Deborah Hopkinson

“Carter G. Wood­son did­n’t just read his­to­ry. He changed it.” As the father of Black His­to­ry Month, he spent his life intro­duc­ing oth­ers to the his­to­ry of his people.

Carter G. Wood­son was born to two for­mer­ly enslaved peo­ple ten years after the end of the Civ­il War. Though his father could not read, he believed in being an informed cit­i­zen, so Carter read the news­pa­per to him every day. As a teenag­er, Carter went to work in the coal mines, and there he met Oliv­er Jones, who did some­thing impor­tant: he asked Carter not only to read to him and the oth­er min­ers, but also research and find more infor­ma­tion on the sub­jects that inter­est­ed them.

“My inter­est in pen­e­trat­ing the past of my peo­ple was deep­ened,” Carter wrote. His jour­ney would take him many more years, trav­el­ing around the world and trans­form­ing the way peo­ple thought about history.

From an award-win­ning team of author Deb­o­rah Hop­kin­son and illus­tra­tor Don Tate, this first-ever pic­ture book biog­ra­phy of Carter G. Wood­son empha­sizes the impor­tance of pur­su­ing curios­i­ty and encour­ag­ing a hunger for knowl­edge of sto­ries and his­to­ries that have not been told.