Self-guided learning opportunities for Black History Month, February 2022
We’re proud to celebrate Black History Month at Planet as a time to listen, learn, and reflect on Black culture. We’ve identified a number of self-guided learning opportunities that we’ll be engaging in throughout the month, and encourage you to join us!
Wednesday, February 2, 2022
Community + Conversations with a Docent, Creative Griots – The African American History and Culture Museum will host conversations with museum docents to discover how identity, politics, and creativity are articulated through African American performance, music, cultural expressions, and the visual arts. Together, the program will explore the ways African Americans have harnessed these elements to fuel social change while creating a vibrant culture that extends to the African Diaspora.
Time: 3:00 pm to 4:30 pm ET / 12:00 pm to 1:30 pm PT
Celebrate What Unites Us! In Celebration of Black History Month, African Heritage Cooking Demo – Oldways in collaboration with Age-Friendly Boston and Friends of the Armenian Heritage Park on The Greenway will celebrate Black History Month, by learning to make recipes inspired by the African Heritage Diet.
Time: 10:00 am ET / 7:00 am PT
Saturday, February 5, 2022
National Museum of African American History & Culture Livestream Tour – Come take an online, virtual tour of The National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC. This event is hosted by Robert Kelleman, the Founder/ director of the non-profit community organization, Washington, DC History & Culture.
Time: 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm ET / 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm PST
Sunday, February 6, 2022
Moving Together: UNAPOLOGETICALLY BLACK Yoga Joy for Black Joy & Radical Self-Care – Unapologetically Black Yoga will host non-linear, trauma sensitive Yoga for Black people, to address anti-Black racial trauma from a place of being already resourced.
Time: 10:30 am GMT
Tuesday, February 8, 2022
Art Afterwards: A Book Discussion – The National Portrait Gallery and the DC Public Library will host a virtual conversation about love, second chances, and the power of a great torch song. The group will analyze a portrait of Ella Fitzgerald and discuss the related book, “Seven Days in June” by Tia Williams. Participants will be encouraged to share their favorite romance novels and love songs during the event.
Time: 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm ET / 2:30 pm to 4:00 pm PT
Author’s Book Talk Event: Class Interruptions: Inequality and Division in African Diasporic Women’s Fiction – Association for the Study of African American Life and Health will host an author’s event with Robin Brooks, author of Class Interruptions: Inequality and Division in African Diasporic Women’s Fiction. Brooks offers compelling new insight on literary portrayals of class inequalities and division. She expands the scope of how the Black women’s literary tradition, since the 1970s, has been conceptualized by repositioning the importance of class and explores why the imagination matters as we think about novel ways to address long-standing and simultaneously evolving issues.
Time: 7:00 pm ET / 4:00 pm PT
Monday, February 14, 2022
History Alive! Coming Home: African Americans Coming Home from World War II – The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture will host History Alive! Coming Home – a program that explores stories and artifacts that reflect the economy, health care, education, housing, and political process for military veterans in the aftermath of WWII. Their living history interpreter tells the story of how those engaged in the military made their service useful not only for the good of their country, but to benefit both their personal lives and their community.
Time: 1:00 pm to 2:00 pm ET / 10:00 am to 11:00 am PT
Tuesday, February 15, 2022
LaTosha Brown: Black History Month Keynote Address,
Midterm Matters: Fostering the Emotional Stamina to Stay Engaged – GRCC Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion will host LaTosha Brown, a catalyst for change, thought leader, and social strategist. Brown’s national and global efforts have been known to organize, inspire and catapult people into action, enabling them to build power and wealth for themselves and their community.
Time: 6:00 pm ET / 3:00 pm PT
Tuesday, February 22, 2022
Origins of the African American Middle Class and Entrepreneurship – The Economics & Personal Finance Resources will investigate how individual rights and personal freedoms help lift individuals, their families, and communities up and out of poverty.
Time: 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm ET / 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm PST
Wednesday, February 23, 2022
What You Don’t Know about the Legacies of Slavery: Health and Wellness
The Association for the Study of African American Life and Health will host this presentation on social practices, beliefs, and psychological dispositions that are distinct continuities from slavery. As part of UNESCO’s recognition of this decade as The International Decade of People of African Descent, a multinational team began to study the long-term effects of slavery on people of African descendant. A series of international symposiums were held to explore findings and the results published as The Psychological Legacy of Slavery: Essays on Trauma, Healing, and the Living Past (2021).
Time: 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm ET / 3:30 pm – 5:00 pm PT
A House Built By Slaves: African American Visitors to the Lincoln White House
The National Archives Foundation will host author Jonathan W. White to present the story of how President Abraham Lincoln welcomed African Americans to his White House in America’s most divided and war-torn era and why that transformed the trajectory of race relations in the United States. Beginning with his 1862 meetings with Black Christian ministers, Lincoln invited African Americans of every background into his home, from ex-slaves from the Deep South to champions of abolitionism such as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth. The President conferred with his guests about the essential issues of citizenship and voting rights. Drawing from an array of primary sources, White reveals how African Americans used the White House as a national stage to amplify their calls for equality.
Time: 9:00 pm to 10:00 pm ET / 5:00 pm to 6:00 pm PT
Thursday, February 24, 2022
The Black Family: Representation, Identity & Diversity – The National Archives Foundation in partnership with the Association for the Study of African American Life and History will host a panel discussion with Ida E. Jones, an archivist at Morgan State University, Alison Parker, author of Unceasing Militant: The Life of Mary Church Terrell, and Darius Young, author of Robert R. Church Jr. and the African American Political Struggle, where they will look at the Black family in history, literature, the visual arts, film, sociology, anthropology, and social policy.
Time: 7:00 pm ET / 4:00 pm PT
Friday, February 25, 2022
Black Wall Street and the Threat of Black Financial Stability – The Council for Economic Education will host an economics webinar that examines the rise and fall of Black Tulsa, OK, and the historical implications of race in American financial success. Greenwood, or “Black Wall Street,” a once thriving section of 1920s Tulsa, met its ultimate demise at the hand of White rioters. Begin to explore what the success of this Black neighborhood meant for the town’s White counterparts, and how racial minorities’ independence was, and potentially continues to be, a threat to White power structures in the United States.
Time: 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm ET / 3:00 pm – 4:00 pm PT
Saturday, February 26, 2022
Taking the Stage: Death and the King’s Horseman – A Play Reading – The National Museum of African American History and Culture will host a virtual staged reading of Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman by the Shakespeare Theatre Company and Howard University’s Department of Theatre Arts. Soyinka is a Nigerian novelist, essayist, poet, playwright, and the first sub-Saharan African Nobel Laureate for Literature. Based on an incident in 1946, Soyinka’s work is a powerful examination of the explosive tension between traditional African culture and the West. The 90-minute digital performance will include an overview of the work by LeeAnét Noble, production director and Shakespeare Theatre Company’s director of equity and enrichment, and contributions by Georgetown University’s Dr. Soyica Colbert and Shakespeare Theatre Company dramaturg Dr. Drew Lichtenberg.
Time: 7:00 pm to 8:30 pm ET / 4:00 pm to 5:30 pm PT
Watch, Listen, Learn Asynchronous Opportunities
The Oakland Museum of California’s “Black Power” Exhibit
“Langston Hughes 101: Understanding a Poet Of the People, For the People”
Listen to “The Works of Langston Hughes”
Additional Resources
Washington D.C. Virtual Itinerary for Black History Month
Library of Congress – African American History Month
Smithsonian Education – Black History Month
National Park Service – African American Heritage
National Archives – African American History Portal
National Endowment for the Humanities – African American History and Culture
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