Black History Month has never been just about the past.
This year marks 100 years since Carter G. Woodson launched Negro History Week, a project rooted in the belief that understanding Black history is essential to understanding power – who has it, who is denied it, and how it’s justified. A century later, that purpose still holds. Black history doesn’t just explain where we’ve been; it helps us make sense of what’s happening now.
And one thing Black history makes clear across time and across geography is that church-state separation has always had racial consequences, even when those consequences are not named explicitly.
When people talk about Black history in the United States, the focus is often narrow: slavery, Jim Crow, civil rights. Those histories matter deeply. But Black history doesn’t stop at U.S. borders. It spans the Americas. It includes the Caribbean, Latin America, and colonized territories where Black bodies are governed, experimented on, and controlled through a mix of religion, law, and state power.
The pattern is clear when we look beyond the mainland. Puerto Rico is often framed only in a “Latin” context, but is also home to Black communities whose lives have been shaped by U.S. colonial rule. In the mid-20th century, Puerto Rican women, many of them Black and poor, were subjected to coerced sterilization and used in early birth control trials. These practices were frequently justified through moral and social narratives about poverty, reproduction, and “responsibility,” where religious ideas and state policy reinforced one another. Black bodies were treated as problems to be managed rather than lives to be protected.
It reflects a larger pattern we’ve seen again and again: When religion becomes intertwined with government authority, Black communities are often among the first to feel the harm, even when that harm is framed as moral guidance or social good.
Religion has played multiple roles in Black life. For many, faith has been a source of strength, care, and resistance, a place to organize, to mourn, and to imagine freedom when the world offered none. Black churches became spaces of political organizing. Black faith leaders challenged unjust laws from the pulpit and in the courts. That truth deserves to be honored.
But Black history also teaches us to be honest about how religion has been used as a tool of oppression. Scripture was used to justify enslavement. Christian doctrine was used to defend segregation. Obedience was framed as morality, while resistance was labeled sinful or dangerous. Over time, the language shifted, but the structure remained: religious values elevated into law, and Black lives constrained in the process.
That’s why church-state separation matters not as a legal abstraction, but as a protective boundary that has served Black communities. It limits the ability of the state to impose religious belief as public rule, and it creates space for people to live without coercion.
Today, we see these dynamics playing out in new forms. Public schools are being pressured to teach history selectively, often through a lens shaped by Christian Nationalism. Books are being banned. Curriculum is being sanitized. Students are being taught whose stories belong – and whose do not. When education is filtered through a narrow religious worldview, Black students are disproportionately harmed, especially those who are queer, transgender, disabled, immigrants, or members of religious minority communities.
We also see it in attacks on reproductive freedom, where religious beliefs are used to justify sweeping restrictions with real consequences for Black women and families. And we see it in political rhetoric that treats Christianity as synonymous with morality and patriotism, quietly signaling that those who do not conform are less deserving of rights, protection, or belonging.
Black history gives us the context to recognize these patterns for what they are and the tools to resist them.
Church-state separation exists to ensure that no one religious tradition dictates public life and that no one has to surrender their identity, conscience, or safety to participate fully in society. For Black communities, that protection has never been theoretical. It shapes whether our children can learn freely, whether our families can make decisions about their own bodies, and whether our lives are governed by law rather than doctrine.
It also matters because Black communities are not monolithic. We are Christian, Muslim, Jewish, spiritual, nonreligious, and everything in between. Yet Black people’s relationship to religion has often been used as leverage – assumed, flattened, or exploited – to advance policies that ultimately cause harm. Naming that dynamic plainly is part of what equity requires.
This is why conversations about church-state separation, religious freedom, and Christian Nationalism must reckon with race; not because these issues belong only to Black history, but because Black lives have long borne and resisted their consequences. The harm has not always been plainly named, but it has always been plainly felt. And so has the resistance.
This is also why spaces like the Summit for Religious Freedom (SRF) matter. They create room for people of all religions and none to examine these histories together, connect them to current struggles, and build strategies rooted in pluralism, dignity, and shared responsibility – rather than imposed belief.
Black History Month asks us not just to remember, but to learn. To look honestly at how we got here. And to recognize that the fight for racial justice has always included confronting how religion is used and misused in the exercise of state power.
Because Black history shows us something else, too: Freedom is fragile when it belongs only to some and strongest when it belongs to all of us.
Photo: Professor, scholar, and New York Times-bestselling author Jemar Tisby delivers his keynote speech “Holy but not Hijacked: The Black Christian Political Witness in the Face of Christian Nationalism” at SRF 2024. Photo credit: Chris Line
