Still I Rise

By Ashley Brewington

I never expected silence to feel so loud.

When I first walked the grounds of the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, I noticed what was not there. There were no romanticized balconies, no grand narratives about architecture, no softened language. Instead, there were names carved into stone. Children, mothers, fathers. Lives. Stories. Humanity.

A summer later, I visited the plantation and home of Andrew Jackson. The tour spoke of leadership and legacy, of military victories and political ambition. Slavery had been mentioned briefly, almost cautiously, as though it were a footnote rather than a foundation. Walking those grounds made me understand something I had not fully grasped before.

History is not only about what happened. It is about what we choose to emphasize, what we soften, and what we dare to confront. That realization feels urgent as we mark one hundred years since Black history first fought to be formally recognized.

In 1926, Carter G. Woodson established Negro History Week to combat erasure and affirm Black contribution to the American story. Decades later it expanded into Black History Month and in 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. asked a question that still challenges us today, “Where do we go from here?”

That question was not merely about recognition. It was about whether being seen would translate into justice. A century later, the goal is no longer visibility, but accountability. To confront injustice; preserve the truth of our past; and create a future where Black lives, culture, and brilliance are celebrated unapologetically and equitably.

Celebration is not the same as equality.

Representation is not the same as protection. Black leaders hold positions of influence, Black culture has shaped global conversations, and representation has expanded. And yet recognition has not erased the disparity. Black women continue to earn significantly less than their white male counterparts despite comparable education and experience.

Incidents of police brutality remind us that equal protection under the law remains unequally applied. The Black Lives Matter movement was not born out of division, but out of grief and urgency. A demand that Black lives be valued not only in spirit but systematically. And yet, even against systematic barriers, Black people are not defined by their oppressors. They are artists, innovators, dreamers. To erase Black history is not only to deny suffering. It is to obscure brilliance.

Nowhere is the tension between recognition and reality more visible than in education. I remember sitting in fourth grade as my favorite teacher, a Black woman whose quiet strength shaped my understanding of dignity, read aloud from an Meet Addy novel about Addy, a girl born into slavery. That story scared me. It forced me to see enslaved children not as statistics, but as real people.

Honest storytelling did not divide our classroom; it deepened our understanding. Afterward, my teacher shared her own experience of discrimination as a child. At that moment, history collapsed into the present. These stories were not over. They were inherited.

As debates intensify over how slavery and racism should be taught, I have seen how textbooks can compress centuries of brutality into cautious paragraphs, as though the truth must be diluted for comfort. When history is sanitized, injustice has won.

Dr. King understood this danger. When he asked “Where do we go from here?” he was speaking to a nation that had passed civil rights legislation but had not ended systematic inequality. Today, we risk repeating that illusion, celebrating visibility while inequalities persist beneath the surface. We celebrate Black excellence, yet economic gaps remain. We commemorate history, yet some seek to restrict how much is taught.

King’s question was never about comfort. It was about courage.