“That is the which means of Negro Historical past Week. It’s not a lot a Negro Historical past Week as it’s a Historical past week. We must always emphasize not Negro Historical past however the Negro in historical past. What we want just isn’t a historical past of chosen races or nations, however the historical past of the world void of nationwide bias, race hate, and non secular prejudice. There needs to be no indulgence in undue eulogy of the Negro. The case of the Negro is nicely taken care of when it’s proven how he has influenced the event of civilization.”
—Carter Godwin Woodson, “The Celebration of Negro Historical past Week, 1927,” Journal of Negro Historical past, April 1927
For the following month, America is challenged to ponder its African-descended residents’ world and nationwide journey and achievements. The ritual was born and pushed by the single-minded devotion and sacrifice of Carter Godwin Woodson (1875–1950), a son of previously enslaved dad and mom who defied American apartheid to amass a Harvard Ph.D., utilizing it with exceptional effectivity to create organizations and rituals that proceed to form our wrestle for mental liberation.
Opposite to the (sadly) well-liked joke, February was not “given” to Black America to rejoice our historical past as a result of it’s the shortest month of the 12 months. Woodson selected the second week in February for the celebration of “Negro Historical past Week” as a result of it contained the birthdays of the numerous symbols of the intertwined fates of Africans and the post-Civil Battle U.S. nation-state: Frederick Douglass (February 14, 1818) and Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809).
By February 1926, his Affiliation for the Examine of Negro [now African American] Life and Historical past had labored for over a decade to realize his purpose of building an impartial institutional base for the research and promotion of the historical past of African folks. Becoming a member of the creation of the Affiliation 11 years earlier at Chicago’s Wabash Avenue Coloured YMCA, the creation of the Journal of Negro Historical past (1916) and the Related Publishers (1921), adopted by the creation of the Negro Historical past Bulletin (1937), “Negro Historical past Week” turned one other in Woodson’s methods to hyperlink the deeper research of Black life to acts of neighborhood consensus and coalition constructing.
Woodson was born in New Canton, Virginia, on Dec. 19, 1875. His dad and mom, James and Anne Woodson, have been born enslaved. His father escaped in 1864, serving within the Union military. His mom, who had seen her mom and two youthful siblings auctioned as a baby, ensured Carter and his siblings discovered to learn and write as safety towards future oppressions.
Carter left house at 17, engaged on the railroads and in coal mines till, at age 22, he accomplished highschool and enrolled in built-in Berea School in Kentucky. He went on to earn levels from Berea, the College of Chicago and, in 1912, Woodson turned the second African American (after W.E.B. Du Bois) to take a Ph.D. in historical past from Harvard College. By then, he had relocated to Washington, D.C., the place he taught on the metropolis’s prestigious M Avenue (Dunbar) and Armstrong Excessive Colleges and launched the primary programs in “Negro Historical past” throughout a quick stint as professor of historical past and dean of liberal arts at Howard College.
By February 1926, Woodson’s Affiliation had established “Negro Historical past Week.” The celebration afforded Black college students, lecturers, establishments and organizations throughout segregated America alternatives to show what they’d discovered throughout the earlier 12 months’s research of what he known as “Negro life and historical past.” 4 years earlier, Woodson and Charles Wesley had printed The Negro In Our Historical past, a wide-ranging textbook that traced the historical past of African folks from the origin of humanity to the current.
The Black-owned publishing firm’s guide began the fashionable period of African American historical past textbooks that many hint to the looks of John Hope Franklin’s From Slavery to Freedom 25 years later. Woodson believed that integrating factually sound analysis on the historical past of African folks in each formal and casual academic establishments would help within the ongoing wrestle to rework American and world social, financial and cultural circumstances.
In 1976, the Affiliation expanded the weeklong celebration to a month, creating what we now name “Black Historical past Month.” As we start the ninetieth celebration of Woodson’s ritual, even many who’ve customary careers from decoding Black experiences have sorely misinterpreted his imaginative and prescient and techniques for carrying it out. A number of generations therefore, the month has develop into a income stream for everybody from tv programmers and division retailer entrepreneurs to enterprising “public intellectuals” of all colours and motives.
Within the January 1943 concern of the Negro Historical past Bulletin, Woodson gave what remains to be one of the best description of the aim of “Negro Historical past Week.” The editorial for that quantity reminds its loyal readership of schoolteachers and youngsters, teachers and rank and file members of his military of Black onlookers and co-conspirators that “that is the week put aside by the Affiliation for the Examine of Negro Life and Historical past for the aim of emphasizing what has already been discovered concerning the Negro throughout the 12 months.”
Woodson would probably not be stunned by the heady mixture of ignorance and free enterprise that now mark the 12 months’s shortest month because the locus of discussions of race slightly than a quick reflection interval for the previous 12 months’s research of Africana. Within the March 1950 concern of the Bulletin, printed the month earlier than he died at his ninth Avenue house in Washington, D.C., Woodson acknowledged that many within the Black neighborhood had successfully inverted and eviscerated the aim of Negro Historical past Week, turning it right into a handy cul-de-sac for partaking in fleeting issues of “the race drawback.” In a hard-hitting editorial titled “No Examine and Consequently No Celebration,” Woodson addressed the issue head-on, saying:
“It’s evident from the quite a few requires orators throughout Negro Historical past Week that colleges and their directors don’t take the research of the Negro critically sufficient to make use of Negro Historical past Week as a brief interval for demonstrating what the scholars have discovered of their research of the Negro throughout the entire college 12 months. These mischievous orators, because it has been stated time and again in these columns, don’t have any message which they’ll join with the celebration of Negro Historical past Week. About the one factor on the Negro which they know is the standard dialogue of the race drawback and the way it has been or might be solved.” [Negro History Bulletin, Vol. XIII, Number 6, March 1950]
Emphasizing that many colleges within the nation have been, in truth, “tak(ing) the research of the Negro critically” at the moment, Woodson nonetheless warned towards the encroaching conflation of exterior definitions of Black life and its potentialities—the concept our existence can be diminished throughout February to variations of solutions to the query that Du Bois had argued lies behind most recognitions of Black life: “how does it really feel to be an issue?
In 2005, the College District of Philadelphia created the nation’s first obligatory African American historical past highschool course in a serious college district. The authors of the course’s curriculum framework anchored it in Woodson’s imaginative and prescient for institutionalizing lots of his approaches to finding out African folks and the world. Our framework included a sequence of classes known as “Intellectuals of the African Diaspora,” every a self-contained essay with lesson plans and first supply supplies that included consultant feminine and male thinkers from each nook of the African world.
We needed college students to enter the minds and work of Black students, aligning their very own rising curiosity with the questions requested by their mental ancestors and seeing themselves as each receivers and producers of data grounded of their experiences. We chosen Carter Woodson as our exemplar. The lesson “Carter G. Woodson and the Origins of African American Historical past Month” might be discovered by clicking right here.
If nothing else, Dr. Woodson’s life and work display that the duty of the learner, whether or not as an apprentice or absolutely developed scholar, is to undertake the seek for which means with will, ardour, mastery of content material and method, and stamina, to see the place the street leads. What’s all too continuously lacking within the research of African humanity are roadmaps that afford us the power to interact in that search independently and directly in comparative, interactive tandem with different genealogies and modalities of human which means.
Shortly after his passing, Woodson’s shut buddy and collaborator Mary McLeod Bethune printed a eulogy within the Journal of Negro Historical past. Her phrases function a becoming reminder of his work in addition to of our personal accountability to proceed it:
“I shall all the time consider in Carter Woodson. He helped me to take care of religion in myself. He gave me renewed confidence within the capability of my race for improvement and within the capability of my nation for justice for her personal folks and for all peoples. With the ability of cumulative reality, he moved again the boundaries and broadened our imaginative and prescient of the world and the world’s imaginative and prescient of us.”
Gregory Carr, Ph.D. is an affiliate professor and chair of Howard College’s Division of Afro-American Research.
