Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 23, 1992 TAG: 9202210185
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JACQUELINE TRESCOTT
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
BLACK HISTORY'S EARLY CHAMPION REVEALED IN SMITHSONIAN EXHIBIT
Here, as you walk through the gallery, is a bill of sale signed April 19, 1809, to James Madison from Thomas Jefferson for one slave. Here is a letter the Rev. Francis Grimke, the pastor of Washington's Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church, wrote to Woodrow Wilson on Sept. 5, 1913, blasting segregation within the federal government. Here is the annotated typescript stanza of poet Paul Laurence Dunbar's "The Unsung Heroes."And here, in this Library of Congress exhibition titled "Moving Back Barriers: The Legacy of Carter G. Woodson," are rare editions of the historian's 15 books, the illustrations for his publications from the masters James L. Wells and Lois Mailou Jones, and Woodson's correspondence with the famous - from George Washington Carver to Booker T. Washington to Mary Church Terrell.
Woodson, the man who founded Negro History Week nearly 70 years ago and lived for three decades in Washington, spent his life documenting and collecting evidence of the ideas and achievements of black Americans - and often the world around them.
The exhibition stands as an umbrella of many topics. To promote black history, Woodson and Woodson others founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915, which published the Journal of Negro History and the Negro History Bulletin, and started Associated Publishers, the oldest black publishing company in the country.
This work is the core of the exhibit. It's divided into eight categories and a good number of the artifacts are arranged on brown partitions, designed to resemble library stacks.
It's a studied, precise touch. Woodson donated 5,000 items from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries to the library. His words are stenciled on the walls: "Just as thorough education in the belief in the inequality of races has brought the world to the cat-and-dog stage of religious and racial strife, so may thorough instruction in the equality of races bring about a reign of brotherhood through an appreciation of the virtues of all races, creeds and colors."
The show strays away from the historian as the main focus in a way that might please Woodson, whose interests were eclectic. Part of the civil rights section is devoted to the case of William D. Crum, a black physician in Charleston, S.C., who was denied a promised political plum of customs collector. Included is a letter Woodson saved from Theodore Roosevelt to Booker T. Washington pledging his support to Crum.
Born in New Canton, Va., in 1875 and the son of former slaves, Woodson worked on the railroad and in coal mines and was 20 before he went to high school. In the next two decades he finished high school and earned degrees from Berea College, the University of Chicago and Harvard University, where he was the second African American to earn a Ph.D. in history. William E.B. Du Bois would later say of Woodson, "Few men have made so deep an imprint as Carter Woodson on thousands of scholars in historical study and research."
Much of his pioneering work is acknowledged in the exhibit. With the help of a grant from Laura Spelman Rockefeller, Woodson did a study of the 1830 census and listed the blacks who had owned slaves. He also wrote "The Mind of the Negro as Reflected in Letters Written During the Crisis, 1800-1860" and "The Mis-Education of the Negro," which took black educators to task for failing to design a curriculum especially for blacks.
The exhibit runs until April 26 in the library's Madison Building.