The Journey: A Poetic Reflection on Black History Month | Guest Blog by CUSA Board Member Peyton McCoy
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The Association for the Study of African American Life and History (or ASALH, the founders of Black History Month), have announced their 2026 theme: “A Century of Black History Commemorations.” Noting Black luminaries including Dr. Carter Godwin Woodson, George Cleveland Hall, William B. Hartgrove, Jesse E. Moorland, Alexander L. Jackson, and James E. Stamps, ASLAH writes: “This year, when we are also commemorating the 250th anniversary of United States independence, it is important to tell not only an inclusive history, but an accurate one.” They continue:
We have never had more need to examine the role of Black History Month than we do when forces weary of democracy seek to use legislative means and book bans to excise Black history from America’s schools and public culture. Black history’s value is not its contribution to mainstream historical narratives, but its resonance in the lives of Black people. (Source: ASALH About the 2026 Black History Month)
Circles USA proudly joins ASALH’s celebration of Black history and culture in the US. We recognize that, due to centuries of systemic racial injustice, African Americans disproportionately experience debt; housing and food insecurity; and chronic, debilitating medical issues. Circles remains committed to centering the people and communities most impacted by poverty. To further that goal this February, several members of Circles USA leadership kindly shared their perspectives on Black economic advancement, the “American Dream,” and what Black history can teach us about building community to end poverty.
Written by Peyton McCoy
CUSA Board Member
What a catastrophe! An overturned dumpster and a chicken truck lay limp across the I-95 expressway. So many chickens! Now a big, bad, bodacious back-up was building on the beltway. I couldn’t move forward and I couldn’t turn back. There was no exit, no offramp; the only way to progress was to inch forward in painfully lethargic increments, intermingled with occasional yard-long leaps and punctuated with chicken prayers. I had not anticipated the derailment, the dumpster, the delay or my feathered friends. Moreover, I had a deadline. How would I get back to my office, retrieve the grant proposal from my computer, write the presentation preamble, and make the pitch to the funder? There I sat, in a panic-driven, agitated state, registering somewhere between frazzled fuming and flummoxed resignation. Then: a revelation. I glanced at my phone and felt my spirit shift and my brain began to percolate. That’s it—the phone! I had everything I needed to complete the assignment right at my fingertips. All I had to do was get to work.
After the ordeal was over, the proposal and preamble completed, the presentation presented, and the grant secured, I pondered the phone that enabled my rescue. I was curious. How many experts surrendered assumptions (and the status quo) to nudge this technological gadget into being? How many workers surrendered preconceived notions, that I might have a multiplicity of resources at my fingertips? How many egos had to be valet checked at the door to attain a common goal? How many unfounded and ungrounded opinions were graciously sidelined to pursue a vision initially beyond human conceptualization? And how many naysayers had attempted to prematurely pulverize the dream and disavow the dreamers?
The whole thing could have become just another link in the chain bearing a fancy name—“subjugated knowledges”—a term coined by French philosopher Michel Foucault. Subjugate means to suppress, submerge, sideline, step on, push down, press under, force back, dominate over, marginalize and malign. In other words, there are a whole set of knowledges and truths that have been dissed, dismissed, disqualified and falsely labeled deficient, devoid of substance, inadequate, insufficient, naïve, and located low down on the hierarchy of significance and importance because of where or who they come from.
Truths like Black History.
Often, truth gets tripped and trapped, bruised and battered, butchered and bewildered. But practices that incite hate rather than help, harm rather than humility, humiliation rather than healing, potentially jeopardize and paralyze.
Thankfully for both the iPhone and Black History Month, that’s not where the story ends. The journey is not a 50-yard dash; it’s a relay. And in this relay, individually and collectively, people have perpetually found it necessary to reimagine, reinvent, reposition, reframe, reconsider, and revamp in order to thrive and survive. Hence, we wear a collective necklace of interwoven experiences, adorned with unexpected joy and perfected by unfathomable pain, while on an incredible journey. Even if we magnify the technological miracle of an iPhone a thousand-fold, we could neither capture nor adequately convey the robust journey intrinsic to Black History Month.
So, the journey continues. Time keeps on easing, twisting, gliding, shifting into the future through a succession of seasons. And sometimes, seasonal susceptibility to the seduction of faulty thinking threatens to eviscerate, estrange, and excommunicate destiny’s promise. Hence, seasons ripe with possibility can be temporarily sequestered in the cubicle of Stay in your place! or crushed in the crucible of power. Nonetheless, time keeps on slipping, dipping, ripping into the future. It travels on the wake of change, cruises atop the Machiavellian mist of power, navigates pain’s corridors, meanders through devious nooks and crannies, ducks into ostensible dead ends, eventually evaporates into the ether, and recalibrates possibilities on its way to eternity. Fortuitously, again, and again, and again, time rides on the wings of faith. Yesterday’s journey evolves into this morning’s testimony; this morning’s testimony strengthens our resolve to soldier through tomorrow’s test; and tomorrow’s test is girdled in new mercies.
Yesterday’s journey evolves into this morning’s testimony; this morning’s testimony strengthens our resolve to soldier through tomorrow’s test; and tomorrow’s test is girdled in new mercies.
Time keeps on skipping, slipping, slithering through seasonal adjustments that produce experiences for which we need imagination; bold, bodacious pioneers; resilient institutions; change agents; reverent and revered leaders; courageous communities of faith; and political participants strong (and stable) enough to stand up and tell the truth, even in times when the truth seems inconvenient. Transforming wisdom stretches wide and drills deep into the essence of fortitude, rendering time ripe to benefit from the risk of telling the truth, the pure unadulterated truth, regardless of consequences or the season. Yes, time keeps on slipping, ticking, ripping. And it is relevant to remember that we are a bold collective with tremendous capacity and capability. We are a work-in-progress evolving through a journey down time’s corridors. Vulnerable to dominance, yet Teflon-protected by honeydipped immersion in syncopated, sanctified, ancient soul.
As human beings, we are the gift of time’s creator and the paradox of grace: a creative product, yet a process in perpetual motion. We reverently remember that we are survivors who even survived periodic, vicious encounters with the marginalizing exploits of the domineering Tate family.
Long story short: the Tate family patriarch, Agitate, had an illicit affair with his outcast common law lover, Irritate, to which four unruly offspring were born:
Cogitate kept stirring up the wrong issues.
Gravitate continued to move closer to dangerous liaisons disguised as patriotic sympathizers.
Potentate made it his mission to run everybody else’s business since he couldn’t handle his own.
And Hesitate lacked the courage to stand up for anything; so he sat down in the stands as the villainous -isms (racism, ageism, sexism, and all the rest) played their seasonal games.
But a funny thing happened. Justice stood up and decided to keep on keeping on, aided by the bodacious bold and the beautiful. And a rainbow was awakened after a long-term sabbatical.
Sensing this rainbow in the distance, people traveled towards it. They went through Back Door Drive by way of Backway Alley to reach Bypass Boulevard and avoid Weapons of Mass Distraction Drive and Dead-End Cul-de-Sac Circle. They curved around Nowhere Lane to emerge onto Made-a-Way Freeway, by way of Faith Street to bypass Doubt It Drive. Taking a right onto I Know That’s Right Highway, a detour to avoid Pit Fall and Pity Party Parkway, they entered Grand Thoroughfare Turnpike and cheered as they celebrated the grand journey of grand people. Grand people who, amid their reality, repeatedly sang their old songs with a new flava—their dirges, and their ditties, classicals, spirituals and jazz jubilees. They prayed prayers nightly to an ever-present Force; bended worn knees humbly to an unseen power that sang We shall not be, we shall not be moved. Like a tree that’s planted by the water, we shall not be moved.
What, then, should we do when it feels like the journey takes us through the wilderness?
Purpose is both the power and the glory intrinsic to an overcomer’s story. And in the midst of it all, the emergent immeasurable value and inherent genius of one's purpose is its ability to flip the script, re-appropriate the theme, and translate oppression that was meant to suppress, into a liberating story ordained to progress.
Purpose is both the power and the glory intrinsic to an overcomer’s story.
“I have on my table a violin string,” said Rabindranath Tagore. “It is free to move in any direction I like. If I twist one end it responds, it is free. But it is not free to sing. So I take it and fix it into my violin. I bind it and when it is bound with purpose, it is free for the first time to sing.”
And just as the violin string comes alive when connected to the violin, we too come alive when we connect with purpose and community. Purpose is the great liberator that sets us free and opens our eyes to the inherent value that we hold in our hands and possess within. After all, that is the power and the glory of the Circles story!
More from our Black History Month 2026 series:
Building Community to End Poverty for 25+ Years
