“There Would Be No Lynching If It Did Not Start in the Schoolroom”: Carter G. Woodson and the Occasion of Negro History Week, 1926-1950

Abstract

This article analyzes Carter G. Woodson’s iconic Negro History Week and its impact on Black schools during Jim Crow. Negro History Week introduced knowledge on Afro-diasporic history and culture to schools around the country. As a result of teachers’ grassroots organizing, it became a cultural norm in Black schools by the end of the 1930s. This program reflected Woodson’s critique that anti-Black ideas in school knowledge were inextricably linked to the violence Black people experienced in the material world. Thus, he worked to construct a new system of knowledge altogether. Negro History Week engaged students in this counterhegemonic knowledge through performances grounded in Black formalism and an invigorated Black aesthetic, facilitating what I have come to call “embodied learning.”