,_Carter_G._Woodson_Home_National_Historic_Site,_1915._(18f7565bf62142c0ad7fff83701ca5f6).jpg){kind=link}
When Dr. Carter G. Woodson, founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History started Negro History Week on February 7, 1926, he'd already been working for years to preserve and tell our stories. Mainstream narratives painted our people in anti-Black strokes. Woodson decided to do something about it because he feared this one thing.
"If a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated," he once said. Woodson knew we couldn't run this risk of outsiders controlling our narrative. So he tapped into his community and put in the work.
Negro History Week coincided with the Harlem Renaissance. Woodson and his comrades provided schools with K-12 curriculum kits with photos, lesson plans, and suggested readings. They engaged adults and children alike through lectures, parades, and historical performances.
From the pulpit to the classroom, Black churches and HBCUs carried the tradition. By the 1940s, the week-long celebration had become a month. The political consciousness of the 1960s culminated in the presidential declaration of Black History Month in 1976.
A hundred years after Woodson established Negro History Week, we know preserving Black history is an intergenerational commitment and celebration. What can we build together right now that will better Black lives for the next century? Because we all we got.