*footnotes

The theme for this year’s Black History Month is “Heritage and Horizons: The African American Legacy and the Challenges of the 21st Century.”

* Black History Month dates back more than 70 years to black historian Carter Godwin Woodson, a Harvard-educated PhD. Woodson devoted his academic career to the study of the African American experience. He founded the Assn. for the Study of African-American Life and History in 1915, a time when Africans were still dismissed as irrelevant to world cultural history.

* Woodson announced the first Negro History Week in February 1926 to coincide with the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. The celebration became known as Black History Week in the early 1970s and, in 1976, Black History Month was established. It is still sponsored every February by the association Woodson founded. The organization’s Web site can be found at https://www.artnoir.com/asalh/. The association distributes Black History Month study kits to help schools and other organizations celebrate the observance.

* Cal State Northridge has a varied calendar of events planned this month, including a concert by the CSUN New Generation Gospel Choir, a Spike Lee film fest, a poetry musical celebrating Langston Hughes and a political conference featuring former Rep. Mervyn Dymally. For a complete schedule, go to the CSUN Black Student Union’s Web site at https://www.hometown.aol.com/blackfamilybsu/2000.html.

* Veteran Civil Rights leader Julian Bond will speak Feb. 23 on “Race and Rights in the New Millennium” at Soka University in Calabasas. The speech is open to the general public and admission is free. For more information, call (818) 880-6400 or see https://www.soka.edu/calabasas/index.html.

* “Biography,” on cable network A & E, will present a week of programs on African American performing artists Ella Fitzgerald, Ray Charles, Sidney Poitier, Otis Redding and Dorothy Dandridge, starting Feb. 14.