This year, Black History Month marks its 100th anniversary. At this pivotal moment — on the eve of America’s 250th anniversary — Black History Month stands as a necessary corrective to the nation’s revisionist history, selective memory, and deliberate attempts at erasure.
This year, no Black History Month programs are scheduled at Trump’s Kennedy Center. In 2025, as part of Donald Trump’s renewed campaign to dismantle Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives across Washington, D.C. federal buildings, the Department of Defense “mistakenly removed” a webpage honoring Jackie Robinson’s service in the U.S. Army. The public outcry was swift.
Back in 2023 to kick off Black History Month, Florida Governor DeSantis rolled out his list of banned books by black authors, including the works by Harvard professor and PBS Finding Your Roots host Henry Louis Gates Jr. in the lineup.
From its inception, Black History has been the subject of criticism.
Dr. Carter G. Woodson — the Father of Black History — established Negro History Week in 1926, deliberately choosing February to coincide with the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. His aim: to ensure that black achievements, struggles, and contributions would not be omitted from the American story.
A century later, the resistance to Black History Month only underscores its necessity.
Trump needs a Black History tutorial
Frederick Douglass is dead. In 2017, President Donald J. Trump didn’t appear to know this fact. Disturbingly, in 2026, he still may not. When Trump kicked off Black History Month in 2017, he hosted a so-called “listening session” at the White House that left attendees scratching their heads. His remarks about Frederick Douglass — a self-liberated, formerly enslaved man turned towering abolitionist — died in 1895.
Trump believed Douglass was somehow still alive and actively producing new accomplishments. Reporters looked to then-White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer to clarify what Trump meant. Instead, Spicer only deepened the confusion, making it clear he, too, was uncertain whether Douglass was dead.
“I think he [Trump] wants to highlight the contributions he has made,” Spicer said. “And I think through a lot of the actions and statements he’s going to make, I think that the contributions of Frederick Douglass will become more and more.”
The remarks from both Trump and Spicer could have been an episode of Drunk History, a TV comedy series where an inebriated narrator fumbles to recount historical events, which illustrates why we need Black History Month and an intensive tutorial for Trump and his administration then — and now.
The Civil War continues
In 2017, Trump’s White House Chief of Staff, John Kelly, depicted Confederate General Robert E. Lee as “an honorable man” and asserted that “the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War.” Those remarks only deepened the nation’s divide and misunderstanding over slavery and its legacy. That Kelly — Boston-born, no less — made these comments on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show was perhaps unsurprising.
Kelly’s framing reflects a troubling moral relativism, one that suggests there is no absolute truth about the Civil War — only competing narratives shaped by individual or cultural perspective. In doing so, it minimizes the central role of slavery and blurs the moral clarity history demands.
Why does this history matter?
Had John Kelly been better versed in Civil War history, he would know that when the war ended, Robert E. Lee refused to be buried in his Confederate uniform. He also urged his followers to put away their flags, warning that their continued display as acts of defiance would amount to treason. Lee understood that reconciliation required an end to Confederate symbolism — not its preservation.
Moreover, Lee’s great-great-grandson, Robert E. Lee V, echoed this sentiment. In the summer following the violent unrest in Charlottesville over the planned removal of Lee’s statue, he addressed the proliferation of Confederate symbols across the South:
“First and foremost, if it can avoid any days like this past Saturday in Charlottesville, then take them down today. That’s not what our family is at all interested in, and that’s not what we think General Lee would want whatsoever.”
White Americans — like Kelly — must learn the full and accurate history of the Civil War. Without an honest reckoning, the nation’s ability to heal, reconcile, and move forward remains compromised
Post-racial myth
With the election of Barack Obama in 2008, queries arose about whether Black History Month was still necessary. Some Millennials, in particular, whose ballots helped elect the country’s first African-American president, revealed that celebrating Black History Month seemed outdated. To them, the continuation of Black History Month was a relic tethered to an old defunct paradigm of the 1960s Black Civil Rights era and hindered the country’s progress. That sentiment was echoed in 2009 by Republican Senator Mitch McConnell. McConnell gave his reasons: the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery; the 1965 Voting Rights Act enfranchising Black Americans; and the election of Barack Obama.
Obama’s candidacy, for many, was seen as having cleansed America of its original sin and ushered in a long-awaited “post-racial” era — in which race had finally become a “non-issue.” In an effort to underscore just how “post-racial” Obama supposedly was, Michael Crowley wrote in The New Republic in his 2008 article “Post-Racial” that it was not only liberals who were unbothered by Obama’s race, but conservatives as well — even the notorious former Klansman David Duke. “Even white supremacists don’t hate Obama,” Crowley wrote, noting Duke’s apparent nonchalance: “[Duke] seems almost indifferent about Obama, don’t see much difference between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton — or, for that matter, John McCain.”
For some white Americans, Obama’s election became both a physical and symbolic fulfillment of Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision, articulated in his historic “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington. Yet for Black Americans, the decades since the March have revealed the deliberate political misuse of King’s words — particularly his line about children being judged “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” That single sentence has been weaponized to discredit race-conscious remedies for historical injustice, including affirmative action (which the Supreme Court allowed to erode beginning with Bakke under the guise of “reverse discrimination”), reparations, Critical Race Theory, African American history, and now DEI initiatives.
In 2023, the Supreme Court formally ended affirmative action in college admissions with Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. Against this backdrop, Trump cancellation of Black History Month came as no surprise. He eliminated all so-called “identity months.”
For decades, the celebration of Black History Month — especially among white conservatives — has provoked ire framed around “identity politics” and “special rights.” Senator John McCain once argued that “special rights” were precisely why he opposed the creation of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday and refused to acknowledge it — until, notably, he ran against Barack Obama for the presidency in 2008.
Still, we rise
The backlash against Black History Month is not new. It is now a century old — and deeply rooted in the persistent refusal to confront America’s racial history honestly. The creation of Black History Month was never intended by Woodson to be divisive, but rather to educate all Americans of African American’s contributions in a shared, though complex history. With 250 years of slavery followed by 90 years of Jim Crow and then 60 years of “separate but equal” discriminatory practices, those hidden voices and stories have shaped not only our communities but, in turn, this nation. Black History Month stands not as a footnote to American History but rather reminds us that a nation cannot be whole unless it remembers itself fully — uncensored, unredacted and unerased.
