“Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history.”
Born December 19, 1875, in New Canton, Virginia, Carter G. Woodson worked as, among other things, a sharecropper and miner during his childhood to help support his large family. He entered high school late but managed to graduate in less than two years. After attending Berea College in Kentucky, Woodson worked in the Philippines as an education superintendent for the U.S. government. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Chicago. In 1912, he became only the second African American (after W.E.B. DuBois) to earn a doctorate from Harvard. He was the first child of formerly-enslaved parents to receive such a degree. A firm proponent of education, Woodson served as Dean at the School of Liberal Arts and Head of the Graduate Faculty at Howard University from 1919 to 1920 and Academic Dean of the West Virginia Collegiate Institute, now West Virginia State University, from 1920 to 1922.
In 1915, Woodson founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, now called the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH). In February 1926, he started Negro History Week, explaining, "It is not so much a Negro History Week as it is a History Week. We should emphasize not Negro History, but the Negro in History. What we need is not a history of selected races or nations, but the history of the world void of national bias, race hatred and religious prejudice." This quest to share the accomplishments of persons of African descent in the United Stares eventually grew into a month-long celebration as a way to promote, research, preserve, interpret, and disseminate information about Black life, history, and culture to the global community. Woodson, who died April 3, 1950, also wrote several volumes on black history, including The Mis-Education of the Negro.
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