“There Would Be No Lynching If It Did Not Start in the Schoolroom”: Carter G. Woodson andthe Occasionof 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.”

Pedagogical Progressivism and Black Education: A Historiographical Review, 1880–1957

“…Third, we viewed the citations, footnotes, and references in the identified works to locate additional books, book chapters, and articles that addressed the topics of race and pedagogical progressivism, with a particular focus on K-12 schools (e.g., Dagbovie, 2007;Kridel, 2018). Fourth, we located additional works on important and influential historical figures during this period-such as Booker T. Washington (e.g., Generals, 2000), G. Stanley Hall (e.g., Ross, 1972), Carter G. Woodson (e.g., Givens, 2019), and John Dewey (e.g., Vaughan, 2018)-who were each the subjects of significant historiographies of three or more studies addressing their racial views. Finally, we included influential and significant studies on both pedagogical progressivism (e.g., Cremin, 1961) and race (e.g., Anderson, 1988) that covered the 1896-1957 period to add historical and historiographical context.…”

Prioritizing Pro-Blackness in literacy research, scholarship, and teaching

“…Drawing from historical and contemporary bodies of literature, we understand how anti-Blackness is manifested in educational settings in ways that undermine education as a human right for Black children. Five types of violence have been identified in the academic literature: 1) physical; 2) symbolic; 3) linguistic; 4) curricular and pedagogical; and 5) systemic school violence (Boutte and Bryan, 2019; Givens, 2019; Johnson et al, 2018; Love, 2016). We note that these types of violence may be unintentional on the part of educators, but acknowledge that damage to Black children’s minds, bodies, souls, and education is still incurred.…”

Searching for Amistad in Two School Districts: A Case Study of Black History Curriculum Implementation in New Jersey

“…Few people have emerged as central to the development of BHE in the United States as Dr. Carter G. Woodson (Givens, 2019) whose contributions to the development of BHE emerged specifically as a response to fundamental exclusions of Black history in teaching and curricula and in the accepted “histories” of the time that presented African descended people and African societies as innately primitive (Dagbovie, 2007; King et al, 2010). Scholars have situated this kind of miseducation (C.…”