Brothers and Sisters of Local 103, Happy Black History Month! Dr. Robert Adams, a member of the IBEW Local 103 Empower DEI Advisory Council, was invited to reflect on how organized labor supported the wide-scale adoption of the celebration created by  Dr. Carter G. Woodson, a former coal miner and farmhand.

A Celebration Conceived in West Virginia, Championed by Organized Labor

 

   Black History Month, originating as Negro History Week in 1926, is nearly a hundred years old. Carter G. Woodson created the observance to highlight African-American contributions to American history and culture. In 1912, Woodson personally entered the history books as the second person to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University, following in the footsteps of W.E.B. DuBois. Facts about Woodson’s founding the historical celebration are widely known. There is less familiarity with Woodson’s pre-Harvard background, the workspaces that birthed his vision of Black history, and the prominent role organized labor played in facilitating the wide-scale adoption of the Black History Month.

   Woodson was born into humble origins in Virginia to James and Anne Woodson in 1875. He was the by-product of the defining events of 19th century America: slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. His parents were born into slavery, and Woodson is the only child of formerly enslaved parents to earn an American Ph.D. Similarly, his father fought in the Civil War, the bloody conflict that ended American slavery. Woodson grew up during Reconstruction, a period marked by increasing African-American political participation, working on the family’s tobacco farm. His work afforded him little opportunity to receive a formal education. The declining fortunes of tobacco farming forced a sixteen-year-old Woodson to seek better opportunities as a wage laborer in the coal mines of West Virginia.

 

“Real education means to inspire people to live more abundantly, to learn to begin with life as they find it and make it better.”

--Carter G. Woodson, Mis-Education of the Negro

 

   Woodson earned formal academic credentials from Harvard, but his historical perspectives developed during his six-year stint as a coal miner in West Virginia. Oliver Jones, an illiterate tearoom owner and organic intellectual, offered Woodson food in exchange for reading history books and newspapers aloud to his fellow Black coal miners. His work as a reader fueled Woodson’s quest for more formal education. At age twenty, he enrolled in high school while continuing to work. After receiving his Ph.D. at thirty-seven, Woodson envisioned taking his Black history project to a larger audience.

 

There has been a larger movement on the part of the Negro intelligentsia toward racial grouping for the advancement of art and literature. . . . Perhaps its greatest single accomplishment is Carter Woodson’s “Negro History Week.”

--W.E.B. DuBois, Dusk of Dawn

 

   Woodson co-founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH) in 1915. Through the Association, Woodson published books on Black life. Eventually, he created a journal devoted to the study of Black history. The 1926 launch of Negro History Week marked a turning point in the struggle to gain recognition for African-American contributions to U.S. history. Prominent foundations like the Rosenwald Fund (created by Julius Rosenwald of Sears, Roebuck, and Company), the Carnegie Foundation, and Rockefeller Trusts provided crucial monetary support for the ASNLH and its activities. Elite financial support was essential, but African-American grassroots activism made the project successful. 

   African-American civil society immediately embraced the observance of Negro History Week. African-American churches, fraternal groups, and clubs spearheaded the observance’s broad adoption. Perhaps no group did more to institutionalize the celebration of Black History than Black organized labor, especially the African-American teacher associations at the local, state, and national levels. It is not hard to imagine the shared agenda; Woodson was a fellow teacher and shared an unwavering belief in the emancipatory power of education. The National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools (NATCS), later the American Teachers Association, relentlessly advocated for the official inclusion of Black history and culture into the schoolhouse curriculum. Its members quietly incorporated ASNLH produced materials into their instruction when their respective states refused to recognize the need for African-American history. Relentless union advocacy, lasting decades, positioned Negro History Week’s expansion into Black History Month in the early 1970s and official recognition by Presidential Ford in 1976.

   Although their ancestors arrived on these shores in chains, African-Americans, like Carter G. Woodson, refused to let the past define them. Born on a poverty-stricken Virginia tobacco farm, Woodson shared his tremendous riches with the nation. He taught Americans how to appreciate the past as a precursor for imagining a more equitable future. Organized labor multiplied his efforts and impact. In the process, Black History Month became a truly American celebration.