That famous day that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his followers stood firm on the bridge at Selma was my birthday. March 7th, 1965; I was eighteen, an a level history student, and already awake to the politics of my community.

Our curriculum dealt with the founding of the Tudor monarchy, The Stuart, The English Revolution and the Restoration, The Wars of Religion in Europe, Charles V and Philip II of Spain, The Holy Roman Empire and so on. We got as far as the French Revolution. I loved `history' and was a good student.

There was nothing on our curriculum that dealt directly with the depopulation of Africa and the Atlantic Slave Trade, events contemporaneous to those we were studying for our A Levels. Meanwhile, there was a British colony in Africa that decided, unilaterally to declare its independence, rather than convert to majority rule, and we were shortly to have our own disturbances.

The discussions we had were on these topics were extra curricular, and had about them the feel of something illicit. It was my first encounter with what we have long since come to recognise as the implicit and deliberate marginalisation of readers who were not white: People of Colour.

Later as a student in England I found myself at first bemused, baffled and then aghast at my English colleagues' ignorance of Britain's imperial adventure, except in the most glowing and jingoistic terms.

They too had been given something well short of the whole story. Stories of black colonials massing on Empire Day to wave the Union Jack and sing "Rule Britannia! Britons never, never, never shall be slaves! "caused peals of laughter, and outright incredulity. Never mind that those blacks thought they were the Britons of which they sang. The teaching of history was political, in what was included and what was excluded; and why.

The perniciousness of this was pervasive. Was it that we had no history? Professor Arnold Toynbee said so. And Froude. Was it that what there was didn't amount to a worthwhile curriculum? Or was it we ourselves who were not worth the trouble? So: and I have not exhausted the inferences.

What happened was that I came across some volumes of Rogers' work in a friend's studio. Then a taxi man introduced me to DuBois "The Souls of Black Folk''. At Baxter's Bookstore I came across James Baldwin's collections of essays. And I was off reading a curriculum of my own devising, haphazard and eclectic though it was; but I was filling in the gaps.

I couldn't get enough of what we called `Black History', that separate, and unequally told story of the African and black presence in the world. And I was glad for it. Simple facts that had been hidden from us thrilled me; for example, that both Elijah (The Real) McCoy and St. Augustine were black! When I discovered that there was a `Black History Month', despite my initial anger that `history' could be partitioned, 11:1 in the ruling minority's favour, I never-the-less hungrily devoured any and every morsel of information about black people that came my way.

In my heart I knew then, that relegating the story of the Black experience to the margins, and dusting it off, as a concession, once a year, was wrong. It was immoral.

It probably is not unjust to say that the deliberate mis-education in the subject called history was the single most damaging ploy in Government sponsored under-development of Bermuda's young population. It gave a spurious underpinning to racialist theories of superiority, and inferiority, and fitted well with the intention of the designers of the 1948 Education Act, who set out in bold print their intention to educate whites for leadership, and blacks for subservience.

In this circumstance it is not surprising that people welcomed Black History, as a separate study, and used Black History Month as a period in which to try and make up for all the omissions, for all the lost time. Yet Black History itself seemed an added -- on element, an after thought, a discourse outside the main narrative of history; a segregated story, the tendrils of causality and consequence withered by its having been decontextualised.

And what is its proper context? This history of mankind begins in Africa. It is not asking too much that World History be its context. Then all children could learn, for example, that at the end of the first Christian millennium, a time of relative cultural backwardness in Europe, a great empire was flourishing in West Africa.

All children could learn that at the time of Chaucer, classical universities had been established in Goa, Djenne and Sankore; that before Columbus Africans, Vikings, and others reached what we now call America. We could explore the relationship of European voyages of `discovery' to the Renaissance, or Atlantic Slavery to the `Enlightenment in Europe', and so on.

No one is disprivileged by history taught is this manner; this is, with the story of the black experience intertwined in the text with the other narratives. Or, better said, with all the `histories' intertwined to make history. This, to my way of thinking, would be the best solution to the notion of separate, unequal `histories'. We would have our story, all our story, not one month, or eleven months a year, but as we experience life itself; all the time.

Black History Month may very well still be needed in a society where blacks are a minority, and unlikely to have the political power to successfully demand their story's rightful place in the main body of the text. While that may be the case in the United States, that is most emphatically not the case in Bermuda. Now, more than ever, we can and should tell the whole story. It's time to tell it like it is: one world, one history.

Writer: Ronald R.W. Lightbourne, former history teacher.

BLACK HISTORY MONTH HIS