🎙️✊🏾'TELL IT LIKE IT IS' Black History Series: Carter G. Woodson and the Architecture of Black History in America

From coal mines to Harvard, Woodson built the institutions, scholarship, and movement that reshaped how America understands its past.

In the long arc of American historical scholarship, few figures have altered the national narrative as profoundly as Carter G. Woodson. Born on December 19, 1875, in New Canton, Virginia, to formerly enslaved parents who nonetheless owned land, Woodson rose from manual laborer to world-renowned historian—laying the intellectual foundation for what would become Black History Month and institutionalizing the study of African American life in the United States.

Woodson’s early life was marked by work rather than formal schooling. During the 1890s, he labored on farms, drove a garbage truck, and worked in coal mines, educating himself whenever possible. His academic breakthrough came at Berea College, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1903. Teaching Black students in West Virginia soon followed, reinforcing his belief that education was both a tool of liberation and a battleground for truth.

His career took on an international dimension between 1903 and 1907, when he worked in the Philippines under the U.S. War Department, then traveled extensively through Africa, Asia, and Europe, including study at the Sorbonne in Paris. By 1908, Woodson had earned a master’s degree from the University of Chicago, and in 1912, he became only the second African American to earn a doctorate in history from Harvard University.