Black History Month: Home

The 2025 Black History Month theme, African Americans and Labor, focuses on the various and profound ways that work and working of all kinds – free and unfree, skilled, and unskilled, vocational and voluntary – intersect with the collective experiences of Black people.

Black History Month is an annual celebration of achievements by African Americans and a time for recognizing their role in U.S. history.  Since 1976, every U.S. president has officially designated the month of February as Black History Month.

February was chosen primarily because the second week of the month coincides with the birthdays of both Abraham Lincoln, and Frederick Douglass. Abraham Lincoln was influential in the emancipation of slaves, and Douglass, a former slave, was a prominent leader in the abolitionist movement, which fought to end slavery.