Celebrating Black History Month

Dear Members of the NJCU Community,

This year, time feels almost sacred in its symmetry. The centennial of Black History Month and the 250th anniversary of the United States — our semiquincentennial. Milestones like these do not simply mark the passage of years. They summon memory. They press history into the present. They ask us, with quiet insistence, to look at who we have been, who we have wounded, who we have lifted, and who we still aspire to become.

One hundred years ago, Carter G. Woodson planted a seed of remembrance in hard soil. Through the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, he established Negro History Week not as a symbolic gesture, but as an act of moral clarity. In an era when Black lives were dismissed, distorted, or erased from the historical record, he dared to insist that truth had weight, that memory had dignity, and that a nation could not fully know itself while refusing to see its own reflection. What began as a single week of recognition has grown into a century-long widening of the American story — proof that when truth is tended, it takes root, it branches, it reshapes the landscape. 

This July, as fireworks rise and flags ripple in summer air, our nation will celebrate 250 years since the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that all men are created equal. Yet the wind that carried those words did not carry them to everyone. The same soil that nurtured liberty was watered with the labor and suffering of millions of Black men, women, and children. This is not a shadow at the edge of our history. It is part of its foundation. Black history is American history in its sorrow and in its song, in its chains and in its choirs, in its grief and in its genius. We cannot honor the birth of the nation without acknowledging the contradiction at its heart, nor can we celebrate how far we have come without reverence for the long road walked in between. 

Dr. Woodson understood that history is not a quiet archive; it is a living force. It bends toward the voices we preserve and away from the ones we silence. For generations, the contributions, creativity, faith, and humanity of Black Americans were pushed to the margins of our national narrative. His work pulled those stories back into the center, where they have always belonged. Inclusive history is not an act of charity. It is an act of truth-telling. And truth is the beginning of justice.

At New Jersey City University, this calling is not confined to a single month on the calendar. It is woven into our very origin and evolution. For nearly a century, this institution has stood as a harbor for those whose talent outpaced their access, whose ambition outlasted their circumstances. Our classrooms echo with the languages of migration, with stories of sacrifice, with dreams first whispered at kitchen tables and carried across oceans. To honor Black history here is to tell the truth about our nation, to celebrate extraordinary resilience, and to recommit ourselves daily to the unfinished promise of equal opportunity. Education, at its best, is an act of repair. It restores what has been denied. It opens what has been closed. It insists that the future can be more just than the past. 

This year of dual commemoration — and of our own transformation as Kean Jersey City within the Kean University system — reminds us of something both humbling and hopeful: America’s promise remains incomplete, but it is not beyond reach. The freedom fighters, teachers, artists, organizers, and ordinary people who refused to disappear from the story left us more than a legacy. They left us an obligation. Progress does not sustain itself. Each generation must decide whether the doors opened by struggle will remain open or quietly narrow again. 

I invite our community to gather for this month’s programs not as spectators, but as participants in an ongoing story. These moments of remembrance are also moments of recommitment to learning, to listening, to the shared work of building a more truthful and more just society.

Dr. Woodson once warned that a people without history risk becoming invisible in the thought of the world. His life’s work ensured that Black history would never be negligible, never peripheral, never forgotten. Two hundred and fifty years into the American journey, one hundred years into the formal commemoration of Black history, that work still lives in our classrooms, in our communities, and in the quiet resolve of those who believe this country can grow into its own ideals.

So let this year not simply pass. Let it mark us. Let it deepen our commitment to truth, widen our sense of belonging, and move us steadily, faithfully toward a nation, and a community, worthy of the stories we now have the courage to tell.

Yours in service,

Andrés Acebo
President
New Jersey City University