Black History Month?

Each year, well intentioned educators and librarians curate Black History Month book lists intended to provide young readers and parents with a wide array of titles to diversify their collections and, I imagine, to allow non-black readers the opportunity to read stories that center on the experiences of black subjects. For one month out of the year.  I certainly believe that Carter G. Woodson had it right in 1926 when he conceived of Negro History Week as a way to educate people about black culture and history.  It was a time when educating the general public about the contributions of black Americans in the face of gross misrepresentation and underrepresentation was sorely needed and it provided a powerful counternarrative.  Yet increasingly, when I see these lists released each February, I grow concerned and I wonder, Where are the titles featuring people of color the other eleven months of the year? 

At what point are books featuring powerful, instrumental figures like Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Satchel Paige, Major Taylor, Katherine Johnson, Louis Armstrong, Ethel Payne  and Claudette Colvin part of our collective history? And not just the names we see in history books but the millions of black citizens who defined and shaped this country through the vast contributions they made by building, working, fighting for this country since its inception.

"There is no American history without African American history," says Sara Clarke Kaplan, executive director of the Antiracist Research & Policy Center at American University in Washington, D.C. The Black experience, she said, is embedded in "everything we think of as 'American history.' "

It is important that in homes and classrooms across the country we remember black stories, black figures, black heroes, black scientists, artists, athletes, activists, journalists, politicians, citizens during Black History Month.  But we best honor them,  young readers and the honest and complete history of this country by continuing to do so every other month of the year as well.