Black History Month is becoming what it was meant to correct | Opinion

“There would be no lynching if it did not start in the schoolroom.”

When Carter G. Woodson wrote these words in "The Mis-education of the Negro" published in 1933, he was not being metaphorical. He was being precise. A century after he founded what became Black History Month, his warning remains an unanswered charge against an education system that reproduces violence through omission and distortion.

Woodson, one of the first Black Americans to earn a PhD from Harvard University, founded Negro History Week in 1926, which later became Black History Month, because he understood something painfully clear: If Black people appeared in textbooks only as enslaved or inferior, violence against them would always feel justified.

White students were being educated to hate. Black students were being educated to be hated. That was, in Woodson’s words, “the worst sort of lynching” – one that kills aspiration and self-worth long before physical violence ever occurs. Woodson understood that schooling was never neutral; it was designed to produce obedience, hierarchy and consent.

A century later, we are still living with the consequences of that miseducation.

I know this not only as a scholar of the African diaspora, but also as someone who grew up immersed in Black history. I was raised in San Bernardino, California, where I lived in a predominantly Black, middle-class neighborhood where Blackness was normalized, not pathologized.

Black history books filled our home, our neighborhood was built by a Black developer, and Black history parades marked the calendar. Every December, my classmates and I received packets of poems and facts to memorize for a Black History Bee held in February. I can still recite Langston Hughes’ poem “I, Too” by heart.

Excellence was assumed of me. I didn’t have to prove I belonged in the room. I had space simply to learn.

I didn’t realize how rare that was until I left it.

My students are stunned by how much they were never taught

Through a citywide desegregation plan, I attended a junior high school across town where I was one of only a few Black students. The contrast was jarring. Suddenly, Blackness became something to explain, to defend, to survive. That grounding in Black history sustained me. It gave me what Woodson knew was essential: a sense of origin and possibility.

Most Black students in America never get that opportunity.

Today, I teach art history and African and African American studies at George Mason University outside Washington, DC. Every semester, I encounter students – Black, White, Jewish, immigrant, African and more – who are stunned by how much they were never taught.

Many Virginia students, raised in a state saturated with Black history, know almost nothing about Nat Turner beyond textbook portrayals of him as a deranged killer. They are shocked to learn how enslaved people read, organized and resisted.

Some are astonished to realize they have never been asked to study a map of Africa, having absorbed it as a monolith ‒ or an afterthought.

Black students often enter my classes knowing there is a gap in their education and feeling an urgent need to fill it. Students from historically advantaged backgrounds discover that they, too, have been misled, responding with anger as they confront the lies they were taught.

Allyship begins there, with the recognition that ignorance was never accidental. This ignorance is sustained by policy and practice.

Black history is not a commodity, it is a foundation

Textbooks sanitize slavery or erase it entirely. Books by marginalized authors are disproportionately banned. Faculty are pressured to submit syllabi for political review by people with no expertise. Teachers fear losing their jobs for telling unvarnished history. African American studies programs are underfunded and threatened.

This is not a failure of Black History Month. It is the danger of asking one month to compensate for 11 months of erasure.

Every February, we watch Black history become a commodity: corporate statements, themed commercials, symbolic gestures. I have taken part in these demonstrations, knowing silence would be worse. But concentrating Black history into the shortest month of the year strips it of context.

March arrives, and the conversation disappears. History becomes episodic instead of foundational.

Woodson never intended that. Black History Month was meant to be a corrective, not a container. A lens for understanding American life.

We must acknowledge that education creates permission structures. If you are taught a group of people is inferior, criminal or passive, then exploitation feels logical. The lynching that Woodson warned about has not disappeared; it has merely changed form. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids echo its logic: people demonized and dragged from their homes, families torn apart, violence normalized, all sanctioned by the federal government. The logic is the same because the education is the same.

This cycle will not cease until we stop wielding Black history, and the history of all marginalized groups, as weapons for oppression and start recognizing what's central to democracy itself.

Lynching begins in the classroom, but so does resistance.

LaNitra M. Berger is an associate professor of history and art history and director of African and African American Studies at George Mason University. She studies Black-Jewish relations in art and is the author of "Irma Stern and the Racial Paradox of South African Modern Art: Audacities of Color."