I had always looked at the concept of Black History Month with a certain degree of skepticism.
After all, I am a Black man in America every day, not just during the month of February. One month out of the year cannot adequately represent the totality of my life or the history of Black people. I also took issue with Black History Month being celebrated in February, the shortest month of the year.
I admittedly didn’t know about why Black History Month began or even the man who conceived it.
His name was Carter G. Woodson. He was born in 1875 to freed slave parents. Despite having to delay his formal education to work in the coal mines of West Virginia, Woodson earned an undergraduate degree from Berea College — a school founded by abolitionists — and a master’s degree in history from the University of Chicago. He would later become the second Black person — and first person of enslaved parents — to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University.
Woodson’s Ph.D. dissertation, “The Evolution of Virginia”, raised eyebrows among some of the Harvard faculty. “The Evolution of Virginia” concerns itself with the reasons why Virginia’s western counties broke away from the state during the Civil War to form the new state of West Virginia. Woodson’s view was not of the publicly accepted opinion the western counties broke away because of their opposition to slavery. Instead, he focused on the social, political and economic factors between the “aristocracy” in the eastern part of Virginia and “dissenters” along the state’s western frontiers. He was criticized for this by some of his faculty advisors, but Woodson maintained his analysis was not motivated by politics at the time.
Woodson taught at Howard University and served as the school’s Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. He also served as Dean of the college that is now West Virginia State University. He eventually became frustrated by the politics associated with working in a university setting. Woodson was a historian and he would never be able to recognize his calling as a professor or dean.
Woodson was not immune to the prevailing racism of the early 20th century. He was shunned by the white educational establishment despite his credentials. Woodson was a dues-paying member of the American Historical Association (AHA) but was not allowed to attend AHA conferences. He also knew the AHA had no interest in studying the history of Black people.
He began to seriously study Black history at a time when the white academic establishment felt they were less than worthy. Between 1915 and 1947, Woodson published four monographs, five textbooks, five edited collections of documents, five sociological studies and 13 articles. The most famous of Woodson’s works, “The Mis-Education of the Negro,” is as applicable today as it was in 1939 when it was first published. He once said the contributions of Black people “were overlooked, ignored and even suppressed by the writers of history textbooks and the teachers who use them.”
In 1915, Woodson traveled from Washington, D.C., to Chicago to the Lincoln Jubilee that celebrated the 50th anniversary of Emancipation. Thousands of Black people attended the three-week event. Despite the Jubilee being held at the Chicago Coliseum, which itself hosted five Republican National Conventions, there was an overflow crowd of anywhere between 6,000 to 12,000 people awaiting their turn to view the Jubilee’s exhibits.
After the Jubilee, Woodson helped establish the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History with the goal of scientific study of Black life. He started “The Journal of Negro History” to publish and promote the work of Black intellectuals of the day. This led to Black civic organizations, teachers, women’s groups and fraternal organizations taking up his cause and establishing Negro History and Literature Week, which was renamed Negro Achievement Week. Woodson championed the “scientific study” of “neglected aspects of Negro life and history” by teaching Black people about research and methodology.
“If a race has no history, it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated,” Woodson said.
In 1926, Woodson announced the creation of Negro History Week. He chose the second week of February to coincide with the birthdays of both Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. Douglass, whose birthday was Feb. 14, had been celebrated in the Black community since at least the late 1890s while Lincoln, born Feb. 12, was celebrated in the Black community and the nation as a whole since his 1865 assassination.
Woodson admired both Douglass and Lincoln, but didn’t appreciate celebrations held in their individual honor. He didn’t believe history was made by a select group of people but rather by the people collectively. Although Woodson purposefully chose Negro History Week to coincide with the birthdays of Douglass and Lincoln, he hoped the celebration would evolve into historical analysis about the countless contributions of Blacks to American life.
Negro History Week was a success from the very beginning. The 1920s was a pivotal period. Post-World War I America saw the rise of racial pride and consciousness. The Harlem Renaissance was in full swing. Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association also helped spread a rise in Black consciousness. Social and economic conditions drove mass numbers of Blacks from the Southern states to urban centers throughout the country. An expanding Black middle class was instrumental in the expansion of Black literature and culture. The number of Black history classes increased. Teachers demanded more material to teach their students. Woodson and his colleagues could hardly keep up with the demand.
As Black populations grew, the celebration of Negro History Week grew as well. Parades, speeches, exhibits, breakfasts, poetry readings and other artistic expression became more commonplace in conjunction with Negro History Week. Woodson warned against pretenders who saw the study of Black history as a fad. In addition, he was concerned the celebration would eventually come to an end. However, Woodson knew the history of Black life to be too vast to be confined to a single week.
Before his death in 1950, Woodson implored teachers to use Negro History Week to show what students learned over the course of a year. In addition, he established a Black Studies extension program that assisted adults. Woodson believed if Black people studied their history every day there would be no need for an annual celebration.
In 1976, six years after the example of students and teachers at Kent State University, Negro History Week officially became Black History Month. The original scholarly ambitions are still important though another aspect has evolved over time. Carter’s organization, now known as the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, has centered Black History Month around a central theme each year. The theme for 2026 is “A Century of Black History Commemorations.”
Robert J. Hughes of the Wall Street Journal described Black History Month as “a time when the culture and contribution of African Americans take center stage at many of the nation’s arts institutions.” The celebration is such a potential moneymaker and PR boost companies such as Macy’s, United Parcel Service (UPS), Coca-Cola, Target, Under Armour and Google have sponsored Black History Month initiatives.
Black History Month began as a uniquely American celebration. Eventually it spread throughout the diaspora. The Canadian House of Commons voted to designate February Black History Month in December 1995. The United Kingdom became the first European nation to observe Black History Month in October 1987. Germany followed suit three years later. John Leerdam, a theater director and former member of the Dutch House of Representatives, began Black Achievement Month, otherwise known as BAM, in 2015.
The month of May is Black Heritage Month in Panama and May 31 is celebrated as Dia de la Etnia Negra (National Black Heritage Day). Costa Rica once declared Aug. 31 Dia del Negro (Black Peoples’ Day), In the 1980s, this expanded to Dia del Negro y la Cultura Afrocostarricense (Black People and Afro-Costa Rican Culture Day). In 2018, a law was signed proclaiming August as the Month of the History of African-Descended People in Costa Rica.
Black History Month is more than a designation on the calendar. It is a time when members of the African diaspora honor their past, celebrate their present and hope for their future. The celebration of our history must be accompanied by intentional highlights of aspects of our culture and thorough, honest assessment of our history.
On Mar. 27, 2025, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14253: “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” This order announced an investigation of the Smithsonian Institution’s museums for the purpose of removing anything that appears to have “divisive or ideologically driven language” or “narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.”
The National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) opened in 2016 and is the world’s largest museum dedicated to Black people with more than 40,000 artifacts covering a span of more than 400 years. NMAAHC was highlighted in the Executive Order for “divisive, race-centered ideology.” This is a far cry from the Trump who said, “I’m deeply proud that we now have a museum that honors the millions of African American men and women who built our national heritage especially when it comes to faith, culture, and the unbreakable American spirit,” during his tour of the museum in 2017.
More than 100 Confederate monuments and statues were removed in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. During this time, a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee was removed from the U.S. Capitol. Trump called the removal of Lee’s statue “revisionist history” and ordered Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum to reinstate the statues and monuments that had been removed from federal property.
There is a concerted effort to rewrite history happening right before our eyes. Carter G. Woodson knew the best way to control someone — to make them more compliant — is to make them believe they don’t matter. The best way to convince someone they don’t matter is to keep their history from them through omissions, half-truths or outright lies. Carter G. Woodson made it his life’s mission to ensure Black people would be looked upon as “a participant rather than a lay person in history.” This is why Black History Month matters and why I stopped being skeptical about its celebration.
Featured image by ekavesh from Pixabay
Edited by James Sutton
