By Carla Thomas
The Truth Contributor
This month, like so many before it, our timelines have been filled with stories of Black brilliance and Black Americans surviving injustice. News outlets have highlighted milestones. Communities have hosted celebrations and events. Social media has circulated reminders of how far we’ve come from the atrocities we endured.
But a quote I read shifted my perspective entirely: “White history is what they did to us. Black history is how we survived it.”
That quote changed how I view February as Black History Month and made me ask whether we’ve been naming this month incorrectly all along.
Let’s take the conversation a step further.
In an article by Warren Dukes, “Celebrating Black Heritage Month: A Reflection of Generational Resilience and Perseverance,” he makes a subtle but powerful shift. He doesn’t frame the month as a revisiting of Black history in the traditional sense, a timeline of suffering and struggle. Instead, he calls it Black Heritage Month, centering resilience, perseverance, and what has been carried forward. In reflecting on Black heritage, Dukes emphasizes generational strength: the endurance passed down that allowed families to survive oppression, build communities despite exclusion, and transform hardship into progress.
For him, heritage is more than a record of events; it is what has been preserved, sustained and inherited: faith, leadership, innovation, sacrifice and collective perseverance. By choosing the word heritage over history, he shifts the focus from simply recounting what happened to honoring what endured, what was built and what continues shaping who we are.
If we were to take an honest look at the images and stories that flood our timelines every Black History Month, even the stories of resilience and overcoming often begin with atrocity. Scenes of brutality, dogs, fire hoses, chains, bombings, lynchings, segregation signs, police beatings, burning crosses, burning cities and assassinations.
We have to ask ourselves, whose behavior is that? It’s almost impossible to tell a story of overcoming without acknowledging the brutality that made the overcoming necessary. But when the violence becomes the primary image we associate with Black history, we start centering what was done to us instead of how we rose above it
What we have labeled as Black history is, in many ways, white history, a traceable record of actions taken against us, then and now, while our true story, our history lives in how we endured, organized, built, resisted and overcame.
In order to call it Black heritage, we must be intentional about separating what was done to us from who we became, what we built and what we carried forward in spite of it.
So when we talk about a little Black girl integrating a school, what story are we actually telling?
If the cameras are focused on screaming adults, federal escorts and the rage of those trying to block a child from entering a classroom, that is not a story about Black behavior. That is a story about white resistance and white history on full display.
The child walking through those doors anyway? That is Black heritage.
When we show sit-ins at lunch counters and focus on milkshakes being poured and fists clenched in hatred, we are documenting white hostility. That hostility is white history.
The discipline to sit there without striking back, the strategy sessions in church basements, the training in nonviolence, the coordination, the courage. That is Black heritage.
Burning down Tulsa’s Greenwood District is white history.
Building Black Wall Street in the first place, thriving businesses, banks, schools and hospitals. That is Black heritage.
Chattel slavery is white history: the laws that defined human beings as property, the auctions, the chains, the forced labor.
Surviving it, preserving culture under terror, creating spirituals that coded freedom, building family structures when families were intentionally torn apart, passing down recipes, rhythms, language patterns, faith and resistance across generations. That is Black heritage.
Redlining neighborhoods, denying loans, blocking Black veterans from receiving full GI Bill benefits, refusing land grants after emancipation, designing policies to exclude us economically and socially. That is white history.
Buying homes anyway, building communities anyway, creating wealth with fewer resources, serving a country that denied you full citizenship and still returning home to educate, build and invest in your people. That is Black heritage.
Police brutality is white history.
Community organizing, legal advocacy, mutual aid networks and sustained movements demanding accountability. That is Black heritage.
Bombing a church is white history.
Rebuilding it, continuing the movement, refusing to let terror define the future. That is Black heritage.
Segregation is white history.
Out-educating it, out-organizing it, dismantling it. That is Black heritage.
Even the Civil Rights Movement is often framed incorrectly. The denial of rights is white history. The Montgomery Bus Boycott, over a year of coordinated economic resistance that successfully desegregated public transportation. That is Black heritage. That is strategy, sacrifice and collective power exercised and realized.
The violence belongs to those who committed it. That’s white history. The resilience belongs to those who endured and overcame it. That’s Black heritage.