A hundred years ago this month, DC resident Carter G. Woodson held an event that launched a mass education movement: Negro History Week. In a pamphlet created to promote the idea, the historian and author wrote, “Let truth destroy the dividing prejudice of nationality and teach universal love with out distinction of race, merit or rank.” It began as a multi-day commemoration of community—a mission to boost Black pride, respect, and self-worth at a time when people of color were being lynched in the South and racial prejudice was at a peak in the North. The week featured events in which students and adults gathered for author talks, musical performances, theater pieces by Black playwrights, and lectures on African American history. It was also celebrated in other cities such as Detroit, Jacksonville, and Richmond. Today we still observe Woodson’s creation, now nationally recognized as Black History Month. The son of formerly enslaved people from Buckingham County, Virginia, Woodson was the second Black scholar to earn a PhD from Harvard, after W.E.B. Du Bois. In 1915, Woodson had founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, which was instrumental in organizing Negro History Week. “It was about making sure that our children and the members of our community were armed with the truth about who we were and what we had contributed to the American historical narrative,” says Karsonya Wise Whitehead, president of what’s now called the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. The celebration grew over time from neighborhoods to university campuses, then spread from there. By the mid-1970s, it was widely observed, now as a full month. When Woodson developed the idea, he lived and worked in a rowhouse at Ninth and Q streets in Shaw, which had become a popular safe haven for students and adults looking to explore books or obtain rare teaching materials on Black history. The National Park Service now operates the house as a historic site. Closed for renovations and improvements since the pandemic, it will reopen to the public later this year as a museum and resource center. New exhibits exploring the historian’s legacy will feature video footage of Woodson and vintage images, along with artifacts from his library. John Fowler, the site’s supervisory park ranger, hopes people will visit the house all year rather than only during Black History Month—just like Woodson wanted Black history to be a subject of general study. “The idea for Negro History Week,” Fowler says, “was to learn all you could about the Negro throughout the year,  and then provide highlights or snippets of what you learned.” Related The NAACP’s Patrice Willoughby on a Moving Portrait of Her Ancestor This article appears in the February 2026 issue of Washingtonian.The post How Black History Month Was Born in DC a Century Ago first appeared on Washingtonian. ...read more read less