In response to both you and thenewgreen, I think that you're kind of right - we shouldn't have a specific time for special attention devoted to them. However, I think that such a thing is needed, at least right now. Why? Because without black history month, no one would ever hear about black history at all. How much does any given student know about Hispanic history? Asian history? Probably not much, and the reason is that no one is saying "ok, this month we are, as a nation, going to be aware of these people and their history." Now, we aren't exactly enlightened about black history, but on the other hand at least we put out that cursory effort which is a lot more than others get. So, long story short, we shouldn't want to have a specific month for black history, but right now, we need it. Otherwise we would never hear anything about it. The fix? Every month is black history month. And Asian history month. And Hispanic history month, and women's history and European history and native American history and Middle Eastern history.
You guys all are missing the point entirely, I'm afraid. The learning history part of black history month is the least important part. As long as you're looking at it with a macro lens, you will continue to not get it. Put on the wide angle and you can see that black were legally sub-human until 1964. Black history month is a chance to try to fix that by showing great contributions of blacks to the US and the world as a way to try to impart some humanity and self confidence to the community while atoning for a former wrong in some small way.
As someone who loves to study history, I have to disagree. You aren't wrong, of course - black history as we take it in America is a way to show the contributions and the value of black people on our culture and our history. And of course, it is to acknowledge the terrible pain that our culture brought upon a whole race for longer than anyone should have allowed. However, segregating a month (the shortest one, incidentally) to say "right, this is where we learn about black people and their struggles and successes and humanity, then we'll get back to our scheduled lessons" seems very diminishing. Why? Why not teach this, and reinforce this all the time? Why not integrate the teaching of African history with the usual curriculum of dead white males? How about when you're teaching American history throughout the whole course reinforce that there were slaves, that it was traumatic, and here's what was happening at the time through every chapter? Until college, every US history class I'd ever taken had one chapter, maybe two about black people, usually squeezed into a 100-year period sometime between just before the civil war and just after MLK. Outside of that, you could assume, by most lesson plans, that there were no black people. That is insane. So I ask - why do we only want one month to try to fix that by showing great contributions of blacks to the US and the world as a way to try to impart some humanity and self confidence to the community while atoning for a former wrong in some small way
This should be all the time.