Carter G. Woodson's Home an Endangered Historic Site

by Karen Juanita Carrillo
SeeingBlack.com Contributing Writer

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The home of one of African America's most famous historians is one of the "11 Most Endangered Historic Places," according to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The last home and workplace of Carter Godwin Woodson is "threatened by neglect, insufficient funds, inappropriate development [and] insensitive public policy, " according to the trust.

Known as the "founder of Black history week," the scholar, writer and educator Carter G. Woodson lived and worked in the now fastly deteriorating red brick house, located in Washington, D.C.'s traditionally Black, Shaw neighborhood, from 1915 to 1950.

With a leaky roof, broken windows, peeling plaster and spongy hardwood floors, the three-story Victorian-era home requires immediate rehabilitation. "It's really in a deplorable condition," says Irena Webster, executive director of the Association for the Study of African-American Life and History Inc. (ASALH). "The sidings and the plaster are coming apart. And the flooring is very, very tenuous—so much so that the architect we hired said that no more than five people should be in the house at any one time." Members of ASALH, the non-profit, tax-exempt organization Woodson incorporated on Oct. 3, 1915, officially maintain the home, which is already a National Historic Landmark.

ASALH wants to restore the property—where Woodson lived and worked from 1923 until his death in 1950—and use the house as their headquarters and as the site for a museum and technology and educational center. Woodson purchased the house, located at 1538 Ninth St. NW, in 1915, making his living quarters on its top floor and reserving the buildings' first two floors as an office and library.

ASALH would like to remake the first floor of the house as a museum, establish the second and third floors as their offices, and then purchase two sites adjoining the house and reconfigure them as the organizations' education and technology centers.

To complete these plans, ASALH has been raising funds by encouraging people to become members of the organization and urging folks to donate to the fund-raising project for Woodson's house. It is also pushing for Congress to pass H.R. 3201. the "Carter G. Woodson Home National Historic Site Study Act of 2000."

H.R. 3201, sponsored by D.C. delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, would "authorize the Secretary of the Interior to study the suitability and feasibility of designating" Woodson's home as a National Historic Site. The bill will be up for a vote this coming October.

Woodson, who was an avid researcher and writer on the cultures of the African diaspora, designed the ASALH as a disseminator of little known and/or often ignored sociological and historical information about the Black past in Africa and the Americas. The ASALH's "Journal of Negro History," first published in 1916, was its scholarly digest while its more widely circulated "Negro History Bulletin," was a popular, history-oriented magazine. Woodson had plans to publish a six volume Encyclopedia Africana, and was working on that project when he died of a heart attack on April 3, 1950.

He was, however, able to establish the Associated Publishers, a for-profit group that circulates the ASALH's "Afro-American History Month Kits" and books by Woodson and other prominent Black scholars. Woodson authored or co-authored 22 books, including his famous "The Miseducation of the Negro," as well as works like "The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861," "A Century of Negro Migration", "The History of the Negro Church," and "The Negro in Our History."

In Feb. 1926, Woodson first announced the institution of "Negro History Week," to coincide with the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Woodson's proclaimed week of African-American remembrances was in 1976 nationally proclaimed Black History Month.

The National Trust's other endangered sites include the residential neighborhood of Jackson Ward, which is Richmond, Va.'s historic "Harlem of the South."

As a part of the National Trust's list, Woodson's former home is not guaranteed funding. But it is, now, guaranteed a spotlight—the building's future as an addition to the demolition heap or as a part of the growing list of African-American heritage sites will be well noted.

The national headquarters of ASALH can be contacted at:

7961 Eastern Ave.
Suite 301
Silver Spring, MD 20910.
(301) 587-5900 phone
(301) 587-5915 fax
http://www.artnoir.com

-- September 10, 2001

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