Carter G. Woodson

Early life

Carter Godwin Woodson was born on 19 December 1875 in New Canton, Virginia, the son of formerly enslaved parents. Schooling was scarce in his childhood, and as a young man he worked in the coalfields of West Virginia's New River Gorge after his family moved to Huntington. He did not begin formal high school until about age 20, at Douglass High School, and finished in two years.

Scholar

Woodson went on to earn a bachelor's degree from Berea College in Kentucky and bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Chicago. In 1912 he received a Ph.D. from Harvard, becoming the second Black American to do so after W. E. B. Du Bois. According to the National Park Service, he was also the first child of enslaved parents to earn a Harvard doctorate.

Building a field

In the summer of 1915 Woodson travelled to Chicago for a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of emancipation, where he displayed an exhibit on Black history. On 9 September 1915, at the Wabash YMCA in Chicago, he and four others, including A. L. Jackson, founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, today the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. The next year he launched The Journal of Negro History to publish research by Black scholars. He later added The Negro History Bulletin and a publishing house, Associated Publishers.

After serving as a dean at Howard University in 1919–20, Woodson left teaching in 1922 to devote himself to the Association, research and writing. From 1922 until his death he lived and worked at the Association's headquarters, 1538 Ninth Street NW in Washington, D.C. Among more than a dozen books, the best known is The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933).

Negro History Week

In February 1926 the Association announced the first Negro History Week. Woodson placed it in the second week of February to include the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, which Black communities already celebrated. ASALH notes that he hoped to move commemoration from honouring two great men to recognising the achievements of a whole people, and that he saw Black history as worth studying all year, not just for a week.

Legacy

Woodson died at his Washington home on 3 April 1950 and is widely called the "Father of Black History." In 1976, the fiftieth anniversary of the first celebration, the observance became Black History Month, with President Gerald Ford issuing the first official message. His home became a unit of the National Park System in 2006, and the association he founded continues to set an annual theme for Black History Month.