Founding Father

John T. Fowler II has loved Black history for as long as he can remember. The son and grandson of Baptist preachers, he was born in Washington, D.C., into a family of educators. The last Sunday of every February, his church would set up a display for Black History Month, and 10-year-old John was drawn to the pictures of Carter G. Woodson, Mary McLeod Bethune and Frederick Douglass — pioneering African Americans who once lived in his own city.

When he started working as a guide at the Carter G. Woodson Home and Mary McLeod Bethune Council House national historic sites in 2010, he felt he’d been preparing for the role his entire life. 

It wasn’t until Fowler worked on his master’s thesis that he learned two of his grandparents had moved in the same circles as Bethune and Woodson. He also discovered that his boyhood Sunday school teacher had worked as a secretary for Woodson, in that very house, when she was a teenager.

“That’s one of the great things about history,” said Fowler, who is now the supervisory ranger for the Woodson and Bethune sites as well as Frederick Douglass National Historic Site. “We’re all connected in some kind of way. It’s almost like I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing because I have connections to these special places and people.”

When Fowler led tours of the 3,380-square-foot house, which Woodson purchased in 1922, he’d start by saying, “Dr. Woodson was the leading African American scholar, activist and historian during the Jim Crow era. Period.” He would tell visitors how Woodson institutionalized the study of Black history by bringing lessons into churches, colleges and community centers, and how he broke new ground through his study of Black social and cultural history. “He was all about Negro life and history, all day, every day,” he told me. “He wrote the books, taught the teachers and preserved the rare objects, all in his home.”

But when I visited the neighborhood in late May, that home sat vacant. Food wrappers and bags littered the sidewalk in front of the three-story brick row house. Inside the property next door that serves as the site’s entrance, ladders and a sheet of insulation cluttered the foyer, and brown paper and painter’s tape covered the floors. The home has been closed to the public since 2020, for the second and third phases of a prolonged renovation. An expected opening in 2024 came and went, and President Donald Trump’s administration has made deep cuts to the National Park Service’s budget and proposed deprioritizing small historic sites. Still, on the eve of the centennial of Black History Month — which Woodson founded as Negro History Week in February 1926 to be around Douglass’ and Abraham Lincoln’s birthdays — the Park Service is preparing to finally reopen the property. And Fowler is preparing, too, brushing up on his narrative about the man known as the Father of Black History. 

Woodson was born in New Canton, Virginia, in 1875, the fourth of nine children of parents who had been enslaved. He grew up working on his family’s farm and, later, in the coal mines of West Virginia. Woodson’s formal education began at the age of 20. He graduated high school at 22 and went on to study at Berea College in Kentucky and the University of Chicago. In 1912, he earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University — only the second person of African descent to do so. (W.E.B. Du Bois was the first.) Woodson moved to Washington to be near the Library of Congress as he finished his dissertation, taught in the D.C. public school system and served as a dean at Howard University. But he discovered that schools weren’t teaching the history of Black people. He believed the economic, social and political struggles Black people were facing would be overcome if more was understood about their past and accomplishments. So he left academia in 1922 and set out to make a change. 

Woodson’s work focused on the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (now the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, or ASALH), an organization he’d founded in 1915. He examined the public records of Black people, prominent and lesser-known alike — birth and death certificates, marriage licenses, census data and obituaries. Then he told their stories in newspapers, speeches, journals and books. He wanted the world to know the contributions they’d made and that Black history is U.S. history. This was his life’s work, carried out in his D.C. home until he died there in 1950. 

Crystal R. Sanders, associate professor of African American studies at Emory University (home to some of Woodson’s books and papers), hung a postcard of Woodson in her office early in her career. Woodson set the bar “for how to conduct rigorous, scholarly investigations for the path of African-descended people,” she said, adding, “I remember being so excited to put that postcard up and wanting students who come in for office hours to ask me who he was.”

Woodson was a quiet man, his last surviving employee told Fowler years ago, and each morning he’d walk alone to the Phyllis Wheatley YWCA for meals. His life and home were filled with words. Woodson’s residence served as the headquarters for his organization and its publications, now called the Journal of African American History and the Black History Bulletin. From his home, he also ran Associated Publishers, Inc., which published novels, poetry, academic books and children’s books for the African American community. 

At a time when Washington was still segregated, Woodson opened his row house to all. He mentored young scholars, who would pull books off his shelves and find inscriptions such as “To the high priest of Negro history.” One of those scholars was the poet, playwright and novelist Langston Hughes, who worked as Woodson’s assistant. 

Fowler described Woodson as a “hoarder” of Black history. “If [a book] had anything to do with Negro history anywhere in the world, he would have it,” he said. “And if he didn’t have it, he could let you know where you could find it.” Volumes reached the ceiling and made it difficult to enter some rooms, and Woodson was often seen carrying stacks of books around the neighborhood, earning him the nickname “The Book Man.” He was known to sit on his front stoop and read African folk tales to children. 

“Carter G. Woodson is in some ways a one-man show,” said Sanders, who serves on the executive council of ASALH. “He’s operating from his house, trying to run ASALH and making sure teachers around the country have the material they need. This is ground zero for ensuring that Negro History Week will be a success.” When Woodson prepared the curriculum for the first Negro History Week, he didn’t know if it would catch on. “But teachers in these segregated schools readily took on the challenge,” Sanders said. “Not only was it a success, it was a faucet that could not be turned off.” The initiative led to the establishment of Black History Month in 1976. [[quote 987]] In addition to promoting African American history, Sanders said, Woodson provided a model of how African Americans can respond to societal wrongs. “That’s something I take with me today,” she said. “We’re looking at a rollback of civil rights, and we’ve been here before. Woodson laid the blueprint. He provided scholarly evidence of the ways African American people used whatever resources they had — not only to survive but to create a culture.”

Sanders said she doesn’t know anyone who can teach a U.S. history course today without teaching about the African American experience. “They may try,” she said, “but thanks to the experience of Dr. Woodson, there would be pushback.”

Trump did issue a proclamation recognizing February as National Black History Month, but other actions suggest the current administration is undermining the preservation of Black history. In April, news reports showed that Park Service pages about Black abolitionist Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad had been amended to downplay the realities of slavery — the original language was restored after a widespread backlash. The administration has vowed to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs from the federal government and targeted the National Museum of African American History and Culture in an executive order seeking to restore “truth and sanity to American history.”

Alan Spears, NPCA’s senior director of cultural resources, said sites such as the Woodson home are particularly at risk. “My sense is that the budget cuts would almost exclusively hit smaller historic and cultural sites like Woodson,” he said.

Sylvia Cyrus, executive director of ASALH, said the “inclusion” element of DEI has been understood to be about “perceived exclusion” and said that’s not the case here. “Black history is an important piece of American history, and it’s American,” she said. “Our goal is not to exclude or minimize the history of George Washington, but it is to say we need to include the great contributions of George Washington Carver.”

ASALH was headquartered in Woodson’s home until 1971, and the Park Service purchased the property and two neighboring row houses in 2005. The home had been neglected for decades and was in “horrible condition,” a park official told The Washington Post in 2013. “Drug addicts and prostitutes lived in the home before we got it.” The house needed extensive restoration and stabilization work and was hit in August 2011 by both an earthquake and a hurricane, further damaging the structure. Fowler led tours of an empty house for a couple of years before the site closed again for the Covid pandemic and yet more renovations. 

Cyrus said the budget to complete the renovations is “as secure as anything could be in these times” and said she looks forward to the 2026 reopening. The plan is for ASALH to have a working office in the house, where staff can interact with the community. Woodson’s home will be open for guided tours, and the two neighboring houses will be used as the visitor center, bookstore and exhibit space. Fowler said the home still has some original floors, fireplaces, doorknobs and windows. When it reopens for tours, visitors will find some of Woodson’s original possessions, including his desk, chair, typewriter and some books.

“It’s so important for our nation to be able to preserve sites like the Carter G. Woodson house … to inspire Americans,” Cyrus said. Woodson showed us, she said, that “if you believe in something and work hard for it, you can make it happen. America is a better place because of his work.”