How Black Lives Matter is changing Black History Month

FRESHMAN YEAR CAN MAKE ANYONE FEEL UNSETTLED, BUT Seattle teen Janelle Gary felt especially lost when she entered high school in 2015. At home, she watched a wave of gentrification drive change in the historically black Central District neighborhood, and at school, where she was one of the few students of color in an honors history class, she felt as if black perspectives were also in the minority.

Looking back at that time, as an 18-year-old first-year student at Central Washington University, she feels her teacher was “tiptoeing” around hard race-related questions about history. But things were different in her ethnic-studies class, where her teacher Jesse Hagopian remembered what it was like to be the only black kid in a class.

That memory is part of the reason Hagopian, 41, and other educators, inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement,