Almost 12 years after Abraham Lincolns 1863 emancipation proclamation, declared free all enslaved people in confederate states still in rebellion, shifting the civil war’s purpose to include abolition. It authorised the enlistment of Black soldiers and applied to over 3.5 million people, though it did not immediately end all slavery.

30 years prior to the emancipation proclamation Britain had initially emerged a parallel, abolishment act of 1833. Freeing all slaves in the America’s West Indies and everywhere in the British colonial empire.

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Carter G Woodson 19 Dec 1875 to 3 April 1959, born in Virginia USA,

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Who put off schooling while he worked in the coal mines and later started an incredible educational journey One of the 1st scholars to study the history of the black African diaspora. The 2nd black person to obtain a PhD degree from Harvard University. Woodson is also the only person whose parents were enslaved in the United States to obtain a PhD in history. Largely excluded from the uniformly – white academic history profession, Woodson realised the need to make the structures which support scholarship in black history and black historians.

In the the summer of 1919 “Red Summer” a time of racial violence that saw 1,000 people killed majority black, Carter worked hard to improve the understanding of Black history, later writing: “I have spent all my time doing this one thing and trying to do it efficiently. The 1920’s were a time of rising Black consciousness, expressed variously in movements such as the Harlem renaissance and by Jamaican immigrant Marcus Garvey. In this atmosphere, Woodson was considered by other black Americans to be one of their most important community leaders who discovered their lost history.

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In 1926 Woodson pioneered the celebration of “Negro History Week,” which would become, “Black History Month,”. Woodson wrote of the purpose for the week as,

It is not so much a Negro History Week as it is a History week. We should emphasise not Negro History, but the Negro in History. What we need is not a history of selected races or nations, but the history of the world, void of national bias, race hatred and religious prejudice.

The idea of a Black History week was a popular one, and to honour, with parades, breakfast, speeches, lectures, poetry, readings, banquets and exhibits were commonly held.

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The journal of African American History started by Woodson in 1916 has been published yearly and still exists today in 2026.