Black History Heritage Profile: Carter Woodson

Carter G. Woodson
Historian, Educator

We owe the fact that we have Black History Month to historian and educator Carter G Woodson. He was born in 1875 and was taught to read by members of his family. He worked in a West Virginian coal mine and put himself through high school. In 1903 he graduated from Berea College in Kentucky. He taught English in the Philippines while studying Romance languages through correspondence courses. Upon returning to the United States, Woodson became a teacher at Dunbar High School in Washington, DC. He became the second African American ever to earn a Harvard doctorate when he got his Ph. D. in history in 1912.

Passionate about black education, Woodson founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, the Journal of Negro History, the Associated Publishers, and Negro History Bulletin. Woodson began promoting Negro History Week during the second week of February to celebrate both the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass in 1926. This celebration became Black History Month in the 1960s, a decade after Woodson’s death in 1950.