LETTER: HISTORY LETS US COMPREHEND PRESENT, ASSURE FUTURE

To the editor:

More shame to the caller who railed against the idea of Black History Month and whose diatribe brought Speak Out to a new low in anonymous hate-mongering.

The caller was upset that February is also the month in which Americans observe the birthdays of Presidents Washington and Lincoln. But, from a historical perspective, few things could be more appropriate than to study the history of Africans in America in the same month in which we honor the man whose ragtag army freed the Americas from European colonialism, and the man who signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

The caller gives his capsule version of real history in which Africans sold other Africans into slavery. This is hardly a new revelation. Another aspect of real history is that European, Arab and American traders took shameless and mercenary advantage of this brutal tribal custom.

I am afraid I don't fit the caller's pejorative description of a "liberal historical revisionist." I am just a simple high school teacher and a conservative Republican to boot. But even I know that a nation that is unwilling to examine its past honestly is a nation that can neither comprehend its present nor assure its future.

The caller wondered when we will "bow down and honor gays and lesbians for a month." He might do well to begin by studying some of the thoughts and words of those two raving gays who provided much of the intellectual underpinning for Western civilization. Their names were Socrates and Plato.

GORDON HEITZEBERG

Cape Girardeau