This is a milestone year for America. It marks both the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the 100th anniversary of an effort to recover and recount the contributions of Black Americans left out of the national narrative—what was launched in 1926 as Negro History Week and then became Black History Month in 1976. One anniversary honors the nation’s founding ideals; the other reckons with its failures to live up to them. Both offer an essential—and timely—opportunity to acknowledge the ambitions and shortcomings of America’s grand and unfinished experiment.
The majority of Americans experience Black History Month as a formula. Students prepare PowerPoint or posterboard projects about people such as Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, or Jackie Robinson—or, for those who would venture further in our history, Phillis Wheatley, the nation’s first published Black poet. Businesses invite speakers and hold events for staff. Civic associations host dinners.
That is not how Black History Month began, though. Its precursor was established by Carter G. Woodson, the historian and founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, at a time when eugenics—race science and the idea that white people were genetically superior to Black people—was finally being challenged as the pseudoscience it is. “The greatest scholars of today are saying that there is no such thing as race in science, and that there is nothing in anthropology or psychology to support such myths as the inferiority and superiority of races,” the 1927 announcement for Negro History Week reads. “These truths, however, will have little bearing on the uplift of the negro if they are left in the state of academic discussion.” From its inception, the event was designed to be a chance to tell the truth about the past in public—the whole truth.
In 1976, Negro History Week became Black History Month, and was officially acknowledged by President Gerald Ford. The nation, founded on “individual rights,” was turning 200—but Black Americans had only just had their right to vote reinforced by law. Every president since then has issued a proclamation to celebrate Black History Month. Freedom is a struggle, Ronald Reagan’s proclamation said in 1986, echoing Frederick Douglass’s exhortation that if there is no struggle, there is no progress. “The American experience and character can never be fully grasped until the knowledge of black history assumes its rightful place in our schools and our scholarship,” Reagan wrote.