No one has played a greater role in helping all Americans know the Black past than Carter G. Woodson, the individual who created Negro History Week in Washington, D.C., in February 1926.
Woodson was the second Black American to receive a Ph.D. in history from Harvard—following W.E.B. Du Bois by a few years. To Woodson, the Black experience was too important simply to be left to a small group of academics. Woodson believed that his role was to use Black history and culture as a weapon in the struggle for racial uplift. By 1916, Woodson had moved to D.C. and established the “Association for the Study of Negro Life and Culture,” an organization whose goal was to make Black history accessible to a wider audience. Woodson was a strange and driven man whose only passion was history, and he expected everyone to share his passion.
Read this story by Lonnie Bunch III in its entirety in the January/February issue of ONYX Magazine.
