The history of Black History Month, one hundred years in
B A PARKER, HOST:
Hey, everyone. You're listening to CODE SWITCH, the show about race and identity from NPR. I'm B.A. Parker.
GENE DEMBY, HOST:
And I'm Gene Demby.
PARKER: Gene, can you think of any particularly memorable Black History Month celebrations?
DEMBY: Wait, what is this question? You mean like...
PARKER: Like, when you were a kid, when you were like, oh, it's Black History Month. We got to do stuff.
DEMBY: Not really. I mean, you know, I went to all-black schools growing up, you know what I mean? So, like...
PARKER: Same.
DEMBY: ...It was sort of - this was back - you know, you went to - yeah, you know what it is. Like, sometimes we'd have, like, extra history-focused stuff during that month. I feel like, especially in elementary school, we - that stuff was, like, just year-round, anyway. But how about you?
PARKER: I think like - remember, 'cause growing up in Baltimore being - you're kind of inundated with Black history.
DEMBY: Yeah, of course.
PARKER: I remember going on a field trip into a church basement, and there was, like, a woman sweeping by a fireplace. She was pretending to be Harriet Tubman. Like, that's what - I was on a regular basis, I think I had to learn head, shoulders, knees and toes, and Swahili for Black History Month...
DEMBY: Oh, my God.
PARKER: ...One year.
DEMBY: I feel like we had the same childhood.
PARKER: Wait. Hold on. Wait. (Singing in Swahili).
DEMBY: Oh, my God.
PARKER: That's locked in here since 1996.
DEMBY: You've got to get your banjo. Banjo or don't count.
PARKER: Oh, no.
DEMBY: (Laughter).
PARKER: Oh, no.
DEMBY: But I do feel like a lot of people - Black History month - when I say a lot of people, I mean me. Black history, in general, is often presented to us as, like, random trivia about famous Black people.
PARKER: Yeah.
DEMBY: Like, you know, what were Madam C. J. Walker's hair care products made out of? Like, you know? And just - or sort of like, did you know that this Black man invented the blah, blah, blah? How many patents did George Washington Carver hold? And that feels like a really - to me, anyway, it feels like a very inert way of learning about history - right? - of, like, sort of famous first and inventors of things, etc., like, movements and thinking and all sorts of things in, like, conflict. And I guess that's kind of just how Americans learn about history in general. So it's not surprising, I suppose, that Black history is often presented this way, too, as, like, just a bunch of sort of trivia dates. You know what I'm saying?
PARKER: Yeah. But, I mean, speaking of dates. So this year marks the 100th anniversary of what we know to be Black History Month.
DEMBY: OK. Happy 100th.
PARKER: Happy 100th. 'Cause it's - as you may know, Gene, the origins of the month are actually way deeper than what a lot of people are exposed to these days.
DEMBY: Oh, yeah, I guess, that makes sense, right? So we talked about this before on the show about how Black History Month started out as Negro History Week. And, of course, you know I mean, the hoteps (ph) will be like, keep your third eye open 'cause of course, February is the shortest month of the year. You know what I mean? Don't let them try the tricknology. You know what I mean?
PARKER: I do. And we get into that. We talk about that.
DEMBY: But yes, Negro History Week conceived, introduced by the historian and journalist Carter G. Woodson.
PARKER: Right. And that - so that was in 1926. And even before that, it was Frederick Douglas Day. And then, in 1976, we get Black History Month as we know it.
DEMBY: 1976 - also the year of the U.S. Bicentennial.
PARKER: And now we're once again at a big anniversary for America, and Black history is still a contentious topic for some.
DEMBY: What do you mean? What have you been saying?
PARKER: Listen. So I was curious about how we approach Black History Month, particularly this year. So I reached out to the professor and scholar Jarvis Givens.
JARVIS GIVENS: I'm a professor of education in African and African American studies at Harvard University. I currently reside in Boston, Massachusetts, but I'm originally from Compton, California.
PARKER: That is a difference. I know you mad this week.
GIVENS: (Laughter) It's so cold, right?
PARKER: (Laughter).
GIVENS: My car's outside, buried in snow.
PARKER: Jarvis has a brand-new book called "I'll Make Me a World: The 100-Year Journey Of Black History Month."
DEMBY: OK.
PARKER: It came out on February 3, and in it, he reckons with the legacy and purpose of teaching Black history. So on today's show, we talk to Jarvis about why some people fought so hard to preserve and teach Black history, while others fought equally hard to prevent that, and where things stand today.
DEMBY: OK. I'm going to let y'all take it away.
PARKER: While I was reading your book, I was trying to think of when was my first brush with Black History, like, when did Black History Month really click for me. And I was like, oh, my grandmother was my kindergarten teacher, and she was in charge of the Black History bulletin board at, like, at school.
GIVENS: That's beautiful. Wow. Yeah.
PARKER: Yeah. So I just have a very distinct memory of a picture of Matthew Henson, the first African American to go to the North Pole. And he's, like, he's wearing, like, this, like, really cool fur hood.
GIVENS: Yeah, yeah.
PARKER: So that - when I'm reading your book, like, oh, I immediately picture Matthew Henson (laughter).
GIVENS: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's so funny because now that you said it, I see the kind of - the little cutouts of the heads of people and also Mary McLeod Bethune...
PARKER: Yes.
GIVENS: ...That were used for the bulletin boards in the elementary and middle school that I went to as well. So you're taking me back a bit.
PARKER: What was your first interaction with Black History Month in school?
GIVENS: Yeah. It was from the very beginning my preschool teacher, a woman named Ms. Butterfield (ph). She was someone who came to early childhood education later in life, but she was my preschool teacher in 1992, and I will never forget that being my first Black History Month program, where she required us to memorize chunks from Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech. So me and my schoolmates, all of us in preschool, she taught - we couldn't read. You know, we could recognize some sight words and things like that, but we were not fluent readers, right?
PARKER: Yeah.
GIVENS: But she taught us parts of this speech orally, the same way we learned Black poetry, the same way we learned songs in our preschool at this small Black independent school I attended in Compton, California. And so that's my first memorable experience is performing an excerpt from, you know, MLK's I Have a Dream speech and remembering the audience of our parents and our cousins and the older students at our school and community members cheering us on and having this just kind of larger-than-life reaction to us young - these young children on stage. And then every year after that, Black History Month programs were a really big part of the school culture. Because all of the teachers at the school were Black as well, and it wasn't until recently that I learned that they were all Southern migrants and had been educated in segregated Black schools, where Negro History Week was a regular kind of practice and observance.
PARKER: Yeah. One thing I'm thinking about. So we start with Frederick Douglass Day. And then we transition to Negro History Week. And then, in 1976, we get Black History Month. Does the way that the month has evolved to present day, mesh with the goals of that initial Negro History week, or, like, was something lost in translation?
GIVENS: Yeah. I think that there's a multitude of ways that people have carried the tradition forward, and some have kind of deviated from the original intent, absolutely, especially when we think about the kind of corporatization of Black culture and Black heritage during the month of February. You know, there are some ways in which when it comes to Black History Month, the history that is presented as a very sanitized version of history, depending on who the audience is and depending on who the people are that are organizing Black History Month events, so that what's presented is it's - it doesn't cause discomfort for some audiences, right?
And I don't think that that's consistent with what Carter G. Woodson and Black educators at the time in the 1920s and through this period of kind of Jim Crow, when they created this that they intended because they were trying to expose communities to more accurate representation of the nation's past, of the world's past, of Black people's past, so that young people who are experiencing all kinds of complicated things in the world around them would have access to truthful representations of history to allow them to analyze those things and to develop an incisive social analysis of the world that they lived in to understand what's not working right and how these things that are broken and that are perpetuating the injustice that they were experiencing came to be.
PARKER: I feel like there - you used the word sanitized. Like, there's, like, the Mount Rushmore of Black history tends to be. You've got, like, Frederick Douglass. You've got MLK, you've got Malcolm X. And then you fast forward to, like, Obama. And...
GIVENS: Yeah.
PARKER: Yeah. And then my experience, Black History Month can be a lot of celebrating Black excellence or focusing so much on accomplishments and firsts of Black people. Do you think we lose a chance to talk about the real nuances of Black history?
GIVENS: Absolutely. You know, there's a lot to be learned from studying the lives of men and women of rare achievement, like, you know, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. But there's also a lot to be learned from studying the social history and cultural history of everyday Black folks in the past and in the present because that allows us to have a much more intimate understanding about the nuances of Black life and Black culture. When Carter G. Woodson writes about his early exposure to Black history, you know, he was born in 1875. He talks about his first teachers, who were his formerly enslaved uncles. He talks about his mother who was a formerly enslaved woman in the history that she communicated to him orally, about what she remembered and what she recalled about the period of enslavement and her family's resistance to it and how they navigated the kind of extraints that are unimaginable to us today, but he also talks about illiterate Black coal miners that he worked alongside in the coal mines, who were Civil War veterans who would pay him in the evenings after they worked in the coal mines to read the newspaper aloud to them because they couldn't read it on their own.
And he talked about them responding back to what they were hearing with their counter-narratives, about what they remember, about things that are being left out, about how the Civil War or the Reconstruction period was being documented. And so Carter G. Woodson recognized the kind of heritage and the importance of preserving memories of everyday Black people in addition to the individuals of rare achievement, your Phillis Wheatley, your Benjamin Banneker, your George Washington Carvers, right? Even during Woodson's own time, I think some people probably needed to be reminded that Black history is much more expansive than just monumental figures and, you know, important events and dates that are nationally recognized, but that it also was about getting at those more nuanced and complex realities of Black lives and Black communities.
And that studying those things are also important for even appreciating the larger-than-life figures, where, you know, I try to take these recognizable figures, but place them in the context of ordinary Black communities that they came from, right? So I write about Martin Luther King Jr. as a high school student, with his high school English teacher working with him on a speech that he gave on, quote-unquote, "the Negro and the Constitution," where he won an oratorical competition in 1944, where he's demonstrating his knowledge of Black history in the Reconstruction period, but it's also in the context of Booker T. Washington High School. And we see him as a 15-year-old student, not as the adult leader of the Civil Rights Movement, but we understand how he gets to that place and how teachers like Miss Grace Bradley, who was his English teacher, and his peers at Booker T. Washington High School, helped shape this vision of a world that he was trying to actively work toward.
PARKER: Oh, my gosh, just reminded me. This is how Black History Month had me messed up, 'cause I think doesn't Dr. King graduate high school when he's 15?
GIVENS: Yeah, yeah, he's super young.
PARKER: Yeah. And as a child, I thought that was normal. So I thought everyone graduated high school at 15. So I just assumed when I got to high school, oh, I'll be - I'll get out when I'm 15. Like, no, you got a couple more years.
GIVENS: Exactly. Right. Yeah (laughter).
PARKER: Oh, my gosh. In your book, you used the term Black memory work or Black memory workers. Can you describe what those terms mean and why that was important to you?
GIVENS: Yeah. So the language of Black memory work and Black memory workers is one that I borrow from a lot of Black women archivists, people who work in libraries and special collections in various places, preserving historical documents and historical collections, particularly those related to Black life. And the reason I borrowed that language from Black archivists is because in this book, I want it to be intentional to emphasize the labor that has gone into creating something like Negro History Week and African American historical knowledge over the years and to demonstrate that that labor was carried forward by many hands, not just traditional historians, the way that we might think about them today, but that it was also school teachers, but also Black artists and Black writers and people who didn't have a college degree. Black memory workers is a much more expansive term to understand the labor that has gone into preserving Black history over the years because I think, you know, it's really important for us to understand that we all have a role to play in preserving important lessons about history in our communities and in the world that we live in, even if we are not, you know, academically trained historians.
PARKER: Can you give - can you give me some more examples of Black memory work?
GIVENS: Yeah. Really early on when I was doing research on Black teachers and Carter G. Woodson, and I started to find all of these textbooks that were written by Black school teachers, even though they weren't formally adopted by schools, but we have public school teachers writing textbooks as early as 1840. A man named James W.C. Pennington, who was an escaped slave from Maryland. You know, he wrote a textbook in 1841 after he had escaped and worked at the African Free School in Connecticut. People like Leila Amos Pendleton - she's a Black public school teacher in D.C. - wrote a textbook in the early 1900s. And they're emphasizing the stories of people like Nat Turner and leaders of the Haitian Revolution at a time when there is a flagrant absence of these stories in mainstream kind of history textbooks in the curriculum that's being used in schools.
And so those are the kinds of stories about Harriet Tubman - right? - and other kind of Black freedom fighters during the kind of period of slavery, but also up and through the Reconstruction era, so on and so forth, where they're writing in stories about Black resistance at a time when there was a complete absence of those stories in historical narratives. You would think that Black people were completely content being enslaved and that being enslaved was an enjoyable experience because the textbooks at the time only wrote about Black people enslaved as being well cared for and singing and producing beautiful songs, right?
But we have a lot of corrective work that these scholars were able to do. But then even beyond that, you know, there's even Black history and Black historians had to evolve in their thinking as well, right? When we think about the role of Black women historians and scholars of Black women history years down the line, who came back and said African American history also has to be more accountable to the dynamics of gender and sexuality when it comes to how we reflect on the past. And so when we get to, for instance, you know, the 1970s, with the blossoming of the field of Black women's history, we also see the kinds of stories that are being unearthed where we have scholars that are pushing us to think about the distinct experiences Black women had, but also the role that they played in all of the periods of the Black freedom struggle, you know, prior to that moment. There are lots of kind of ways in which these Black memory workers, you know, were able to do that corrective work.
PARKER: Yeah. I love - there was a moment when, I think, a group of students learn what an archivist is. And they're like, oh, that's a thing?
GIVENS: Yeah.
PARKER: All right.
GIVENS: Yeah.
PARKER: I guess we can do that then.
GIVENS: Absolutely. These wonderful, young high school students I've been working with, they created their own - this organization called a Black Literary Society, that's across all of the different high schools in Long Beach, California, and these young people - they organize around reading African American literature, you know, and developing skills that are transferable to other subjects in school. But they are actively working to preserve their local history. And part of this is because they were introduced to a way of thinking about history that's not just about the facts and dates, but they were introduced to an idea of thinking about how history is made. And that's an important part of being a kind of a mature historical thinker is knowing that before there's a textbook, that there are people that are making decisions based on artifacts from the past that they use to construct narratives. And that when people make those decisions, they have their own biases that inform what they choose to emphasize and what they don't emphasize.
And these are young people who are realizing that, oh, it's important for me to know what an archivist is and to know what an archive is in order to appreciate, like, historical production, to know, you know, how silences are also produced in history. And that's what Negro History Week and Black History Month was about, was cultivating a kind of a more mature historical consciousness in communities and inviting them to participate in telling more honest accounts of the past, for their own empowerment and for the world that we are all invested in trying to collectively build. And I'm just excited to invite more people to kind of continue in doing this work and to recognize that oftentimes those important stories are sitting in your family's photo albums, right? I just think that there is so much that has yet to be done in terms of uncovering important stories in Black history that has so much to teach us.
PARKER: Coming up...
GIVENS: We cannot have a conversation about American freedom for 250 years without taking seriously the way that the freedoms that certain people in America have experienced have been at the expense of the unfreedom experience by so many people in this nation and also in the world.
PARKER: Stay with us.
Parker.
DEMBY: Gene.
PARKER: CODE SWITCH.
DEMBY: And we are continuing your conversation with the author Jarvis Givens. He has a new book called "I'll Make Me A World: The 100-Year Journey of Black History Month."
PARKER: In the book, you talk about the letters of Miss Mary Ross Jones (ph). I loved it. Can you tell us who she was and how did you find her writing?
GIVENS: So Miss Mary Ross Jones was a teacher in Mississippi just outside of Jackson, Mississippi, and I encountered a letter by her unexpectedly when I was doing research about the early history of Negro History Week. I remember some people being skeptical as to whether or not these commemorations and celebrations of Black history would have happened in a place like Mississippi that was so notoriously violent and oppressive to Black people in schools and otherwise, right? But I suspected otherwise, knowing Black people that I know from Mississippi and elsewhere is that, you know, even if it's not easy to find those records, I suspected that there was kind of a memory of that and went looking for that documentation, which I found.
But I also kind of stumbled across some of these letters by Black teachers where they were writing about things that they were experiencing and the kind of inequities they were experiencing to support some of these legal cases that were being waged to address educational inequality. And this story by Miss Mary Ross Jones, where she describes the conditions of the school that she's in. She both talks about her commitment to her students and the value of education in the African American communities that she's a part of, even as she's documenting the inequities. But one of the things that she talked about that just blew my mind because I had never thought about it was that she was operating this school out of a church, you know, because the local school was overcrowded, and even the church was overcrowded, so they were operating essentially something like four classrooms in the space of one church with no dividers.
But she talked about on days when there were funerals that they had to kind of in classes and her and her students had to reorganize the church space to be repurposed for homegoing ceremonies, for funerals, essentially. And that detail, that specific, just that everyday narrative of this ordinary teacher and this ordinary community of students just about 10 miles north of Jackson, Mississippi, you know, forced me to think about something that I had kind of, like, not really thought about before. I knew so many Black schools were started in churches, but it didn't - I think about what that meant from a day-to-day, right?
PARKER: Yeah.
GIVENS: And what does it mean to think about Black education and kind of Black death to be in such intimate relationship with one another in these contexts? And that handwritten letter by Miss Mary Ross Jones, forced me to ask a lot of those kinds of conceptual questions, and to emphasize why studying these everyday aspects of Black life continue to be important because there are things that we can learn from these everyday experiences of ordinary Black people about the texture of Black life during various periods in history that we would otherwise lose sight of when we just focus on names and dates and the kind of encyclopedic knowledge that people often repeat when it comes to the study of Black history.
PARKER: Yeah. 'Cause those letters were from, I think, like, 1949.
GIVENS: Yeah.
PARKER: And then that theme that you're kind of talking about that trickles down, I think, in your book, there's this powerful thread where you talk about the oratory skills you learned during Black History Month, which you later used as a young child at your father's funeral. And if you're not comfortable talking about that, that's OK. But I just thought that that was, like, a beautiful encapsulation of how Black history kind of translates to, like, our everyday.
GIVENS: Absolutely. Yeah. No, I'm totally fine talking about that. My father was killed, you know, just months after that first Black History Month program that I talked about. And I remember, you know, there are these photos of me speaking at my father's funeral, but I'm reciting words that I also learned from that same teacher, Miss Butterfield (ph). It was a prayer that I was reciting in the space of my father's funeral. But I learned that prayer, the same way that I was taught the words of people like MLK, the same way that I was taught the words of various Black poets in the space of her classroom, that gave me the confidence to kind of speak publicly and to kind of begin crafting an identity of myself as someone who was a scholar who could achieve academically, but that also was someone who came from a people with a legacy that we could use as resources in our everyday lives.
And so that story with Miss Mary Ross Jones and the repurposing of that church that was also functioning as a classroom, and that relationship between kind of Black history and Black death - right? - became a moment for me to make some important arguments about how Black history has always been about valuing Black lives in the past, in order to continue to struggle to value Black lives in the present and future because of the fact that Black people have had such an unnatural relationship to death and dying in the world that we live in because of anti-Blackness, right? And people like Carter G. Woodson, when they were saying, we need to learn and we need to continue to preserve Black history, it's because they - you know, Carter G. Woodson has this line, there would be no lynching if it did not start in the schoolroom, right? Where essentially he's saying that there's a connection between the devaluing and the denigration of Black life in literature and in history that then structures the way in which Black people are treated and how they experience the world around them.
So Black history is always about more than just the details of history, but it's about this, you know, the social world that we live in. And people like Carter G. Woodson were very clear about that. And so that story from Miss Mary Ross Jones and that funeral happening in these schools also became a space for me to then open up this conversation about Black History Month to think about why the teaching of things about, like, Emmett Till was so important, why teaching about not just the work that Martin Luther King Jr. did, but also the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The same thing when it comes to people like Malcolm X. It's about what they did in the world, but also the things that happened to kind of neutralize and to kind of kill the work that they were doing. And so there's a way in which these themes around Black death are kind of throughout Black history, and in many ways, what the struggle to preserve Black history is responding to. And that essay that you're pointing to that begins with Miss Mary Ross Jones and that end with me talking about my father's funeral in 1992, as a result of gang violence in Southern California, is a space for me to think about that, like, the larger stakes of Black history.
PARKER: You write that Black history tends to be surveilled. Can you expand on that?
GIVENS: I was just reading about the case in Philadelphia where the names of the enslaved people who were owned by George Washington that were listed at his home in Philadelphia were recently removed in this particular moment. I think that's an example of the kind of surveilling and the erasure and sculpting out of important details of Black history that's in the present day and that is reflective of this larger pattern of the kind of erasure and kind of constraining of Black historical knowledge and Black memory work, right? An example - before the first Negro History Week, there is this - a newspaper article that I remember reading in the Afro-American, which was a very important national Black newspaper out of Baltimore in August of 1925. The headline reads, Dr. Woodson's Negro history confiscated.
And that article was about a story of a Black segregated high school in Oklahoma that was using Carter G. Woodson's textbook, "The Negro In Our History," that he began publishing in 1922. The local white school board decided to inspect the textbook a little more closely. And after reading about Woodson's treatment of the Red Summer of 1919 and the fact that Black people fought back during the race riots of 1919 after World War I, or the fact that he wrote explicitly about the kind of sexual violence that Black women and girls experienced at the hands of white men in the South during the period of enslavement was something that they felt was out of step with what was acceptable to be included in Black history or in history in general.
And so the textbooks were confiscated, the teachers were reprimanded and the principal at that school, his life was threatened, and he was forced to resign, right? So that's an example of the kind of censorship and the kind of suppression that Black teachers were operating under during the Jim Crow period when Negro History Week is developing, you know, in the early 20th century. That's the kind of hostile intellectual environment that they're responding to. And there's a long history of that, right? If we go back, you know, even before Negro History Week, you know, there's a really important text, "David Walker's Appeal To The Coloured Citizens Of The World" that's published in 1829. That's a really, really important Black historical text, but he's advocating for Black people to resist slavery at all costs, even if that means taking up arms.
This text is circulated around the South and especially Southern cities where there are kind of ports, and that text became forbidden, and it was confiscated. You have examples of police breaking into churches to kind of confiscate this text, and this is happening at a time when there are also anti-literacy laws, right? Because of the spread of abolitionist literature, you have texts like Frederick Douglass' slave narrative - right? - part of the circle of abolitionist literature, where their efforts to kind of restrict Black education because of the potential access to these kind of texts, right? These are also early examples and precursors to the kind of censorship around Black knowledge and Black history that we see in the current moment.
Anti-assembly laws that are also happening - you know, even prior to these anti-literacy laws, we have anti-assembly laws in the early 1800s that don't allow black people to congregate without kind of white oversight because of what they might be communicating to one another, the ideas that they might be translating to one another. And so these are all examples of these kind of - the censorship that is a part of this long history of Black intellectual struggle to preserve their stories and to preserve their memories and to offer their interpretations of historical events in the world around them, right? These are all examples of that, and we're seeing new versions of this intersection between race and power and history that's always been a part of the story of, like, the circulation of knowledge in the society that we live in.
PARKER: OK. With the 100-year anniversary of Negro Week/Black History Month coinciding with, I guess, the 250 anniversary of America, how are you able to reconcile those two things?
GIVENS: Yeah. It is interesting that the expansion from the week to the month occurred in 1976, 50 years after, you know, the inauguration of Negro History Week, but also at the same time as the nation's bicentennial, right? And that was in the mid-'70s, which was a moment when Black communities were experiencing a lot of backlash to, you know, gains made during the Civil Rights Movement, the rise in kind of policing and incarceration and kind of, like, new kind of depths when it came to, like, urban poverty and things of that sort. That was a moment when kind of Black scholars and scholars of African American history said, we can't find ourselves in a place holding up these narratives of American exceptionalism, where we're seeing all of this regression happening in the society around us. And so the expansion from week to month was an effort to kind of force the public to be more accountable to Black history and to put the kind of work of preserving Black history and Black interpretation of the past in conversation with these narratives around the kind of 200 years of American independence at that time.
And I would say that 50 years later, now we're in 2026, we find ourselves in a similar moment of backlash and regression and retrenchment, where history is also important, and the centennial of Black History Month presents itself as a resource for us today to say that we cannot have a conversation about American freedom for 250 years without taking seriously the way that the freedoms that certain people in America have experienced have been at the expense of the unfreedom experienced by so many people in this nation and also in the world, right? And Black History Month, as a critical approach to telling you know, U.S. history and world history, is an opportunity for us to kind of speak back to some of those, you know, American exceptionalism narratives that are likely to be perpetuated this year.
PARKER: OK. You've answered this a little bit, but what does the future of Black History Month look like? Is it more intentionality?
GIVENS: I would hope so. I would hope that moving forward, we take a moment to kind of pause and reflect and to say that just regurgitating dates and names is not actually honoring what was intended with this particular commemorative holiday. But that there's a lot of action that should be kind of surrounding this work. Like, the work of preserving Black history is under attack right now. And so I think there's opportunities for communities to invite young students and community members to actively participate in the preservation and the continuation of this tradition, as opposed to just, you know, watching interesting films or celebrating Black heritage and culture through food and music, so on and so forth.
So hopefully, there's a way in which there's more action around the way we commemorate Black history, that we study it rigorously, we preserve it. We kind of - we learn new stories. We add some unfamiliar names to the pantheon of names that we typically tell, and we stretch our imaginations to look in different places for new stories about Black history that can teach us important things about the past and teach us important things about ourselves and where we might be trying to go, and that we kind of emphasize that agency that we all have to help contribute to continuing this legacy and making it even better than it has been and that it currently is today.
PARKER: Jarvis Givens is a professor of education in African and African American Studies at Harvard University. His newest book is "I'll Make Me A World: The 100-Year Journey Of Black History Month." Jarvis, thank you so much for talking with me.
GIVENS: Absolutely. Thank you for having me.
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DEMBY: And just a reminder that signing up for CODE SWITCH+ is a great way to support our show and to support public media, which I don't know if y'all heard, we need your help right now. And you get to listen to our show and episodes of other shows, sponsor-free. So please go find out more at plus.npr.org/codeswitch.
PARKER: This episode is produced by Jess Kung. It was edited by Leah Donnella. Our engineer was Jimmy Keeley.
DEMBY: And we'd be remiss if we did not shout out the rest of the CODE SWITCH massive. That's Christina Cala, Xavier Lopez and Dalia Mortada. As for me, I'm Gene Demby.
PARKER: I'm B.A. Parker.
DEMBY: Be easy, y'all.
PARKER: Hydrate.
Happy Black History Month. Grand rising.
DEMBY: Grand rising. There's a lady who says that to me every morning, and I'm always jarred. [inaudible] mother.
PARKER: Grand rising, brother.
DEMBY: Like, what's good? She's like, grand rising. What do I say back to that? You know what I'm saying? Like, grand rising to you, as well, my queen.
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