By: Eric Bishop, Ed.D
In this early part of 2025, the just concluded February also concludes what we have dubbed as Black History Month. This was an atypical BHM as the community found itself recognizing the contributions of our history against the backdrop of intentional efforts to erase not only our history, but our current day presence, at least at the federal level, as well as in some of these not so United States.
Next year, 2026, marks the 100-year anniversary of Carter G. Woodson’s founding of Black History Week and the 50-year anniversary of its expansion to Black History Month. It is designed to honor the achievements, history and contributions of African Americans, and is actually recognized globally, including in the United Kingdom and Canada.
The attempted erasure in the telling of our history comes because it absolutely is a part of the fabric of U.S. American History. A painful history for many. And for others a history they would rather pretend never existed. That desired amnesia is not just to not own the actions of their ancestors and the cruelty this nation has inflicted upon people with brown skin, but to also ignore the accomplishments of our ancestors and continue to refute the credit to which so many have earned. Given the impact of the chattel slave business, it is part of “all of the Americas” history, but we particularly focus on the history within these United States. A note for the uninformed, there are 35 countries in the three Americas and the Caribbean. The whitewashing of U.S. history to tell fables of presidents who were saviors, and economic growth of a nation that was built on unpaid labor, without telling of how that economic growth came about is at least an omission, and at most an outright denial and lie.
This new era and desire to remove any acknowledgement of Black history requires us to return to our communal roots. I am not one of these fools who believes or will say that Black Americans were better off in the Jim Crow, or pre-Civil Rights Amendment eras. I do believe that integration tore apart communities that had become self-reliant and self-sustaining. The rush to spend Black dollars in White store and restaurants did such harm that it even today, it has not been recovered.
Black History Month 2025 ended on a call for an all-out economic boycott. A call for African Americans, and maybe their allies, to spend no money for a day – a day with the intent of demonstrating economic strength. So, as our calendar moves into the winds of March, so should the continued telling of stories on how those from the African diaspora have contributed and continually contribute to the building and success of this so-called nation and of the world. And we should continue to flex our economic muscle. And we should lean into our history and not shy away from it. To that point, we need to acknowledge what the world-wide slave trade to did to our psyche and our self-value.
Try to think of March 1 as the first day of Black History Month, the March edition. That will then be followed by the April edition, and so on and so forth. You cannot have American History without Black History and you cannot tell the truth of Black history without telling the story of how American impacted and influenced that history. It is ours to own and to tell. But they are intertwined. Recognizing and celebrating a year-round, 365-day, celebration of African American and African history also requires us to cease separating ourselves based on who is from where and who has what skin tone. As we know, regardless of where you come from, or who you may think you are, or what your melanin level is, if the police see you as Black, then you are Black. The “African-American” experience is unique from the Pacific to the Atlantic and from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border, but Black brothers and sisters coming from North American, Central America and South America do share our lineage. It could be that the slave traders were directionally challenged and therefore Africans landed whatever eastern shore the ship touched first.
What we do know that race consciousness and separations are definitely prevalent in the U.S. Americas. There is an old — and I would add, wise — saying, “Not all skin folk are kin folk.” It posits that just because people may look like us, does not mean that they consider themselves like us or are willing to identify with our place in society. History and contemporary times are plentiful of those who move away from their identity in preference of acceptance by Whiteness. Today, we see much of that shaming and that moving coming from economic backgrounds. Many of those who may share our melanin, but have found financial or economic success, find themselves attempting to move toward this current new power structure that would rather erase our existence. But we know what happens when the moths get too close to flame.
Our consciousness of who we are and where we are in the society is tied directly to where we have been. History requires us to remember so as to create paths different than those already traversed. Continuing to celebrate who we are, unapologetically, requires us to remember some of the ways in which African American history is U.S. American history. Such as:
– The Slave Patrols in our history are the police departments of today. According to the NAACP, the origins of modern-day policing can be traced back to the “Slave Patrol.” The earliest formal slave patrol was created in the Carolinas in the early 1700s with one mission: to establish a system of terror and squash slave uprisings with the capacity to pursue, apprehend, and return runaway slaves to their owners. Tactics included the use of excessive force to control and produce desired slave behavior.
They essentially were designed to restrict free moment of Black people and to terrorize them. Similar to what the institution of policing is today.
– Sundown towns, where Black people were not welcome to be after dark, still exists. We want to believe that such tactics only impacted those in the South. But Minden, Nevada only recently stopped sounding a siren at dusk as a signal for Native Americans to leave the town before dark. Contrary to some beliefs, racism has not geographic borders.
– Black economic mobility has a history of success, ala, Greenwood, Altadena, and it has a history of destruction because of that success. Self-sufficient Black communities have often been burnt down because of being too successful.
– The redlining of neighborhoods became the issuing of predatory mortgages to ensure generational wealth was too difficult to obtain.
I leave you with the thought that the reason we have so much to celebrate around Black history, is because every time they said we couldn’t, we did. And we did so with less resources and opportunity. There is plenty to celebrate, and we get to decide when we celebrate it.
