Carter G. Woodson Inaugurates Negro History Week

On February 7, 1926, Carter G. Woodson launched the first celebration of Negro History Week, choosing February for the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. The week extended the work of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (founded 1915) and the Journal of Negro History, which Woodson had established to counter the exclusion of Black history from American scholarship. Negro History Week became Black History Month in 1976.