There is a myth that persists about Black History Month that can be heard in the common gripe: “They gave us the shortest month of the year” (they, the unnamed powers that be). Jarvis Givens, the author of I’ll Make Me a World: The 100-Year Journey of Black History Month, hates it. “Every time I hear that backhanded comment it doesn’t seem right,” said Givens, an associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “If you know anything about the basic origins of Black History Month then you know that we weren’t ‘given’ anything.”
The question of who owns and authorizes Black History Month holds particular relevance now, in its centennial year, and at a time when efforts to celebrate, preserve, and acknowledge Black people’s past in this country are under attack. Official recognition of Black American resistance to centuries of racial injustice is being challenged by local, state, and national efforts to restrict, ban and possibly criminalize such information in public schools, universities and other institutions. So the sentiment that Black history can be quite literally given or taken away by state officials is valid.
But Givens wants us to shift that thinking. National park placards and special edition postage stamps are undoubtedly important, but they are the result of community organizing about Black history, not the source of it. Black History Month itself has persisted and evolved throughout a century of both subtle threats (via commercialization and political watering-down) and openly hostile attacks of white violence and backlash. Asking what has become of Black History Month and digging deeper into its evolution, however, reveals that everyday Black people who drew their strength from knowing about Black heritage understood that what was never given to Black communities can never be taken from them.
The beginning of what was originally called Negro History Week can be found in the Black schools and churches of the post-civil war era. African Americans immediately looked to their past to define what the freedom for which they fought would mean on their own terms. Inspired by the looming figures of abolition movements throughout the US and the Caribbean, Black schoolteachers were already educating pupils and communities about their lives: figures such as Toussaint Louverture, Denmark Vesey, and Phillis Wheatley. It was this grassroots fervor for recovering Black heritage that the historian Carter G Woodson organized into a week-long celebration. He chose February because it coincided with increasingly popular community observances of Frederick Douglass Day, on Douglass’s chosen birthday, 14 February – a tradition born from the activism of the Black feminist educator Mary Church Terrell.
Woodson, the son of enslaved parents who was educated by formerly enslaved teachers until college, envisioned the week as a way to mark the struggles Black people faced, as well as to reframe a more accurate history of them than what was being taught in textbooks. Though he was the second Black man to receive a PhD from Harvard University, Woodson was first and foremost a public school teacher who sought to correct injurious false narratives about the past that shaped the present and future. “There would be no lynching,” he wrote in The Miseducation of the Negro, his seminal 1933 text, “if it did not start in the schoolroom.”
Just a quarter century later, Woodson’s vision was coming to fruition. By the 1950s, a cohort of young Black activists who had grown up with Negro History Week and learned from its activist principles turned their focus towards dismantling Jim Crow segregation. Department stores, much like buses and public facilities, became a battleground for Black consumer protest. Many people today are rightfully suspicious of corporate pandering and the commercialization of Black History Month celebrations. There was the time Barnes & Noble slapped Black faces on to reissued covers of literary classics, or when Bath & Body Works packaged limited edition candles and lotions in counterfeit Kente cloth.
Givens wants us to know that we would be remiss, however, to assume that the root of American enterprise’s participation in Black heritage remembrance is due to some eager concession on their part. The Black labor movement’s rallying cry, “don’t buy where you can’t work”, thrust holding mainstream businesses accountable into the crosshairs of the civil rights movement. Acknowledgment of Negro History Week was one of many demands by Black protesters whose boycotts and picket lines forced major retailers such as FW Woolworth Co to end its discriminatory practices that had been a daily source of degradation, humiliation and economic exploitation for Black shoppers, workers and jobseekers.
It was the tremendous gains made by Black activists in these mainstream sectors that fired up calls for the week to be expanded to a month-long national observance in the 1970s. Appeals for a presidential proclamation of Black History Month were not granted by President Gerald Ford, though he was the first president to officially recognize the month. In a toothless February 1976 presidential address, he gestured at African Americans’ “significant strides” toward the ideals of the American Revolution without any acknowledgment of past racial oppression or ongoing injustices. A new challenge was afoot that took a much different form from the violent white mobs of the previous decades’ department store sit-ins. Corporate influence coupled with the White House’s neutering of the commemorative month’s social justice aims threatened to water down the observance into just another consumption-driven holiday.
The appropriation of Black heritage converged with the decade’s overall rise in opportunistic appeals to Black consumers, often through major advertising campaigns riddled with superficial stereotypes and racial pandering. Five decades prior, Woodson idealized a time when Black history was so thoroughly centered in school curricula that a separate observance would eventually be unnecessary. Instead, longtime proponents of expansion, such as Ebony Magazine senior editor Lerone Bennett Jr, had come to a damning realization. In 1975, Bennett, lamented: “There are images and echoes of black heritage almost everywhere today … Black heritage sells soap, whiskey and detergent … Never before have so many people talked about so much black heritage in so many places with so little understanding.”
Such skepticism was further aggravated by the 1980s rise of the neoconservative Reagan revolution, which cunningly conceded to demands for an official proclamation of Black History Month in 1986, after long opposing but finally nationalizing Martin Luther King Jr Day in 1983. The observances were both gutted of their connection to historical racial injustices, and their legacies were co-opted to signal the administration’s so-called “colorblind” stance on race. With a White House under Ronald Reagan that perfected gesturing toward Black representation while severely undermining Black struggle, corporate interest in Black History Month persisted in unmooring it from Woodson’s original ideals and doubled down on converting communities into consumers.
Month-long expansion was bound to challenge many of the celebration’s original political and cultural groundings, but that isn’t to say that the groundings themselves can ever be taken from the communities in which they are rooted. For skeptical supporters, today’s Black History Month provides a template for how the mainstreaming of similar Black heritage commemorations, such as Juneteenth, can lead to commercialization and sanitization. Contemporary critics are sounding the alarm that Black History Month has “has turned into a mundane, meaningless and commercialized farce”, and Black scholars in the Trump era warn that “we’re headed in the direction where there’s even an attempt to deny that the institution of slavery even existed.”
However, recognizing why this celebration has persisted throughout a century of racial hostility and mainstream exploitation relies on understanding that like those grassroots community celebrants in church basements, sharecropping shacks and one-room schoolhouses (who Givens calls “Black memory workers”), it has always been Black people who give Black history its relevance and meaning. Woodson never set out for Negro History Week to be a holiday. It has no required customs nor concern with the consecration of traditions. Givens understood history as a way to “challenge ourselves to improve the ways we engage the past”,he has said, always with an eye toward what the future holds for Black lives.
Our interest in asking “what’s happening to Black History Month?” is a reflection of its purpose. Black history holds up a mirror to reflect on what we value about our past, and thus ourselves, in this moment and the next. Remembrance of the Black past was never meant to get us stuck in it, but always intended to fuel us to take on the challenges of today.
America has attempted to take everything from Black people, and yet with no monuments, nor government recognition, it was them who emerged from slavery and instantly reclaimed the resilience of their past as the north star for navigating the stony roads ahead. The fact that present-day attacks on Black heritage and its commodification by corporations warrant both criticism and direct resistance isn’t an indictment of Black History Month itself. Givens reminds us that the mainstreaming of Black heritage doesn’t lessen the Black fidelity to its call for action and justice. “It was never one or the other,” he said. “Both things were true.” It was Black people who gifted America with Black History Month, not the other way around.
Saida Grundy is an associate professor of sociology and African American studies at Boston University, and the author of Respectable: Politics and Paradox in Making the Morehouse Man
