Carter Godwin Woodson was born on December 19, 1875 in New Canton, in Buckingham County, Virginia, to parents who were formerly enslaved. He was instrumental in bringing professional recognition to the study of African American history during a period when most historians held the opinion that African Americans were a people without history.
He founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in September 1915 and a journal to chronicle the history and advancements of African Americans. To draw greater attention to the contributions and achievements of African Americans to civilization, he and others founded Negro History Week in 1926. He chose the week to coincide with the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln on February 12 and Frederick Douglass on February 14, whose lives and work supported freedom, equality, and citizenship for African Americans. This celebration and remembrance would later evolve into Black History Month, celebrated nationally beginning in the mid 1970s. Years later many referred to Woodson as the "Father of Negro History."
The association today sets the theme for Black History Month and serves as a resource for local, state, and international branches to help promote greater knowledge of African American history through programs of education, research, and publishing.
Born to a poor family, Woodson supported himself by working in the coal mines of Kentucky. As a result, he was unable to enroll in high school until he was 20. After graduating in less than two years, he taught high school, wrote articles, studied at home and abroad, and went on to earn a doctorate in history at Harvard University in 1912; at the time, only the second African American to receive a Harvard doctorate. His predecessor was the eminent scholar, W.E.B. DuBois.
His organization, the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, encouraged scholars to engage in the intensive study of the past as it related to Africans and their descendants through the world. In 1916, Woodson edited the first issue of the association's principal scholarly publication, The Journal of Negro History (now the Journal of African American History), which, under his direction, remained an important historical periodical for more than 30 years. Woodson served as dean of the College of Liberal Arts and head of the graduate faculty at Howard University, Washington, DC. (1919-20), and was dean at West Virginia State College in Institute, West Virginia (1920-22).
Important works by Woodson include the widely consulted college text The Negro in Our History (1922; 10th ed., 1962); The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861 (1915); A Century of Negro Migration (1918), and The Miseducation of the Negro (1933). He was at work on a projected six-volume Encyclopedia Africana at the time of his death. Woodson died on April 3, 1950, in Washington, DC.
Read more about Carter G. Woodson
National Park Service
Journal of African American History
The Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies
John Mercer Langston Institute
Sources: Daryl Michael Scott, Howard University, ASALH
Photograph courtesy of National Park Service
