All about February

By Matt Echelberry

Inquirer Reporter

Although Feb­ru­ary is the short­est month of the year, its 28-day allot­ment on the cal­en­dar (or 29 dur­ing Leap Years) has some sig­nif­i­cance. For starters, Feb­ru­ary is nation­ally rec­og­nized as Black His­tory Month, an annual cel­e­bra­tion of the achieve­ments of black Americans.

Accord­ing to the Asso­ci­a­tion for the Study of African Amer­i­can Life and His­tory (www.asalh.net): “The story of Black His­tory Month begins in Chicago dur­ing the

late sum­mer of 1915. Carter G. Wood­son trav­eled to Chicago from

Wash­ing­ton, D.C. to par­tic­i­pate in a national cel­e­bra­tion of the fiftieth

anniver­sary of emancipation.”

Inspired by the event, Wood­son later formed an orga­ni­za­tion to pro­mote the

sci­en­tific study of black life and his­tory, called the Asso­ci­a­tion for the Study of African Amer­i­can Life and His­tory. The group later announced the cre­ation of Negro His­tory Week in Feb­ru­ary, 1926.

History.com explains that the sec­ond week of Feb­ru­ary was cho­sen for Negro His­tory Week to coin­cide with the birth­days of Abra­ham Lin­coln and Fred­er­ick Dou­glass. The week-long cel­e­bra­tion con­tin­ued and expanded, and by the time of the Civil Rights Move­ment, was well on its way to becom­ing a month-long event.

In 1976 Pres­i­dent Ger­ald Ford offi­cially rec­og­nized Black His­tory Month. Since the mid-1970s, every Amer­i­can pres­i­dent, Demo­c­rat and Repub­li­can, has issued procla­ma­tions endors­ing the Association’s annual theme. Other coun­tries around the world, includ­ing Canada and the United King­dom, also devote a month to cel­e­brat­ing black history.

Some sig­nif­i­cant accom­plish­ments in black his­tory, accord­ing to History.com:

John Mer­cer Langston was the first black man to become a lawyer in Ohio when he passed the Bar in 1854. When he was elected to the post of Town Clerk for Brown­helm, Ohio in 1855 Langston became one of the first African Amer­i­cans ever elected to pub­lic office in Amer­ica. John Mer­cer Langston was also the great-uncle of Langston Hughes, famed poet of the Harlem Renaissance.

Thur­good Mar­shall was the first African Amer­i­can ever appointed to the United States Supreme Court. He was appointed by Pres­i­dent Lyn­don John­son and served on the Supreme Court from 1967 to 1991.

George Wash­ing­ton Carver devel­oped 300 deriv­a­tive prod­ucts from peanuts among them cheese, milk, cof­fee, flour, ink, dyes, plas­tics, wood stains, soap, linoleum, med­i­c­i­nal oils and cosmetics.

Hiram Rhodes Rev­els was the first African Amer­i­can ever elected to the U.S. Sen­ate. He rep­re­sented the state of Mis­sis­sippi from Feb­ru­ary 1870 to March 1871.

Shirley Chisholm was the first African Amer­i­can woman elected to the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives. She was elected in 1968 and rep­re­sented the state of New York. She broke ground again four years later in 1972 when she was the first major party African-American can­di­date and the first female can­di­date for pres­i­dent of the United States.

In 1940, Hat­tie McDaniel was the first African-American per­former to win an Acad­emy Award (the film industry‘s high­est honor) for her por­trayal of a loyal slave gov­erness in Gone With the Wind.

Of course, no Feb­ru­ary would be com­plete with­out Valentine’s Day. Here’s how History.com describes it: “Every Feb­ru­ary 14, across the United States and in other places around the world, candy, flow­ers and gifts are exchanged between loved ones, all in the name of St. Valentine.”

History.com explains that there are sev­eral saints who were named Valen­tine, but which one the cel­e­bra­tion is based on remains a mys­tery. “Feb­ru­ary has long been cel­e­brated as a month of romance, and that St. Valentine’s Day, as we know it today, con­tains ves­tiges of both Chris­t­ian and ancient Roman tradition.

“One leg­end con­tends that Valen­tine was a priest who served dur­ing the third cen­tury in Rome. When Emperor Claudius II decided that sin­gle men made bet­ter sol­diers than those with wives and fam­i­lies, he out­lawed mar­riage for young men. Valen­tine, real­iz­ing the injus­tice of the decree, defied Claudius and con­tin­ued to per­form mar­riages for young lovers in secret. “


Although writ­ten Valen­tine let­ters did not appear until 1400, Valen­tine greet­ings were pop­u­lar as far back as the Mid­dle Ages. The old­est known valen­tine still in exis­tence today was a poem writ­ten in 1415 by Charles, Duke of Orleans, to his wife while he was impris­oned in the Tower of Lon­don fol­low­ing his cap­ture at the Bat­tle of Agincourt.

Some fun facts from www.mydearvalentine.com:

Mother’s day and valentine’s day are the two biggest occa­sions on which flow­ers are given,

Of the 73% of peo­ple who buy Valentine’s Day flow­ers are men, while only 27 per­cent are women.


The red rose was the favorite flower of Venus, the Roman god­dess of love. The color red stands for strong roman­tic feel­ings mak­ing the red rose the flower of love.

The heart is asso­ci­ated to Valentine’s Day as it is con­sid­ered the source of all human emo­tions. The cus­tom of draw­ing a heart shape is sup­posed to have come from early attempts to draw an organ that no one had seen.

Every year around 1 bil­lion Valen­tine cards are sent, the sin­gle largest card-sending occa­sion after Christmas.

In Slove­nia, a proverb says that “St Valen­tine brings the keys of roots”, so on Feb­ru­ary 14, plants and flow­ers start to grow.

In Korea, if you do not receive any gift on Valentine’s day then all the sin­gles go to Korean restau­rants and eat black noo­dles to mourn their sin­gle status.

And to top off all the his­tory and romance that Feb­ru­ary has to offer, President’s Day arrives on the third Mon­day of the month each year. Accord­ing to History.com, it is an Amer­i­can hol­i­day estab­lished in 1885 in recog­ni­tion of Pres­i­dent George Wash­ing­ton (whose actual birth­day was Feb. 22).

It was the first fed­eral hol­i­day to cel­e­brate the life of an indi­vid­ual per­son. How­ever, in an effort to cre­ate more three-day week­ends, Con­gress passed the Uni­form Mon­day Hol­i­day Act in 1971. The hol­i­day thus became the cel­e­bra­tion of pres­i­dents in gen­eral, rather than solely the first one. Sorry, George.

Also, the date change is said to align the hol­i­day as a cel­e­bra­tion for both Wash­ing­ton and Abra­ham Lin­coln, whose birth­day also falls in Feb­ru­ary. Con­gres­sional mea­sures to restore Wash­ing­ton and Lincoln’s indi­vid­ual birth­days were pro­posed dur­ing the early 2000s, but all failed to gain much atten­tion. For its part, the fed­eral gov­ern­ment has held fast to the orig­i­nal incar­na­tion of the hol­i­day as a cel­e­bra­tion of the country’s first president.

Accord­ing to Patriotism.org: “Like Inde­pen­dence Day, Pres­i­dents’ Day is tra­di­tion­ally viewed as a time of patri­otic cel­e­bra­tion and remembrance.

Posted by Matt Echelberry on Feb 1 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.