Skip to Main Content
MCPHS Library Logo

Black History Month

In this guide, you will find information about Black History Month and resources supporting each year's theme. Updated for 2025!

What's On This Page?

Explore resources that support the theme for Black History Month 2025, African Americans and Labor.

Black History Month 2025: African Americans and Labor

This year's Black History Month theme is African Americans and Labor.  According to ASALH:

  • "The 2025 Black History Month theme, "African Americans and Labor", focuses on the various and profound ways that work and working of all kinds – free and unfree, skilled, and unskilled, vocational and voluntary – intersect with the collective experiences of Black people. Indeed, work is at the very center of much of Black history and culture. Be it the traditional agricultural labor of enslaved Africans that fed Low Country colonies, debates among Black educators on the importance of vocational training, self-help strategies and entrepreneurship in Black communities, or organized labor’s role in fighting both economic and social injustice, Black people’s work has been transformational throughout the U.S., Africa, and the Diaspora. The 2025 Black History Month theme, “African Americans and Labor,” sets out to highlight and celebrate the potent impact of this work....The theme, “African Americans and Labor,” intends to encourage broad reflections on intersections between Black people’s work and their workplaces in all their iterations and key moments, themes, and events in Black history and culture across time and space and throughout the U.S., Africa, and the Diaspora. Like religion, social justice movements, and education, studying African Americans’ labor and labor struggles are important organizing foci for new interpretations and reinterpretations of the Black past, present, and future. Such new considerations and reconsiderations are even more significant as the historical forces of racial oppression gather new and renewed strength in the 21st century."

Black History Month 2025 Activities and Events

Important Note

On this guide we have included some resources that we recommend, but are not available through the MCPHS Libraries.  For these resources, we have set up the links to redirect to the Boston Public Library, as many members of the MCPHS community are able to use their resources.  If you are not able to use the Boston Public Library, feel free to find these resources at your own library!

Want to sign up for a Boston Public Library eCard?  Learn to do so here. Not eligible for a Boston Public Library eCard? Find these items in your local library in WorldCat.

Books

Chained in Silence
Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow
Brotherhoods of Color
Workers on Arrival
For Jobs and Freedom
Whose Detroit?
Opportunity Denied
Household Workers Unite
Detroit: I Do Mind Dying
A Renegade Union
A New Deal for Bronzeville
A Brick and a Bible
A. Philip Randolph and the Struggle for Civil Rights
Black Folk
Black Power at Work
To 'Joy My Freedom
There's Always Work at the Post Office
Black and Blue

Streaming Videos from the MCPHS Libraries

Videos to Check Out from Your Local Library

Connect with the MCPHS Libraries via Social Media: Instagram