Acknowledging Blacks

* Ron Harris’ thoughts articulated in “History for One and All” (Feb. 4) certainly mirrored my ambiguity towards black history month.

As a private school elementary teacher (retired), I attempted to incorporate black history into the daily curriculum. This required a very time-consuming effort to draw from many resources. A single month just doesn’t afford ample time to explore the events and accomplishments of a great people who so significantly contributed to the story of our illustrious nation.

Our textbooks must be rewritten to be inclusive of all people; thus eliminating the need for “special” months.

LEAH J. LEMELLE

Inglewood

* In response to “Acknowledging a Terrible Sacrifice” by S. Allen Counter, Commentary, Feb. 13:

Regardless of how many hyphenates are invented by the current generations of black Americans, it is impossible to accurately relate to the degree of suffering and misery experienced by those millions of initial hostages upon whose blood, sweat and tears the economic foundation of this now-great country was built.

Indeed, the descendants of those original slaves are the only group, other than the aboriginal American Indians, who come close to qualifying as “original Americans.” Their losses far exceeded that experienced by the Jewish citizens of Europe under Hitler, yet in all America there is not one memorial acknowledging their sacrifice.

Even along the African coast many of the slave-holding pens and prisons and other artifacts of the period have been preserved as a reminder of that great scar on Africa’s history.

I fully support Counter’s suggestion, and think that it should be demanded of the U.S. government that a memorial be commissioned and erected in this nation’s capital to commemorate the contributions and sufferings made by black slaves of America in the building of this country. Such a monument would lend more to mending the stripped pride and esteem of black Americans than anything else I can imagine. White America needs to come to grips with the magnitude of injustice inflicted upon its black citizens, in much the same way that it is now doing with the Native Americans. Very much like the Holocaust, there are too many whites who find it easier to pretend that the horrors of slavery have been exaggerated, or worse, that slavery never really existed.

HERMAN A. REGUSTERS

South Pasadena