Black history first began being celebrated and recognized by Black historian Carter G. Woodson and other intellectuals who gathered at a national celebration of the 50th anniversary of emancipation in Chicago in 1915. The fair featured exhibits highlighting the progress Black people had made since the destruction of slavery. Woodson published The Journal of Negro History in 1916, and as early as 1920 began urging Black civic organizations to promote the historical Black achievements researchers were discovering.

They went on to start the creation of Negro History and Literature Week in 1924, later called Negro Achievement Week, and then in 1926, renamed Negro History Week, to take place a week in February to commemorate the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. As early as the 1940s, Blacks in West Virginia began celebrating all of February as Black History Month, and various states and cities gradually got on board throughout the 1960s.

Black History Month became nationally recognized first by President Ford in 1976, and every president since has made a February proclamation to celebrate Black History Month.

Black History Month is not only an American tradition but a global recognition. While not always in February, a month designating Black History is celebrated in the UK, Germany, Canada, Ireland, France, and in seven countries in Africa.

To kick off your celebration, here are a few noteworthy African American achievements that have shaped our world with beauty, technology, and science.

Philis Wheatley was the first African American to publish a book of poetry, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, in 1773, which she wrote as a slave (she was emancipated soon after its publication). 

The Pizzagate conspiracy theory of the day alleged her poetry was actually written by a white man, since the ideas were too great and the words too beautiful to have been written by a Black woman. Wheatley had to testify in court to a bunch of racist crackers who couldn’t believe Black women wrote poetry. Poet Nikki Giovanni’s appearance on the Blackalicious album NIA would have blown their minds, but not the same way it blows ours. 

Speaking of hip-hop, singer and music producer Sylvia Robinson produced the first-ever commercially successful rap record. Billboard magazine dubbed her “Hip-Hop’s First Godmother.” She conceived and produced the first successful rap record, “Rappers’ Delight,” by the Sugarhill Gang in the summer of 1979, “the first rap single to conquer the radio and the charts — topping Billboard’s R&B tally and reaching No. 37 on the Hot 100 — but the first to sell over a million.” Along with her husband, Robinson co-owned the first hip-hop label, Sugar Hill Records.

African American inventor Henry T. Sampson created the world’s first cell phone. Along with George H. Miley, Sampson was awarded a patent in 1971 for a gamma-electrical cell that made portable cell phones possible. The device used radio waves to transmit and receive audio signals. Motorola engineer Marty Cooper used Sampson’s technology to place the first public call from a real handheld portable cell phone on April 3, 1973.

Sampson was also the first African American student to earn a Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering in the United States, from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1967.

The son of freed slaves, Black inventor Garrett Morgan was the first to patent the gas mask, which was first used to rescue tunnel workers trapped in an underground tunnel in Lake Erie in 1916. A natural gas pocket had exploded, trapping workers. Morgan rode to the scene and offered his gas masks to rescuers, who were able to get the workers safely out. Morgan had marketed the device through a demonstration with a white actor who posed as the mask’s inventor to circumvent racism. The Cleveland Police Department had learned of Morgan’s gas masks through those demonstrations.

The gas mask wasn’t Morgan’s only contribution to our modern world. Four years later, Morgan went onto invent the three-way traffic signal after witnessing a horrific accident between an automobile and a horse-drawn cart at an intersection. Until then, traffic signals only had two settings – stop and go. “My grandfather’s great improvement was the ‘all hold’—what is now the amber light,” his granddaughter Sandra Morgan said. He sold the patent to General Electric, which spread the technology.

The inoculation of smallpox was first developed by a slave named Onesimus in the early 1700s. He told his owner, Cotton Mather (of Salem Witch Trials renown and also a racist cracker who had least had enough sense to listen to his slave) about a folk remedy where he protected himself against smallpox by rubbing the puss of someone infected into a wound in order to gain immunity. This activated the body’s immune response into an inoculation. 

Mather tested the method during a smallpox epidemic in Boston that wiped out 844 – 14% of the population. Mather inoculated 242 Bostonians using Onesimus’s method, and only six died, or about one in 40, as opposed to one in seven deaths among the population of Boston who didn’t undergo the procedure.

Onesimus’ method saved hundreds of lives—and led to the eventual eradication of smallpox.

We owe the world we live to the contributions of Black folks, amazing achievements made in a country whose Constitution legally counted them as 3/5s of a person in the dawn of its time. 

In her poem “BLK History Month,” Nikki Giovanni said it best: 

“If Black History Month is not

viable then wind does not

carry the seeds and drop them

on fertile ground

rain does not

dampen the land

and encourage the seeds

to root

sun does not

warm the earth

and kiss the seedlings

and tell them plain:

You’re As Good As Anybody Else

You’ve Got A Place Here, Too”