Welcome to Karen Hunter's awesome. I'm Karen Hunter, and this week marks the 100th anniversary of Negro History Week, which we now call Black History Month.

It was founded, of course, by Carter G. Woodson, actually on February 7, 1926, but this is the

week, the corridor that holds both the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, which he, of course, didn't know when he was

born because he was born enslaved, which was February 14th. That's the date that he picked, and Lincoln was

February 12th. And Carter G. Woodson, while a lot of people, why are the Black History Month? Why do we

have the shortest month of the year? Well, that's why. It's not because it was the shortest month.

It's because that month held significance for black people. And Carter G. Woodson, being the

visionary that he was and still is, because we celebrate him. To this day, we still erect his name,

understood that it was important to create a ritual that people could connect to. This is a man whose parents were born in bondage. In fact,

he was the first person to graduate from Harvard, Harvard, the Harvard with parents, graduate

with a PhD from Harvard with parents who were enslaved. W.B. Du Bois, of course, is the first

black person to graduate from Harvard. But who were enslaved. W.B. Du Bois, of course, is the first black person to

graduate from Harvard. But for Woodson, his foundation in the coal mines of West Virginia and his

entree into education reading from black newspapers every day to the coal miners, educating

them of what's going on in the world, sparked in him this desire to want to go out and teach.

Negro History Week was an amalgam of other iterations of rituals that had centered, formerly enslaved black people, on the 200-year erasure of their history.

And what Carter G. Woodson said is that it's not black history, it's not Negro history.

It's Negroes in history, meaning that we are history.

Our stories matter.

Everything that we've done and accomplished must be remembered.

We must recover our memory.

So Negro History Week was founded with the hopes that 100 years from now, we would be talking

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