“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.”