By: Christiana Best Giacomini, Ph.D.
February 17, 2026
February is Black History Month in the United States, and as a Black immigrant, I had to grow into it. I came from a Black-majority country where Black leadership, culture, and history were not confined to a single month; they were woven into everyday life. Like many postcolonial societies, we continue to grapple with colorism, economic inequality, and the lingering effects of colonial rule. Yet most of my political, educational, and cultural leaders were Black, even if economic elites were not always fully representative.
When I first arrived in the United States, Black History Month felt both affirming and unfamiliar. I deliberately embraced it, attending events, engaging with scholarship, and celebrating the contributions highlighted each February. Over time, however, as my understanding of structural racism deepened, particularly how it operates through institutions, public policy, housing, education, and historical narratives, the observance began to take on a more complex meaning.
It became less about celebration alone and more about education, inquiry, and historical reckoning. I came to understand more fully the distinct historical trajectory of foundational Black Americans, a history shaped not only by slavery, which connects many of us across the African diaspora, but also by the prolonged period of legalized segregation, racial terror, and systemic exclusion that followed emancipation in the United States.
This realization sharpened my awareness of both shared diasporic connections and divergent historical experiences. Migration complicates Black identity in important ways: immigrants bring their own national histories, cultural frameworks, and racial understandings while simultaneously learning to navigate the racial realities of the United States. Diaspora scholars remind us that Black identity is not monolithic; it is historically layered and shaped by encounters with colonialism, nationalism, and racialization.
My education about what African Americans endured to achieve the rights many now exercise was genuinely eye-opening. While poverty existed in the West Indies, I never heard my parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents speak about being legally required to drink from separate water fountains, sit at the back of buses, or surrender seats because of race. Social divisions certainly existed, often tied to class, colorism, colonial legacies, and ethnicity, but they did not manifest through the same legally codified system of racial segregation that characterized much of U.S. history.
Residential separation in my homeland tended to reflect socioeconomic inequality more than explicit racial exclusion, even though race and class often intersected. By contrast, housing segregation in the United States developed through explicit policies such as redlining, racially restrictive covenants, and discriminatory lending practices, producing disparities that persist in wealth, education, and health outcomes today.
Migration narratives further illuminate these differences. Caribbean migration has largely been framed around economic mobility and opportunity. The Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to Northern and Western cities, however, was driven not only by economic aspiration but by racial survival, an escape from lynching, disenfranchisement, violence, and systemic terror. Recognizing this distinction has been essential to understanding African American resilience and the roots of contemporary racial inequality.
African American intellectual traditions have long grappled with these realities. In a 1959 speech as part of the University of Hartford’s Hillyer College lecture series, titled “The Future of Integration”, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described three broad phases in U.S. racial history. The first, spanning roughly 1619 to 1865, was defined by slavery, a system that reduced Black people to property valued primarily for their labor. Although slavery formally ended with the 13th Amendment in 1865, its social, political, and economic legacies persisted. The subsequent 14th Amendment, which guaranteed citizenship and equal protection under the law, and the 15th Amendment, which secured voting rights for citizens regardless of race, were central pillars of the Reconstruction Era for African Americans. At the same time, the constitutional protections embedded in the 14th and 15th Amendments later became foundational safeguards that would also shape immigrants’ legal rights and claims in the United States.
The second period, approximately 1865 to 1954, represented what King described as restricted emancipation. Legal slavery ended, yet equality remained elusive. The 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision legitimized segregation under “separate but equal,” entrenching racial hierarchy until the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, which declared segregated education inherently unequal. That decision helped catalyze the modern Civil Rights Movement, culminating in legislation such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, laws that not only advanced racial equality but also reshaped immigration patterns and expanded civil protections benefiting immigrants more broadly.
King was clear, however, about the limits of legislative change. Laws, he argued, often evolve faster than social attitudes. Sympathy without sustained action risks allowing injustice to persist even after legal barriers fall.
These insights profoundly shaped my understanding of Black History Month. It is not simply a celebration of achievement; it is an opportunity to grapple honestly with structural realities, acknowledge unfinished work, and situate contemporary inequities within their historical context. For immigrants, it also offers a reminder that many of our opportunities have been shaped by struggles led by African Americans before our arrival.
As a Black immigrant, I have come to experience Black History Month less as a symbolic observance and more as a commitment – a commitment to historical literacy, diasporic solidarity, and sustained engagement with the complexities of race, migration, and belonging. While our pathways into Black identity may share common origins in enslavement, followed by periods of racial labor control after formal emancipation, they diverge through distinct historical experiences such as Jim Crow in the United States and the Plantation Economies in the Caribbean. Yet our futures remain deeply interconnected. Understanding those connections is essential not only for scholarship but also for building more equitable communities in an increasingly diverse society.
(Dr Christiana Best is an Associate Professor at the University of Saint Joseph, Connecticut)
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