A hundred years ago, in 1926, Dr. Carter G. Woodson planted a small but deliberate marker in time—Negro History Week—never knowing it would one day swell into a month, a memory, a reckoning.
February has carried that weight ever since, in what is now known as Black History Month. It is a month crowded with remembrance, with names spoken loudly and moments replayed until they feel familiar.
But February also carries the ongoing debate over whether Black history should be relegated to a single month, primarily since Dr. Woodson himself never intended the week-long celebration to be permanent, let alone to encompass a whole month lasting 100 years.
For Woodson, he wanted Black history integrated into the mainstream curriculum, not restricted to a single week or, in our case, a single month.
For me, two things can be true.
If you’ve been following me for any amount of time, you know I spend 90% of my time reading, researching, documenting, and sharing Black historical facts year-round. Thus, I am for incorporating Black history into the mainstream curriculum and reducing its focus to a footnote or an elective.
But I do also love the idea of keeping it separate, special, and set apart, as we are.
Additionally, it’s a great time to promote reading. The harsh reality is that American reading levels are still declining. (2024 NAEP data show 12th-grade reading scores at their lowest level since 1992.) I’d bet that your average adult had not read a full-length book since High School, if even then.
Therefore, if February is a time when the minds of the people are not as distracted, then let us use it to do some good.
To quote Bob Marley, “The people who were trying to make this world worse are not taking the day off. Why should I?”
So while Black History Month is not the movement itself, I do see it as a mirror history placed in our hands. When we look into it, we do not see the past frozen in black-and-white—we see ourselves.
Our language. Our resistance. Our contradictions.
The mirror does not lie.
It shows us who we’ve been bold enough to become and who we’ve been too afraid to remember.
The PBS Blog 