AMANDA GORMAN, U.S. YOUTH POET LAUREATE, WILL BE GUEST SPEAKER AT JAN. 20, 2020 EVENT

Called the 'next great figure of poetry in the US', at 19-years-old, Amanda Gorman is a published author and the first ever Youth Poet Laureate of the United States of America. 

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She's spoken around the country from the UN to the Library of Congress, alongside the likes of Lin-Manuel Miranda and Hillary Clinton Her first poetry book, "The One For Whom Food Is Not Enough", was published in 2015 by Pemanship Books.  She is Founder and Executive Director of One Pen One Page, which promotes literacy through free creative writing programming for underserved youth. She is a Harvard junior in the top of her class, and writes for the New York Times student newsletter The Edit.

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photo credit: Anna Zhang

The History of Black History

by Elissa Haney

Americans have recognized black history annually since 1926, first as "Negro History Week" and later as "Black History Month." What you might not know is that black history had barely begun to be studied-or even documented-when the tradition originated. Although black people have been in America at least as far back as colonial times, it was not until the 20th century that they gained a respectable presence in the history books.

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We owe the celebration of Black History Month, and more importantly, the study of black history, to Dr. Carter G. Woodson. Born to parents who were former slaves, he spent his childhood working in the Kentucky coal mines and enrolled in high school at age twenty. He graduated within two years and later went on to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard. The scholar was disturbed to find in his studies that history books largely ignored the black American population-and when black people did figure into the picture, it was generally in ways that reflected the inferior social position they were assigned at the time.

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Woodson, always one to act on his ambitions, decided to take on the challenge of writing black Americans into the nation's history. He established the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (now called the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History) in 1915, and a year later founded the widely respected Journal of Negro History. In 1926, he launched Negro History Week as an initiative to bring national attention to the contributions of black people throughout American history.

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Woodson chose the second week of February for Negro History Week because it marks the birthdays of two men who greatly influenced the black American population, Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. However, February has much more than Douglass and Lincoln to show for its significance in black American history.

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