Carter G. Woodson

Carter Godwin Woodson was born in New Canton, Virginia, on the nineteenth of December 1875, the son of former slaves. He worked as a coal miner before completing his secondary education at Frederick Douglass High School in West Virginia, where he graduated as valedictorian at the age of twenty-two. He took his undergraduate degree at Berea College, his master's at the University of Chicago, and in 1912 became the second African American to earn a doctorate in history from Harvard — after W. E. B. Du Bois.

In 1915 he founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History — today the Association for the Study of African American Life and History — to professionalize the historical study of Black America. He launched The Journal of Negro History the following year and edited it for forty years. He founded Associated Publishers in 1921 to produce textbooks the white-controlled commercial publishing industry would not.

In February 1926 he initiated Negro History Week — chosen for the week containing the birthdays of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. The week expanded to Black History Month in 1976 and is now observed as a national designation in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the Republic of Ireland.

His book The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933) — a critique of American education's role in perpetuating racial subordination — remains in continuous print after ninety years.

He died at his home in Washington, D.C., on the third of April 1950, age seventy-four.

He is honored here as the historian who professionalized Black history and gave America the month that names it.