Carter Godwin Woodson
(1875-1950)

"The achievements of the Negro, properly set forth will crown him as a factor in early human progress and a maker of modern civilization."

--Carter Godwin Woodson

With the establishment of "Negro History Week" in 1926, Carter Godwin Woodson earned the designation as "The Father of Negro History." Negro History Week later turned into nationally celebrated "Black History Month."

Woodson's life stands as a monument of steadfastness and unswerving devotion to a cause larger than himself. Against a background of lynching Blacks by the thousands, frequent urban mob attacks by white ruffians, and white polemicists publishing racist books, Dr. Woodson and his cause persevered. He fought against the national furor against Blacks created by the motion picture Birth of a Nation. He fought against the apathy of Blacks and founded the "Association for the Study of Negro Life and History" in 1915. On January 1, 1916, his association began publishing The Journal of Negro History and has continued every three months without fail since that date.

Born of former African prisoners-of-war in Virginia, Dr. Woodson was denied a formal early education. He worked as a coal miner. At age twenty he enrolled in high school and graduated a year and a half later. For the next sixteen years, he worked and went to school graduating with a doctorate in history from Harvard University.

During the 1920s, Dr. Woodson's association nurtured the training of historians who were dedicated to telling the true story of a society which had at one time been omitted from communication. Among these historians was Dr. Charles Wesley. Dr. Wesley studied the abolitionist era and the evolution of Black labor. He wrote the definitive history of the first Black collegiate fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha.

Dr. Rayford Logan, another protegé, took on an international perspective in his book

Diplomatic Relations of the United States With Haiti.

In 1947, Dr. John Hope Franklin, published From Slavery to Freedom. This work became so popular it finally replaced George Washington Williams's sixty-five-year-old History of the Negro Race as the standard reference.

Through his life work, Carter G. Woodson established Black history as a legitimate topic of study.