The Black Family: Representation, Identity, and Diversity is the 2021 Black History Month Theme. According to ASALH, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (the founding organization of Black History Month), the family has been studied over a wide variety of topics. "Its representation, identity, and diversity have been reverenced, stereotyped, and vilified from the days of slavery to our own time."
A feature from one of our widely used databases, JSTOR, is JSTOR DAILY, their "scholarship-backed magazine" that contains a treasure trove of information. Their first story in February, How Civil Rights Groups Used Photography for Change, tells us how black activists used photography to tell their stories. As one activist said, "If our story is to be told, we will have to write it and photograph it and disseminate it ourselves." We will be updating their stories here so stay tuned.
Througout this month we will be focusing on Black authors. Works featured will include memoirs, history, poetry, essays, science fiction, graphic novels, short stories, plays and fiction. Currently, we are celebrating novelist, essayist, book editor, professor, and Nobel Prize Winner, Toni Morrison. In 2012 she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama. February 18th would have been Ms. Morrison's 90th birthday. "Ms. Morrison placed African Americans, particularly women, at the heart of her writing at a time when they were largely relegated to the margins both in literature and in life. With language celebrated for its lyricism, she was credited with conveying, as powerfully or more than perhaps any novelist before her, the nature of black life in America, from slavery to the inequality that went on more than a century after slavery ended." from Ms. Morrison's obituary - Washington Post