I have no profound thoughts on black history month, the shortest month of the year, other than to hope that someday it won't be necessary.

In the meantime, lamely, I offer past articles that touch on some of the issues this month touches on:

• A 2003 Seattle Times review of Library of Congress' epic, two-volume, two-thousand-page tome, “Reporting Civil Rights: American Journalism: 1941-1972,” which gives us the history before it's history, and before it's been sweetened and commodified and forgotten. One of the more important books you can read about the civil rights movement.
• A 1998 Seattle Times review of David Halberstam's “The Children,” which focuses on the Nashville sit-in kids, including future U.S. Congressman John Lewis and future DC Mayor Marion Berry.
• A 1997 personal review of Jules Tygiel's seminal book, “Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and his legacy.”
• A short, personal review of Henry Louis Gates' “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man.”  
• A 2008 personal review of Barack Obama's “Dreams From My Father.” 
• A 2005 MSNBC article on actor Jeffrey Wright.
• A 2006 MSNBC analysis of the career of director Spike Lee.
• A 2007 MSNBC paean to Morgan Freeman.
• A 2008 MSNBC dissection of the secret to Tyler Perry's success.

In “Reporting Civil Rights,” Russell Baker reminds us that by the time Dr. King spoke, “huge portions of the crowd had drifted out of earshot,” while civil-rights worker Michael Thelwell details how the Kennedy administration turned the March into something “too sweet, too contrived, and its spirit too amiable to represent anything of the bitterness that had brought the people there.”