Black History Month 2024: 5 Things To Know

ACROSS AMERICA — “African Americans and the Arts.” is the theme of the month-long Black History Month observance, which begins Thursday and continues through Leap Day on Feb. 29.

Since 1976, every U.S. president has set aside February as a month to celebrate the achievements of African Americans and their role in U.S. history.

Events through February will celebrate the multiple cultural influences — including African, Caribbean and the Black American lived experiences — that are infused in African American art, according to the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, the founder of Black History Month.

These influences are seen in the visual and performing arts, literature, fashion, folklore, language, film, music, architecture, culinary and other forms of cultural expression.

Below are five things to know about Black History Month, which is also sometimes called African American History Month:

Who Was Carter G. Woodson?

Carter Godwin Woodson, who founded the association that sponsors Black History Month, was born to illiterate former slaves in New Canton, Virginia, on Dec. 19, 1875, but in his 74 years became known as the “father of Negro history.”

Only the second Black American to obtain a Ph.D. from Harvard University, he was largely self-taught. Needing to support his father’s meager income, Woodson worked as a child laborer in coal mines in West Virginia and Kentucky, he didn’t enroll in high school until he was 20.

He received a bachelor’s degree from Berea College in Kentucky, then became a school supervisor in the Philippines and traveled throughout Europe and Asia before returning to the United States to study at the University of Chicago and, later, Harvard.

Woodson’s Influence Is Still Felt

It became pointedly clear to Woodson that his lived experience as a Black American and as the son of former slaves was of little interest to historians, and that the contributions of African Americans were deliberately “overlooked, ignored and even suppressed by the writers of history textbooks and the teachers who use them.”

Woodson’s own experiences reinforced this. For example, he was a dues-paying member of the American Historical Association, but was banned from attending and participating in conferences, according to a history of Woodson’s life compiled by the NAACP.

So, in 1915, a half century after the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, Woodson and others used philanthropic funding to co-found the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in Chicago. The group is known today as the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.

Woodson’s goal was to create a social scientific collection recording and publicizing especially the accomplishments of Black Americans that he envisioned as a “bridge to interracial group harmony” to confront “white prejudice,” according to Black Past, an African American history site.

The goal was not “spectacular propaganda or fire-eating agitation,” he said, reasoning “Nothing can be accomplished in such a fashion.

“The aim of this organization is to set forth facts in scientific form,” he explained. “Facts properly set forth will tell their own story.”

Three Important Publications

Four months later, Woodson launched the scholarly Journal of Negro History, still published today under the title Journal of African American History.

In 1937, he founded the Negro History Bulletin, now the Black History Bulletin, a repository for peer-reviewed publications on all aspects of Black history, but especially those focusing on middle and high school curricula and teacher preparation in U.S. history methods.

The works of white scholars were also included in both the Journal and Bulletin at Goodson’s insistence. They included William Munro, one of Goodson’s professors at Harvard, who paraphrased Woodson’s thinking when he noted, “A proper understanding of the Negro problem [is] the best means for ameliorating it.”

In 1921, Goodson founded Associated Publishers, the first non-religious, Black-owned publishing house in the nation. It published books on African Americans that were unacceptable to white publishing houses, as well as pictorials, bibliographies and other materials that would later be used in the observance of Negro History Week.

Early Observances

In 1926, Woodson launched Negro History Week in the second week of February to coincide with the birthdays of President Abraham Lincoln, who signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and Frederick Douglass, an abolitionist, social reformer, orator and statesman who escaped slavery in Maryland.

The observance was later expanded to last an entire month.

Every administration since President Gerald Ford’s in 1976 has observed Black History Month, and after Congress passed “National Black (Afro-American) History Month” into law in 1986, the observance became more widespread.

In the first presidential proclamation, President Ronald Reagan said the purpose of Black History Month is to “make all Americans aware of this struggle for freedom and equal opportunity,” and that it is a time “to celebrate the many achievements of African Americans in every field from science and the arts to politics and religion.”

Why Is Black History Month Needed?

Increased awareness of Black culture as an essential part of U.S. culture have brought about the end to chattel slavery, the dismantling of Jim Crow and Jane Crow segregation, the end to school segregation, passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and increased political representation at all levels of government.

Yet, struggles remain, according to social justice and civil rights groups.\
They say many of the forces that drove Woodson more than a century ago to provide an authentic narrative of the lived Black experience remain relevant today.

“There is no more powerful force than a people steeped in their history,” Lonnie G. Bunch III, the director of the Smithsonian Institution, said in 2016 at the opening of Washington, D.C.’s National Museum of African American Culture and History.

“And there is no higher cause than honoring our struggle and ancestors by remembering.”