Black History Month - February 2022
There’s a story my parents tell about when I was four years old. I’ve come to realize it’s a particularly Oregon story. I’d grown up in Zambia, aware of race from a very young age. We had recently arrived in Portland where we were intending to live while my dad went to Western Evangelical Seminary. As we were driving to church one Sunday, I was looking out the window and shouted, “Mommy, where are all the Black people?”
I say this is a particularly Oregon story, because there’s a good reason people who move to Oregon often ask, “Where are all the Black people?” If you don’t know that history, I recommend this YouTube video, or one of the longer lectures by Walidah Imarisha available on the Internet. There is a long and rich history of Black people living and thriving in the Oregon Territories, which you can find at the Oregon Black Pioneers. There is also a more-troubling history of intentional, legal exclusion of non-Whites that began when Oregon was chartered, and continued for decades.
It’s Black History Month, often thought of as the month when we post quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ida B. Wells on our Facebook page. However, this month was originally intended as an opportunity for teachers to look at their curriculum and ask the question, “Where are all the Black people?” Too much of our history has been written as White stories about White people, ignoring the perspectives of people who are not White. In Black History Month, we’re invited to dig deeper.
A cohort from our CPC Board has been doing this digging-deeper work as part of the Reckoning with Our Racist History Project of the Common Table. The first year, our cohort consisted of three Board members and three staff. This year, we have five Board members and two staff. Along with cohorts from faith communities across Oregon (including several CPC Churches), we’ve been invited to tell our histories, looking at our land -- how we acquired it and from whom -- and asking the question, “Whose stories are missing when we tell our history the way we usually do?”
Recently, the CPC Board cohort has been reading the official conference history book published in 1976, Churches along the Oregon Trail. We’ve been reading it looking for where people who are not White show up, and how they show up. Then we ask, “How might this story have looked from their perspective?” In the official history, often non-White people are portrayed as others, or as projects. I noticed one of our churches named a conflict they had in the early 1860s, when the pastor preached against slavery and was told, “Stop preaching politics!” It’s prompted me to want to go to the Black Pioneers and see what I can find out about African Americans living in that town in the 1860s for whom that squabble at a local Congregational church would have been much more personal. It’s also given me knew perspective on the echoes of that same “no politics in the pulpit” refrain I hear today. It makes me want to do better this time around.
We in the CPC Board cohort are trying to live into the spirit of Black History Month all year long. We’re looking at the stories we tell, and how we tell them. We’re looking for the perspectives of people who are not White. Noticing how our story looks different when we ask questions like, “Where are the Black people in this story?” or “Where are the indigenous people?” or “Where are the Latine people?” or “Where are the Asian people?”
For most of our history we’ve told the story of the churches dotted along the wagon trail that stretched through southern Idaho, the Columbia Gorge, and Oregon from the perspective of White Christians. After all that was our perspective as Congregationalists and German Reformers. This Black History Month, I invite you to tell a deeper, richer story. Look at your church’s history, and ask who is there that you’re not noticing? Is there someone outside looking in? What is the story that hasn’t been told? See where those stories lead, and who they lead you to. See how your histories can change you when they’re told a different way.
Blessings,
Tyler
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