Carter G. Woodson

Carter Godwin Woodson was born on the nineteenth of December, 1875, in New Canton, Buckingham County, Virginia, the son of James Henry and Anne Eliza (Riddle) Woodson, both of whom had been enslaved. Poverty deferred his schooling, and as a young man he followed his brothers to Fayette County, West Virginia, where he labored in the coal mines. His hunger for learning never dimmed. In 1895 he enrolled at Douglass High School in Huntington, West Virginia, and completed a four-year course in two, earning his diploma in 1897.

From that late beginning rose one of the great scholarly lives of the age. Woodson took his bachelor's degree at Berea College in Kentucky in 1903, studied further at the University of Chicago, and in 1912 was awarded a doctorate in history from Harvard University — only the second African American, after W. E. B. Du Bois, to attain that honor. He taught, served as a school principal, and became dean of arts and sciences at Howard University.

In 1915 he founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, and the following year launched The Journal of Negro History, insisting that the record of Black achievement be gathered, studied, and preserved with rigor. His many books, among them The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861 and The Mis-Education of the Negro, gave a people back their own past.

In February 1926 he established Negro History Week, the seed that would grow into Black History Month. Carter G. Woodson died on the third of April, 1950. Rightly honored as the father of Black history, he taught a nation that a people who know their story can never be erased.