01/10/2020
It's October 1st and welcome to Black History Month. Confusingly, October is also LGBT History Month in the United States, but for internationally looking programmes such as ours, this gives us the opportunity to mark the amazing contributions of LGBTQ people of colour, sometimes shortened to QTIPOC communities. Black History Month is thought of by many people to date back to the Black Power movement and political counterculture of the late 1960's, which also gave rise to a modern gay liberation movement. But as with the history of homosexual and transgender emancipation, so the history of the Black History Month dates back far earlier than you might realise. It begins with the work of a remarkable historian called Carter Godwin Woodson, who was born in 1875 and dedicated his life and career to the preservation of African-American history and that of the wider Black diaspora globally. Self educated against a background of a state education system that barely catered for the needs of working class white children, let alone African-Americans, Woodson studied in his own time when working and eventually secured a Bachelor of Literature degree. But this was only the start of his ambitions. Woodson moved through the education system, overcoming racist obstacles to secure a Professorship at Howard University. But he recognised that white dominated institutions were not interested or perhaps even capable of providing the black population with the analysis and discussion of their history that was deserved, and so through his career, Woodson worked on projects that foregrounded black experience. In September 1915, he co-founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and soon after, recognising that the movement needed its own publication, so he launched the Journal of Negro History. Dissatisfied with the largest black civil rights network of the day, the NAACP, Woodson found more to his liking in the rapid growth in radical politics in the 1920s when the Harlem Rennaissance was in full swing on the East Coast of the States, and black – and it might added a very black gay culture – was on display in the new media of movie theatres and the radio, as well as in books and magazines. Woodson continued his journalism, writing for the Negro World newspaper, owned and operated by Marcus Garvey a charismatic and foreward thinking man. In 1926, Woodson pioneered the celebration of "Negro History Week",chosen to run in February, to coincide with marking the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. The Black United Students and Black educators at Kent State University expanded this idea to include an entire month beginning on February 1, 1970. In 1987, Black Jewish lesbian activist Linda Bellos was part of team who initiated Black History Month in the UK in October, along with Ghanan Akyaaba Addai-Sebo. Despite Ms Bellos's later distancing from the LGBTQ movement, the contribution of gay, bi and trans black people is a central part of Black History Month in the UK. ShoutOut's home station, BCFM in Bristol, along with many in its family of broadcasters, will be marking Black History Month so remember to stay tuned for interest, information and inspiration.
