Black History as Collective Liberation
Honoring Carter Godwin Woodson
While Black history is lived every day of the year, I want to take this first day of Black History Month to honor the ancestor Carter Godwin Woodson, whose work, passion, and love for his people helped move this society toward something better by insisting that Black history be seen, studied, and honored.
Due to his own experiences with racism and witnessing the erasure of Black history, he dedicated his life to uplifting and amplifying Black history and culture. His legacy still lives on through the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (now called the Association for the Study of African American Life and History), the Journal of Negro History (now the Journal of African American History, still published to this day it has never missed an issue), and Black History Month itself, which began as Negro History Week before Black educators and students at Kent State University fought to expand it into a full month.
Woodson understood that America could never live up to her ideals of prosperity without honoring and acknowledging how Black people have shaped and nurtured this society into being. He wanted us to understand that we are so much more than our pain and the lies told about us.
At the same time, he understood what the world stood to gain if it truly studied the intelligence, the technologies, and the spirituality of Black African people.
Speaking of generational wealth, here's an interesting fact tied to the Woodson family lineage —
A white musician and ethnomusicologist, Craig Woodson, publicly acknowledged the role of his white ancestors in the enslavement of Black members of the Woodson family lineage. This acknowledgment did not stop at words.
Together, Black and white descendants developed what became known as the Black–White Families Reconciliation (BWFR) Protocol. The work centered ritual, drumming, storytelling, and intergenerational witnessing as pathways for accountability and repair.
There is so much we can learn from the legacy of Carter G. Woodson, especially right now, in the times we are living in.
Joy Long is a mother, writer, healing artist, ecotherapist, and prosperity & intimacy guide. She is the founder of Whole with Joy, a healing movement rooted in embodiment, Earth wisdom, and joy. Shaped by her journey through community mental health, ecotherapy, movement, ritual, and learning across the African diaspora and other land-based cultures, Joy creates spaces for people to reconnect with themselves, each other, and the living world. Her work invites a remembering: that prosperity is not something we earn, but something we embody when we return home to who we are together, with dignity, pleasure, and power.