The language used in the past to describe events and peoples does not always reflect language that is considered acceptable today. The following history of Black History Month contains such language and does so to remain historically accurate.
Since 1976, every United States president has officially declared February Black History Month. However, the idea to celebrate African Americans and their contributions to the United States started much earlier. In 1915, Carter G. Woodson, a Harvard trained Historian, traveled from Chicago, Illinois to Washington, D.C. to take part in the national celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the emancipation of African American slaves. At the celebration, Woodson observed the thousands of people who had traveled to see exhibits highlighting the progress of African Americans since the end of the Civil War. The celebration lasted three weeks, and inspired by the immense turnout, Woodson decided to form an organization that would promote the scientific study of black life and history. On September 9, 1915, before leaving Washington, D.C., Woodson met with four others and formed the Association of Negro Life and History (ASNLH).
In 1916, Woodson founded The Journal of Negro History and hoped that others would join him in spreading the word about the findings he and other prominent African Americans were publishing in the journal. Part of his mission to spread the message of Black achievement included asking his Omega Psi Phi fraternity brothers to help him. They responded by creating Negro History and Literature Week, later renamed Negro Achievement week. While the work Omega Psi Phi was significant, Woodson desired a greater impact and thought that the ASNLH should take an more active role. In fulfillment of this desire, Woodson sent out a press release in February of 1926 announcing Negro History Week.
Woodson chose February specifically since it was already tied to celebrations focusing on Frederick Douglass's and Abraham Lincoln's birthdays. Woodson knew that by choosing a month in which the African American community were already celebrating he would have greater success. Woodson was also interested in moving the celebrations away from what he called "great men" to the entire community. Instead of focusing on a couple of people Woodson wanted to focus on the Black community as a whole and the contributions that countess African American men and women had made to the United States.
The 1920s was known at the time as the decade of the New Negro, due to the raising racial pride and consciousness that was developed by the post-WWI generation. As urbanization and industrialization increased, African Americans began to move from rural areas in the south into the bigger, expanding cities of the north. This migration, combined with urbanization and industrialization, helped to expand the Black middle class. This increasing Black middle class became consumers of Black culture and literature and created Black history clubs. It was in this cultural flourishing that Woodson and the ASNHL received an overwhelming response to their call to celebrate African Americans.
Teachers and Black history clubs created a demand for instruction materials and Woodson responded by setting a theme each year for the national celebration and provided study materials, lesson plans, plays, and posters highlighting important peoples and events. Many high schools created Negro History Clubs and the ASNLH branches were formed Across the United States. As Black populations grew, mayors issued Negro History Week proclamations.
In the 1940s, the Black community began to slowly expand the study of Black history and Black history celebrations to the public. African Americans wanted to include African American history as part of school curriculum and not just as a supplement to United States history. The 1940s also saw some communities celebrating the full month of February, not just a week. By the 1960s, Negro History Week had evolved into Black History Month on many college campuses. Since 1976, every American president has designated February as Black History Month.
Sources:
Scott, Daryl Michael. "Origins of Black History Month." Association for the Study of African American Life and History, accessed November 11, 2019. https://asalh.org/about-us/origins-of-black-history-month/.
"Black History Month." History.com. A&E Television Networks, August 21, 2018. https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/black-history-month.
Photograph: An African American man pouring liquid magnesium into a container at the Basic Magnesium plant in Henderson, Nevada from the Henderson Public Library Photograph Collection on Henderson, Nevada, approximately 1940-1988. PH-00254. Special Collections and Archives, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Las Vegas, Nevada.
Digital Project: African American Experience in Las Vegas
The 2025 Black History Month theme, African Americans and Labor, focuses on the various and profound ways that work and working of all kinds – free and unfree, skilled, and unskilled, vocational and voluntary – intersect with the collective experiences of Black people. Indeed, work is at the very center of much of Black history and culture. Be it the traditional agricultural labor of enslaved Africans that fed Low Country colonies, debates among Black educators on the importance of vocational training, self-help strategies and entrepreneurship in Black communities, or organized labor’s role in fighting both economic and social injustice, Black people’s work has been transformational throughout the U.S., Africa, and the Diaspora. The 2025 Black History Month theme, “African Americans and Labor,” sets out to highlight and celebrate the potent impact of this work.
Considering Black people’s work through the widest perspectives provides versatile and insightful platforms for examining Black life and culture through time and space. In this instance, the notion of work constitutes compensated labor in factories, the military, government agencies, office buildings, public service, and private homes. But it also includes the community building of social justice activists, voluntary workers serving others, and institution building in churches, community groups, and social clubs and organizations. In each of these instances, the work Black people do and have done have been instrumental in shaping the lives, cultures, and histories of Black people and the societies in which they live. Understanding Black labor and its impact in all these multivariate settings is integral to understanding Black people and their histories, lives, and cultures.
Africans were brought to the Americas to be enslaved for their knowledge and serve as a workforce, which was superexploited by several European countries and then by the United States government. During enslavement, Black people labored for others, although some Black people were quasi-free and labored for themselves, but operated within a country that did not value Black life. After fighting for their freedom in the Civil War and in the country’s transition from an agricultural based economy to an industrial one, African Americans became sharecroppers, farm laborers, landowners, and then wage earners. Additionally, African Americans’ contributions to the built landscape can be found in every part of the nation as they constructed and designed some of the most iconic examples of architectural heritage in the country, specifically in the South.
Over the years to combat the superexploitation of Black labor, wage discrepancies, and employment discrimination based on race, sex, and gender, Black professionals (teachers, nurses, musicians, and lawyers, etc.) occupations (steel workers, washerwomen, dock workers, sex workers, sports, arts and sciences, etc.) organized for better working conditions and compensation. Black women such as Addie Wyatt also joined ranks of union work and leadership to advocate for job security, reproductive rights, and wage increases.
2025 marks the 100-year anniversary of the creation of Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids by labor organizer and civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph, which was the first Black union to receive a charter in the American Federation of Labor. Martin Luther King, Jr incorporated issues outlined by Randolph’s March on Washington Movement such as economic justice into the Poor People’s Campaign, which he established in 1967. For King, it was a priority for Black people to be considered full citizens.
The theme, “African Americans and Labor,” intends to encourage broad reflections on intersections between Black people’s work and their workplaces in all their iterations and key moments, themes, and events in Black history and culture across time and space and throughout the U.S., Africa, and the Diaspora. Like religion, social justice movements, and education, studying African Americans’ labor and labor struggles are important organizing foci for new interpretations and reinterpretations of the Black past, present, and future. Such new considerations and reconsiderations are even more significant as the historical forces of racial oppression gather new and renewed strength in the 21st century.
Click here to explore past themes from ASALH.
Sources:
"Black History Themes." Association for the Study of African American Life and History, accessed February 01, 2025. https://asalh.org/black-history-themes/.
UNLV has a variety of resources for African-American students. Click on the links below to explore more.