By Al Calloway
The continued value of Carter G. Woodson’s sociological tour de force “The Mis-Education of the Negro,” first published in 1933, exists because every aspect of the book reveals truth that Black people are confronted in 2026 with the same Centuries-old problem. Once basic education became available for so-called “freed” Black people, a system of exclusion accompanied total immersion in European dominance learning. Blacks learned nothing of Africa or of a place of dignity for themselves in America.
In the book’s introduction, Woodson writes, “The mere imparting of information is not education. Above all things, the effort must result in making a man think and do for himself just as the Jews have done in spite of universal persecution.” However, the “educated Negro,” Woodson found, “have the attitude of contempt toward their own people because in their own as well as in their mixed schools, Negroes are taught to admire the Hebrew, the Greek, the Latin and the Tenton, and to despise the African.” That was what Woodson’s research uncovered during the 1920’s and early 1930’s, and, to date, little has changed.
While the Trump years attempt to reprise a semblance of the Black Codes, Jim Crow and outright discrimination against Black and Brown people in the United States—and possibly all the Americas—mounting worldwide backlash may stand in his way. Trump’s various attacks on public education, private and public colleges and universities has eliminated Black history, except for his racist version. Meaningless verbiage seems to be white America’s response to Trumpist anti-democratic rot. Woodson left us this, too: “History does not furnish a case of the elevation of a people by ignoring the thought and aspiration of the people thus served.”
Since so-called emancipation, Black people off the farms have been forced into ghetto life, but Woodson believed the Black man “can more easily develop out of it under his own leadership than under that which is superimposed.” Power develops at your door, be you a tenant or homeowner, then the next neighbor and then four neighbors, and then eight, and so on. Organize! Organize! Organize! Soon your fish fry’s become an economic and political social force, teaming with other neighborhoods, creating, developing and serving. Churches, schools and businesses become more proactive and, therefore, unimaginable progress occurs naturally, through the creative energy of the people. It’s not magic, just purposeful life!
In 2026, there is so much in Woodson’s “The Mis-Education of the Negro” that must be remedied in order for Black people to rein in real progress. Every time I read the following passage, I wonder, how long, how long! Woodson: “If the ‘highly educated’ Negro would forget most of the untried theories taught him in school, if he could see through the propaganda which has been instilled into his mind under the pretext of education, if he would fall in love with his own people and begin to sacrifice for their uplift—if the ‘highly educated’ Negro would do these things, he could solve some of the problems now confronting the race.”
POSTSCRIPT: Mis-Education is a social pathogen, a terrible germ, a disease, and its presence among Black and Brown people is, among other
