Carter G. Woodson

Carter Godwin Woodson (1875-1950) was an American historian, author and journalist who founded the Association for the Study of African American Life and History in 1915 and edited its Journal of Negro History from 1916. Born in Virginia to parents who had been enslaved, he worked in coal mines before completing his schooling, then earned degrees from Berea College and the University of Chicago before becoming the second African American, after W. E. B. Du Bois, to earn a doctorate from Harvard University. Largely shut out of the white-dominated academic history profession, he built independent institutions to support Black history scholarship, taught at Howard University and West Virginia State University, and in 1926 launched Negro History Week, the direct precursor of Black History Month. He is widely known as the father of Black history.