From its inception, America has been a landscape peopled by diverse ethnic and racial groups, and today virtually all peoples are represented. If America has always been racially and ethnically diverse, the nation’s self-image has not always recognized its multicultural history. Until the last decades of the twentieth century, American has seen itself largely as the flowering of Anglo-Saxon culture and prided itself on allowing immigrants to adopt the American way.

During the early years of the twentieth century, a small number of intellectuals began to question whether America was simply a ransplant of English civilization. W. E. B. Du Bois, Theodore Herzel, and Randolph Bourne believed that modern America should embrace the cultural differences that newcomers brought with them to America. Democracy, they believed, required tolerance of difference and could sustain those differences in harmony.

Among those intellectuals of the Progressive era, Carter G. Woodson did most to forge an intellectual movement to educate Americans about cultural diversity and democracy. For the sake of African Americans and all Americans, Woodson heralded the contributions of African Americans and the black tradition. In 1915, he established the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and by the time of his death in 1950, he had laid the foundation for a rethinking of American identity. The multiculturalism of our times is built on the intellectual and institutional labors of Woodson and the association he established. He should be known not simply as the Father of Black History, but as pioneer of multiculturalism as well. In honor of its founder, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History devotes the 2008 Annual Black History Theme to both the labors of Woodson and the origins of multiculturalism.