Tag: Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson- Chapter 5: The Failure to Learn to Make a Living part 1

It’s Black History Month, so I am continuing with the series of posts regarding Shaw resident and Father of Black History, Carter G. “Grumpypants” Woodson and his book The Mis-Education of the Negro, published in 1933. I’ll get to the grumpy pants part later. Here’s a link to Woodson’s Wikipedia page, but I’d like to flesh out the history of Black History Month.

Prior to 1926, when Woodson created Negro History Week, he had already laid the foundation for African-American history scholarship with the founding of Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) in 1915. Negro History Week was to be the same week when Americans were celebrating the birthday of President Abraham Lincoln (2/12/1809) and Orator and Abolitionist Frederick Douglass (2/14?/1818). It is not just a matter of suggesting Negro History Week, he and the ASALH promoted it so that it became a regular observance. In the 60s it unofficially expanded into a whole month and in 1976 President Gerald Ford made the month official.

But back to Woodson and this book and this chapter. Once again, Woodson has bad things to say about Black college graduates and praise for Black business. I’m going to split this into two posts because there are two themes in this chapter. The first theme is AfAm college graduates are somewhat useless to the Black race. The second is related, AfAm college graduates are a drain if not a detriment to Black business. Yes, surprising from the father of Black history, if you knew nothing else about him. He makes a fairly good point in his argument and his goal is ultimately the betterment of the Black/Negro race. However, you’re not going to get to a better place with false praise and excuses. Let’s get into this. Continue reading Carter G. Woodson- Chapter 5: The Failure to Learn to Make a Living part 1

Carter G. Woodson- Chapter 4: Education Under Outside Control

This is a series regarding Shaw resident Carter G. Woodson’s book The Mis-Education of the Negro.

Okay, I’d rename this chapter “Beware of Allies Trying to Do You Favors”.  Now I feel I should quote Malcolm X or something on the topic of white Americans who are supposed to be supporting you.

So this chapter comes across as a criticism of sorts of all the Northerners and others who came down after the Civil War. Woodson acknowledges that they meant well, but they weren’t well suited for the task. This extended to the white leadership and faculty of HBCUs because of the social status differences.

Yet we should not take the position that a qualified white person should not teach in a Negro school. For certain work which temporarily some whites may be able to do better than the Negroes there can be no objection to such service, but if the Negro is to be forced to live in the ghetto he can more easily develop out of it under his own leadership than under that which is super-imposed. The Negro will never be able to show all of his originality as long as his efforts are directed from without by those who socially proscribe him. Such “friends” will unconsciously keep him in the ghetto.

I have thoughts but I will leave those to the end. Continue reading Carter G. Woodson- Chapter 4: Education Under Outside Control

Carter G. Woodson- Chapter 3: How We Drifted Away From The Truth

This is a series regarding Shaw resident Carter G. Woodson’s book The Mis-Education of the Negro. This post is rated PG-13 for language.

According to Ancestry DNA African American ancestors hail from Cameroon/Congo, Nigeria, and Ivory Coast/ Ghana, sub-Saharan parts of Africa. However, they didn’t have DNA tests in the 1930s, so Carter G. Woodson would not have known this. Even if he did, it probably would not have stopped him from being a booster for all of Africa.

So in this 3rd chapter Woodson is critical of the Eurocentric nature of history and other subjects being taught. His very valid points:

In geography the races were described in conformity with the program of the usual propaganda to engender in whites a race hate of the Negro, and in the Negroes contempt for themselves. A poet of distinction was selected to illustrate the physical features of the white race, a bedecked chief of a tribe those of the red a proud warrior the brown, a prince the yellow, and a savage with a ring in his nose the black the Negro, of course, stood at the foot of the social ladder.

However there is a very practical problem. Literacy. Until someone literate shows up (usually to bitch about you) your history is limited to the best guesses of the anthropologists. Feel free to correct me in the comments, Continue reading Carter G. Woodson- Chapter 3: How We Drifted Away From The Truth

Carter G. Woodson – Chapter 2: How We Missed the Mark

This is a series regarding Shaw resident Carter G. Woodson’s book The Mis-Education of the Negro.

In this chapter Woodson looks at the history of education for African Americans after the Civil War. I just finished an audiobook that threw general criticism of Southern education, and Woodson does here too a bit. “The participation of the freedmen in government for a few years during the period known as the Reconstruction had little bearing on their situation except that they did join with the uneducated poor whites in bringing about certain much-desired social reforms, especially in giving the South its first plan of democratic education in providing for a school system at public expense. ”

In this chapter, the way I’m reading it, Woodson is not happy with the practicality of AfAm education, in addition to the quality.

Others more narrow-minded than the advocates of industrial education, seized upon the idea, feeling that, although the Negro must have some semblance of education, it would be a fine stroke to be able to make a distinction between the training given the Negro and that provided for the whites. Inasmuch as the industrial educational idea rapidly gained ground, too, many Negroes for political purposes began to espouse it; and schools and colleges hoping thereby to obtain money worked out accordingly makeshift provisions for such instruction, although they could not satisfactorily offer it. A few real industrial schools actually equipped themselves for this work and turned out a number of graduates with such preparation. Continue reading Carter G. Woodson – Chapter 2: How We Missed the Mark

Carter G. Woodson- Chapter 1: The Seat of Trouble part 2

This is a series regarding Shaw resident Carter G. Woodson’s book The Mis-Education of the Negro. Find part 1 here.

So there was a problem with Black college education:

When a Negro has finished his education in our schools, then, he has been equipped to begin the life of an Americanized or Europeanized white man, but before he steps from the threshold of his alma mater he is told by his teachers that he must go back to his own people from whom he has been estranged by a vision of ideals which in his disillusionment he will realize that he cannot attain.

In a previous paragraph he wrote:

In schools of journalism Negroes are being taught how to edit such metropolitan dailies as the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times, which would hardly hire a Negro as a janitor; and when these graduates come to the Negro weeklies for employment they are not prepared to function in such establishments, which, to be successful, must be built upon accurate knowledge of the psychology and philosophy of the Negro.

In my earlier post on this chapter I took a quote about how successful African-Americans were uneducated. These were the entrepreneurs of the age. Woodson points out the problem that college graduates from HBCUs, could not work in their fields of study because they were not white. They are not prepared, Woodson contends, to work in the places where they can be hired because they do not understand their customer nor their employer, because of their education.

For the arduous task of serving a race thus handicapped, however, the Negro graduate has had little or no training at all. The people whom he has been ordered to serve have been belittled by his teachers to the extent that he can hardly find delight in undertaking what his education has led him to think is impossible. Considering his race as blank in achievement, then, he sets out to stimulate their imitation of others The performance is kept up a while; but, like any other effort at meaningless imitation, it results in failure.

There is a paragraph I’ve very temped to skip and because of that I will include it: Continue reading Carter G. Woodson- Chapter 1: The Seat of Trouble part 2

Carter G. Woodson- Chapter 1: The Seat of Trouble part 1

This is a series regarding Shaw resident Carter G. Woodson’s book The Mis-Education of the Negro.

Post long disclaimer- I feel I need to mention my background and biases. I have a graduate degree studying Modern European History. As an undergrad, I studied Early Modern European History, mainly focusing on the Tudors, the Stuarts and Ireland. Why? Because those were the classes where I got better grades. I learned my lesson losing a scholarship for 1 year due to poor grades (failed Business school math), I stuck with the classes that upped my GPA. I took one class on African History.

I studied the ‘Atlantic World’ looking at the triangle trade taking place between Europe, Africa and the New World. For some reason, I wrote a grad school paper comparing South African agriculture and the sharecropping system in the US South regarding Black people. So I have a tiny bit of South African history under my belt.

That said, I have my opinions when I read Woodson’s words on ‘our history.’ I also understand he was a man of his time and the challenges of what was being taught in the public school system and in Black colleges were real. That challenge was that the education system dismissed the Negro (I’m going to use his words) and the African.

“At a Negro summer school two years ago, a white instructor gave a course on the Negro, using for his text a work which teaches that whites are superior to the blacks. When asked by one of the students why he used such a textbook the instructor replied that he wanted them to get that point of view. Even schools for Negroes, then, are places where they must be convinced of their inferiority. “

So that was a problem.

“Practically all of the successful Negroes in this country are of the uneducated type or of that of Negroes who have had no formal education at all. 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.”

It doesn’t really get any better. He pretty much considers the Black college graduate useless.

Last quote for this post : “And even in the certitude of science or mathematics it has been unfortunate that the approach to the Negro has been borrowed from a “foreign” method. For example, the teaching of arithmetic in the fifth grade in a backward county in Mississippi should mean one thing in the Negro school and a decidedly different thing in the white school. The Negro children, as a rule, come from the homes of tenants and peons who have to migrate annually from plantation to plantation, looking for light which they have never seen. The children from the homes of white planters and merchants live permanently in the midst of calculations, family budgets, and the like, which enable them sometimes to learn more by contact than the Negro can acquire in school. Instead of teaching such Negro children less arithmetic, they should be taught much more of it than the white children, for the latter attend a graded school consolidated by free transportation when the Negroes go to one-room rented hovels to be taught without equipment and by incompetent teachers educated scarcely beyond the eighth grade.”

I have no doubt whatsoever that Black schools lacked equipment. The one room school house or ‘rented hovel’ as Woodson puts it, could be part of a romantic past or nightmarish past, depending on how dark or rose colored the viewer’s glasses. But the “incompetent teachers” comment seems a bit harsh and cruel. Who do you think was teaching these Black children? Black teachers, products of Black colleges. My mother’s sisters and sister-in-laws were all teachers at one point in their lives, products of HBCUs, so the comments cut a little.

My grandmother, born and raised in North Carolina, had a 6th grade education. So she didn’t even make it to the eighth grade. She could read. She could write well enough to communicate her thoughts and maintain addresses in her address book. Maybe do simple math (that I’m unsure of). She was prepared enough to be a sharecropper’s wife.

Woodson will mention “foreigners” and “foreign” a few times in ways that make me uncomfortable because I think it hints of antisemitism. This was the early 1930s so distrusting and bad mouthing Jews was all the rage. And we know where that led. However here, in this paragraph it doesn’t have that connotation.

 

Carter G. Woodson- Much Ado About A Name

I’m going to start at the near end of Carter G. Woodson’s book The Mis-Education of the Negro with an essay called “Much Ado About a Name.”

It starts with a discussion with a Lady Simon, the wife of a British Cabinet member who asked what did Black Americans want to be called. Lady Simon did not want to offend African Americans in her writings.

Although a student of social problems, this learned woman cannot fathom this peculiar psychology. Americans, too, must confess the difficulty of understanding it, unless it is that the “highly educated Negro mind” tends to concern itself with trifles rather than with the great problems of life. We have known Negroes to ask for a separate Y. M. C. A. or Y. W. C. A., a separate church or a separate school, and then object to calling the institution colored or Negro. These segregationists have compromised on principle, but they are unwilling to acknowledge their crime against justice. The name, they believe, will save them from the disgrace.

It does not matter so much what the thing is called as what the thing is. The Negro would not cease to be what he is by calling him something else; but, if he will struggle and make something of himself and contribute to modern culture, the world will learn to look upon him as an American rather than as one of an undeveloped element of the population.

So this comes off as critical.  I get it. I was not initially on board with the term African-American because it seemed to make my Americaness secondary. But with use, I’ve come to find utility in the term and the related Afro-American and  AfAm terms. I like the option for variety. But it is very limited and when writing about other members of the African diaspora, African- British or Afro-Canadian, just looks and sounds clunky.

Later in the essay and what can be hinted at in the above quotes, he is critical of AfAms who seem to be ashamed or wanting to downplay their Blackness. He mentions multiracial people who take pride in their African heritage. “As a rule, however, a European of African Negro blood feels proud of this racial heritage and delights to be referred to as such. The writer saw a striking case of this in London in the granddaughter of a Zulu chief. She is so far removed from the African type that one could easily mistake her for a Spaniard; and yet she thinks only for her African connection and gets her inspiration mainly from the story of her people beyond the Pillars of Hercules.”

Oh and for those of you who caught a whiff of shade he threw at the “highly educated Negro mind”….. yeah. There’s a lot of that. I’ll start at the beginning of his book next time and as we go through.

Now I hope you learned a little bit more about Carter G. Woodson than you knew before.

Carter G. Woodson- Mis-education

To me Carter G. Woodson was an avatar (second definition) or a figure to be used. He was the reason for the National Park Service to purchase some decaying Shiloh owned properties.

What did I know about the man? Just the very short elevator pitch: He started Black history week, which turned into Black History Month. He was an early 20th Century African American intellectual figure. He started a journal to study Black people. And most importantly, he lived, and did a lot of his work on 9th St in Shaw.

Because of some changes made by Audible regarding membership, I had a mess of credits I had to use up. I decided to use one of those on Carter G. Woodson’s Mis-Education of the Negro.

My honest first impression after listening to the audiobook is, that someone is a grumpy old man. He has criticism for everyone. For example, a young Black educated woman came to him looking for work. He offered her a job, but her pay would be either $15 a week or month (I forget which) and the young lady scoffs about how that isn’t enough for her to live. And there are more unhappy musings about Black college graduates, which come across to me as being a grumpus.

He was justified in his grumpiness. He does have points. Points I will cover from now through Black History Month in February.

Because I have a butt-load of Audible credits, I’ll give away the audiobook of Carter’s Mis-Education of the Negro, to the first two readers who managed to make it this far into my post. Just email me  mari at inshaw.com with the topic line of “Mis-education of the Negro”.