Black History Month Beyond the U.S.: Teaching the Early 20th Century Through Europe

Jazzhus Montmartre in Copenhagen became a leading European stage for American jazz musicians in the postwar era, continuing a transatlantic cultural exchange that began earlier in interwar Paris.

Black History Month is often taught through a national lens. In the United States, that focus makes sense. But between 1900 and the outbreak of the Second World War, Europe played a central role in shaping Black modern history - through war, empire, migration, art, and ideology.

For history teachers, this period offers something especially valuable: a way to teach Black history not as a separate strand, but as a structural part of the modern world. Traveling through Europe with this lens allows students to encounter Black history where it unfolded - in streets, cafés, museums, and monuments that are often taught without it.

Paris: Art, War, and the Interwar Black Atlantic

La Rotonde, Montparnasse: A gathering place of interwar writers and artists, where conversations about race, modernism, and empire unfolded beyond formal institutions.

After World War I, Paris became a gathering place for Black writers, musicians, performers, and intellectuals from across the Atlantic world. African-American veterans who had served in France returned with a sense that life - and possibility - looked different there. Artists and performers followed.

Walking through Montmartre and Montparnasse today reveals a geography of interwar modernism that is inseparable from Black creativity. Jazz clubs, performance halls, and cafés became sites where racial boundaries felt temporarily negotiable, even as exoticism and stereotyping persisted beneath the surface. Standing in Montmartre allows students to consider why Jazz, and the people who created it, was received differently in Europe than in the United States.

Figures like Josephine Baker embodied this tension. Celebrated as a star, she was also marketed through a colonial gaze that reveals much about race, gender, and empire in the interwar period. Paris offers students a way to explore both cultural freedom and its limits—at the same time, in the same place.

London: Black Presence in the Imperial Metropole

The London Docklands were a vital artery of empire, where maritime labor and global trade reshaped the capital in the early twentieth century.

Early-20th-century London tells a different story. Here, Black history emerges less through voluntary migration and more through imperial structures. Black seamen worked the docks. Colonial troops passed through the city during World War I. African and Caribbean students and workers navigated a capital that governed a global empire but struggled to imagine Black belonging at home.

Sites in London - the Docklands, Brixton, the Imperial War Museum, and so on - allow students to confront questions of citizenship and visibility. Black presence was real, sustained, and essential - but often rendered invisible in traditional narratives of British history. The city becomes a case study in how empires depended on racialized labor while denying full inclusion.

London offers an opportunity to examine how global war and empire reshaped the metropole itself - and why those changes were often resisted, ignored, or minimized.

Berlin: Visibility and Erasure in the Interwar Years

Within Berlin’s field of remembrance, students confront the ideological transformation that ended Weimar openness and narrowed the boundaries of belonging.

In the Weimar years, Berlin briefly became one of Europe’s most culturally experimental cities. Jazz clubs, cabarets, and performance spaces created opportunities for Black entertainers and Afro-German communities to be seen, if not fully accepted.

That openness was fragile.

As students move through Berlin, the transition from Weimar experimentation to Nazi racial ideology becomes starkly visible. Afro-Germans were targeted under racial laws, forcibly sterilized, and erased from public life. Their experiences complicate simplified understandings of race under National Socialism and broaden discussions beyond categories students may already know.

Berlin invites students to ask difficult questions about who is remembered, who is erased, and how ideology reshapes the boundaries of belonging.

Brussels: Colonial Power on Display

The Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren was built to celebrate Belgium’s colonial empire, transforming distant exploitation into national prestige.

In Brussels, Black history is inseparable from empire. The early 20th century was a moment when colonial power was not hidden - it was displayed openly.

Museums, monuments, and exhibitions presented Africa to European audiences through propaganda, spectacle, and deeply racialized hierarchies. Human exhibitions and curated narratives turned colonial violence into something consumable and distant.

Visiting these sites today allows students to confront how Europeans understood empire at the time, and how those understandings were constructed, justified, and normalized. Brussels becomes a place to examine not only what happened in colonies, but how imperial societies taught themselves to accept it.

Lisbon: The Long Arc of the Atlantic World

Lisbon’s Monument to the Discoveries reflects how twentieth-century Portugal linked early Atlantic expansion to modern nationalist identity.

Lisbon offers a longer view. Portugal’s early-20th-century empire drew on centuries of Atlantic history while adapting to a new age of nationalism and authoritarianism.

African communities from Cape Verde, Angola, and elsewhere formed part of the city’s social fabric, even as official narratives emphasized a “benevolent” imperial identity. Walking through Lisbon highlights the tension between imperial myth and lived reality, a tension that would persist well beyond the interwar years.

In Lisbon, we see the connection between early modern Atlantic systems and 20th-century political structures, reinforcing the idea that historical periods overlap rather than end cleanly.

Why These Places Matter for Teaching History

These cities aren't side stories. They're evidence.

Together, they show how Black history shaped - and was shaped by - World War I, empire, modernism, and the crises of the interwar years. They help students see Europe not as a closed continent, but as part of a global system of movement, power, and culture.

For history teachers, travel to these sites offers something rare: the chance to place students inside the questions historians still debate. Standing in these spaces encourages analysis, comparison, and reflection that no single text can provide.

Black history in early-20th-century Europe isn't supplemental. It is foundational to understanding the modern world.

If you’re interested in exploring how student travel can deepen historical understanding, learn more about traveling with your students - or discover which interwar cities offer the richest classroom connections.