America loves its heroes. The nation has made lions of the men who signed a document 250 years ago to declare independence from the English crown; it’s made saints of the 55 men who gathered in a sweaty room in Philadelphia to draft its Constitution. Time elevates those people and their deeds to the heights of deities, and American gods must be faultless. But those heroes are not gods; they were, indeed, men—fallible as all others.
In the same city where the Founders wrote the words that have guided the nation for more than two centuries, George Washington—the most esteemed of them—made a home as America’s first president. He brought men and women he had enslaved with him, and rotated them between Philadelphia and Mount Vernon, in Virginia, so that they would not earn their liberty under Pennsylvania law. He shuffled them back and forth so that they would remain his property. These facts cannot be changed; only how they are remembered can.
For 16 years, an exhibit at Washington’s Philadelphia home, “The President’s House: Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation”—situated in the shadow of the Liberty Bell’s unambiguous nod to freedom’s ring—highlighted that difficult history. But in late January, a cadre of federal workers yanked placards from the site’s brick walls in response to a March 2025 executive order from the White House that shunned complication. In the order, President Trump had charged the secretary of the interior with ensuring that public monuments “focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.”
[Clint Smith: What it means to tell the truth about America]
Black History Month is sometimes treated as little more than an opportunity for corporate branding and, maybe, school assemblies; but in the face of such erasure, observing it this February feels radical. Black history in America is, of course, more than the story of enslavement and what was done to Black people on this continent across hundreds of years. It is a story of family, love, resilience, determination, achievement, and, yes, despair, wrapped into one package—what Black Americans achieved in spite of the fact that, for many years, they were not seen as fully Americans. It is not a simple history and it is not a story of unrelenting progress, because America’s history is neither of those things. To acknowledge the troubling, shameful aspects of American history is not to denigrate the Founders but to see them, and the others who made their livelihoods possible, as people. Black History Month calls on us to remember their humanity, and to remember the heroic and human deeds of those who have always been unsung.
This is a milestone year for America. It marks both the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the 100th anniversary of an effort to recover and recount the contributions of Black Americans left out of the national narrative—what was launched in 1926 as Negro History Week and then became Black History Month in 1976. One anniversary honors the nation’s founding ideals; the other reckons with its failures to live up to them. Both offer an essential—and timely—opportunity to acknowledge the ambitions and shortcomings of America’s grand and unfinished experiment.
The majority of Americans experience Black History Month as a formula. Students prepare PowerPoint or posterboard projects about people such as Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, or Jackie Robinson—or, for those who would venture further in our history, Phillis Wheatley, the nation’s first published Black poet. Businesses invite speakers and hold events for staff. Civic associations host dinners.
That is not how Black History Month began, though. Its precursor was established by Carter G. Woodson, the historian and founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, at a time when eugenics—race science and the idea that white people were genetically superior to Black people—was finally being challenged as the pseudoscience it is. “The greatest scholars of today are saying that there is no such thing as race in science, and that there is nothing in anthropology or psychology to support such myths as the inferiority and superiority of races,” the 1927 announcement for Negro History Week reads. “These truths, however, will have little bearing on the uplift of the negro if they are left in the state of academic discussion.” From its inception, the event was designed to be a chance to tell the truth about the past in public—the whole truth.
In 1976, Negro History Week became Black History Month, and was officially acknowledged by President Gerald Ford. The nation, founded on “individual rights,” was turning 200—but Black Americans had only just had their right to vote reinforced by law. Every president since then has issued a proclamation to celebrate Black History Month. Freedom is a struggle, Ronald Reagan’s proclamation said in 1986, echoing Frederick Douglass’s exhortation that if there is no struggle, there is no progress. “The American experience and character can never be fully grasped until the knowledge of black history assumes its rightful place in our schools and our scholarship,” Reagan wrote.
[Vann R. Newkirk II: American democracy is only 55 years old–and hanging by a thread]
On February 3, President Trump continued that tradition, and signed a proclamation of his own for Black History Month. “From the very beginning, our country has been blessed with countless black American heroes,” he stated, before lambasting people who have “needlessly divided” the public over race. “As President, I proclaim that ‘black history’ is not distinct from American history—rather, the history of Black Americans is an indispensable chapter in our grand American story.”
But what his administration is doing belies whatever nice words Trump had to say about Black heroes. Its actions to limit what aspects of Black history can be included in the American story betray Trump’s real meaning. His administration has renamed monuments for Confederate traitors, scrubbed memorials to the contributions of Black military service members, and purged writings by authors such as Maya Angelou from the U.S. Naval Academy library; this is an ongoing project.
Other politicians have made a concerted effort to curtail examinations of American history over the past several years. State lawmakers have limited what can be taught in public schools. Florida passed a law that warns teachers not to “persuade students to a particular point of view,” and blocked an Advanced Placement curriculum for African American studies. Oklahoma barred “discriminatory principles,” such as the idea that people bear responsibility for what someone of their race did in the past; teachers at one school said they were told to stop saying “Black excellence” to motivate their students. The Trump administration’s executive orders targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives have created confusion and a climate of fear—not least because administration officials have been vague about what punishments districts, universities, and nonprofits might face for running afoul of their ideological standards and about what would even constitute a violation.
That haze has led to a drawback of even the most anodyne of celebrations honoring Black achievement. Last month, Indiana University at Indianapolis canceled its annual Martin Luther King Jr. Dinner—held, without fail, every year since 1969—citing budget cuts. As a joint production of the university and its Black Student Union, the dinner was a marquee event in town. But halfway through 2025, IU closed its DEI office. State law had mandated that it shut down all DEI-adjacent programs, which meant the Black Student Union would lose a portion of its funding—funding that would have helped support the dinner.
On January 13, in response to a community outcry, the chancellor, Latha Ramchand, said the university was trying to “reimagine” its “affinity dinners” and other such events. “In short, the MLK Dinner is not going away—rather we are in a moment of transition and the work of this task force will help us create its next iteration.” But traditions gain salience through time and repetition. When they are interrupted, when we stop choosing them consistently, they lose their heft.
[Clint Smith: Those who try to erase history will fail]
At its most elemental, Black History Month is about seeing the nation in full. It invites complexity. Booker T. Washington, who created the Tuskegee Institute and built it into an academic juggernaut for Black students, was the most powerful Black man of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Even his critics were forced to confess as much and admire his brilliance. Acknowledging his greatness does not mean forgetting that his philosophy would have allowed—at least in the short term—the continuation of Black Americans’ second-class citizenship. “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers,” he told a predominantly white audience at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta in 1895, “yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”
Trump is correct that the United States is one nation with a shared history—people, places, dates, and events. But that history has been experienced differently by different people. It is a nation of the enslaved and the enslaver. It is also a nation built on principles. And one feels bad about telling the true legacy of the slaveholder only if one identifies, in some way, with his actions rather than his nobler ideals. To recognize the divide between someone’s stated values and their actions is to recognize where they should have done better and where we can still do better.
On Monday, citing George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, a federal judge ordered the administration to restore the placards at Washington’s old home in Philadelphia. History could not be erased. “The government here likewise asserts truth is no longer self-evident, but rather the property of the elected chief magistrate and his appointees and delegees,” Judge Cynthia Rufe, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote. “An agency, whether the Department of the Interior, NPS, or any other agency, cannot arbitrarily decide what is true, based on its own whims or the whims of the new leadership, regardless of the evidence before it.”
A day later, Jesse Jackson died at the age of 84. The civil-rights leader’s two upstart presidential campaigns revealed how limited America’s political imagination was at the time; his platform would become the foundation of the progressive movement for the next three decades. Sometimes I look at black-and-white photos of Jackson—playing basketball with Marvin Gaye, standing next to King on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis before he was murdered, or preparing to deliver the first joint address by a Black man to the Alabama legislature since Reconstruction. It’s easy to think of Jackson in the past. But he was also human, and lived until it was no longer this world but his friend John Lewis that he would see in the morning.
In 2019, members of Congress were preparing to discuss H.R. 40, a bill that would study reparations for slavery—a bill to atone for history. I spoke with Jackson ahead of the hearing. We talked about racism, reparations, and ultimately about hope. It felt natural to wonder where someone who had seen so much bad in U.S. history continued to draw his resolve from. Jackson told me that his own hope stemmed from the fact that the truth cannot be erased. “The truth of slavery—that Africans subsidized America’s wealth—that truth will not go away,” he said. History must be remembered. His death is a reminder that the duty to contend with that history falls to those who are still on this Earth.
The post Black History Month Is Radical Now appeared first on The Atlantic.
