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February marks the month in which Dr. Carter G. Woodson created Black History.
It started as a day and after his death became a month.


Carter Godwin Woodson was born on 19 December 1875 as the seventh child, of nine, to two former slave parents. Two of his uncles ran a school five months out of the year and Woodson attended when he could. When he wasn't at school Woodson would work on the 10-acre tobacco farm for his parents.
When he was 20 years old, Woodson enrolled at Frederick Douglass High School in West Virginia, where he was family was now living. He graduated in a year and went on to Berea College in Kentucky and Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. While he was still in college, he became an educator, teaching high school and serving as principal.
"Woodson was not the first African American to earn a Ph.D. in history from Harvard; that distinction went to W.E.B. Du Bois. But when Woodson graduated in 1912, he embarked on the project of making the history of African Americans both visible and respected."
Woodson moved to Washington, D.C., where he erected the permanent headquarters for the ANSLH. And, Woodson continued to publish--A Century of Negro Migration (191😎, The History of the Negro Church (1921) and The Negro in Our History (1922) were among these publications.
In 1926, he hit upon an idea--a week devoted to the celebration of the achievements of African Americans. "Negro History Week," the progenitor of today's Black History Month, began the week of February 7, 1926, a week that witnessed the birthdays of both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. He died at the age of 74 in 1950. He did not live to see Brown v. Board of Education, which made segregation in schools illegal, nor did he live to see the creation of Black History Month in 1976.

Sources

Baldwin, Neil. The American Revelation: Ten Ideals That Shaped Our Country from the Puritans to the Cold War. New York: Macmillan, 2006.
"Carter G. Woodson: Father of Black History." Ebony. Vol. 59, no. 4 (February 2004): 20, 108-110.
Dagbovie, Pero Gaglo. The Early Black History Movement, Carter G. Woodson, and Lorenzo Johnston Greene. Champaign, IL: The University of Illinois Press, 2007.
Woodson, Carter G. The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861. New York: G. P. Putnam's sons, 1915. Available online: http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/11089/pg11089.html.