How To Celebrate Black History Month at Work With 11 Poems Worth Sharing

THE GIST: This blog highlights 10 inspiring poems for Black History Month and explains how poetry can help teams reflect on Black history, culture, and lived experiences in a meaningful way. It features works from influential poets like Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lucille Clifton, each exploring themes of resilience, identity, freedom, and empowerment. The key takeaway is that sharing and discussing these poems at work can spark important conversations, deepen understanding, and create more thoughtful, inclusive ways to celebrate Black History Month.

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Most teams get stuck in the same place when they sit down to plan how to celebrate Black History Month at work. The options feel like either a slide deck nobody remembers or skipping February because nobody wants to get it wrong.

Poetry is one of the simplest ways out of that. A good poem does the work of a whole workshop in about ninety seconds, and costs nothing to share.

I’ve spent years watching what connects with teams and what makes people check their phones. Below are eleven Black History Month poems I’d bring into a room.

You’ll also find activities that go past a mass email and honest guidance on marking the month in a way your Black colleagues won’t wince at. Our Diversity and Inclusion Programs are built on the same thinking.

How to celebrate Black History Month at work

Start smaller than you think you need to. The most effective Black History Month ideas tend to be short, specific, and repeatable, rather than one big event that eats an afternoon and never happens again.

A ten minute poem reading at the top of a standing meeting reaches more people than an optional lunch session, and it asks less of everyone, so it’s likelier to survive a busy February.

The goal isn’t to deliver a history lesson. Most of how to celebrate Black History Month at work comes down to giving people something real to react to, then getting out of the way.

If your company has DEI principles written down somewhere, this is a good month to use them rather than reference them. Black History Month has been federally recognized since 1976, and plenty of workplaces still treat it as an open question.

TeamBonding celebrates Black history

We treat February as a starting line. One of our most requested options is Almost Anything Goes: Black History Month Trivia, covering African American artists, innovators, and trailblazers across the arts, literature, fashion, film, and music.

What works about trivia is that it’s low stakes. People learn things sideways while they compete, and what they didn’t know comes up naturally afterward.

11 Black History Month poems to share with your team

These eleven Black History Month poems span a century of American writing, from the Harlem Renaissance to a poem written during the pandemic. For each, I’ve noted what it’s doing, where it sits historically, and a question to put to a group afterward.

Read them out loud, or have someone read them. These were built for the ear, and silent reading flattens most of them.

If you’re working out how to celebrate Black History Month at work on a tight schedule, this is the section to steal from. The poems pair well with simple icebreakers or conversation starters.

“New Day’s Lyric” by Amanda Gorman

Amanda Gorman became the youngest inaugural poet in US history in 2021 and the first National Youth Poet Laureate. She shared “New Day’s Lyric” at the start of 2022.

Written while the pandemic was still reshaping daily life, it refuses to pretend the hard part didn’t happen, then argues for hope anyway. A useful opener for a team that’s been through something together.

Ask what your group got through last year that nobody ever properly acknowledged. More on Gorman.

“I, Too” by Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes was a defining voice of the Harlem Renaissance. “I, Too” first appeared in 1926 as a direct answer to Walt Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing.”

The speaker gets sent to eat in the kitchen when company comes, eats well anyway, and promises tomorrow will look different. It’s about belonging and who gets counted as American.

A ninety year old argument that still lands. Ask who gets sent to the kitchen in your meetings, and who does most of the talking. More on Hughes.

“Caged Bird” by Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou was a poet, memoirist, and civil rights worker. “Caged Bird”, from her 1983 collection Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing?, sets a free bird against a caged one.

The caged bird sings because song is the only freedom it has left. The title nods to Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “Sympathy,” which also gave Angelou her memoir title: Black writers answering each other across decades.

Ask where people have a voice but no real say. It’s uncomfortable, which is why it’s a good question. More on Angelou.

“Primer for Blacks” by Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn Brooks was the first Black author to win a Pulitzer Prize, which she received for poetry in 1950. “Primer for Blacks”, self-published in 1980, treats Blackness as a title and a commitment rather than a circumstance.

The tone is instructional and a little impatient, like a teacher who has said this before. She wrote it while deliberately publishing with Black presses for Black readers first, which changes how it sounds.

Ask what it costs someone to make themselves smaller at work. More on Brooks.

“For My People” by Margaret Walker

Margaret Walker’s first collection won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1942, when she was in her twenties. “For My People” is the title poem, built like a sermon.

Long rolling lines move through generations of work, worship, and grief before turning to demand that a new generation rise. Read this one aloud if you only read one aloud.

Ask what your team wants the next group of people here to inherit. More on Walker.

“Nina’s Blues” by Cornelius Eady

Cornelius Eady is an American writer from Rochester, New York, who focuses most of his writing on jazz and the blues, life, and societal problems that often stem from race and class issues. 

Eady is a co-founder of Cave Canem, a national organization for Black poets and poetry. In this poem, he praises Nina Simone, a legendary singer, performer, and Civil Rights activist.

“Won’t you celebrate with me” by Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2000 and served as poet laureate of Maryland. “Won’t you celebrate with me”, from Book of Light in 1993, runs fourteen lines with almost no capital letters.

The speaker explains that she made herself up, having had no model to copy. It ends on survival rather than triumph, which is why it gets read at graduations and memorials alike.

Pair it with recognition conversations and ask what people here have built without a template. More on Clifton.

“Still I Rise” by Maya Angelou

Angelou earns a second place here, because “Still I Rise” does something the others don’t. Published in her 1978 collection And Still I Rise, it speaks directly to an oppressor and answers with joy instead of grievance.

Nine stanzas, with “I rise” returning like a drumbeat. Familiarity is an advantage: people who swear they don’t like poetry already know this one.

Use it as a closer and read the final stanza as a group. Saying “I rise” out loud with other people lands differently than reading it silently.

“Black is Beautiful” by Shannon D. Brown-Rogers

This poem comes from a reader submission platform rather than a literary archive, which is why I keep it on the list. “Black is Beautiful” uses plain, unguarded language to celebrate Black beauty and heritage.

Nothing to decode, nothing to look up. Every other poem here arrives with institutional weight behind it, while this one arrives as a person writing something down because they meant it.

Hand it to the colleague who insists poetry isn’t for them. It’s the easiest entry point on the list.

“Short Speech to My Friends” by Amiri Baraka

Amiri Baraka helped found the Black Arts Movement in the mid 1960s, opening the Black Arts Repertory Theatre School in Harlem. “Short Speech to My Friends”, from The Dead Lecturer in 1964, opens by proposing that political art be tenderness.

Then it argues with that idea for the rest of its length. It never resolves, which is the honest part, and it’s addressed to friends who may not want what the speaker asks of them.

Bring this to a group that enjoys disagreeing. The Poetry Foundation has an introduction to the Black Arts Movement, and there’s more on Baraka.

“Green-Thumb Boy” by Marilyn Nelson

Marilyn Nelson is a three-time National Book Award finalist and served as poet laureate of Connecticut. “Green-Thumb Boy” comes from Carver: A Life in Poems, her 2001 book about George Washington Carver.

It’s spoken by Dr. L. H. Pammel, a botany professor who taught him, so the praise arrives secondhand from a white colleague with condescension folded in. Nelson lets you hear both at once.

A sharp prompt for managers: how do we talk about our highest performers, and what do we assume while we do it? The Poetry Foundation published a selection of Nelson’s work.

What are some other activities for Black History Month?

The best activities for Black History Month give people something to do together rather than something to sit through. Most of the ideas below cost nothing and need no vendor, including the ones I’d recommend first.

That’s the part people miss when they research how to celebrate Black History Month at work: budget is rarely the obstacle. Here are six approaches that work whether your team shares an office or spans time zones.

Host a book or poetry discussion

Pick one short text, send it out a week early, and block thirty minutes. Poetry works especially well because nobody has to finish a three hundred page book to take part.

Choose two or three of the poems above and ask one question about each. A few ground rules help: no requirement to speak, no wrong readings, and a hard stop so people trust the time.

Invite a speaker

An outside voice takes pressure off your own team and usually raises the quality of the conversation. Local historians, authors, museum educators, and poets often do this work for reasonable fees.

Good speakers bring their own structure, so there’s less planning for you. I’ve seen the Q and A run longer than the talk because people finally had somewhere to put their questions.

Our speaker roster is one option, and speakers like Shamiel Gary build sessions around audience participation.

Visit a cultural museum or landmark

Field trips are underrated. A local African American history museum, a civil rights landmark, or a university exhibit gives a team shared ground a conference room can’t.

Many museums offer group rates and docent-led tours if you book ahead, and most major institutions now run virtual tours for distributed teams.

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture publishes Black History Month resources each year, including material built around the annual theme.

Run a donation drive

Reach out to Black-led or Black-owned nonprofits nearby and ask what they need before deciding what to collect. The answer is frequently not what you’d guess.

From there a team can gather items for local schools, raise funds, or use its reach to get an organization’s mission in front of more people.

Pick something you can sustain. A drive that returns every February means more than a one time donation with a press release attached.

Support Black-owned businesses

Invite a local entrepreneur to a team meeting to talk about their work, or route real spending their way. Catering, print, gifts, and event services are all easy places to start.

Black-owned businesses are straightforward to find online, and your team probably has recommendations if you ask.

The spending matters more than the social post. Adding a vendor in February and keeping them in March is what counts.

Share stories and spotlights

Ask for volunteers to help build a list of Black leaders, artists, scientists, and innovators, then share one or two a week in your newsletter or team channel.

Keeping it short is the trick. A paragraph and a link gets read, while a long profile gets saved for later and never opened.

If your company has employee resource groups, ask whether they want to shape this, and respect the answer if they’d rather not.

How can teams celebrate Black History Month respectfully?

Celebrating respectfully comes down to three things: not making your Black colleagues do the work, not treating February as the whole conversation, and not reducing a century of achievement to a highlight reel of suffering.

These are where I see well-intentioned plans go sideways. Anyone thinking through how to celebrate Black History Month at work can avoid all three with some planning up front.

Don’t make Black employees the teachers

The quickest way to sour a program is to volunteer your Black colleagues to run it. Being Black at work isn’t a qualification to deliver unpaid DEI training, and being asked repeatedly is exhausting in a way that’s easy to miss from the outside.

Ask, don’t assign. If someone wants to lead a session, it should be recognized as real work with real time attached.

Outside speakers, historians, and published material exist precisely so this doesn’t land on whoever happens to be in the room. Employee resource groups make good partners too, as long as they’re invited rather than drafted.

Our notes on building an inclusive culture at work get into how that distinction plays out.

Don’t let recognition end on February 28

A single month can’t carry a year of inclusion, and treating February as the whole program is how companies earn a reputation for performance over substance.

Pick one thing from February and keep it running: a rotating book pick, a quarterly speaker, a vendor you kept, or a budget line that doesn’t disappear on March 1st.

Carter G. Woodson founded the organization now known as ASALH in 1915 and launched the first week-long observance a decade later. It has always framed the month as a foundation, not the whole structure.

Working diversity and inclusion activities into your normal rhythm beats concentrating everything into four weeks. Programs like Knowing Me, Knowing You run just as well in June.

Lead with achievement, not only struggle

Black history at work often gets flattened into slavery, segregation, and the civil rights movement, full stop. That history matters enormously, and it isn’t the whole story.

The eleven poems above make the case. They’re records of invention, craft, humor, and argument by people who won Pulitzers and National Book Awards and reshaped American literature.

ASALH sets an annual theme that makes this easier. The 2027 theme is “From Black Print Culture to Digital Blackness,” tracing how Black Americans have told their own stories from the first Black-owned newspapers through today’s digital spaces.

For a poetry-centered program that theme is a gift, since it puts the writing itself at the center.

Celebrate Black History Month with TeamBonding

Culture is worth celebrating year-round, and we build experiences that make it straightforward rather than daunting. If you want ideas for Black History Month at work that don’t require producing an event from scratch, several of ours translate well.

Our Virtual Museum Scavenger Hunt takes teams through key exhibits from the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, while Almost Anything Goes Trivia and Jeopardy!® turn learning into friendly competition.

If you’re rethinking culture in the workplace more broadly, February is a reasonable place to begin. Deciding how to celebrate Black History Month at work is often the first honest conversation a team has about inclusion.

Start with something small you can repeat. One poem read out loud in a meeting is a real beginning. Contact us today and we’ll help you work out the rest.