The Origins of Black History Month: Douglass Day, Carter G. Woodson, and the Red Summer

Written by: Becca Williams, Start By Talking Copywriter

In researching the origins of Black History Month, I was struck by how little I knew and by how similar the stories of Carter G. Woodson and the Red Summer feel to what we’re going through today.  I spent the last week learning things I wasn’t taught and feeling inadequate, then guilty, and inadequate again, and then feeling as though I was at the rim of a volcano: the heat, the pressure, the brightness, the depth.  The monolith-ing of the Black community that I caught myself doing, the singular feelings of grief and resentment I felt, the bouncing opposing forces of beauty and resilience.  I slowed down.  Any one experience or memory is so much more than the flattening that any retelling of it brings.  We need to approach this learning with our minds and our hearts open to fit that expansiveness, named and unknown, alive and transitioned, present and historical.  

As a white woman actively working on my Hannah-dom, I recognize that knowing how little I know is an unending process that constantly keeps me in check.  Being accountable to that knowledge reminds me of how integral and important the work of A.B.L.E. is. 

If folx know anything about the origins of Black History Month, they know about Carter G. Woodson, one of the founders of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH), and among the first Black men to receive a PhD from Harvard University.  A prolific writer and historian, he first launched “Negro History Week” in February of 1926.  He chose February as it is the month of both Abraham Lincoln’s and Frederick Douglass’ birthdays.  It should be noted here that in 1897, Black activist, suffragist, and educator Mary Church Terrell had established Douglass Day to celebrate the life and works of Frederick Douglass.  Dr. Woodson’s idea for Negro History Week expanded on this day’s celebration, and sought to move beyond the notion that Black historical achievements resided solely with a few men.  Woodson and his supporting colleagues believed that this week should focus on the countless achievements made by the many Black men and women who had contributed, and continue to contribute to society at large.  Negro History Week caught on quickly among schools and publishing houses and in as early as the 1940s in West Virginia, Black communities began celebrating Black History Month, which became institutionalized in the mid-1970’s. 

 The roots of Carter G. Woodson’s desire to celebrate the historical and future achievements of Black folx was borne out of a time defined by both racial violence and an expanding Black middle class. The mid-1920’s saw an increased urbanization and industrialization in the North that drew millions of Black families up from the South in what we now call the Great Migration.  This is a vast simplification of what was happening.  In any migration, there are push and pull factors, and the brutality of sharecropping, the KKK, lynching, and daily violences inflicted upon Black communities in the South made life there very difficult.  Some historians have strayed away from calling this a migration and instead aptly refer to it as a vast refugee crisis as Black families fled and became internally displaced.

 The North wasn’t the idyllic job haven it was made out to be, either.  Between April and December of 1919, just a few years before Woodson established Negro History Week, around 25 riots and a wave of racial terror aimed at Black communities swept through the North and South in what became known as the Red Summer. This violence was spurred by a few things:  the white panic setting in at the increased presence of Black families settling in the North and the return of hundreds of thousands of Black soldiers from WWI to towns and cities that denied them their rights after they had just sacrificed themselves for their country (W.E.B. DuBois wrote about this homecoming: “we return, we return from fighting, we return fighting”).  At the core of this violence was white folx’s desire to maintain their grip on white supremacy in the face of Black folx continuing to assert their rights and desires for the lives they knew deserved to live. 

(map of the Red Summer riots, from: https://www.dusablemuseum.org/exhibition/troubled-waters-chicago-1919-race-riot/)

In July of 1919 a young Black man, Eugene Williams, was enjoying a summer day on Lake Michigan when his raft accidentally floated into the “whites only” section of the lake.   Angered by this, white men on the shore began to throw stones at him, and Eugene ultimately drowned.  Police were present and failed to intervene.  This set off a race riot in Chicago that lasted for two weeks with marines and “athletic clubs” (gangs of white men) roaming the streets inflicting violence, and burning and shooting into Black homes and businesses.  One of the men in these “athletic clubs”, Richard Daley, would later become Chicago’s mayor, as would his son, comprising one of the more powerful families in the area.  Here, white families profited off of solving the problems that they themselves create by inflicting violence against Black bodies in the name of law and order.  We still see this every day. 

In late September of 1919 in Elaine Arkansas, Black sharecroppers met at a local church to discuss ways they could advocate for themselves and press for a fairer share of the profits for their labor.  Aware of the risk they were taking in meeting, they placed armed guards at the front of the church.  A few local white men drove by the church that evening, and a single shot was fired, killing one of them.  Word quickly spread in town that there was a plot among the Black community members to murder all of the white community members, and violence ensued.  Black townspeople fled, white mobs poured in from surrounding states, and the National Guard was called – however oral historical accounts point to them partaking in the violence as well.  Land was taken from Black landowners, Black homes and businesses burned, and Black families in Elaine today are still feeling the impacts.  Some estimates place the lives lost at 237, other oral accounts place the number in the thousands.  The only people prosecuted for these events were Black men.  Please take some time to read about the Elaine 12, including Ida B Wells-Barnett’s investigation, and the role the NAACP played in getting the case to the Supreme Court. And then take a moment to consider why a wrongful case against 12 Black men had to make it all the way up to the Supreme Court while the members of National Guard who murdered Black civilians were never held accountable. 

(image of the Elaine 12 from Ida B. Wells Barnett's investigative report)

I had never heard about the Elaine Massacre.  Had you?  I read an article in the Guardian about it, linked above, that made me think about the obvious:  that white families still own the land they stole from Black families during the massacre 100 years ago.  In my mind, this had happened in the past and was relegated to only occurring then. This is what white supremacy rooted in our educational systems does to us: freezes these events in time or blames individuals over systems so we don’t have to consider the present-day ramifications.  Further, we can’t talk about this without mentioning that the land in its entirety was stolen from Indigenous peoples, and like Landback.org’s manifesto says, “[Landback] is a future where Black reparations and Indigenous Landback coexist.”  This is the grey and uncomfortable area that we must choose to live in as we interact with this material and think about the still-today consequences of not critically examining the role that we play in upholding, or maintaining through apathy, these systems.

 Back to 1919: Around this same time in DC a white woman, Bessie Gleason, alleged that Charles Ralls, a Black man, assaulted her.  We have been here before.  We know her (Karen.)  Bessie’s husband, a civilian employed by the navy, formed a uniformed mob of returned WWI white soldiers to find and kill Ralls.  Black veterans took up arms to protect him, themselves, and their families while newspapers like the Washington Post added fuel to the white rage.  Black community members requested official support from the government and law enforcement, who remained silent.  When else has this happened?  Tulsa; Thao, Lane, and Kueng (the three officers silently watching Derek Chauvin murder George Floyd); the Supreme Court’s silence in the face of Texas’s SB8 Abortion ban; the list goes on - as do the arguments for abolition (we’ll get to that another time).  Carter G. Woodson was in DC the day after this riot began, and encountered a violent mob while walking down the street.  He heard shots firing and hid in a department store, waiting and listening for the violence and death to pass.  This experience and the disillusionment that followed provided the backdrop for Carter’s ultimate drive to begin this further exploration of Black achievement and sacrifice.   

(Chicago, 1919)

My main takeaway here is that this is all intertwined and nonlinear. We can’t talk about Black history without talking about Black lives, reparations, abolition, complexity, vastness.  It’s not all one thing, and we can’t get there through the one route of honoring the same heroes we tend to see, or flattening it through the same retellings of the trauma without noticing where we are now, what we are building, and what has been built before.  For me, this journey is like a river.  The shores may look different now than they did 100 years ago.  We may not explicitly have Jim Crow, Bessie Gleason, sharecroppers, or “athletic clubs” roaming the streets.  But we do have the prison industrial complex, Central Park Karen, migrant farmworkers, law enforcement, and the Proud Boys. We do have our work cut out for us.  The underlying current then is the underlying current now.  Equity, access, liberation, the right to dream in peace. To enjoy Lake Michigan on a sunny day, to unionize in Arkansas, to stroll through the streets of DC.

(San Jose, 2020)

Additional resources:  

In the aftermath of the 1919 riot, the city of Chicago commissioned a report to be written detailing the reasoning behind the riot.  This report, titled “The Negro in Chicago: A Study on Race Relations and A Race Riot” was written by six Black men and six white men and formed the basis for sociologist Eve Ewing’s 2019 book of poems titled 1919, in which the poems are reflections from excerpts of the report.  The poem Countless Schemes is in response to a portion of the report in which the authors elaborate on some of the proposals for improving race relations that had been previously discussed.  Here is Eve Ewing on NPR’s Fresh Air discussing her poetry and the significance of understanding the 1919 riots in today’s context.

 This is a fantastic summary video of the Red Summer, and here is one about the Great Migration.  Both are put together by Crash Course Black American History.