When Carter G. Woodson established Negro History week in 1926, he realized the importance of providing a theme to focus the attention of the public. The intention has never been to dictate or limit the exploration of the Black experience, but to bring to the public’s attention important developments that merit emphasis.
For those interested in the study of identity and ideology, an exploration of ASALH’s Black History themes is itself instructive. Over the years, the themes reflect changes in how people of African descent in the United States have viewed themselves, the influence of social movements on racial ideologies, and the aspirations of the black community.
The changes notwithstanding, the list reveals an overarching continuity in ASALH–our dedication to exploring historical issues of importance to people of African descent and race relations in America.
The Origins of Black History Month
2025 THEME
2025 – African Americans and Labor
The 2025 Black History Month theme, African Americans, and Labor, focuses on the various and profound ways that work and working of all kinds – free and unfree, skilled, and unskilled, vocational and voluntary – intersect with the collective experiences of Black people. Indeed, work is at the very center of much of Black history and culture. Be it the traditional agricultural labor of enslaved Africans that fed Low Country colonies, debates among Black educators on the importance of vocational training, self-help strategies and entrepreneurship in Black communities, or organized labor’s role in fighting both economic and social injustice, Black people’s work has been transformational throughout the U.S., Africa, and the Diaspora. The 2025 Black History Month theme, “African Americans and Labor,” sets out to highlight and celebrate the potent impact of this work.
Considering Black people’s work through the widest perspectives provides versatile and insightful platforms for examining Black life and culture through time and space. In this instance, the notion of work constitutes compensated labor in factories, the military, government agencies, office buildings, public service, and private homes. But it also includes the community building of social justice activists, voluntary workers serving others, and institution building in churches, community groups, and social clubs and organizations. In each of these instances, the work Black people do and have done have been instrumental in shaping the lives, cultures, and histories of Black people and the societies in which they live. Understanding Black labor and its impact in all these multivariate settings is integral to understanding Black people and their histories, lives, and cultures.
Africans were brought to the Americas to be enslaved for their knowledge and serve as a workforce, which was superexploited by several European countries and then by the United States government. During enslavement, Black people labored for others, although some Black people were quasi-free and labored for themselves, but operated within a country that did not value Black life. After fighting for their freedom in the Civil War and in the country’s transition from an agricultural based economy to an industrial one, African Americans became sharecroppers, farm laborers, landowners, and then wage earners. Additionally, African Americans’ contributions to the built landscape can be found in every part of the nation as they constructed and designed some of the most iconic examples of architectural heritage in the country, specifically in the South.
Over the years to combat the superexploitation of Black labor, wage discrepancies, and employment discrimination based on race, sex, and gender, Black professionals (teachers, nurses, musicians, and lawyers, etc.) occupations (steel workers, washerwomen, dock workers, sex workers, sports, arts and sciences, etc.) organized for better working conditions and compensation. Black women such as Addie Wyatt also joined ranks of union work and leadership to advocate for job security, reproductive rights, and wage increases.
2025 marks the 100-year anniversary of the creation of Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids by labor organizer and civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph, which was the first Black union to receive a charter in the American Federation of Labor. Martin Luther King, Jr incorporated issues outlined by Randolph’s March on Washington Movement such as economic justice into the Poor People’s Campaign, which he established in 1967. For King, it was a priority for Black people to be considered full citizens.
The theme, “African Americans and Labor,” intends to encourage broad reflections on intersections between Black people’s work and their workplaces in all their iterations and key moments, themes, and events in Black history and culture across time and space and throughout the U.S., Africa, and the Diaspora. Like religion, social justice movements, and education, studying African Americans’ labor and labor struggles are important organizing foci for newinterpretations and reinterpretations of the Black past, present, and future. Such new considerations and reconsiderations are even more significant as the historical forces of racial oppression gather new and renewed strength in the 21st century.
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2024 THEME
2024 – African Americans and the Arts
African American art is infused with African, Caribbean, and the Black American lived experiences. In the fields of visual and performing arts, literature, fashion, folklore, language, film, music, architecture, culinary and other forms of cultural expression, the African American influence has been paramount. African American artists have used art to preserve history and community memory as well as for empowerment. Artistic and cultural movements such as the New Negro, Black Arts, Black Renaissance, hip-hop, and Afrofuturism, have been led by people of African descent and set the standard for popular trends around the world. In 2024, we examine the varied history and life of African American arts and artisans.
For centuries Western intellectuals denied or minimized the contributions of people of African descent to the arts as well as history, even as their artistry in many genres was mimicked and/or stolen. However, we can still see the unbroken chain of Black art production from antiquity to the present, from Egypt across Africa, from Europe to the New World. Prior to the American Revolution, enslaved Africans of the Lowcountry began their more than a 300-year tradition of making sweetgrass baskets, revealing their visual artistry via craft.
The suffering of those in bondage gave birth to the spirituals, the nation’s first contribution to music. Blues musicians such as Robert Johnson, McKinley ‘Muddy Waters’ Morganfield and Riley “BB” B. King created and nurtured a style of music that became the bedrock for gospel, soul, and other still popular (and evolving) forms of music. Black contributions to literature include works by poets like Phillis Wheatley, essays, autobiographies, and novels by writers such as David Walker and Maria Stewart. Black aesthetics have also been manifested through sculptors like Edmonia Lewis and painters like Henry O. Tanner.
In the 1920s and 30s, the rise of the Black Renaissance and New Negro Movement brought the Black Arts to an international stage. Members of the armed forces, such as James Reese Europe, and artists such as Langston Hughes, Josephine Baker and Lois Mailou Jones brought Black culture and Black American aesthetics internationally, and Black culture began its ascent to becoming a dominant cultural movement to the world. In addition to the Harlem Renaissance, today we recognize that cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and New Orleans also were home to many Black artists.
The 1960s continued this thread through the cultural evolution known as the Black Arts Movement, where artists covered issues such as pride in one’s heritage and established art galleries and museum exhibitions to show their own work, as well as publications such as Black Art. This period brought us artists such as Alvin Ailey, Judith Jamison, Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez. The movement would not have been as impactful without the influences from the broader Black world, especially the Negritude movement and the writings of Frantz Fanon.
In 1973, in the Bronx, New York Black musicians (i.e. DJ Kool Herc and Coke La Rock) started a new genre of music called hip-hop, which comprises five foundational elements (DJing, MCing, Graffiti, Break Dancing and Beat Boxing). Hip-hop performers also used technological equipment such as turntables, synthesizers, drum machines, and samplers to make their songs. Since then hip-hop has continued to be a pivotal force in political, social, and cultural spaces and was a medium where issues such as racial violence in the inner city, sexism, economic disinvestment and others took the forefront.
The term Afrofuturism was used approximately 30 years ago in an effort to define cultural and artistic productions (music, literature, visual arts, etc.) that imagine a future for Black people without oppressive systems, and examines how Black history and knowledge intersects with technology and science. Afrofuturist elements can be found in the music of Sun Ra, Rashan Roland Kirk, Janelle Monáe and Jimi Hendrix. Other examples include sci-fi writer Octavia Butler’s novels, Marvel film Black Panther, and artists such as British-Liberian painter Lina Iris Viktor, Kenyan-born sculptor Wangechi Mutu, and Caribbean writers and artists such as Nalo Hopkinson, and Grace Jones.
In celebrating the entire history of African Americans and the arts, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) puts into the national spotlight the richness of the past and present with an eye towards what the rest of the twenty-first century will bring. ASALH dedicates its 98th Annual Black History Theme to African Americans and the arts.
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THEMES
2030: Black Economics
2029: Sustaining and Saving Black Land and Property
2028: TBD
2027: African Americans in the Digital Age
2026: A Century of Black History Commemorations
2025: African Americans and Labor
2024: African Americans and the Arts
2023: Black Resistance
2022: Black Health and Wellness
2021: The Black Family: Representation, Identity, and Diversity
2020: African Americans and the Vote
2019: Black Migrations
2018: African Americans in Times of War
2017: The Crisis in Black Education
2016: Hallowed Grounds: Sites of African American Memories
2015: A Century of Black Life, History, and Culture
2014: Civil Rights in America
2013: At the Crossroads of Freedom and Equality: The Emancipation Proclamation and the March on Washington
2012: President Barack Obama National Black History Month Proclamation
2012: Black Women in American Culture and History
2011: African Americans and the Civil War
2010: The History of Black Economic Empowerment
2009: The Quest for Black Citizenship in the Americas
2008: Carter G. Woodson and the Origins of Multiculturalism
2007: From Slavery to Freedom: Africans in the Americas
2006: Celebrating Community: A Tribute to Black Fraternal, Social, and Civil Institutions
2005: The Niagara Movement: Black Protest Reborn, 1905-2005
2004: Before Brown, Beyond Boundaries: Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education
2003: The Souls of Black Folks: Centennial Reflections
2002: The Color Line Revisited: Is Racism Dead?
2001: Creating and Defining the African American Community: Family, Church Politics and Culture
2000: Heritage and Horizons: The African American Legacy and the Challenges for the 21st Century
1999: Legacy of African American Leadership for the Present and the Future
1998: Black Business
1997: African Americans and Civil Rights; a Reprisal
1996: Black Women
1995: Reflections on 1895: Douglass, Du Bois & Washington
1994: Empowering Black Americans
1993: Afro-American Scholars: Leaders, Activists and Writers
1992: African Roots Experience New Worlds, Pre-Columbus to Space Exploration
1991: Educating America: Black Universities and Colleges, Strengths and Crisis
1990: Seventy-Five Years of Scholarly Excellence: A Homage to Our Forebearers
1989: Afro Americans and Religion
1988: Constitutional Status of Afro Americans in the 21st Century
1987: Afro Americans and the Constitution from Colonial Times to the Present
1986: Afro American Experience: International Connection
1985: Afro American Family
1984: Afro Americans and Education
1983: Afro Americans in the United States
1982: Afro American Survival
1981: Black History: Role Model for Youth
1980: Heritage for America
1979: History: Torch for the future
1978: Roots, Achievements and Projections
1977: Heritage Days: The Black Perspective; the Third Century
1976: America for All Americans
1975: Fulfilling America’s Promise: Black History Month
1974: Helping America Understand
1973: Biography Illuminates the Black Experience
1972: African Art, Music, Literature; a Valuable Cultural Experience
1971: African Civilization and Culture: A Worthy Historical Background
1970: 15th Amendment and Black America in the Century (1870-1970)
1969: Changing the Afro American Image through History
1968: The Centennial of the Fourteenth Amendment Afro American History Week
1967: Negro History in the Home, School, and the Community
1966: Freedom from Racial Myths and Stereotypes Through Negro History
1965: Negro History: Freedom’s Foundation
1964: Negro History: A Basis for the New Freedom
1963: Negro History Evaluates Emancipation (1863-1963)
1962: Negro History and a New Birth of Freedom
1961: Freedom and Democracy for the Negro after 100 years (1861-1961)
1960: Strengthening America Through Education in Negro History and African Culture
1959: Negro History: A Foundation for a Proud America
1958: Negro History: A Factor in Nationalism and Internationalism
1957: Negro History
1956: Negro History in an Era of Changing Human Relations
1955: Negro History: A Contribution to America’s Intercultural Life
1954: Negro History: A Foundation for Integration
1953: Negro History and Human Relations
1952: Great Negro Educators (Teachers)
1951: Eminent Negroes in World Affairs
1950: Outstanding Moments in Negro History
1949: The Use of Spirituals in the Classroom
1948: The Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth
1947: Democracy Possible only Through Brotherhood
1946: Let us Have Peace
1945: The Negro and Reconversion
1944: The Negro and the New Order
1943: The Negro in the Modern World
1942: The Negro in Democracy
1941: The Career of Frederick Douglass
1940: Negro Labor
1939: Special Achievements of the Race: Religion, Education, Business, Architecture, Engineering, Innovation, Pioneering
1938: Special Achievements of the Race: Oratory, Drama, Music, Painting, Sculpture, Science and Inventions
1937: American Negro History from the Time of Importation from Africa up to the Present Day
1936: African Background Outlined
1935: The Negro Achievements in Africa
1934: Contribution of the Negro in Poetry, in Painting, in Sculpture and in Science
1933: Ethiopia Meets Error in Truth
1932: What George Washington Bicentennial Commission Fail to Do
1931: Neglected Aspects of Negro History
1930: Significant Achievements of the Negro
1929: Possibility of Putting Negro History in the Curriculum
1928: Civilization: A World Achievement