Historian and founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, the Journal of Negro History, and “Negro History Week", Carter Godwin Woodson was born on December 19, 1875 in New Canton, Virginia. He was the son of two illiterate parents, James and Anne Eliza, who were coal miners and formerly enslaved. As a Black boy growing up in central Virginia during the late 19th century, Carter Woodson had few educational or employment opportunities. Carter, one of nine children, would often leave the dinner table hungry and sought food in nearby woods. Working as a farm laborer, he attended school just five months out of the year in a one-room schoolhouse, only on days of rain and snow, when he was not needed to work the farm, where he was taught by their uncles, John Morton Riddle and James Buchanon Riddle. He was an excellent student when he showed up and often completed assignments early.
As a teenager, he worked on other farms to earn money for his family, eventually going with his brothers to Huntington, West Virginia, to earn money in the coal mines in 1892 when he was 17. In 1895, he and his older brother Robert completed jobs building railroads and working in the coalfields. Between 1890 and 1910, many Black Americans sought work in West Virginia, a state that was rapidly industrializing, especially the industry of coal production, and was slightly less racially oppressive than the deep south. At this time, Black Americans were barred from many professions because of their race but able to work as coal miners, which was dangerous and strenuous work, and coal companies gladly hired Black because they could get away with paying them less than White Americans.
At least two people Woodson met in the mines left indelible impressions on him: Oliver Jones, and a White miner whom Woodson did not name. Jones, an intelligent Civil War veteran, opened his home as a safe space for Black Americans to read and have discussions about everything from Black rights and politics to stories about the war. Equality was a common topic. In Jones, Woodson found the embodiment of a well-educated man, the antithesis of the college-educated people Woodson described as mis-educated. Jones was an illiterate who collected books and subscribed to many newspapers. Mr. Jones proved to be an important part of Woodson's life. Jones encouraged Woodson to study the many books and newspapers he kept in his home—many of which covered topics in Black history—in exchange for free refreshments. Woodson began to realize his passion for research, particularly researching the history of his people.
Oliver Jones also persuaded Woodson to read to the other illiterate miners, as he had been doing for his father. One book that Jones encouraged Woodson to read was "Men of Mark" by William J. Simmons. Simmons wrote short biographies of many prominent Black men and historic figures, such as Crispus Attucks, Frederick Douglass, Henry Highland Garnet, and Alexander Crummell, as well as lesser known ones. On the other hand, the White coal miner, was the symbol of what Woodson disliked about religion. The miner, a devout Episcopalian, bragged about his participation in the attacks on four blacks in Clifton Forge, Virginia, and their lynching in 1892, causing Woodson to question the legitimacy of religion. Woodson judged this miner as a representative of the people who used religion to support the slavery system, and Woodson’s reaction to him helps explain Woodson’s relentless attacks in the 1930s on Black church leaders with close ties to institutions that promoted segregation, such as the YMCA. He considered segregation an evil remnant of slavery and called it unchristian.
Woodson enrolled in segregated Huntington’s all-Black Douglass High School, and was frequently absent because he was off working. His regimen of self-instruction paid off, he earned his high school diploma in 1897 after completing four years of course work in two years in a graduating class of two. Woodson then studied briefly at Berea College in Kentucky. He continued his education at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania before moving to Fayette County, West Virginia, and his first teaching assignment, teaching high school in Winona, W.VA. from 1898 to 1900. Despite misgivings about churches run by the wrong people, Woodson remained a Christian, serving as a Sunday schoolteacher and president of the board of deacons of the First Baptist Church in Winona.
In 1900 Carter H. Barnett, a Woodson first cousin, was fired as principal of Douglass High School because of his politics. The West Virginia Spokesman, a newspaper Barnett edited, supported independent Black politics, rather than party lines. Carter Woodson was hired to replace Barnett as principal that summer. While principal, Woodson earned a West Virginia teaching certificate and gained recognition in the local press when he honored William McKinley in a special service at Douglass following the president’s assassination in 1901. In private life, Woodson continued to read aloud to his father and was said to bring breakfast to him at his railroad job on Sundays. Woodson then studied briefly at Berea College in Kentucky then one of the nation’s few integrated colleges (a year after Woodson graduated, a state law outlawed integrated education). Woodson earned a Bachelor of Literature degree from Berea in 1903.
After his college graduation from Berea in 1903, he saw Booker T. Washington for the first time, in Lexington, Kentucky, that year and was impressed by Washington’s oratory and, was still spellbound three decades later when he wrote about the speech. During the period of 1903 to 1909, he served as a teacher and supervisor of schools in Philippines. When he left there four years later because of poor health, he had been promoted to supervisor and was training local teachers. Woodson continued to traveling, visiting the Middle East and Europe. He studied at Sorbonne University in Paris during his travels. When he returned to the U.S., he enrolled at the University of Chicago and received a second bachelor's degree and a master's degree in European History in 1908.
In 1908, he entered the Ph.D. program in history at Harvard University, one of several historically white “colonial colleges” that gained some of its wealth from slavery. After graduating from the University of Chicago, he became the second Black American, after W.E.B Du Bois, to obtain a Ph.D. degree from Harvard University in 1912. While in residence at Harvard University, he did research at the Library of Congress for his doctoral dissertation, "The Disruption of Virginia", while teaching high school in Washington, D.C. During his time at Harvard, Woodson became increasingly concerned about the lack of scholarship on the place of African Americans in the nation’s history—that four centuries of slavery had relegated their considerable contributions to the margins. After earning his doctoral degree, he continued teaching in public schools ultimately becoming the principal of the all-Black Armstrong Manual Training School in Washington D.C. He taught at Armstrong and at M Street High School (now Dunbar High School), the first public high school for Blacks in the United States.
Promoting the documentation of Black history quickly became Woodson’s mission. He found that many of the achievements by Blacks were overlooked, ignored and even suppressed by writers of history textbooks. He felt that young Blacks in the early 20th century were not being taught enough of their own heritage, and the achievements of their ancestors. His prime ambition was that "young Blacks would grow up with a firm knowledge of their ancestors". In September of 1915, Woodson was visiting Chicago and in residence at the Wabash Avenue YMCA and in the surrounding Bronzeville neighborhood. It was there that he decided to move forward with the idea of creating an organization devoted to the study of Black history and culture. While attending the Exposition of Negro Progress, which was organized to celebrate the 50th anniversary of emancipation, Woodson founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH), along with four other Black men, George Cleveland Hall, W. B. Hartgrove, Alexander L. Jackson, and James E. Stamp, who agreed to the project.
It was later renamed the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, (ASALH). It was the first academic association to promote the study of Black history. The same year, Woodson established the Journal of Negro History to publish scholarly articles about African American history. Its first issue was published in January 1916 to give scholars, primarily African Americans and Whites who wrote about Black history, a vehicle in which to publish their research. The journal’s mission was to shift the dynamic of the telling of American history from the dominant White perspective and to investigate African Americans as a group with distinct cultural, religious, economic, and social signatures. The articles Woodson published in the Journal not only challenged racism, but also emphasized daily struggles and resistance. In sum, Woodson’s editorship of the Journal furthered his objective to promote and professionalize Black history, to provide scholars with a place to publish, and to expose and critique the untruths in some of the White-run history journals.
Dr. Woodson's first book, published in 1915, shortly before he found the ASNLH, was on the history of Black American education titled "The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861." In this book, he emphasizes the importance and power of the Black American story but talks about why it has not been told. He explains that enslavers are responsible for preventing Black Americans from receiving proper education so as to more easily force them into subordination and that the erasure of Black history has benefited White people for centuries. The only way to fight racism then, he argues, is to educate people about all that Black people have done for society so that this race is no longer regarded as lesser. Even as World War I raged, he began to campaign vociferously for research into the achievements of Blacks in American history, particularly the work of archiving the public record of the generation born after the Emancipation Proclamation.
In 1918, Woodson returned to Armstrong as school principal. Although the school focused on teaching trades, Woodson insisted that students have vocational and liberal arts classes. He also instituted an adult education program. This commitment to adult education would continue in his work with the ASNLH. Woodson would walked to the Library of Congress, near the U.S. Capitol, to do his research. During these walks, in addition to getting great exercise, Woodson was able to observe his fellow citizens and be a part of the crowd in a burgeoning urban center. Woodson developed an audience for his journal and books by traveling around the country and lecturing to African American organizations and institutions, women’s clubs, fraternal associations, and civic groups. He also held annual meetings of the ASNLH, and worked with schoolteachers and boards of education to promote the study of Black history.
The summer of 1919 was the "Red Summer", a time of intense racial violence. Washingtonians, as did residents in major cities throughout the U.S., experienced a wave of terror after the end of World War I instigated by White servicemen, often with the support of White police officers. Woodson was caught up in one night's horror. On July 20th, 1919, Woodson was walking home on Pennsylvania Avenue, Woodson was forced to hide in the shadows of a storefront as a White mob approached. "They had caught a Negro and deliberately held him as one would a beef for slaughter," he recalled, "and when they had conveniently adjusted him for lynching, they shot him. I heard him groaning in his struggle as I hurried away as fast as I could without running, expecting every moment to be lynched myself." In the face of widespread disillusionment felt in Black America caused by the "Red Summer", Carter worked hard to improve the understanding of Black history, later writing: "I have made every sacrifice for this movement. I have spent all my time doing this one thing and trying to do it efficiently."
In 1920, Dr. Woodson became dean of the School of Liberal Arts at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and it was there that he created a formal Black American history survey course. In this class, Woodson worked to offer his students a “new and acceptable form of history” that considered social conditions and attended to the lived experiences of African American people. From Howard, he went on to be the dean at West Virginia State. While at West Virginia, Woodson founded Associated Publishers, which was dedicated to issuing books by African American authors. Woodson published two seminal works— "The History of the Negro Church" (1921), which describes how Black churches have come to be and have developed over time. The next year his overview of the Black experience, "The Negro in Our History", was published. It summarizes the contributions Black people have made to America throughout history.
Woodson's Omega Psi Phi fraternity voted to launch Negro History and Literature Week, grounded in the work of Woodson and the ASNLH in 1920. The first Negro History and Literature Week took place the following year, in April 1921. He continued to write publish and lecture nationwide. For instance, in 1924, he published the first study of free Black slave owners of 1830, in the United States. Woodson never married—his commitment to his mission was absolute. Woodson poured his own money into the organization and traveled frequently to raise money. Critics found him egocentric and demanding in his near-dictatorial administration of the ASALH. In 1925, Woodson requested that Negro History and Literature Week be transferred to the ASNLH so that he and his colleagues could oversee it. Mary McLeod Bethune, as president of the National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools, worked closely with the ASNLH on this effort.
Under the ASNLH, the name was changed to Negro History Week and shifted from April to February, to honor Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, who were both born in February. Woodson had the idea of devoting a week to the celebration of achievements by Black Americans, achievements that were overlooked because they were not seen as valuable or important by many White Americans. Schools would pay particular attention to the contributions of African Americans. It was first celebrated the week of Feb. 7, 1926. Black educators, with Woodson's encouragement, rapidly adopted the week-long study of Black American history. It was Dr. Woodson's belief that setting aside a week for studying Black history would make its way into school curriculums across the country and bring light to the many ways that Black Americans have shaped society. In 1926, Carter Woodson received the Spingarn Medal, the highest award given by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), in recognition of his crusade to define a history of African American culture.
The seeds of Negro History Week were planted decades before by Mary Church Terrell. Terrell is known for her anti-lynching activism and leadership in the National Association of Colored Women. Terrell’s passion for educating Black students and honoring the contributions of Black leaders fueled her desire to spread Black history. As a member of the Washington, D.C Board of Education, she leveraged her position on the Board to create the first “Frederick Douglass Day,” which D.C. Black schools began celebrating on February 14, 1897. Many historians see Terrell’s Douglass Day as one of the direct precursors to Negro History Week. Terrell later wrote that teaching Black youth about great figures of their own race was essential to counter racist ideas of Black inferiority. Terrell worked directly with Woodson to promote black history and Negro History Week across the country. She helped Woodson plan conferences for the ASNLH.
Less well known are Woodson’s activities in civil rights organizations. He was a lifelong member of both the NAACP and the National Urban League. Woodson vigorously championed the NAACP’s antilynching campaign. During the 1930s and 1940s, Woodson backed other radical and leftist Black organizations, such as the New Negro Alliance and its “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaign, lead by Negro League Baseball executive Effa Manley, which was a reaction to the exclusion of Black laborers from White-owned businesses in large urban areas. He also supported the radical National Negro Congress and attended its meetings, which aimed to unite Black and white people against Jim Crow, segregation, and violence. In 1933, he completed his defining work, "The Mis-education of the Negro", a sweeping and visionary reappraisal of how to educate Black Americans about their own cultural place in their nation.
Dr. Woodson spent the rest of his life studying, writing about, and promoting the study of Black history. He fought to keep Black history alive at a time when most White historians were actively working to bury it and White Americans were ambivalent or hostile toward African Americans. He kept the ASNLH and its journal going, even when funding was scarce. Mary McLeod Bethune served as president of ASNLH beginning in 1936 (and through 1950) and urged Woodson to create the Negro History Bulletin. In 1937, he published the first issue of the Negro History Bulletin, a newsletter with resources—such as journal entries by enslaved people and research articles by Black scholars—that teachers could use to teach Black history. Bethune was one of a number of Black women responsible for the reach and success of the Negro History Bulletin. Other African American women served on the editorial and managing boards, served as writers and contributors, and taught the material as schoolteachers. They were the ones most actively engaged with the Negro History Bulletin.
ASNLH sent the Negro History Bulletin to local schools and communities across the country to supplement their teaching of Black history during Negro History Week. For example, the first bulletin featured “The Thrilling Escape of William and Ellen Craft.” In the 1940s, efforts began slowly within the Black community to expand the study of Black history in the schools and Black history celebrations before the public. In the South, African American teachers often taught Negro History as a supplement to United States history. One early beneficiary of the movement reported that his teacher would hide Woodson’s textbook beneath his desk to avoid drawing the wrath of the principal. In 1948, ASNLH began producing Negro History Week kits. Woodson and his colleagues recognized that individuals living in rural areas needed more resources to learn and share black history. The kits, then, included plays, speeches, writings, and photographs. They offered a rich foundation for teachers and others to use these materials to develop their own unique programs and celebrations.
Dr. Woodson did not live to see Brown v. Board of Education rule school segregation unconstitutional, nor did he live to see the creation of Black History Month in 1976. Dr. Woodson died at his home in Washington, D.C., at the age of 74 on April 3, 1950. The ASNLH, the Associated Publishers, and the Journal of Negro History struggled to survive after his death. Financial hardships plagued the organization throughout the second half of the twentieth century. The time that schools have set aside each year to focus on African-American history is Woodson's most visible legacy. His monumental body of writings across more than six decades of public service to his race and to his nation testifies to his enduring optimism that racial harmony would come as a result of reeducation of both White and Black America. Because of Carter G. Woodson, African Americans that often went obscured are now recognize. Woodson laid the foundation for Black social consciousness that would grow during the “modern” Civil Rights era of the 1950s and 1960s.