The origins of Black History Month

Historian Dr Carter Woodson was motivated to do more to honour Black history after attending the Lincoln Jubilee celebration in Chicago in 1915

Black History Month has been observed in the US for nearly 100 years. Two years after the death of civil rights advocate Frederick Douglass on 20 February 1895, Washington DC schools started to celebrate what would later be referred to as Douglass Day.

Educator and activist Mary Church Terrell suggested at a school board meeting for Black schools in the DC region on 12 January 1897 that a holiday be put in place to celebrate the life of Mr Douglass. The date chosen was 14 February, the day he observed as his birthday after being born into slavery and not knowing his precise date of birth.

The board agreed that the day should be set aside for the students to learn about Mr Douglass’ life, his writing, as well as his speeches.

Historian Dr Carter Woodson was motivated to do more to honour Black history after attending the Lincoln Jubilee celebration in Chicago in 1915 – observing the 50th anniversary of emancipation – along with thousands of others from across the US.

Dr Woodson established the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History on 9 September 1915. The organisation is now called the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.

The organisation created The Journal of Negro History in 1916, focusing on the historical accomplishments of Black persons.

“If a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated,” Dr Woodson wrote in The Mis-Education of the Negro, which was published in 1933.

He asked his fraternity brothers in Omega Psi to help him educate others about Black history and they created the Negro History and Literature Week in 1924. Two years later, Dr Woodson announced the establishment of Negro History Week in February 1926, choosing that month as it was the time of birth for both President Abraham Lincoln and Mr Douglass.

Black Americans and Republicans had celebrated Mr Lincoln’s birthday – 12 February – following his 15 April 1865 assassination, and Douglass Day on 14 February had grown in significance since Ms Terrell instituted it in 1897.

Dr Woodson viewed Negro History Week as a vehicle for growing the celebration of Mr Douglass and Mr Lincoln as well as the study of all Black history, The New York Times noted.

The historian and his colleagues provided a curriculum for kindergarten through grade 12, which included photos, lesson plans, and posters.

In a 1932 article entitled Negro History Week: The Sixth Year, Dr Woodson wrote that white schools had begun taking part in the new tradition and that it had improved race relations.

Dr Woodson often conducted lectures in West Virginia, and the state began celebrating what they called Negro History Month in the 1940s. The Association for the Study of Negro Life and History started forming organisations across the country, with Negro History Clubs beginning to be established in High Schools.

When Dr Woodson died in 1950, numerous mayors all over the US supported Negro History Week.

As political consciousness grew among Black college students in the 1960s, they pushed for more Black history to be taught. Students and teachers at Kent State University proposed the first Black History Month in February 1969, which was celebrated the following year.

President Gerald Ford met with civil rights leaders in October 1974, just months after President Richard Nixon resigned because of the Watergate scandal. The civil rights leaders wanted Mr Ford to “make a ‘ringing reaffirmation’ of the nation’s commitment to racial justice and moral leadership”, The Times reported.

Mr Ford issued a statement in support of Black History Month in February 1976 – 200 years after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on 4 July 1776.

“The last quarter-century has finally witnessed significant strides in the full integration of black people into every area of national life,” Mr Ford said. “In celebrating Black History Month, we can take satisfaction from this recent progress in the realization of the ideal envisioned by our founding fathers. But, even more than this, we can seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.”

A Black History Month proclamation has been issued by every president since Ronald Reagan.

President Joe Biden said in his 2021 proclamation in support of Black History Month that “the soul of our Nation will be troubled as long as systemic racism is allowed to persist. It is corrosive. It is destructive. It is costly. We are not just morally deprived because of systemic racism, we are also less prosperous, less successful, and less secure as a Nation”.

Johns Hopkins University history professor and the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, Martha Jones, told The New York Times that “there’s no question that history is and continues to be a battleground. The origin stories that we tell matter a great deal for where we set the bar and how we set the bar going forward”.

“So when you talk about people like Carter Woodson, these are men who knew that if you don’t rewrite the history of Africans and people of African descent, if you don’t rewrite the history of the United States through the lens of Black history, if you don’t make that record and if you don’t make that case, there are [false] stories that will expand and go toward rationalizing and perpetuating racism, exclusion, marginalization and more,” she added.