As we move toward the end of Black History Month 2026 and our Daily Black History Month Challenges, I want to ensure I do all I can, in my remaining messages, to uplift us, prepare us, and lay a path forward. As the 30th person and eighth woman to lead The Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), I am honored to stand in the house of our founders—Carter G. Woodson, William Hartgrove, Jr., George Cleveland Hall, James Stamps, and Arthur Jackson, II—and sit in the seat of Hall and Mary McLeod Bethune, our first president and first woman president.
We carry the weight of our ancestors’ dreams as we are (to paraphrase Elijah Cummings) the living messages they sent to a future they knew they would never see.
We must remind ourselves and our children daily that, because of this and their sacrifice, we matter. Our lives matter. Our tears matter. Our joy matters. Our victories matter. Our defeats matter. Our children matter. Our stories matter. Our pain matters. Our leaders matter. Our communities matter. Our dreams, realized or deferred, matter. Our ancestors and our children yet unborn matter. Our rituals and prayers matter. Our artists, poets, singers, dancers, comedians, and writers matter. The way we love each other and love on each other matters. Our names matter. The way we see ourselves and see ourselves in others matters. Our very breath, as a form of resistance and resilience, matters.
For over 400 years, we have tried to appeal to White America’s humanity. We preached love and practiced non-violence even in the face of hatred and terror. We worked within their system, played by their rules (while creating our own), colored within their lines while desperately trying to prove our worth and convince them that we belonged here. We stood by and screamed, sometimes in silence and sometimes out loud, as they enslaved us, abused us, raped us, tortured us, and sold us. We have spent many years swallowing the lies that they have fed us and the injustice that they have meted out toward us. We were in the room when they legislated slavery, when they decided that we were three-fifths of a human, and when they chose to secede from the Union rather than set us free. The history of this country was written with our blood. We are the reason why America became America, but we were not supposed to survive. Yet, we did not die. We are the descendants of men and women who chose survival as an act of rebellion.
Frederick Douglass, in 1851, argued that after 230 years of being chained and lashed, hunted with bloodhounds, and surrounded with utter insecurity, we had learned how to live on and how to smile under it all. We learned how to sing through our pain and laugh through our tears. And even when we thought we made it over, we were reminded time and time again that America had never been America to us. But as Langston Hughes once asserted, America will be.
Sit with that for a moment.
And then, on this 24th Day of Black History Month, take action: If you are not an ASALH member, join today. If you are already a member, become a Life Member. If you are a Life Member, purchase a membership for someone else. Then prepare for our Black History Month Luncheon this Saturday in Washington, DC, where we will hear and celebrate Our State of the Union and move forward together, with grace and dignity, into a bright and glorious morning.
*Portions of this essay were first published in Conversations with Dr. Kaye.
Sitting in the Seat of Hall and Bethune
Over the past 111 years, twenty-nine (not including me) men and women have volunteered their time to serve as the president of ASALH. I lift their names up here with a note of thanks for the work they did to move ASALH forward!
1916-1917 George Cleveland Hall
1917-1920 Robert E. Park
1921-1930 John R. Hawkins
1931-1936 John Hope
1936-1951 Mary McLeod Bethune
1952-1964 Charles Harris Wesley
1965-1966 Lorenzo J. Greene
1966-1967 J. Reuben Sheeler
1968-1970 J. Rupert Picott
1971-1973 Andrew Brimmer
1974-1976 Edgar Toppin
1977-1980 Charles Walker Thomas
1981-1982 Earl E. Thorpe
1983-1984 Samuel L. Banks
1984-1985 Jeanette Cascone (acting)
1989-1990 Andrew Brimmer
1993-1995 Janette Hoston Harris
1997-1999 Edward Beasley
1999-2001 Samuel DuBois Cook,Sr.
2001-2004 Gloria Harper Dickinson
Bending toward social justice,
Karsonya Wise Whitehead
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