The History of Black History Month

Americans have recognized black history annually since 1926, first as "Negro History Week" and later as "Black History Month." What you might not know is that black history had barely begun to be studied-or even documented-when the tradition originated. Although blacks have been in America at least as far back as colonial times, it was not until the 20th century that they gained a respectable presence in the history books.

Blacks Absent from History Books

We owe the celebration of Black History Month, and more importantly, the study of black history, to Dr. Carter G. Woodson. Born to parents who were former slaves, he spent his childhood working in the Kentucky coal mines and enrolled in high school at age twenty. He graduated within two years and later went on to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard. The scholar was disturbed to find in his studies that history books largely ignored the black American population-and when blacks did figure into the picture, it was generally in ways that reflected the inferior social position they were assigned at the time.

Established Journal of Negro History

Woodson, always one to act on his ambitions, decided to take on the challenge of writing black Americans into the nation's history. He established the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (now called the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History) in 1915, and a year later founded the widely respected Journal of Negro History. In 1926, he launched Negro History Week as an initiative to bring national attention to the contributions of black people throughout American history.

Woodson chose the second week of February for Negro History Week because it marks the birthdays of two men who greatly influenced the black American population, Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. However, February has much more than Douglass and Lincoln to show for its significance in black American history.

To give the Negro an appreciation of his part is to endow him with the confidence in his own position in this country and in the world which he must have, and which he can best attain when he has available a foundation of scientific fact concerning the ancestral cultures of Africa and the survivals of Africanisms in the New World. And it must again be emphasized that when such a body of facts, solidly grounded, is established, ferment must follow, when this information is diffused over the population as a whole, will influence opinion in general concerning Negro abilities and potentialities, and thus contribute to a lessening of interracial tensions.

Woodson was not alone in his belief in the importance of such observances. During the New Negro movement of the 1920's there developed something of an appreciation for modified African music and art. One white anthropologist, Melville J. Herskovits, not only made excellent field studies of certain African and West Indian Negro groups, but authored a general book to glorify African culture and to show how it had survived in the American Black community. He avowedly did so to give the Blacks of his day a confidence in themselves and to give the white man less "reason" to have race prejudice.

This month I forgo the normal retelling of slavery's journey to Jim Crow to Civil Rights legislation to Barack Obama (one of many African-Americans making modern history). I will not rework the well deserved but equally well observed accomplishments of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr. and other titans of Black History and Black History month observance. I will, over the next month (or two), write five to ten articles and share some history that readers may not be familiar with, but that are as significant as the events and person mentioned above. I will focus not only on individuals, but places, events, inventions and other integral parts of the History of Black Peoples in these great United States.