Do We Ask Too Much of Black Heroes?

This is the first piece in “Black History, Continued,” a series that will explore pivotal moments and transformative figures in Black culture and examine how the past shapes the present and the future.

In the early 20th century, before Negro History Week had turned into Black History Month, African-American teachers and children in schools throughout the segregated South would paste images of celebrated figures of Black history on the walls of their schools. It was a public affirmation that greatness existed among their people despite oppression. As a woman born post desegregation, in 1972, I remember the photocopied programs featuring a list of names to celebrate: Sojourner Truth, W.E.B. DuBois, Daniel Hale Williams, with facts to go along with each. Even then, I knew these models of aspiration were meant to guard me against any feelings of inferiority that might come from not seeing my story in textbooks or on screens.

Though the world has changed a great deal over the past century, celebrating heroes remains an important and familiar part of the Black History Month ritual. It is consistent with the way Americans celebrate history. As the historian Benedict Anderson notes in “Imagined Communities,” his examination of the rise of nationalism, in a national imagination the solitary hero is possessed of qualities and abilities that exceed what we expect of a human being and he (and it is usually a he) invariably succeeds. In the history of the United States, dominating the landscape and vanquishing all opponents (think George Washington and Davy Crockett) are classic hero’s traits. The hero becomes a proxy for the nation.

Black historic and political figures have been rendered as vanquishing heroes as well. Noble, brave and transcendent, they have remarkable stories. We tremble in awe before the recounting of Frederick Douglass escaping from slavery and Ida B. Wells narrowly evading the Klan in Memphis, saving her own life — then, through her investigative journalism into the practice of lynching, saving the lives of countless others. Martin Luther King Jr., who survived threats, bombs and jail cells before falling to an assassin’s bullets, has been rendered as the ultimate hero. His depiction is messianic. And though he was a key member of a vast and complex movement, he is often presented as singular. This is the way we tell history in the American public sphere.

The Black American hero is necessarily more complicated than the mainstream “Great American heroes.” Both American and Black in a racially oppressive nation, he is a figure of double consciousness, often put to cross purposes. His greatness is trumpeted in order to reject the concept of Black inferiority and to assert belonging in the nation — a sign of legitimacy. “I, too, sing America,” he sings, as Langston Hughes once put it.

Or the hero might instead be a salvific figure, someone like Malcolm X or Huey P. Newton, who rejects the racist nation. See, for example, the embrace of Marcus Garvey, Garveyism and the Back-to-Africa movement in the early 20th century. Another type of Black hero is one who survives untold brutalities and lives to tell the tale, indicting white supremacy by his very existence.

Heroes, as historians and activists have noted for generations, are often made mythic in ways that are troubling. Social change is never wrought by individuals. Movement is a collective endeavor and the romantic ideal of the hero obscures that truth. Recent social movements like the Movement for Black Lives have been deliberate about describing themselves as leaderless or “leader-full,” in order to emphasize the importance of collective organizing while rejecting the model of the charismatic male leader. “We’re not following an individual, right? This is a leader-full movement,” Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Global Network told NPR in 2015. “There [are] groups on the ground that have been doing this work, and I think we stand on the shoulders of those folks.”