The Great Conversation: A Century of Remembering
- b3yondmark3ting
- Feb 3
- 4 min read
Updated: Feb 6
Hello, everyone! Today, as part of The Great Conversation, we want to invite you to reflect on Black History Month and the stories and people that continue to shape our shared history.
February marks a milestone: the 100th anniversary of what we now know as Black History Month. A commemoration that feels permanent and inevitable today actually began as a radical experiment, born out of frustration with how American history erased Black people almost entirely.
To understand how Black History Month started, we have to begin with one person: Carter G. Woodson. Woodson was the son of formerly enslaved parents, a coal miner turned scholar, and one of the first Black Americans to earn a Ph.D. in history from Harvard. In the early 1900s, he looked around at school textbooks, museums, and public monuments and saw a disturbing pattern: Black people were either absent, caricatured, or reduced to slavery and servitude. He understood that if a nation’s story leaves you out, it quietly tells you that you don’t belong in its future.
So in 1915, after attending a major exposition in Chicago that barely acknowledged the achievements of Black Americans, Woodson helped found the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, the organization we now know as the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, or ASALH. Its mission was simple but profound: to research, preserve, and spread knowledge of Black history. Over the next decade, Woodson and his colleagues published scholarship, created teaching materials, and urged Black churches, schools, and civic groups to take history into their own hands.
By the early 1920s, you had Black history clubs forming in high schools, teachers begging for materials, and fraternities and community groups organizing local programs. Woodson kept pushing for something bigger—a coordinated moment each year when the country would pause and focus on Black history. He knew that visibility matters: people remember what the calendar tells them is important.
In February 1926, he made his move. Through ASALH, Woodson announced the first “Negro History Week.” He chose the second week of February to align with the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass—dates that Black communities were already marking with speeches, church programs, and local celebrations. Woodson’s idea was to harness that existing energy and turn it into a structured, educational campaign.
Negro History Week wasn’t just a slogan; it came with a whole toolkit. ASALH developed themes for each year, printed booklets and posters, and circulated lesson plans, plays, and photographs that teachers and churches could use. In cities across the country, mayors issued proclamations, schools held assemblies, and newspapers published special sections highlighting Black inventors, writers, soldiers, and community leaders. The week caught on because it met a hunger that had always been there—a desire to see Black life represented as more than oppression, to see brilliance, creativity, and resistance in the historical record.
Over time, that single week stretched, informally at first. In some places, especially where Woodson had personal ties, communities started using all of February to focus on Black history. By the 1940s, for example, Black West Virginians were treating the entire month as Negro History Month, even while the official celebration was still a week. Then came the 1960s, with civil rights struggles, Black Power, and a new wave of scholarship and activism that demanded a deeper reckoning with America’s past.
On college campuses, young Black students pushed for courses, departments, and events that reflected their heritage, not as a side note but as central to understanding the United States. Many of them expanded Negro History Week into a full Black History Month on campus, linking it explicitly to Africa and the global Black freedom struggle. Inside Woodson’s own organization, younger members pressed to update the language and the format to match the moment. What began as a week in the 1920s was evolving into a month‑long observance that felt truer to the scale of the history it was trying to honor.
By 1976, the United States had officially caught up with what communities had already been doing on the ground. That year, during the nation’s bicentennial, President Gerald Ford formally recognized Black History Month. In his message, he urged Americans to, in his words, “seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.” It was an acknowledgment, at the highest level, that the old, narrow version of American history was no longer acceptable—even if the work of changing it was far from complete.
Today, a century after that first Negro History Week, Black History Month is woven into the rhythm of American life: school bulletin boards, museum exhibits, streaming platforms, and corporate campaigns all shift their attention each February. But the spirit of Woodson’s project goes deeper than a month of themed content. For him, studying Black history was a tool of liberation, a way to combat racist myths with documented facts, and to give people a sense of their own power and belonging.
As Black History Month turns 100, the question isn’t just how it started, but what we do with it now. In an era of book bans, curriculum fights, and ongoing debates over how we remember the past, the call that Woodson issued in 1926 still echoes: history is not neutral, and forgetting is never accidental. The stories we choose to tell—or to hide—shape who we become.
So this February, when you see the familiar posters and hashtags, you’re watching the legacy of a century‑long struggle to make Black history visible, respected, and central to the American story. It began with a week, a handful of educators and activists, and one historian who refused to accept a version of the past that left his people out. One hundred years later, the work continues—not just in museums and classrooms, but wherever people insist that Black history is, and has always been, American history.
In light of this reflection, please click the link and then continue with the article below from the New York Times for a deeper understanding of the concept and how it shapes today’s discussion.
