We’re halfway through Black History Month, the 28 days of the year where Black achievements are celebrated. Americans take the time to look outside of the white mainstream and focus on the Black current that has rumbled underneath us throughout history. Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr. and Harriet Tubman are the stars of the show – we admire them for their bravery and tenacity.

Black History Month is a good thing, but it’s not without its problems. The meaning behind the month is empowering. It was created by Carter Woodson, a University of Chicago Alum. After attending a celebration for the 50th anniversary of emancipation, Woodson was inspired to found what is now the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), and encouraged his former Fraternity and other civic organizations to create small-scale, weeklong Black History celebrations. As Woodson encouraged schools to follow suit, Black History week caught on across the country. The week turned into a month, and was officially recognized in 1976 by President Ford.

But the normalcy of the month, now officially recognized for nearly 50 years, has made it lose some of its meaning. Today, as compared to 1976, people respect and look up to Black historical figures. If asked to name one, anyone could reasonably come up with a name and tell you what they did. Rosa, Martin, and Harriet changed the world and risked their lives for the future of Black society, and we’ve come to a point in society where we can all pretty much agree on that. This is nothing but good. But think deeper about each of these Black heroes. What do they have in common? Yes, their race; yes, their fight for freedom, but also their agreeableness. None of us find these figures threatening. Their contributions to history are causes we can all get behind – freeing enslaved people, defying racial segregation, dreaming of equality. They did something we can all obviously agree was good. We can all look up to them and feel pride in what they did – even if we’re not Black.

Black History Month can sometimes veer into complicit territory – not by all who celebrate it, but within the mainstream perception. Setting aside a month to talk about Black Americans is the bare minimum to seem inclusive. If it’s acknowledged, and if the “agreeable” events and people are mentioned, America can say they have championed diversity and achieved equality for all.

Outside of the white-washed, watered down, “Kumbaya” version of Black History month we think of lies an uncomfortable truth. For a long time, the people we call heroes today were our Nation’s greatest villains. MLK, for example, was one of the FBI’s most wanted “criminals”. He was thought of as a radical by politicians, disliked by 75% of the American Public at the time of his death, and was a personal enemy of J. Edgar Hoover (the FBI’s “it boy”). That means if you’re a white American, it’s not unlikely your grandparents thought of MLK as a bad person. In the 70s, textbooks were just beginning to wipe out “lost cause” and “states rights” narratives about the Civil war, ushered in by the United Daughters of the Confederacy a few generations prior (By the way, on the 150th anniversary of the Civil war in 2011,  at least half of all Americans believed the cause of the war was state’s rights directly because of the UDC’s impact. Read more here.

This is not pleasant, meaning it’s not agreeable, and not discussed in our Black History lessons in school. Now consider Black History Month. Today we think of it in nice terms. It’s a “nice” holiday to celebrate good people – but in 1976 when Black History Week turned into Black History Month, it wasn’t met with the same acceptance that we give it in 2023. Even today some question why we don’t have a “white history month”. If the month were to stop feeling so nice – if during the month we talked about how we can still see the effects of red-lining and systemic poverty – how would America feel about it? Would it still be an integral annual celebration, or would it go back to being a “radical” holiday?

Black History month helps combat baseline racism and misinformation like that of the Civil war. Its greatest function is to show everyone that Black Americans are more than just slaves or slave ancestors. In areas where a person may go their whole life without ever seeing a Black person, Black History month helps expose students to diversity, and can help them realize Black people really can be anything – doctors, actors, inventors. Hopefully, if students learn about the hardships Black people have gone through, they’ll be less likely to participate in derogatory jokes or stereotypes when they’re older. This is good and all, but it only goes so far.

Last February, NPR shared the story of Hassan Tilghman. In 2012, he roamed the streets of New York City with a sandwich board hung on his shoulders that read “End Black History Month”. Luckily, the back revealed a more positive message, reading “Black History is American History”. For Tilghman, one month is not enough. At the time of the stunt, Tilghman was creating a movie which pondered if relegating Black history to one month was just a gentler form of segregation. To him, Black people are invisible for 11 of our 12 months. America “gives” Black society one month, then it’s back to its regularly scheduled programming.

Black History is American History – because of Slavery, and because of everything else Black people have done for this country. Why then, are Black people only mentioned in February? Further, why are they most often mentioned in the contexts of Slavery or Jim Crow? There’s a lot of time between those periods, there’s been a lot of time after them. Black people have been a part of everything that has happened in America, we’ve just never been taught about them.

This month, we should all look further than our go-to Black heroes. We should look further than the month of February. We can’t just recycle the same facts about MLK, Rosa Parks, and all the other people we know changed the world. We have to look for Black people in every decade. What were they doing, and why did they have to do it? What was America’s reaction to what they were doing, and where can we see its effects today?

Black History Month was once a week long. Before that, it was a 50th anniversary. Going even further back, it was just a couple of days – Abraham Lincoln and Fredrick Douglas’ birthdays on the 12th and 14th of February. Carter Woodson wanted the celebrations he witnessed to be bigger. He knew how important it was to teach others about what Black Americans had done, so he spread the idea to anyone he could reach. His efforts eventually bloomed into Black History Month, and they can go further still. Woodson would be proud of a world that no longer finds Black History month necessary because it’s taught all year round. It would mean so much if we didn’t have to scour the internet and libraries to find Black people throughout history, we would already know who they were because we learned about them in the 5th grade. We need Black History Month now, but one day, the month itself could be a part of history – a relic of what we used to be, a marker of how far we’ve come. Black history is American History, and it’s just as important as the white parts.

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