Carter Godwin Woodson once said racial prejudice “is merely the logical result of tradition, the inevitable outcome of thorough instruction to the effect that the Negro has never contributed anything to the progress of mankind.”
February is, of course, Black History Month. It has its roots in the establishment of Negro History Week in 1926 by Woodson, (Dec. 19, 1875 – April 3, 1950).
Woodson, an historian, journalist and educator, had lived for a time in the city where I went to college, Huntington, W.Va. He served there as principal of Douglass High School, a segregated school for blacks.
Some years after college, I had the opportunity to do research on him, and I interviewed some people who had known him personally in West Virginia and in Washington, D.C., where he worked later, and who spoke of him in reverent tones. That was more than 35 years ago, and I remain fascinated by his life and legacy.
Woodson’s parents, who had lived in slavery in Virginia, moved to Huntington precisely because it had a black high school, but the family was large and poor. As the eldest of nine children, at 17, Woodson went to southern W.Va. to work in the then booming coal mines to earn money. He studied on his own and attended school sporadically. Finally, he entered Douglass High at age 20, graduating in two years, and went on to become only the second person, after William E.B. Du Bois, to earn a doctorate from Harvard University. Woodson believed in the power of education.
He also felt strongly that the history of African Americans written by whites underrepresented or misrepresented the race, and he devoted his life to redressing that wrong, eventually founding what is now the Association for the Study of African American Life and History and the Journal of Negro History.
He wanted the world to know what blacks had contributed and accomplished. Most importantly, he wanted blacks to know it. In establishing “Negro History Week,” Woodson chose the second week of February to include Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, February 12, Frederick Douglass’, February 14.
