The History and Continued Importance of Black History Month

This week's article summary, The 100-Year History of Black History Month, is an interview with Harvard professor Jarvis R. Givens about his new book, I'll Make Me a World: The 100-Year Journey of Black History Month.

While many of us have grown up observing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Black History Month, and recently Juneteenth, the origins of these observances are often overlooked. The article informs us that while Black History Month was officially recognized in 1976 as part of the U.S. Bicentennial, its roots trace back to 1926.

I have always felt conflicted about dedicated heritage months. Dedicating a single month to groups whose voices and accomplishments were historically minimized—much like the afterthought sections on women in 1990s history textbooks I used in my classes—felt like a insufficient fix for a year-round necessity, analogous to food pantry donations only during the holidays when the need is year round.

But this article shifted my position. Black History Month (held in February to honor the birth months of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass) serves today as reminder to resist becoming complacent. In the current polarized climate where even the Super Bowl halftime entertainment is controversial, it's critical for educators to guide students to be open-minded, to view the world through multiple perspectives, and to be inquisitive about others, especially those different from them. Without these important skills, our students will be more susceptible to the influence and manipulation of others. (As a native New Yorker, I consider my skepticism an asset in today's world.)

In an ideal world, the contributions and historic struggles and tribulations of all people would be integrated every day in our curriculum. While much progress has been made in my lifetime, we still have a long way to go. Until then, observances like Women's History Month, Native American Heritage Month, Hispanic/Latinx Heritage Month, and Pride Month remain overt reminders to make space for those whose history has long been invisible.

Joe

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What do people get wrong about Black History Month?

Black History Month grew from the bottom up, from grassroots organizing and centuries of intellectual and political struggle. We only have this commemorative holiday because African American scholars and community members organized to create holidays like Crispus Attucks Day on March 5, beginning in the 1850s, and Douglass Day on Feb. 14, beginning in 1897. Negro History Week grew out of that tradition, and it was later expanded to Black History Month in 1976 during the United States’ bicentennial.

How has the way we think about and celebrate Black History Month changed these past 100 years

Early on, Negro History Week and Black History Month were mostly internal to African American communities. It formed and grew within an expansive segregated world of Black schools, colleges, churches, and institutions across the United States. However, with desegregation, Black History Month eventually became an instrument used to encourage racial tolerance for those in the United States who didn’t know much about Black people and Black cultures. 

Things are a bit different now. We live in a society where, for the most part, Black History Month or Negro History Week has always existed. And therefore, the urgency around the work of preserving and teaching Black history hasn’t been as present in more recent decades, at least not the way it was with the early Black history movement, when people had intimate knowledge and memories of Black history being absent in textbooks and school curriculum in this country.

I think the further we moved away from the period when people had to fight to create and celebrate Black history, the more comfortable our communities became with the idea that knowledge about Black history would always be readily available. But those of us who teach Black studies and African American history have always been aware of the precarious state of Black history’s inclusion in mainstream curricula and public memory. This moment is reminding all of us that this work continues to be both urgent and under attack.

How has Negro History Week/Black History Month, as an institution, survived and remained popular for the last 100 years?

First, it survived because Black communities created it and continued to value it through the segregated era, and in doing so, made it an integral part of Black culture and community calendars on an annual basis. It became institutionalized within Black organizations and, therefore, a central part of African American heritage. All of this occurred, again, before it was nationally recognized by the U.S. government. 

However, the staying power of Black History Month is also connected to major advancements in the field of African American history and Black studies in the post-civil rights era. The first wave of scholars of African American and African diaspora history were part of a transformation in higher education during the late 1960s and early ‘70s. Because of the impressive work of that generation of scholars, building on seeds planted generations before, there continued to be new waves of knowledge and content about the Black past, pushing us all to think about the world we inherited in more critical ways and to dream about the worlds we hoped to build with more mature, historically informed imaginations.

Another reason it has persisted is because political leaders saw value in holding up Black History Month as a demonstration of America’s inclusion of Black people as integral parts of U.S. society, though they often did so without recognizing past harms, instead using inspiring elements of Black history that could support narratives of American exceptionalism. This is obviously a very complicated part of the legacy, but it’s important to recognize, nonetheless.

What is one takeaway you would like readers to gain from reading the book?

I want people to remember that the struggle to preserve, study, and teach Black history is always about more than the facts, names, and dates of the past. It is about recognizing and disrupting the way power dynamics in our society shape historical memory and it’s also about studying the way historical memory shapes how we define ourselves as a people and the dreams we imagine for the worlds of the future. I hope readers will see, by looking at the African American intellectual tradition that informed the creation of Black History Month, that this ongoing fight to value the lives of Black folks in the past is part and parcel of an enduring war to value Black lives in the present and future.