By Lee A. Daniels

The conventional wisdom has it that we’ve nearly exhausted our exploration of African-American history – that we know all of the “important” people and events and everything about the dynamics of America’s Slave, Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras.

Only a fool – or worse – would think so.

On the contrary, the more I learn about the history of these periods, and the lives white American and black Americans and other Americans of color led, the more I understand how much more there is to learn. Increasingly for me, what provokes that realization isn’t the big event or development in history. It’s the small detail or fact of what living under the repression meant at the ground level, so to speak, of the lives of ordinary black people.

There’s a perfect example of the small fact which metaphorically speaks with symphonic volume in the brief discussion in the September 14 “F.Y.I.” column of the New York Times. It answers a reader’s query whether the principal who in the early 1960s supervised the New York City elementary school the reader attended was the first black principal in the entire school system.

The stunning answer was that that educator, Henrietta Percell, who took up her post in 1963, was only the fourth black person to be appointed principal of a New York City public school in the twentieth century. In the prior six decades since the modern New York City school system was organized in 1898, there had been only three others. There had been two black principals of New York City schools in the late 19^th century, when the system was largely officially segregated, and both loom large in that century’s post-Civil War freedom struggle: Charles L. Reason and Sarah J. Smith Thompson Garnet, whose husband, Henry Highland Garnet, was also a leading activist.

At that point, against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement in both the South and the North, change came swiftly. By 1966, the Times article states, there were six black principals of city public schools, and by 1969, there were 35, including the first three blacks named to head public high schools.

The information left me shaking my head. I thought of all the ramifications of the six-decade-long exclusion of black men and women from these significant school-system – and civic – posts …

The next time someone questions the importance of studying Black History, tell them to, first, do their homework and see how much there is yet to learn.

Lee A. Daniels is Communications Director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., and Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline.