“Black history is American history,” said Ernest McMillan, an 80-year-old human rights activist and author.
McMillan has been active in the struggle for human rights and equity for the past 60 years. Today, he works to educate and motivate the American youth to investigate the past and join in his endeavors to enlighten and uplift others within our communities.
McMillan said that understanding American history as a whole requires “a full understanding of what happened to the African American people, indigenous people and other people of color in the U.S.”
“We need to acknowledge the exploitation, oppression and enslavement that generations of African Americans and indigenous people have undergone by those seeking to erase them”, he said.
“We have been shortchanged on integrating our history as a part of American history and relegated to one month out of the whole year,” the author says. McMillan said that knowledge and resources on this topic should be continuously accessible. For this reason, he celebrates Black history all year round.
The activist urges that on an individual level, honoring Black stories and voices past February entails engaging with various organizations and institutions – both online and locally – taking the initiative to make changes. He said that through spreading the news and sparking conversations on social media, people can make an impact.
“It is important for us to learn real history. To understand how we got to who we are and what we got to do,” said McMillan.
This also includes educating oneself and disseminating awareness to push against ignorance, which, McMillan says the government perpetuates purposefully to “dumb people down and present the good aspects of this nation.”
In light of the current government and the disbanding of DEI, McMillan touches upon this by revisiting his statement on education and awareness.
“Ignorance of the common people is an old strategy that’s been utilized time and time again to keep America at the hands of a select few oligarchs and the wealthy who want to keep ruling and profiting off our misery,” he said.
One of the two of McMillan’s books is a memoir, “Standing: One Man’s Odyssey During the Turbulent ’60s”, which is available at the Learning Commons in Lavaca Hall. What the author wants readers to take away from his book is to look through the narrative of one man’s life through the ’60s and ’70s, and understand the individual steps taken toward progress, understanding the spirit behind these actions, and learning from the loss and hardships these communities went under.
The activist ends on a positive note, believing in hope for the future. He talks about how young people and students must come together to advocate not just for civil rights, but human rights. “We need to activate our forces to come together to build a better, brave, new world.”
