Black History Month: People Who Changed the World #28 (Final Day) · 8:34pm Feb 28th, 2018
Welcome to the FINAL installment in my Month-Long anthology which depicts specific African-American people who, in one way or another, changed the world. Today's topic is actually the man we give credit for us celebrating this month anyways. Mr. Carter G. Woodson.
Bio: Carter Godwin Woodson (December 19, 1875 – April 3, 1950) was an American historian, author, journalist and the founder of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. He was one of the first scholars to study African-American history. A founder of The Journal of Negro History in 1916, Woodson has been cited as the "father of black history". In February 1926 he launched the celebration of "Negro History Week", the precursor of Black History Month. Convinced that the role of his own people in American history and in the history of other cultures was being ignored or misrepresented among scholars, Woodson realized the need for research into the neglected past of African Americans. Along with William D. Hartgrove, George Cleveland Hall, Alexander L. Jackson, and James E. Stamps, he founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History on September 9, 1915, in Chicago. That was the year Woodson published The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861. His other books followed: A Century of Negro Migration (1918) and The History of the Negro Church (1927). His work The Negro in Our History has been reprinted in numerous editions and was revised by Charles H. Wesley after Woodson's death in 1950.
In January 1916, Woodson began publication of the scholarly Journal of Negro History. It has never missed an issue, despite the Great Depression, loss of support from foundations, and two World Wars. In 2002, it was renamed the Journal of African American History and continues to be published by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH).
Woodson stayed at the Wabash Avenue YMCA during visits to Chicago. His experiences at the Y and in the surrounding Bronzeville neighborhood inspired him to create the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915. The Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (now the Association for the Study of African American Life and History), which ran conferences, published The Journal of Negro History, and "particularly targeted those responsible for the education of black children". Another inspiration was John Wesley Cromwell's 1914 book, The Negro in American History: Men and Women Eminent in the Evolution of the American of African Descent.
Woodson believed that education and increasing social and professional contacts among blacks and whites could reduce racism and he promoted the organized study of African-American history partly for that purpose. He would later promote the first Negro History Week in Washington, D.C., in 1926, forerunner of Black History Month. The Bronzeville neighborhood declined during the late 1960s and 1970s like many other inner-city neighborhoods across the country, and the Wabash Avenue YMCA was forced to close during the 1970s, until being restored in 1992 by The Renaissance Collaborative.
He served as Academic Dean of the West Virginia Collegiate Institute, now West Virginia State University, from 1920 to 1922.
He studied many aspects of African-American history. For instance, in 1924, he published the first survey of free black slaveowners in the United States in 1830. Woodson devoted the rest of his life to historical research. He worked to preserve the history of African Americans and accumulated a collection of thousands of artifacts and publications. He noted that African-American contributions "were overlooked, ignored, and even suppressed by the writers of history textbooks and the teachers who use them." Race prejudice, he concluded, "is merely the logical result of tradition, the inevitable outcome of thorough instruction to the effect that the Negro has never contributed anything to the progress of mankind."
In 1926, Woodson pioneered the celebration of "Negro History Week", designated for the second week in February, to coincide with marking the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. However, it was the Black United Students and Black educators at Kent State University that founded Black History Month, on February 1, 1970.
My thoughts: Honestly, I didn't know any of this stuff (I know. Shocking ain't it?)! Once I read up on it though, that made me rather happy to know. This man spent years of his life working towards bettering the preservation of Black-Americans for future generations and is the reason why a lot of us in school had to do something for the whole month of February to commemorate and celebrate African-American history! Putting on plays, concerts, church sermons, etc. These are things that we as a race--no...we as people can do to better preserve our heritage. Other races and cultures do things to celebrate them! And y'all wanna know why almost every black person who went to see Marvel's "Black Panther" in theaters this month was "all forms of EXTRA!". Hell we was celebratin'! Happy to see such a film displayed in all its glory! Proud to see a (primarily) African-American/African cast fucking slay it on the screen! *gasp*.....*sigh*...anyways, due to this man's work, we can better appreciate our culture. And Now! A very inspiring quote from Carter G. Woodson:
If a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated.
