Fulfilling Carter G. Woodson’s Vision—
History month founder saw African American saga as part of national experience

Carter G. Woodson

“If you can control a man’s thinking, you do not have to worry about his action. When you determine what a man shall think, you do not have to concern yourself with what he will do. If you make a man feel that he is inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself. If you can make a man think that he is justly an outcast, you do not have to order him to the back door. He will go without being told: And if there is no back door, his very nature will demand one.”

Those words of Carter G. Woodson help explain his life- long commitment to the history of African Americans, and why, in 1915-16, he established the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and The Journal of Negro History, followed in 1926 by Negro History Week. It is a testament to Woodson’s ability to inspire others that all of these creations still exist, although “Black” or “African American” has now replaced the word “Negro.”

As a youth, Woodson witnessed the disfranchisement and lynching of Blacks in the South and the imposition of formal or informal Jim Crow practices throughout the land. Of greatest discouragement to the Harvard-trained historian was the fact that White academics reflected and implicitly justified these injustices by a scholarship that demeaned Black folk, distorted their history, and denied their place in American society. The founder of Columbia University’s graduate school of political science and one of the period’s leading scholars, John W. Burgess, famously opined: “A Black skin means membership in a race of men which has never ... created any civilization of any kind.”

Woodson, along with a generation of talented Black historians—Benjamin Quarles, Rayford Logan, and John Hope Franklin, among others—were convinced that unvarnished truth would provide the best vindication of the race. This hope was realized in the years following Woodson’s untimely death in 1950. By the 1960s, racist historians were discredited in the academy, and African American history had become the most dynamic, innovative, and productive branch of American history, attracting the profession’s best minds, both Black and White, and culminating in 1979 with the election of John Hope Franklin as president of the American Historical Association.

Woodson wanted Black history to be studied and taught as part of a national experience. At the college level his hope has largely been fulfilled. College-level historical texts make slavery and racial discrimination the central contradictions of American society; stress the contributions of Black Americans to the nation’s cultural legacy, especially in literature, music, and sports; and celebrate the Civil Rights Movement for bringing justice to women, gays, the elderly, the handicapped, and other ethnic minorities, as well as to Blacks.

History texts at the primary and secondary school level do not yet reflect this consensus, but the gap is narrowing.

If Woodson would be pleased with the progress made at the university level, he would not be as content with progress at the public level. Since its establishment in 1926, Negro History Week has continued to grow in popularity and influence among both White and Black Americans until, in 1976, it was expanded to a month-long celebration. Today, February is filled with Black history programs, on the airwaves, in the classrooms, and elsewhere.

To be sure, there are some complaints. Some note that February is the shortest month of the year, yet Woodson chose February as the birth-month of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Nor would Woodson probably care whether it lasts a week or a month. He stressed that the study of Black history should be a continuous affair, capped by an annual celebration of the previous year’s activities and discoveries.

Curiously, Woodson might be the most disappointed in the fact that there still is a Black History Month! He had hoped that the history of Black Americans would become recognized as so fully entwined with the history of the nation that a separate celebration would not be needed. Most Americans would agree that a separate celebration is appropriate; Woodson would regard that as a measure of how much progress has been made, but also of how much remains to be done.