As Black History Month starts, can’t we resolve to be honest about Missouri’s past? | Opinion

Our nation heads into this Black History Month with nerves raw yet again. Last Friday, footage of the savage fatal beating of Tyre Nichols by five Memphis police officers shocked our conscience, and brought back painful memories of 1991 in Los Angeles. That year, we watched as another video went viral — long before TikTok and Twitter — graphically showing the brutal beating of a Black man named Rodney King by four police officers. When the lawmen were acquitted months later, a violent uprising killed 63 and caused almost $1 billion in property damage.

The old cliche warns us that those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it. So did we grow as a society after watching that carnage? Did we engage in a sustained, nationwide conversation about ratcheting down tensions between law enforcement and the communities they police?

Unfortunately, no. Rodney King became yet another symbol for both sides in the sickening debate we continue to hash out over race relations. To one “side,” King’s case was a vivid illustration of how African Americans feel targeted and overpoliced. To the other, it showed how difficult law enforcement is: He was a robbery parolee who was intoxicated when he fled from police. If he had just complied with instructions, the assault never would have happened.

Is the story any different today? Michael Brown, George Floyd, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor, Amadou Diallo, Daunte Wright, Atatiana Jefferson, Freddie Gray and far too many others have put faces and names to the injustice so many of us experience. There’s good reason to believe the Black Lives Matter movement has opened eyes in recent years.

“The world is watching us and we need to show the world what lessons we can learn from this tragedy,” Steve Mulroy said when announcing a grand jury had returned indictments for second-degree murder against the officers in Tyre Nichols’ death. Mulroy is the county district attorney serving Memphis, and he campaigned for the job promising more transparency in law enforcement and more accountability to the community.

“If there is any silver lining to be drawn from this very dark cloud,” he said, “it’s that perhaps this incident can open a broader conversation about the need for police reform.”

That conversation is important — but we can’t kid ourselves that all of us are already having it. Civitas, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit based in St. Louis, recently asked its class of interns to read the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Project. Reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones’ controversial work has been the focus of much praise and scorn since it was first published in The New York Times Magazine in 2019. Tracing the arrival of a slave ship that year to the English colony of Virginia, it begins: “No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed.”

Hannah-Jones’ work “made me look at the Constitution from a different angle,” Civitas quotes its intern Myla. “Before reading this article, I had never realized that our right to property included enslaved Black people.”

“Despite living in a household of a proud advocate of Black culture and teachings, my father, I was surprised by many of the things I have read,” said Martriana. So if this is all news to young people patriotic enough to seek an internship at an organization such as Civitas — which works on Model United Nations and other responsible citizenship initiatives — imagine how many other kids never even realized there are alternative perspectives on our history.

That’s why it’s so dispiriting that multiple pieces of legislation have been introduced in both Missouri’s and Kansas’ statehouses in recent years to limit how teachers can talk about our real, fraught past. Kansas may have been a fiercely proud free state, but schoolkids need to know about the wrangling that allowed Missouri to become the northernmost slave-owning state in the Union.

“I think people who say learning these lessons just hurts their kids’ feelings — they’re selling their children short,” said Carmeletta Williams, executive director of the Black Archives of Mid-America in Kansas City. “They’re saying their kids are not bright enough to understand the truth. They need to quit denigrating their own children.”

So here’s a challenge for every proud American who wants this nation to live up to the promise that originally applied only to white property owners: Let this Black History Month be a new chance to commit ourselves to the idea that all of us are created equal, and that our government requires the consent of the governed. That means every one of us deserves an equal voice — in the Capitol and in the classroom.