Aaron Grimmett

Carter Goodwin Woodson

December19, 1875 to April 3,1950

Teacher

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.

The skeletal facts of his personal struggle for light and of his rise from the coalmines of West Virginia to the summit of academic achievement are great in and of them 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 in West Virginia, he returned to the coalmines and studied Latin and Greek between trips to the mineshafts. He then went on to the University of Chicago, where he received bachelors and master's degrees, and Harvard University, where he became the second black to receive a doctorate in 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 scientific study of black history began with Woodson, who almost single-handedly created the Association for the Study of Negro 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? 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.

It was no accident, historian John Hope Franklin once said, that Carter G. Woodson accomplished these things. 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 10 years after the end of the U.S. Civil War, in New Canton, Virginia. The Woodson family was poor 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 was few black schools, partly because his father needed his hands in the fields. But unlike many of his playmates, he created an special place within. More than this, deeper than this, he perceived early, as pioneer black educators Mary McLeod Bethune and Benjamin E. Mays and others perceived in similar circumstances, that the key to his dungeon was 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, West Virginia, 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 coalmines, braving falling rocks, accidental explosions and poisonous gases. He was injured one day by falling slate, but he never turned back.

In fact, Woodson served, as he said later, a six-year "apprenticeship" in the mines. He was 19 years old when he enrolled at Douglass High School. After graduation and several semesters at Berea College and a teaching assignment in Winona, West Virginia, he returned to Douglass High School, four years after his graduation, as principal. There then followed an interlude of teaching in the Philippines and graduate study at the University of Chicago and Harvard. In 1909, he turned a major fork of destiny, settling down to a 10-year period of teaching in Washington.

"When I arrived in Washington in 1909 and began my research," he said later, "the people there laughed at me and especially at my `hayseed' clothes. At that time I didn't have enough money to pay for a haircut. When I, in my poverty, had the `audacity' to write a book on the Negro, the `scholarly' people of Washington laughed at it."

The laughing stopped in 1915. In the summer of that year, the 39-year-old teacher received an invitation to a Negro folklore conference at the University of Chicago. Woodson turned the invitation down, saying with characteristic bluntness that he was not a folklorist and that he didn't think the conference would accomplish anything. He told the organizers "that something else was taking shape in his mind."

The "something else" was quite unprecedented, a national black historical society. Woodson planned to organize the scholarly association with flourishes and fanfare at a national conference. This plan, however, was abandoned, he said, "for the reason that it was not believed that a large number of persons would pay any attention to the movement until an actual demonstration as to the possibilities of the field had been made." Woodson believed in the power of the deed. To his dying day, he believed that the actual is more compelling than the potential and that one-ounce of real work is worth more than a ton of speeches and resolutions.

So believing and so saying, he asked a handful of men to "join him in organizing, so to speak, in a corner." The corner was the office of the director of the Wabash Avenue YMCA in Chicago. There, on September 9, 1915, Woodson and four others organized the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. The purposes of the organization, in Woodson's words, were "the collection of sociological and historical data on the Negro, the study of peoples of African blood, the publishing of books in the field, and the promotion of harmony between the races by acquainting