Black History Month: where it came from and who to study

How Black History Month started: Carter G. Woodson and 1926

Carter G. Woodson was born in Virginia in 1875 to parents who had been enslaved. He worked in coal mines as a teenager, finished high school in his twenties and in 1912 became the second African American, after W. E. B. Du Bois, to earn a doctorate from Harvard. In 1915 he co-founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in Chicago, and the next year started the Journal of Negro History. His point was that Black Americans had a history worth serious research, and that leaving it out of schools did damage.

In February 1926 the Association launched Negro History Week. Woodson chose the second week of February because it contained two birthdays that Black communities already celebrated: Abraham Lincoln's on 12 February and Frederick Douglass's on 14 February. Douglass never knew his real birth date and chose the 14th himself. The week asked schools to teach Black history, and the Association supplied pictures, lesson plans and pamphlets.

Students and teachers at Kent State University in Ohio expanded it to a month in February 1970. In 1976, the year of the US bicentennial, President Gerald Ford urged Americans to recognise Black History Month, and every president since has issued a proclamation. Woodson's organisation, now the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), still picks a theme each year. February 2026 marked 100 years since the first Negro History Week.

Black History Month in Canada and the UK

October was chosen in the UK partly because it falls at the start of the school year, when students are fresh. UK schools tend to include the history of Black Britons (such as the writer Olaudah Equiano and the Crimean War nurse Mary Seacole) and the history of Africa and the Caribbean, not only American figures.

Frederick Douglass: the reason February was chosen

Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in Talbot County, Maryland, in February 1818, taught himself to read after his mistress began lessons that her husband stopped, and escaped by train and boat to New York on 3 September 1838, disguised as a free Black sailor. His Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) became a bestseller. The book's turning point, his fight with the “slave-breaker” Edward Covey, is introduced with one sentence:

He edited The North Star from 1847, supported women's suffrage at Seneca Falls in 1848, met Lincoln three times during the Civil War, recruited Black soldiers (two of his sons among them), and later served as US marshal for the District of Columbia and minister to Haiti. He died in Washington on 20 February 1895.

His best-known speech, given in Rochester, New York, on 5 July 1852, asked a white audience what their national holiday meant to the enslaved:

During the 250th anniversary of independence it is the obvious speech to read alongside the Declaration. Yuga's debate set at the White House in 1863 stages his first meeting with Lincoln, over equal pay for Black soldiers.

Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth

Harriet Tubman was born Araminta Ross in Dorchester County, Maryland, around 1822. She escaped to Philadelphia in 1849 and went back to the Eastern Shore about thirteen times over the next decade, guiding around seventy people, many of them her own family, to freedom, and giving instructions to dozens more. During the Civil War she worked for the Union Army as a nurse, scout and spy, and in June 1863 helped lead the Combahee River Raid in South Carolina, which freed more than 700 enslaved people. She later lived in Auburn, New York, supported women's suffrage and opened a home for elderly Black people. Her own words reach us mainly through Sarah Bradford's biographies (1869 and 1886), so treat quotations with care: several popular “Tubman quotes” online have no source at all.

Sojourner Truth was born Isabella Baumfree in Ulster County, New York, around 1797. Her first language was Dutch. Freed under New York's emancipation law in 1827, she sued to recover her son Peter, who had been illegally sold to Alabama, and won. In 1843 she took the name Sojourner Truth and became a travelling preacher and speaker against slavery and for women's rights. She met Lincoln in 1864, worked with freed people in Washington, and petitioned Congress for land for them in the West. She supported herself by selling photographs of herself captioned “I sell the shadow to support the substance”. The famous “Ain't I a Woman?” text is a later rewrite by Frances Gage (1863); the 1851 report by Marius Robinson is the closer record.

African history: Mansa Musa and Hannibal

Woodson's own books covered Africa as well as America, and many schools now use the month for African history before and beyond the Atlantic slave trade. Two promoted figures fit, each with a caution.

Mansa Musa ruled the Mali Empire in West Africa from about 1312 to about 1337. Mali controlled much of the gold that reached the Mediterranean. His pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324 passed through Cairo with so much gold that, according to the Syrian scholar al-Umari, writing about twelve years later, its value in Cairo fell for years. He brought scholars and the architect al-Sahili back to Mali, and building in Timbuktu is linked to his reign. The 1375 Catalan Atlas shows him enthroned, holding a gold nugget. Caution: the claim that he was “the richest person who ever lived” is a modern estimate with no real basis, and most of what we know comes from Arab writers and later chronicles, not from Mali itself.

Hannibal Barca was a general of Carthage, a city in North Africa near modern Tunis, founded by Phoenician settlers. In 218 BC he took an army with elephants from Spain over the Alps and beat Rome at Cannae in 216 BC. Caution: he belongs to African history because Carthage was an African power, not because of claims about his appearance. No portrait made in his lifetime can be securely identified, his family was of Carthaginian (Phoenician) descent, and every surviving account of him was written by Greek or Roman authors, mostly hostile ones.

Classroom ideas for Black History Month

• Read the Fourth of July speech: assign sections of Douglass's 1852 speech to groups, who summarise their part and pick one sentence to read aloud. Then discuss what he says about the Declaration.
• Fact-check a quote: one widely shared line about Tubman freeing “a thousand slaves” and more “if only they knew they were slaves” has no historical source. Have students search for its origin, then use our guide on checking whether a quote is real.
• Map the routes: trace Mansa Musa's route from Niani to Cairo and Mecca, then compare it with Tubman's routes from Maryland to Philadelphia and St Catharines in Canada.
• Woodson's question: students write a paragraph on why Woodson thought the history taught in schools mattered, using a passage from his 1933 book The Mis-Education of the Negro.
• Interview by voice: students prepare questions and practise them with AI recreations of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman or Sojourner Truth on Yuga, built from their writings and the record. They are not the real people and can make mistakes, so final work should cite the Narrative, the speeches or the biographies.

For more depth, see Lincoln and Douglass, our question lists for Douglass, Tubman and Truth, and African history key figures.