Carter G. Woodson was the historian known as the "Father of Black History" who founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (1915) and Negro History Week (1926), institutionalizing the study of Black history to counter claims that African Americans had no past worth studying.
Carter G. Woodson was an educator and historian who turned Black history from a scattered effort into an organized field. In 1915 he founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH), and in 1926 he launched Negro History Week, which later grew into Black History Month. His goal lines up exactly with EK 3.15.A.1: American schools taught that Black people had made no meaningful cultural contributions, and Woodson believed African Americans had to become agents of their own education to refute that lie and inform their future advancement.
Woodson's bigger argument, laid out in The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933), was that the problem wasn't just missing facts. Schools were actively training Black students to see themselves as inferior. His answer was to research, document, and disseminate Black history through journals, associations, and an annual celebration, creating the body of educational resources EK 3.15.A.2 describes. That institution-building made him a cornerstone of the Black intellectual tradition that existed long before African American Studies entered universities in the late 1960s (EK 3.15.B.1).
Woodson anchors Topic 3.15 (Black History Education and African American Studies) in Unit 3: The Practice of Freedom. He's your go-to evidence for two learning objectives. For 3.15.A, he's the clearest example of a New Negro era educator who researched and spread Black history to Black students on purpose, as a counter to schools that erased Black contributions. For 3.15.B, he shows that the Black intellectual tradition predates the formal field of African American Studies by decades. When the exam asks where African American Studies came from, Woodson's ASNLH and Negro History Week are the institutional bridge between earlier figures like the African Free School and Schomburg's collection and the academic field founded in the late 1960s.
Keep studying AP® African American Studies Unit 3
Arturo Schomburg (Unit 3)
Schomburg and Woodson attacked the same myth from two sides. Schomburg collected the physical evidence (books, art, documents proving Black history existed), while Woodson built the institutions to study and teach it. Pairing them is an easy way to show the New Negro movement's educational project had both an archive and a curriculum.
Black intellectual tradition (Unit 3)
Woodson didn't invent Black history scholarship; he professionalized it. The tradition runs from the African Free School in the late 1700s through activists and archivists who documented Black experiences. Woodson is the link in that chain who gave the tradition a journal, an association, and an annual national platform.
W.E.B. Du Bois (Units 3-4)
Both were Harvard-trained Black scholars dismantling the claim that African Americans had no history. Du Bois did it through sociology, activism, and the NAACP; Woodson did it by building the infrastructure of Black history education itself. Together they show the New Negro movement's intellectual wing in action.
African American Studies as a discipline (Unit 3)
The field you're literally taking this AP course in traces back to Woodson. His ASNLH and Negro History Week proved Black history deserved systematic study, laying groundwork for African American Studies departments founded in the late 1960s. That's the EK 3.15.B.1 timeline in one sentence.
Multiple-choice questions about Woodson usually test purpose and method, not biography. Expect stems like why he founded the ASNLH in 1915, what strategic purpose Negro History Week (1926) served within the New Negro movement, and how his methodology challenged Eurocentric narratives that ignored Black sources and contributions. The move you need to make is connecting his institutions to the larger goal of refuting the claim that Black people were without history. On the free-response side, the 2026 DBQ asked you to evaluate the extent to which the New Negro movement achieved its objectives. Woodson is strong outside evidence there, because Negro History Week becoming Black History Month is a concrete, measurable success of the movement's educational aims.
Both were pioneering Black scholars with Harvard PhDs, so they blur together easily. The cleanest split is what each one built. Du Bois is tied to sociology, The Souls of Black Folk, and the NAACP's political activism. Woodson is the institution-builder of Black history education specifically, with the ASNLH (1915), the Journal of Negro History, and Negro History Week (1926). If the question is about teaching and disseminating Black history, that's Woodson.
Carter G. Woodson, called the "Father of Black History," founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915 to organize the systematic study of Black history.
He created Negro History Week in 1926, which later expanded into Black History Month, giving Black history a permanent place in American education.
Woodson argued that American schools mis-educated Black students by teaching that Black people had no meaningful history, so African Americans had to become agents of their own education (EK 3.15.A.1).
His work is a key example of the Black intellectual tradition that predates the formal founding of African American Studies in the late 1960s (EK 3.15.B.1).
On the exam, Woodson works as evidence that the New Negro movement pursued, and partly achieved, its goal of refuting the myth that African Americans were a people without history.
He founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915 and Negro History Week in 1926, building the institutions that made Black history a serious field of study. In AP African American Studies, he's central to Topic 3.15 on Black history education.
Essentially yes, but indirectly. Woodson created Negro History Week in 1926, and it expanded into Black History Month in 1976, decades after his death. Exam questions usually credit him with founding the original week, so use the 1926 date.
Schomburg was a bibliophile who collected the physical evidence of Black history, and his collection became the Schomburg Center in Harlem. Woodson built the organizations and publications to study and teach that history. Think collector versus institution-builder, both refuting the same myth.
His work matches LO 3.15.A exactly. New Negro era educators researched and spread Black history to Black students because schools taught Black inferiority. Woodson's ASNLH, journal, and Negro History Week were the movement's most lasting educational institutions.
Yes. He appears in Topic 3.15 under Unit 3, and the 2026 DBQ on New Negro movement objectives is exactly the kind of prompt where Woodson works as outside evidence. Multiple-choice questions also test the purpose of the ASNLH (1915) and Negro History Week (1926).
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