The Mis-Education of the Negro Study Guide

The son of illiterate and formerly enslaved parents, Carter G. Woodson spent much of his childhood working on farms and in West Virginia coal mines. He did not go to high school until his early twenties, but he excelled academically, becoming a teacher and then a school principal before even earning his bachelor’s degree. He studied at Berea College, the University of Chicago, the Sorbonne, and Harvard University, where he became the second Black American to complete a PhD in 1912. Unable to find work as a professor, Woodson continued teaching high school for several years after finishing his PhD. In 1919, he briefly became a History professor and the Dean of the School of Liberal Arts at Howard University, one of the oldest and most prominent historically Black universities in the United States. He next spent two years at the West Virginia Collegiate Institute, but then he dedicated the rest of his career to directing the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and promoting the discipline of Black American history more generally. Woodson published more than 30 books in his career, befriended many Harlem Renaissance intellectuals and activists, and also frequently wrote for a popular audience in publications like activist Marcus Garvey’s newspaper Negro World. To combat the pervasive racism in academia and the discipline of history in particular, Woodson also began promoting “Negro History Week” in the 1920s. In the decades since, this tradition has transformed into Black History Month, which American schools celebrate every February.

Carter G. Woodson strongly promoted the study of Black history, both in the U.S. and around the world. But The Mis-Education of the Negro specifically focuses on the history of Black Americans in the U.S. education system between the end of the American Civil War (1865) and the early years of the Great Depression (1933, when Woodson was writing). Before the Civil War, enslaved people generally had no access to education, which slaveowners and the white Southern public generally viewed as a threat to their power. In fact, from the 1830s through the 1860s, the U.S. was the only country in the world to outlaw educating enslaved people. After the Civil War, during the period known as Reconstruction, freed Black people held significant political power throughout the South and established a system of public schools and colleges for Black students. Although racially segregated, inadequately funded, and poorly staffed, these schools helped dramatically improve literacy rates and create numerous economic opportunities for the Black community. In fact, this was the first major push for public education in U.S. history, and it’s largely responsible for spurring the creation of a national public school system. However, from the late 1870s through 1908, white Southerners formed violent militias, massacred Black citizens, and imposed discriminatory voting laws in order to win back political control in the South. They established the regime of legal segregation commonly known as Jim Crow, which lasted until 1965. During this period, white supremacist state governments drained funding from Black schools and instituted the unequal education system that persists in the U.S. to this day. Meanwhile, the small Black elite increasingly pulled away from the Black masses, a process that Woodson heavily criticizes in The Mis-Education of the Negro. As a result, Woodson notes, Black students scarcely received a better education in 1930 than they did in 1880, and this jeopardized not only their economic opportunities, but also their prospects of mounting a successful campaign for political equality.

Although The Mis-Education of the Negro is by far Woodson’s most popular and widely read work, he also wrote numerous other books as part of his quest to popularize Black history. The most significant include The History of the Negro Church (1921), The Negro in Our History (1921), and the important textbook The African Background Outlined, or Handbook for the Study of the Negro (1936). He also founded an extremely influential academic journal, The Journal of Negro History, which is still being published today as The Journal of African American History. Like Woodson, the influential early 20th-century Black intellectual W. E. B. DuBois was deeply interested in the problem of public education for Black people in the US. He discussed the importance of education in his landmark book The Souls of Black Folk (1903), and his writings on education are collected in the anthology The Education of Black People: Ten Critiques, 1906-1960 (2001). Biographies of Woodson include Jacqueline Goggin’s Carter G. Woodson: A Life in Black History (1997) and Robert F. Durden’s The Life of Carter G. Woodson: Father of African American History (2014). Finally, other books on the history of Black education in the eras of slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow include Henry Allen Bullock’s A History of Negro Education in the South: From 1619 to the Present (1967), James Anderson’s The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 (1988), and William H. Watkins’s The White Architects of Black Education: Ideology and Power in America, 1865-1954 (2001).