Carter G. Woodson

Educator, scholar, and writer

• Born: December 19, 1875
• Birthplace: New Canton, Virginia
• Died: April 3, 1950
• Place of death: Washington, D.C.

A career educator and early advocate of the importance of researching African American history, Woodson founded and directed the first and most influential academic association devoted to the study of African American history. He also was instrumental in establishing February as Black History Month.

Early Life

Carter Godwin Woodson was born in rural central Virginia, the son of two former slaves. Woodson and his eight siblings worked on the family farm, although Woodson relished the time he could devote to his education at the local one-room schoolhouse, run by two of his uncles. Because the demands of farming made full-time schooling impossible, Woodson taught himself the basics of a high school education in the evenings.

In 1892, Woodson and one of his brothers moved to Huntington, West Virginia, to earn money in the coal mines. At nineteen, he finally was able to continue his education, enrolling in Huntington’s segregated high school. His regimen of self-instruction paid off: He graduated in two years (1897). Eager for more education, Woodson immediately enrolled in Kentucky’s Berea College, then one of the nation’s few integrated colleges (a year after Woodson graduated, a state law outlawed integrated education). While teaching in local high schools, Woodson earned his undergraduate degree in literature, graduating in 1903. He then accepted a position as an English teacher in the Philippines. When he left there four years later because of poor health, he had been promoted to supervisor and was training local teachers. He returned determined to complete his own education—after spending a year in France and a semester at the Sorbonne, Woodson earned a master’s degree in European history from the University of Chicago (1908) and then a doctorate in Civil War history from Harvard (1912), making him only the second African American to earn a doctorate.

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. Little was known of their culture, their art, their family life, or the considerable adjustments they had been forced to make to the brutal conditions of slavery. African Americans had become a shadow presence in historical investigation. Addressing that neglect through careful historical research and investigative scholarship, Woodson believed, would ultimately be instrumental in bolstering African Americans’ sense of self-respect and would also help alleviate the pernicious logic of racism, as white America would learn of the significant achievements of African Americans.

Life’s Work

Promoting the documentation of black history quickly became Woodson’s mission. Even as World War I raged, he began to campaign vociferously for research into the achievements of African Americans in American history, particularly the work of archiving the public record of the generation born after the Emancipation Proclamation. He was concerned that, without such efforts, that record would be lost forever. In 1915, Woodson was among five prominent black academics who established 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 organization sponsored research projects that gathered original historical data, arranged national conferences for scholars of black history, worked to preserve original documents, and raised funds to promote black history through publications, lectures, and books. In 1916, the association began to publish the Journal of Negro History, the first journal devoted to promoting research into African American history. 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.

Even as Woodson found success as an academic (between 1919 and 1922, he taught at Washington’s Howard University before accepting a position as academic dean at West Virginia Collegiate Institute), he became the public voice of both the historical association and its increasingly prestigious journal. While at West Virginia, Woodson founded Associated Publishers, which provided a forum for studies of African American history and culture, studies ignored by more mainstream academic presses. At the same time, Woodson published two seminal works—The History of the Negro Church (1921) and The Negro in Our History (1922)—the first of what would become more than a dozen such studies over the next three decades.

In 1922, Woodson retired from teaching to devote his energies to shaping the direction of the ASALH. He handled secretarial work; managed the finances; arranged academic conferences; solicited research projects to preserve thousands of artifacts, papers, and artworks; and scrubbed the floors and repaired the bathrooms in the association’s headquarters in Washington. He 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, and conservative establishment historians attacked his goal of defining African Americans’ history as distinct, even separate, from their place in American history. Despite these attacks, however, Woodson became a prominent and respected voice in promoting the integrity of black history.

It was to that end that he worked to establish Negro History Week. He proposed setting aside a week in February, the month in which both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass were born, during which schools would pay particular attention to the contributions of African Americans. Decades after his death, the commemoration would become Black History Month. Woodson prepared hundreds of lesson plans for public school curricula centered on black history, and he published scores of articles advocating the need to preserve that history. He edited the speeches of prominent African Americans (notably Douglass and Booker T. Washington). He gathered and edited a wide-ranging sampling of letters written in the decades leading up to the Civil War, which he published as The Mind of the Negro as Reflected in Letters Written During the Crisis, 1800-1860 (1927). He published several groundbreaking studies on the economics of the South and the labor migrations of its black workers. In 1933, he completed his defining work, The Mis-education of the Negro, a sweeping and visionary reappraisal of how to educate African Americans about their own cultural place in their nation.

Beyond his considerable writings or even his work with the ASALH, Woodson inspired a generation of young historians, black and white, to turn their attention and energies to the contributions of African Americans. That inspiration helped provide critical historic context for the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920’s. In 1926, 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. He continued to work with the ASALH and to publish essays on black history until his death in 1950. The association suffered significantly after his death, struggling to raise sufficient operating capital. That it continued to operate into the twenty-first century is a testament to Woodson’s pivotal place in American history.

Significance

Woodson’s impact is difficult to overstate: Before him, there was a tacit assumption by American historians that African American culture did not merit significant investigation. What attention was paid to African Americans was distorted by the biases and, at times, overt racism of the white establishment. Woodson’s pioneering efforts forever altered the narrative of American history. He led the call to define African American history and to use education as a means to effect social change, that both white America and black America would benefit from learning the historical truth of African Americans and their contributions. In his zealous lifelong campaign to promote the cause of African American history, Woodson directly addressed the frustrations among black Americans that their history, their culture, and indeed their very identity had been denied expression. For Woodson, once African Americans could study the considerable contributions of black America that gave shape and narrative to their long presence in America, including the brutalities and suffering of the slavery era, they would have cause to celebrate what generations of American histories had largely denied: black intelligence, black achievement, and ultimately black integrity. 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.

Bibliography

Dagbovie, Pero. The Early Black History Movement: Carter G. Woodson, and Lorenzo Johnston Greene. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Critical examination of Woodson’s pivotal role in defining the mission of African American studies, with particular emphasis on the ASALH.

Durden, Robert Franklin. Carter G. Woodson: Father of African American History. Berkeley Heights, N.J.: Enslow, 1998. Accessible overview of Woodson’s long career, geared to young adults. Centers on his campaign to establish Negro History Week.

Goggin, Jacquline Anne. Carter G. Woodson: A Life in Black History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997. Landmark and definitive biography of Woodson that highlights his work with ASALH and his prodigious writings. Handsomely illustrated.

Rojas, Fabio. From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Although more contemporary in its investigation, this source offers a cogent look at Woodson’s seminal influences and the way his vision shaped the initial definition of African American studies as an academic endeavor with profound cultural ramifications.

Woodson, Carter Godwin. Carter G. Woodson: A Historical Reader. Vol. 14 in Crosscurrents in African American History. New York: Routledge, 2000. Indispensable collection of Woodson’s voluminous writings, showcasing his passion and vision. Provides a helpful introduction that covers Woodson’s long career.