February is Black History Month—officially observed as such by President Gerald Ford in 1976, America’s bicentennial year, to celebrate the contributions of Black Americans to our nation. It began as a week of remembrance established in 1926 by Carter G. Woodson, founder and president of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. He chose the second week in February because it coincided with the birthdays of President Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, the former slave who became a famous orator, author, and abolitionist. Later, in 1986, Congress designated the month of February as “National Black History Month.”

I didn’t know about the origins of Black History Month until I was preparing this editorial. This made me wonder about the many other things I wasn’t aware of concerning the history of Black Americans in this country. It wasn’t until last year, on its centennial, that I learned about the massacre that destroyed the Black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921. And it was only in the last few years that I learned about the Tuskegee syphilis study conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service from 1932 until 1972. (Yes, 1972!) In this study, originally known as the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,” participants with syphilis were […]