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February marks the 39th government-recognized Black History Month. But the month-long celebration of a history that was once disregarded and suppressed didn\u2019t originate during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and \u201860s. In fact, its origins date back to 1926, when a historian named Carter G. Woodson spearheaded \u201cNegro History Week.\u201d<\/p>\n
Before Carter G. Woodson became the \u201cfather of black history,\u201d he witnessed it firsthand as the son of two former slaves. An enthusiastic and gifted student, Woodson was the second black American to receive a Ph.D. in history. But though he was interested in the history of his race, he quickly found that libraries and archives just didn\u2019t collect primary materials relating to black Americans.<\/p>\n
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Carter G. Woodson (via\u00a0Wikimedia Commons<\/a>)<\/strong><\/p>\n The origins of Black History Month date back to 1926, when a historian named Carter G. Woodson spearheaded \u201cNegro History Week.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Eager to fill in the historical record, Woodson created the Association for the Study of African American Life and History in 1915 and founded\u00a0The Journal of Negro History<\/em>\u00a0soon after. As Jacqueline Goggin reports in\u00a0\u201cCarter G. Woodson and the Collection of Source Materials for Afro-American History,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0Woodson used the\u00a0Journal\u00a0<\/em>and his new organization to spread the word about the importance of primary materials. Though institutions like the Guggenheim and the Carnegie Institution refused to fund him, he was able to form powerful alliances with the Library of Congress and other organizations.<\/p>\n Woodson\u00a0documented the lives of black soldiers during World War I, solicited oral histories from surviving slaves, and uncovered rare letters and artifacts along the way. As Woodson\u2019s professional network grew, so did his conviction that a better understanding of black history would help overcome prejudice in the United States.<\/p>\n \u201cNot to know what one\u2019s race has done in former times is to continue always a child,\u201d he wrote in\u00a0a pamphlet advertising the first \u201cNegro History Week\u201d<\/a>\u00a0in February 1926. \u201cIf a race has no history, if it has no worth-while tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated.\u201d<\/p>\n The first Negro History Week brought together historians and public school teachers, business leaders and educators, church leaders and lay people in a week-long celebration of the accomplishments of blacks in the United States. Woodson worked with state Departments of Education to further the program, and after Woodson\u2019s death in 1950 it grew so popular that it was championed by leaders of the students\u2019 movement at Kent State University in the late 1960s, and expanded to a month in 1976.![\"\"](\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Carter_G_Woodson_portrait.jpg\")
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