Rejecting whitewashed versions of American history especially critical this Black History Month 

February 4, 2026 / Evelyn L. Lucado

By Logan Monteleone

News Editor

The theme of this year’s Black History Month, as decided every year by The Association for the Study of African American Life and History, is “A Century of Black History Commemorations.” The 100th anniversary of the recognition period started by historian Carter G. Woodson aligns with the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding this year.

The century-and-a-half that stands between the two occasions accurately reflects the tongue-bitten silence from the nation when it comes to confronting its longstanding oppression of Black individuals. Despite America’s reckoning with forms of racial violence like police brutality and job hiring inequality in 2020, the country is yet again walking backwards, according to the Washington Post.

Citizens have to pay attention to the Trump administration’s pathetic yet power-backed efforts to spare white Americans from confronting the ongoing legacy of slavery in the country at the expense of recognizing Black Americans’ experiences throughout a history of oppression-defying and achievement. Conversely, celebrating Black culture and experiences independent from attempts at invalidation by a racist government is important. The United States cannot, at this intersection of anniversaries, quietly watch the country to revert into its familiar state of silence and a failure to listen.

According to ASALH, in 1926, Woodson began a one-week recognition focused on improving public and self-perception of Black individuals through education on Black history. To mark the 50th anniversary, President Gerald Ford expanded the federally recognized celebration from a week to the full month of February.

To mark America’s 250th and Black History Month’s centennial, President Trump is tearing apart the cultural institutions and school curriculums that teach citizens the real version of American history.

Late last month, a Philadelphia exhibit focused on the lives of the nine individuals enslaved by President George Washington was removed by the Department of the Interior and the National Park Service, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer. 

The exhibit in the President’s House informs visitors about the legacy of enslavement of Black individuals in the U.S. and the founding fathers––and of Washington College’s namesake in particular––who perpetuated systems of oppression and bondage in a sick irony alongside their work toward developing a democracy that purports values of freedom and the pursuit of happiness.

Alongside legal actions from the city against the exhibit’s removal, activists in Philly have refused to allow the history of enslavement in their city and nation to be erased by creating temporary public art displays at the site of the former exhibit.

Though the federal administration has the power to disrupt formal systems of education and storytelling, its leaders and supporters cannot stop scholars, activists, and community leaders from continuing to repeat that slavery was real, the legacy of racial injustice in the country is ongoing, and there is real need for continuing to tell accurate versions of the U.S.’s past.

Darius Johnson, Project Director of Chesapeake Heartland, an African American humanities initiative in collaboration with the College’s Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, said that it is also important to think about combating erasure on local levels in one’s closest circles.

While the dismantling of the exhibit is worthy of concern, it is only one, higher-profile example, Johnson said, and covert erasure in Kent County––one of the last counties to desegregate its schools in 1967––has happened throughout the county’s history. The rejection of materials connected to the Black educational experience at Garnet High School is one example, Johnson said.

“It’s easy to get caught up in what’s happening on a national scale, but the connectivity of society is preserved in our households, and our neighborhoods, and our towns. Engage locally first,” Johnson said. “Seek to understand what’s being threatened locally, or what should be amplified and commemorated, because, the last thing you want to do is watch everything unfold on TV or social media and miss what’s happening right in your backyard.”

Johnson explained how his work at Chesapeake Heartland in preserving materials from Garnet High School, including his own grandmother’s 1951 diploma, among other artifacts like yearbooks that have been digitized, has allowed him to think about the role that objects of shared community play in informing the present.

An effective form of resistance during Black History Month and continually, however, is to not only remember and discuss the pain that has been endured by the Black community in the U.S. but to focus also on celebrating progress, appreciating Black achievements and contributions to the larger American society despite systemic oppression, and to commit to the continued work of addressing racial injustice.

Classrooms and museums in America cannot let Black history start with slavery and end with Martin Luther King Jr.; Black History month must reach back to the first arrival of enslaved Africans in colonial America and extend beyond the present to a non-abstract future where systems of injustice are dismantled.

Black History does, can, and should, in many ways, exist separately from the actions of white people who have so long insisted on determining who tells the story and how it is told; simultaneously, failing to recognize or celebrate a version of Black history that ignores or dates the injustice that is happening right now is unacceptable.

As someone who devotes a large part of his work to addressing the way that issues like gentrification and income constraints affect Black communities in Kent County, Johnson said talking about history without taking action is a failure to uphold Black existence.

“People will happily tell stories, go home and sleep well,” Johnson said. “We have to remember that erasure of stories leads to erasure of Black people and communities. And if we’re going to commit to telling these stories, we need to commit to ensuring that the physical places where Black families live can sustain. Otherwise, the stories are hollow forms of reality.”