(Editor’s Notes by Christina Myer – Photo Illustration – MetroCreativeConnection)
I always enjoy quizzing kids on what they’re learning about in school. Nine times out of ten they tell me something that wasn’t even part of the curriculum when I was in school. What they are learning is fascinating. Usually when Black History Month rolls around a young student will surprise me by telling me about a person I’d never heard of — someone I very much SHOULD have heard of, given their significance in American or world history.
So this year, I decided to get a jump on things. I did a little digging early. And I got surprised, anyway. It turns out the founder of the observation that eventually became Black History Month was from West Virginia.
According to the destination marketing organization Visit Southern West Virginia, Carter G. Woodson was working in the coal mines in the New River Gorge area when he started listening to the stories of his fellow Black miners and decided to document the challenges they had overcome — and what they had contributed to their country. Dubbed the “Father of Black History,” Woodson founded what was called at the time Negro History Week, in February 1926. The celebration eventually evolved to include a full month.
He also saved enough money to pay for an education so that he could switch careers and become a teacher.
Woodson graduated from high school in Huntington, but according to Visit Southern West Virginia, went on to become “a historian, journalist, and one of the first African American history scholars. He earned a Ph.D. from Harvard, the second African American man to ever achieve this. He was also the only person of enslaved parents to ever earn a Ph.D. in History from a U.S. institution. He founded the Association for the Study of African American Life and History and the Journal of African American History.”
Booker T. Washington was born into slavery, grew up in Malden, W.Va., and eventually became a U.S. presidential adviser.
Minnie Buckingham Harper, of McDowell County, because the first Black female legislator when she became a delegate in 1928.
Baptist preacher and civil rights leader Leon Sullivan was born in Charleston in 1922 and founded the Opportunities Industrialization Centers because he believed oppressed people needed “a hand up, not a hand out.” He was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize and won the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
NASA “computer” Katherine Johnson, from White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., earned the Presidential Medal of Freedom, too.
Like listening to “Sweet Georgia Brown?” Maceo Pinkard, born in Bluefield, W.Va., in 1897, composed it and many other pieces, eventually earning a spot in the National Academy of Popular Music’s Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Are you a fan of PBS’s “African American Lives” or “Finding Your Roots?” Henry Louis Gates Jr. was born in Keyser, W.Va., in 1950. He is the first African American scholar to earn the National Humanities Medal, and has received many other degrees and accolades.
There are so many more. And even despite my work for this column, I’m still looking forward to the prospect of learning something new this month. It’s inspiring to get a greater understanding of what and WHO make us who we are as West Virginians (and Americans). It’s probably the kind of thing I should search out all year long, but given the excuse provided by a designated Black History Month, I’ll take advantage of being reminded to do it, now.
Christina Myer is executive editor of The Parkersburg News and Sentinel. She can be reached via e-mail at cmyer@newsandsentinel.com
