One Black Historian's Hope for the Future: "Put Me Out of Business"

Dr. W. Marvin Dulaney’s hope for the future is that one day he’ll be out of a job. Dulaney is the president of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH). The organization’s mission is to promote the teaching and understanding of the countless contributions that Black people have made to the United States.

“What I’m hoping for is that I get put out of business,” Dulaney told WAMU in a recent interview marking the launch of Black History Month. “In that all educational entities will start infusing African and African American history and culture in the curriculum, in our master narrative, 12 months of the year rather than just in February.”

Expanding the teaching and appreciation for Black history to a year-round endeavor would make Dulaney’s lifelong work as a professor of African American history essentially complete.

Black History Month started as just a week-long celebration in 1926. It was the brain child of ASALH founder Dr. Carter G. Woodson. Woodson was inspired to start ASALH in 1915 to counter the racist rewriting of American history propagated by the blockbuster film The Birth of a Nation — adapted from a novel about the Ku Klux Klan.

“There was so much violence in the early 20th century, and The Birth of a Nation sort of capsulated all of the violence by trying to rewrite what happened during Reconstruction,” Dulaney says. “What we’re seeing now is sort of a similar attempt where we’ve actually been able to integrate African American history into the grade school curriculum. And if you deal with African American history, you have to deal with the violence, segregation, [and] racism.”