Carter G. Woodson

The son of illiterate and formerly enslaved parents, Carter G. Woodson spent much of his childhood working on farms and in West Virginia coal mines. He did not go to high school until his early twenties, but he excelled academically, becoming a teacher and then a school principal before even earning his bachelor’s degree. He studied at Berea College, the University of Chicago, the Sorbonne, and Harvard University, where he became the second Black American to complete a PhD in 1912. Unable to find work as a professor, Woodson continued teaching high school for several years after finishing his PhD. In 1919, he briefly became a History professor and the Dean of the School of Liberal Arts at Howard University, one of the oldest and most prominent historically Black universities in the United States. He next spent two years at the West Virginia Collegiate Institute, but then he dedicated the rest of his career to directing the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and promoting the discipline of Black American history more generally. Woodson published more than 30 books in his career, befriended many Harlem Renaissance intellectuals and activists, and also frequently wrote for a popular audience in publications like activist Marcus Garvey’s newspaper Negro World. To combat the pervasive racism in academia and the discipline of history in particular, Woodson also began promoting “Negro History Week” in the 1920s. In the decades since, this tradition has transformed into Black History Month, which American schools celebrate every February.