(CNN) -- To illustrate just how dedicated Carter G. Woodson was to the neglected field of black studies, he used to tell a story about the time he was on vacation at a resort in New Jersey.

Woodson saw a woman whose face seemed somehow familiar, so he approached her and said, "Haven't I met you somewhere before?"

"I should think you have," she replied. "You proposed to me once."

Woodson was an admirer of women, Ebony magazine reports in its February issue, but as he put it himself, "my work is my only wife."

In 1926, Woodson founded Negro History Week, a modest undertaking in those early years that was observed in black schools, churches and YMCAs around the country. But over the decades, Woodson's idea has blossomed into a celebration of African-American culture that became Black History Month in 1976 to coincide with the nation's bicentennial.

Where observances in Woodson's time amounted to readings and memorized orations, the celebration now includes music, dance, films, art shows, plays and lectures by hundreds of experts and scholars in a field that scarcely existed in 1926.


Black History Month allows students a chance to discover works by playwrights such as Langston Hughes.

"In terms of institutionalization, it is one of the events within the African-American community that might be considered extremely successful," says Molefi Kete Asante, a professor and chairman of African-American studies at Temple University. "I have given talks in Canada during Black History Month, and there are celebrations in places like Costa Rica and Panama and the Caribbean islands."

"There's an incredible hunger for it," says Asa G. Hilliard III, a professor of urban education at Georgia State University. "I do lectures all the time. If I went every time I was invited, it would consume me. I would cease to exist."

Following Du Bois

Woodson believed that historians had, as Halford H. Fairchild of Pitzer College in California puts it, "whitewashed the contributions blacks have made to the world. His idea was that Negro History Week -- and, later, Black History Month -- would revise what we know about the world we live in."

The world Woodson was born into in 1875 was one that appeared to doom him to a life of hard labor and poverty. His family was poor, and as a child he was put to work in the fields rather than going to school.

Two of his uncles taught him to read and write, however, and at 17 he went to Huntington, West Virginia, where he worked in a coal mine and, at 19, enrolled in a black high school --the only high school a black teen-ager could attend in those times.

Woodson graduated in two years and spent several semesters at Berea College in Kentucky, a school open to blacks and whites that was founded before the Civil War by people opposed to slavery.

Between teaching stints in West Virginia and the Philippines, he returned to Huntington and was the principal of the high school he'd graduated from just four years before.


Named in honor of W.E.B. Du Bois, Harvard University began the nation's first research center dedicated to African-American studies in 1975.

Woodson received a doctorate from Harvard University in 1912, following the example of W.E.B. Du Bois, a noted intellectual and the first African-American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard.

Excellence and responsibility

Woodson moved on to Washington to continue his study of black history, ignoring those who laughed at his bad haircut and "hayseed" clothes.

"When I, in my poverty, had the audacity to write a book on the Negro," Ebony quotes him as saying, "the 'scholarly' people of Washington laughed at it."

His book, "The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861," was published in 1915 and was followed three years later by "A Century of Negro Migration." In 1922, he completed the first of what would be 10 editions of his "The Negro in Our History." The last edition was published in 1962.

In September 1915, Woodson and four other men organized the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History at a YMCA on Chicago's South Side.

Its purpose, in Woodson's words: "The collection of sociological and historical data on the Negro, the study of peoples of African blood, the publishing of books in the field and the promotion of harmony between the races by acquainting the one with the other."

A year later, he founded The Journal of Negro History, a publication that endured for 30 years.

"He was a pioneer in the discipline, and his was the forerunner of the black studies programs of today," says Leroy Davis, associate professor of African-American history at Emory University.

"He operated out of what came to be the twin components of black studies: excellent scholarship and social responsibility. The expectation was more or less to bring African-American history to the masses of African Americans, and then later have it recognized by the nation at large."

An American celebration

Woodson kept Negro History Week alive, according to Davis, by "almost single-handedly developing Negro history kits" that were sent out to black colleges and high schools around the country. The material was also used at churches and YMCAs in the cities, and at churches in rural communities.

"It was scholarly, but it appealed to the working class, too," says Davis, who grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. "That's how I became interested in African-American history, through these local branches of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History when I was in segregated elementary and junior high schools."

Davis says that in the 1940s, white politicians began promoting Negro History Week, and that as it has continued to grow in depth and scope it has become "in many ways not just an African-American celebration, but an American celebration."

"It's been extremely successful," says Asante. "It's now a celebration that's found in the smallest villages in America, as well as in the largest urban centers."

But that doesn't mean Woodson's cause is won. While it is generally agreed that Black History Month has raised the consciousness of millions of people throughout the decades, advocates for the event say much remains to be done.

Says Georgia State's Hilliard, "I'm overwhelmed with what needs to be done. There's a writing effort that needs to go on. A lot of books need to be written. Films need to be made. Study groups need to be formed and curricula need to change in schools.


The first memorial dedicated solely to black soldiers and sailors who fought for the Union cause in the Civil War was erected in Washington in July 1998.

"We need more ethnic studies, more libraries, more museums. We call the torture we've endured Maafa, and it took place in this country, but we don't have memorials to it. There are all kinds of things that happened that need to be memorialized."

No shortage of ignorance

"It's extremely important that we keep the focus," says Asante. "In the future, you should be able to pick up a textbook and read that Benjamin Banneker, an African-American mathematician from Maryland, made the first clock in North America."

Woodson makes that claim for Banneker in his book, "The Negro in Our History." Banneker built the clock out of wood in 1761 from drawings he made of the parts of a pocket watch. It kept precise time for decades.

A free man and a farmer, Banneker also was a self-taught astronomer, and he compiled almanacs so impressive that Thomas Jefferson, with whom he corresponded, sent them to Europe, where they were acclaimed by scientists.

"There is a growing cadre of black scholars and experts in other disciplines who are discovering new facts about black history," says Halford H. Fairchild, a professor of psychology and black studies at Pitzer College in California. "We're only beginning to scratch the surface. We're learning so much more that the growth in knowledge is exponential."

Nevertheless, there is no shortage of ignorance about the subject, and the consensus is that schools are to blame.

"It's not just ignorance on the part of whites," says Asante, "but also on the part of African Americans. Student interest is consistent and strong, but many of the young people coming to college these days come out of what I call a conspiracy of unconsciousness.

"There's nothing in the high school background that would lead them to an interest in African-American history. But once they take some courses, all students -- black and white -- find it very interesting and feel betrayed that they hadn't been taught about it in high school."


Commemorating the life of civil rights leader Malcolm X, the U.S. Postal Service issued a 33-cent stamp in January in his honor.

Hilliard objects to what some call "myth-making," the presentation of black history as "snippets about Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X or Harriet Tubman. It's a parade of individuals who have achieved at some level, but you don't get the story of who we are and how we got here."

'A delight to teach'

"It's amazing how little most Americans know about the black American past," says Donald Wright, a professor of history at the State University of New York in Cortland.

"There are some lovely books out that reinterpret black history, and we know so much more now it's a delight to teach. It's about real human beings who made human decisions. Being a slave was bad, but these were complex individuals living in difficult circumstances who carved out a life and who had some fulfillment despite the difficulties. And the record shows that."

Wright is an anomaly in the field, a Caucasian teaching African-American studies, and he thinks it works to his advantage in a classroom where many students are white.

"If I were black, a lot of students might pass off some of the things I say," Wright says. "But they can't do that with me."

Other educators report that there are more whites in their classes than before, but in some places the number of African-American students has declined. Fairchild thinks one reason is the absence of charismatic African-American leaders.

"All the most important ones have been silenced through murder, assassination or incarceration," he says. He adds that "while I'm not a conspiracy theorist, there was, and perhaps continues to be, an effort to silence black nationalism."

Going mainstream

He refers in particular to COINTELPRO, a program mounted by the FBI to infiltrate organizations such as the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam and "sow dissension and bring the downfall of these groups."

(African-American groups were not COINTELPRO's only targets. It also infiltrated such groups as the Puerto Rican independence movement, the Jewish Culture Society and the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance. The leaking of COINTELPRO documents by anti-war activists in the 1970s eventually forced FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to terminate the program.)

Fairchild also laments the "mainstreaming" of African Americans who have been assimilated by "the dominant culture which values material acquisition, money, the outward signs of achievement and success. Many have been co-opted by these values."

On the other hand, he says, Carter G. Woodson's dream will be realized when African-American culture has itself merged with the American mainstream.

"That will be when we see the true diversity of our roles as people who rebelled against oppression, as creative and inventive and the moral conscience of America," says Fairchild. "When that's fully integrated into the curricula, we won't need Black History Month any more."

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