Black History Month marks its 100th anniversary this year. At this pivotal moment, on the eve of America’s 250th anniversary, the month stands as a necessary corrective to the nation’s revisionist history, selective memory and deliberate attempts at erasure.
Carter G. Woodson – who established the basis for the celebration as Negro History Week in 1926 – chose February deliberately to coincide with the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. His aim to ensure that Black achievements, struggles and contributions would not be omitted from the American story.
This year, though, no Black History Month programs are scheduled at Trump’s Kennedy Center, part of a campaign by president Donald Trump and his allies to dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives that has been building for years. The Department of Defense “mistakenly removed” last year a webpage honoring Jackie Robinson’s service in the U.S. Army. (Public outcry was swift.) Florida governor Ron DeSantis kicked off Black History Month in 2023 by rolling out a list of banned books by Black authors. (They included works by Harvard professor and PBS “Finding Your Roots” host Henry Louis Gates Jr.) Trump’s chief of staff in 2017, John Kelly, depicted Confederate general Robert E. Lee as “an honorable man” and asserted that “the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War.”
That kind of framing reflects a troubling moral relativism, one that suggests there is no absolute truth about the Civil War – only competing narratives shaped by individual or cultural perspective. In doing so, it minimizes the central role of slavery and blurs the moral clarity history demands.
Why does this history matter?
Had John Kelly been better versed in Civil War history, he would know that when the war ended, Lee refused to be buried in his Confederate uniform. He also urged his followers to put away their flags, warning that their continued display as acts of defiance would amount to treason. Lee understood that reconciliation required an end to Confederate symbolism – not its preservation.
Moreover, Lee’s great-great-grandson, Robert E. Lee V, echoed this sentiment. After 2017’s violent unrest in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the planned removal of Lee’s statue, he addressed the proliferation of Confederate symbols across the South: “First and foremost, if it can avoid any days like this past Saturday in Charlottesville, then take them down today. That’s not what our family is at all interested in, and that’s not what we think general Lee would want whatsoever.”
White Americans – such as Kelly – must learn the full and accurate history of the Civil War. Without an honest reckoning, the nation’s ability to heal, reconcile and move forward remains compromised.
Assault on civil rights
It’s easy to assess gains from the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, given the deliberate and sustained strategies that have successfully diminished or dismantled them. As a member of the first generation of African Americans to benefit from those, it’s heartbreaking to see where we are at today.
Consider a few examples. Affirmative Action, implemented in 1965, effectively ended in 2023. Diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives gained broad public traction after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, only to be rolled back by 2025. In fact, Black progress has largely stalled since the Civil Rights era across key indicators – entrepreneurship, homeownership, income, health outcomes, education, employment and wealth, to name just a few. A 2015 report, “The Color of Wealth in Boston,” revealed that the median net worth of U.S.-born Black households in Greater Boston was a mere $8. The shrinking or retraction of gains is nothing new, though. The Reconstruction era was to be the remedy for country’s race problem and disparities after the Civil War. It began in 1865 and ended in 1877.
Critical race theory, which has been taught in law schools since the mid-1970s, seeks to analyze and address these persistent poor outcomes. It entered the broader public consciousness – and was swiftly demonized – with The New York Times’ 1619 Project, developed by Nikole Hannah-Jones in 2019. The backlash intensified in 2020, when Trump issued Executive Order 13950, aimed at combating what he characterized as race- and sex-based “stereotyping” of white men.
The late Harvard legal scholar Derrick Bell (1930–2011), regarded widely as the godfather of critical race theory, warned that civil rights victories are often short-lived. They are met with fierce resistance and backlash when they threaten the interests or comfort of the white majority – whether rich or poor, urban or rural, educated or illiterate, liberal or conservative.
Still here
The backlash against Black History Month is now a century old – and deeply rooted in the persistent refusal to confront America’s racial history honestly. The creation of Black History Month was never intended by Woodson to be divisive, but to educate all Americans of African Americans’ contributions in a shared, though complex, history. With 250 years of slavery followed by 90 years of Jim Crow and then 60 years of “separate but equal” discriminatory practices, those hidden voice and stories have shaped not only our communities but, in turn, this nation. Black History Month stands not as a footnote to American History but rather reminds us that a nation cannot be whole unless it remembers itself fully uncensored, unredacted and unerased.
The Rev. Irene Monroe is a speaker, theologian and syndicated columnist. She co-hosts the “All Rev’d Up!” podcast.
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