February is Black History Month-Honor Historian Carter G. Woodson

February is Black History Month-Honor Historian Carter G. Woodson

By Sam Eaton

Normally, unlike guys like Sam Lowell and Frank Jackman that write here about politics and history, I am not interested in the fate of historians dead or alive. They provide valuable material, mostly, but I just am not attuned to history enough to go crazy over any particular one, or any particular morsel they have to serve up. Not so the man we are honoring here Carter G. Woodson (and on Google’s home page doodle as well which is where I got my prompt from). The reason I am more than happy to make an exception is that the good Doctor did yeoman’s work, no more than that, to bring us young white kids who were involved in the black civil rights movement in the early 1960s plenty of information about the history of early black struggles and personalities. Started journals and programs to study the subject. Stuff that we were clueless about despite our avidity to help in the black liberation struggle. Stuff that was not taught in any high school course, hell, any college courses until well after Black/Afro-American study programs were established. So, yes, hats off the good Doctor.