Thoughts on Black History Month

By Patrice Lumumba Jones, Enlight Media

As a child growing up in Atlanta, I loved Black History Month. It was a celebration of Blackness different than the more routine Afrocentricity in which my classmates and I were immersed on a daily basis. We learned about George Washington Carver and his hundreds of uses for the peanut. Dr. Charles Drew and his pioneering work on blood transfusions. Harriet Tubman, who liberated herself and then went back — again and again — to liberate others. Nat Turner, who refused to wait for freedom to be granted and reached out to take it. These were heroes. And for 28 days, they were everywhere. 

But I've grown older now. I've been out of my majority-Black bubble for a long time. And I've come to see Black History Month differently. 

It feels, too often, like an audition. A presentation of credentials. An effort to prove to White America that we are worthy of a place in this society. That we are capable of intelligence, entrepreneurship, strategy, and compassion. That we, too, have contributed. That we belong here. 

For those who are unaware of these qualities — or unwilling to see them — I doubt that 28 days of celebratory Facebook posts will move the needle. And frankly, it is insulting to have to make the case for our humanity at all. We should not have to list our accomplishments like a résumé to justify our existence. The very premise is degrading. 

But here's what I've come to believe: Black history does serve a purpose. Just not the one we've been sold. 

Black history is not about proving we can succeed. It's about understanding why success has been made so difficult. It's about struggle — the fight to overcome systemic barriers that are continually adjusted to overcome our overcoming. Every time we adapt, the system adapts. Every time we rise, the rules change. This is not an accident. This is by design 

Consider the pattern. 

Slavery was not simply an economic system. It was a legal and social architecture designed to extract labor and deny humanity. When slavery ended, the architecture did not collapse — it evolved. Jim Crow laws emerged to maintain the hierarchy through segregation, disenfranchisement, and terror. Black codes criminalized ordinary behavior — loitering, unemployment, walking without proof of employment — so that newly freed people could be arrested, convicted, and leased back to the same plantations they had just escaped. The convict lease system was slavery by another name, and in some ways more brutal, because the state had no ownership stake in keeping the laborer alive. 

When the civil rights movement dismantled the legal framework of Jim Crow, the system adapted again. The War on Drugs — launched in the early 1970s and escalated through the 1980s and 1990s — targeted Black communities with surgical precision. Crack cocaine, prevalent in urban Black neighborhoods, carried sentences 100 times harsher than powder cocaine, favored in White suburbs. The result was mass incarceration on a scale the world has never seen. The United States, with less than 5% of the world's population, now holds nearly 25% of its prisoners. And Black Americans are incarcerated at more than five times the rate of White Americans. 

This is not a series of unrelated injustices. This is a continuum. Slavery. Jim Crow. Convict leasing. Mass incarceration. The names change. The mechanisms evolve. But the function remains the same: to maintain a racial caste system that places Black people at the bottom and White people at the top. To ensure that there is always a disposable class — a population that can be exploited, policed, caged, and blamed for its own condition. 

And here is what makes the lie so effective: at every stage, the system generates narratives to justify itself. Enslaved people were called lazy, childlike, dangerous — incapable of freedom. Under Jim Crow, Black people were called inferior, criminal, unfit for integration. Today, we are told that disparities in wealth, education, and incarceration are the result of cultural dysfunction, broken families, and bad choices. The myth of meritocracy insists that America is a level playing field — and if you're losing, it must be your fault. Unless you’re White, then blame it on Black people or brown immigrants.  

This is the lie that Black history can expose. But not by celebrating our triumphs alone. When we tell the stories of accomplishment, we must also tell the story of the obstacles — the forces that made those accomplishments extraordinary in the first place. George Washington Carver didn't just invent; he invented while being denied access to the institutions, funding, and recognition afforded to his White peers. Dr. Charles Drew revolutionized blood storage and transfusion medicine — and died after a car accident in North Carolina, where the hospital that could have saved him turned him away because of his race. Harriet Tubman didn't just escape slavery; she returned to the South again with a price on her head, because she understood that her freedom meant nothing if her people remained in chains.  

I've also come to realize that Nat Turner was not celebrated outside of my Atlanta bubble the way Carver and Tubman were. His name made white America uncomfortable in ways theirs did not. This is a nation that still displays statues to Confederate generals — men who bore arms against the Union to preserve the institution of slavery. Yet it remains squeamish about celebrating a man who bore arms against that same institution in hopes of liberating his people from it. The difference, of course, is not the violence. The difference is the direction of the violence. One is treason in defense of slavery. The other is rebellion against it. And America has always known which one it prefers to honor. 

And for every Carver, every Drew, every Tubman — there were thousands who didn't make it. Thousands who had the same brilliance, the same courage, the same will — and were crushed anyway. Lynched. Imprisoned. Denied. Erased. We cannot tell the story of those who overcame without acknowledging those who were overcome. Their absence is not failure. It is evidence. 

The damage is real. It is measurable. It is the direct consequence of deliberate policy — redlining, predatory lending, underfunded schools, biased policing, discriminatory hiring. These are not relics of the past. They are the present tense. 

So, when I think about what Black History Month should be, I don't think about a parade of heroes lifted out of context. I think about telling the whole truth. The triumph and the obstacle. The ones who made it and the ones who were not allowed to. Not to make White people feel guilty, but to make all of us see clearly. Because you cannot fix what you refuse to name. And you cannot build equity on a foundation of selective memory. 

Black history is American history. It is the history of a nation that proclaimed liberty while practicing bondage. A nation that amended its Constitution to guarantee equal protection under the law — and then spent the next 150 years finding ways around it. A nation that still cannot decide whether Black lives matter. 

Perhaps a clear-eyed discussion of this history can set the stage for common understanding. Perhaps it can strip away the power of lies meant to validate current disparities in opportunity. Perhaps it can help us see that the barriers are not natural, not inevitable, not the fault of those who are blocked by them. 

And perhaps then we can stop asking Black people to prove we belong — and start asking America why it has worked so hard to keep us out.