From Negro History Week to Black History Month—And Why They Can’t Erase What Lives in Us
One hundred years ago, a Black man with a vision and a pen decided that if America wouldn’t tell our story, we would say to it ourselves.
In 1926, Dr. Carter G. Woodson—the son of formerly enslaved parents who earned a Ph.D. from Harvard—launched Negro History Week. He deliberately chose the second week of February to honor the birthdays of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. But more than that, he chose it as an act of resistance. An act of love. An act of defiance against a nation determined to write us out of its own history.
Now, a century later, as we celebrate Black History Month 2026, we find ourselves in another moment of resistance. Books are being banned. Curricula are being gutted. The words “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion” are being treated as threats. And once again, some forces want to erase us—not just from history books, but from public life itself.
But here’s what they don’t understand: You cannot erase what lives in us.
The Story They Don’t Want You to Know
When we talk about Black History, we must speak of the whole story—including the BIPOC LGBTQ+ leaders, artists, activists, and everyday people who shaped our movements, our culture, and our survival. Their stories aren’t footnotes. They are the main text.
Bayard Rustin was the architect of the 1963 March on Washington. He taught Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. the principles of nonviolent resistance. He organized one of the most transformative moments in American history. And he was a proud, openly gay Black man who was nearly erased from civil rights history because of who he loved. In 2013—fifty years after the March—President Obama posthumously awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. They tried to erase him. They failed.
Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera—Black and Brown transgender women—were at the front lines of the 1969 Stonewall Uprising, the rebellion that ignited the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement. For decades, their contributions were minimized, sanitized, or ignored. But the truth has a way of rising. Today, Marsha’s face is immortalized in monuments, and her name is spoken with reverence by those who understand that Black trans women have always been on the front lines of liberation.
James Baldwin gave us language for our pain and our power. His essays, novels, and speeches remain as urgent today as when he wrote them. A Black gay man who refused to be silent about race or sexuality, Baldwin warned us: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” We are still facing it. We are still changing it.
Audre Lorde —self-described “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet”—taught us that our silence will not protect us, and that caring for ourselves is an act of political warfare. Her words echo through every pride celebration, every protest, every moment we choose visibility over safety.
Pauli Murray —lawyer, activist, and priest—developed the legal arguments that would later be used in Brown v. Board of Education and helped inspire Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s gender discrimination cases. Murray, who identified as gender-nonconforming decades before the language existed, was a towering figure whose brilliance shaped American law. The fact that many Americans still don’t know this name is precisely the erasure we’re fighting against.
Why This Moment Matters
In 2026, we mark 100 years since Dr. Woodson’s audacious act of self-determination—and 30 years since Atlanta Black Pride was founded to serve our community. The timing is not lost on us.
We are living through a moment of unprecedented attacks on our communities. LGBTQ+ rights are being rolled back. DEI programs are being dismantled. Black history itself is being labeled “divisive.” There are those who believe that if they remove enough books, cancel enough programs, and silence enough voices, they can make us disappear.
They are wrong.
Our history is not in a book they can ban. It’s in the songs our grandmothers hummed while they worked. It’s in the recipes passed down through generations. It’s in the way we gather, the way we mourn, the way we celebrate, the way we love. It’s in the pulse of go-go music and the sway of a praise dance. It’s in the ballroom scene and the church pew, the barbershop and the hair salon, the kitchen table and the front porch.
Our history lives in us.
Standing at the Intersection
At Atlanta Black Pride, we’ve spent three decades creating space for those of us who live at the intersection of identities—Black and LGBTQ+, proud and vulnerable, resilient and human. We know that our liberation is bound together: there is no Black freedom without queer freedom, and no queer freedom without Black freedom.
The contributions of BIPOC LGBTQ+ people to Black History aren’t separate from Black History—they are Black history. Every justice movement has been strengthened by queer and trans Black people, whether their identities were acknowledged or not.
This Black History Month, we honor them all: the famous and the forgotten, the celebrated and the silenced, those who lived openly and those who loved in secret. We honor the ancestors who survived so we could thrive. We honor the elders who fought so we could live. We honor the young people who are writing the next chapter of our story right now.
The Work Continues
Dr. Woodson created Negro History Week because he believed that “if a race has no history, it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated.”
A hundred years later, the work of preserving and celebrating our history is more vital than ever. Not because we need permission to exist, but because our stories deserve to be told—fully, authentically, and proudly.
So this February, tell the stories. Say the names. Celebrate the heroes—including the queer ones, especially the trans ones, particularly the ones they tried to erase. Teach the children. Remember the elders. Honor the ancestors.
And know this: No matter what they ban, what they cut, what they try to silence—they cannot erase what lives in us.
We are our ancestors’ wildest dreams. And we’re just getting started.