Black History is recognized by many within our nation during the month of February.

Negro History Week was established in 1929 by acclaimed historian Dr. Carter G. Woodson to educate Americans about notable African Americans and their achievements.

He noted that African American contributions “were overlooked, ignored, and even suppressed by the writers of history textbooks and the teachers who use them.”

Race prejudice, he concluded, “is merely the logical result of tradition, the inevitable outcome of thorough instruction to the effect that the Negro has never contributed anything to the progress of mankind.”

Woodson selected the second week in February, because it contained the birthdays of both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglas, who were pivotal in the struggle for freedom by those of African descent. In 1976, the Bi-Centennial year of our nation, Negro History Week was expanded to become Black History Month.

In 1986, the first year Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day was recognized as a federal holiday, President Ronald Reagan issued Presidential Proclamation 5443. The proclamation proclaimed “the foremost purpose of Black History Month is to make all Americans aware of this struggle for freedom and equal opportunity.”

“Black history is a book rich with the American experience but with many pages yet unexplored,” Reagan wrote.

Now, there is often debate as to whether or not there is a need to continue to celebrate Black History Month in this nation.

There are those who may feel that the African American community has reached the “Promised Land” that King spoke of on the night prior to his assassination, with the election of President Obama in 2008.

But the last seven years since the Obama election hardly make up for the 396 years of contributions made toward the establishment and development of this nation by people of African descent, which have not been fully explored.

As the first Africans who had been enslaved were introduced on this continent in 1619, and here in what would become Natchez in the year 1716.

Black history must be acknowledged as it is an integral part of American history. With each passing day the Natchez Museum of African American History & Culture has as its mission, an effort to expose yet another paragraph among the pages of that book that President Reagan spoke of.

We’re not here to rewrite history, but to call attention to some of its omissions.

Come pay us a visit.

Darrell S. White is director of the Natchez Association for the Preservation of Afro-American Culture.