African American History Month 2024
Orgins of Black History Month
Black History Month is an annual celebration of achievements by African Americans and a time for recognizing their central role in U.S. history.
African American Artists: Digital Art Collections
Alabama & African American Artists
Celebrate African American History Month 2024
- 2024 Theme: African Americans & The ArtsFebruary is African American History Month and is the annual celebration of the many contributions African Americans have made throughout history. African American art is infused with African, Caribbean, and the Black American lived experiences. In the fields of visual and performing arts, literature, fashion, folklore, language, film, music, architecture, culinary and other forms of cultural expression, the African American influence has been paramount. African American artists have used art to preserve history and community memory as well as for empowerment. Artistic and cultural movements such as the New Negro, Black Arts, Black Renaissance, hip-hop, and Afrofuturism, have been led by people of African descent and set the standard for popular trends around the world. In 2024, we examine the varied history and life of African American arts and artisans.
Events Happening for Black History Month 2024
- JSCC Black History Month ProjectIn commemoration of Black History Month, yet in celebration of ALL our family stories, we announce the launch of our Oral History project in February.
- Bham Now: Black History Month 2024 – How to Celebrate in BirminghamAs a city with rich ties to the Civil Rights Movement, Birmingham is not short of places to visit or events to commemorate the role African American leaders have played in U.S. history. Keep reading for ways to celebrate this legacy in the Magic City.
- Birmingham Civil Rights Institute EventsBlack History Month 2024: Celebrating African Americans & the Arts
- Birmingham Public Library Celebrates The Arts This Black History Month 2024 With 81 ProgramsCelebrate Black History Month at the Birmingham Public Library this year with a variety of programs, like film screenings and art programs—including an art exhibition of contemporary Gee's Bend quilts! There are 81 programs happening across 16 active BPL library branch locations this February.
Events Happening in Clanton: JSCC-Chilton Campus
- Feb 13, QR Code investigation of Phillis Wheatley - Portraits Podcast by the Smithsonian https://npg.si.edu/podcasts/phillis-wheatley
- Feb 20, 2:00pm Room 204 Writing Inspirations with Dr. Pouncey - come learn to hone your writing craft
- Feb 27, 12:30pm Lobby - Gee's Bend Poetry Reading and Quilting Activity with Sharon Stewart
Events Happening at Shelby/Hoover Campus:
- Black History Trivia Bowl: Wednesday, February 28, 2024, at 11:30 a.m. The trivia bowl will be in person in the multipurpose room in the Judy Merritt building on the Shelby-Hoover campus. Pizza will be provided. Prizes for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners for each trivia bowl will be awarded.
African American Quilters: Gee's Bend
Quilts That Embody the Legacy of Black America: About an hour southeast of Selma, on a horseshoe bend of the Alabama River, sits Gee’s Bend, a town of roughly 200 people whose homemade quilts hang in museums and galleries worldwide. A 14-mile trail of wooden billboards reveals the legacy of the town and its quilting matriarchs.
Gee's Bend: The residents of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, are direct descendants of the enslaved people who worked the cotton plantation established in 1816 by Joseph Gee.
The Freedom Quilting Bee by ISBN: 9780817303105Publication Date: 1987-12-30The original book on the renowned Freedom quilters of Gee's Bend. In December of 1965, the year of the Selma-to-Montgomery march, a white Episcopal priest driving through a desperately poor, primarily black section of Wilcox County found himself at a great bend of the Alabama River. He noticed a cabin clothesline from which were hanging three magnificent quilts unlike any he had ever seen.
African American Poets
From the Poetry Foundation: Poems, articles and podcasts that explore African American history and culture.
African American Literature & Folklore
The Power of Poetry: The New Negro Renaissance to the Black Arts Movement: Known as the Harlem Renaissance, or the New Negro Renaissance, this creative upsurge in music, visual arts, theater, and literature found full expression in Harlem, Chicago, Washington, DC and other cities nationwide; it was a tangible form of racial uplift for African Americans.
Harlem Renaissance: In the 1920’s, creative and intellectual life flourished within African American communities in the North and Midwest regions of the United States, but nowhere more so than in Harlem. The New York City neighborhood, encompassing only three square miles, teemed with black artists, intellectuals, writers, and musicians.
Black Arts Movement: The Black Arts Movement began—symbolically, at least—the day after Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965. The poet LeRoi Jones (soon to rename himself Amiri Baraka) announced he would leave his integrated life on New York City’s Lower East Side for Harlem. There he founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre, home to workshops in poetry, playwriting, music, and painting.
Afrofuturism: Afrofuturism is a genre that centers Black history and culture and incorporates science-fiction, technology, and futuristic elements into literature, music, and the visual arts. Often using current social movements or popular culture as a backdrop, Afrofuturism focuses on works that examine the past, question the present, or imagine an optimistic future, and are meant to inspire a sense of pride in their audience.
Before Harlem by ISBN: 9781621902027Publication Date: 2016-03-15Despite important recovery and authentication efforts during the last twenty-five years, the vast majority of nineteenth-century African American writers and their work remain unknown to today's readers. Moreover, the most widely used anthologies of black writing have established a canon based largely on current interests and priorities. Seeking to establish a broader perspective, this collection brings together a wealth of autobiographical writings, fiction, poetry, speeches, sermons, essays, and journalism that better portrays the intellectual and cultural debates, social and political struggles, and community publications and institutions that nurtured black writers from the early 1800s to the eve of the Harlem Renaissance.
Behold the Land by ISBN: 9781469663036Publication Date: 2021-06-07In the mid-1960s, African American artists and intellectuals formed the Black Arts movement in tandem with the Black Power movement, with creative luminaries like Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Cade Bambara, and Gil Scott-Heron among their number. In this follow-up to his award-winning history of the movement nationally, James Smethurst investigates the origins, development, maturation, and decline of the vital but under-studied Black Arts movement in the South from the 1960s until the early 1980s.
The Black Arts Movement by ISBN: 9780807829349Publication Date: 2005-05-09Emerging from a matrix of Old Left, black nationalist, and bohemian ideologies and institutions, African American artists and intellectuals in the 1960s coalesced to form the Black Arts Movement, the cultural wing of the Black Power Movement. In this comprehensive analysis, James Smethurst examines the formation of the Black Arts Movement and demonstrates how it deeply influenced the production and reception of literature and art in the United States through its negotiations of the ideological climate of the Cold War, decolonization, and the civil rights movement.
Building the Black Arts Movement by ISBN: 9780252042430Publication Date: 2019-03-30As both an activist and the dynamic editor of Negro Digest, Hoyt W. Fuller stood at the nexus of the Black Arts Movement and the broader black cultural politics of his time. Jonathan Fenderson uses historical snapshots of Fuller's life and achievements to rethink the period and establish Fuller's important role in laying the foundation for the movement.
The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature by ISBN: 9780195138832Publication Date: 2001-02-15A breathtaking achievement, this Concise Companion is a suitable crown to the astonishing production in African American literature and criticism that has swept over American literary studies in the last two decades. It offers an enormous range of writers-from Sojourner Truth to FrederickDouglass, from Zora Neale Hurston to Ralph Ellison, and from Toni Morrison to August Wilson.
Contemporary African American Literature by ISBN: 9780253006257Publication Date: 2013-08-28In this volume, Lovalerie King and Shirley Moody-Turner have compiled a collection of essays that offer access to some of the most innovative contemporary black fiction while addressing important issues in current African American literary studies. Distinguished scholars Houston Baker, Trudier Harris, Darryl Dickson-Carr, and Maryemma Graham join writers and younger scholars to explore the work of Toni Morrison, Edward P. Jones, Trey Ellis, Paul Beatty, Mat Johnson, Kyle Baker, Danzy Senna, Nikki Turner, and many others.
Understanding James Baldwin by ISBN: 9781611179644Publication Date: 2019-04-30The Harlem-born son of a storefront preacher, James Baldwin died almost thirty years ago, but his spirit lives on in the eloquent and still-relevant musings of his novels, short stories, essays, and poems.
Visualizing Blackness and the Creation of the African American Literary Tradition by ISBN: 9781107041585Publication Date: 2014-02-17Negative stereotypes of African Americans have long been disseminated through the visual arts. This original and incisive study examines how black writers use visual tropes as literary devices to challenge readers' conceptions of black identity. Lena Hill charts two hundred years of African American literary history, from Phillis Wheatley to Ralph Ellison, and engages with a variety of canonical and lesser-known writers.
African American Music
Roots of African American Music: African American music cannot be separated from the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the forced transportation of millions of African people across the Atlantic who were then enslaved. The cultures from which they were torn and the conditions into which they were forced both contributed to the sounds of African American music.
Birth of the Blues: Southern African Americans developed blues music in the decades that followed the end of slavery. It incorporated elements of West African music that they retained during their American experience.
Timeline of African American Music: From the moment the first African slaves arrived on the shores of the Americas in the 16th century, a process of cross-cultural musical dialogue was set into motion that has continued to the present. From the United States to South America, Central America and the Caribbean, a constellation of African musical traditions have blended with musical practices of Western European and Native American origin to form the foundations of the music cultures of the African diaspora.
Revolutionary Concepts in African American Music: Since slavery, African Americans have infused their musical expression with revolutionary messages indicative of their unique and troubled journey in the New World. Through music they have demonstrated resilience...
Musical Crossroads: African American Influence on American Music: Describing the African-American influence on American music in all of its glory and variety is an intimidating—if not impossible—task. African American influences are so fundamental to American music that there would be no American music without them.
Hip Hop & Rap Across the Smithsonian: Explore hip-hop and rap-related collections from across the Smithsonian that offer perspective on the African American experience and its impact on American culture.
Black Country Music by ISBN: 9781477326497Publication Date: 2022-10-042023 Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame 2023 ARSC Awards for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research, Association for Recorded Sound Collections 2023 The Judy Tsou Critical Race Studies Award, American Musicological Society How Black musicians have changed the country music landscape and brought light to Black creativity and innovation.
The Intertwining of Culture and Music: Love and the Times by ISBN: 9781443898744Publication Date: Newcastle upon Tyne : Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 2017This volume explores various kinds of love and the way music reflects them. It is about romantic love, ethnic pride and love, love and the media, and various other loves we have, especially love for popular culture.
Music in Black American Life, 1945-2020 by ISBN: 9780252044588Publication Date: 2022-08-23In this collection, a group of predominately Black scholars explores a variety of topics with works that pioneered new methodologies and modes of inquiry for hearing and studying Black music.
Race Music by ISBN: 9780520210486Publication Date: 2003-06-01This powerful book covers the vast and various terrain of African American music, from bebop to hip-hop. This lays the foundation for a brilliant discussion of how musical meaning emerges in the private and communal realms of lived experience and how African American music has shaped and reflected identities in the black community.
African Americans: Theater and Performing Arts
Black Theatre: Wake up Black Theater--Theater can both reflect racism against African Americans and offer a vehicle for activists to fight against discrimination. In this way, theater tells the story of the struggle for racial justice from the late 1800s through the twentieth century. The general trend in black theater has been away from the struggle for inclusion in white-dominated institutions and toward the establishment of cultural autonomy.
Black Playwrights You Should Know: The Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute is celebrating Black artists in theatre and highlighting sixteen Black playwrights you should know. Continue reading for a biography of each playwright and a selection of their notable plays.
The Transformative History of African American Theater--The Transformative History of African American Theater: From the African Grove Theater to "Shuffle Along" An exhibition at the Gallatin Galleries explores seminal moments in Black theater history and their impact on musical theater today.
Alvin Ailey: ALVIN AILEY (1931–1989) founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (AAADT) to carry out his vision of a company dedicated to enriching the heritage of American modern dance as well as safeguarding the uniqueness of the African American cultural experience.
Breaking Barriers on Stage: African Americans Ballet Dancers Who Made History--Before Misty, few African Americans have ever danced in the principal position at a major American ballet company. All but one were men.
From Servants to Outlaws: 100 Years of Black Representation in Hollywood Films: From Hollywood's beginnings, Black people were mostly given roles as subservient maids, butlers, slaves and sharecroppers in movies with regressive, racist messages. But over the last century, there have also been movements, from the Harlem Renaissance to the L.A. Rebellion, to present Black people as real, nuanced human beings with stories worth telling on film.
Five You Should Know: Black Actresses Who Refused to Be Typecast-Through their achievements in the dramatic arts, African American women have broken barriers, enriched American culture, and inspired audiences around the world. Over time, the roles that black artists played on the stage and screen reflected changing aspirations, struggles, and realities for women of color in American society.
African American Theater Buildings by ISBN: 9780786449224Publication Date: 2011-08-17African American theater buildings were theaters owned or managed by blacks or whites and serving an African American audience. Nearly 2,000 such theaters, including nickelodeons, vaudeville houses, storefronts, drive-ins, opera houses and neighborhood movie theaters, existed in the 20th century, yet very little has been written about them.
After August by ISBN: 9780813942995Publication Date: 2019-08-08Critics have long suggested that August Wilson, who called blues "the best literature we have as black Americans," appropriated blues music for his plays. After August insists instead that Wilsons work is direct blues expression. Patrick Maley argues that Wilson was not a dramatist importing blues music into his plays; he was a bluesman, expressing a blues ethos through drama. After August makes a significant contribution to the scholarship on Wilson and his undeniable impact on American drama.
Dancing in Blackness by ISBN: 9780813056616Publication Date: 2017-12-30Dancing in Blackness is a professional dancer's personal journey over four decades, across three continents and 23 countries, and through defining moments in the story of black dance in America. In this memoir, Halifu Osumare reflects on what blackness and dance have meant to her life and international career. Now a black studies scholar, Osumare uses her extraordinary experiences to reveal the overlooked ways that dance has been a vital tool in the black struggle for recognition, justice, and self-empowerment. Her memoir is the inspiring story of an accomplished dance artist who has boldly developed and proclaimed her identity as a black woman.
Macbeth in Harlem by ISBN: 9781978809994Publication Date: 2020-06-12For over a century, black performers had fought for the right to perform on the American stage, going all the way back to an 1820s Shakespearean troupe that performed Richard III, Othello, and Macbeth, without relying on white patronage. "Macbeth" in Harlem tells the story of these actors and their fellow black theatrical artists, from the early nineteenth century to the dawn of the civil rights era.
Staging Faith by ISBN: 9780814707951Publication Date: 2013-10-25In the years between the Harlem Renaissance and World War II, African American playwrights gave birth to a vital black theater movement in the U.S. In a time of profound social transformation fueled by a massive migration from the rural south to the urban industrial centers of the north, scripts penned by dozens of black playwrights reflected cultural tensions, often rooted in class, that revealed competing conceptions of religion's role in the formation of racial identity.
African American Visual & Performing Arts
African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Era and Beyond presents works dating from the early 1920s through the 2000s by black artists who participated in the multivalent dialogues about art, identity, and the rights of the individual that engaged American society throughout the twentieth century. Artist: (James Van Der Zee)
African American Artists & Selected Work: Explore a selection of self-portraits and other works by Black artists in the Smithsonian's collections. Visual Art and The American Experience at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, illustrates the critical role American artists of African descent have played in shaping the history of American art.
Black Women of the Harlem Renaissance Era by ISBN: 9780810885424Publication Date: 2014-10-16The Harlem Renaissance is considered one of the most significant periods of creative and intellectual expression for African Americans. Beginning as early as 1914 and lasting into the 1940s, this era saw individuals reject the stereotypes of African Americans and confront the racist, social, political, and economic ideas that denied them citizenship and access to the American Dream. While the majority of recognized literary and artistic contributors to this period were black males, African American women were also key contributors.
Images of Black Modernism by ISBN: 9781613760505Publication Date: 2010-09-01Focusing on the years from 1922 to 1938, this book revisits an important moment in black cultural history to explore how visual elements were used in poems, novels, and photography to undermine existing stereotypes. Miriam Thaggert identifies and analyzes an early form of black American modernism characterized by a heightened level of experimentation with visual and verbal techniques for narrating and representing blackness.
African Americans & Culinary Arts
Five Ways Black Women Shaped Food History: Black women have influenced American food history in countless ways. Several Smithsonian museums and Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III recently shared stories of Black Food History on social media. They highlighted women who nourished families and communities.
African American Chefs You Should Know: Before the 1970s, Aunt Jemima’s pancake box carried the stereotypical image of a black cook, illustrating how the American food industry undervalued Southern cooks and cooking. Today, a new wave of African American chefs safeguard Southern foodways. As they reintroduce recipes in the nation’s top kitchens, they humanize how the public sees black chefs.
How Enslaved Chef's Helped Shaped American Cuisine: It is the story of people like Chef Hercules, George Washington's chef; and Emmanuel Jones, who used his skills to transition out of enslavement into a successful career cooking in the food industry, evading the oppressive trappings of sharecropping.* It is also the story of countless unnamed cooks across the South, the details of their existences now lost.
Bound to the Fire by ISBN: 9780813174730Publication Date: 2017-11-17For decades, smiling images of "Aunt Jemima" and other historical and fictional black cooks could be found on various food products and in advertising. Although these images were sanitized and romanticized in American popular culture, they represented the untold stories of enslaved men and women who had a significant impact on the nation's culinary and hospitality traditions, even as they were forced to prepare food for their oppressors.
High on the Hog by ISBN: 9781608194506Publication Date: 2012-01-24New York Times bestseller From the Winner of the James Beard Lifetime Achievement Award Now a Netflix Original Series The grande dame of African American cookbooks and winner of the James Beard Lifetime Achievement Award stakes her claim as a culinary historian with a narrative history of African American cuisine. Acclaimed cookbook author Jessica B. Harris has spent much of her life researching the food and foodways of the African Diaspora. High on the Hog is the culmination of years of her work, and the result is a most engaging history of African American cuisine. Harris takes the reader on a harrowing journey from Africa across the Atlantic to America, tracking the trials that the people and the food have undergone along the way.
Hog and Hominy by ISBN: 9780231146395Publication Date: 2010-06-09Frederick Douglass Opie deconstructs and compares the foodways of people of African descent throughout the Americas, interprets the health legacies of black culinary traditions, and explains the concept of soul itself, revealing soul food to be an amalgamation of West and Central African social and cultural influences as well as the adaptations blacks made to the conditions of slavery and freedom in the Americas.
The President's Kitchen Cabinet by ISBN: 9781469632537Publication Date: 2017-02-20An NAACP Image Award Finalist for Outstanding Literary Work--Non Fiction James Beard award-winning author Adrian Miller vividly tells the stories of the African Americans who worked in the presidential food service as chefs, personal cooks, butlers, stewards, and servers for every First Family since George and Martha Washington. Miller brings together the names and words of more than 150 black men and women who played remarkable roles in unforgettable events in the nation's history.
Recipes for Respect by ISBN: 9780820353661Publication Date: 2019-03-15Food studies, once trendy, has settled into the public arena. In the academy, scholarship on food and literary culture constitutes a growing river within literary and cultural studies, but writing on African American food and dining remains a tributary. Recipes for Respect bridges this gap, illuminating the role of foodways in African American culture as well as the contributions of Black cooks and chefs to what has been considered the mainstream.
African Americans & Fashion
Trailblazer, fashion icon, creative force: Andre' Leon Talley: The greatest luxury,’ proclaimed André Leon Talley in a 2010 interview with the Yale Daily News, ‘is to be a kind, good person and to impart to humanity something that will enrich their lives, to have a moment with someone that you’ve imparted richness.’ Through his insistence, Talley was able to throw open the doors of the fashion world for a much wider group of people.
Black Fashion Icons You Should Know: African Americans have participated in the fashion industry in various roles, including as designers, dressmakers, seamstresses and influencers. They have found ways to build spaces for their creative expressions, even when they have faced intensively challenging circumstances such as prejudices and discrimination based on race, gender and classism.
Fashion and Jazz by ISBN: 9780857851260Publication Date: 2015-03-26Drawing on fashion studies and cultural theory, the book provides an in-depth analysis of the social and political entanglements of jazz and dress, with individual chapters exploring key themes such as race, class and gender.
