Fifty years ago, Gerald Ford became the first US president to recognize Black History Month.
Ford issued a “message” — but not a presidential proclamation — as the nation prepared to celebrate its bicentennial. He encouraged people to celebrate Black History Month and “seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.”
What Carter G. Woodson, a respected Black historian and author, founded in 1926 as “Negro History Week” evolved into Black History Month. Woodson chose February to honor the birthdays of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln; in 1986, Congress officially designated it as Black History Month.
“Black history in the United States has been a proving ground for America’s ideals,” Ronald Reagan said in his presidential proclamation that year. He added, “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.”
But for Black History Month’s centennial, the people, events, and accomplishments of Black people continue to be erased by the current president and his racist administration.
So far, President Trump hasn’t mentioned Black History Month. In a White House event in 2025 to recognize the celebration, Trump gave a meandering speech and much of the time sounded like a smitten groupie as he talked to and about golfer Tiger Woods, who was in attendance.
Weeks after paying “tribute to the generations of Black legends, champions, warriors, and patriots who helped drive our country forward to greatness,” Trump issued an executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” a paean to white supremacist revisionism. Trump railed against what he called “divisive narratives” that “undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States.”
What the president was referring to was any history that exposed this nation’s curated version of itself, the one without 246 years of Black enslavement that built and enriched this country; the genocide and vicious relocation of Indigenous people and theft of their lands; nearly a century of Jim Crow laws, race massacres, lynchings, and violent and persistent white resistance to upholding the tenets of equality and democracy for all.
Last month, to comply with Trump’s anti-history directive against “corrosive ideology,” the National Park Service dismantled an outdoor exhibit at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia that memorialized nine Black people enslaved by George Washington when he lived in the city.
White supremacy, the undergirding of Trump’s political career, is so fragile that it withers in the face of unvarnished history.
Trump has continued to attack diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in colleges and universities and the workplace. His immigration enforcement policies target Black and brown people, regardless of their immigration status. American citizens have routinely been detained by federal immigration agents.
His petty administration even removed Martin Luther King Day and Juneteenth, which commemorates the end of slavery on June 19, 1865, from the National Park Service’s list of national holidays that allow free entry for patrons.
Anything that Trump might say in praise of Black history this month, or any month, turns to dust as soon as the words leave his mouth. From calling for the restoration of New York’s death penalty after five teenagers of color were wrongly accused of raping a white woman in Central Park in 1989 to his disparaging description of majority Black and brown nations as “shithole countries,” Trump’s life and policies say all that one needs to know about his disdain for Black people.
Ceremonial presidential proclamations have their place. But they do not do the heavy lifting of giving Black people their full due or their freedom. That’s why Woodson first founded Negro History Week and why Black communities still celebrate it one hundred years later.
Black people are this nation’s moral compass. We are the living monuments to the ancestors, both sung and unsung, who have been the guardians of this nation’s values and who’ve fought and died for the still-unrealized task of making democracy whole and the Constitution inviolable. Black people are the soul and conscience of America.
As this nation gears up for its 250th anniversary this summer, Trump’s warped version of history will continue to deracinate the past and champion the white nationalism that’s choking the life out of the country.
But this Black History Month, perhaps more than any before, Black voices must ring loud and tell the truth, the bitter and sweet stories of generations in a nation that would not exist and can never be great — for the first time — without us.
Renée Graham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at renee.graham@globe.com.