The Journal of African American History

• 1. A Journal Without Peers

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  The Journal of African American History launched in January 1916 with no rivals. Its founder, Carter G. Woodson, had earned his doctorate at Harvard University. He saw a field the academic world had not bothered to build. Black history was not recognized as a separate discipline. There were no comparable texts, no competing journals, no institutional home for scholars of the African American experience. Carol Adams, CEO of the Chicago Museum of African American History, described Woodson in a phrase. "He didn't just see a need, he moved to fill the need," she said. The journal Woodson started became the dominant scholarly source for African American history almost by default. Its reach, over the decades that followed, would extend far beyond the academy.

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• 2. Father of African American History

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  Woodson was born in 1875 and spent the heart of his career as a professor at Howard University. W. E. B. Du Bois was among the handful of black scholars who, like Woodson, had earned doctoral degrees in this era. Adams spoke to the challenge those scholars all faced. "It wasn't easy to get your work published if you were an African-American scholar," she said. "So he started a journal and then a press." Woodson received a nickname that spoke to the scale of what he built: the Father of African American History. He died in 1950, leaving behind an organization and a publication that outlasted him by decades.

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• 3. A Platform for Scholars

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  Every year, the journal issued more than sixty reviews of recently published books on African and African-American history. That output sat alongside original scholarly articles covering every aspect of the African American experience. The publication gave black scholars a venue to publish and build academic careers. It also served as an outlet for white scholars whose views differed from those of their peers. Neither group had a ready alternative. Alongside historical scholarship, the journal documented the current black experience in the United States. Living life was treated as worthy of scholarly attention, not just the past. Among those who found an unexpected outlet here were female scholars who had almost no comparable venue in academic publishing.

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• 4. Nine Percent

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  Female authors contributed nine percent of articles in The Journal of Negro History. That figure sounds modest until set against the average at other scholarly journals of the time: three percent. Publications like the Mississippi Valley Historical Review and the Journal of Southern History showed what the standard looked like. Marion Thompson Wright was among the women who found a different standard here. Wright earned a doctoral degree in history and published her research on blacks in New Jersey in the journal's pages. Woodson had laid institutional groundwork even before the first journal issue appeared, and that groundwork would eventually reach into every American February.

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• 5. History Week to a Month

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  In 1915, Woodson co-founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, a year before the journal's first issue. The organization was founded in Chicago and later based in Washington, D.C. It was later renamed the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. Together, Woodson and this organization created African American History Week in 1926. They chose a specific week: it fell on the birthdays of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. The observance grew, over the following decades, into Black History Month. Black History Month is recognized every February, still tied to those two birthdays as Woodson originally intended. Among the historians who had published in the journal's pages were figures who would themselves become landmarks of the field.

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• 6. Scholars and Stewards

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  Benjamin Quarles and John Hope Franklin were among the scholars whose work appeared in the journal. W. E. B. Du Bois also published in its pages. Jesse E. Moorland co-established the journal alongside Woodson. He and activist Arthur Spingarn also donated novels and manuscripts to the library at Howard University. Howard's Moorland-Spingarn Research Center was named in their honor. Joe R. Feagin, later president of the American Sociological Association, researched racism in society and carried forward the scholarly tradition Woodson had built. In 2018, editor V. P. Franklin, working alongside Harvard historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, signed a publishing agreement with the University of Chicago Press. The journal now appears under that imprint on behalf of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. As of December 2023, Bertis English, a history professor at Alabama State University, serves as editor. The name changed in 2001, from The Journal of Negro History to The Journal of African American History. Under his stewardship, the quarterly issues continue.

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