There are usually two complaints you'll hear about Black History Month (BHM) almost every year. One, usually with a nod to the right, says it shouldn't exist at all. Why bother? And anyway what about white history month?! Urgh. There is, it's called the curriculum and it runs from January to December folks. The other says relegating it to one month isn't enough. The second one is probably a lot older than you think. Carter G. Woodson started Negro History Week in 1926 and historians who've since led his association tell us that even then he warned that a subject given one week of the school year wouldn't mean much to anyone. So Black History Month has the rare distinction of being critiqued by its founder before it was even a month at all, and continues to find critics amongst those of us still in the thick of the work today. A century on, most organisations have managed to prove him right even with the addition of a few extra weeks.
To be transparent we have mixed feelings about Black History Month, we’re not against it by any means and there's definitely still a case for it in the mainstream. But we think it matters to know where things come from and to honour those roots rather than let them get buried in the streamers of celebration. So let's get clear on some of that because BHM didn't come from nowhere. It came out of people refusing to let their history be erased at times when the state and academic institutions were working hard to do just that. The celebration everyone has held on to so keenly was part of that refusal. And it's true, so wonderfully true, that Black movements have always had this ability to hold joy and resistance in the same room. That isn't a contradiction anyone needs to tidy up; we absolutely need more joy. But what's missing from most workplace celebrations of BHM is the refusal piece, the resistance it was born from. Whiteness kept the party, of course, and hosted within the very institutions the movement was resisting.
So where did it come from?
In 1926, in the America of Jim Crow and lynching, Woodson launched Negro History Week. The son of formerly enslaved parents, he had previously founded an association and a journal to build the record that white scholarship was refusing to keep. The week was meant to show off what Black children had been learning all year round.
Britain's version arrived later, in October 1987, toward the end of a decade in which Black Britain had been under sustained attack. Margaret Thatcher, borrowing the rhetoric of an increasingly popular National Front, had spoken in 1978 of people fearing the country would be "swamped" by other cultures. It worked, the Front's vote collapsed the following year as its supporters found a home in the Tory party. In government she rewarded that loyalty and delivered on her promises, what followed was a decade of state violence, through the economy as much as the police. Black workers were among the first to lose their jobs as factories closed and unemployment passed an ungodly number of three million. Her 1981 Nationality Act removed the automatic right to citizenship for children born here. That same year thirteen young Black people died in the New Cross fire. Black communities knew it as a racist arson attack, at a time when the National Front was waging war on Black homes and neighbourhoods. The families were met with silence from both the state and the press and as a result in March of that year around 20,000 people marched from New Cross to Westminster for the Black People’s Day of Action, chanting “Thirteen dead, nothing said”. Weeks later Brixton rose up, then Toxteth, Moss Side, Chapeltown and Handsworth, against policing that treated whole neighbourhoods as criminal and an economy that had totally abandoned them. Black people continued to die in police custody. In 1985 police shot Cherry Groce in her home in Brixton and Cynthia Jarrett died during a police search of hers in Tottenham. Both neighbourhoods rose again. Against this backdrop of such violence, schools continued to chronically fail Black children and refused to teach them anything about their own histories, in response? Black parents kept an old tradition of running supplementary Saturday schools.
At the time Akyaaba Addai-Sebo, a Ghanaian organiser who'd come to Britain as a refugee, was Special Projects Coordinator in the Greater London Council's Ethnic Minorities Unit. The GLC was London's city wide government and under its left wing leadership it had funded anti-racist work across the capital. That was until Thatcher, in her ever growing Tory wisdom, abolished it in 1986. Addai-Sebo has described the moment that set him going: a colleague's six-year-old son, named after Marcus Garvey, asking his mother why he couldn't be white. Regardless, he and his colleagues carried on the anti-racist work after the shutters closed, alongside people like Linda Bellos, a Black lesbian feminist who was leading Lambeth Council at the time.
The African Jubilee Year Declaration launched what is now known as Black History Month in the UK, whilst simultaneously calling on London's boroughs to step up their support against apartheid in South Africa. For the founders the struggle was not just domestic. Black History Month in the US was built against literal erasure from the record, and here built inside a state openly hostile to Black life. Both were Pan-African in outlook and both were about children's dignity and belonging in a violent world that sought to erase them and their ancestors' contributions from the record. Neither was designed as a date in a diversity calendar.
If any of this feels familiar, it should. Black history has been recast as a culture war issue: in a Commons debate held for Black History Month in 2020, the then equalities minister (Badenoch forever giving us material!) told MPs that schools teaching white privilege as fact were breaking the law. And let’s be honest the way the month itself gets dressed up within institutions already does enough to erase history.
One month, one story
Mainstream BHM tends to tell the story of Black people in Britain as though it began with Windrush, alongside a handful of firsts and some American civil rights leaders whose radical politics have been sanded off. What drops out is most of it: Black life in Britain before 1948, the women who organised, the queer and trans people who have always been here, the liberation struggles on the African continent that are still ongoing.
This same erasure and invisibilisation happens every time someone says "the Black community" no plural (?). News flash folks there isn’t just one kind of us. We're a kaleidoscope of people, from Somali families in Lawrence Hill and Moss Side to fourth generation Jamaican families in Handsworth. There are the Nigerian nurses holding wards together across the country with a warmth and tenacity that rarely gets named and Black people of every background stuck in the asylum system, there are Black Scots, Black Muslims, Black trans migrants. We, as Black people, do not share a single lived experience or one migration story, one class position or one experience of gender. Our dealings with the British state haven't been the same either.
Even the American figures we borrow get flattened. Most October displays for example are happy to keep the Malcolm and lose the Muslim, along with the Islamic Black radical tradition he belonged to. An organisation that can't hold the complexity of who we are isn’t going to do a very good job of serving the many Black communities we are.
All too often Black history gets turned into content, often delivered by Black staff on top of their day jobs, then packaged up for the website and the annual report. bell hooks called this eating the Other: difference consumed as seasoning while the structures stay exactly where they are. Organisations get to be seen recognising Black people, Black excellence, without handing over any decision making power or changing conditions for them. And, most frustratingly of all, a month built around exceptional achievement and resilience leaves very little room to talk about what people were having to be resilient against: empire, capitalism, patriarchy and a state that continues to over-police them.
There's a difference, though, between being lumped together and choosing to stand together. Solidarity doesn't need everyone's experience to be the same. It comes out of struggling alongside each other and, to be honest, solidarity built from the inside is our politics. Sameness assigned from the outside? That’s a sorting system that suits systems of dominance, not us.
Taking stock
Addai-Sebo has explained that choosing October honours African traditions of harvest, a season of reconciliation, when leaders gathered to settle differences and people examined their lives in relation to the collective, asking whether what they'd set out to do over the past year had actually happened. He's even said he'd like to see it stretch into a Black History Season. He describes a stock take that looks back and plans forward, which is a very different thing from four weeks of crammed content.
So, could we take him at his word and use October to look honestly at what our organisations said they would do about racism this past year and whether it has happened? Including who carried that work and what it cost them. Asking whether the people celebrated this month have any more say over how the organisation runs than they did last October. Then decide what changes before the next one and who gets a say in deciding it.
Celebrate, absolutely. Just don't put the reckoning back in the cupboard with the bunting in November people, please.
Wanna go deeper?
The Radical and Transnational Roots of Black History Month in Britain by E. James West, on the GLC, Addai-Sebo, Ansel Wong and Linda Bellos
Black Feminist Praxis: Challenging Imperial Legacies in Global Development by Alya Harding
Muslim Philanthropy within Western Paradigm and Islamic Black Radical Tradition by Faiza Abdulkadir
Blackwashing Empire by Jacob
Radical Anti-Colonial Histories of Resistance on Uncharitable TV
Eating the Other:Desire and Resistance bell hooks
