PIONEER IN BLACK HISTORY

Son of a Former Slave.

Carter Godwin Woodson, the son of a former slave, rose from humble origins and against steep odds to a remarkable career as a scholar and educator. Though he did not begin high school until the age of twenty, Woodson went on to study at Berea College, the University of Chicago, the Sorbonne, and Harvard University, where he earned a Ph.D. in 1912. Later, from 1919 to 1920, he was dean of the School of Liberal Arts at Howard University.

Framework for the Study of Black History.

In 1915 Woodson founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History to train black historians and to collect, preserve, and publish documents on blacks, Woodson lived in an era that had completely neglected the history of black Americans, and the absence from textbooks and from historical volumes of any information about the history of blacks in the United States was his...