Since the nation officially recognized Black History Month in 1976, Americans have debated whether it needed a designated month to honor African American culture. The answer is, “hell, yeah.” The argument that Americans should celebrate it all year-round is correct in theory. Usually, though, when something is supposed to happen all of the time, it ends up happening none of the time.

Either way, to say Black history contributed to American culture vastly understates its significance: Black history has defined American culture, including much of its style and flavor. The ubiquity of Black culture means few Americans, if any, are entirely white.

Young whites grew up in a popular culture dominated by African Americans; their great-grandparents had equated cool with Black at least since rock ‘n roll pioneer Chuck Berry electrified white teens in the 1950s.

But if young whites today know something about Nipsey Hussle and Tyler, the Creator, they know less about Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor or Black writers like Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston. They know something about Martin Luther King Jr., but less about Malcolm X, Harriet Tubman, Denmark Vesey, and Frederick Douglass, or the collective struggles against slavery, segregation and racism that have informed Black history since the first enslaved Africans landed in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. Black freedom fighters were, at their core, American patriots struggling to make the U.S. Constitution whole.

Jazz and blues musicians, such as John Coltrane and Billie Holiday, created, arguably, America’s greatest contribution to world culture. Today, the art of hip-hop has influenced not only the music but also the style, dress and attitude of generations of young people worldwide. And if you don’t think hip-hop has been elevated to high art, listen to Illmatic by Nas, or almost anything by Kendrick Lamar, who in 2018 became the first rapper to win the Pulitzer Prize in music.

By stressing achievement, Black History Month also counters the still-pervasive portrayal of the Black experience, in the media and elsewhere, as one of pathology and deprivation.

Incarceration and poverty rates remain far higher for Black Americans than for whites. As a journalist, I’ve been in more than 50 prisons; the optics inside the walls always remind me of slavery. Even in prison, however, Black people create and resist, writing poems and stories, playing in makeshift jailhouse bands and improvising rhymes in their cells.

In 1926, with Jim Crow in full effect, Black historian Carter G. Woodson helped launch “Negro History Week,” a precursor to Black History Month, during the second week of February, marking the birthdays of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. Nearly a century later, we still need a special observance. Without understanding African American history, we can’t understand who we are as Americans.

On a personal level, Black art and culture have enriched my world. After high school, I played drums in several bands and entered college as a music major. Jazz drummers like Sonny Murray and Elvin Jones inspired me.

After completing a remedial English class as a freshman, I took a Black literature class as an elective. It opened my mind to the power and beauty of language and learning. Amiri Baraka and James Baldwin — writers I interviewed years later as a journalist — became my mentors. Like other Black writers, they seemed to understand white society and white people better than white people understood themselves.

In the spirit of Black History Month, I’ve compiled a few works of Black literature and music to recommend.

Books:

1. Notes of a Native Son (1955) and The Fire Next Time (1963) by James Baldwin. Two essential collections by the writer who practically invented the art of the personal essay. No one has done it as well since.

2. Native Son by Richard Wright (1940). Bigger Thomas, an impoverished youth from Chicago, murders a white woman, setting the stage for one of the finest novels of the 20th Century.

3. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (1937). A soulful Southern love story, exploring race, sex, gender roles and female sexuality in a way that hadn’t been done before.

4. Tales (1967) and The Dead Lecturer (1964) by Amiri Baraka. A collection of impressionistic stories and poems showing the central figure of the Black Arts Movement at his best. I interviewed Baraka in 1995. Despite his fiery image, he was warm, down-to-earth and funny. Always ahead of his time, Baraka recorded a reading of his controversial mid-1960s poem “Black Dada Nihilismus” to the free jazz of the New York Art Quartet.

5. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952). This masterpiece alone catapulted Ellison to the top tier of American writers.

6. Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison. The first African-American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature wrote about a dozen novels. Beloved, which explores slavery’s destruction of identity, is among her best.

7. Cane by Jean Toomer (1923). A masterpiece of the Harlem Renaissance, this haunting and beautiful series of vignettes, many rooted in Southern folk culture, is poetic and surreal.

8. A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry (1959) and Fences by Pittsburgh’s own August Wilson (1985). Two landmarks of the Black theater. Hansberry’s aspirational play takes its name from the famous poem, “Harlem,” by Langston Hughes.

9. The Autobiography of Malcolm X by journalist Alex Haley (1965), and The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X by Les Payne (2020). A Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Payne wrote the definitive biography of Malcolm X. Like the autobiography, it is essential to understanding one of the greatest U.S. human rights leaders.

10. Dapper Dan: Made in Harlem, A Memoir (2019) by Daniel R. Day. From street hustler and dice wizard to Gucci god, Day spins an amazing true life story of tenacity and artistry.

Bonus Pick: Cruelty by Ai (1973). Ai is indispensable for her raw power and uncompromising honesty. Her poetry inhabits a dystopian world of outcasts, women with crushed dreams and violent men.

Music:

1. John Coltrane: Giant Steps (1960). Coltrane’s influence on modern jazz as a saxophonist, composer and improviser is impossible to overstate.

2. John Coltrane: A Love Supreme (1965). Recorded when Coltrane was leading the avant-garde and free jazz movement. The group, including pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison and drummer Elvin Jones, is widely considered the greatest quartet in jazz history. A profoundly spiritual work that influenced another brilliant avant-garde saxophonist, Pharoah Sanders.

3. Miles Davis, Kind of Blue (1959). Kind of Blue seems to top almost every jazz list. Miles shifted gears in 1971, when his Tribute to Jack Johnson ushered in the genre of jazz rock.

4. Ornette Coleman: The shape of Jazz to Come (1959); Eric Dolphy, Out to Lunch! (1964); and Cecil Taylor, The Cecil Taylor Unit (1978). These are watershed albums in the history of free jazz, testimonials to the innovation, creativity and improvisation that is the heart of jazz.

5. Billie Holiday: 20th Century Masters (The Millennium Collection). Lady Day, the greatest female jazz vocalist, gives an especially haunting and painfully poignant rendition of Strange Fruit, first recorded in 1939 from the lyrics of an anti-lynching protest poem. “Blood on the leaves and blood at the root / Black bodies swingin’ in the Southern breeze / Strange fruit hangin’ from the poplar trees.”

6. Nas: Illmatic (1994). Growing up in Queensbridge, Nas was only 20, and wise beyond his years, when this out cold masterpiece of hip-hop dropped in 1994, an instant game-changer for hip-hop production, lyrical technique, content and artistry.

7. Kendrick Lamar won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2017 for “Damn,” and rightly so, but I’m still partial to “Good Kid, M.A.A.D City” that dropped in 2012. Like Illmatic, they’re both poetic and lyrically brilliant.

8. Aretha Franklin: I normally avoid greatest hits albums but Aretha’s 30 Greatest Hits covers most of the Queen of Soul’s significant songs from 1967 to 1974.

9. Sam Cooke: if you’ve heard only Cooke’s studio albums, Live at the Harlem Square Club will be a revelation. Recorded in 1963 at a nightclub in Miami’s Black Overtown neighborhood, this live album wasn’t released until 1985 because it was considered too gritty and raw for Cooke’s crossover image. This was a down-home, gut-bucket show before an audience that Cooke worked into a frenzy. The recording quality isn’t great but oh, my, God, the man could sing.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Jeffery Gerritt is editorial page editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

First Published: February 3, 2022, 5:00 a.m.
Updated: February 3, 2022, 12:51 p.m.