Happy Black History Month!

The 1960s had a dramatic effect on the study and celebration of Black history. Before the decade was over, Negro History Week would be well on its way to becoming Black History Month. The shift to a month-long celebration began even before Woodson’s death. As early as the1940s, Black folks in West Virginia (Woodson’s home state), began to celebrate February as Negro History Month. In Chicago, a cultural activist, Fredrick H. Hammaurabi, started celebrating Negro History Month in the mid-1960s. Having taken an African name in the 1930s, Hammaurabi used his cultural center, the House of Knowledge, to fuse African consciousness with the study of the Black past. By the late 1960s, as young Black students on college campuses became increasingly conscious of their African roots, and the lack of these studies in school systems, Black History Month replaced Negro History Week at a quickening pace. Within the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASNLH), younger and awakened intellectuals pushed Woodson’s organization to evolve with the times. As a result, in 1976, fifty years after the first celebration, ASNLH used its influence to institutionalize the shifts from a week to a month, and from Negro history to Black history.