Carter G. Woodson, a pioneering African American historian and educator, is often referred to as the "Father of Black History." Through his efforts to promote the study of African American history and culture, Woodson established Negro History Week (later expanded to Black History Month) and founded the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, leaving a lasting legacy of scholarship and cultural awareness.

"The Negroes are facing the alternative of rising in the sphere of production to supply their proportion of the manufacturers and merchants or of going down to the graves of paupers."



"The author takes the position that the consumer pays the tax, and as such every individual of the social order should be given unlimited opportunity to make the most of himself."



"Even schools for Negroes, then, are places where they must be convinced of their inferiority."



"The so-called modern education, with all its defects, however, does others so much more good than it does the Negro, because it has been worked out in conformity to the needs of those who have enslaved and oppressed weaker peoples."



"This assumption of Negro leadership in the ghetto, then, must not be confined to matters of religion, education, and social uplift; it must deal with such fundamental forces in life as make these things possible."



"The strongest bank in the United States will last only so long as the people will have sufficient confidence in it to keep their money there."



"If the Negroes are to remain forever removed from the producing atmosphere, and the present discrimination continues, there will be nothing left for them to do."



"In the long run, there is not much discrimination against superior talent."



"The thought of' the inferiority of the Negro is drilled into him in almost every class he enters and in almost every book he studies."



"If the white man wants to hold on to it, let him do so; but the Negro, so far as he is able, should develop and carry out a program of his own."



"The large majority of the Negroes who have put on the finishing touches of our best colleges are all but worthless in the development of their people."



"If the Negro in the ghetto must eternally be fed by the hand that pushes him into the ghetto, he will never become strong enough to get out of the ghetto."



"If Liberia has failed, then, it is no evidence of the failure of the Negro in government. It is merely evidence of the failure of slavery."



"The different ness of races, moreover, is no evidence of superiority or of inferiority. This merely indicates that each race has certain gifts which the others do not possess."



"Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history."


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"And thus goes segregation which is the most far-reaching development in the history of the Negro since the enslavement of the race."



"Negroes who have been so long inconvenienced and denied opportunities for development are naturally afraid of anything that sounds like discrimination."

