Black History Month of 2026
“An ounce of fact is worth a pound of controversy. So the Negro historian today digs under the spot where his predecessor stood and argued.” — Arthur A. Schomburg (1874–1938), The Negro Digs Up His Past (1925)
For every National Museum of African American History and Culture, there will be government officials and citizens who will edit, synthesize, and change depictions of Black history. For every truth spoken, there is still one hundred years later a multiplied backlash from those who would benefit from denying the truth. We recognize this fact on the centennial celebration of Black History Month, originally Negro History Week. This cycle of research, retribution, and revision is neither new nor surprising, but it will not be endless, until it ends. However, the need to continue digging where our predecessors stood is shared by Black historians worldwide and reflected here at home in our work at the SoulFolk Collective. The SoulFolk Collective, rooted in visions of more liberatory futures for all of us, digs not on new, untoiled soil, but on soil fertile by generations present and past. This soil is nurtured from the pages written, memories held, and histories protected by the millions who have come before us. As poet June Jordan wrote in her “Poem for South African Women”:
Our own shadows disappear as the feet of thousands
by the tens of thousands pound the fallow land
into new dust that
rising like a marvelous pollen will be
fertile
…we are the ones we have been waiting for
As a research collective, we fervently believe in the mindset of active and consistent collaboration—amongst our lab and within the community—we are all essential co-creators of generative and generational knowledge. We collected the stories of 75 Black residents in Madison, Wisconsin, 59 of whom have chosen to donate their oral histories to the Wisconsin Historical Society (WHS). Our first SoulFolk Collective lab manager, Ziyen C. Curtis, worked closely with WHS archivists to curate the Black Madison oral history collection. In doing so, we have taken up the tradition of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, the creators of Black History Month. We won’t stop there—we are committed to Black history throughout the year through community conversations and by developing a Saturday Freedom School that will open at The Center for Black Excellence and Culture in January of 2027. This year, we are excited to celebrate the formal BHM observance with the launch of public access to the Black Madison archive on WHS’s newly updated online platform this month. We encourage you to engage with this “marvelous pollen” by clicking, listening, watching, and/or reading the oral histories of our Madison area community.
We thank our allies at the Wisconsin Historical Society and those who proudly and bravely shared their stories, their proverbs, their warnings, and their laughter for this oral history project.
Happy Black History Month.
Hope Kelham is the photographer and editor for The SoulFolk Collective.
