Carter G. Woodson founded what became Black History Month. He had a Harvard Ph.D. in history. He wrote The Mis-Education of the Negro at the back end of two decades of trying to get his colleagues to take African and African-American history seriously as a field. The book is the sound of a serious man losing patience.
The argument is structural. Woodson observes that the curriculum of the American school, from grade school through the Negro college, was designed in the white tradition for white students. When it was extended — by white philanthropy and Black necessity — to Black students, the content did not change. The result was that Black students were trained, lesson by lesson, to admire the people who had enslaved their grandparents and to view their own forebears with embarrassment or pity.
Woodson's most quoted line is: 'When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions.' Less quoted is the consequence he draws — that the Negro college, as it existed in 1933, was producing graduates more useful to white power than to their own communities. He names institutions. The book made him enemies.
Read it for the argument; read it also for the prose. Woodson is a careful writer and an angrier one than the historiography tends to remember. The Africa World Press edition is widely available; the out-of-copyright text is at Project Gutenberg.
Editorial commentary
Carter G. Woodson's The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933) is one of the foundational documents of African-American educational thought. Woodson wrote the volume as a sustained critique of how the American school system was preparing Black students to operate within a social order that systematically denied their political and intellectual claims.
Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950) was the second African-American to receive a doctorate from Harvard (1912, in history) and the founder of what became Negro History Week (1926, later Black History Month). His Mis-Education of the Negro (1933) is the foundational document of African-American educational thought; his founding of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (1915) and the Journal of Negro History (1916) provided the institutional infrastructure for the broader subsequent tradition of African-American historical scholarship.
Woodson's argument is institutional rather than psychological. He is not arguing that Black students individually fail to develop self-esteem; he is arguing that the curriculum, pedagogy, and institutional culture of the American school system — including the historically Black colleges and universities — had been organized in ways that trained Black students to admire white achievements and disdain their own intellectual and political traditions.
The volume's prescription is the construction of an alternative educational apparatus organized around the intellectual and political tradition of African-descended people. The Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (1915), the Journal of Negro History (1916), and Negro History Week (1926) were the institutional instruments. The instruments were partial but established the analytical and curricular base from which subsequent generations of African-American educators could operate.
The standard contemporary edition is the Africa World Press 1990 reprint with an introduction by Asa G. Hilliard III. The 2008 Tribeca Books edition is available as an inexpensive paperback for classroom use. The volume's continuing analytical value is in its institutional precision: empirical observation, institutional diagnosis, prescriptive intervention — the mode contemporary educational reform efforts continue to operate within when doing serious work.
This entry sits within the archive's broader catalogue of primary-source documents, book reviews, audio essays, and discussion circles. Readers approaching the material for the first time will find suggested reading paths in the curated bundles in the shop section; readers with prior background in the tradition will find adjacent material via the Read Alongside links at the foot of each detail page. The archive's editorial policy is to reproduce public-domain texts in full, to excerpt in-copyright material under fair-use conventions with attribution to canonical sources, and to cite living scholars by name where their work is engaged. Provenance fields on each document record the source, the year of first publication, and the canonical digital edition used as the basis for the version on this site.
Where this archive links to a book purchase, the link routes through Bookshop.org, which directs a share of the purchase price to independent bookstores. Affiliate disclosures are at the foot of every page; the editorial selection is not influenced by the affiliate arrangement.
Editorial commentary
Carter G. Woodson's The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933) is one of the foundational documents of African-American educational thought. Woodson wrote the volume as a sustained critique of how the American school system was preparing Black students to operate within a social order that systematically denied their political and intellectual claims.
Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950) was the second African-American to receive a doctorate from Harvard (1912, in history) and the founder of what became Negro History Week (1926, later Black History Month). His Mis-Education of the Negro (1933) is the foundational document of African-American educational thought; his founding of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (1915) and the Journal of Negro History (1916) provided the institutional infrastructure for the broader subsequent tradition of African-American historical scholarship.
Woodson's argument is institutional rather than psychological. He is not arguing that Black students individually fail to develop self-esteem; he is arguing that the curriculum, pedagogy, and institutional culture of the American school system — including the historically Black colleges and universities — had been organized in ways that trained Black students to admire white achievements and disdain their own intellectual and political traditions.
The volume's prescription is the construction of an alternative educational apparatus organized around the intellectual and political tradition of African-descended people. The Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (1915), the Journal of Negro History (1916), and Negro History Week (1926) were the institutional instruments. The instruments were partial but established the analytical and curricular base from which subsequent generations of African-American educators could operate.
The standard contemporary edition is the Africa World Press 1990 reprint with an introduction by Asa G. Hilliard III. The 2008 Tribeca Books edition is available as an inexpensive paperback for classroom use. The volume's continuing analytical value is in its institutional precision: empirical observation, institutional diagnosis, prescriptive intervention — the mode contemporary educational reform efforts continue to operate within when doing serious work.
This entry sits within the archive's broader catalogue of primary-source documents, book reviews, audio essays, and discussion circles. Readers approaching the material for the first time will find suggested reading paths in the curated bundles in the shop section; readers with prior background in the tradition will find adjacent material via the Read Alongside links at the foot of each detail page. The archive's editorial policy is to reproduce public-domain texts in full, to excerpt in-copyright material under fair-use conventions with attribution to canonical sources, and to cite living scholars by name where their work is engaged. Provenance fields on each document record the source, the year of first publication, and the canonical digital edition used as the basis for the version on this site.
Where this archive links to a book purchase, the link routes through Bookshop.org, which directs a share of the purchase price to independent bookstores. Affiliate disclosures are at the foot of every page; the editorial selection is not influenced by the affiliate arrangement.