I recently interviewed Jarvis R. Givens, a professor of education and African and African American studies at Harvard University. His new book, I’ll Make Me a World: The 100-Year Journey of Black History Month, is about the 100-year history of Black History Month—from its radical beginnings in 1926 as “Negro History Week” to its role today as a celebration and flashpoint in America’s cultural battles.
How did the ideas for I’ll Make Me a World come about?
The book draws from my academic research and lived experiences. However, I’d been anticipating this anniversary for quite some time, especially since the release of my first book, Fugitive Pedagogy, in 2021, during the first wave of anti-critical race theory laws and anti-woke efforts.
I decided that the 100th anniversary since the beginning of Negro History Week, which we’ve celebrated as Black History Month since 1976, would be an important moment for critically reflecting on the Black historical tradition. I interpreted President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14190 on Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling as a clear attack on the intellectual traditions that gave birth to Black History Month, as well as an attack on all educators seeking to teach truth about histories of racial violence and struggles for racial justice.
What do people get wrong about Black History Month?
The first one is the ill-informed critique that “they gave us the shortest month of the year for Black history.” The idea that “they gave us anything” implies that Black History Month was imposed from the top down, and nothing could be further from the truth. Black History Month grew from the bottom up, from grassroots organizing and centuries of intellectual and political struggle.
We only have this commemorative holiday because African American scholars and community members organized to create holidays like Crispus Attucks Day on March 5, beginning in the 1850s, and Douglass Day on Feb. 14, beginning in 1897. Negro History Week grew out of that tradition, and it was later expanded to Black History Month in 1976 by African American scholars during the same year as the United States’ bicentennial.
Also, Black History Month tends to be observed to focus on great men and women of history, or a time for emphasizing important facts and dates. These things are important. However, critical Black history is also about the everyday aspects of Black life, and we must also find ways of studying, teaching, and commemorating those histories, as well.
How has the way we think about and celebrate Black History Month changed these past 100 years?
Early on, Negro History Week and Black History Month were mostly internal to African American communities—not entirely, but mostly. It formed and grew within an expansive segregated world of Black schools, colleges, churches, and institutions across the United States. However, with desegregation, Black History Month would eventually become an instrument used to encourage racial tolerance for those in the United States who didn’t know much about Black people and Black cultures.
Things are a bit different now. We live in a society where, for the most part, Black History Month or Negro History Week has always existed for everyone that’s alive. And therefore, the urgency around the work of preserving and teaching Black history hasn’t been as present in more recent decades, at least not the way it was with the early Black history movement, when people had intimate knowledge and memories of Black history being flagrantly absent in every textbook and school curriculum in this country.
I think the further we moved away from the period when people had to fight to create and celebrate Black history, the more comfortable our communities became with the idea that knowledge about Black history, for the most part, would always be readily available. But those of us who teach Black studies and African American history have always been aware of the precarious state of Black history’s inclusion in mainstream curricula and public memory. This moment is reminding all of us that this work continues to be both urgent and under attack.
How has Negro History Week/Black History Month, as an institution, survived and remained popular for the last 100 years?
First, it survived because Black communities created it and continued to value it through the segregated era, and in doing so, made it an integral part of Black culture and community calendars on an annual basis. It became institutionalized within Black organizations and, therefore, a central part of African American heritage. All of this occurred, again, before it was nationally recognized by the U.S. government. I can’t stress that enough.
However, the staying power of Black History Month is also connected to major advancements in the field of African American history and Black studies in the post-civil rights era. The first wave of scholars of African American and African diaspora history were part of a transformation in higher education during the late 1960s and early ‘70s. Because of the impressive work of that generation of scholars, building on seeds planted generations before, there continued to be new waves of knowledge and content about the Black past, pushing us all to think about the world we inherited in more critical ways and to dream about the worlds we hoped to build with more mature, historically informed imaginations.
Another reason it has persisted is because political leaders saw value in holding up Black History Month as a demonstration of America’s inclusion of Black people as integral parts of U.S. society, though they often did so without recognizing past harms, instead using inspiring elements of Black history that could support narratives of American exceptionalism. This is obviously a very complicated part of the legacy, but it’s important to recognize, nonetheless.
What is one takeaway you would like readers to gain from reading the book?
I want people to remember that the struggle to preserve, study, and teach Black history is always about more than the facts, names, and dates of the past. It is about recognizing and disrupting the way power dynamics in our society shape historical memory and it’s also about studying the way historical memory shapes how we define ourselves as a people and the dreams we imagine for the worlds of the future.
I hope readers will see, by looking at the African American intellectual tradition that informed the creation of Black History Month, that this ongoing fight to value the lives of Black folks in the past is part and parcel of an enduring war to value Black lives in the present and future.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Read more from educators on advancing Black history education.
