Black History Month evolved from Negro History Week, which Woodson created in 1926 as a time to celebrate the contributions of African-Americans. He went on to establish the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915 and the scholarly Journal of Negro History the following year, a periodical now published by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) as the Journal of African American History.
Dr. Carter G. Woodson
Yet, Woodson can’t be properly understood apart from his years in Appalachia and at Berea in eastern Kentucky, suggests Dr. Alicestyne Turley, director of the Carter G. Woodson Center for Interracial Education at Berea and associate professor of African and African American Studies.
“There’s a lot of information about Carter Woodson’s time at the University of Chicago and Harvard, but not as much insight about him as an Appalachian and Berean and his early life in the region,” says Turley. “I was shocked to know he graduated from Berea because it was never publicized.”
That was in spite of her having served on a task force that worked to historically preserve Woodson’s home in Washington, D.C., where he had taught high school and later was a professor and dean at Howard University before his death in 1950.
Turley recalls colleagues being as uninformed as she was about the early chapter in Woodson’s history that included Appalachia and Berea.
