Some History Behind Black History Month

It was 1926 when Carter G. Woodson and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASLNH) announced the second week of February to be “Negro History Week.” The time was chosen because it coincided with the birthdays of two men who had been celebrated in the Black community since the Civil War, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln. But let’s step back two decades earlier to gather a little context for our story.??

Woodson met Booker T. Washington in 1903 in Lexington Kentucky and was so impressed by his speech that he wrote about it three decades later. In that same year, he traveled to the Philippines as a teacher and a supervisor. What he witnessed there was the profound and unforeseen impacts of colonialism on a people’s ability to preserve their history and consequently see their place in the world around them. Convinced that the role of his own people in history was being ignored or misrepresented among scholars, Woodson realized the need for research into the neglected past of Black peoples across the globe and founded the ASLNH on September 9, 1915, in Chicago.?

The twenties were both tumultuous and wondrous, arriving on the heels of the First Red Scare and serving as the antebellum to the Great Depression. What is known to American historians as the Roaring Twenties, will be forever known as The Harlem Renaissance to the Black community, and The New Negro Movement for anyone whose infatuation persisted beyond fleeting interest. From this movement, Woodson’s voice rose to prominence and sustained its relevance nearly a hundred years later.?

While colloquially restricted to Harlem, the New Negro Moment spread as far from New York as Alabama and California. The founder of the movement, often remembered as the Black Socrates, was Hubert Henry Harrison, an autodidact who infused his intellectual curiosity into every aspect of the Black experience from history to entertainment, to politics. Because of his efforts, we have a stage set for two of the most impactful individuals in modern Black History, Marcus Garvey and Carter G. Woodson.??

While Garvey mobilized the masses with grand schemes of industry and capitalism that created controversy across the globe, Woodson would be spending his time collecting, curating, and championing the lost history of those masses. It was Hubert’s platform that brought Garvey to the grand stage of history, and it was through Garvey’s massive networks that Woodson’s work would touch global audiences.?

This message came at a time when most Americans, including the growing Black minority, were under the social impression that entertainment, athletics, and manual labor would be all the African American could ever be capable of. Woodson lamented the shame of the sociological impacts of a people not being seen in the shaping of the world and sounded the alarm for the need for Black historians to preserve and represent Black peoples’ place in history.?

“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.” - Carter G. Woodson??

Recommended Reading?

Up From Slavery – Booker T Washington??

The Souls of Black Folk – W.E.B. Du Bois??

When Africa Awakes – Hubert Henry Harrison??

The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey – Marcus Mosiah Garvey??

The Miseducation of the Negro – Carter G. Woodson??

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Quick Facts??

Woodson and Du Bois both worked for and were controversially dismissed from the NAACP?

Woodson was the second African American after Du Bois to graduate from Harvard with a PHD??

Woodson is the only person whose parents were enslaved in the US to obtain a PhD in history?