Every February, some brands change their logos. Companies post tributes to Martin Luther King Jr, and other black legends. Schools dust off documentaries. And for 28 days, the shortest month of the year, no less, Black history gets its moment.
Then March arrives. The logos revert, posts stop. And the institutions that spent February celebrating return to business as usual.
So here’s the uncomfortable question: Is Black History Month still serving us? Or has it become a consolation prize – a way for the world to check a box?
The Origin Story Most People Don’t Know
To answer that question, we need to go back to 1926.
Carter G. Woodson wasn’t just a historian. He was the son of formerly enslaved parents. He worked in coal mines as a teenager. He didn’t enter high school until he was 20. And despite all of this, he became the second Black American to earn a PhD from Harvard after W.E.B. Du Bois.
Woodson had witnessed how Black contributions were systematically erased from American history. As he put it: “If a race has no history, it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world.”
So he did something about it. In February 1926, he launched Negro History Week, choosing February because it held the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, dates Black communities were already celebrating.
The goal was never a permanent month of recognition. Woodson viewed it as a corrective – a way to push schools and institutions to teach Black history year-round.