Education Week - February 3, 2021 - 15

OPINION

As I think of our current state of Black
history education and Black History
Month, I am reminded of the words of
Carter G. Woodson, who noted in 1929,
" Instruction with respect to the life and
history of the Negro requires probably
more preparation than any other
phase of social science for the simple
reason that no other problems have
been so grossly misrepresented and so
generally misunderstood. To undertake
to give instruction in this field in which
one is not prepared, then, would be a
most expensive error for which future
generations must pay in suffering from
other misunderstandings like the many
which handicap us today. It requires
centuries for truth to overcome error. "
I am guest editing a series of opinion
essays and videos for Education Week
over the coming weeks that reflect on
what it means to be a Black history
educator. I hope these essays will serve
as an introduction to overcoming the
expensive error that still handicaps
us today: not understanding Black
people are human through our history. I
challenge teachers to reject the dominant
historical narratives that suggest Black
people's experiences are not important
unless they converge with white people's
- LaGARRETT J. KING
interests.

By Jarvis R. Givens
GIVENS is an assistant professor of
education, a faculty afﬁliate in African and
African American Studies, and the Suzanne
Young Murray assistant professor at the
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
at Harvard University. He is the author
of Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson
and the Art of Black Teaching (Harvard
University Press, 2021) and numerous
articles published in journals, including
the American Education Research Journal,
Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics
Culture and Society, and Race Ethnicity
and Education.

The History of
Black History Month

M

any accept Black
History Month
as a special time
of year, yet few
recognize the
role African
American teachers played in establishing and popularizing this
tradition during Jim Crow. Originally founded
in 1926 as Negro History Week by the famed
educator and groundbreaking historian Carter
G. Woodson, Black History Month is the product
of Black teachers' long-standing intellectual and
political struggles.
As a longtime public school teacher, Woodson
witnessed white school leaders resist efforts to
meaningfully transform curriculum and school
policies, and while earning his doctorate from
Harvard University, between 1908 and 1912, he
learned how distortions about Black life were
constructed at the highest levels of education.
Recognizing these barriers, he decided to work
from outside the classroom to partner with
teachers. This began with Woodson founding
the Association for the Study of Negro Life and
History in 1915.
Woodson was particularly interested in using
Negro History Week to infuse students' learning
with critical knowledge about racial domination
as well as the long traditions of Black resistance
and achievement. Negro History Week quickly
became a cultural norm in Black segregated
schools. According to surveys conducted by Black
educator and journalist Thomas L. Dabney in
1934, it was celebrated in more than 80 percent of
those high schools by the mid-1930s.
The creation of Negro History Week did not
occur in a vacuum. It reflected a continuum
of consciousness among Black educators,
channeling an intellectual and political tradition
long practiced in the private spaces of their
classrooms. This class of teachers placed the
needs of their students above protocols imposed
by white school leaders.
This tradition stretched back as early as
1864, when Black abolitionist Charlotte Forten
taught recently freed children in South Carolina
about Toussaint L'Ouverture and the Haitian
Revolution. Noticing the absence of such
narratives in textbooks and materials supplied
by white missionaries, Forten wrote that Black
children " should know what one of their own
color had done for his race. "
A decade before establishing Negro History
Week, Woodson and his colleagues at the
M Street School in Washington planned
professional-development events for Black
teachers, and they did so independent of the
school district. These workshops during the
1915-16 academic year extended from previous
strategies they employed to work around the
official school curriculum.
Woodson facilitated a history and civics
workshop, which took place just after he
published the inaugural issue of the Journal of
Negro History-the first academic publication
of its kind and one that Woodson founded and
edited using the small salary he earned from
teaching history, English, and French at the M
Street School. W.E.B. Du Bois-who had visited

Carter G. Woodson
AP

A NOTE FROM
THE GUEST EDITOR

the school in previous years at the invitation of
Anna Julia Cooper, the school's principal at the
time and the author of A Voice from the South: By
A Black Woman from the South-led workshops on
Black history for teachers.
Such examples reflect a robust intellectual
culture among Black schoolteachers. What's
more, these educators insisted on the importance
of providing students with cultural armor to
repudiate the racial myths reflected in the nation's
laws, social policies, and American curriculum.
But teaching about Black life and culture was
not just about songs, poems, and a few good
stories of successful Black people. Woodson
emphasized the direct relationship between
curricular content and the violent lived
experiences of Black people in the world. When
reflecting on Negro History Week in 1926, he
wrote the following in the Journal of Negro
History: " A Negro is passed on the street and is
shoved off in the mud; he complains or strikes
back and is lynched as a desperado who attacked
a gentleman. And what if he is handicapped,
segregated, or lynched? According to our
education and practice, if you kill one of the
group, the world goes on just as well or better; for
the Negro is nothing, has never been anything,
and never will be anything but a menace to
civilization. "
Woodson argued that the official school
curriculum cultivated anti-Blackness as a social
competence, and its system of representation
reflected and reproduced social hierarchies that
plagued human society. Based on the American

curriculum, Blackness and Black people
represented the antithesis of human civilization
and achievement. Thus, Negro History Week
emerged from Black teachers' political clarity
about the ideological foundations of American
schooling and their desire to disrupt such
foundations.
The occasion arrived annually in February, yet
teachers should not wait until February to study
Black life and culture. Woodson emphasized
this point again and again. " Some teachers
and their students have misunderstood the
celebration of Negro History Week, " Woodson
explained in the February 1938 Negro History
Bulletin. He observed how some schools " work
up enthusiasm during these few days, stage a
popular play, present an orator of the day, or
render exercises of a literary order; but they
forget the Negro thereafter throughout the year.
To proceed in such fashion may do as much
harm as good. " At its best, Negro History Week
dramatized and expressed an educational vision
that shaped learning year-round. This caution
offered in 1938 might also be applied to our 21stcentury present.
As we reflect on the importance of Black
History Month in 2021-a time of unprecedented
challenges-we might draw inspiration from the
robust intellectual and political tradition of Black
teachers from the past. The greatest among them
were more than ordinary practitioners. They were
scholars of the practice. We have Black History
Month because of their long tradition of study
and struggle. 

EDUCATION WEEK | February 3, 2021 | www.edweek.org/opinion | 15
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Education Week - February 3, 2021

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