Welcome February, the month we set aside to celebrate, among other things, Black history.

This is the month that posters go up with quotes from Martin Luther King Jr., units are taught about Frederick Douglass and conversations are had about the remarkable Harriet Tubman.

With good cause.

Legal slavery is, historically speaking, still recent. What’s more, the remnants of that system continue to shape our every day. We see it play out in employment statistics, bias in the legal system and a teenager being denied graduation because of his hair. The civil rights leaders were, and are, the ones on the front lines changing laws and influencing perceptions.

It is correct to pay them homage.

But in so doing, we sometimes bypass the reality that “civil rights” is not the only area where people of color have changed our nation for the better. We owe so many debts of gratitude, and we often have no idea.

In every single conflict our nation has seen, from the Revolutionary War – where an estimated 9,000 African-American troops fought on average eight times longer than white troops – to modern conflict, people of color are among the heroes. James Armistead Lafayette, Salem Poor, Robert Smalls, Henry Johnson, the Tuskegee Airmen – these are just a few examples. And I don’t know any of them as well as I ought to.

Leaving war, we have the arts! Jean-Michel Basquiat was a wild genius who made inroads into popular awareness. Fellow artists Jacob Lawrence, Alma Thomas, Sam Gilliam, Kara Walker, Romare Bearden and Robert Sheldon are all featured in the National Gallery of Art. And I don’t know any of them as well as I ought to.

Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Colin Whitehead, Alex Haley and the great Langston Hughes are just a few of the scores of remarkable authors of color for which we can be grateful, to say nothing of the actors, dancers, musicians and athletes. And I don’t know any of them as well as I ought to.

Our fundamental understanding of the nature of our world and the cosmos owes a debt to scientists such as Walter Lincoln Hawkins, Alexa Canady, Edward Bouchet and Marie M. Daly. And I don’t know any of them as well as I ought to. Heck, it took a Hollywood movie for me to know the stories of Annie Easly, Gladys West and Katherine Johnson, without whom we would never have made it to the moon.

We all know that George Lucas gave us “Star Wars,” but did you know it was a man named Marc Hannah who designed the special effects that gave us “Jurassic Park”? Or that it was Gerald A. Lawson that gave the world interchangeable gaming cartridges? Just two of many, many tech geniuses of color.

And next time you drop off a suit or fancy dress, thank Thomas Jennings, the first African-American to receive a patent. His invention? Dry cleaning. I didn’t know this.

We have a lot of people and a lot of history to celebrate. In fact, it’s really more than one month can hold. What if we used February not so much as a once-a-year event, but as a spark? The catalyst for actively deconstructing the rest of the year to make room for all the stories, all the lives, all the histories that belong within our collective history?

Our education would be so much richer and more complete. We would know ourselves so much better.

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