Can Black History Month live up to its founder’s vision?

A few years ago, I was awestruck when NBA guard Jarrett Jack wore a T-shirt to commemorate the study of Black history during the month of February. The shirt read, “Black History [Month] Years” – with “Month” crossed out. The wording resonated with me. 

It still does.

The history of Black people in America and abroad can’t be adequately taught – if taught at all – in 28 or 29 days. Dr. Carter G. Woodson, the “father of Black history,” knew that full well. That’s why he never intended for what we now recognize as Black History Month to be a decadeslong endeavor.

A year after founding Negro History Week in 1926, Woodson offered this explanation in The Journal of Negro History, which he also founded:

This is the meaning of Negro History Week. It is not so much a Negro History Week as it is a History Week. We should emphasize not Negro History, but the Negro in history. What we need is not a history of selected races or nations, but the history of the world void of national bias, race hate, and religious prejudice. There should be no indulgence in undue eulogy of the Negro. The case of the Negro is well taken care of when it is shown how he has influenced the development of civilization.

The idea of carving out a path for Black history – even being the “father” of Black history – doesn’t do Woodson justice. He not only cut a path, a gateway, into Black achievement; he also had to cut through the horrors committed against Black people in the United States. Those horrors separated Black people not only from their native land but also from hard-won freedoms during Reconstruction.

A short-lived renaissance

The result of Woodson’s quest, at least in the short term, was a renaissance: “The demand for the literature [related to Negro History Week] was not restricted to those sections of the country in which Negro schools are established,” he wrote. Rather, the demand was “unprecedented,” a national newspaper noted.  

Yet nearly a century later, the decision to treat Black history like a piece of apparel to be worn and then discarded on March 1 leaves us at a crossroads.

The willful omission of the achievements and adversity of Black folk has stunted Americans’ growth. It has affected how we understand capital and storming the Capitol. We see wealth disparities as individual successes or failures rather than as products of systemic racism. Our country is reeling from an attack on the Capitol by individuals who felt they were victims of voter suppression and election fraud – yet they brandished symbols recalling the poll taxes and intimidation that for decades prevented African Americans from voting.

The four R’s of Black history

American history as we know it is ahistorical. That needs to change – starting in our schools. Woodson touches on this urgent need in his provocative and profound “The Mis-Education of the Negro.” In the opening chapter, aptly titled “The Seat of the Trouble,” he wrote:

As another has well said, to handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is a curse and that his struggle to change his condition is hopeless is the worst sort of lynching. It kills one’s aspirations and dooms him to vagabondage and crime. It is strange, then, that the friends of truth and the promoters of freedom have not risen up against the present propaganda in the schools and crushed it. This crusade is much more important than the anti-lynching movement, because there would be no lynching if it did not start in the classroom. Why not exploit, enslave or exterminate a class that everybody is taught to regard as inferior?

As young Americans, we learn reading, ’riting, and ’rithmetic. My urgent suggestion to us now is that we embrace the four R’s of rich Black history – revolution, Reconstruction, rights, and right now.

That will bring us closer to Woodson’s vision.

Ken Makin is the host of the “Makin’ A Difference” podcast.