Woodson, Carter (1875–1950)

Carter Godwin Woodson was born in New Canton, Virginia, only a decade after the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment that legally abolished slavery. His grandparents and parents with whom he lived had therefore been slaves and, like other newly freed Americans of African descent, were very poor. Woodson worked throughout his childhood and was well into his teens by the time he was able to attend a formal school. Not unlike other black youth during this period, Woodson had learned to read at an early age and devoted himself to study in those fleeting moments when he had spare time. He was therefore adequately prepared by the time he began his formal education and completed high school. In 1903, Woodson graduated with honors from Berea College, an institution founded in 1855 that introduced integrated education in the 19th century. Ironically, only a day after Woodson graduated from Berea, Kentucky, the former slave state where the college was located, passed a law forbidding black and white students from studying in the same classroom. Woodson was keenly aware of the implications of this decision and of the other obstacles of law and custom that denied African Americans access to education and to a full knowledge of their history and accomplishments.

In 1907, Woodson earned an undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago and his M.A. degree from the same institution in 1908. In 1912, Harvard awarded the doctorate. By 1916, the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, the organization Woodson had founded, issued the Journal of Negro History to chronicle the culture, life, experiences, and history of Americans of African descent. This publication was significant in addressing a problem that Woodson considered to be of paramount importance to the African American condition: the lack of knowledge of one's history. According to Woodson, an accurate knowledge of history is a precondition of one's self-knowledge and of the awakening of one's inherent genius—for Americans of African descent, as with people of all backgrounds.

Woodson served as dean of the School of Liberal Arts and head of the graduate faculty at Howard University from 1919 to 1920 and as dean of the West Virginia Collegiate Institute from 1920 to 1922, where he also served as the president of Associated Publishers. The latter outlet, like the Journal of Negro History, served as an organ to publish and disseminate writings by and about Americans of African descent. In 1922, Woodson retired from academia and devoted the rest of his life to writing, editing, and promoting black history. Along these lines, perhaps Woodson's [Page 1489]greatest legacy was his movement to establish Negro History Week. Set in the month of February in honor of abolitionist Frederick Douglass and President Abraham Lincoln, Negro History Week was created as an annual celebration of achievements of Americans of African descent. In the 1960s, Negro History Week was expanded to Black History Month and became a national celebration of African American heritage and achievements in science, literature, and the arts.

Woodson was a prolific writer, publishing the important Education of the Negro Prior to 1861 in 1915 and The Negro in Our History in 1922. The author of numerous other volumes, Woodson is best known for the classic Miseducation of the Negro, a series of reprinted articles published in 1933 that served as a jeremiad on black education. In the final analysis, Carter G. Woodson will always be known as one of North America's most prominent historians of African American history and life.

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