Huntington Beach Moves To Cut Ethnic And Cultural Heritage Months

Black History Month, Women’s History Month and Pride Month will no longer be recognized in Huntington Beach. Instead, the city council voted Tuesday to establish a monthly calendar program that honors local, California, and American history.

Some of the new monthly themes will include "Black Gold Jubilee: Honoring the Discovery of Oil" in November and “The Revolutionary and Civil War” in February, which will lead to a Civil War reenactment in March.

Before the council adopted the item, Kathie Shey, who has served on Huntington Beach’s Historic Resources Board for 15 years, resigned in protest from her position.

“A whole additional board is going to be created to administer these heritage projects,” Shey said. “I think it's a pretty thinly veiled stinging, a vote of no confidence both in my role as a historian. And leadership of the Historic Resources Board.”

Shey said the board includes a history professor, two history authors who have “incredible knowledge, incredible training, incredible skill sets that they contribute all the time with enthusiasm and commitment to preserving and sharing the history of our city.”

Two council members and a group of Huntington Beach residents will manage the new calendar.

Councilmember Casey McKeon, who proposed the new calendar, said the move was necessary as current monthly celebrations are “fragmented, they're inconsistent and relatively unorganized between the departments.”

He says the new calendar will organize and distill the city's efforts to "map out an entire calendar of events to celebrate something for an entire month.”

But Councilmember Dan Kalmick said that the history being recognized in the new calendar is “easily known” and is taught in schools.

Instead, he called for the inclusion of “things that were overlooked for what we learned in public school, usually because they were either too complicated to learn as a child or they were adult themed, like the Tulsa massacre.”

California State Sen. Dave Min, whose district oversees Huntington Beach, called the move an “assault on American Heritage celebrations.”

In a statement, posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, he said the new calendar was a “whitewashed revisionist history that unabashedly lionizes Big Oil and indulges in Civil War nostalgia.”

The new calendar program will be implemented in the New Year starting with “Founders' Legacy — Celebrating Huntington Beach's Origins" which will delve into the city's founding and establishment of Huntington Beach. During Tuesday’s meeting, a Holocaust Remembrance Day was also added to January.