Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950), the Father of Black History, is best known for starting Negro History Week in the US, which by the 1970s had led to Black History Month and African American Studies. He is also known for writing “The Mis-Education of the Negro” (1933) about how education in the US serves White interests not Black interests.
Education: His mother as a slave secretly taught herself to read and write and passed that knowledge onto him. By day he was a coal miner, hearing the stories of Black men who had fought in the Civil War. By night he studied Latin and English classics so he could get a high school education. By 1912 he had a PhD in history, the second Black American ever to get a PhD at Harvard. W.E.B. Du Bois was the first.
Ignorance and racism: Woodson discovered that even highly educated Blacks and Whites knew little about Black history. And what little they did know was often wrong. That made it next to impossible for Blacks to overcome racism, both from Whites and from within.
In 1915, to help set that right, he founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH). Its aim was to put Black history on a sound scholarly footing and make its findings widely known. He raised money for research, put out the Journal of Negro History, and published books no one else would.
In 1922 he wrote “The Negro in Our History”. It was the book he was best known for in his own time, the one Malcolm X learned Black history from when he was in prison. It was the best book on Black history till John Hope Franklin’s “From Slavery to Freedom” (1947).
In 1926 Woodson started Negro History Week to help spread knowledge of Black history. It was the second week of February when Blacks were already celebrating the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln (12th) and Frederick Douglass (14th). It proved to be a hit: he could not keep up with the demand for material by schoolteachers and Negro History Clubs. He dreamed of the week becoming a year. It was already a month in West Virginia by the time of his death.
Day job: Before the ASNLH could raise enough money to support him full-time, he was a schoolteacher and sometimes a principal, in West Virginia, the Philippines, and especially Washington, DC. In time he was a professor of history and a dean at Howard University.
Research: He liked Washington, DC because of its huge Library of Congress where he could do research. He wrote the first thorough history of the Black church and was one of the first historians to look at slavery from the slave’s point of view.
In 1933 he wrote “The Mis-Education of the Negro”, his essays (rants) about Black education and his answer to Du Bois’s idea of the Talented Tenth. It was not just history that needed to be Blacker. So did literature, philosophy, political science, music, art, law, medicine, religion, and sociology.
– Abagond, 2018.
See also:
- Mis-Education of the Negro
- Black History Month
- W.E.B. Du Bois
- What Malcolm X read in prison
- internalized racism
- The history of Black history
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Still no post about present day black slavery in libya….and ideologically concern about alleged black victims of crime only if the perpertrator is white ,if black its not news and does not matter – which is true for most black people.
Will he do any reviews of current movies or tv ?, cause I have seen black copperation and subservience even in the realm of fantasy.
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Still no post on the first emancipation from slavery in the modern world dated 02/02/1794, and the background, people involved in that forgotten historical first. Happy Black History Month!
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Carter G. Woodson’s rants in the Mis-Education of the Negro were on the money. It is sad that many of his observations about the failings of Black education in 1933 are still true in 2018.
The more things change, the more they stay the same….
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“I am rooting for all the black people.” —IssaRaye. Black History month needs to last 365 days a year. While I type this post I am staring at my copy of The Miseducation of The Negro in my book pile.
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“The educated Negroes have the attitude of contempt towards their own as well as in their mixed schools Negroes are taught to admire the Hebrew, the Greek, the Latin and the Teuton and to despise the African. Of the hundreds of Negro, and in most of the Negro colleges and universities where the Negro is thought of, the race is studied only as a problem or dismissed as of little consequence.
For example, an officer of a Negro university, thinking that an additional course on the Negro should be given there, called upon a Negro Doctor of Philosophy of the faculty to offer such work. He promptly informed the officer that he knew nothing about the Negro. He did not go to school to waste his time that way.”
Taken From Carter G. Woodson The Miseducation Of The Negro: Chapter One: The Seat Of Trouble
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“At a Negro Summer school two years ago, a white instructor gave a course on the Negro, using for his text a work which teaches that whites are superior to blacks. When asked by one of the students why he used such a textbook the instructor replied that he wanted them to get that point of view. Even schools for Negroes, then, are places where they must be convinced of their inferiority.
The thought of the inferiority of the Negro is drilled into him in almost every class he enters and in almost every book he studies. If he happens to leave school after he masters the fundamentals, before he finishes high school or reaches college, he will naturally escape some of this bias and may recover in time to be of service to his people.” Taken From The Miseducation Of The Negro. Carter G. Woodson Chapter One: The Seat Of Trouble, Page Two.
Both of these comment post are in correlation to the bullet point of Ignorance and Racism and reading these first two pages from the book show how Even highly educated blacks were just as ignorant of their history as whites and it’s a jarring fact of how white supremacy works to brainwash and blind black people to into self hatred.
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@ Mary Burrell
“…Even highly educated blacks were just as ignorant of their history as whites…”
Good point. The real question is who and what are most educated Black people taught to serve?
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@Afrofem: That for me is a complex question. You are highly educated who and what were you taught to serve? I appreciate that you are not an academic snob, and you don’t use your academic knowledge as a bully like some posters I have encountered. It was always my belief that black people with advanced degrees are the Jack and Jill respectability Negroes like the ones in Margo Jefferson’s Negroland. Having an advanced degree affords advances one’s social standing in life.
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Afrofem: Who and What are most educated Black people taught to serve. I am old school and I always think of W.E.B. Dubois Talented Tenth. The best and brightest of our people. But unfortunately even the best and brightest do not want to help the others that are disadvantaged and they want to assimilate with white culture.
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@ Mary Burrell
While I have found having an advanced degree can open some doors, having a strong work ethic, perseverance and great social skills count for so much more. I have relatives with little education who met the right people, jumped on opportunities and worked long hours for years to advance themselves.
I have other relatives who were brilliant students. They sailed through school and universities only to spend years as adults trying to find themselves and work they loved. Everyone has a different path. I’m less impressed by degrees and material success than I am by people who make a positive difference in the lives of others.
…the best and brightest do not want to help the others that are disadvantaged and they want to assimilate with white culture.
Yes. DuBois’ Talented Tenth did not serve the rest of Black people like he’d hoped. Many were and are seduced by the “illusion of inclusion”.
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While reading the Miseducation of the Negro, I just happened to run across a quote supposedly by Assata Shakur on the internet: “No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes, if they know that that knowledge will help set you free.”
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@ Helen
That is one reason the government still wants to capture Assata Shakur to this very day.
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“No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes, if they know that that knowledge will help set you free.”
Quite a profound statement
And its interesting how you can say so much in a statement known as a qoute and people still write books.
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@gro jo 1794 US flag 13 stars – Betsy Ross.svg United States The Slave Trade Act bans both American ships from participating in the slave trade and the importation of slaves by foreign ships.[40]
Who was freed in 1794?
1794 France Slavery abolished in all French territories and possessions.[54]
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