people are exposed to images of African-American academic achievement in their early years, they won’t have to define school achievement as something for Whites only. They will know that there is a long history of Black intellectual achievement,” Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum said in her book, “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?”
”Sometimes the assumptions we make about others come not from what we have been told or what we have seen on television or in books, but rather from what we have not been told. The distortion of historical information about people of color leads young people to make assumptions that may go unchallenged for a long time.”
Tatum emphasizes that racial identity development is a critical part of healthy self-concept. When children lack positive cultural mirrors, they may unconsciously absorb society’s stereotypes and stories to correct that imbalance.
One thing’s for sure, Claudette Colvin knew who she was when she refused to move. She had been taught her history. She knew she came out of somebody’s house.