A Call to Remember and Reclaim Black History

Professor Jarvis Givens’ scholarship of Black history goes well beyond the great workings of notable men. His research and writing about the history of Black educators takes careful note of the many stories and lessons learned that go deeper than simply memorizing notable dates and names.

His latest book, I’ll Make Me A World, which was released this month, is a reflection on a century of Black History Month, which originated in 1926 with Carter G. Woodson’s establishing of Negro History Week. Named after a line from “The Creation,” a poem written by James Wedon Johnson, the author of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” I’ll Make Me A World takes care to highlight “Black memory workers,” a name Givens assigns to the many people outside of the traditional classroom who helped cultivate Black history.

“By focusing on the labors of Black memory workers, I’m hoping that more people will participate in Black History Month commemorations in ways that center around action — supporting local preservation efforts, unearthing and telling new histories that have been overlooked as opposed to stories about the same familiar figures,” says Givens. 

Below, Givens reflects on which questions he asked when writing I’ll Make Me A World, and details how his scholarship of Black history models the urgency of preserving the movement’s origins at a time where Black scholarship is facing unprecedented challenges.

You mentioned in another interview that, by now, most living people have only ever known a world where Black History Month existed in some form. But you also write that its original intent has largely been lost. How can we refocus its current trajectory to more align with its origins?

To refocus our current trajectory in commemorating Black history, we need to take seriously what’s politically at stake in preserving and critically studying Black history. Erasure in historical literature and public memory perpetuates the narrative condemnation of Black life that animates broader forms of violence against Black people, as well as other marginalized communities. Refocusing requires studying the origins of the tradition of Black History Month, because when we do that, we learn that this tradition is not just about learning more names and dates; it’s also about disrupting power dynamics that have structured historical memory and the production of knowledge about our shared past.

We also get a much deeper appreciation of Black History Month as a call to action: We should honor Black history and integrate it all throughout the year, but knowing that it continues to be threatened, this concentrated time of February becomes an opportunity to actively contribute to the labor of preserving, studying, and teaching black histories that might otherwise be lost. So, beyond reading a new book, watching a Black film, or eating food reflective of Black cultures, we should also be thinking of how to support local preservation efforts focused on Black history, and how we can support organizations that support this work year-round.

In the book you wrote “gaining knowledge about the black past has been a contested activity for black people everywhere.” In what ways do you feel the current moment of teaching and learning Black history is both with and without precedent?

I would say the surveillance and suppression of Black intellectual traditions is very precedented. This dates back to anti-assembly laws and anti-literacy laws created as early as the colonial era to police the circulation of independent thought and knowledge among Black communities, both free and enslaved. For instance, as early as 1740, the colonial legislature of South Carolina passed a law criminalizing the act of writing among the enslaved in the wake of the 1739 uprising known as the Stono Slave Revolt. It was believed that Black people’s use of the written word, to exchange their own ideas, would bring about “great inconveniences,” to quote the colonial lawmakers. There is a very long precedent of censorship and surveillance when it comes to Black history, Black studies, and Black knowledge production. In my work, I read these anti-Black laws criminalizing African American education as some of the earliest manifestations of American education policy.

However, there is something unprecedented about the current moment. It has to do with temporality, with our particular place in time, and in history. As previously mentioned, most people alive today have lived in a world when Black History Month and Negro History Week existed, and where Black history has been integrated into school curricula in some way, shape, or form — though often in very sanitized and restricted ways, to be clear. I think many people began to take for granted that we had historic sites around the country recognizing and commemorating Black history — both the stories of oppression and stories of Black resistance and resilience. So while scholars like Woodson and his collaborators urgently worked to preserve and protect Black history, because they had seen what the world was like without it, we are living at a time when African American and African Diasporic history has dramatically expanded, and where lots of progress has been made as it pertains to public access to Black historical knowledge; and yet, we are literally seeing this information be removed from buildings, websites, curricula, all before our own eyes. Experiencing this backlash to Black history, at this scale, and on the heels of so much progress, is jarring, and it is unprecedented. I think that’s important to emphasize.

In the book, you describe in detail the role of “black memory workers,” such as teachers, in collecting and shaping Black history. Why is it so important to focus on people and their work in passing on Black memories?

I chose to focus on the everyday Black people who helped preserve this tradition because that’s the story of how it grew from the idea developed by Woodson to a nationally recognized commemorative holiday. Before it was officially recognized by the U.S. government, it expanded internally within African American segregated communities as a formalized expression of Black heritage. And it was not just trained historians and history teachers, it was also librarians, archivists, church leaders, community educators, poets, musicians, and many others, who helped grow and pass this tradition on. So, I use that term “Black memory workers” to acknowledge the many hands that labored to maintain this tradition.

Even as Black History Month grew and became a mechanism for exploiting Black culture by various corporations and companies interested in manipulating Black consumers, there continued to be teachers — like my own — and community members and scholars who have preserved the best of the tradition for future generations. I focus on the work done by these people to demonstrate the agency we all have to contribute in more meaningful ways to the preservation, study, and teaching of Black history.

Is there anything new you learned about yourself and maybe your own relationship to Black History Month in the course of writing this book?

I was reminded that my assignment as a scholar was not formed within the academy. In studying the efforts of these people who came before me, and in reflecting on the work of so many teachers and mentors who introduced me to this tradition, I was able to see how my job, thus far, has been to use my access to resources within the academy to complete assignments that have been outlined for me by many generations of Black people who were systematically kept out of these places.

My job is to think and write in a way that accounts for the social realities of those who for so long had been narratively condemned by the scholarly enterprise of the American academy, to produce knowledge that is accountable to those who had been deemed “a negligible factor in the thought of the world,” to use Woodson’s language. I think this is something I knew already, but I feel like I gained more clarity about that in the process of writing I’ll Make Me a World.

I feel so grateful to have that sense of clarity, especially when I feel dispirited by the current state of higher education. It’s a gift to be clear about one’s assignment. And that gift was handed to me by the Black memory workers I write about — those whom I met in the flesh as well as those who have touched my mind in more intimate ways.