Lift every voice and sing, always

Observed annually as a month-long celebration of Blackness, Black History Month descends from Negro History Week, created by historian Carter G. Woodson and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH) in 1926 to ensure our stories remain centered in history, in public sentiment, and in public policy. In 1970, after being proposed by Kent State University's Black Student Union with Black educators, Black History Month was celebrated for the first time at Kent State. Six years later, the month-long celebration was embraced across the country, with then-president Gerald Ford formally recognizing it as a necessary opportunity to honor the accomplishments and influence of our people seen in every area of this country and every facet of its history.[1]

In over a dozen U.S. states, sharing this truthful, uncontested history of how Black History Month came to be in public K-12 classrooms is illegal. Curiously, this year's Black History Month saw the advancement of legislation seeking to bar Black history and literature from public educational spaces in 44 states.[2] The College Board also joined in this concerted effort to advance a revised Black history, purging Black Lives Matter and the esteemed works of Black feminists and queer writers from their formal Advanced Placement (AP) African American Studies curriculum.[3]

In the face of these systemic efforts to erase, revise, and de-emphasize Black history, we're reminded that our storytelling remains our greatest weapon. The stories of resilience, triumph, achievement, and challenge we've kept alive and shared in community have helped preserve our history outside formal education. Organizations across the U.S., such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Education Law Center (ELC), are mobilizing against classroom censorship and working to ensure the Black experience is taught in America's public schools. We invite our supporters to dive into each of their calls to action and to do so while carrying these three truths about the power of our storytelling and our ever-pioneering brilliance:

What we do and create with our stories affirms that #BlackHistoryIsInfinite.

The two years of collective work that went into the Black Well-being: Moving Toward Solutions Together report demonstrates how sharing and affirming our stories in community with each other moves us toward historical change and once unnamed possibilities. Identifying and shaping solutions based on Black Washingtonians' ideas and experiences, the report outlined approaches devised by us and for us to inspire work that forges systems supportive of our health, public safety, education, economic mobility, and civic engagement. Historical work is underway in these realms to bring forth Black well-being.

Amplifying Black media makers and surveyors ensure our truth and history are told.

A Color of Change and Family Story study cited by Free Press' Media 2070 and in the Black Well-being report finds that Black families represent 59% of stories about poverty in news and opinion outlets like CNN and Fox News — even though they make up just 27% of poor families in the country. Our narrative power is the most impactful counter to the revisionist narratives that exist about us, and media makers and surveyors of media help ensure the truth of who we are in the world. Black History Month is also Black Narrative Power Month, founded by Media 2070, to amplify and celebrate this power and to invite all into the work to secure a world where media reparations have been made real. Taking from the approaches that Black Washingtonians identify as integral to shifting and disrupting harmful anti-Black narratives, as we name the pedagogical shifts happening across the country to accommodate the white supremacist push to contort our history, it is on all of us to hold outlets and institutions accountable for the harm they spread, to elevate Black-led media, and to model the informed curiosity we want all to embody when they engage with stories about our communities.

As James Baldwin shares in his esteemed memoir, I Am Not Your Negro, "history is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history." In a world that seeks to impose restrictions and limits on how our history, full of both tribulations and triumphs, is told, shared, and passed along to future generations, we remain committed to wielding the profound power of storytelling that has preserved and adds to the record of our shared experience, using it to forge new precedents and to initiate solutions supportive of Black prosperity and well-being.

References:

[1] https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/celebrating-black-history-month  

[2] https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/map-where-critical-race-theory-is-under-attack/2021/06 

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/01/us/college-board-advanced-placement-african-american-studies.html