By Seth Quillen

RICHMOND -- There is a growing consensus that black history month should be abolished, but not because African-Americans are not important -- in fact, quite the opposite.

"I wish we didn't celebrate black history month. The role of African-Americans in our country is so important it should just be history and studied with the rest of American history," said Michael Nicholls during the second lecture of the Friends of the Library series at the Richmond Library last week.

Nicholls, a professor of history at Utah State University, does not consider himself an African-American historian, but through his extensive study of Virginia, where 20 percent of the American colonial population was black, it just sort of happens.

"If you are a historian of 18th-century Virginia you had better know about African-American history," said Nicholls. "So yeah, I guess I am a historian of black America."

The larger question of black history month, Nicholls explained, is not the importance, rather how and why it came about.

"In the early 19th century it was felt by many people that blacks had long been ignored and overlooked so the second week in February was set aside because both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass were born in during that week, both of whom were heroes to the black freedom," said Nicholls.

It was not until 1976 that black history gained national attention and was given the whole month of February and officially declared Black History Month.

As we approach the 200th anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase it's surprising that the majority of Americans are unaware of the importance blacks played in the acquisition that doubled the size our the United States, Nicholls said.

Napoleon had sent an army to settle a revolt in what is now Haiti, but the soldiers were brutally beaten through guerrilla warfare. Those who did survive the war were plagued by the diseases of a foreign land and were finished off. Napoleon so desperately needed money to recover from his loss he sold the whole thing for around $16 million. The United States was able to buy the land for 4 to 7 cents per acre from France.

Many Americans are also surprised when they hear of the important role blacks played in the Civil War. By 1865 there were 179,000 blacks fighting for the Union Army -- that was more than 10 percent of the Union Army and was 70 percent of age-eligible black people. Most of them were free blacks who had run away from the South and believed in the cause and wanted to free their fellow slaves left behind.

"Because when it comes down to it, ultimately it was a war about slavery and freedom even though it is often passed off to be about states' rights," said Nicholls.

Ohio was a great focal point before and through the war for the Underground Railroad, which did not end in northern America but in Canada. The North was not extremely excited about having blacks as neighbors either.

"The South has no monopoly on racism in American history," said Nicholls.

He also spoke of other great African-Americans such as Daniel Hale Williams, who performed the first open-heart surgery; Garrett Morgan, who invented the gas masks used through WWII and later the automatic stop-light signal system.

Nicholls also spoke about Charles Richard Drew, who studied blood at Columbia and figured out how to store plasma and blood banking. At one point Drew was the head of the American Red Cross but later resigned because they wanted to segregate the source of blood. He died ironically: after he got into an automobile accident, emergency workers would not take him to the nearest hospital. Instead they took him across town to a black hospital, and not in time to save his life.

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