Black History Month profile:
Carter G. Woodson
- --in 1926, pioneered "Negro History Week" to coincide with making the birthdays of Frederick Douglas and Abraham Lincoln.
- --one of the first black people to receive a PhD. from Harvard.
- --worked to preserve the history of African Americans and accumulated a collection of thousands of artifacts and publications.
- --noted that African-American contributions “were overlooked, ignored, and even suppressed by the writers of history textbooks and the teachers who use them.
- --”Race prejudice", he concluded, “is merely the logical result of tradition, the inevitable outcome of thorough instruction to the effect that the Negro has never contributed anything to the progress of mankind."
- --also formed the African-American-owned Associated Publishers Press in 1921 and wrote more than a dozen books over the years, including A Century of Negro Migration (1918), The History of the Negro Church (1921), The Negro in Our History (1922) and Mis-Education of the Negro(1933).
- --Mis-Education—with its focus on the Western indoctrination system and African-American self-empowerment—is a particularly noted work and has become regularly course adopted by college institutions.
"If you can control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his action. When you determine what a man shall think you do not have to concern yourself about what he will do. If you make a man feel that he is inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself. If you make a man think that he is justly an outcast, you do not have to order him to the back door. He will go without being told; and if there is no back door, his very nature will demand one.”
― Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro