As the annual celebration of Black History Month has come to an end, it seems appropriate to focus on the life of its “father,” Carter G. Woodson, who promoted Negro History week as part of his work as founder of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.

From the Coal Mines to Harvard

Born in Virginia in 1875, Woodson worked as a sharecropper and was taught to read and write at home. When his family moved to Huntington, W.Va., he went to work in the coal mines.
At age 20, he enrolled in Huntington’s segregated Frederick Douglass High School. He graduated in two years and was admitted to Berea College in Kentucky where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1903, a year before Kentucky outlawed integrated education.
He returned to Huntington and taught at Douglass High School until the U.S. War Department (later renamed the State Department) offered him a teaching post in the Philippines, where he took correspondence courses in Spanish from the University of Chicago, where he formally enrolled in 1907 and earned a master’s degree in European history. In 1912, he was awarded a doctorate in history from Harvard.Promoting Scholarship

Woodson settled in Washington, D.C., where he briefly taught at segregated Dunbar High School and served as professor of history and dean of College of Liberal Arts at Howard University. In 1915, he withdrew from full-time work in higher education when he founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH). Under Woodson’s leadership, ASNLH published The Journal of Negro History (later renamed The Journal of African American Life and History), a scholarly journal, and The Negro History Bulletin, which is geared toward general readers.
Although his own prolific publications include both African and African-American history, his most widely read book is “The Mis-Education of the Negro” (1933), which was recently reprinted. Woodson died in 1950 at his home in Washington, D.C.