This month marks 100 years since Americans first celebrated what would eventually become Black History Month.

On our video podcast, Settle In, we marked the centennial with award-winning journalist and writer Michael Harriet.

We talked about the ongoing fight over how history is taught and his best-selling book, Black A.F. History, which argues that black history

isn't a counter-narrative to the American story, but the narrative itself. Here's part of that

conversation. There's so much reverence around America's founding story, and your take on

Jamestown stands out because it was so irreverent and biting. And you portray the

English settlers, not as these heroic figures, but as these sort of bumbling founders. Tell me more

about that. Yeah. Well, first of all, like of the 109 people who came here, there were nine

survivors. They cannibalized each other. They starved to death

because they ate all their provisions. They didn't know how to plant. They thought they could

like climb in the tree and see the Pacific Ocean. Remember, these were investors. People came here

to make money. They weren't people who explored other nations and they

perished because of their incompetence. And that reframing objectively, right, instead of a mythology

of these rugged individualists who came here looking for freedom, we know that that's not

what they came here for. And to tell that

truth, not just through the eyes of black people, but through an objective lens, it's important.

And then there's what transpired in 1619, which gets a lot of attention now because of the

book. But you look at this not as a symbolic moment, but as a structural one,

the point at which the American colonies became viable because of slave labor.

And even the term slave labor insinuates that it was like the muscles and the brawn

and the, you know, the hard work of those enslaved people.

But it is important to understand the intellectual capacities of these people, the intellectual

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