Token Black Historical Figures?

Typically when Black History Month rolls around, it's suddenly time for schoolchildren across America to learn about the civil rights movement through the stories of larger-than-life people like Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and Harriet Tubman. Despite the undeniable importance of these three figures, don't they act as America's token black historical figures?

The majority of history courses in America don't spend significant time acknowledging the African American perspective, or African history, but instead approach history from the European/"discoverer" perspective. In World History freshman year, I recall the textbook having more pages on Greek civilization than the entire African country continent.

While focusing on figures like MLK, Tubman, and Parks may seem to Americans to be a sufficient way to replace/make up for the lack of African American perspective in education, focusing on figures that are few-in-number but grand-in-persona makes it seem more like they’re exceptions to most of African American history rather than integral pieces of it. Almost as fast as these African Americans pop up in history courses, most traces of African Americans in American history disappear.

In the past, what has learning about African/African-American history been like for you? What aspects of African-American history should be incorporated more in to American education, if at all? What sort of picture does Black History Month paint about the nature of African-American history?

Cocaine vs. Crack | 1:100

In 1986, congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act in response to mounting fears, suspicions, and assumptions about crack cocaine (as opposed to powder). The death of a basketball player, who was thought to have OD'd on crack (he actually OD'd on powder cocaine), led to a lot of media attention, and congress passed the law in response.

At the time, there were beliefs that crack was worse than powder cocaine, causing increased crime rates, being more addictive, being more likely to cause psychosis/death, etc. Now, it is known that powder cocaine and crack cocaine are exactly the same pharmacologically: one gram of powder is equally potent as one gram of powder.

However, the law passed differentiated between cocaine and crack in an extreme and irrational manner, such that the penalty for possessing one gram of crack has the equivalent criminal sentencing of 100 grams of powder cocaine. As a result, the mandatory minimum prison sentence for 5 grams of crack (the weight of 5 sugar packets) is five years, while more than one pound of cocaine will result in that same sentence.

It turns out, the only real difference between crack cocaine and powder cocaine are the people who use it. Crack cocaine tends to be preferred by African-American drug users, while powder cocaine tends to be preferred by whites. The results of the law have been surprising:

"In 1986, before mandatory minimums for crack offenses became effective, the average federal drug offense sentence for blacks was 11% higher than for whites. Four years later following the implementation of harsher drug sentencing laws, the average federal drug offense sentence was 49% higher for blacks." -source

Additionally, "Most drug offenders are white. Five times as many whites use drugs as blacks. Yet blacks comprise the great majority of drug offenders sent to prison."-source

...And I don't really know quite what to make of this: "more than 80% of the defendants sentenced for federal crack cocaine offenses are African American, despite the fact that more than 66% of crack users are white or Hispanic."-source

And even when law officials realized the disparity between blacks and whites with incarceration soon after the law's passage, no action was taken. Today, it is still a law, although, finally, presidents (both Bush and Obama) and congresspeople have started speaking about the law, and preliminary new laws are present in both houses of Congress. (There is still a ways to go, however.)

Is it negligence that caused this to take so long? What are other laws passed under such irrational circumstances? Why is it possible for trends, craze, & suspicion to cause such devastating laws, yet scientific refutation and regret take forever to undo these damages? Why are African Americans overrepresented in the prison system for crack use more than other crack-using minorities?