By Laura Onyeneho
In February 1926, historian Carter G. Woodson launched Negro History Week, driven by his frustration with American textbooks that omitted Black contributions and academic institutions that ignored Black scholarship altogether.
Woodson, the second African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard, understood that history was being weaponized through omission.
One hundred years later, the observance Woodson founded has grown into Black History Month, a federally recognized fixture of American cultural life. Yet the centennial arrives during another era of historical erasure. Across Texas and nationwide, legislative efforts seek to ban books, restrict curriculum, and reframe the teaching of Black history as divisive. Who controls the story of America, and what happens when entire communities are excluded from it?
Why Negro History Week Began
On Sept. 9, 1915, Woodson founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH), which aimed to promote the scientific study of Black life and history. In 1916, the association launched The Journal of Negro History, the first scholarly journal to publish research on the historical achievements of Black individuals.
He deliberately chose the second week of February, aligning it with the birthdays of Frederick Douglass, who spearheaded the abolition movement in the country, and Abraham Lincoln, who issued the Emancipation Proclamation that declared the end of slavery.
Woodson believed that if Black children could see themselves and their ancestors as historical actors, they would understand their present in a different light. He responded to textbooks that portrayed enslaved people as content, Reconstruction as chaos, and Black intellectual life as nonexistent.
“I’m thinking about the fact that Black History Month is a hundred years old, we are almost being forced to do what Woodson did for Black History a hundred years ago,” says Dr. Melanye T. Price, Director of the Ruth J. Simmons Center for Race and Justice at Prairie View A&M University. “We are in a moment where they are dismantling all of the formal structure in place for students to be educated about Black history.”
The well-known change-makers in African American history never took a formal Black Studies class. Price explains that what they learned about Black people and Black studies came through alternative means, such as civic organizations, their neighbors, and the church.
For decades, Negro History Week was celebrated in Black institutions, including churches, historically Black colleges and universities, community centers, and progressive school systems. Educators built lesson plans. Cultural leaders organized programs.
By the 1960s, amid the Civil Rights Movement and a growing Black consciousness movement, students and activists pushed for expansion. In 1976, during the nation’s bicentennial and fifty years after Woodson’s founding, President Gerald Ford officially recognized Black History Month.
What began as a tool of Black self-determination became, in some spaces, a box to check, a month of sanitized figures and feel-good stories that avoided the structural violence Woodson had documented in his book The Mis-Education of the Negro.
Bishop James Dixon, who leads both the NAACP Houston Branch and the Community of Faith Church, has made Black history education a weekly practice at his church. Every Sunday includes a Black history moment with videos and educational content. He sees religious and civic institutions as essential to filling the gap left by restricted classroom education.
“Black social justice organizations, civil rights organizations, and Black churches play a significant role in becoming the educational centers in our community that maintains our history, and that educates new younger generations about who we actually are, what our story actually is,” Dixon says. “The Black church is still the largest Black institution in our community. We have more people in our churches every Sunday than any other organization can boast, which gives us an opportunity and yet a responsibility.”
Texas has become a testing ground for how far historical restrictions can go. Since 2021, state legislators have introduced bills targeting “critical race theory,” a term now applied broadly to any curriculum examining racism’s structural dimensions. Books by Toni Morrison, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and others have been challenged or removed from school libraries.
The implications reach beyond classrooms. Public libraries face pressure. Museums reconsider exhibitions. When Black history acknowledges oppression and resistance, it becomes a source of controversy.
This isn’t unique to Texas. Florida, Tennessee, and other states have enacted similar restrictions. Nationally, PEN America documented over 10,000 book bans during the 2023–2024 school year, with books by and about people of color disproportionately targeted.
“Educators are not volunteers. They have families to feed. They have responsibilities, mortgages, car notes, student loan debt, and all the things that they need, Price says. “Educators are trying to find a safe ground where they can be responsible to the subject matter that they’re teaching, but also be adherent to the fact that they have responsibilities in their own life. It’s a challenging time for teachers.”
Houston as a Site of Resistance and Preservation
Houston’s Freedmen’s Town, one of the earliest post-emancipation communities in Texas, has always been a site where Black people told their own stories. Today, the Houston Freedmen’s Town Conservatory continues this work, preserving archives, oral histories, and cultural memories that would otherwise be lost.
“The threat right now with political control over curriculum really saddens me because there’s so much that can be learned from places like Freemanstown. There’s never been a broad framework for our stories to be told, even though there’s been this honoring of Black history months through schools,” said Sharon Fletcher, executive director of the Houston Freedmen’s Town Conservatory. “We always hear about the same figures, and not that these figures are not important, like Martin Luther King and the Rosa Parks, and Frederick Douglass, but it gives the impression to our kids that Black history only started in the 30s or the 40s or the 50s or the 60s, and that’s just not true for the existence of the African and African-American race who’s made contributions, not only here in the United States, but also globally as well.”
The conservatory hosts various educational activities, such as The Porch Talk, an intimate series of panel discussions that aims to shed light on the untold stories of Texas’ Freedmen’s Towns, honoring their contributions to the state’s cultural and historical landscape. Their visitor’s center hosts youth literacy, history, and technology activities in partnership with the community, such as Reading with a Rapper.
“It’s important to host space, but also creating, continuing to create spaces that allows you to come in and experience the very places that people are saying don’t exist,” Fletcher says. “It’s also the 100th year of the Gregory School, which is in Freemanstown as well. We’re also seeing advocates and allies even push through all of that noise, like Project Row House, Fifth Ward, Deluxe Theater. This is something to celebrate.”
Similarly, events like the Woodson Black Fest at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston reclaim Black History Month as a community-led educational initiative.
Emanuelee Bean is the former Houston Poet Laureate and curator of the 5th annual Woodson Black Fest. The festival, which honors Woodson’s legacy, introduces the community to the power of the arts through spoken word, poetry, and musical performances.
He is also a teacher through Writers in Schools, a program that connects children and youth with professional writers and spoken word artists to unlock the joy and power of storytelling.
“Every day to me is Black History Month, because without African-Americans on this soil, this country has no culture whatsoever,” Bean says. “America’s greatest export is cultural and entertainment. Art is not meant to be consumed. It’s meant to be experienced.
Woodson didn’t wait for permission to teach Black history. He built the infrastructure himself, archives, journals, and networks of educators, because he understood that communities must control their own narratives.
“I teach in a very untraditional way. I believe education is a very communal practice. As a collective, we are trying to educate kids from an individualistic mindset,” Bean said. “These events are workshops and are free. What you are paying for is time. And that time is a seed.”