Why everyone should be concerned about the miseducation of Black history

Negro History Week was launched on February 7, 1926, as an attempt to counter the “indoctrination” of Black students in public schools with some fundamental truths about Black lives. “When you control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his actions,” wrote historian Carter G. Woodson, Negro History Week’s founder. The indoctrination, he believed, was designed to erase the contributions of Black excellence in order to keep people small. “You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his ‘proper place’ and will stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told. In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one for his special benefit. His education makes it necessary.”

Negro History Week was designed to reacquaint Black people with themselves, and Woodson aimed to be part of that history. 

He was the only child of formerly enslaved parents to have ever earned a PhD in the U.S.—from Howard University, of course. In 1915, he co-founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life, which currently operates as the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH). But it was Woodson’s seminal book, The Mis-Education of the Negro, published in 1933, which helped codify the battle for the historical record which you see playing out in the book-banning hysteria that is sweeping the nation today.

But Black excellence bloomed even in toxic soil. 

Imani Perry, educator, historian and author of  South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, says the disappointment of the Jim Crow era became the foundation of Black intellectual life. “What is remarkable about that time is that Black people got to work despite the devastation,” she tells author Rebecca Carroll in this must-read interview. “People were building organizations and networks, writing books and developing social theory, building schools, and churches at every turn. And so, even when society shut the door to opportunity and treated Black people with horrible brutality, they kept dreaming, doing, and creating.”

Black History Month has only grown since it was founded, and to some degree has become a global conversation necessitated by colonialism, forced migration, and the routine violence of white supremacy. “Black History Month is rooted in a tradition of Black people writing themselves into history in ways that reject the logic of white supremacy and give a more expansive reach to the story of Black life both in this country and globally,” says Perry.

But history is well and truly being made today, and not the uplifting kind. 

Howard University and other HBCUs are enduring bomb threats that are not slowing down. Neo-Nazis are marching again, this time in Florida. Educators across the country are being forced to explain inclusive curriculum to angry white parents—or worse.  And legislatures across the U.S. are effectively tossing “critical race theory” fears into communities like cultural grenades. 

But despite the devastation, work is being done. Again.

If Woodson were alive, I would ask him where he thought Black History Month should go from here. After all, it can only achieve its intended effect if everyone, including white students, are informed by it, too. 

To that end, he once called for a great re-framing. “It is not so much a Negro History Week as it is a History Week,” he said. “We should emphasize not Negro History, but the Negro in History. What we need is not a history of selected races or nations, but the history of the world void of national bias, race hatred and religious prejudice.”

And don’t sleep on what’s happening right now in schools, he might say. It’s history on auto-repeat.

In this quote from Mis-Education, he asked Black people of his era to stand up in spite their understandable fear. But he also identified the white impulse to police what was taught. ″African Americans themselves in certain parts join with Euro-Americans, to keep out of school, teachers who may be bold enough to teach the truth as it is,” he wrote. “They usually say the races here are getting along amicably now, and we do not want these peaceful relationships disturbed by teaching of new political thought. What they mean to say with respect to the peaceful relation of the races, then, is that the African-Americans have been terrorized to the extent that they are afraid even to discuss political matters publicly.”

Let the voices become a chorus this month.

Ellen McGirt
@ellmcgirt
Ellen.McGirt@fortune.com

This edition of raceAhead was edited by Wandy Felicita Ortiz.

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