35TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION Super Hero CARTER G. WOODSON

Carter G. Woodson 

Carter G. Woodson did more for the scholarly study of Black Americans than any other historian. He opened the long-neglected field of Black studies to scholars and popularized the subject in schools and colleges. 

Ironically, studying was something Woodson had to put off for quite a while. Born December 19, 1875, in New Canton, Virginia, he was the oldest of nine children of former slaves. Woodson could not attend school because his parents needed him to work in the coal mines.

Unable to attend high school full-time until he was 20, the self-taught young man made up for lost time by graduating in less than two years. Carter then studied at Berea College in Kentucky and, after earning a teaching certificate, taught in West Virginia high schools. 

Through periodic visits and correspondence courses, Woodson received his bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago in 1908.

Meanwhile, from 1903 to 1906, he was a school supervisor in the Philippines and then spent 1906 and 1907 studying and traveling in Asia, North Africa, and Europe. In 1912, Woodson received a Ph.D. in history from Harvard. 

Woodson explained his commitment to the study of African-American history by contrasting Native Americans and Jews. Native Americans, he argued, had no recorded past and, after centuries of white expansion, had virtually disappeared as a people. Centuries of travail, including the Holocaust, however, had not destroyed the Jewish people, whose sense of their place in history had contributed to their very survival. A people without a sense of their past are doomed to perish. In 1915, along with several other associates, Woodson formed the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH) in Chicago to encourage scholars to engage in the intensive study of the Black past. Previously, the field had been denigrated by white historians who accepted the traditionally biased perceptions of Black involvement in domestic and world affairs. 

The ASNLH was primarily committed to historical research; training African-American historians; publishing texts about African-American life and history; collecting valuable or rare materials on the history of the race; and promoting that history through schools, churches, and fraternal groups. 

From 1916 until his death in 1950, Woodson edited the Journal of Negro History, one of the premier historical publications in America during its time. From 1919 to 1920, Woodson was dean of the school of liberal arts and head of the graduate faculty at Howard University. From 1920 to 1922, he was dean at West Virginia State College. While there, Woodson founded Associated Publishers, which produced accurate, scholarly books on Black life and culture. He also wrote Negro in Our History, one of the earliest African-American history textbooks. 

In 1926, this stern and demanding academician founded Negro History Week to focus attention on Black contributions to civilization. The week was observed nationally and expanded into Black History Month in 1976 by proclamation of President Gerald Ford as part of the nation's bicentennial. Woodson was writing a six-volume Encyclopedia Africana at the time of his death. He died of a heart attack on April 3, 1950.

From Great African Americans.  Copyright, Publications International, Ltd.