Carter G. Woodson: father of black history

Ebony, Feb, 1993

"If a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated."

ONE of the most inspiring and instructive stories in Black history is the story of how Carter G. Woodson, the Father of Black History, saved himself for the history he saved and transformed.

The skeletal facts of his personal struggle for light and of his rise from the coal mines of West Virginia to the summit of academic achievement are eloquent in and of themselves and can be briefly stated.

At 17, the young man who was called by history to reveal Black history was an untutored coal miner.

At 19, after teaching himself the fundamentals of English and arithmetic, he entered high school and mastered the four-year curriculum in less than two years.

At 22, after two-thirds of a year at Berea College, he returned to the coal mines and studied Latin and Greek between trips to the mine shafts. He then went on to the University of Chicago, where he received bachelor's and master's degrees, and Harvard University, where he became the second Black to receive a doctorate in history.

The rest is history--Black history.

For in an extraordinary career spanning three crucial decades, the man and the history became one--so much so that it is impossible to deal with the history of Black people without touching, at some point, the personal history of Carter Woodson, who taught the teachers, transformed the vision of the masses and became, almost despite himself, an institution, a cause, and a month. One could go further and say that the systematic and scientific study of Black history began with Woodson, who almost singlehandedly created the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (now the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History) and the prestigious Journal of Negro History. Not content with these achievements, he ventured into the field of mass education, creating the annual Black History celebrations.

What makes this all the more remarkable is that Woodson created these cultural monuments largely by his own efforts. Stubborn and proud, he refused to rely on White philanthropy and financed his first ventures out of the $1,000 to $5,000 a year he received as a teacher. Defiantly independent, he gave up the things most men hold dear--family, material comforts, fun and social relations--and devoted his every waking hour to the task of ensuring that Blacks would escape "the awful fate of becoming a negligible factor in world thought." Like most pioneers, he was ridiculed and attacked. But in the end, he prevailed, like a pine tree on a rocky height, providing one of the greatest examples in our history of the power of an impassioned individual who subordinates everything to his cause and focuses all the powers of his being, like a piercing sunbeam, on a single point.

Looking back on this pageant of endurance and creativity, W.E.B. Du Bois said that Woodson's achievements were staggering by any standard, adding: "He literally made this country, which has only the slightest respect for people of color, recognize and celebrate each year, a week in which it studied the effect which the American Negro has upon life, though and action in the United States. I know of no one man who in a lifetime has, unaided, built up such a national celebration."

It was no accident, John Hope Franklin said once, that Carter G. Woodson accomplished these things. By this we must understand, among other things, that history knew what it was doing when it gave James Henry and Anne Eliza Woodson, two former slaves, the honor of bringing Carter G. Woodson into the world on December 19, 1875, a bare ten years after the Civil War, in New Canton, Buckingham County, Va. The Woodson family was impoverished and oppressed, and the future scholar's childhood was bleak and unpromising. Like so many of his contemporaries, he was denied education, partly because there were few Black schools, partly because his father needed his hands in the fields. But, unlike many of his playmates, he created an inviolate place within. More than this, deeper than this, he perceived early, as Mary McLeod Bethune and Benjamin E. Mays and others perceived in similar circumstances, that the key to his dungeon was a nine-letter key called education. And he decided early that he was willing to do almost anything to get that key.

Driven by this need, young Carter, aided by two uncles, taught himself the ABCs between backbreaking hours in the field. Then, accompanied by his brother, he moved in 1892 to Huntington, W. Va., which had one of those rarities of the time, a high school for Black students. To get money to finance his education, he went to work in the coal mines, braving falling rocks, accidental explosions and poisonous gases. He was injured one day by falling slate, but he never turned back.

"Nothing could stop Carter," a cousin, John Riddle, said. "He didn't stay in the mines long. He was always interested in getting an education."