Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950), Educator, Historian, Author, and “Father of Black History.”
“Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history.” -Carter G. Woodson
Above, an important letter on the critical need for teaching Black History which Dr. Woodson felt was given short shrift in every school and university. He cites a real-life example of why it needs to be taught versus a solely white-centered curriculum of Western Civilization that “is downright propaganda, an effort to praise one race and to decry the other to justify social repression and exploitation.” Washington, DC, October 1, 1927.
Born in Virginia to former slaves, Carter Godwin Woodson learned to read at a Freedman’s Bureau school. Discouraged by the low wages he later received driving a garbage truck, he relocated to West Virginia to become a coal miner, one of the few occupations at which blacks could earn a decent living.
Woodson’s senior coworker, Oliver Jones, was a Civil War veteran who used his home as an after-hours tearoom for black miners. Though illiterate, Jones subscribed to a half-dozen newspapers and soon had Woodson reading them news and topics of racial import. Jones also collected notable books about Black History, and there, in what he later called a “godsend,” Woodson’s “interest in penetrating the past of my people was deepened and intensified.”
In 1895, determined with what he’d learned, he returned to his family to enter high school at age 20. Graduating in less than half the usual time, he advanced from Berea College and the University of Chicago, earning a masters in European history and a PhD in history from Harvard in 1912, the second African American to do so after W.E.B. Du Bois. At age 24, Woodson returned to his former high school, this time as its principal.
In 1915, Dr. Woodson co-founded what is now called the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, in Washington, DC. where he was a high school teacher. In 1916, he launched the Journal of Negro History (now Journal of African American History) which he edited until his death. In later years he was a professor and dean at Howard University.
With stamina developed in the coalmines, Woodson labored single-mindedly 16 to 18 hours a day to defeat skepticism and elevate Black History to a national cause: That the chronicle of American history and culture objectively reflect its African American roots and contributions.