Black History has reached 100 years of celebration this year! To honor it, we at TEP are taking the time to slow down, talk to our elders, and ask to hear their favorite story one more time. We are also retracing the path back to the founding ideas of these celebrations to understand how the practice endured and spread as a movement.

Black History, by nature, is expansive. Since the founding of these celebrations (February 7, 1926), the stories have always been outgrowing their containers. It’s so important to highlight that the founder, Carter. G. Woodsoon, wanted Black History Month celebrations (or Black History Week as it originated) to elevate everyday people. He hoped they would bring people together over and over again and give way to permanent, year-round installations of rigorous Black history studies. They were never meant to be solely about the bolded names and date ranges printed in textbooks that can be easily memorized. Black History celebration was designed and destined to become a practice of storytelling that kept the spirit of liberation alive through community. 

Daryl Michael Scott, professor of history at Howard University and former president of The Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), summarizes Woodson’s strategy for what was originally Negro History Week in a Zinn Education Project article. Using the February birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass as bookends, Woodson aimed to spotlight the everyday people who fought for freedom in the Civil War, hoping that the history would do exactly what it has done: travel the world as a geopolitical force for freedom.

“Rather than focusing on two men, the Black community, he believed, should focus on the countless Black men and women who had contributed to the advance of human civilization…Well before his death in 1950, Woodson believed that the weekly celebrations—not the study or celebration of Black history—would eventually come to an end. In fact, Woodson never viewed Black history as a one-week affair. He pressed for schools to use Negro History Week to demonstrate what students learned all year,” writes Scott, “The Negro History movement was an intellectual insurgency that was part of every larger effort to transform race relations.”

“Rather than focusing on two men, the Black community, he believed, should focus on the countless Black men and women who had contributed to the advance of human civilization…”

Daryl michael scott

Woodson was a man of Christian faith and a Sunday school teacher who challenged the status quo. His hard, undereducated beginnings growing up in a share-cropping family steered the belief that everyday people are both history and future-makers. So how can we honor him? How can we keep the spirit of people’s history percolating in minds young, old, and everything in between, all year round?

Strengthen our communal bonds. We get to know our neighbors, congregation members, or aunties in other cities and ask them what they remember, what they know, and what they did.  

We reject Black excellence as being synonymous with Black liberation. Full stop. Until everyone has abundance, individual achievements–no matter how noteworthy–are mere exceptions to the rule of oppression.

Commit to quality public education in our communities and nation. As faith leaders, we must devote ourselves to the movement for truth and to public education anew.

May we go forward into the next 100 years, seizing every opportunity to remind each other of our power with the spirit of resistance in the day-to-day, as this blueprint for celebration invites us. Amen

What do you think? We want to know how you’re commemorating 100 years of Black History. Sound off in our comments!