The Conversation - Good reads for Black History Month

As the father of Black history, Carter G. Woodson would marvel at how Black History Month has become mainstream. Countless organizations, from Netflix to McDonald’s, have some sort of recognition of the contributions of Black people to American history.

It wasn’t always this way. In 1926, Woodson simply wanted a Black History Week in February to mark the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

His goal then – which is still timely now – was not only a celebration of Black achievement but also to offer “the history of the world void of national bias, race hatred and religious prejudice.”

A towering figure in Black history scholarship, Woodson became in 1912 the second African American, after W.E.B. Du Bois, to earn a doctorate at Harvard. He founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915. Later, Woodson launched The Journal of Negro History and The Negro History Bulletin. Both of those academic journals aimed to legitimize the study of African American history and culture.

Woodson’s seminal work, “The Mis-Education of the Negro,” was published in 1933. “If you can control a man’s thinking,” Woodson famously wrote, “you do not have to worry about his actions.”

Renowned Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes once wrote in February 1945 that America owed Woodson a debt of gratitude. “For many years now he has labored in the cause of Negro history, and his labors have begun to bear a most glorious fruit.”

Here at The Conversation, we publish articles on Black history throughout the year, including these three recent ones.

In the first, African American studies scholar Frederick Gooding Jr., explores Black national monuments in the United States, writing that “the lack of Black statues sends a clear message of exclusion.”

The second takes a critical look at the legacy of an experiment designed to teach third graders about race shortly after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

And the third recounts the struggles of Charles Chesnutt, one of the first Black novelists at the turn of the 20th century. Like other Black artists in U.S. history, Chestnutt had to adjust his style to fit the mores of a racist society – which also pervaded the publishing establishment.