The History of Black History Month

Woodson chose February for reasons of tradition and reform.  It is commonly said that Woodson

selected February to encompass the birthdays of two great Americans who played a prominent role in

shaping black history, namely Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, whose birthdays are the 12th

and the 14th, respectively.  More importantly, he chose them for reasons of tradition.  Since Lincoln’s

assassination in 1865, the black community, along with other Republicans, had been celebrating the fallen

President’s birthday.  And since the late 1890s, black communities across the country had been

celebrating Douglass’.  Well aware of the pre-existing celebrations, Woodson built Negro History Week

around traditional days of commemorating the black past.  He was asking the public to extend their study

of black history, not to create a new tradition.  In doing so, he increased his chances for success.

Yet Woodson was up to something more than building on tradition. Without saying so, he aimed to

reform it from the study of two great men to a great race.  Though he admired both men, Woodson had

never been fond of the celebrations held in their honor. He railed against the “ignorant spellbinders” who

addressed large, convivial gatherings and displayed their lack of knowledge about the men and their

contributions to history.  More importantly, Woodson believed that history was made by the people, not

simply or primarily by great men.  He envisioned the study and celebration of the Negro as a race, not

simply as the producers of a great man. And Lincoln, however great, had not freed the slaves—the

Union Army, including hundreds of thousands of black soldiers and sailors, had done that. Rather than

focusing on two men, the black community, he believed, should focus on the countless black men and

women who had contributed to the advance of human civilization.

From the beginning, Woodson was overwhelmed by the response to his call.  Negro History Week

appeared across the country in schools and before the public.  The 1920s was the decade of the New

Negro, a name given to the Post-War I generation because of its rising racial pride and consciousness.  

Urbanization and industrialization had brought over a million African Americans from the rural South into

big cities of the nation.  The expanding black middle class became participants in and consumers of

black literature and culture.  Black history clubs sprang up, teachers demanded materials to instruct their

pupils, and progressive whites stepped and endorsed the efforts.  

Woodson and the Association scrambled to meet the demand.  They set a theme for the annual

celebration, and provided study materials—pictures, lessons for teachers, plays for historical

performances, and posters of important dates and people.  Provisioned with a steady flow of knowledge,

high schools in progressive communities formed Negro History Clubs.  To serve the desire of history

buffs to participate in the re-education of black folks and the nation, ASNLH formed branches that

stretched from coast to coast.  In 1937, at the urging of Mary McLeod Bethune, Woodson established

the Negro History Bulletin, which focused on the annual theme. As black populations grew, mayors

issued Negro History Week proclamations, and in cities like Syracuse progressive whites joined Negro

History Week with National Brotherhood Week.

Like most ideas that resonate with the spirit of the times, Negro History Week proved to be more

dynamic than Woodson or the Association could control.  By the 1930s, Woodson complained about the

intellectual charlatans, black and white, popping up everywhere seeking to take advantage of the public

interest in black history.  He warned teachers not to invite speakers who had less knowledge than the

students themselves.  Increasingly publishing houses that had previously ignored black topics and

authors rushed to put books on the market and in the schools.  Instant experts appeared everywhere, and

non-scholarly works appeared from “mushroom presses.”  In America, nothing popular escapes either

commercialization or eventual trivialization, and so Woodson, the constant reformer, had his hands full in

promoting celebrations worthy of the people who had made the history.  

Well before his death in 1950, Woodson believed that the weekly celebrations—not the study or

celebration of black history–would eventually come to an end.  In fact, Woodson never viewed black

history as a one-week affair.  He pressed for schools to use Negro History Week to demonstrate what

students learned all year.  In the same vein, he established a black studies extension program to reach

adults throughout the year.  It was in this sense that blacks would learn of their past on a daily basis that

he looked forward to the time when an annual celebration would no longer be necessary. Generations

before Morgan Freeman and other advocates of all-year commemorations, Woodson believed that black

history was too important to America and the world to be crammed into a limited time frame.  He spoke

of a shift from Negro History Week to Negro History Year.  

In the 1940s, efforts began slowly within the black community to expand the study of black history in

the schools and black history celebrations before the public.  In the South, black teachers often taught

Negro History as a supplement to United States history.  One early beneficiary of the movement reported

that his teacher would hide Woodson’s textbook beneath his desk to avoid drawing the wrath of the

principal.  During the Civil Rights Movement in the South, the Freedom Schools incorporated black

history into the curriculum to advance social change.  The Negro History movement was an intellectual

insurgency that was part of every larger effort to transform race relations.

The 1960s had a dramatic effect on the study and celebration of black history.  Before the decade was

over, Negro History Week would be well on its way to becoming Black History Month.  The shift to a

month-long celebration began even before Dr. Woodson death.  As early as 1940s, blacks in West

Virginia, a state where Woodson often spoke, began to celebrate February as Negro History Month.  In

Chicago, a now forgotten cultural activist, Fredrick H. Hammaurabi, started celebrating Negro History

Month in the mid-1960s.  Having taken an African name in the 1930s, Hammaurabi used his cultural

center, the House of Knowledge, to fuse African consciousness with the study of the black past.  By the

late 1960s, as young blacks on college campuses became increasingly conscious of links with Africa,

Black History Month replaced Negro History Week at a quickening pace.  Within the Association,

younger intellectuals, part of the awakening, prodded Woodson’s organization to change with the times.

They succeeded.  In 1976, fifty years after the first celebration, the Association used its influence to

institutionalize the shifts from a week to a month and from Negro history to black history. Since the mid-

1970s, every American president, Democrat and Republican, has issued proclamations endorsing the

Association’s annual theme.

What Carter G. Woodson would say about the continued celebrations is unknown, but he would smile on

all honest efforts to make black history a field of serious study and provide the public with thoughtful

celebrations.

Despite being held at the Coliseum, the site of the 1912 Republican

convention, an overflow crowd of six to twelve thousand waited

outside for their turn to view the exhibits. Inspired by the

three-week celebration, Woodson decided to form an organization

to promote the scientific study of black life and history before

leaving town.  On September 9th, Woodson met at the Wabash

YMCA with A. L. Jackson and three others and formed the

Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH).