Carter G. Woodson
Carter G. Woodson
Carter Godwin Woodson 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 The Journal of Negro History in 1915, Woodson has been cited as the father of black history. In February 1926 he launched the celebration of "Negro History Week"; it was the precursor of Black History Month...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionHistorian
Date of Birth19 December 1875
CountryUnited States of America
Carter G. Woodson quotes about
I am ready to act, if I can find brave men to help me.
Even schools for Negroes, then, are places where they must be convinced of their inferiority.
The so-called modern education, with all its defects, however, does others so much more good than it does the Negro, because it has been worked out in conformity to the needs of those who have enslaved and oppressed weaker peoples.
The present system under the control of the whites trains the Negro to be white and at the same time convinces him of the impropriety or the impossibility of his becoming white... the Negros will have no outlet but to go down a blind alley, if the sort of education which they are now receiving is to enable them to find the way out of their present difficulties.
The bondage of the Negro brought captive from Africa is one of the greatest dramas in history, and the writer who merely sees in that ordeal something to approve or condemn fails to understand the evolution of the human race.
It may be well to repeat here the saying that old men talk of what they have done, young men of what they are doing, and fools of what they expect to do. The Negro race has a rather large share of the last mentioned class.
If the white man wants to hold on to it, let him do so; but the Negro, so far as he is able, should develop and carry out a program of his own.
Why not exploit, enslave, or exterminate a class that everybody is taught to regard as inferior?
This crusade is much more important than the anti- lynching movement, because there would be no lynching if it did not start in the schoolroom.
The thought of' the inferiority of the Negro is drilled into him in almost every class he enters and in almost every book he studies.
In schools of theology Negroes are taught the interpretation of the Bible worked out by those who have justified segregation and winked at the economic debasement of the Negro at times almost to the point of starvation.
Truth must be dug up from the past and presented to the circle of scholastics in scientific form and then through stories and dramatizations that will permeate our educational system.
The large majority of the Negroes who have put on the finishing touches of our best colleges are all but worthless in the development of their people.
When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions.