“On Feb. 7, 1926, Carter G. Woodson initiated the first celebration of Negro History Week, which led to Black History Month, to extend and deepen the study and scholarship on African American history, all year long.”
Daryl Michael Scott writes: “Carter G. Woodson chose February for Negro History Week for reasons of tradition and reform. It is commonly said that Woodson selected February to encompass the birthdays of two great Americans who played a prominent role in shaping Black history, namely Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, whose birthdays are the 12th and the 14th, respectively.” Here’s a short video about him.
In 1976, fifty years after Woodson’s innovation, President Gerald Ford officially recognized February 1 as the first day of Black History Month, asking the public to “seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.”
Being a sucker for anniversaries, I decided several years ago to emphasize the centennial. But then, the FOTUS Executive Orders. Still, “Equal opportunity and antidiscrimination obligations are enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and our federal civil rights laws. The EOs do not and cannot change that [and they] do not change the reality that the American Dream is not equally available to all… These racial inequities hurt the American economy as a whole: A 2020 study by Citi estimates that the United States’ aggregate economic output would have been $16 trillion dollars higher since 2000 if we had closed racial gaps in wages, access to higher education, lending, and mortgage access.”
BHO
Naturally, I blame Obama. It seemed as though, if a Black person-okay, a Black MAN-could be elected, then the perception that “we HAVE overcome” became the narrative, even as, from the very start of his first administration, the Tea Party and its allies were invigorated to stop him from succeeding.
“On June 25, 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a devastating decision, Shelby County v. Holder, which dealt a significant blow to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.” This was another “we have overcome” moment. In reality, the “decision swung open the door for states to enact restrictive voting laws, making it harder for people of color to vote.”
In 2025, there had been efforts to erase black history, which you can read about here, here, and here, among many other places.
Retrograde
Then, per Heather Cox Richardson, and during the centennial month of Woodson’s action: “On February 1, 2026, as the fiftieth observance of Black History Month begins, government officials under the [regime] have just removed an exhibit on enslavement from Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia. The exhibit acknowledged nine people enslaved at the President’s House Site when President George Washington lived there.
“Curators intended the exhibit to examine ‘the paradox between slavery and freedom in the founding of the nation,’ but it conflicted with the March 2025 order that national historic sites should ‘focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.’ In his order, [he] called out Independence National Historical Park for promoting ‘corrosive ideology,’ teaching visitors that ‘America is purportedly racist.'”
So I feel obliged to keep lifting up these stories. As I’ve said in the past, there were plenty of narratives that I never knew about until well into my adulthood, people like Claudette Colvin, Oscar Micheaux, Charles Hamilton Houston, Lloyd Gaines, and Harriet Elizabeth Brown; events such as those shown in Slavery By Another Name and The song Strange Fruit, and lynching in America. And these were only some of the ones I wrote about from 2010 to 2015.