Feb 24, 2019 4 min read

Editor’s note: This is the winning essay in the Black History Month essay contest sponsored by Washington Health System Teen Outreach.

African-Americans have been fighting for equality since I can remember. We have black people dying to this day for racist acts and literally anything. Black kids are scared to walk outside by themselves because they don’t want to get ganged up on, shot at or even killed. We have many African-American people from the past and the present who tried to get things to change, but some things haven’t changed at all. Us children want things to change; we want to see equality. We see things happening in the world where violence is taking over everything. We hear many things on the news, in the paper, on the internet and social media. Many things that happen we don’t have control over, but we don’t like seeing things not being taken care of. It isn’t just happening to us children either. It’s happening to our parents, our siblings, our aunts, everyone. We want change and people aren’t really doing their best at it.

One thing we can do to change things in our school or in our community is to have respect for black history all year long. In schools, we celebrate Black History Month in February obviously, but some of my peers and I have talked about how we should respect and talk about black history more than we do. We have our fun and talk about people who have tried or did change things that happened in the past or influential starts to getting more things to change for a month. Being a black teenager, I’d really like to learn about what led up to the changes and the outcome of the changes. It’s not just black students who want to know more about black history. We all know about Rosa Parks, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. , etc., but nobody really talks about other people. Doing our projects for Black History Month helped me learn more about African-Americans than ever learned in a class before. I was fond of Malcolm X until I did my project on him. I didn’t know who the first female African-American physician was, or Rebecca Lee Crumpler, until my classmate did a project on her. We don’t learn the importance of black history the way we should. We learn about the importance of world history, which is totally understandable because we need to know about our world, but we also need to know about the people who have changed our lives as African-Americans.

Adding on to how we should have respect for Black History Month all year, another thing we can do to change things in schools is to not have a separate month for black history. Having a separate month for black history is putting the importance of African-Americans and their history to the side. There are things that we need to know about black history to understand our world history as a whole. Having us as students learn about black history all throughout the year will give us more of an understanding as to why we have Black History Month and its importance to the world. The things African-Americans have done are for us. They did the things they did for our freedom, our rights, our dreams, and anything we want to do. They wanted to know that with the things they have done have helped us understand and know things we didn’t before.

Black History Month is a good learning month for students who don’t know much about the history of African-Americans and is an interesting thing to learn about. But if we learned about it all year long we wouldn’t have to take the time to incorporate it into our schedule, and we’d know more about things that we think is also important to history. My peers and I have discussed how important black history is to us as a whole and we dislike how we only get a month and some days to discuss our interest about the people who have changed and influenced the world to be the way it is now. All of the influential African-Americans would want students and adults to know why they did the things they did and how they’d wish the events positively affected us today.

Alexia Clemens is an 11th-grade student at Washington High School, and is the daughter of Richard and Marcy Clemens.