BLACK HISTORY MONTH 2022
February marks the start of the national, annual observance of Black History Month, and celebration of the achievements of African Americans.
The theme for 2022 focuses on the importance of Black Health and Wellness.
Black History Month was started by Carter G. Woodson, a Harvard-trained historian, who founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915, and later announced “Negro History Week” in 1926, which grew until it’s formal recognition in 1976.
That year, U.S. president Gerald Ford extended the recognition to “honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.”
Black History Month has been celebrated in the United States every February since. Woodson selected the second week of February for the inaugural celebration because it includes the birthdays of both Frederick Douglass, an abolitionist, and former U.S. president Abraham Lincoln.
Since 1976, every U.S. president has officially designated the month of February as Black History Month.
——– a BIT OF HISTORY INFORMATION ——–
James McCune Smith, born in NYC in 1813, was the first African American to earn a medical degree, educated at the University of Glasgow in the 1830s, when no American university would admit him.
In addition to this achievement, Smith was an abolitionist and writer.
He was the first African American to publish peer-reviewed articles in medical journals; he also wrote essays and gave lectures refuting pseudoscientific claims of black inferiority and forecast the transformational impact African Americans were destined to make on world culture.