This year, Black History Month is under attack – and is needed more than ever.
Created in 1926 by the great historian Carter G. Woodson, the celebration each February of African American life and history has been officially recognized since 1976. That year, a Republican President – Gerald Ford – issued a proclamation. This year, the federal government under white nationalist president Donald Trump is moving to end all Black History Month celebrations by federal agencies.
Each year, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History provides a theme for that year’s Black History Month celebration. The association – founded by Carter G. Woodson and the official sponsor of Black History Month – has proclaimed this year’s theme to be “African Americans and Labor.”
This theme is especially fitting for 2025.
Black History Month 2025 is taking place in the midst of a vicious campaign by the Trump administration to incite hatred against African Americans and other people of color. The commemoration is occurring in the midst of a propaganda barrage by Trump and his flunkies designed to convince white workers in blue collar jobs that people of color are their enemy.
In actual fact, from the time of slavery until today, workers of African descent have comprised the heart of the working class of this country. From colonial times until the present, the attacks on the working class as a whole have always started as attacks on Black workers. Throughout our history, when Black workers have been pushed backward, everyone ultimately suffered. When Black workers have advanced, everyone has moved forward.
In a very real sense, this country was founded on the oppression of people of African descent. The slave trade created the vast wealth for the modern capitalist system. As long as Black workers could be forced to work without any wages whatsoever, it was almost impossible for white workers to significantly increase their own wages. As W.E.B. Du Bois observed, in the U.S. “…slave labor in conjunction and competition with free labor tended to reduce all labor toward slavery.”
It was only after the abolition of chattel slavery that there was any possibility whatsoever of a credible trade union movement in the United States. And even after the Civil War, the overthrow of the progressive Reconstruction governments in the South turned the former Confederacy into a bastion of conservatism which has dragged down the wages and social conditions of workers in the rest of the country ever since.
In the industrial era, many trade unions – especially in the most skilled occupations – refused to admit Black workers, helping to lock Black workers into the most impoverished section of the working class and ensuring privileges for white workers. Black workers were often the last hired and the first fired, paid low wages, and barred from the skilled trades.
Today, vast changes are transforming the economy. The end of the industrial era is creating an equality of poverty among workers of all ethnicities, as many white workers are beginning to experience the economic conditions once felt largely by Black workers. Regardless of their color or immigration status, the workers of the United States now have common class interests – even if some don’t realize it yet. This creates the possibility of a common struggle against the billionaires who rule us — a struggle across color lines. While there is much more work to be done to forge the necessary unity, and it will be difficult, we have seen examples of that unity developing in various struggles for a number of years, and this is a hopeful sign.
Today, there is no possible demand that the Black worker can put forward that is not in the interest of all workers. When Black workers in Flint, Michigan demand clean water, that demand is in everyone’s interest. When Black women teachers in Chicago refuse to let Trump’s bullies invade their classrooms to snatch away immigrant children, that brave stand helps all workers. Today, when Black workers demand decent health care or good public schools or an end to police terror, the solutions they demand would help us all.
That’s why Black History Month 2025 should be a time for all workers to reflect on the contributions that Black workers have made to the fight for justice in America.
During this Black History Month 2025, it’s time to re-assert the truth that Black workers have always comprised the very heart of the most embattled section of the working class of this country. Black history is at the very center of American history.
The Trump administration’s attack on Black History Month and other important holidays is just one part of its sick campaign to divide the working class by appealing to the ugliest parts of this country’s past. Let’s all ensure that this depraved move fails.
