Frederick Douglass is dead.  In 2017, it was not clear President Donald Trump knew this fact. In 2025, he may still not know.

While kicking off Black History Month in 2017, Trump hosted a “listening session” at the White House, leaving attendants scratching their heads wondering if he knew Douglass – a self-liberated former enslaved male turned abolitionist – died in 1895. Trump described Douglass as “somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more.”

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Then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer did little to clarify what Trump meant when he added, “I think he  [Trump] wants to highlight the contributions he has made. And I think through a lot of the actions and statements he’s going to make, I think that the contributions of Frederick Douglass will become more and more.” The remarks could have been made on an episode of “Drunk History,” a TV comedy series where an inebriated narrator fumbles to recount historical events.

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It is moments like these that illustrate why we need Black History Month – and an intensive tutorial for Trump and his administration then and now.

The myth of a post-racial society

After the election of Barack Obama, queries arose concerning the future need for Black History Month.  Many voters whose ballots helped elect the country’s first African-American president expressed that celebrating Black History Month seemed outdated. To them, its continuation was a relic tethered to an old defunct paradigm of the 1960s Black Civil Rights era. Apparently, maintaining this celebration of Black history hindered the country’s progress.

Obama’s  candidacy was thought to have eradicated America’s Original Sin and marshaled in America’s dream of a  “post-racial” era where race had finally become  a “non-issue.” Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) even stated in 2019 that Obama’s election made up for the “sin of slavery.”

In trying to prove how “post-racial” Obama was as a presidential candidate, Michael Crowley of The New Republic wrote in a 2008 article that it wasn’t only liberals who had no problem with Obama’s race but also conservatives who had no problem, even ex-Klansman David Duke. “Self-described white nationalists like himself, he explained cordially, ‘don’t see much difference in Barack Obama than Hillary Clinton–or, for that matter, John McCain,'” Crowley wrote about Duke.

Obama’s election encapsulated for some whites the physical and symbolic representation of Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision laid out in his historic “I Have a Dream” speech during the 1963 March on Washington. 

But since the march, Black Americans have seen the deliberate, racist political misuse of MLK’s quote,  “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. ” 

The quote has been used to discredit all race-based remedies for historical injustice: Affirmative Action, reparations, Critical Race Theory, African American History, and now DEI. It’s no surprise that Trump 2.0’s war on DEI has led to the cancellation of Black History Month celebrations across multiple federal agencies, as well as the cancellation of events for other “identity months.”

For years, the celebration of Black History Month has aroused conservative ire around “identity politics” and “special rights.” The late Republican Senator John McCain argued that these “special rights” were why he didn’t vote for the MLK Holiday or acknowledge it until, of course, he ran against Obama for the presidency in 2008. 

Identity politics and “special rights,” however, have always benefitted white Americans and perhaps people of color in Trump’s camp. During Trump’s first presidency, he cut funding for fighting white supremacy to focus exclusively on Islamic extremism. In this term, Trump gave all the January 6th insurrectionists a get-out-of-jail pardon.

Trump’s actions have emboldened his followers to not only contest the celebration of Black History Month but to insist on a white history month. 

Still, we rise

During Black History Month, we gather to celebrate us. After 250 years of slavery, followed by 90 years of Jim Crow and then 60 years of “separate but equal” discriminatory practices, we still rise. Our history is a canon for survival and an archive for future generations to pass along because our lived experiences are sacred texts. It’s Trump’s hubris to assume we need his permission to celebrate.

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