With Trump and his MAGA acolytes seemingly intent on erasing any acknowledgment of racial diversity from public life, this year’s Black History Month has taken on special significance. The administration is following the Project 2025 playbook to rewrite history and normalize white supremacy, trying to undo nearly a century of hard-won progress with a flurry of executive orders. Incorporating Black history into our education system and public consciousness took generations of advocacy and activism. It will take continued activism and advocacy to protect it today.

Black History Month itself has its origins in Virginia. Historian and journalist Carter G. Woodson is often regarded as the “father of Black history” for his work establishing Negro History Week in February 1926. Woodson was born in New Canton, Virginia in 1875 to formerly enslaved parents. His father, James escaped from slavery during the Civil War and served as a scout for the Union Army in Virginia, and his mother Eliza Anne was literate and self-educated. The family moved to West Virginia, where young Carter worked as a coal miner before going to school and beginning his academic career. His younger sister, Bessie Woodson Yancey, would also become an activist, educator, and author; her poetry is considered foundational to Black Appalachian literature.

Woodson taught public school in West Virginia, attended Berea College in Kentucky, and served as an academic administrator in the Philippines before attending the University of Chicago and becoming the second Black man (after W.E.B. DuBois) to earn a PhD from Harvard. In 1915 he founded the organization now known as the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, and the following year he launched the scholarly Journal of Negro History, which has never missed a quarterly issue to this day. In 1926, he launched the first Negro History Week in February, the month when both Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln were born.

For the rest of his life, Dr. Woodson aggressively promoted the study and celebration of Black history through public lectures, writings, and the creation of an extensive collection of school curricula centered around Negro History Week. His old home state of West Virginia was the first to expand the week-long observance to Negro History Month in the 1940s. In 1970, 20 years after Dr. Woodson’s death, students and faculty at Kent State University held the first Black History Month. In 1976, as part of the nation’s bicentennial celebrations, President Gerald Ford encouraged all Americans to observe Black History Month, beginning a tradition that every President has continued until today.

In his seminal 1933 work The Mis-Education of the Negro, Dr. Woodson wrote, “The oppressor has always indoctrinated the weak with his interpretation of the crimes of the strong.” Generations later, as Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, Elon Musk, and other MAGA leaders openly denigrate Black contributions to American history and culture and downplay and justify the horrors and injustices of white supremacy, Dr. Woodson’s words ring true. As progressives, we must fight to protect the recognition of Black history in the public square because Black history is American history, and our future is charted by those who control the narrative around our past.