Celebrate Black History Month

In February, we're posting resources and interesting info on our social media pages in celebration of Black History Month (BHM). As we publish posts, the info will also be added here. Scroll through to explore some of the awesome information we've shared. Read about BHM at the end of this post.

1. For our educator friends: AfricanAmericanHistoryMonth.gov has a whole page dedicated to teachers with ready-to-use lesson plans, student activities, collection guides, and research aids. Tons of primary sources from the Library of Congress, National Archives, Smithsonian Institution, and more!

2. Langston Hughes (1902 - 1967) was an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance, a flourishing of black intellectual, literary, and artistic life during the 1920s that began in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. Hughes’ literary works helped shape American literature and politics. Through his poetry, short stories, essays, plays, children’s books, and novels, he sought to honestly portray the joys and hardships of working-class black lives, avoiding both sentimental idealization and negative stereotypes. Read: 10 Extraordinary Langston Hughes Poems

3. Celebrate Black History Month with Books for Young Readers - A Book List from the New York Public Library

4. Created by the National Park Service, the short film “Twenty & Odd” seeks to inform, highlight, and educate the nation as a whole on the trauma, resilience, and beauty of the African American Experience in our country. Read the Companion Guide for more in-depth discussion.

5. Toni Morrison (1931-2019) won the Fiction Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for ‘Beloved.’ She was the first (and still only) black woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. She was also honored in 2012 with a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Her other best-known novels are The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and A Mercy. February 18th would have been her 89th birthday. Check out this list of must-read authors according to Toni Morrison.

6. NPR’s Code Switch Podcast put together a playlist for Black History Month where you can listen to episodes all about the hidden heroes and buried history of black America. Topics include sports activism, the Black Panther Party, and one woman's fight for respect that went all the way to the Supreme Court, and more!

7. With the invention of the airplane came an air age associated with adventure and heroism. African Americans shared the widespread enthusiasm for flying, but found themselves routinely denied access to training as pilots and mechanics. Explore the stories of black pioneer aviators like Bessie Coleman, Benjamin O. Davis Jr., and Guion "Guy" Bluford, who challenged racial discrimination and with great effort — and against formidable odds — realized their dream to fly. -- Smithsonian National Space & Air Museum.

8. Visit the exhibit “Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words” online at the Library of Congress, which showcases rarely seen materials that offer an intimate view of Rosa Parks and documents her life and activism.

9. Remembering Katherine Johnson today and the contributions she made as a NASA mathematician who helped to calculate the flight path for America's first crewed space mission and moon landing. She was 101. Born in 1918 in West Virginia, Katherine G. Johnson made the most of limited educational opportunities for African Americans, graduating from college at age 18. She began working in aeronautics as a "computer" in 1952, and after the formation of NASA, she performed the calculations that sent astronauts into orbit in the early 1960s and to the moon in 1969. Johnson was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015, and saw her story brought to light through a book and a feature film the following year.


10. Explore NYPL’s Digital Collection of ‘The Black Experience in Children’s Books: Selections from Augusta Baker’s Bibliographies'. View books written between 1913 and 1963.

11. Hair Love won the Oscar for best animated short film. It was adapted from the book of the same name, written by Matthew A. Cherry & illustrated by Vashti Harrison. A great 6-min watch:

About Black History Month

As a Harvard-trained historian, Carter G. Woodson, like W. E. B. Du Bois before him, believed that truth could not be denied and that reason would prevail over prejudice. His hopes to raise awareness of African American’s contributions to civilization was realized when he and the organization he founded, the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH), conceived and announced Negro History Week in 1925. The event was first celebrated during a week in February 1926 that encompassed the birthdays of both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. The response was overwhelming: Black history clubs sprang up; teachers demanded materials to instruct their pupils; and progressive whites, not simply white scholars and philanthropists, stepped forward to endorse the effort.

The celebration was expanded to a month in 1976, the nation’s bicentennial. President Gerald R. Ford urged Americans to “seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.” That year, fifty years after the first celebration, the association held the first African American History Month. By this time, the entire nation had come to recognize the importance of Black history in the drama of the American story. Since then each American president has issued African American History Month proclamations. And the association—now the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH)—continues to promote the study of Black history all year. (africanamericanhistorymonth.gov/about/)