Welcome to Karen Hunter's awesome. I am Karen Hunter and it is Black History Month, and that means we are doing our good job. Okay. Up next, part two of my discussion with Dr. Gray Carr. This is from In Class with Carr, where he is breaking down the origins of the holiday. But in this particular episode, we're talking about Carter G. Woodson and how it all started. Stay tuned. This man writing in the 1930s, 20s, how is he able? We're battling right now, books are being banned, whole curriculum around, and I know it's

going to be a whole ass mess with Black History Month, with a whole lot of states mad that

we're going to be studying people.

How did Carter G. Woodson get a Negro History Week, and then which turned into a Black History Month that we all

accept now. How was he able to do that? And I'm just, I just wanted to kind of, you know,

go through the blueprint of that because I'm sure there's a lesson in there for us right now.

Well, I think, and let me just one more thing on the piece of, on the self-segregation,

because Woodson, in that decade of the 1930s, is very interesting.

I just give you two quick examples.

Two towering figures who didn't always get along because Woodson didn't get along with a whole lot of people.

He was a single-minded guy.

And this other cat, you love black people, but sometimes it was more theoretical in the sense that, you know, he thought he was better and he was better than a whole lot of people. But I mean, the service, you can't. And that's W.B. Du Bois. And I'm only saying this in terms of a social structure narrative to reinforce the thing that probably one of a few people know about either one of them.

You know, Du Bois was the first person of African descent to get a PhD in history, Harvard University.

Woodson was the second and the only one who ever came out of Harvard University with a doctorate whose parents had been enslaved.

Because Woodson, Du Bois, of course, was in Massachusetts, Great Barrington, the black burgharts yet to go back

generations but to see that but I'm raising that to say that in the decade of the 1930s

both of them run afoul of the single-minded integrationist strain in the black kind of petty bourgeois.

Woodson received criticism for the miseducation, including for statements like that.

But, and then Du Bois, who two years later published Black Reconstruction in America, and during that same decade, it was 1934, when he revised his talented 10th thesis that a speech he gave in New York to Sigma Pi 5, he was a member of Sigma Pi 5, who's commonly known as the Boulet, saying that, you know, we might just need a talented 10th. We ain't even got 10%. Maybe we can get a

guiding hundredth. I mean, there are enough people in this room with families. If y'all will turn

back toward the people. And then, of course, one of the themes in association in Negro is, Woodson is saying, y'all, these people who, who quote, make it, they'll be okay. But they don't He had a whole chapter in there. Understand the Negro. He said, y'all may even dealing with the Negro?

He said, the Negro needs institutions. We need education. We need to develop and continue

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