I was recently asked “What does Black History Month mean to you?” As the voice for the NAACP, I gave the typical answer about Dr. Carter G. Woodson, the second African American to graduate from Harvard (behind Dr. W.E. B. Dubois), who created Black History in 1926 as a week of celebration and remembrance, which later growing into Black History Month.
Upon great reflection, I reflect on the true meaning of Black History to me: Black History honors the struggles, triumphs, and resiliency of African Americans throughout the United States. From the atrocities of slavery and the Civil War, the Underground Railroad, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the abolition of enslaved people; to Reconstruction and the ugly history of Jim Crow laws with separate but equal; to the Montgomery Bus Boycott and tired old Rosa Parks's refusal to give up her seat on the bus after working all day; to the 1955 horrific lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till; to organizing and agitating with sit-ins at lunch counters; to the many terrorist attacks of the KKK, the August 1963 March on Washington, the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing of four little girls in September 1963, the Freedom Summer murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner in my home state of Mississippi in 1964, peaceful marches and protests including the 1965 bloody Selma marches where dogs and firehoses were turned loose on people while the world witnessed the horror, to being jailed/whipped and — lest we forget — the 9 minutes and 29 seconds of the 2020 public lynching of George Floyd; to triumphs such as Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, which segregated schools before I was born but wasn’t enacted until my freshman year of high school; to the Civil Rights Act of 1964-1965; the Voting Rights Act of 1965; the 1967 confirmation and elevation of Thurgood Marshall (who argued Brown v. Board of Education) to Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, and the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
From abolitionist Fredrick Douglass to Sojourner Truth, Harriett Tubman, Dr. W.E.B. Dubois, the birth of the NAACP in 1909, Black inventors like Garret Morgan who invented the three-position traffic signal; to Dr. Charles Drew and his discovery of blood plasma preservation; and all the hidden figures who made an impact — Black History Month honors the struggles, resiliency, and triumphs of Blacks/African Americans throughout the United States.