Who is carter woodson

It was around this time he learned a school for black children was to be built in Huntington, West Virginia. Through self-instruction, Woodson mastered the fundamentals of common school subjects by age He continued his education in Fayette County, VA, earning a living as a coal miner to pay for his education. There he received his diploma in less than two years. Woodson enrolled in Berea College in , taking classes part-time between and He graduated from Berea with a Bachelor of Literature degree in By , Carter G.

After attending Berea College in Kentucky, Woodson worked in the Philippines as an education superintendent for the U. DuBois to earn a doctorate from that institution.

Like DuBois, Woodson believed that young African Americans in the early 20th century were not being taught enough of their own heritage, and the achievements of their ancestors.

He chose February because the month contained the birthdays of both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass , two prominent men whose historic achievements African Americans already celebrated.

The house was also home base for the Associated Publishers Press, which Woodson had founded in Clearly, Woodson never viewed the study of Black history as something that could be confined to a week. As early as the s, efforts began to expand the week of public celebration of African American heritage and achievements into a longer event. This shift had already begun in some locations by , when Woodson died suddenly of a heart attack at home in Washington.

Here, he received a political education and learned what little was then available on black history. One of his co-workers was a Civil War veteran, Oliver Jones, who operated a tearoom for black miners out of his home where he sold fruit and ice cream and provided a gathering place for black miners.

Learning that Woodson was literate, he engaged him to read the daily newspapers to the miners in return for free treats. Woodson must have been impressed by the idealism and dedication of the marchers for he became knowledgeable about the Populist doctrines of Tom Watson and William Jennings Bryan.

He graduated in two years, and then in enrolled at Berea College in Kentucky, one of the few colleges of the time which offered interracial education. He took a classical curriculum, with a smattering of the emerging social sciences. For the first time, he studied history on a formal basis. He also participated in the vocational training required at Berea.

Later, he would argue in several of his writings that this type of education, a combination of classical courses and vocational training, was best for blacks. Woodson also returned to Fayette County during this period to teach at a school in Winona, just five miles from Nuttallburg.

Built by John Nuttall to open-up the 30, acres of coal lands of which he owned the mineral rights, the branch ran from Nuttallburg up the New River Gorge to the highlands above and terminated in about 10 miles at Lookout. By the time Woodson arrived in Winona in there were at least two major coal operations near the town, the Ballinger Coal Company and the Smokeless mine owned by the Masters Coal Company.

Both operated company stores and built a number of company houses at Winona. Winona was a bustling, wide-open, and independent community in with a population of , according to the Federal Census. The mining town boosted several independent businesses, partly because the coal companies did not control the surface rights of the land. John Cavalier, historian of Fayette County, noted that during its prosperous period which extended past the s until the s , Winona had a drug store, several general merchandise stores, dry goods stores, a meat market, a pool room, a millinery business, a barber shop, several hotels, a lodging house, a bank, and a movie theatre.

Several fraternal organization were represented at Winona, including a Masonic lodge chartered in Several churches stood at Winona, as well, along with a one-room school, presumably a white school that started in Only a very few individuals were born in states other than Virginia or West Virginia—nine from North Carolina, three from Ohio, and one each from Kentucky, Alabama, and Pennsylvania.

The occupation of all but ten of the males was coal mining, either as miner or mine laborer. The eleven non-coal occupations were held by six railroad workers, three construction workers, one barber, and one public school teacher Carter G.

All of the black females for which an occupation was listed were servants or housekeepers. None of the households were inter-racial, but it seems plain from the order in which the enumerator listed persons that black families were interspersed among white families.

This suggests that there was no rigid segregation in the town. For the most part, though, both blacks and whites were listed in blocks of several households, suggesting that there were black and white sections or neighborhoods in the community.

The Federal Census provides some interesting, and perhaps controversial, information about Carter G. Although the date for his birth is commonly given by his biographers and other sources as , the enumerator lists it as February, Woodson left Winona in in pursuit of greater opportunity in Huntington.