We’re Celebrating Black History Month Without You, Google Calendar!
February 13, 2025
Did you check your phones? Is it any shock that Google Calendar genuflected to the current scorched-earth administration’s anti-DEI tour and removed Black History Month from its holiday list during Black History Month? Is it a shock that they claimed their holiday list wasn’t “globally scalable or sustainable?” Talk about Big Tech being an avowed fascist’s pick me. Doublespeak and all. Well, guess what, Google Calendar? We don’t need you to recognize Black History Month. Keep on with your Ku Klux Kowtowing while we get this party started.
This year’s theme highlights how Black communities have always been vital to transforming and tooling the US through all varieties of labor, visible and invisible, through the centuries. We have just the handful of labor-themed and labor-adjacent titles from our catalog for the occasion. This inexhaustive list doubles as a shout-out to the labor force of Black writers. Because, yes, writing is labor, too.
“All Labor Has Dignity”
Edited and Introduced by Michael K. Honey
“You are demanding that this city will respect the dignity of labor. So often we overlook the work and the significance of those who are not in professional jobs, of those who are not in the so-called big jobs. But let me say to you tonight, that whenever you are engaged in work that serves humanity and is for the building of humanity, it has dignity, and it has worth. One day our society must come to see this. One day our society will come to respect the sanitation worker if it is to survive, for the person who picks up our garbage, in the final analysis, is as significant as the physician, for if he doesn’t do his job, diseases are rampant. All labor has dignity.”
—Martin Luther King, Jr.
And the Category Is . . . : Inside New York’s Vogue, House, and Ballroom Community
“I often compare [Ballroom] to sports. We have international leagues for basketball, football, swimming. Why don’t we have that for Ballroom? Why aren’t these same brands and corporations treating us the same? If y’all want to give us a coin, give us a coin to create the sort of infrastructure that people can sustain themselves around. Growing up, I always heard you couldn’t put Ballroom on a resume. Well, I have made it part of my life’s mission to disprove that notion. I was like, ‘Why can’t you?’ And so, I don’t want to be an anomaly. I don’t think it should only be me. I think it should be any and everyone who wants to make Ballroom their career. There should be a path to do that. I’m tired of this, ‘Oh, Paris Is Burning. Oh, Vogue. Oh, Vogue Evolution. Oh . . . these things just come up and then just go away for a while.’ But I say, No, kiki happened. No, Pose happened. Now, Legendary happened. We just need to keep going.”
—Twiggy Pucci Garçon in conversation with Ricky Tucker
A Black Women’s History of the United States
“ . . . [B]ecause in just about every battle that Black women have undertaken in the United States, every barrier that they have shattered, and every first accomplishment they have secured, their actions have paved the way not just for other Black women but for all marginalized peoples. Even against their will, Black women’s bodies, knowledge, labor, and offspring have helped develop the country and contributed to its wealth, which laid the foundation for the colonies’ move toward independence.”
—Daina Ramey Berry and Nicole Kali Gross
Kindred
Foreword by Janelle Monáe
“I kept Kevin’s room clean. I brought him hot water to wash and shave with, and I washed in his room. It was the only place I could go for privacy. I kept my canvas bag there and went there to avoid Margaret Weylin when she came rubbing her fingers over dustless furniture and looking under rugs on well-swept floors. Differences be damned, I did know how to sweep and dust no matter what century it was. Margaret Weylin complained because she couldn’t find anything to complain about. That, she made painfully clear to me the day she threw scalding hot coffee at me, screaming that I had brought it to her cold.”
—Octavia E. Butler
The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks: 10th-Anniversary Edition
“Parks’s lifetime of political work ran the gamut of approaches. A longtime admirer of Martin Luther King Jr., Ella Baker, Malcolm X, Septima Clark, and Robert F. Williams, she embraced multiple approaches, given the systematic and pervasive character of American racism. Working alongside the Left from the Scottsboro case to E. D. Nixon’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters to the Highlander Folk School to her association with the National Negro Labor Council, Parks refused to be intimidated by the red-baiting of the era. She also knew that registering to vote and taking her youth group to see the Freedom Train exhibit—let alone galvanizing an organized bus boycott—were revolutionary acts in the postwar South. To her, a united front was key to black struggle.”
—Jeanne Theoharis
“To the unrequited harm done to blacks during slavery and after, the use of apprenticeships to provide former slave owners with slave labor after the Thirteenth Amendment, must be added the experience of these children and families who fought, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, to prevent emancipated children from being pushed back to forced labor. Any consideration of reparative justice must take the suffering of these children and their families into account.”
—Mary Frances Berry
Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty
“[Ruby] Duncan loved her new job. She learned how to cook for thousands of people, and relished the camaraderie of the Sahara kitchen staƒf. Supervisors praised her thoroughness and style, bantered with her, and laughed at her sometimes bawdy jokes. ‘One supervisor would always call me ‘punkin,’’ she says. He also taught her how to prepare 1,200 salads a day. ‘I would get all my bowls and I was in there with both hands flying,’ Duncan says. Even the hotel boss took a liking to her, asking Duncan to personally prepare his grapefruit every morning. ‘I could have stayed and stayed,’ she says.”
—Annelise Orleck
Three Leaves, Three Roots: Poems on the Haiti-Congo Story
“use instead a slow swelling of light that begins at a
beginning when the scar-giver forges the scar and forgets,
and the bearer remembers indelibly the mark on the body,
recalls how a mark can be made on a body. in the ear a clear
consciousness whispered. use instead reply because peace
is a place free of trouble: a blue firmament, a gold sun that
reaches the skin. use instead the equalization of all suns, the
standing next to, the standing for, rotation, and the equi-
librium of stars: objects held together by their own gravity.
gravity is the flame of dissonance, is the mind honed with
the vision of its unity. grave is the fist raised of the body.”
—Danielle Legros Georges, “in this poem, do not use the word revolution”
“Once I found substantive information about one African American woman physician, she led me to the next, and the next. When I felt my knees begin to buckle under the weight of the knowledge that, for well over a century, people like me had been rejected from medical schools and then residency programs solely because of their identities, these black women’s stories were my antidote. They gave me the strength to keep running in my own race toward a career in medicine.”
—Jasmine Brown
The White Peril: A Family Memoir
“My dream for YPP [Young People’s Project] was that it could be a space for young people who nurtured whatever gifts they’d brought into this world, who challenged them to make good use of their gifts—like the basketball court and swimming pool had for me. A space that encouraged young people to be invested in each other’s success, to practice winning and losing together. Some crawl space to become conscious of and perhaps confront the challenges of their generation. I dreamt, like Baba [my father, Bob Moses], that math could be a catalyst for learning, teaching, leading, and organizing, for the self-realization and self-determination required to transcend, to perhaps deconstruct America’s cages.”
—Omo Moses
“By the spring of 1942, the units Morgan had devised, titled Supplementary Units for the Course of Instruction in Social Studies: The Negro in American Life, were ready for classroom use. The new curriculum was unveiled at 2:00 p.m. on Thursday, May 28, 1942, at Emerson Elementary, the school Madeline had left to begin her curricular efforts a year earlier, in a ceremony that involved not only the board of education but also an audience ‘consisting of leaders interested in the field of Negro education.’”
—Michael Hines
About the Author
Christian Coleman is the digital marketing manager at Beacon Press and editor of Beacon Broadside. Before joining Beacon, he worked in writing, copy editing, and marketing positions at Sustainable Silicon Valley and Trikone. He graduated from Boston College and the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. Follow him on Twitter at @coleman_II and on Bluesky at @colemanthe2nd.bsky.social.