Carter G. Woodson
founded Negro History
Week in 1926 in order
to focus attention on
Black contributions. 
This celebration and
remembrance would
later become Black
History Month.

What we now call Black History Month started in 1926 by Carter Godwin Woodson as Negro History Week. Some people say the month of February was selected because both Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln were both born in that month. However, others say Woodson chose February because, even though the 13th Amendment to the constitution abolishing slavery was signed in January, slaves did not start to hear of the news until February.

The son of a slave, Carter G. Woodson was born in New Canton, Va. on Dec. 19, 1875 to a poor family. He supported himself by working in the coal mines of Kentucky and was unable to enroll in high school until he was 20.

After graduating in less than two years, he taught high school, wrote articles, studied in the U.S. and abroad, and received his Ph.D. from Harvard University (1912). In 1915, he founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History to encourage scholars to engage in the intensive study of the past, as it related to Africans and their descendants through the world.

Prior to this work, the field had been largely neglected or distorted by historians who accepted the traditionally biased picture of Blacks in American and world affairs. In 1916, Woodson edited the first issue of the association’s principal scholarly publication, The Journal of Negro History, which, under his direction, remained an important historical periodical for more than 30 years.

Woodson spent his life working to educate all people about the vast contributions made by Black men and women. He was dean of the College of Liberal Arts and head of the graduate faculty at Howard University, Washington, D.C. (1919-20), and dean at West Virginia State College, Institute, W.Va. (1920-22). While there, he founded and became president of Associated Publishers to bring out books on Black life and culture, since experience had shown him that the usual publishing outlets were rarely interested in scholarly works on Blacks.

Important works by Woodson include The Mis-education of the Negro (1933); the widely consulted college text The Negro in Our History (1922; 10th ed., 1962); The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861 (1915); and A Century of Negro Migration (1918).

He was at work on a projected six-volume Encyclopaedia Africana at the time of his death. Woodson died on April 3, 1950, in Washington, D.C.