The_History_of_Black_History_Month

Black History Month After the reading the origins of Black History Month I have learned several facts, such as the founder and why it’s celebrated. Black History Month started when a man named Carter G. Woodson attended the fiftieth anniversary of emancipation and learned about his culture and background. Before leaving town he decide to form an organization to encourage the scientific study of black life and history, so on September 9th, Carter met with A. L. Jackson and three others and created the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH). In 1920, Woodson urged black civic organizations to promote the achievements that researchers were revealing. They didn’t reply for 4 years, but finally they did with the creation of Negro History and Literature Week, which they renamed Negro Achievement Week. Carter desired a greater impact, because he told an audience of Hampton Institute students, “We are going back to that beautiful history and it is going to inspire us to greater achievements.” In 1925, he decided that going forward would both create and make the knowledge about the black past known. The next year, he sent out a press release to announce Negro History Week in February. The 1920s was the decade of the New Negro, a name given to the Post-War I cohort because of its rising racial pride and realization. Urbanization and industrialization had brought over a million African Americans from the bucolic South into cities of the nation. The intensifying black middle class became participants in and patrons of black literature and traditions. Black history clubs sprang up, teachers demanded supplies to instruct their students, and progressive whites stepped and authorized the efforts. Carter and the organization try to meet the demand. They set a theme for the annual celebration, and provided study materials—pictures, lessons for teachers, plays for historical performances, and posters of important dates and people. Provisioned with a steady flow of awareness, high schools in progressive communities formed Negro History Clubs. To serve the desire of history buffs to participate in the re-edification of black people and the country, ASNLH created branches that stretched from coast to coast. Woodson established the Negro History Bulletin, which focused on the annual theme. Like most ideas that resonate with the spirit of the times, Negro History Week proved to be more vibrant than Woodson or the organization could control. Woodson complained about the intellectual charlatans, black and white, popping up everywhere. Before Woodson’s death in 1950, Woodson believed that the weekly celebrations eventually would come to an end. In fact, Woodson never viewed black history to b e one-week. Years later a man who changed his last name to one African decent stared celebrating Black History Week for the whole month of February, and this started to catch on to more and more people until it was declared a month celebration across the world.