Carter Godwin Woodson - founder of The Journal of African-American History

 Carter Godwin Woodson (December 19, 1875 – April 3, 1950) was an African-American historian, author, journalist and the founder of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. Woodson was one of the first scholars to study African American history. A founder of Journal of Negro History (now titled The Journal of African-American History), Dr. Woodson has been cited as the father of black history.  

     Woodson  understood how important gaining a proper education is when striving to secure and make the most out of one’s divine right of freedom. Although he did not begin his formal education until he was 20 years old, his dedication to study enabled him to earn a high school diploma in West Virginia and bachelor and master’s degrees from the University of Chicago in just a few years.
In 1912, Woodson became the second African American to earn a PhD at Harvard University.

      Carter G Woodson was born in New Canton, Virginia, the son of former enslaved Africans, James and Elizae Riddle Woodson. His father helped Union soldiers during the Civil War, and he moved his family to West Virginia when he heard that Huntington was building a high school for blacks. Coming from a large, poor family,  Woodson could not regularly attend school. Through self-instruction, Woodson mastered the fundamentals of common school subjects by age 17.

     Wanting more education, Carter went to Fayette County to earn a living as a miner in the coal fields. He was able to devote only a few months each year to his schooling. In 1895, at age 20, Woodson entered Douglass High School, where he received his diploma in less than two years. From 1897 to 1900, Woodson taught in Fayette County. In 1900 he was selected as the principal of Douglass High School. He earned his Bachelor of Literature degree from Berea College in Kentucky in 1903 by taking classes part-time between 1901 and 1903.

      From 1903 to 1907, Woodson was a school supervisor in the Philippines. Later, he attended the University of Chicago, where he was awarded an A.B. and A.M. in 1908. He was a member of the first black fraternity Sigma Pi Phi and a member of Omega Psi Phi. He completed his Ph.D. in history at Harvard University in 1912, where he was the second African-American (after W.E.B. DuBois) to earn a doctorate.  His doctoral dissertation,The Disruption of Virginia, was based on research he did at the Library of Congress while teaching high school in Washington, D.C. After earning the doctoral degree, he continued teaching in the public schools, later joining the faculty at Howard University as a professor, where he served as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

      Convinced that the role of his own people in American history and in the history of other cultures was being ignored or misrepresented among scholars, Woodson realized the need for research into the neglected past of African Americans. Along with Alexander L. Jackson and three associates, he founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History on September 9, 1915, in Chicago. That was the year Woodson published The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861. His other books followed: A Century of Negro Migration (1918) and The History of the Negro Church (1927). His work The Negro in Our History has been reprinted in numerous editions and was revised by Charles H. Wesley after Woodson's death in 1950.

      In January 1916, Woodson began publication of the scholarly Journal of Negro History. It has never missed an issue, despite the Great Depression, loss of support from foundations, and two World Wars. In 2002, it was renamed the Journal of African American History and continues to be published by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH).

        The Mis-Education of The Negro - Chapter 1 The Seat of The Trouble

Henry Walton Bibb - First Black Newspaper In Canada

Henry Walton Bibb

Henry Walton Bibb (1815–1854) was born to an enslaved woman, Milldred Jackson, on a Cantalonia, Kentucky plantation on May 10, 1815. His people told him his white father was James Bibb, a Kentucky state senator, but Henry never knew him. As he was growing up, Bibb saw each of his six younger siblings, all boys, sold away to other slaveholders. Bibb “received stripes without number, the object of which was to degrade and keep him in subordination.” The young man was sold and resold again to new masters, and transferred to different regions. Instead of learning a trade, he learned the desperate skills of self-preservation. He dangerously risked escape often, without success.

Able to marry, Bibb wed Malinda in 1833. The Bibbs had two children, one child unable to survive infancy. Bibb made good on an escape to Canada in 1838, thinking he would return for Malinda and their daughter, Mary Frances. Taking on the abolition cause, Bibb later returned to Kentucky to search for his family. They could not be located, and Bibb, still an escaped slave, was captured and sold. He learned “that Malinda had been sold as the mistress of a while slave owner,”

Escaping again in late 1840 with help from the Underground Railroad, Bibb fled to Detroit, Michigan. “There he joined the anti-slavery movement,” “travelling across Michigan, Ohio, and the northeastern states lecturing upon the evils of slavery.”

In June 1848, Bibb remarried. His new wife was Mary Elizabeth Miles, born in Rhode Island in 1820 to free black parents. Mary was of the Quaker religion, well-educated and trained as a teacher. (Her school principal, Reverend Samuel May, was an advanced thinker, promoting women’s rights and anti-slavery.) Schools in Massachusetts, Ohio and New York hired Mary to teach. The pair met at a New York abolitionist meeting the year before their wedding in Dayton, Ohio.

In 1849-50 he published his autobiography 'Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave,' Written by Himself , which became one of the best known slave narratives of the antebellum years. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 increased the danger to Bibb and his second wife Mary E. Miles, of Boston. It required Northerners to cooperate in the capture of escaped slaves. To ensure their safety, the Bibbs migrated to Canada and settled in Sandwich, Upper Canada now Windsor, Ontario. Although Canada abolished slavery in 1833, blacks were still not treated well or equally, but the country’s policy was decades ahead of the United States.

In 1851, he set up the first black newspaper in Canada, Voice of the Fugitive. Due to his fame as an author, Bibb was reunited with three of his brothers, who separately had also escaped from slavery to Canada. In 1852 he published their accounts in his newspaper. Interviews of escapees published in its pages, the newspaper helped others find family members and included poetry, news and hope. The Voice of the Fugitive was printed every other week, according to the African American Registry, and was sold at a subscription rate of $1 per year. Bibb used space in his newspaper to appeal for funds to help the new refugees. Believing strongly that the freed black slaves should integrate into Canadian society, Bibb encouraged the refugees to become a part of Canadian culture, not segregated by separate schools or institutions.

Elected to Toronto’s North American Convention of Coloured Freemen in 1851, Bibb was also elected president of the Windsor Anti-Slavery Society. The Bibbs were founding members of Detroit’s Refugee Home Society, an organization to help the tens of thousands of escaped slaves trying to make new lives in Canada. The Society purchased land to help the refugees who came north with absolutely nothing but themselves. “Each settler received 25 acres, five of which would be free if the land was cultivated within three years and the remainder of which was to be paid for in nine installments,” said John K.A. O’Farrell. The Society used profits to construct schools, pay teachers and obtain more land for more refugees.

On August 1, 1854, the man who established the first black newspaper in Canada died after a brief illness in Windsor, Ontario. Henry Walton Bibb was only 39 years old.