The Origins
Black History Month is a beautiful celebration of African-American history, culture, and community. It is a special and significant month, but many people aren’t aware of how it all started.
The story behind Black History Month begins with Dr Carter G. Woodson, a Black hisotrian, and the Association for the Study of Negro Lfe and History (ASNLH), the organization Woodson helped found. Dr Carter G. Woodson was born on December 19th, 1875 he was the son of former slaves. He worked as a coal miner before eventually graduating from Berea College, the first college in the Southern United States to be coeducational and racially integrated. He eventually became a teacher and a school administrator. He earned graduate degrees at the University of Chicago, and became the second African American after William Edward Burghardt Du Bois —American sociologist, writer, historian, and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist— to obtain a PhD degree from Harvard University.
Woodson is the only child of enslaved parents in United States history to earn a PhD. He taught at Howard University and West Virginia State University— historically Black colleges. However, he spent most of his career in Washington, D.C., managing the ASALH, public speaking, writing, and publishing.
Woodson believed that education and bringing black and white people together could reduce racism. Accroding to Woodson, race prejudice “is merely the logical result of tradition, the inevitable outcome of thorough instruction to the effect that the Negro has never contributed anything to the progress of mankind.” Therefore, he promoted the organized study of African-American history, and would later promote the first Negro History Week in history.
He sent out a press release announcing the first Negro History Week in Washington D.C., February 1926. The reason Woodson chose February was because the month contained the birthdays of both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, two prominent men whose historic achievements were celebrated among African Americans.
As you can see, the original Black History Month wasn’t even a month; it was instead a week-long event. People saw the fault in this, and in the 1940s, efforts were made to begin to expand the celebration into a longer event and truly honor the history of African Americans. Those efforts were eventually sought through, which is why the entire month of February has now been named Black History Month.
There were many different events that were held to honor the event including parades, speeches, lectures, banquets, and exhibits, all things that we still do to celebrate today. Let’s look at the ways Black History Month is celebrated in current times.
Why is it important today?
Black History Month is important in many ways. It brings light to the amazing Black figures in history that are often overshadowed.
Unfortunately, there have been countless times in history where Black people’s accomplishments have been overlooked and forgotten. White people have even taken credit for research, inventions, and other bodies of work created by African Americans, claiming it as their own and suppressing the real creators. This is one of the reasons why people like Dr Carter G. Woodson are so important, as he and many other African Americans helped discover the “lost history” of the Black community.
Black History Month helps the community reclaim and preserve our history and accomplishments. It celebrates the culture and heritage of the Black community, and it helps us improve and grow for the future generations of African Americans. Black individuals have had an immense effect on so many things including, music, science, politics, literature, and technology. These achievements have not only affected the Black community, but the United States as a whole.
Black History Month is not just a celebration of the past of the Black community, but also the present and the future.
