By Lonnie G. Bunch III, Yes!, February 5, 2021
No one has played a greater role in helping all Americans know the Black past than Carter G. Woodson, the individual who created Negro History Week in Washington, D.C., in February 1926.
Woodson was the second Black American to receive a Ph.D. in history from Harvard—following W.E.B. Du Bois by a few years. To Woodson, the Black experience was too important simply to be left to a small group of academics. Woodson believed that his role was to use Black history and culture as a weapon in the struggle for racial uplift. By 1916, Woodson had moved to D.C. and established the “Association for the Study of Negro Life and Culture,” an organization whose goal was to make Black history accessible to a wider audience. Woodson was a strange and driven man whose only passion was history, and he expected everyone to share his passion.
This impatience led Woodson to create Negro History Week in 1926, to ensure that schoolchildren would be exposed to Black history. Woodson chose the second week of February to celebrate the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.
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