Brooks: What it means to celebrate Black History Month today

But America never needed its government’s permission to celebrate Black History Month. Black History Month started with a week. Historian Carter G. Woodson inaugurated the first celebration the week of Feb. 6, 1926 – a week when Black Americans were already celebrating the birthdays of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. The 1920s was a decade of lynchings and race riots and government-sanctioned racism – a new low in the nadir of race relations in America. “Negro History Week, at least initially, was this opportunity to pause and to really reflect on, in spite of all those challenges, everything Black Americans had contributed to the republic,” Williams said. “So much that we associate with liberty and equality came on the backs of, because of the agitation of Black Americans.” Even in a country with a history of one step forward, three steps back in race relations, watching the NFL scrub “end racism” out of the end zones for the Super Bowl felt like hitting rock bottom. Again. “Right now, it feels so heavy for a lot of people to think of the president, by executive fiat, attempting to get rid of this commemoration,” Williams said. “The irony for me is that...