In the midst of Trump’s efforts against diversity, Black History Month takes new meaning

February 1 is the beginning of Black History Month, which for decades has recognized contributions from black people to American Civic Life and Culture with festive lunch, serious lectures, profitable merchandise lines and fixed receptions in the White House.

But a month that was officially recognized almost five decades ago by a Republican President, Gerald R. Ford, pots this year with new significance in the midst of President Trump’s furious assault on diversity programs in and outside the federal government.

Suddenly, the study of black history – or at least the dark corners of slavery, segregation and Bigotry – appears to be an act of faith.

“Black History Month existed long before presidents approved it, and it will continue, though presidents do not,” said Martha Jones, professor of history and a presidential scientist at John’s Hopkins University. Nevertheless, she added, “there is a lot of lament and even rejecting” about the suppression of American history.

On Friday night, Mr. Trump a proclamation announcing “February 2025 as National Black History Month”, “by virtue of the authority awarded to me by the Constitution and Laws of the United States.”

Adding to mentions of famous black historical characters such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, he celebrated two modern black conservatives, learned Thomas Sowell and Justice Clarence Thomas as well as golfer Tiger Woods.

In particular, missing was a more bleak mention of the “incredible prejudice and difficulty” that African Americans have been exposed to, just as the one to which Mr. Trump included in his proclamation in 2020.

This time he wrote: “As America is preparing to enter a historically golden age, I will expand my enormous gratitude to black Americans for all they have done to bring us to this moment, and for the many future contributions , They will make as we progress in a future with unlimited opportunity during my administration. “

But as agencies and departments are encrypted to respond to Mr. Trump’s ban on “diversity, justice and inclusion”, these feelings may be in doubt. Federal employees Scrubs are coming out of their E emails. Gender identity beyond man and woman disappears from government sites.

At least one federal unit, Defense Intelligence Agency, has “paused” recognition of Black History Month. The air defense even removed a video celebrating Tuskgee Airmen, a separate unit of black pilots fighting in World War II before restoring it in the middle of an uprising.

Asked how the White House would mark the next month, Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary, said Thursday, “We will continue to celebrate American history and the contributions that all Americans, regardless of race, religion or regulation, have given our great country.” On Friday, she seemed to catch herself when she said more specifically, “The president is looking forward to signing a proclamation celebrating Black History Month.”

Each president since 1996 has issued An annual proclamation for National Black History Month, according to the Library of Congress.

But this year, as the federal government – the largest employer in the country – is encrypted to comply with a executive order that ends “all discriminatory programs” in the federal government, the month begins under a cloud of doubt.

In large parts of last year’s presidential campaign, Mr. Trump to indicate that the study of the darkest corners of American history – slavery, Confederacy and Jim Crow -Laws – should be wrinkled out as an undermining of national pride. Now historians say these campaign prates could become government policy.

“I find it FEIGT, the idea that we would shrink from our past,” said Ms. Jones. “I think we are strong enough as a nation to know that the past, to make it part of our history, to learn it, to read it, learn it and still be a nation.”

There is a often repeated joke among black people that the celebration of their story was limited to the shortest month of the year, but there is a reason. The month grew from “Douglass Day”, which was observed in the 1890s on February 14 – the day Frederick Douglass, an abolition man and a former slave, celebrated his birthday – in “colored” schools in Washington, DC, the area. In February 1926, the learned Dr. Carter G. Woodson Negro History Week, which built on Douglass Day and the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, which falls two days before Douglass’s observance.

In 1970 it was Black History Month.

In 1976, Ford was The first president who officially recognized the Black History Month, using the highest office in the country to “honor the too often neglected the implementation of black Americans.” In the country’s bicentennial year, Ford connected the black struggle for equal rights with the founding of America.

“Freedom and recognition of individual rights is what our revolution was about,” he wrote. “It was ideals that inspired our struggle for independence: Ideals that we have endeavored to live up to ever since.”

Before scholars like Woodson’s efforts to create a canon, American history was dominated by propaganda used to refuse black people full citizenship and political rights, Dr. Kevin Gaines, the temporary director of the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia.

The story was filled with stories that soft -pointed the brutality of slavery, which made it seem like a benevolent institution, while films like “the birth of the nation” helped burn violence against African Americans, he said.

The scholarship to Mr. Woodson and others began to change it.

“It challenged the very partial anti-black tales that had been the norm in the American historical profession,” Mr. Gaines. “African American history is at the center of modern American history,” he added. “Unfortunately, that point must be emphasized in the current political and cultural climate that we are in.”

After the protests with Black Lives Matter and the racial calculation in 2020, which jumped from the murder of George Floyd, a setback took shape. Some states began to ban what they called “dividing concepts”, for example – as described in legislation in Alabama – teaching that a person is “inherent responsible for actions committed in the past” or that a person must ” Accept, acknowledge, confirm or consent to a sense of guilt, participation or a need to apologize ”based on their race, religion, gender or background. Trump – To run diversity and inclusion programs.

But turning away from the Thornier parts of American history misses an opportunity to explore the nuances of this story, Ms. Jones. Even disturbing episodes such as the racist massacre in 1898 in Wilmington, NC, contain lessons on multiracial democracies built under the emergence of Jim Crow separation.

“African American history has several examples of this kind of multiracial alliances,” said Mr. Gaines, including civil rights movements from the 1960s and George Floyd protests. Implicitly in the intelligence agency’s ban is the notion that it is inherently too uncomfortable to highlight different experiences in American history, or that parts of American history are too uncomfortable for a workplace to confront.