The 1999 theme for Black History Month is "The Legacy of African American Leadership for the Present and the Future." Carter G. Woodson, "The Father of Black History," initiated Negro History Week in 1926 to correct errors, omissions and distortions about the black past. Even many learned individuals assumed that people of African ancestry had contributed little if anything to the development of world civilization in general and to American society in particular. Through the Association for the Study of Afro-American (formerly Negro) Life and History (ASALH) that Woodson founded in 1915 and the promotion of Negro History Week, he hoped to inform the nation about black contributions to American and world history and to inspire black youth in particular to higher achievement.
The son of former slaves, Woodson was born in New Canton, Va., on Dec. 19, 1875. Because he had to work at an early age to help support his impoverished family, Woodson was largely self-taught and did not graduate from high school until he was 22 years old. But he was determined to pursue higher education and completed Berea College in only two years. He later earned a master's degree at the University of Chicago in 1908 and a Ph.D. degree at Harvard University in 1912.
Woodson selected the second week in February as Negro History Week to coincide with "Brotherhood Week" and to embrace the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. In 1976, the 50th anniversary of Negro History Week and the bicentennial of the United States, ASALH expanded Negro History Week to Black History Month. The purpose of Black History Month is not to exhaust the theme and the study of black history but to introduce information and ideas that hopefully will be discussed throughout the year and that will become part of the school curriculum.
The theme for 1999, "The Legacy of African American Leadership for the Present and the Future," helps to assess the current status of African Americans and lessons from the past. African American leadership has traditionally been seen as male and charismatic. From Frederick Douglass, to Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, A. Philip Randolph, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., there has been the idea of a single black leader, almost a messiah, responsible for the salvation of the race. By examining the legacy of African American leadership, we recognize that many individuals, female and male, played prominent roles in the struggle for freedom, justice and equality. We also learn that leadership was exercised on many levels and usually in response to a particular need.
Mary Ann Shadd Cary, for example, was the first black woman in North America to publish and edit a newspaper, in 1854. She used her newspaper, the Provincial Freeman, to fight against slavery, racial oppression and sexism.
The courageous civil rights organizer Ella Baker made a distinction between "leadership-centered groups" that carried the tradition of the single, charismatic, hierarchical leader and "group-centered leadership" that involved a more grass-roots approach to addressing problems. The present and future needs of black leadership in the post-civil rights era call for a different concept of leadership and different expectations of leaders. We will probably always yearn for heroes, but we need to redefine the scale from which heroes might emerge. Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, Benjamin "Pap" Singleton, Ida B. Wells, Carter G. Woodson and Mary McLeod Bethune among many others saw problems that needed to be addressed. They did not rise to the level of the charismatic leader but were just as effective, if not more so, in advancing the cause of freedom, justice and equality.
Robert L. Harris Jr. is associate professor of African American history at the Africana Studies and Research Center.
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