A Return to Radical Roots

Origins of Black History Month

Given the distracting accumulations around Black History Month, it helps to recall the revolutionary nature of early celebrations. Black History includes a long history of co-opting Black narratives for ulterior motives. Whether that’s corporations commercializing it, or politicians sterilizing radical roots, many feel disillusioned or apathetic toward the celebration. The Black community itself has often questioned the use, relevance, and implications of dedicating just a month to Black history, or the message that allocation might send. Given all this, highlighting the radical nature of early Black History celebrations remind us of the intended transformative abilities of learning Black History.

Many have felt that ads like these are nothing more than attempts to capitalize on Black History, only to leave that history behind once February ends.

Created in 1926 by Dr. Carter G. Woodson, the son of former slaves, the celebration was first a week known as Negro History Week. Woodson, of whom many refer to as the Father of Black History, chose a week in February, a month that contains the birthdays of both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, two heroes of the Black community. In 1976, under President Ford, the week was officially turned into a month of national celebrations, hence, Black History Month.

Woodson, the son of former slaves, spent his life devoted to education. As the second Black person, after W.E.B. Dubois to receive a doctorate from Harvard, he used his position to advocate for the Black community.

Essentially, Woodson envisioned the week as a call to educational arms: to ask, talk, teach, and learn African and African American history to engender pride in Black communities. To that end, his historical society created extensive literature for the day to be disseminated throughout the country. The week therefore entailed calls for literature to be circulated, books to be written, history to be researched; he called for lectures, for special classes, for commemorations and plays to be enacted in churches and classrooms, social halls and lodges, and a mass collection of resources, historical documents. He sought to create a shared historical consciousness among his people, among the various and complex communities. Woodson believed the week also served an equally important purpose for white people — a re-education against their racist beliefs.

To appreciate the revolutionary roots of Black History Month it helps to recall the context in which the week was first created and celebrated. It was an ambitious undertaking at the time, one of rampant Jim Crow enforcement, racial violence, days of domestic terrorism, race riots, a year in which the NAACP reported at least one lynching every 54 hours, a conservative estimate based only on the incidents reported.

Educationally, it was a dismal era of enforced segregation, curricula that either just ignored African and African American history, or greatly distorted it through the lens of racist mythology. American history and American historians wholly neglected the existence of complex extensive kingdoms in Africa, and made no attempt to even acknowledge the contributions of African societies to world history. In depicting American history, slavery was taught, but only taught under the absurdly distortive lens of race mythology.

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Historians taught that slaves actually benefited from slavery. They argued that the Southern Lifestyle was a beneficial system to the slaves, to the childlike, dim-witted, incapable African population. Southern slave masters were depicted as fatherly, caring for savages that couldn’t live otherwise, except for servitude. Historians made the specious claim that the slavery system actually hurt the Southern economy. The only reason, they argued, that the South persisted in slavery was out of their patriarchal sense of obligation to savages. Here, for example, is a popular and common sentiment found in W.E. Woodward’s A New American History, a book widely praised in its own time:

The slave system…did incalculable harm to the white people of the South, and benefited nobody but the negro, in that it served as a vast training school for African savages. Though the regime of the slave plantations was strict, it was, on the whole, a kindly one by comparison with what the imported slave had experienced in his own land. It taught him discipline, cleanliness, and a conception of moral standards.

Given this absurd and cruel situation Woodson concluded that, “the philosophy and ethics resulting from our educational system have justified slavery, peonage, segregation, and lynching.” It was a time when America felt few qualms about lying to itself, almost wholesale. The gap between the bloated rhetoric of American exceptionalism and the campaign of oppression it waged against African Americans was widening.

Few attempts were made to include the contributions of African Americans into general American history. Even if you desired to know the truths of African American history, you would be hard pressed to find the appropriate materials. In his 1922 book, The Negro In History, Woodson begins his history with the most basic facts of African civilization. He does so because he believes that “most historians in this field know practically nothing about the Negroes in Africa prior to their enslavement,” and instead of caring about the actual truth, the white world just presumes that once a slave always a slave. Nor could you easily find books and documents about the heroic experiences of slaves in both the Revolutionary and Civil War, or about the numerous slave rebellions.

In today’s world, try to envision that you could not find texts that talked about your history, the history of your people and country in any truthful way throughout the country. Sadly, in regards to documentary evidence of early slaves, this remains true. Take into account that for bulk of their time in America, African Americans were either explicitly or implicitly, barred from the realms of education. Unable to learn how to read or write during the years of slavery, these restrictions were kept implicit in many places.

Seeing this situation, facing the continuous avalanche of entrenched racism, Woodson and a small coterie of other devoted historians first created the Negro Historical Society in 1912, then created the first black academic periodical, The Journal of Negro History. Negro History Week was Woodson’s idea, and a brilliant extension of these earlier projects. Woodson made many attempts to integrate African American history into the general populace, both black and white, but it is this, his creation of Negro History Week, that many see as his greatest and most successful legacy. Negro History Week, Woodson hoped, would counteract all the hate, racism, stereotyping, and discrimination pervasive throughout American culture, while engendering pride in the Black community.

Also Recommended:

The Order of Myths: The first Mardi Gras in America was celebrated in Alabama in 1703. In 2007, Mobile’s celebration is still racially segregated. A fascinating Sundance documentary examines American race relations with wit, access, and sharp-eyed observation. Available on MUBI.

Anatomy of a Self Taught, Black Artist

In the next part of this essay, Joseph focuses on the specifics of Woodson’s radical vision that saw African history, one shorn of racist assumptions, as one of the central antidotes towards the scourge of racism.

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