For academics, historians and activists, the past year has been tumultuous in advocating the teaching of Black history in the United States.
Despite last year proclaiming February as National Black History Month, President Donald Trump started his second term by claiming some African American history lessons are meant to indoctrinate people into hating the country. The administration has dismantled Black history at national parks, most recently removing
an exhibit on slavery in Philadelphia last month. Black history advocates see these acts and their chilling effect as scary and unprecedented.
“States and cities are nervous about retribution from the White House," said DeRay Mckesson, a longtime activist and executive director of Campaign Zero, an organization focused on police reform. "So even the good people are just quieter now.”
In the 100th year since the nation’s earliest observances of Black History Month — which began when scholar Carter G. Woodson pioneered the first Negro History Week — celebrations will go on. The current political climate has energized civil rights organizations, artists and academics to engage young people on a full telling of America’s story. There are hundreds of lectures, teach-ins and even new books — from nonfiction to a graphic novel — to mark the milestone.
“This is why we are working with more than 150 teachers around the country on a Black History Month curriculum to just ensure that young people continue to learn about Black history in a way that is intentional and thoughtful,” Mckesson said about a campaign his organization has launched with the Afro Charities organization and leading Black scholars to expand access to educational materials.
About three years ago, Angélique Roché, a journalist and adjunct professor at Xavier University of Louisiana, accepted a “once-in-a-lifetime” invitation to be the writer for a graphic novel retelling of the story of Opal Lee, “grandmother of Juneteenth.”
Lee, who will also turn 100 this year, is largely credited for getting federal recognition of the June 19 holiday commemorating the day when enslaved people in Texas learned they were emancipated. Under Trump, however, Juneteenth is no longer a free-admission day at national parks.
Juneteenth helped usher in the first generation of Black Americans who, like Woodson, was born free. “First Freedom: The Story of Opal Lee and Juneteenth," the graphic novel, comes out Feb. 10. It is the culmination of Roché's assiduous archival research, phone chats and visits to Texas to see Lee and her granddaughter, Dione Sims.
“There is nothing ‘indoctrinating’ about facts that are based on primary sources that are highly researched,” said Roché, who hopes the book makes it into libraries and classrooms. “At the end of the day, what the story should actually tell people is that we’re far more alike than we are different.”
While Lee is the main character, Roché used the novel as a chance to put attention on lesser known historical figures like William “Gooseneck Bill” McDonald, Texas’ first Black millionaire, and Opal Lee’s mother, Mattie Broadous Flake.
She hopes this format will inspire young people to follow Lee and her mantra — "make yourself a committee of one.”
“It doesn’t mean don’t work with other people,” Roché said. “Don’t wait for other people to make the changes you wanna see.”
When Trump's anti-DEI executive orders were issued last year, Jarvis Givens, a professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard, was thousands of miles away teaching in London, where Black History Month is celebrated in October. He had already been contemplating writing a book for the centennial.
Watching Trump's “attack” cemented the idea, Givens said.
“I wanted to kind of devote my time while on leave to writing a book that would honor the legacy that gave us Black History Month,” Givens said.
The result is “I’ll Make Me a World: The 100-Year Journey of Black History Month,” a book with four in-depth essays that comes out Tuesday. The title is a line from the 1920s poem “The Creation” by James Weldon Johnson, whose most famous poem, “Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing,” is known as the “Black National Anthem.”
Givens examines important themes in Black history and clarifies misconceptions around them.
The book and the research Givens dug up will tie into a “living history campaign” with Campaign Zero and Afro Charities, Mckesson said. The goal is to teach what Woodson believed — younger generations can become historians who can discern fact from fiction.
“When I grew up, the preservation of history was a historian’s job,” Mckesson said, adding his group's campaign will teach young students how to record history.
Born in 1875 to formerly enslaved parents, Woodson was among the first generation of Black Americans not assigned to bondage at birth. He grew up believing that education was a way to self-empowerment, said Robert Trent Vinson, director of the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The second Black man to earn a doctorate at Harvard University — W.E.B. Du Bois was the first — Woodson was disillusioned by how Black history was dismissed. He saw that the memories and culture of less educated Black people were no less valuable, Vinson said.
When Woodson established Negro History Week in 1926, he was in an era where popular stereotypes like blackface and minstrelsy were filling in for actual knowledge of the Black experience, according to Vinson. This sparked the creation of Black history clubs and Woodson began inserting historical lessons “on the sly” in publications like the “Journal of Negro History” and the “Negro History Bulletin.”
“Outside the formal school structure, they’re having a separate school like in churches or in study groups,” Vinson said. “Or they’re sharing it with parents and saying, ‘you teach your young people this history.’ So, Woodson is creating a whole educational space outside the formal university.”
In 1976, for the week's 50th anniversary, President Gerald Ford issued a message recognizing it as an entire month. There was pushback then over the gains the Civil Rights Movement had made, Givens said.
As for today's backlash over Black and African American studies, Vinson believes Woodson would not be surprised. But, he would see it as a sign “you’re on the right track.”
“There’s a level of what he called ‘fugitivity,' of sharing this knowledge and being strategic about it,” Vinson said. “There are other times like in this moment, Black History Month, where you can be more out and assertive, but be strategic about how you spread the information.”
Resistance to teaching Black history is something that seems to occur every generation, Mckesson said.
“We will go back to normalcy. We’ve seen these backlashes before,” Mckesson said. “And when I think about the informal networks of Black people who have always resisted, I think that is happening today.”
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Tang reported from Phoenix.
