DECATUR, GA — Noted Black scholar and historian Carter G. Woodson, known as the Father of Black History, was born in 1875 to former slaves. He worked on the family farm in West Virginia as well as in the coal mines nearby. He was largely self-taught in most school subjects, and entered high school at the age of 20, graduating in only two years.
Woodson would work as a teacher and school principal in segregated schools before obtaining his Bachelor’s Degree from Berea College in Kentucky. He later traveled abroad throughout Europe and Asia, serving as a school supervisor in the Philippines. Later earning his master’s degree from the University of Chicago, Woodson would become the second Black American, following W.E.B. Du Bois to obtain a Ph.D. doctorate degree from Howard University, eventually serving as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard.
Though an accredited and published historian, Woodson’s involvement was shunned by most of the professional and trade associations of his day, he assumed in part due to his frequent objection to the non-inclusion of the history of Black Americans or slavery. Noting that no other colleges would take on this cause at that time, Woodson founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915 in Chicago. His continuing devotion to the study and promotion of the contributions of Black American bore fruit in 1926 when Woodson launched Negro History Week during the second week of February, to coincide with the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.
The Celebration Was a Bit Slow to Grow
Spreading slowly, primarily across public school systems and college campuses in or near urban areas, Negro History Week became Negro History Month, and then Black History Month, first celebrated and renamed at Kent State University in 1970. Not long after assuming the presidency, Gerald R. Ford met with Civil Rights Leaders including Dorothy Height, Jesse Jackson and Vernon Jordan seeking a more substantive commitment by the United States to make a ringing reaffirmation of the U.S. commitment to racial justice and moral leadership across the world, 50 years after Woodson’s modest start of this now national celebration.
In February of 1976, by Executive Action, President Ford proclaimed Black History Month as a national period of recognition and study, as part of the nation’s Bicentennial celebration. And since that time, each President since Ronald Reagan has issued a proclamation honoring Black History Month.
My Family Came South in Civil Rights Era
My family published newspapers in metro Atlanta, starting scrappily in Decatur in 1949, and eventually growing to eight suburban weekly newspapers across DeKalb, south Fulton, Clayton, Fayette and Henry Counties, along with a commercial printing business that employed over 300 people. That later commercial printing enterprise would print many other newspapers as well, including The Atlanta Daily World, and for some time The Birmingham Daily World, for the Scott family of Auburn Avenue, Sweet Auburn Business District and Atlanta’s Fourth Ward for nearly 40 years. My father and his family were Yankee carpetbaggers, arriving in 1949, with little more than the car and Jet Stream trailer they rolled into downtown Decatur with.
My mother would arrive alone as a teenager by bus from Birmingham in 1960, with a suitcase and less than $50, collected from friends and neighbors to help her locate her mother, who had left her behind to follow better job opportunities in Atlanta. When I was born in 1961, MLK, Jr.’s eldest son, Dexter Scott King, and I were born on the exact same day in hospitals just a few miles, yet then world’s apart in Atlanta.
This South, Atlanta, and Scottdale Are All HOME
And now, Atlanta and my home of DeKalb County is a very much blended and diverse melting pot and community. We moved to Scottdale, GA in 2007, not long before my youngest daughter was born. This unincorporated community within DeKalb County has its own rich and colorful history, to be shared again in another column, but the names of Scott Boulevard, and Agnes Scott College, all share the same proud Irish American roots.
The census data in 2007 for Scottdale identified the local demographics as 67% Black, and less than 26% White. And now in my home county of DeKalb, my family is by far in the minority, with white residents only accounting for about 24% of the entire county’s population. Yet, I have never felt more at home.
I fully agree with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.‘s quote suggesting that we judge people by the content of their character, and not just the color of their skin...and that culture and history and prior good deeds are also a part of character, so I am glad that we spend an entire month recognizing and celebrating this. And though I won’t be the first to make the suggestion, I hope you will consider joining me in wishing that we spend part of every month recognizing, celebrating and educating our youth on the many contributions and challenges faced by black and brown Americans, across our nearly 250 years as a nation. Like my Irish forebears, they were not all initially welcomed here, but in the broad tapestry of the modern American society that we have become, learning more of each other’s cultures, customs and history only benefits us all. Have a blessed Black History Month, and God bless America.
