The 2002 University of Nebraska Medical Center/Nebraska Health System
(UNMC/NHS) celebration of national Black History Month will feature a return
engagement by jazz musician Preston Love. In addition, there will be an
art exhibit in the McGoogan Library, a presentation on minority health
disparities and a soul food day in the Nebraska Cafe.
The monthly line-up, organized by the NHS/UNMC Employee Diversity Network
(EDN), is as follows:
Feb. 11-28 — Patty Talbert will display her colorful batiks and paintings
of African and African-American influence in the Linder Lounge of the McGoogan
Library, located in Wittson Hall, 42nd and Dewey Sts. Talbert has taken
the centuries old, labor-intensive stamp block process of building colors
and patterns into fabric and expanded the concept to easel painting on
stretched canvass. She is bringing some surprising art pieces for
display.
Wednesday, Feb. 20 Jazz and rhythm and blues master Preston Love and
a five-piece band will perform at 3 p.m. in the Eppley Science Hall, 42nd
and Dewey Sts. Love has more than 60 years of professional musicianship
as sideman and leader in both internationally known bands and recording
studio backup bands.
Wednesday, Feb. 20 The Nebraska Café in University Hospital
will feature a soul food menu of barbecue ribs, baked beans, corn on the
cob, cornbread and sweet potato pie.
Wednesday, Feb. 27 Marilyn McGary will address a lunch and learn audience
on the topic of 100% Access 0% Disparities: Embracing the Challenge.
The noon presentation will be in the Lower Storz Pavilion in the NHS Clarkson
Hospital. McGary was recently appointed administrator of Womens Community
Health Center at Creighton University. She is a registered nurse, wife,
mother, mentor, and ordained minister with more than 20 years. Experience
in health-care administration and management. She has a bachelors degree
of science in nursing and a masters degree of science in health-care administration.
Before joining Creighton, she served four years as director of operations
and then director of development at Omahas Charles Drew Health Center.
The annual observance of Black History Month is designed to encourage
individuals to read more of the historical literature about African-Americans.
The development of scholarly African-American historical texts was a long,
slow, painstaking process. Although blacks came to America as slaves in
1619, there were only 18 African-Americans with doctoral degrees in history
by 1940. Even today, people are fascinated and surprised by African-American
history and are often left wondering: Why hasnt anyone told these stories
before? and Why did textbooks ignore so many great tales about the black
experience?
The fact is, as explained by James and Lois Horton in Hard Road to
Freedom: The Story of the African-American,” black history was mostly passed
down orally for the first 300 years. It was intermixed with written petitions
to the government, in autobiographical narratives, in poetry and song and
in dance and religious ceremonies. It wasnt until 1827 that James Pennington,
a slave blacksmith and carpenter who taught himself to read and write,
wrote a general African-American history book titled A Textbook of the
Origin and History of Colored People. In the 1850s, William Cooper Nell
wrote two history books detailing the role of blacks in the Revolutionary
War and War of 1812. Then, in 1863, William Wells Brown published The
Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius and His Achievements.”
In 1882, George Washington Williams published a landmark book, History
of the Negro Race in America. To prevent his account of the role and accomplishments
of African-Americans from being dismissed as propaganda or wishful thinking,
Washington documented everything in his book with extensive footnotes.
His level of scholarship raised the bar for future black historians and
set a standard that has never been lowered.
In 1912, Carter G. Woodson, the son of a former slave, earned a doctorate
in history at Harvard University, and three years later organized the Association
for the Study of Negro Life and History and established the Journal of
Negro History. Many of the 20th centurys greatest African-American historians
obtained their first published papers through Woodsons journal. His association
eventually led the movement that resulted in a presidential declaration
of National Negro History Week in February 1925 now observed as National
Black History Month.