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03 January 2020
Black History Month is as a way of remembering important people and events in the history of the African diaspora. It is an annual celebration of achievements by African Americans and a time for recognizing the central role of blacks in U.S. history. It is also known as African-American History Month. It has received official recognition from governments in the United States and Canada, and more recently has been observed unofficially in Ireland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. It is celebrated in February in the United States and Canada, while in Ireland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom it is observed in October.
The story of Black History Month begins in 1915, half a century after the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in the United States.
That September, the Harvard-trained historian Carter G. Woodson and the prominent minister Jesse E. Moorland founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH), an organization dedicated to researching and promoting achievements by black Americans and other peoples of African descent.
Known today as the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), the group sponsored a national Negro History week in 1926, choosing the second week of February to coincide with the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. The event inspired schools and communities nationwide to organize local celebrations, establish history clubs and host performances and lectures.
In the decades that followed, mayors of cities across the country began issuing yearly proclamations recognizing Negro History Week. By the late 1960s, thanks in part to the civil rights movement and a growing awareness of black identity, Negro History Week had evolved into Black History Month on many college campuses.
President Gerald Ford officially recognized Black History Month in 1976, calling upon the public to “seize the opportunity to honour the too-often neglected accomplishments of black Americans in every area of endeavour throughout our history.”
In August of 1619, a journal entry recorded that “20 and odd” Angolans, kidnapped by the Portuguese, arrived in the British colony of Virginia and were then were bought by English colonists.
The date and the story of the enslaved Africans have become symbolic of slavery’s roots, despite captive Africans likely being present in the Americas in the 1400s and as early as 1526 in the region that would become the United States.
The fate of enslaved people in the United States would divide the nation during the Civil War. And after the war, the racist legacy of slavery would persist, spurring movements of resistance, including the Underground Railroad, the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Selma to Montgomery March. Through it all, black leaders, artists and writers would emerge and help shape the character and identity of a nation.
Slavery Comes to North America, 1619
To satisfy the labour needs of the rapidly growing North American colonies, white European settlers turned in the early 17th century from indentured servants (mostly poorer Europeans) to a cheaper, more plentiful labour source: enslaved Africans. After 1619, when a Dutch ship brought 20 Africans ashore at the British colony of Jamestown, Virginia, slavery spread quickly through the American colonies. Though it is impossible to give accurate figures, some historians have estimated that 6 to 7 million slaves were imported to the New World during the 18th century alone, depriving the African continent of its most valuable resource—its healthiest and ablest men and women.
After the American Revolution, many colonists (particularly in the North, where slavery was relatively unimportant to the economy) began to link the oppression of black slaves to their own oppression by the British. Though leaders such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson—both slaveholders from Virginia—took cautious steps towards limiting slavery in the newly independent nation, the Constitution tacitly acknowledged the institution, guaranteeing the right to repossess any “person held to service or labour” (an obvious euphemism for slavery).
Many northern states had abolished slavery by the end of the 18th century, but the institution was vital to the South, where blacks constituted a large minority of the population and the economy relied on the production of crops like tobacco and cotton. Congress outlawed the import of new slaves in 1808, but the slave population in the U.S. nearly tripled over the next 50 years, and by 1860 it had reached nearly 4 million, with more than half living in the cotton–producing states of the South.
In the spring of 1861, the bitter sectional conflicts that had been intensifying between North and South over the course of four decades erupted into civil war, with 11 southern states seceding from the Union and forming the Confederate States of America. Though President Abraham Lincoln’s antislavery views were well established, and his election as the nation’s first Republican president had been the catalyst that pushed the first southern states to secede in late 1860, the Civil War at its outset was not a war to abolish slavery. Lincoln sought first and foremost to preserve the Union, and he knew that few people even in the North—let alone the border slave states still loyal to Washington—would have supported a war against slavery in 1861.
By the summer of 1862, however, Lincoln had come to believe he could not avoid the slavery question much longer. Five days after the bloody Union victory at Antietam in September, he issued a preliminary emancipation proclamation; on January 1, 1863, he made it official that slaves within any State, or designated part of a State in rebellion, “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” Lincoln justified his decision as a wartime measure, and as such he did not go so far as to free the slaves in the border states loyal to the Union, an omission that angered many abolitionists.
By freeing some 3 million black slaves in the rebel states, the Emancipation Proclamation deprived the Confederacy of the bulk of its labour forces and put international public opinion strongly on the Union side. Some 186,000 black soldiers would join the Union Army by the time the war ended in 1865, and 38,000 lost their lives. The total number of dead at war’s end was 620,000 (out of a population of some 35 million), making it the costliest conflict in American history.
Though the Union victory in the Civil War gave some 4 million slaves their freedom, significant challenges awaited during the Reconstruction period. The 13th Amendment, adopted late in 1865, officially abolished slavery, but the question of freed blacks’ status in the post–war South remained. As white southerners gradually re-established civil authority in the former Confederate states in 1865 and 1866, they enacted a series of laws known as the black codes, which were designed to restrict freed blacks’ activity and ensure their availability as a labour force.
Impatient with the leniency shown toward the former Confederate states by Andrew Johnson, who became president after Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865, so–called Radical Republicans in Congress overrode Johnson’s veto and passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which basically placed the South under martial law. The following year, the 14th Amendment broadened the definition of citizenship, granting —equal protection” of the Constitution to former slaves. Congress required southern states to ratify the 14th Amendment and enact universal male suffrage before they could rejoin the Union, and the state constitutions during those years were the most progressive in the region’s history.
The 15th Amendment, adopted in 1870, guaranteed that a citizen’s right to vote would not be denied —on account of race, colour, or previous condition of servitude.” During Reconstruction, blacks won election to southern state governments and even to the U.S. Congress. Their growing influence greatly dismayed many white southerners, who felt control slipping ever further away from them. The white protective societies that arose during this period—the largest of which was the Ku Klux Klan (KKK)—sought to disenfranchise blacks by using voter fraud and intimidation as well as more extreme violence. By 1877, when the last federal soldiers left the South and Reconstruction drew to a close, blacks had seen dishearteningly little improvement in their economic and social status, and what political gains they had made had been wiped away by the vigorous efforts of white supremacist forces throughout the region.
As Reconstruction ended and the forces of white supremacy regained control from carpetbaggers (northerners who moved South) and freed blacks, Southern state legislatures began enacting the first segregation laws, known as the “Jim Crow” laws. Taken from a much–copied minstrel routine written by a white actor who performed often in blackface, the name “Jim Crow” came to serve as a general derogatory term for African Americans in the post–Reconstruction South. By 1885, most southern states had laws requiring separate schools for blacks and whites, and by 1900, “persons of colour” were required to be separated from whites in railroad cars and depots, hotels, theatres, restaurants, barber shops and other establishments. On May 18, 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its verdict in Plessy v. Ferguson, a case that represented the first major test of the meaning of the 14th Amendment’s provision of full and equal citizenship to African Americans.
By an 8–1 majority, the Court upheld a Louisiana law that required the segregation of passengers on railroad cars. By asserting that the equal protection clause was not violated if reasonably equal conditions were provided to both groups, the Court established the “separate but equal” doctrine that would thereafter be used for assessing the constitutionality of racial segregation laws. Plessy vs. Ferguson stood as the overriding judicial precedent in civil rights cases until 1954, when it was reversed by the Court’s verdict in Brown v. Board of Education.
In June 1905, a group led by the prominent black educator W.E.B. Du Bois met at Niagara Falls, Canada, sparking a new political protest movement to demand civil rights for blacks in the old spirit of abolitionism. As America’s exploding urban population faced shortages of employment and housing, violent hostility towards blacks had increased around the country; lynching, though illegal, was a widespread practice. A wave of race riots—particularly one in Springfield, Illinois in 1908—lent a sense of urgency to the Niagara Movement and its supporters, who in 1909 joined their agenda with that of a new permanent civil rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP). Among the NAACP’s stated goals were the abolition of all forced segregation, the enforcement of the 14th and 15th Amendments, equal education for blacks and whites and complete enfranchisement of all black men (though proponents of female suffrage were part of the original NAACP, the issue was not mentioned).
First established in Chicago, the NAACP had expanded to more than 400 locations by 1921. One of its earliest programs was a crusade against lynching and other lawless acts; those efforts—including a nationwide protest of D.W. Griffiths’ silent film Birth of a Nation (1915), which glorified white supremacy and the Ku Klux Klan—would continue into the 1920s, playing a crucial role in drastically reducing the number of lynching’s carried out in the United States. Du Bois edited the NAACP’s official magazine, The Crisis, from 1910 to 1934, publishing many of the leading voices in African American literature and politics and helping fuel the spread of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s.
During World War II, many African Americans were ready to fight for what President Franklin D. Roosevelt called the “Four Freedoms”— freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear—even while they themselves lacked those freedoms at home. More than 3 million blacks would register for service during the war, with some 500,000 seeing action overseas. According to War Department policy, enlisted blacks and whites were organized into separate units. Frustrated black servicemen were forced to combat racism even as they sought to further U.S. war aims; this became known as the “Double V” strategy, for the two victories they sought to win.
The war’s first African American hero emerged from the attack on Pearl Harbour, when Dorie Miller, a young Navy steward on the U.S.S. West Virginia, carried wounded crewmembers to safety and manned a machine gun post, shooting down several Japanese planes. In the spring of 1943, graduates of the first all–black military aviation program, created at the Tuskegee Institute in 1941, headed to North Africa as the 99th Pursuit Squadron. Their commander, Captain Benjamin O. Davis Jr., later became the first African American general. The Tuskegee Airmen saw combat against German and Italian troops, flew more than 3,000 missions, and served as a great source of pride for many blacks in America.
Aside from celebrated accomplishments like these, overall gains were slow, and maintaining high morale among black forces was difficult due to the continued discrimination they faced. In July 1948, President Harry S. Truman finally integrated the U.S. Armed Forces under an executive order mandating that “there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, colour, religion or national origin.”
On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered its verdict in Brown v. Board of Education, ruling unanimously that racial segregation in public schools violated the 14th Amendment’s mandate of equal protection of the laws of the U.S. Constitution to any person within its jurisdiction. Oliver Brown, the lead plaintiff in the case, was one of almost 200 people from five different states who had joined related NAACP cases brought before the Supreme Court since 1938.
The landmark verdict reversed the “separate but equal” doctrine the Court had established with Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), in which it determined that equal protection was not violated if reasonably equal conditions were provided to both groups. In the Brown decision, Chief Justice Earl Warren famously declared that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” Though the Court’s ruling applied specifically to public schools, it implied that other segregated facilities were also unconstitutional, thus striking a heavy blow to the Jim Crow South. As such, the ruling provoked serious resistance, including a “Southern manifesto” issued by southern congressmen denouncing it. The decision was also difficult to enforce, a fact that became increasingly clear in May 1955 when the Court remanded the case to the courts of origin due to “their proximity to local conditions” and urged “a prompt and reasonable start toward full compliance.” Though some southern schools moved towards integration relatively without incident, in other cases—notably in Arkansas and Alabama—enforcing Brown would require federal intervention.
On February 1, 1960, four black students from the Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro, North Carolina, sat down at the lunch counter in a local branch of Woolworth’s and ordered coffee. Refused service due to the counter’s whites–only policy, they stayed put until the store closed, then returned the next day with other students. Heavily covered by the news media, the Greensboro sit–ins sparked a movement that spread quickly to college towns throughout the South and into the North, as young blacks and whites engaged in various forms of peaceful protest against segregation in libraries, on beaches, in hotels and other establishments. Though many protesters were arrested for trespassing, disorderly conduct or disturbing the peace, their actions made an immediate impact, forcing Woolworth’s—among other establishments—to change their segregationist policies.
To capitalize on the sit–in movement’s increasing momentum, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was founded in Raleigh, North Carolina in April 1960. Over the next few years, SNCC broadened its influence, organizing so–called “Freedom Rides” through the South in 1961 and the historic March on Washington in 1963; it also joined the NAACP in pushing for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Later, SNCC would mount an organized resistance to the Vietnam War. As its members faced increased violence, SNCC became more militant, and by the late 1960s it was advocating the “Black Power” philosophy of Stokely Carmichael (SNCC’s chairman from 1966–67) and his successor, H. Rap Brown. By the early 1970s, SNCC was effectively disbanded.
Founded in 1942 by the civil rights leader James Farmer, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) sought to end discrimination and improve race relations through direct action. In its early years, CORE staged a sit–in at a Chicago coffee shop (a precursor to the successful sit–in movement of 1960) and organized a “Journey of Reconciliation,” in which a group of blacks and whites rode together on a bus through the upper South in 1947, a year after the U.S. Supreme Court banned segregation in interstate bus travel.
In Boynton v. Virginia (1960), the Court extended the earlier ruling to include bus terminals, restrooms and other related facilities, and CORE took action to test the enforcement of that ruling. In May 1961, CORE sent seven African Americans and six whites on a “freedom ride” on two buses from Washington, D.C. Bound for New Orleans, the freedom riders were attacked by angry segregationists outside of Anniston, Alabama, and one bus was even firebombed. Local law enforcement responded, but slowly, and U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy eventually ordered State Highway Patrol protection for the freedom riders to continue to Montgomery, Alabama, where they again encountered violent resistance.
Kennedy sent federal marshals to escort the riders to Jackson, Mississippi, but images of the bloodshed made the worldwide news, and the freedom rides continued. In September, under pressure from CORE and other civil rights organizations, as well as from the attorney general’s office, the Interstate Commerce Commission ruled that all passengers on interstate bus carriers should be seated without regard to race and carriers could not mandate segregated terminals.
“I Have a Dream,” 1963
On August 28, 1963, some 250,000 people—both black and white—participated in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the largest demonstration in the history of the nation’s capital and the most significant display of the civil rights movement’s growing strength. After marching from the Washington Monument, the demonstrators gathered near the Lincoln Memorial, where several civil rights leaders addressed the crowd, calling for voting rights, equal employment opportunities for blacks and an end to racial segregation.
The last leader to appear was the Baptist preacher Martin Luther King Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), who spoke eloquently of the struggle facing black Americans and the need for continued action and nonviolent resistance. “I have a dream,” King intoned, expressing his faith that one day whites and blacks would stand together as equals, and there would be harmony between the races: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.”
King’s improvised sermon continued for nine minutes after the end of his prepared remarks, and his stirring words would be remembered as undoubtedly one of the greatest speeches in American history. At its conclusion, King quoted an “old Negro spiritual: ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!'” King’s speech served as a defining moment for the civil rights movement, and he soon emerged as its most prominent figure.
Thanks to the campaign of nonviolent resistance championed by Martin Luther King Jr. beginning in the late 1950s, the civil rights movement had begun to gain serious momentum in the United States by 1960. That year, John F. Kennedy made passage of new civil rights legislation part of his presidential campaign platform; he won more than 70 percent of the African American vote. Congress was debating Kennedy’s civil rights reform bill when he was killed by an assassin’s bullet in Dallas, Texas in November 1963. It was left to Lyndon Johnson (not previously known for his support of civil rights) to push the Civil Rights Act—the most far-reaching act of legislation supporting racial equality in American history—through Congress in June 1964.
At its most basic level, the act gave the federal government more power to protect citizens against discrimination based on race, religion, sex or national origin. It mandated the desegregation of most public accommodations, including lunch counters, bus depots, parks and swimming pools, and established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to ensure equal treatment of minorities in the workplace. The act also guaranteed equal voting rights by removing biased registration requirements and procedures and authorized the U.S. Office of Education to provide aid to assist with school desegregation. In a televised ceremony on July 2, 1964, Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law using 75 pens; he presented one of them to King, who counted it among his most prized possessions.
Less than a week after the Selma–to–Montgomery marchers were beaten and bloodied by Alabama state troopers in March 1965, President Lyndon Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress, calling for federal legislation to ensure protection of the voting rights of African Americans. The result was the Voting Rights Act, which Congress passed in August 1965.
The Voting Rights Act sought to overcome the legal barriers that still existed at the state and local level preventing blacks from exercising the right to vote given them by the 15th Amendment. Specifically, it banned literacy tests as a requirement for voting, mandated federal oversight of voter registration in areas where tests had previously been used and gave the U.S. attorney general the duty of challenging the use of poll taxes for state and local elections.
Along with the Civil Rights Act of the previous year, the Voting Rights Act was one of the most expansive pieces of civil rights legislation in American history, and it greatly reduced the disparity between black and white voters in the U.S. In Mississippi alone, the percentage of eligible black voters registered to vote increased from 5 percent in 1960 to nearly 60 percent in 1968. In the mid–1960s, 70 African Americans were serving as elected officials in the South, while by the turn of the century there were some 5,000. In the same time period, the number of blacks serving in Congress increased from 6 to about 40.
After the heady rush of the civil rights movement’s first years, anger and frustration was increasing among many African Americans, who saw clearly that true equality—social, economic and political—still eluded them. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, this frustration fuelled the rise of the Black Power movement. According to then–SNCC chairman Stokely Carmichael, who first popularized the term “black power” in 1966, the traditional civil rights movement and its emphasis on nonviolence, did not go far enough, and the federal legislation it had achieved failed to address the economic and social disadvantages facing blacks in America.
Black Power was a form of both self–definition and self–defence for African Americans; it called on them to stop looking to the institutions of white America—which were believed to be inherently racist—and act for themselves, by themselves, to seize the gains they desired, including better jobs, housing and education. Also in 1966, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, college students in Oakland, California, founded the Black Panther Party.
While its original mission was to protect blacks from white brutality by sending patrol groups into black neighbourhoods, the Panthers soon developed into a Marxist group that promoted Black Power by urging African Americans to arm themselves and demand full employment, decent housing and control over their own communities. Clashes ensued between the Panthers and police in California, New York and Chicago, and in 1967 Newton was convicted of voluntary manslaughter after killing a police officer. His trial brought national attention to the organization, which at its peak in the late 1960s boasted some 2,000 members.
The Fair Housing Act of 1968, meant as a follow–up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, marked the last great legislative achievement of the civil rights era. Originally intended to extend federal protection to civil rights workers, it was later expanded to address racial discrimination in the sale, rental or financing of housing units. After the bill passed the Senate by an exceedingly narrow margin in early April, it was thought that the increasingly conservative House of Representatives, wary of the growing strength and militancy of the Black Power movement, would weaken it considerably.
On the day of the Senate vote, however, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. Pressure to pass the bill increased amid the wave of national remorse that followed, and after a strictly limited debate the House passed the Fair Housing Act on April 10. President Johnson signed it into law the following day. Over the next years, however, there was little decrease in housing segregation, and violence arose from black efforts to seek housing in white neighbourhoods.
From 1950 to 1980, the total black population in America’s urban centers increased from 6.1 million to 15.3 million; during this same time period, white Americans steadily moved out of the cities into the suburbs, taking with them many of the employment opportunities blacks needed. In this way, the ghetto—an inner-city community plagued by high unemployment, crime and other social ills—became an ever more prevalent fact of urban black life.
When Did African Americans Actually Get the Right to Vote?
The 15th Amendment granted black men the right to vote under the law, but exercising that right became another challenge.
In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, the United States found itself in uncharted territory. With the Confederacy’s defeat, some 4 million enslaved black men, women and children had been granted their freedom, an emancipation that would be formalized with passage of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution.
For black Americans, gaining the full rights of citizenship—and especially the right to vote—was central to securing true freedom and self-determination. “Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot,” Frederick Douglass famously said in May 1865, a month after the Union victory at Appomattox.
Every one of the black leaders has a distinct story and legacy, but they all share some commonalities: poise and confidence that no doubt added to their iconic statuses. Look a little closer at each story to witness their perseverance through oppression and their determination through struggle. There, you'll find the link that brings these American heroes together.
Powered by faith, inspired by Gandhi and motivated by hope for equal treatment for all, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered words to a generation (such as his "I Have a Dream" speech) that moved them to change the way they thought, which ultimately shifted the world. There is still work to be done to complete Dr. King, Jr.'s vision, but there is no doubt that the immense progress we've made was set in motion by black leaders like him.
Often called "The Mother of the Civil Rights Movement," Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white male passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama, public bus in 1955. Four days later, black people in the city organized a boycott of the bus that lasted for over a year. This collective protest employed Martin Luther King, Jr. as its spokesperson and initiated the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement.
He was known for having firm views on black empowerment and separatism, but Malcolm X is an important black leader for the transformation he made later in life. Although he was once the face of the Nation of Islam, Malcolm later left the organization and renounced its teachings. After a life-changing pilgrimage to Mecca, he came home a new man with optimistic views on integration and a message of love for all.
During a time when black people were discouraged from learning how to read and write, Phillis Wheatley, a Senegal/Gambia-born black girl who was kidnapped and sold into slavery, defied them all and published a book of poetry. She's not only the first African-American to have a work of poems published (endorsed by John Hancock and George Washington), but also one of the first women to do so.
The mother of late rapper Tupac Shakur is known from his affectionate song, "Dear Mama," but Afeni Shakur is also remembered as a black leader in her own right. Once a Black Panther, Afeni defended herself and, because of that, was acquitted of conspiracy bombing charges (along with 20 others), giving birth to Tupac just one month and three days later. A political activist, businesswoman and philanthropist, Afeni symbolized what was achievable even through the most severe circumstances in life.
Born a slave to a mother he would only see a few times in his life and a white father he'd never meet, Frederick Douglass resolved to escape his harsh life and help other African-Americans do the same through abolition. He published multiple autobiographies about his life as a slave, acting as a spokesperson for equality. He wasn't only a leader of the black community, but to all, fighting for equal rights of women and minorities during his lifetime.
One of the most recent and significant black leaders of our time is none other than the U.S.'s 44th president, Barack Obama. He was only the fifth African-American to ever be elected to the U.S. Senate and the first black person ever elected as commander in chief. The entire Obama clan—including, Michelle, Malia and Sasha—are this county's greatest representation of #blacklove and deserve to be celebrated during Black History Month.
Like so many other great authors throughout history, Zora Neale Hurston died without knowing how powerful a leader she would become. Zora was born in Alabama, but was adopted by New York, becoming a significant contributor of the Harlem Renaissance and an honest voice for the black experience of her time. With her candid accounts of life, writers like Ralph Ellison were inspired by her and have carried her legacy into today.
As the first black U.S. Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall was an extremely influential black leader. He was a patriot liberal who defended constitutional rights in a positive light whenever he had the chance. With monumental victories throughout his career, like Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (the verdict that invalidated segregation in public schools), he was a major contributor to the end of the Jim Crow era.
