"I’ll let history speak for itself. The facts are there for those who want to read them."

How exactly does "history" do something like "speak for itself?" History is not an entity unto itself that can speak. History is written (where it is written, instead of embodied) by people. People are biased. Most history that is "there for those who want to read [them]" was written and disseminated (by force, if necessary) by whoever won the war, colonized the region, removed and/or killed and/or 'civilized' the 'savages', and so on. It inevitably says that the people who did that were right and good, regardless of what others who didn't get to write any of said history might have experienced. The reason we need to try experiments like "Black history month" is because actual Black history from a Black experiential perspective has been ignored, denied, repressed, obliterated, marginalized, and otherwise mis-represented. At least in the USA, in the last 500+ years, the "history" of white people is a very different set of "facts" than the "history" of black people.

So I would argue that no, "the facts" are not there for the reading. The stories about the past told by those who dominate a given culture are there for the reading. That's what history speaking for itself amounts to.