By Shamecca Brown, Columnist
“A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.” — Marcus Garvey
It’s Black History Month again. And if I’m being honest, I almost forgot.
That sentence scares me, not because I don’t know who I am or where I come from, but because it reminds me how brutal this society has been. How loud survival has become. How heavy life feels some days. When you’re busy protecting your peace, your children, your home, and your sanity, the calendar can quietly flip without permission.
And that’s exactly why this matters.
Black history has never been a once-a-year conversation in my household. It’s not something I dust off in February and tuck back away in March. It lives in our everyday language – in the stories I tell my kids, in the music playing while we clean, in the way I explain why certain doors were closed before we ever touched the handle, and how our people still built houses without blueprints.
I teach my kids Black history the same way I teach them kindness, accountability and self-worth – consistently and without apology. So the fact that I almost forgot this month shook me. Because being forgotten is happening a lot.
Black stories get buried under trending topics. Black pain becomes background noise. Black joy gets questioned, monitored, and sometimes punished. And if we’re not careful, even we can get so caught up in surviving that we forget to pause and remind ourselves, and our children, who we are and whose shoulders we stand on.
I don’t want my kids to think Black history starts with chains and ends with a hashtag. I want them to know its brilliance, resistance, creativity, love, mistakes, lessons, laughter and legacy. I want it to feel normal to talk about Harriet and Malcolm the same way we talk about math homework or weekend plans. Because it is normal. It’s our inheritance.
February isn’t a reminder for me, it’s a check-in. A moment to ask: “Am I still doing the work the other 11 months?” Am I still correcting narratives when they show up wrong in classrooms? Am I still teaching my kids to be proud without teaching them to be hardened? Am I still telling the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable?
The answer is yes, but the near-forgetfulness reminded me how intentional we have to be. This world does not reward remembrance. It rewards speed, silence and distraction. And when history is inconvenient, it gets minimized, renamed or erased. That’s why I refuse to let Black history live in a box labeled “February.”
We talk about it when we’re driving. When questions come up. When my kids notice injustice and ask why. We talk about it when it’s joyful and when it’s painful. We talk about it because forgetting is a luxury we don’t have. Because remembrance is resistance. Teaching our children daily is protection. And Black history deserves more than one month, it deserves to breathe, to be spoken, and to be lived out loud. Every day.
We are not forgotten, unless we allow ourselves to stop remembering.
Shamecca Brown is a New Hampshire-based columnist who is family-oriented and passionate about serving underserved communities. These articles are being shared by partners in the Granite State News Collaborative. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.