Carter Godwin Woodson (1875–1950) was an American historian, author, and educator who founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (1915) and established Negro History Week (1926), which became Black History Month. Woodson is often called the “father of Black history.”
Core ideas
- Miseducation: in The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933), Woodson argued that the American educational system trained Black people to despise themselves and defer to white authority. Education designed by the dominant group, even when extended to the oppressed, serves the dominant group’s interests by teaching the oppressed to see themselves through the oppressor’s eyes.
- Self-determined education: Woodson called for education controlled by Black communities and grounded in Black history, culture, and intellectual traditions. The solution to miseducation was not inclusion in a fundamentally hostile system but the creation of educational institutions accountable to Black communities.
- Historical consciousness: Woodson understood the study of Black history as itself a form of liberation — a counter to the erasure and distortion that the dominant educational system perpetuates.
Notable works
- The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933)
- The Negro in Our History (1922)
- The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861 (1915)
Related
- Black radical pedagogies — the tradition his work helped establish
- banking model — the pedagogical dynamic his critique anticipates