Black History Month
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The theme for 2023 focuses on the importance of Black Resistance. By resisting, African Americans continue to mobilize resources and shape social movements to create a space for Black Americans to thrive.
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Black History Month is an annual celebration of achievements by African Americans and a time for recognizing their central role in U.S. history. Also known as African American History Month, the event grew out of “Negro History Week,” the brainchild of noted historian Carter G. Woodson and other prominent African Americans. Since 1976, every U.S. president has officially designated the month of February as Black History Month. Other countries around the world, including Canada and the United Kingdom, also devote a month to celebrating Black history.
Is Black History Month still relevant today?
Despite the profound change in race relations that has occurred in our lives, Carter G. Woodson’s vision for black history as a means of transformation and change is still quite relevant and quite useful. One thing has not changed. That is the need to draw inspiration and guidance from the past. And through that inspiration, people will find tools and paths that will help them live their lives.
MAKING A WAY OUT OF NO WAY - Smithsonian Museum Stories
How do you make a way out of no way? For generations, African Americans worked collectively to survive and thrive in the midst of racial oppression. Through education, religious institutions, businesses, the press, and organizations, Black men and women created ways to serve and strengthen their communities. They established networks of mutual support, cultivated leadership, and improved social and economic opportunities. They also developed a tradition of activism that paved the way for broader social change.
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No one has played a greater role in helping all Americans know the black past than Carter G. Woodson, the individual who created Negro History Week in February 1926 to ensure that school children be exposed to black history. Woodson chose February for reasons of tradition and reform to coincide with Abraham Lincoln and Fredrick Douglass’s birthdays.
The second black American to receive a PhD in history from Harvard—following W.E.B. Du Bois by a few years—Woodson had two goals. One was to use history to prove to white America that blacks had played important roles in the creation of America and thereby deserve to be treated equally as citizens.