The history of Black History Month, one hundred years in

February 4, 2026·35 min·2 clips

Illiterate Black coal miners paid young Carter G. Woodson to read the newspaper to them, then corrected the record with their own Civil War counter-narratives.

The question sounds simple at first. Gene Demby is asked whether any Black History Month celebration from childhood really stayed with him, and his answer sits somewhere between a shrug and a slow yes. School made the whole thing complicated. At all-Black schools, he says, the month did not sit apart from the rest of the year in quite the same way. B.A. Parker remembers Baltimore another way: Black history was everywhere, less a special unit than the weather in the room. Then the conversation gets sharper. The episode moves into the work behind preservation, especially the work done by people who were not treated as official historians. The guest calls it Black memory work. That means teachers, writers, and communities carrying the parts of history classrooms often dropped. James W.C. Pennington is one example. After escaping slavery in Maryland, he wrote a textbook and worked at the African Free School in Connecticut. Lila Amos Pendleton is another. As a Black public school teacher in D.C., she wrote a textbook in the early 1900s that pushed against silence. The point is plain enough, and it stings. These educators taught Nat Turner, Haitian Revolution leaders, Harriet Tubman, and other Black freedom fighters when textbooks softened slavery and cut out resistance. By the end, preservation feels less like a museum job than a shared duty. Even after the credits, the hosts slip back into jokes about Black History Month greetings, keeping the warmth without sanding down the history.

As heard by us

A sharp, warm history of who kept Black history alive when schools did not.

Code Switch treats Black History Month less like a calendar marker and more like an ongoing repair job. It opens from childhood memory, then widens to the teachers and historians who kept Black history alive when mainstream textbooks left it out.

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want Black History Month framed through memory work, not slogans.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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