The seeds of Black History Month were sown more than 100 years ago in the South Side YMCA at 3763 S. Wabash Ave., Chicago.
Carter G. Woodson, a University of Chicago alum, was staying in a room at the Colored YMCA, as it was designated, while manning a booth at the Exposition of Fifty Years of Negro Progress in the nearby Chicago Coliseum. It marked the 50th anniversary of the 13th Amendment ending slavery, and Woodson was selling posters celebrating Black heroes and books about Black history.
He also hoped to find a publisher for the doctoral dissertation he’d written at Harvard University despite the racist attitudes of some faculty members, including one who argued there was no Black history in America, according to Woodson’s book, “The Mis-Education of the Negro.” Professor Edward Channing dismissed the importance of the Boston Massacre in 1770, considered a turning point in American history, because one of those who was killed, Crispus Attucks, was Black.
“Channing spoke of Crispus Attucks and his companions as idlers who happened to be among those who were throwing missiles at British soldiers stationed in Boston,” Woodson recalled in his book.
Woodson would say it took him 20 years to recover from Harvard. The process began at the South Side YMCA. It was a gathering place for Black intellectuals and professionals, and Woodson’s gift for gab enabled him to keep pace with them. Their accomplishments belied the racism of his professors.
Once on a ride to a college where he was to speak, “Woodson talked so interestingly,” a professor said, “that when we arrived at the college the cab driver said he would park the cab, if he were permitted to come inside the classroom and hear Dr. Woodson speak.”
So on Sept 9, 1915, Woodson confidently invited four African American notables to a meeting at the YMCA. There he persuaded a doctor at Provident Hospital; the head of the Colored Y and the orator of his Harvard graduating class; his assistant, who had a master’s degree from Yale; and a lawyer who, like Woodson, taught high school in Washington, to join him in founding the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History.
It published the Journal of Negro History. It had a section titled “Undistinguished Negroes,” accounts of workaday folk. Today that approach is known as history from the bottom up. Back then, white scholars saw history through the eyes of society’s nabobs, kings and presidents.
In 1926, Woodson proclaimed a Negro History Week in a pamphlet he sent to schools, colleges and community groups. The states of Delaware, North Carolina and West Virginia urged teachers to support Woodson’s project. So, too, did the cities of Baltimore and the District of Columbia, headmasters of private schools and university presidents.
Beginning in 1976, successive American presidents have proclaimed February as Black History Month.
Fittingly, the Chicago Public Library’s repository for the gold nuggets of Black history is named for its godfather: Woodson Regional Library at 9525 S. Halsted St.
Carter Woodson was born in 1875 in Buckingham County, Virginia. His mother and father were enslaved before the Civil War. Enslaved people generally bore the name of their enslavers. Carter Woodson’s last name indicates a forebear was John Woodson, an English immigrant at the dawn of America and an owner of enslaved Africans.
During the Civil War, Woodson’s grandfather fled to a Union detachment and saw action in its final battles. After the war, he encouraged Carter Woodson to go to school. Blacks could vote, and he needed his grandson to read to him newspaper accounts of candidates for office. He was loath to vote for an ex-Confederate.
Some of Woodson’s relatives moved to Kentucky, where he enrolled in Berea College. The school was dedicated to lifting students out of poverty and considered books the steppingstones.
Carter Woodson had just realized the potential of that idea when Kentucky outlawed interracial classrooms. Woodson transferred to the University of Chicago, determined to become a teacher for the sake of his fellow African Americans.
From hearing his grandparents’ and parents’ stories, he knew that the idea of Black people not having a history was pure bunk.
But he lacked a resource white historians had: conferences where he could share their preliminary findings. Woodson was a dues-paying member of the American Historical Association. But he and other Black historians often couldn’t even attend the group’s annual conventions because of segregation.
His solution was the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (later the Study of African American Life and History). Keeping the organization afloat was a struggle. The Chicago philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, famed for his generous aid to Blacks, limited his contribution to $100 annually. He explained he wasn’t interested in the “printer’s ink method of helping the Negro.”
Woodson borrowed $400 against his life insurance policy to have the first issue printed. He was determined to publish studies of “The Mis-Education of the Negro,” as he titled an anthology of his ideas.
In 1919, Woodson joined the history faculty at Howard University. But neither Howard nor any other Black colleges offered classes in Black culture. Black students were taught Europeans’ achievements but nothing about those of African Americans. Woodson said the result was similar to enslaved people bearing their masters’ names.
Educated Negros were conditioned to think they were powerless to change their servile condition. They passed that psychological handicap on to students they taught in Black public schools.
Woodson and Howard weren’t a match made in heaven. He was contemptuous of indifferent students and told them so, bluntly. The student magazine satirized him in its description of an ideal faculty: “Just imagine Dean Carter Woodson without his sarcasm.”
A break with its white president was precipitated when a Republican senator demanded that the book “Seventy Six Questions on the Bolsheviks and the Soviets” be removed from Howard’s library. The university president wanted to comply, but Woodson refused, saying academic freedom meant not giving a member of Congress the power of censorship.
From then on it was a race to see if Woodson would resign or be fired. Saying he was too trusting of white administrators who were unfit to administrate Black colleges, Woodson left Howard and took a position at West Virginia Collegiate Institute, another historically Black college, which is now called West Virginia State University.
That position also proved short-lived. Freed of teaching and faculty infighting, Woodson campaigned endlessly for Black history. He gave myriad lectures to Black groups, like Boston’s League for Women in Community Service and Philadelphia’s Alpha Phi Alpha chapter’s annual “Go to High School, Go To College” campaign.
He organized Black history parades and produced materials for Black history clubs. Virtually out of funds in 1925, he asked Franz Boas, a noted anthropologist, to endorse his appeals for funding. Boas did so, while noting: “It is rather difficult to cooperate with him, but his work is credible.”
And so beginning this week, students in the city and suburbs alike will observe Black History Month. By doing so, they will fulfill a dream that the son of former slaves had in Chicago’s Colored YMCA, 110 years ago.
Ron Grossman is a columnist emeritus for the Chicago Tribune. His columns vary from social and political commentary to chapters in Chicago history. Before turning to journalism, Grossman was a history professor. He is the author of “Guide to Chicago Neighborhoods.”
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