Note: My use of “African” is inclusive of all black people, regardless of where on Earth we were born.
Every February, members of the African nation celebrate Black History Month. School children are taught random facts about what African people have “accomplished” throughout history. The google homepage whips out its cool black illustrations with similar black people facts to match. PBS replays specials about various black people who were the first accomplish something. And African people are paid reparations (JK on that last part).
Black History Month grew out of “Negro History Week” which was originally started in 1926 by African historian Carter G. Woodson in an effort to convince the white colonizers in the U.S. to be less oppressive to African people. Woodson stated that Africans “were overlooked, ignored, and even suppressed by the writers of history textbooks and the teachers who use them. Race prejudice is merely the logical result of tradition, the inevitable outcome of thorough instruction to the effect that the Negro has never contributed anything to the progress of mankind.”
Woodson’s thought process was that if the colonizer was able to learn about and acknowledge African people’s accomplishments and how we have contributed to society, they would be prompted to begin to like us and no longer oppress us. What Woodson failed to correctly conclude was that “race prejudice” or racism is the ideas that white people have in their heads about Africans, ideas that they came up with in order to legitimize colonialism and slavery.
His rationale does not take into account the 500-year “contribution” that African people made to colonial society through our enslavement and colonization; contributions that didn’t matter one bit to white people.
Black History Month, however, also provided African people an account of our history. During the early 1920s, most Africans, specifically in the south, lived in a demoralizing state of abject poverty with little or no schooling. As a way to help combat this dehumanization and instill a sense of pride in our people, Black History Month was established.
The History of Black History Month
Negro History Week was celebrated during the second week of February as it coincided with the birthdays of former U.S. president Abraham Lincoln who “freed the slaves” yet opportunistically stated, “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it,” and famed abolitionist and appointed “spokesman for the Negro” Frederick Douglass.
The institutionalization of a full month to celebrate black history was first proposed by the members of the Black United Students (BUS) at Kent State University in February 1969. BUS was formed by African students in response to Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968 and as an organization to struggle for social justice. The African students questioned why the university did not provide events and activities that catered to their blackness and culture and began to make demands for a hub for black culture and education, so that the contributions of African people would be taught and discussed.
In February of 1969, the Black United Students proposed the extension of Negro History Week into a full month, making the student group the first in the U.S. to make this kind of proposal. The Kent State BUS was just one of the dozens of black student organizations that sprang up during the black power movement that demand for black studies in our their campuses. The following year, the first observation of the country-wide known month celebrating the culture, history and contributions of African people was held at Kent State.
Black History Month was celebrated all across the country in educational institutions, centers of black culture and community centers by 1976. Then U.S. president Gerald Ford in the midst of the siege of the counterinsurgency against black organizations like the Black Panther Party, urged the U.S. population to “seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of” African people. This was an attempt to co opt the celebration of Black History Month and set the terms throughout the country of what would be considered “black history.”
A tool of inclusion
Although Woodson and the Black United Students’ struggle for the celebration of African people’s accomplishments and history was an honest struggle, it was ultimately a struggle for inclusion into the colonial status quo. It is of no surprise then that whenever we are bombarded with Black History Month facts we would hear about African people who never challenged the status quo and even struggled to uphold it. And when we are told about true freedom fighters like Harriet Tubman and Malcolm X, it is often a watered down version which ignores their principled struggle against colonialism and capitalism.
One of the more popular black history facts that have been regurgitated and celebrated over the past nine years is Barack Obama and his appointment as the “first black president.” These celebrations always seem to omit, however, that Obama’s presidency set African people back to a worse position than before he was elected. Another favorite, Oprah Winfrey, is celebrated for being one of the richest women in the world, although she got her wealth through attacks on the African poor and working class.
Traitors to the African nation like these are propped up during Black History Month alongside genuine freedom fighters like Harriet Tubman who challenged the institution of slavery and Martin Luther King who was anti-capitalist, anti-war and anti-imperialist.
To Celebrate or Not to Celebrate?
Black History Month, although born out of honest struggles, came out of an objective to combat ideas that white people have about us and our history. Ultimately, our objective as freedom loving people should be to build a world where no African has any interest in having a month dedicated to showing our “accomplishments” to white people.
As we struggle to build that world however, we should begin to use Black History Month as our own tool in the struggle for African self-determination. We should take up space during Black History Month discussions, centering them around Africans being a self-determining people. This includes discussions of our struggle to overturn colonialism, imperialism and parasitic capitalism. We should use Black History Month as a tool to discuss our struggle for reparations for 600 years of colonialism.
The African poor and working class must decide that any month that we do celebrate would honor the revolutionary wins of our African freedom fighters, those who challenged and fought to destroy the system that was built on and upheld through the oppression of African people.
We should also expand beyond the colonial borders of the U.S. and Canada to recognize, study and revere worldwide African resistance like the Haiti Revolution (1791–1804), the first and most successful revolution of African people, led by key figures Toussaint L’Ouverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, François Mackandal and Dutty Boukman. Studying figures like Nanny of the Maroons who led a fierce resistance struggle against the British on the island of Jamaica and Marcus Garvey (early 1900s), who set the example for organized resistance by uniting 11 million Africans worldwide should be prime on the agenda.
This Black History month, when we discuss George Washington Carver’s development of the peanut butter, we must do so if in the context that he was able to innovate these products because he was an ex-slave who knew the land better than anyone. We must recognize that workers push innovation and in our fight for freedom we will need botanists like Carver. When we speak on Madame CJ Walker’s creation of the hot comb and lye relaxers, we must also identify that she was successful because Africans came to trust her products because she was a fellow African. Our discussion should be tied to African nationalism and the petty bourgeoisie building a genuine relationship with its customers as we struggle to build economic development in our community.
Let us begin to move away from a benign Black History Month towards a lethal Black Power History Month.
