Black History Month

Today is the first day of Black History Month.  It runs throughout the month of February.  Carter Woodson, the son of former slaves from Virginia, founded Black History Month in 1926.  It started as Negro History Week.  He chose the month of February because it was the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln, the president who was considered the "Great Emancipator" and Frederick Douglass, one of the black abolitionists in the nineteenth century prior to the ending of slavery.  Woodson was born in 1875 in Canton, Virginia.  He was a sharecropper, miner, and various other trades to help support his family.  He earned his bachelor''s and master's degrees at the University of Chicago before earning his doctorate at Harvard, the second black to do so.  Woodson believed that many African Americans in the early twentieth century didn't know much about their own heritage so he set out start Negro History Week to educate blacks about the achievements from their ancestors.  In 1976, on the 50th anniversary of the founding of Negro History Week, the association made the shift to "Black History Month."  Today black history is celebrated throughout the month of February every year. 

This month we'll once again feature posts celebrating black achievements and probably various events that have taken place in black history in American society.  I don't know exactly all I'll be writing about this month, but we'll be celebrating the month on this blog.