This year Black History Month hits a milestone most people haven’t clocked.
2026 marks 100 years since historian Carter G. Woodson and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History launched what was then called “Negro History Week” in February 1926.
That matters, not because anniversaries are cute, but because the original problem still exists: history doesn’t preserve itself. You either teach it on purpose, or you lose it by default.
The quick origin story (1926)
Black History Month didn’t start as a month. It started as a week.
According to ASALH, Woodson established Negro History Week in 1926 during the second week of February. The timing was intentional: the week includes the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.
But Woodson’s goal wasn’t to create a seasonal trend. It was to make sure Black history was studied, taught, and celebrated in a country that didn’t naturally make space for it.
A 100-year anniversary doesn’t happen just because something is “popular.” It happens because people keep choosing to remember—year after year, classroom after classroom, community after community.
Source:
- ASALH: About Black History Month https://asalh.org/about-us/about-black-history-month/
What changed from “week” to “month”
The modern version is bigger than Woodson’s original week. It’s a full month—school programming, museum exhibits, panels, playlists, and (sometimes) corporate statements.
Some of it is meaningful. Some of it is noise. But the expansion itself tells a story: when something matters, people try to give it more room.
A week can introduce an idea. A month can build a tradition. And traditions are one of the only ways communities protect their memory over time.
The point people miss: history needs infrastructure
The most useful lesson in “100 years of Black History Month” isn’t just a list of names.
It’s the underlying mechanism.
History gets erased when you don’t build systems for it. If history is treated like a nice-to-have, it gets crowded out by whatever feels urgent. If history is treated like an annual moment with no follow-through, it becomes performance.
But if history is treated like infrastructure, it sticks.
That infrastructure is the unsexy part: teachers making lesson plans, institutions building archives, communities telling stories to their kids even when nobody else is listening, and people choosing to name what happened even when naming it makes others uncomfortable.
That is what 100 years of this tradition represents: persistence.
How to participate without being performative
If you’re not sure how to approach Black History Month without doing the shallow version, here’s a simple framework: start specific.
Read one story deeply instead of skimming ten headlines. Share a source that teaches something, not just a quote graphic. Support the places doing the real work year-round—educators, historians, museums, community archives.
And if you create content, create with humility. You don’t have to pretend you’re an expert, but you do have to respect the people who are. That means citing sources, correcting mistakes, and refusing to flatten Black history into one generic storyline.
A hundred years ago, Black history needed a protected window on the calendar to be seen. In 2026, the need hasn’t disappeared. But a hundred years of persistence is proof of something else, too: memory can be defended.
One week became a month. A month became a tradition. And a tradition became an infrastructure for remembering.
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