Celebrating Black History Month- Resource Round Up – The Delight Directed Homeschooler

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I understand why we have a Black History month. However, I would encourage you not to wait for February to introduce Black History to your homeschool. Why not include these amazing people and events throughout your year?!?!

Here are some facts you may or may not know about Black History Month:

Black History Month takes place for the entire month of February.
Carter G. Woodson is responsible for starting the ball rolling.
Woodson joined four others in founding the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH) to encourage scholars to engage in the intensive study of the Black past.
Black History month began in 1924 with the creation of Negro History and Literature Week, which was later renamed Negro Achievement Week.
Woodson chose February because of the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, two great Americans who played a prominent role in shaping black history.
Woodson believed that history was made by the people, not simply or primarily by great men. He did not want to celebrate the “negro race” as producers of great men, but to celebrate the race as a whole. “Rather than focusing on two men, the black community, he believed, should focus on the countless black men and women who had contributed to the advance of human civilization.”
In 1976, the annual celebration shifted from one week to an entire month.
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.”
Since the first Negro History Week in 1926, other countries have joined the United States in celebrating Black people and their contribution to history and culture, including Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands.
For Woodson, such associations and commemorations provided a kind of “real education” – one that “inspires people to live more abundantly, to learn to begin with life as they find it and make it better.”

I’ve spent some time rounding up activities, videos, books, and virtual fieldtrips you could include in your homeschool this month as you teach your children more about Black History.

Virtual Field Trips

National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, TN. My kids and I have visited the museum on two different occasions. It is a sobering experience. The museum is built around the former Lorraine Motel, the place where Martin Luther King Jr. spent his final hours before being shot and killed.

Civil Rights Trail: “The fight for American civil rights spanned decades, cities and states – from Topeka, Kansas, to Memphis, Tennessee, from Atlanta, Georgia, to Selma and Birmingham, and all the way to Washington, D.C. Chart the course of the Civil Rights Movement through the Civil Rights Trail that begins with the site of school integration and takes you to the scene of Bloody Sunday and finally the Supreme Court of the United States.”