Woodson, Carter Godwin

Impact on the world

Founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915 and launched its scholarly Journal of Negro History the following year, then in February 1926 created Negro History Week, choosing the date deliberately to coincide with the birthdays of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln; the observance expanded into Black History Month decades after his death and remains the most widely recognized annual commemoration of African American history in the United States, earning Woodson lasting recognition as 'the Father of Black History.'

Life & background

Born in New Canton, Virginia to formerly enslaved, illiterate parents, Woodson worked the family farm and later West Virginia's coal mines as a teenager, attending school only during the four months between harvest and planting season, and did not enter high school full-time until age 20, completing a four-year course of study in less than two. He earned a bachelor's degree from Berea College, then a second bachelor's and a master's from the University of Chicago, before completing a PhD in history at Harvard in 1912, becoming only the second African American, after W.E.B. Du Bois, to earn a doctorate from that institution and the first person born to formerly enslaved parents to earn any American PhD; his Harvard advisor nonetheless wrote in private correspondence that he considered Black people inherently inferior, a view Woodson encountered as casual, pervasive racism throughout his graduate training. After teaching in Washington, D.C.'s segregated public schools and observing the near-total absence of African American history from the curriculum, he founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915, just months before Booker T. Washington's death, and launched the Journal of Negro History the following year, a publication that has never missed a single issue despite the Great Depression and two world wars. His 1926 creation of Negro History Week, intentionally scheduled to honor Frederick Douglass's and Abraham Lincoln's February birthdays, spread nationally through parades, lectures, and school programs, and decades after his 1950 death was formally expanded into Black History Month, first by grassroots Black educators and students in the late 1960s and then by presidential recognition under Gerald Ford in 1976. His influential 1933 book 'The Mis-Education of the Negro' argued that American schooling itself, by centering white achievement while diminishing Black history, actively damaged Black students' sense of self-worth, an argument that remains widely cited in education scholarship; he died in 1950 while still working on a planned six-volume encyclopedia of African history that he never completed.

Sources

1. Encyclopædia Britannica; NAACP; Biography.com; Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative; Library of Congress; Picturing Black History