hen Joe Biden signed a bill making Juneteenth a federal holiday in 2021, the decision stirred mixed emotions among Black Americans. On the one hand, the nation was finally acknowledging the end of slavery as a crucial moment of revolutionary rebirth in U.S. history. On the other hand, a cherished ritual in many Black communities was suddenly everybody’s business — and plenty of racist coworkers and neighbors who would never get invited to the cookout now got a day off. At that very moment, however, the right-wing assault that would go into overdrive during Donald Trump’s second presidency was threatening all of Black history in Republican-controlled legislatures around the country. “In the boundless satire that is the United States of America,” Jesse Hagopian wrote in 

Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education

, “Juneteenth — the oldest commemoration of the ending of slavery — became a federal holiday at the same time legislators were making it [illegal] to teach about the origins of the commemoration in many states, including in Texas, where the holiday originates.”

For much of the United States’s 250 years,

Black history and the broader field of Black studies of which it is a cornerstone have endured and thrived outside of mainstream attention, studied more often in unofficial, grassroots spaces. But Black scholars and activists have long labored to change that, to secure official space, with impressive results. As a field of research, study, and teaching, Black history has captured more institutional resources than ever before in U.S. history.

Yet our progress is now under systematic, nationwide assault. Why? The truth is that telling Black history is dangerous — and therefore the battle to tell it will always be important. Right-wing extremists cannot tolerate even the most mild, patriotic expressions of Black history because their project is about restoring the pre-civil-rights-era status quo in which white supremacy ruled. Any facts to the contrary need to be erased. But liberals, too, fear Black history when it opens the door to a deeper critique of U.S. society. To acknowledge the validity of Black historical perspectives is to accept the possibility that the U.S. might not be the greatest nation ever, that its white male founders didn’t honor the principle that all men are created equal, and that creating a better future for all of humanity will require taking a hard look at inequality and injustice in the past and present.

he bans and restrictions on teaching that affect nearly half of K–12 students today are nothing new for the United States. They have a long lineage, going back all the way to the colonial period, when legislators reacted to uprisings of enslaved peoples in nearly identical ways. The first time that a colony passed a law to criminalize literacy, for example, was 1740, following the Stono Rebellion in South Carolina.

The uprising had been led by an enslaved Central African person known as Jemmy or Cato, who came from Angola or Congo, where he likely learned to read Portuguese. Over the next 100 years, all the Southern states followed suit. Teaching Black people to read or write was punishable by fines, whippings, and imprisonment. It’s not hard to draw a line from these anti-literacy laws to the anti–Black history laws spreading nationwide today.

Thus, for most of U.S. history, teaching Black history happened in the shadows. By the early 20th century, chiefly through the efforts of Black scholars and activists, it began to come into the light, slowly leading to greater institutional resources and visibility. But progress did not come evenly, nor without negative consequences at each step forward.

The dual centennial celebrations this year of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and of Black History Month illustrate this arc toward capturing greater institutional resources.

Unlike most major New York City cultural organizations, the Schomburg Center is not named for someone fantastically wealthy, but rather for an Afro-Puerto Rican activist, scholar, and bibliophile whose career began, by necessity, outside of formal academic institutions.

Arturo Alfonso Schomburg and most of his collaborators lacked scholarly degrees, titles, and positions, but they nevertheless nurtured a vibrant intellectual culture, centered around Afro-diasporic history and culture.

Schomburg was a prodigious collector of rare books, manuscripts, images, artworks, and other “vindicating evidences” of Black people’s contributions to global culture. He was able to collect so voluminously on his modest wages (his day job was in the mailroom of a bank) because such materials were not valued in society at large. Scholars of Black history would travel from far and wide to Schomburg’s humble Brooklyn rowhouse, where he served as reference librarian, helping researchers navigate the stacks of thousands of items piled in rooms and hallways. He was the collector and the catalog — only he knew what was where.

All of this is heroic and commendable, but Schomburg eventually recognized the limits of his endeavor. In 1926, the New York Public Library, with assistance from the Carnegie Corporation, purchased Schomburg’s collection for $10,000. The purchase set the library’s 135th Street branch on the path to becoming the world-renowned research library that it is today. In a very practical sense, because the

Schomburg Center can control temperature and humidity in a way that Arturo Schomburg could not, the institution made it possible for all of us, 100 years later, to continue to read and use his collection. Schomburg the activist scholar purposely brought his work “indoors,” so to speak, and in doing so dramatically increased its impact.

Likewise, Carter G. Woodson, who initiated Negro History Week 100 years ago in February 1926 (aligned with the

birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass), aimed to promote its institutional adoption as widely as possible. The title of Jarvis R. Givens’s book about Woodson, 

, is a helpful reminder, though, that much of that work was first nurtured in unofficial ways and spaces. Woodson communicated with networks of Black teachers nationwide, regularly mailing them materials to support the teaching of Black history, including timelines, essays, and posters to hang up in their classrooms.

Even in segregated, Black-run schools, lessons on the Haitian Revolution or Reconstruction had to be taught with the door closed in many places, out of sight and earshot of white authorities. Black history was truly contraband, as the appropriate 

 of a recent collection of Black studies scholarship puts it.

Over the decades, Negro History Week spread; in some places, Black educators expanded it to include activities for the whole month of February. Woodson might have been astonished to see a president of the United States, Gerald Ford, officially recognize Black History Month in 1976, giving Woodson’s grassroots initiative the highest possible form of institutional validation.

Honoring Black history became an annual national ritual — but not without costs. No longer the lone province of expert, fugitive educators steeped in the traditions, quantity sometimes replaced quality.

After the Supreme Court declared segregated schooling unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education,

white officials decided that tens of thousands of Black teachers and principals were now superfluous — some 38,000 Black educators were fired in just 10 years. So when the importance of Black history was officially recognized by the federal government, the very people (particularly Black women) most qualified to teach it had long been dislodged from their profession. In recent nationwide surveys, educators in the overwhelmingly white teaching force have admitted that they are ill-equipped to teach Black history topics such as Reconstruction. Authors, educators, and publishers are working mightily to try to fill the gaps, creating the kinds of resources that Woodson’s grassroots networks once regularly relied on producing themselves.

In higher education, the pioneering scholar-activists who laid the foundation of Black history were, for most of the 20th century, mostly shut out. Woodson and W. E. B. Du Bois earned PhDs and could teach in historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), but they were often barred from publishing in mainstream academic journals, denied access to fellowships and other professional opportunities, and even, in some cases, prevented from accessing archives. By necessity, they worked in the margins, building their own institutions, sustained by the communities that cared the most about their work. This foundational work was often led by Black women. Two recent biographies —

 — show the wide political range of Black educator-activist institution building. Hubert Harrison, an early 20th-century working-class intellectual and socialist based in Harlem who is the subject of a new biography by 

, likewise had little opportunity to bring his work “indoors” to mainstream academic institutions. He mostly taught outdoors — literally — on the streets of Harlem, regularly drawing crowds of hundreds of listeners.

The mid-20th-century expansion of higher education and the successes of the civil rights movement changed this dynamic. A new generation of scholars — including many non-Black ones — looked back to the work of figures like Du Bois with interest. Who got to be a scholar changed, too. Military spending fueled the growth of postsecondary opportunities, and hundreds of thousands of working-class youth jumped at the chance to be students. A significant number also became political activists, on campus and off.

Black students played a leading role in this activism, whether in HBCUs or in the predominantly white institutions that they were entering for the first time. Their demands for Black studies in the post–civil rights period changed higher education and opened the door to rethinking curricula across the board, ultimately paving the way for ethnic studies, women’s studies, and, later, queer studies.

Once again, Black history came quite a bit more “indoors,” capturing greater institutional resources and status. After years of shutting out Black studies, especially in predominantly white institutions, universities switched gears and embraced it, though cautiously. Postsecondary education was transformed from a rarefied elite institution to one more people could access. As the U.S. abandoned Southern-style segregation — while carefully preserving its Northern relative — its universities were central to developing ideas about how U.S. society could “manage difference” in the postcolonial, post–Jim Crow world. As historian Roderick Ferguson wrote, for a time, Black studies and other similar disciplines actually became a new source of legitimization for higher education

This created an opening for insurgent student movements to capture institutional resources, further expand curricula and literary canons, and make space for those who had previously been marginalized.

 reminds us, victory and defeat can coexist and often do. Black studies blossomed as a field in the decades surrounding the turn of the 21st century, producing award-winning, groundbreaking scholarship. But higher education overall has been undermined during the era of neoliberalism, struggling under the weight of the accelerating casualization of academic labor, devaluation of humanistic knowledge production in general, declining public investment, and rising costs borne disproportionately by working people.

This toxic combination has diminished opportunities for Black people — and everyone else — to participate in academia. What little space and resources there were for Black studies are now shrinking, not expanding.

here is a political dynamic at work as well. The speed with which universities and other institutions abandoned “diversity” and any commitment to antiracist education in the face of Trump administration attacks shows just how shallow those commitments were in the first place. Even before Trump’s second term, there was a spreading consensus among the highest ranks of higher ed, as in corporate boardrooms and the political class, that it was time for a course correction: The George Floyd uprisings of 2020 and the pro-Palestine student encampments of 2024 had gone “too far” and needed to be rooted out. Diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives were already pared back at postsecondary institutions, along with freedom of speech, intellectual freedom, and faculty governance. The Trump administration’s threats have been a useful cover for an agenda already being implemented.

The bans on teaching directed at K–12 classrooms represent a similar “correction” in primary and secondary education as well. The texts of the bills rammed through state legislatures target “critical race theory” and other academic concepts with language so broad that teachers don’t really know where the line is and which book, activity, or classroom discussion could constitute a violation.

There are many good reasons slaveholders, white supremacists, Confederates, Christian nationalists, and other authoritarians have feared Black history through to the present day. Reactionaries of all stripes share a commitment to hierarchy as an ideal, especially racial hierarchy. They don’t believe that all people are created equal or deserve legal and political equality. That’s why they cannot tolerate liberal multiculturalism or mild celebrations of Black history, even when stripped of its radical content. To the right-wing extremists, teaching Black history is itself “racist,” with educators supposedly reversing the racial hierarchy to put Black people on a pedestal and denigrate white people. But as anyone who has stood in front of a blackboard knows, teaching Black history is nothing of the sort. It is, at its core, a record of struggles to achieve genuine equality and justice.

There can be no denying the scope and the dangers of this assault on Black history. But one unintended consequence may be a strengthening of the grassroots, fugitive channels of education that made it possible to bring our history “indoors” in the first place. On a Zoom call earlier this year organized by the Zinn Education Project and led by Jesse Hagopian, more than 100 K–12 teachers discussed how to teach the Black freedom struggle. I heard from educators nationwide — including some teaching in states where such conversations are now banned — and came away impressed by the resilience of people taking risks to teach the truth. I had the feeling that I was witnessing a meeting of the kind of unofficial network that Carter G. Woodson pioneered.

We shouldn’t romanticize what it means to lose academic jobs, funding, departmental status, and more. These devastating losses ruin people’s lives and are real setbacks; their impacts will be felt for a long time. But they won’t actually stop people from reading, writing, and teaching Black history, one way or another. On the contrary, they can increase interest in the histories that right-wingers want to make “contraband.” A persistent, committed minority will use every resource at its disposal, and create new ones, to keep telling Black history. In doing so, they will lay the foundation for future generations to go further, just as the enemies of Black history fear — to see more and do more to understand the past in order to transform the present and the future.

Students listen to a teacher at a Freedom School held in Roxbury, Mass., Feb. 26, 1964. The Freedom School was one of many organized during a student boycott to protest segregated schools in Boston. Photograph by Bettmann Archive, via Getty Images.

Hammer&Hope

Brian Jones

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The Battle to Tell Black History

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