Woodson, Carter Godwin
- Aaron Myers
Extract
One of nine children, Carter Godwin Woodson was born in New Canton, Virginia, and grew up on his family's farm in rural Virginia. His mother, a former slave who had secretly learned to read and write as a child, and two of his uncles, who had received training at Freedmen's Bureau schools, tutored him and cultivated his interest in learning. In 1892 Woodson moved to Huntington, West Virginia, where he worked in coal mines.
At age twenty, Woodson enrolled at Frederick Douglass High School, the only all-black school in the area. He completed the four-year curriculum in two years while working to pay his tuition. Following graduation he obtained a teaching position in Winona, West Virginia. But in 1901 Woodson returned to his former high school to teach and later to serve as principal Meanwhile he intermittently attended Berea College an integrated school established by abolitionists in Kentucky from ...
A version of this article originally appeared in Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience.
