Title: The History of Black History Month • EBONY
Headings: The History of Black History Month
The History of Black History Month
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Content: “It is evident from the numerous calls for orators during Negro History Week that schools and their administrators do not take the study of the Negro seriously enough to use Negro History Week as a short period for demonstrating what the students have learned in their study of the Negro during the whole school year. These mischievous orators, as it has been said again and again in these columns, have no message which they can connect with the celebration of Negro History Week. About the only thing on the Negro which they know is the traditional discussion of the race problem and how it has been or can be solved.” [ Negro History Bulletin, Vol. XIII, Number 6, March 1950]
Emphasizing that there were many schools in the country that were, in fact, “tak (ing) the study of the Negro seriously,” Woodson nevertheless warned against the encroaching conflation of external definitions of Black life and its possibilities—the idea that our existence would be reduced during February to variations of answers to the question that Du Bois had argued lies behind most recognitions of Black life: “ how does it feel to be a problem? In 2005, the School District of Philadelphia created the country’s first mandatory African American history high school course in a major school district. The authors of the course’s curriculum framework anchored it in Woodson’s vision for institutionalizing many of his approaches to studying African people and the world. Our framework included a series of lessons called “Intellectuals of the African Diaspora,” each a self-contained essay with lesson plans and primary source materials that included representative female and male thinkers from every corner of the African world. See Also
Studying the Law While Black
We wanted students to enter the mind and work of Black scholar, aligning their own growing curiosity with the questions asked by their intellectual ancestors and seeing themselves as both receivers and producers of knowledge grounded in their experiences.