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I'll Make Me a World : The 100-Year Journey of Black History Month
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Overview
On its one-hundredth anniversary, a powerful and essential meditation on the origins, evolution, and future of Black History Month from one of America's leading historians of Black education and the author of American Grammar.
In I'll Make Me a World, acclaimed Harvard scholar Jarvis R. Givens takes us on a personal and political journey through the 100-year history of Black History Month--from its radical beginnings in 1926 as "Negro History Week" to its role today as a celebration and flashpoint in America's cultural battles. Drawing on archival research, personal stories involving family and students, and especially the wisdom of Black educators, Givens recovers the legacy of Carter G. Woodson and many others who envisioned Black history as a liberatory force--knowledge that shapes who we are, how we resist, and what we dream.
With striking clarity, Givens challenges today's myopic commemorations of iconic figures and urges us to expand our understanding of Black history to include the everyday lives of ordinary people--the "workadays" whose stories have long gone untold but form critical parts of Black history. Indeed, people who played important roles in passing on Black memories that helped disrupt oppressively narrow perspectives on human life. Givens also attends to the labor involved in preserving Black history, especially in intellectual environments where it is constantly denigrated and undervalued, and he insists that more transparency about such processes is necessary to ensure this worthy tradition is passed on to future generations.
I'll Make Me A World is a call to remember, reimagine, and reclaim an intellectual tradition built by communities well before our time, and to take seriously what is politically at stake in its preservation. At a time when Black history is under attack, this book offers an inspiring vision for how it can still be a source of power, truth, and possibility.
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Details
- ISBN-13: 9780063478824
- ISBN-10: 006347882X
- Publisher: Harper
- Publish Date: February 2026
- Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 1.3 inches
- Shipping Weight: 0.75 pounds
- Page Count: 256
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The subtitle of Jarvis R. Givens’ probing, illuminating I’ll Make Me a World is “The 100-Year Journey of Black History Month.” But from the get-go, Givens writes that the four potent sections of the book are “not a retelling of events chronicling the development from Negro History Week through Black History Month.” We do learn that history indirectly throughout his book. Negro History Week began in February 1926 during the long era of official segregation. The observance was the brainchild of Dr. Carter G. Woodson, the second Black person to receive a doctorate in history from Harvard. The celebrations were partly to counter the oft-repeated assertion that African Americans had no history. We also learn that as the nation’s 1976 bicentennial approached, the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History noted that 1976 was also the 50th anniversary of Negro History Week and pressed a reluctant President Ford to support a month-long observance. He did so via a presidential message rather than the stronger form of a presidential proclamation. Givens recounts how Black History Month was largely co-opted by corporate interests, moving far from its historical roots in the liberatory struggle of enslaved people. The heart and subject of I’ll Make Me a World are the people Givens calls “black memory workers,” a term he borrows from Black women archivists “to describe the enterprise of recovering, preserving, and bearing witness to black history.” Some are well-known individuals like Frederick Douglass, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston and W.E.B. Du Bois. But most are unsung schoolteachers, thinkers and community members who passed forward the knowledge that “black people did things.” For Givens, Black history cannot be ceded to professional historians alone. He calls on Black memory workers to urgently attend to “everyday histories of black life and culture.” Givens’ deeply informed examination of the dense weave of people engaged in Black memory work is both eye-opening and often quite moving. Givens is professor of education and of African American studies at Harvard. His writing is passionate and clear. While not polemical, it does not—can not—avoid being political. He is appalled by the current threats to free speech and attacks on teaching Black history. The study of Black life “emerged as a criticism of racial chattel slavery and the formation of its afterlives in the modern world,” he writes. “Memory work and black history itself are political.” Givens’ vibrant reanimation of this history will leave readers with much to ponder about our nation’s past, present and future.
The subtitle of Jarvis R. Givens’ probing, illuminating I’ll Make Me a World is “The 100-Year Journey of Black History Month.” But from the get-go, Givens writes that the four potent sections of the book are “not a retelling of events chronicling the development from Negro History Week through Black History Month.” We do learn that history indirectly throughout his book. Negro History Week began in February 1926 during the long era of official segregation. The observance was the brainchild of Dr. Carter G. Woodson, the second Black person to receive a doctorate in history from Harvard. The celebrations were partly to counter the oft-repeated assertion that African Americans had no history. We also learn that as the nation’s 1976 bicentennial approached, the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History noted that 1976 was also the 50th anniversary of Negro History Week and pressed a reluctant President Ford to support a month-long observance. He did so via a presidential message rather than the stronger form of a presidential proclamation. Givens recounts how Black History Month was largely co-opted by corporate interests, moving far from its historical roots in the liberatory struggle of enslaved people. The heart and subject of I’ll Make Me a World are the people Givens calls “black memory workers,” a term he borrows from Black women archivists “to describe the enterprise of recovering, preserving, and bearing witness to black history.” Some are well-known individuals like Frederick Douglass, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston and W.E.B. Du Bois. But most are unsung schoolteachers, thinkers and community members who passed forward the knowledge that “black people did things.” For Givens, Black history cannot be ceded to professional historians alone. He calls on Black memory workers to urgently attend to “everyday histories of black life and culture.” Givens’ deeply informed examination of the dense weave of people engaged in Black memory work is both eye-opening and often quite moving. Givens is professor of education and of African American studies at Harvard. His writing is passionate and clear. While not polemical, it does not—can not—avoid being political. He is appalled by the current threats to free speech and attacks on teaching Black history. The study of Black life “emerged as a criticism of racial chattel slavery and the formation of its afterlives in the modern world,” he writes. “Memory work and black history itself are political.” Givens’ vibrant reanimation of this history will leave readers with much to ponder about our nation’s past, present and future.