Nell Irvin Painter, a Princeton scholar, no longer accepts invitations to Black History Month events.
NEW YORK (AP) -- The only black county commissioner in Dallas, John Wiley Price, spoke Monday to 100 mostly black middle school students about history, responsibility and their futures. If he had been invited the following day -- February 1 -- he would have refused.
That's not because of a scheduling conflict.
Price no longer makes public appearances during February, which the U.S. government declares as Black History Month. Like some other top speakers, Price has grown weary of being in high demand for just a few weeks and then often ignored.
"I'm not going to be, as the kids say, 'pimped' during the month of February," Price said.
A few years ago, Price said, he was inundated with speaking requests. Then he realized that "black people were visible during February, but the other 11 months of the year we became the invisible people."
He isn't a lone rebel: Twenty-nine years after Black History Month was officially designated by the federal government, something of a backlash has begun.
Although February is still an exhilarating time for many high-profile black Americans, whose research and life experiences are celebrated, others see it as overwhelming, even debilitating.
They grow bleary-eyed, traveling almost daily, giving keynote addresses, participating in symposiums and moderating panels. And their physical exhaustion highlights an unsavory reality: Come March 1, public interest in them and their work plummets.
"Black history being confined to that month is more aggravating than ameliorating," said Larry Aubry, a columnist with the Los Angeles Sentinel, a black weekly, who worked on the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission for 34 years.
Black History Month has roots in historian Carter G. Woodson's Negro History Week, which he designated in 1926 as the second week in February to mark the birthdays of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. Woodson, who also began the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, said he hoped the week could one day be eliminated -- when black history would become fundamental to American history.
Now his idea has been expanded to include all of February, a month when there are seemingly nonstop television programs, art exhibits, films, historical tours, new books and public lectures.
"An industry has grown up around (Black History Month) which is really quite fascinating," said Nell Irvin Painter, a Princeton historian. Like Kwanzaa, she said, "It became a corporate holiday, a way for corporations and museums and the U.S. postal service to declare they're multicultural bona fides."
Painter no longer accepts invitations to events pegged to the month, however, because they typically come from groups that "want to hear the same old thing, very often." She spoke Thursday at Wesleyan University on her forthcoming book, "The History of White People," but agreed because it was part of the campus's yearlong program, Conversations on Race.
If speakers don't choose their venues carefully, Black History Month lectures can become "kinds of performances. They're not necessarily intended to solve problems," said Robin D. G. Kelley, a professor of African American Studies at Columbia University. "They're enlightening and interesting. It's enlightened entertainment, which is not a bad thing."
Whereas he once traveled nonstop in February, Kelley declined about 100 invitations this month -- all except three at which he'll speak to youth: "Just when I'm about to get cynical, I give a talk and I have such great engagements with the community and students. People are hungry for a conversation, and I can't be too cynical because I remember that hunger myself as a young person."
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