I understand your question and I can see how we would love to just be integrated year round and not just in February.
I love Black History Month and because of the lack of total curriculum integration for Black History, it is still very essential.
Last year I wrote Black Facts on the board,
www.blackfacts.com
and I wrote 2 of the X amount of facts on the board. One day I wrote about Roots and Alex Haley. Do you know a lot of my 9th graders had no idea who he was. They had heard of Roots but did not know it was a book. They just thought it was a really long movie.
Somewhere along the way before walking into my classroom, someone should have told them about Alex Haley's study of his family history.
Plus a lot of Black History teaches the Top 5 Tried and True:
1. Martin Luther King
2. Rosa Parks
3. Slavery - underground railroad, Harriet Tubman
4. George Washington Carver
5. Frederick Douglass
Our HISTORY is DEEP. It was not until I began my study of Delta and learned about some of the other orgs' founders and histories that I learned some little known Black History.
But we should know that every day is Black History. Just because it might be focused on by the United States in February does not mean this is only when WE as Black people need to study Black History.
Yes, BLACK HISTORY MONTH is very much necessary, but we need to expand it past the most popular or well known parts of our history.