TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Black History Month is an observance to celebrate the accomplishments of Black Americans and a time to examine how race continues to influence the country today. The predecessor to the event began in the 1920s. In 1976, President Gerald Ford recognized Black History Month on the federal level.

The United States now has a Black and South Asian vice president for the first time in its history and the U.S. Treasury is taking steps to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill. As the country changes, Black History Month continues to evolve as well.

Florida State University professors are available to offer context for coverage of Black History Month and beyond.

Shantel Gabrieal Buggs, assistant professor, Department of Sociology and Program for African-American Studies, College of Social Science and Public Policy sbuggs@fsu.edu; (850) 645-1730

Buggs’ research interests include race, gender and intimacy, racial identity and community and representation of race and gender in popular culture. She specializes in critical race theory, social media and digital life, multiracial identity and interracial families and Black popular culture.

“Black History Month in 2021 is an opportunity to reflect on historic firsts — with the election of the first Black and South Asian woman to the U.S. vice presidency and the first Black Democratic U.S. senator from the South — and historic losses, specifically the ways that Black people have borne the disproportionate impacts of a global pandemic, faltering economy and increasing white supremacist unrest and state violence. Given that I study people's intimate lives and media, particularly spaces like social media, the events of the last year clearly illustrated why our closest relationships and interactions matter. Black History Month provides an occasion for people to revisit and learn new information about Black culture and Black experience. Now more than ever, we should consider how the internet and the people we choose to share our lives with can help to make incremental positive change (or potentially do more damage to the world).”

Davis Houck, professor, College of Communication and Information dhouck@fsu.edu

Houck is the Fannie Lou Hamer Professor of Rhetorical Studies, and his expertise includes mediated messages about race, race and memory and the civil rights movement.

“Black History Month comes at a moment of great tumult and great uncertainty in our country. Whom we remember, how we remember and how those memories are received will be examined with unusual focus and intensity in 2021.”

L. Lamar Wilson, assistant professor, Department of English, College of Arts & Sciences llwilson@fsu.edu

Wilson’s work explores the voices and experiences of Black, brown and indigenous peoples thriving in the rural South despite white nationalist terror. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, poets.org, African American Review and elsewhere, and he appeared on NPR’s Code Switch to discuss the lynching of Claude Neal that took place in 1934 in Jackson County, Florida.

“My areas of expertise are all modes of experimental creative writing, newspaper journalism and journalism ethics, African American poetics, multi-ethnic American poetics, gender and sexuality studies, sound studies and documentary film studies.”