The flip side of U.S. history - Minorities seek place in `national consciousness'

The flip side of U.S. history - Minorities seek place in `national consciousness'
By Erin Texeira
Copyright by The Associated Press
Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune
Published August 30, 2006

American students often get the impression from history classes that the British got here first, settling Jamestown, Va., in 1607. They hear about how white Northerners freed the black slaves, how Asians came in the mid-1800s to build Western railroads.

Forty-two years before Jamestown, Spaniards and American Indians lived in St. Augustine, Fla. Several thousand Latinos and nearly 200,000 black soldiers fought in the Civil War. And Asian-Americans had been living in California and Louisiana since the 1700s.

Now, because of the nation's growing diversity, more of these and other lesser-known facts about American minorities are getting more attention.

More than 1 in 4 Americans is not white, and many minority groups are trying to bring their often-overlooked histories to light.

Minority communities "are yelling for inclusion in the national consciousness," said Gary Okihiro, a historian at Columbia University.

Hundreds of efforts are under way to tell the untold stories.

Hispanics are the nation's largest minority group--14.5 percent of the population, according to new census figures--but there is no national museum dedicated to their history.

Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.) is pushing a bill to study building one on the National Mall in Washington.

The Mall has dozens of sites highlighting American culture and history, including the National Museum of the American Indian that opened in 2004, 20 years after it was authorized. Organizers in June settled on the future site of the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, but its opening date is still years away. A Latino museum would be even further off.

Once considered marginal to American history, those stories are "really important because oftentimes the margins really are the holders of American democracy," said Okihiro, an expert in Asian-American history. "They are those who have fought against their own racial profiling and fought for the freedoms that the majority seem to take for granted."

Asian-Americans are the only immigrants in U.S. history to have faced laws explicitly written to bar their entry--laws not overturned until immigration reform in the 1960s, said Dmae Roberts, whose public radio program on Asian immigration, "Crossing East," airs on hundreds of stations.

"People know very little of this outside of California," she said.

Some tales have gone untold because, in the less-diverse America of the past, minorities didn't make the decisions on textbooks and other means of passing along history. However, some who came of age during the civil rights movement are determined to pass the stories on.

"It is so important that children of color are not made to feel that they're asking for anything--they're claiming what's rightfully theirs just like any other child," said Cynthia Morris Lowery, executive director of the African American Experience Fund. "I tell my grandchildren, `Grandpa has earned that spot for you."'

Sometimes, history is recalled through criminal investigations, as in the case of Emmett Till.

Prosecutors in Jackson, Miss., last year exhumed the remains of the black teenager from Chicago killed in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a white woman. Medical examiners performed a new autopsy, and investigators are poring over thousands of documents.

Technological advances also have fueled new interest in history.

In Connecticut last month, archeologists excavated the grave of an 18th Century slave named Venture Smith in hopes that DNA evidence could verify tales of amazing physical strength and a childhood in Guinea, West Africa. No DNA traces were found, but the graves of his wife and children also will be examined.

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America's other stories

Some examples of efforts to highlight minorities in American history:

- In Colorado, a Civil War-era incident, the Sand Creek Battle, is increasingly called the Sand Creek Massacre. In 1864, U.S. soldiers killed 150 Cheyenne and Arapaho people who thought they were under Army protection. A National Park Service site has been designated but is not yet open.

- Last month in Topeka, Kan., a 10-foot-tall bronze sculpture of the Mariachi Estrella de Topeka--Topeka's Mariachi Stars--was mounted outside the city's Performing Arts Center in honor of local Mexican-American musicians who died in a Kansas City, Mo., building collapse 25 years ago.

- On Angel Island near San Francisco, thousands of immigrants, nearly all from China, were processed starting around 1910. Parts of the grounds--including barracks with Chinese poems carved on the walls--are closed pending renovations expected to be completed next year.

- A stretch of Los Angeles County's Manhattan Beach was renamed Bruce's Beach last month. Once owned by the African-American Bruce family, it was one of the few California beaches open to blacks in the 1920s and '30s.

- A just-opened museum honors the integration of Clinton High School in Clinton, Tenn., 50 years ago.

--Associated Press