Welcome to Black History Month 2024!

This year’s Black History Month theme is “changing the narrative”. It has long been said that History (with a capital ‘H’) has been written by, for and about wealthy white men and that the accomplishments and lives of everyone else has somehow been left out of the official record. Let’s change that together! This month, I will be surfacing just a few of the voices and accomplishments of Black people from all backgrounds – men of industry and commerce through to women who innovated to survive poverty and became such successful entrepreneurs that they finally launched entirely new business sectors.

How many of these groundbreaking Black people have you heard of?

Nichelle Nichols (Lieutenant Uhura from the original series/films of Star Trek) was both an accomplished musician and trailblazing activist and “friend to NASA” who inspired both the first woman astronaut and the first Black astronaut to go into space. While it has been recognised that Lt Uhura held lower rank to other officers, as one of the first Black women actresses to hold a serious and prominent role where she was treated with respect equal to her white male compatriots, Nichele Nichols helped revolutionise the representation of Black women on American television in the face of horrifying derision and active discrimination. She nearly quit after discovering that the studio executives had colluded to withhold her fanmail while she suffered overt and relentless racial abuse, continuing only after Martin Luther King, Jr reminded her of the importance of her prominent visibility as a Black icon on the show.

Following trailblazers such as Nichelle Nichols, American engineer, physician and NASA astronaut, Mae Carol Jemison became the first African American woman to travel in space when she went into orbit aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour on September 12, 1992.

Some of the world’s leading mathematicians and computer scientists have been Black women, including Annie Easley, NASA’s “human computer,” who NASA relied upon to perform complex mathematical computations and who later became a leading computer programmer, and Gladys West, who invented the global positioning system (GPS).

Walter Lincoln Hawkins invented a plastic coating for telephone wires that allowed signals to be transmitted over long distances.

The first African-American woman in the US to receive a PhD in Chemistry, Marie Maynard Daly helped open up new vistas of research into understanding how diet can impact heart and circulatory system health.

Marie Van Brittan Brown co-invented home security systems to help keep herself safe while living in downtown Queens, a rough district of New York, which included a doorbell camera linked to a monitor, a two way microphone-speaker system, a button to unlock the door and a button to contact the police. She took out three patents with her husband between 1967-69 for inventions that still underpin home security systems commonly in use today.

Black inventor Garrett Morgan was a serial inventor of everything from an improved sewing machine to the three-light traffic light system we know today. Morgan introduced the amber light that warns oncoming traffic that the lights are changing and instructs drivers to stop if safe to do so and yield to oncoming traffic, which was increasingly important as traffic speeds increased because it avoided dangerously rushed decision-making as lights suddenly changed from green to red without warning.

Celebrating Black writers

Black writers and thinkers have also left us a legacy of great literature, which has helped rewrite the narrative of our times and made clear how much suffering and deprivation that many would like us to assume to be unavoidable has actually been carefully engineered and maintained through systems of violent oppression so familiar to us that we can no longer see them in operation in our daily lives. So over the coming few weeks, let’s take a tour of just a few of the great Black authors you can read in the University Library, starting with the works of gay Black twentieth century thinker, writer and novelist James Arthur Baldwin (1924-1987).

Black writers have been among the most influential and insightful thinkers of the past century, echoing the philosophies developing since antiquity that tell us how to thrive amid adversity and remind us of how we support ourselves best when we help others to succeed. Black authors, several of them who lived with intersectional oppression because they were also women, LGBTQ+ or both, continue to lead inclusive lines of modern thought, offering counter-cultural insights from the perspective of those historically without structural power but never without influence. You can find some of these writers highlighted on shelf end posters around the Library. I’ll be exploring some of these diverse voices over the coming weeks. Stay tuned!

Image source: Nichelle Nichols CC BY-SA 2.0 Gage Skidmore via Flickr https://www.flickr.com/photos/gageskidmore/8853272714