One Hundred Years Of Black History

A century after Negro History Week, we revisit why the project began as a corrective and why it still protects our minds and communities today. With historian and storyteller Donald Payton, we trace a clear arc: Reconstruction’s fragile gains, the textbook erasures that shrank national memory, and the coalition of churches, abolitionists, and early colleges that opened doors when the state would not. Along the way, we explore how media—from black newspapers to early film—preserved truth, spread migration routes, and too often sold damaging caricatures that still echo in public perception.

We get specific about the psychology of erasure: what happens when innovators design the filament, the interface, or the skyline and someone else collects the credit. Payton names the minority stress that follows, the anger and exhaustion of doing everything right and being written out anyway. We contrast Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois to show how strategy debates shaped education and class mobility, then examine the “illusion of inclusion” that followed integration—when school names, curricula, and civic rituals softened history rather than integrating the full truth.

This conversation is practical at heart. We talk about defending libraries under pressure, funding neighborhood bookstores, building family reading lists that start before 1619, and teaching media literacy that explains both the Chicago Defender’s quiet power and Hollywood’s loud distortions. The throughline is mental health: knowledge of self stabilizes identity, expands the horizon of possibility, and restores dignity across generations. If Black History Month is a doorway, the work is what we carry through it—policies, habits, and stories that honor the whole.

Listen, share with a friend who loves real history, and help us pass the truth forward. If this resonates, subscribe, rate, and leave a review so more people can find the show.

Transcript

Opening And Centennial Context

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to One Soul Matters, the educational podcast of the St. Louis Community Dynamics Church Mental Health Ministry, where we're exploring a section of faith, emotional well-being, and today the intersection of history. I'm your guest host, Reverend Jermaine Alberty, and today we present a very special Black History Month episode marking 100 years since the founding of what began as Negro History Week in 1926. Before it was a month, before it was widely recognized, it was a corrective act, an intentional intervention against historical rapture. It was a declaration that black history did not begin with slavery, and it would not be confined to footnotes in someone else's narrative. In this conversation, we are honored to sit down with historian Donald Payton, who helps us to trace the social, political, psychological, and cultural forces that made Negro History Week necessary, and why its purpose remains urgent. Today, we will explore reconstruction games and backlogs, the role of churches, institutions, and black advancement, psychological impact of historical racial, media representation, and the ongoing responsibility to move from awareness to action. Because history is not just about the past, it shapes identity, it shapes dignity, and it shapes mental and communal health. Let's begin. That's right, a hundred years since Black History Month was established, and it actually wasn't established as a month. It was established initially as a week. And so, Donald, thank you so much for joining us for this podcast interview. Yes. So our first question is around Reconstruction and the need for Negro History Week. I want to talk about how the gains made during Reconstruction, such as voting rights, black political leadership, and the founding uh black colleges, create both progress and vulnerability that made Negro History Week necessary.

Reconstruction Gains And Vulnerabilities

SPEAKER_01 2:18

Well, it was a time when we were coming out of the Civil War and coming out of, I call it kind of like absolute slavery, plantation slavery, and uh people were just allowed to vote. We were allowed to vote starting in uh 1867. We were in some states, and here in Texas, we were allowed to register the vote, and uh we were starting to get our first college graduates, a lot of the people who had come out of slavery, their uh parents encouraged them to go to school. We start getting colleges in the 1870s. It was a time for learning, and everybody was glad to learn and uh go to college and graduate for the first time. So the the political aspect was allowed to vote. We had black senators and congressmen during the Reconstruction era. So, you know, that was kind of a positive move for us.

Textbooks And Erased Heritage

SPEAKER_00 3:41

I I think what's so important what you just said is that in the Reconstruction era, there were black senators and black House of Representatives. I think it's always interesting when people say the you know the first black senator and the U.S. Senate, kind of ignoring that history of Reconstruction. But I think the reason why that gets ignored is because black contributions were excluded from textbooks. And so I want to ask you In what ways did the omission of African heritage and global black contributions from textbooks distort national identity and limit how black Americans understood themselves?

SPEAKER_01 4:27

Well, one thing that they kind of left out is teaching us that our culture and our history didn't start with slavery. And that's kind of where America put us in that position, never teaching us about our African roots and our African contributions. So it gave us the impression that nothing happened in this country. We didn't make any contributions in the world until the slavery era, not teaching us about people like uh Hannibal and Toussaint, the Overture and Dessaline, and people down in San Domingo, what we call it Haiti now, their contributions, and you know, even uh all the way back into our African heritage, they just deleted that from the textbooks, and then we have to go back further than slavery to get uh a true view of uh of what African history and African American history was about.

Churches, Abolitionists, And Colleges

SPEAKER_00 5:52

You know, having that lost history that wasn't taught, it really speaks to who teaches that history. My next question is around the role of churches in academic institutions. Can you tell me how the churches, abolitionists and early educational institutions, both black founded and state supported, work together to establish colleges and create spaces for black advancement?

SPEAKER_01 6:20

Well, in some cases, they were one and the same. The churches through progressive ministers started our universities, started our colleges, and you had whites coming out of the abolitionist movement, starting colleges like Berea College up in Kentucky, was started by abolitionists named Cassius Marcellus Clay and John G. T. They started Berea. You had the church and all starting Oberlin, and even in Texas, we had the ministers and white people working together to start Bishop College and Wiley College, Johnson C. Smith, which was bitter, started by abolitionists, and also it was a time when blacks and whites worked together for the betterment of black top people by starting black universities. And then you had the state universities starting in the 1860s and 1870s, state-supported universities like South Carolina State, down in Texas. We had Prairie View AM, those land grant colleges.

Carter G. Woodson’s Purpose

Integration And The Illusion Of Inclusion

SPEAKER_00 7:56

Well, that's a rich history. Carter G. Woodson on February 7, 1926, initiated the first celebration of Negro History Week, which led to the Black History Month, uh to extend and deepen the study and scholarship on African-American history. Carter Woodson, a quote, this crusade is much more important than the anti-lynching movement because there would be no lynching if it did not start in the school room. I want to move our conversation now to shifts since 1926. I want you to talk about how did the transition from self-determined black historical study to moving to integration, how do those things affect the purpose and the emphasis of Negro History Week and later Black History Month?

Beyond Familiar Civil Rights Figures

SPEAKER_01 8:48

Well, it was uh a time in there that uh we knew that uh white people weren't gonna teach us about ourselves. The most important knowledge that you can ever have is knowledge of the self. So if it was gonna be done, we had to do it. But then as we started to go into integration, we started assuming that we were just going to be accepted with what we had and who we were. I call it the era of the illusion of inclusion. And uh so we started saying, well, why we want to celebrate uh Negro history, we all are, we we all won now. We all American. And so let's just study American history, but then even that was all kind of watered down because I noticed in the South we went to schools that were named for black educators and black heroes. Booker T. Washington, Paul Launch, Dunbar, and George Washington, Carver. And that was a part of our identity. But then also we had schools named for Thomas Jefferson and a lot of uh white people that owned slaves, but you know, then we weren't thinking about uh what they had done because they were presented to us as the great American heroes rather than uh who they really were. James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, all of these guys who who bought and sold slaves, that was part of that indoctrination to where those were people that we were presented as heroes, like Christopher Columbus and all of those different guys, a lot of them pirates, and uh, we going to schools named for these people.

SPEAKER_00 11:11

I have another question that I want to ask you. Can you give me some names of some earlier labor organizers, educators, and thinkers that others may not be familiar with beyond the familiar civil right era figures?

The Psychology Of Erasure

SPEAKER_01 11:27

Philip Randolph organized the first union and brotherhood of sleeping car porters. That was the first middle class sleeping car porters. And you had Booker T. Washington. A lot of the leaders didn't necessarily like Washington because you know Washington said, don't worry about politics, just train the hands. And then DuBoy's, he just wanted the talented tens, just the people who educated in the white universities like he was.

SPEAKER_00 12:07

So now I want to talk about the psychological impact of erasure. And my next question is what emotional psychological consequences arise when black achievement is minimized, overlooked, or credited to others?

Media, Newspapers, And Stereotypes

SPEAKER_01 12:23

Oh, well, you know, if it erases who you are and what you've done and made it seem like what you do is insignificant, then that hurts an example. It was a guy named William Sidney Pittman, who graduated from Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia. At that time was the top engineering school in the world. And Booker T Washington got him enrolled. Booker T was a friend of Drexel, and they enrolled Sydney. Sydney graduated a five-year program in three years at the top of his class. And when Sydney graduated, all of the guys who were under him got commissions to build Philadelphia, to build all of the skyscrapers and all of the fine buildings in Philadelphia. And Sydney was relegated to building small churches and gymnasiums and that kind of thing. So you can imagine what his ego was like. He married Booker T. Washington's daughter, he married Portia Washington, but he did all of the right things, but he never got commission to build a skyscraper in Philadelphia. And all of the guys who were under him got those commissions. So he so you can imagine how marginalized he was, how angry he was. And uh, you know, that's a kind of thing that uh we have to deal with. I had a very dear friend, a guy named Beauregard Andrew Harderman, a graduate of uh Mohaus, and he designed the computer mouse. Yeah, and he designed the computer mouse, but the guy that was over the program, the team got all of the credit and possibly all of the money. Lewis Latimer worked for Edison, and he designed the long-lasting filament that we use in our light bulbs, and Edison got the credit. So, you know, we've been marginalized and you know, second banana for a long, long time, man. You know?

SPEAKER_00 15:34

When we think about media and messaging and representation, how black newspapers, film, and early television both preserve community truth and at times perpetuated harmful stereotypes that shaped public perception.

From Awareness To Action

SPEAKER_01 15:50

Well, as far as the media was concerned, basically all of our news for years and years came out of the black newspapers. And every major city had a black newspaper, some cities had more than one. Some of them had daily newspapers, some of them had weekly newspapers, and and even in a lot of small towns, they had they had newspapers. And then when the newspapers were outlawed, the the porters, the sleeping car porters on the trains, used to throw the newspapers out in the South. And because they were outlawed, news, black newspapers were outlawed in the South, but the porters would throw them out in the woods, and the black people would get the newspapers, and they found out about what was happening in Chicago through that Chicago Defender. You had the Cleveland Collins Post, and the people in the South say those newspapers encouraged people to run away and go north for better jobs and better living conditions. So the black newspaper was outlawed in uh in a lot of places. So that was our basically our media outlet, and uh, you know, you you never really want to downplay the network of the black mouth. Yeah, that black mouth gets to places where the internet will never go, you see, and uh people put out messages through our music. A lot of the songs were message songs, and then when television came about, you know, it was a real special occasion when you saw a black person on television. People would go from house to house and tell people that this black person because and they gathered around television because not everybody had a TV coming out of the 40s and early 50s. So uh we were exposed to, you know, the middle class was exposed to uh television, but it was nothing on television for us. And even in the in the movies, the movies developed uh some people like Herb Jeffries, who was a singing cowboy, and uh then you had uh blacks in the movies, but they all played either subservient or dimwits, and we had a guy who one of our first media stars was a guy named Stephen Fetchett, and uh he used to explain to people because people thought that Stephen Fetchett was a real character, and the guy that played him, his name was Lincoln Perry. And Lincoln Perry says, Don't y'all get me confused with Stephan Fetchett. Now, I hang Stephen Fitchett up in a locker when I leave the lot, and Lincoln Perry goes home in a limousine to a house overlooking Beverly Hills. So, you know, we and even in White America, they had a movie that came out called The Birth of a Nation, done by D. Griffith, and it lit a fire under the Klu Kluck Klan, because the Birth of a Nation was the first movie that a lot of people had ever seen, and they were white people in blackface, and white people believed it, and well, even today, our movie heroes are the closest thing that we have to royalty. Well, that that harks back to black people, black men who were in the early movies had to do blackface. And uh you had a guy, the most popular comedian in the world at the time was a guy named Burt Williams. And Burt Williams uh was a blackface comedian, was the highest paid comedian in the country for, well, really in the world for years, and he used to say that uh being having to wear a blackface, it wouldn't hurt so bad if he didn't still hear the laughter. He'd be in the back taking off his blackface, and the people were still laughing at his jokes. But once he, as long as he had that blackface on, he could go in anywhere. But as soon as he took that blackface off, he had to get back in his place. And so you had a lot of those guys who were successful as blackface comedians, and uh they were out except a guy named Pygmy Malcolm. Pygmy, he did a thing called Here Come the Judge, Here Come the Judge, and uh he used to put blackface On and he'd laugh about it because he was blacker than the blackface that he was putting on. So he was whitening up. Instead of blackening up, he was whitening up. And you know, he was one of the last of the blackface, blackface comedians. And so, you know, that again goes back to wearing having to wear a dress. And you know, some kind of way, you just got to always dehumanize, dehumanize yourself. You know, you just can't be a straight up, a straight up guy. You got to have uh some kind of flaw about you, you know, something that they can hold over your head.

SPEAKER_00 22:49

I want to ask one final question. From awareness to action, after learning black history, how can individuals move beyond awareness to tangible action?

SPEAKER_01 23:04

So, you know, we've got our neighborhood bookstores. We can support them. There we've got one here in Dallas called the Pan African Connection, and uh, they have information. You can uh support your local library that you pay for because this current administration is clamping down on libraries, and they're taking all of the black books and black magazines off the shelves, and they're doing it with the governor, the president's permission. And so I like to say, get off Facebook and put our face in a book.

Closing Reflections And Call

SPEAKER_00 23:56

What a way to wrap up the interview. Get off Facebook and put your face in our book, my friends. I have been talking with Donald Payton, a historian, and as you can tell, storyteller. This has been One Soul Marriage Podcast, and thank you so much for listening. Thank you for inviting me. You are welcome. As you conclude this powerful Black History Month conversation, we are reminded that history is not merely about dates and names, it's about identity, memory, and dignity. Historian Donald Payton has helped us understand that Negro History Week, now Black History Month, was never simply celebratory. It was corrective, it was protective, it was restorative. It was a declaration that knowledge of self is essential to freedom. When contributions are erased, when achievements are minimized, when narratives are distorted, the consequences are not only political, they are psychological. They affect self-worth, belonging, and generational confidence. That's why this conversation matters to a mental health ministry. Awareness, however, is only beginning. As Mr. Peyton reminded us, get off Facebook and put your face in a book. Support black bookstores, protect libraries, teach the full story, study beyond February, and most importantly, pass the truth forward. On behalf of the Second Community, UMC Mental Health Ministry, thank you for joining us for this special edition of One Soul Matters. I'm Reverend Jermaine Audi, and we are grateful to historian Donald Payton for sharing his wisdom and storytelling. Until next time, remember every soul matters and every story deserves to be told.