Black In Session: Black History Month 2024 ✊🏾

Nat'l Urban League
2 min readFeb 2, 2024

Welcome to Black History Month! ✊🏾✊🏿✊🏽

πŸ”” The bell has rung and we’re officially Black in Session. πŸ””

We know that Black history is under attack on all sides.

Book bans.
Barriers to the accurate teaching of U.S. history.
Attacks against the very idea of diversity and efforts to include ALL people in various aspects of American life.
Laws that to block our voting rights and access to the ballot box.

There is an undeniable attempt keep us all divided, distracted and dumb.

So this month, we’re resisting by educating and informing right here on Medium. Pay attention to your assignments. Don’t fall asleep in class. And stay woke so you can take action. They want to take us back, but we will continue to march onward.

πŸ‘‡πŸΎ Check your class schedule πŸ‘‡πŸΎ

πŸ“š First lesson: The origin story of #BlackHistoryMonth πŸ“š

The organization sponsored a National Negro History Week in 1926, choosing February to coincide with the birthdays of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. This sparked many schools and communities across the U.S. to organize celebrations, start history clubs, and present performances.

For the next several decades, U.S. mayors issued annual proclamations declaring β€œNegro History Week,” and by the late 1960s, it had evolved to Black History Month on several college campuses. President Gerald Ford officially recognized February as Black History Month in 1976.

Today, we celebrate Black history all year long, and we use February as a special opportunity to celebrate even more, to educate a little more, and to reflect a little more about the astounding contributions and impact of Black people across the world.

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Nat'l Urban League

National Urban League is the nation's largest historic civil rights & urban advocacy organization, devoted to empowering communities & changing lives since 1910