“Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history.”
— Carter G. Woodson, founder of Negro History Week (later Black History Month)
The story of Black history in the United States has always been one of struggle, brilliance, and survival–all in spite of deliberate erasure. From the days of slavery through Jim Crow, and now into our present moment, powerful forces have sought to silence, distort, or sanitize our truths. Our names were changed, use of our native languages were criminalized, families were torn apart, and lies of our origins, cultures, and peoples were seared into us. These intentional distortions of ourselves and therefore our histories are not coincidental, but rather calculated acts of violence that shrinks the possibility of how Black futures are imagined.
“History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. To obscure that truth is to wound generations yet to come.”
— James Baldwin
Today, the stakes of remembering are as urgent as ever. Across the country, state legislatures are banning books, restricting classrooms, and cutting “divisive concepts” from curricula. Federal directives have even attempted to scrub the contributions of Black leaders from cultural institutions and government archives, pretending as if our communities never shaped science, culture, defense, or democracy. These acts are meant to rob future generations of the context, pride, and vision that come from knowing their people’s power. But the truth has never lived in just textbooks or museums. It lives in us.
“Our struggle is also a struggle of memory against forgetting.”
— bell hooks
Every time someone tries to erase us, we remember louder. Families pass down stories. Teachers slip truth between the lines. Artists paint, write, and sing our histories into the present. Grassroots organizers build archives. Communities build cultural homes. Each act of remembrance becomes its own form of protest, a declaration that our history is too alive, too central, and too beloved to be undone.
History as Fuel for Liberation
Even in the face of erasure, Black history has always been our inheritance and our engine. Oral traditions, spiritual practices, cultural expressions, and community storytelling have carried what written history often tried to erase. And whenever our history is reclaimed, it plants the seeds for liberation.
The Civil Rights Movement grew from the living memory of slavery, Reconstruction, and the generations of freedom fighters before them. Ella Baker, Malcolm X, and Dr. King each reminded us that we were carrying forward the unfinished work of our ancestors. The Black Power movement linked our struggle to global liberation efforts, affirming that the fight for Black freedom was, and is, part of a worldwide chorus for justice.
Even our cultural expressions have been acts of remembrance. In the 1980s and 1990s, hip-hop became a living archive, weaving the names of Garvey, Malcolm, and the Panthers into the rhythms of a new generation. And today, movements like Black Lives Matter remind us to “Say Their Names”, an act of both mourning and reclamation mirroring legacies like Mammy Till Mobely’s decision for an open casket funeral. It is no coincidence that attempts to ban African American Studies have risen in response, because history has shown: when Black people know our history, we organize for our freedom.
Fund Our Histories, Fuel Our Futures
To protect our stories, we must act together:
- Support institutional spaces. Museums, archives, and cultural centers keep our histories alive not just as artifacts, but as living, breathing guides for the future.
- Bolster grassroots memory-keepers. Community archives, oral history projects, and volunteer-run platforms like BlackPast.org ensure no story is lost.
- Center Sankofa in our giving. Philanthropy must understand history as activism, story as power, and memory as liberation.
Despite every attempt to erase us—from schools to museums to policy halls—our histories endure. Because we endure. Our communities remember, our stories rise, and our futures continue to be written with resilience and brilliance.
When we fund and honor these histories—both the institutional and the grassroots—we are not only protecting the past. We are fueling the futures our ancestors dreamed of, and the ones we are still daring to imagine today.