February is Black History Month.

I’d offer the post I did a couple of weeks ago on Martin Luther King Jr Day, which is here.  This post contains Martin Luther King Jrs Letter from the Birmingham Jail, and the letter from Birmingham church leaders at the time, which led to his response from Jail about Easter time, 1963.  If you haven’t read it, or haven’t read it for some time, take the time to take it in today.  There are some small ‘gymnastics’ to get the two letters – that is intentional on my part.

Heather Cox Richardson gives a succinct history of the day here (Feb. 1 2026).

Of course, nothing is easy these days.  February 1 I heard that the President had signed the usual proclamation for Black History Month.  No such luck.  (You can find one if you’re diligent.  The one he signed was January 31, 2025, one year ago less than two weeks into his reign.)

Maybe we can all have an informal Everybody’s History Month between now and July 4, 2026, without diminishing Black History.  There can be other notes, like the significance of January 6, 2021….  We, everyone of us, are players in the ongoing history of this country of ours.  We cannot simply be spectators.

And Ken Burns 6-part 12-hour History of the American Revolution is still widely available on Public Broadcasting (PBS) – it just replayed within the last week, and I’m sure it will replay again.  Contact your station.  Rachel Maddow’s pod cast Burn Order, about the disgraceful interning of the Japanese in WWII America is also available.

Jan 13, long-time friend and colleague Paul wrote about the Burns series:

I watched, slowly, the Ken Burns series and was impressed by the detail, depth and breadth of the stories told.  Of course, there were many things we never learned when we were young.  Some because we were kids and would never have absorbed it all – imagine teaching a 6th grade class American history and trying to include it all in depth.  However, it is instructive to think about the selection of stories we were told and the ones that were not selected. There was obvious bias in that selection.  Burns gets to most of those missing pieces. Finally, women, indigenous people, slaves and free blacks and poor mountain men and more are all included in the series. Thank you, Ken Burns.  Now if we can just get the flag-waving, history erasing, politicians and their followers to watch this, we might have a chance to save our country.

COMMENTS:

from John:  Hopefully tensions in Minnesota have lessened a little bit– heard a long interview with the mayor of Minneapolis and he seemed to be hopeful – and it appears that the “Short Attention Span Theatre” that is our president has moved on to other things. I’m sure that won’t last though…