Black History Month: The African American Experience: Black History Month 2026: A Century of Black History Commemorations

The Association for the Study of African American History and Life (ASAHL) has selected this annual theme to honor the evolution of historian Carter G. Woodson's concept of "Negro History Week" into a month-long, scholarly movement to study, teach, and disseminate Black history.

2026 marks a century of national commemorations of Black history. Dr. Carter Godwin Woodson, George Cleveland Hall, William D. Hartgrove, Jesse E. Moorland, Alexander L. Jackson, and James E. Stamps institutionalized the teaching, study, dissemination, and commemoration of Black history when they founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH) on September 9, 1915.

In 1925, when Dr. Carter G. Woodson planned the inaugural week-long observance of Black history, he could have hardly anticipated the imprint he would leave on the world. From Negro History Week to Black History Month, ASALH has carried forth the tradition and the observances have become part of the wolf and warp of American culture and increasingly the global community. For its 100th theme, the Founders of Black History Month urges us to explore the impact and meaning of Black history and life commemorations in transforming the status of Black peoples in the modern world.

As part of the global African Diaspora, people of African descent in the United States have viewed their role in history as critical to their own development and that of the world. Along with writing Black histories, antebellum Black scholars north of slavery started observing the milestones in the struggle of people of African descent to gain their freedom and equality. Revealing their connection to the diaspora, they commemorated the Haitian Revolution, the end of the slave trade, and the end of slavery in Jamaica. They observed American emancipation as Watch Night, Jubilee Day, and Juneteenth celebrations. Eventually they feted the lives of individuals figures who fought against slavery, most notably Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. The scholar Arthur A. Schomburg captured the motivation of Black to dig up their own history and present it to the world: “The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future.”

Click here to read the full description of the ASAHL 2026 theme.

Check out these links to learn more about the origins and future of Black History Month: