What February 14 Means to Me

I’ve never celebrated Valentine's Day with a valentine. For me, this holiday has never consisted of a date, or a box of chocolates, or a kiss, or someone to hold or be held by. It’s been a rather hollow holiday for my whole life, but I love it nonetheless because I love love. I think we all ought to celebrate love, even if we don’t currently have the type of love Valentine’s Day is typically understood to celebrate. But there are other reasons to celebrate this day, too.

Valentine’s Day shares a date with another important holiday: the birthday of preeminent abolitionist and statesman Fredrick Douglass. Born into enslavement, Douglass earned his spot as one of the most influential and celebrated Americans to ever live.

His birthday represents far more than an ordinary birthday. Douglass, like many enslaved people, had his birthday taken away from him. He never knew the true date — only that it was likely sometime in February. Because his mother called him her “Little Valentine,” he chose February 14th to celebrate his birthday, reasserting his personhood and defying the dehumanization of his enslavement.

For centuries, Black holidays and celebrations have been forged and fought for — history has shown that they aren’t just a given. As we look beyond Valentine’s Day, we should view the entirety of Black History Month in this light. This month-long celebration is a way to honor the previously forgotten, unmarked, and unmemorialized love Black Americans have poured into this country and our own liberation in the face of a past and present of racist violence and dehumanization. Black History Month provides us a framework for marking those unremembered contributions.

I’ve heard a few times that Black History Month relegates the history of Black Americans to a limited timeframe (the shortest month of the year, at that), but the dates bookending a celebration don’t have to limit its acknowledgement or belittle its importance. Regardless, it remains incredibly important to have a regular, structured time to celebrate all of the contributions Black Americans have made to this country, particularly those we don’t have dates for. We should imagine this month not as an all-encompassing celebration of the history we do know, but rather as an opportunity to commemorate the stories that have gone unarchived and forgotten.

The lost archive of Black history doesn’t just include the names on slave ledgers, or the physical demarcations of sexual violence in my genome, or the hope in a simple hymn. Much about the lives of my ancestors will never be accessible to me; it has been taken from me.

So this month is about another project, too, that Douglass was instrumental in launching. He initiated a process of self-memorialization in a world that didn’t want him to be actualized in the first place. He was, for a long time, the most photographed American ever. Douglass filled the photobooks, the calendar, and the archives of Blackness, all of which had been hollowed out and kept empty for generations — he advanced the self-memorialization of the whole race.

To thrive and survive as a Black person in a white space, we must research, acknowledge, celebrate, and share our accomplishments — the big, communal ones, but also the small, personal ones. This project necessitates the constant discovery and celebration of new holidays that catalog the work, fights, wins, and losses that don’t have dates on our calendar. That the history behind the Black American experience cannot fit neatly in February doesn’t mean that Black History Month isn’t a worthy endeavor.

I do understand that holidays like these can also spur apprehension and sadness. It is painful for anyone to celebrate themselves, or their ancestors, or the love in their life, when so much history was purposefully erased. It’s like building without a foundation.

Indeed, Black History Month and all the holidays it contains are bittersweet for me. But they are better celebrated now than never. Hopefully, in celebrating these holidays, we hold ourselves to building a better future, treating the people around us with respect and dignity, and loving ourselves a little more every day.

For me, this means commemorating Fredrick Douglass’s Birthday, celebrating the interracial, queer love that created my family this Valentine’s Day, and always remembering how thankful I am for the Black leaders that fought for my ability to be where I am today. As for the rest of the month, let the love flow freely.

Tenzin R. Gund-Morrow ‘26, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Canaday Hall.