Boys & Girls Club Members Create Black History Month Video

Members of the Boys and Girls Club of Pasadena Slavik branch have produced a video that relates the story of how Black History Month came to be.

Narrated by three BGC Pasadena members, the two minute-forty-four-second video first shows images and video clips of significant African American personalities and events, before the three narrators introduce themselves as McKenna, Kacey and Amber, and go on to tell the story of how Carter G. Woodson launched the celebration of Negro History Week in 1926.

Starting that year, Negro History Week was celebrated in February. The video says Woodson chose that month because it was the month Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglas – two men who helped lift liberty and civil rights for African Americans – were born.

The video then tells of what transpired over the next 50 years before Black History Month was officially recognized by the U.S. government, in 1976 under President Gerald Ford’s administration. That year, Carter urged Americans to “”seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.”

As it tells the story, the video shows images of the struggle for desegregation and the people who worked for it. The personalities included a number of African American civil rights activists – from Malcolm X to James Baldwin to Martin Luther King Jr. – and more famous African Americans from the 40s to the 60s and to the present time, including heavyweight champion Mohammad Ali and Pasadena’s own Jackie Robinson.

The images also included shots of African American servicemen and women from the Second World War to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

The Boys and Girls Club Pasadena said the video was played in public during Black History Month celebration on February 23 by members at the Slavik branch, “to teach each other about the origins of Black History Month and the civil rights movement.”

On February 28, the Mackenzie-Scott branch continued a 10-year tradition of their Annual Food Dinner as part of Black History Month, with teens giving a special presentation about the Brown vs. Board of Education case, a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case where the Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional.