10/10/2026
Carter G. Woodson founded his history association inside a colored YMCA in 1915. The young man running that Chicago building had worked the year before under Jesse Moorland, a Black YMCA official who raised money for rooms like it. Woodson's group went on to start Negro History Week, and plenty of lists now name Moorland as a founder beside him. Was Moorland in the room that day?
He was not.
The meeting was held on September 9, at the Wabash Avenue branch on Chicago's South Side, at the corner of 38th Street. Woodson had been staying in the building. He called in four men: a fellow Washington schoolteacher, a doctor, an economist and A. L. Jackson, a 24-year-old Harvard graduate.
Those five men make up the association's own list of founders, and Moorland's name is not on it.
Then why does his name keep getting attached? BlackPast says he helped Woodson build the association once it existed.
His own papers at Howard University hold its correspondence and minutes. He was in the work, just not at that table.
The road to that building starts on a farm in Ohio.
Moorland was born on September 10, 1863, in Coldwater, Ohio, the only child of a farmer. His mother died, and his father left the boy with his grandparents to raise.
He and his wife moved to Washington to study at Howard University, and he finished a master's in theology in 1891. He was ordained a Congregational minister and went to work for the YMCA's colored branch in the capital.
That word colored was the policy, in writing. The YMCA kept Black and white members apart from its early years, and it kept that rule until 1946.
A Black young man who wanted a gym, a bed or a night class in a strange city needed a branch of his own.
In 1898 Moorland joined the YMCA's national staff in its Colored Men's Department. Around 1900, he was one of two Black officials the national YMCA had.
His job was the one every church treasurer dreads: raising money. He still wrote like a preacher, and in 1909 the American Negro Academy printed a paper of his, priced at fifteen cents.
In it he looked back at the preachers on the plantations under slavery. "If this preacher chose to be, he was a dangerous man to the institution of slavery and ofttimes was sold."
He asked for that kind of man in every pulpit again, with training behind him. "The Negro minister ought to be the best trained man among us," he wrote.
Near the end of the paper, he put it plainly: "I have been as one crying in the wilderness, sounding the alarm."
In 1910 Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears, Roebuck, made an offer Moorland's department would live on for twenty years. He would put $25,000 toward a YMCA for Black men in any city that raised $75,000 itself.
Who pitched that offer first depends on which archive you open. Springfield College's archive says Moorland convinced Rosenwald. A history of the Chicago building says the head of Chicago's YMCA got to him first.
The math did not care who pitched it: three of every four dollars had to be found in the city itself.
In Chicago that money built the Wabash Avenue branch, finished in 1913. The Black Fives Foundation counts about 10,000 Black donors who gave $67,000 toward it, roughly one Black Chicagoan in four.
So the room Woodson used that September had been paid into by ten thousand Black Chicagoans, at about $6.70 a head.
The YMCA's own archive says Black leaders in 24 cities took Rosenwald's offer. Springfield College's archive still files those buildings under one nickname, the Rosenwald Buildings.
The man who wrote the matching check got the nickname, and the people who raised the other three-quarters got the rooms. BlackPast puts Moorland's own tally at over $2 million for 29 new buildings in big cities.
He was also giving things away himself. Over the years he had gathered a private library on Black life in Africa and the United States.
In 1914 Kelly Miller, a Howard professor planning a Negro-Americana museum and library, asked for it. Moorland gave the university more than 3,000 items.
Moorland sat on Howard's board from 1907 to 1936. He did not sell the trustees his collection. He gave it.
In 1914 the YMCA also made him senior secretary of its Colored Men's Department. Nine years later, a YMCA rule about age caught up with him.
On July 10, 1923, YMCA secretaries from around the country gathered at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, to honor him. They chose the town where John Brown made his last stand against slavery.
Moorland was fifty-nine, and under a YMCA regulation he would retire on November 1, after thirty-one years.
A speaker from the New York branch gave him a diamond stick pin and gave his wife a diamond brooch. Another handed him a black leather volume of letters from men like Rosenwald.
Then the organizers announced a fund in his name, $10,000 to train new YMCA secretaries. Much of it was already pledged.
A pin, a book and a scholarship, and then the rulebook walked him out the door at sixty.
His name did go up on a building. In North Dallas, Black residents raised $75,000 for a new YMCA during the Depression, $25,000 more than their goal.
A fund Rosenwald had set up matched part of it, and the Moorland YMCA opened on Flora Street in 1930. Ernie Banks, later a shortstop for the Chicago Cubs, got some of his earliest training there.
Moorland moved to Brooklyn after he left the Howard board in 1936. His wife died before he did.
In mid-April 1940 he had a heart attack. He died two weeks later, on April 30, at seventy-six.
The YMCA was still segregated the day he died.
It dropped segregation as national policy six years later. That same year it shut down the department for Black work he had spent his career inside.
Thirty-one years of fundraising, and the rule outlasted the man who raised the money.
In 1941, the year after his death, his papers went to Howard. The university lists them as his gift: forty linear feet of letters, speeches, photographs and minutes.
Woodson's letters are in there. So are minutes of the association whose list of founders leaves Moorland off.
He raised the rooms, and then he kept the record and gave it away for nothing. Getting his part right is the least of what he is owed.
Forty linear feet of paper, kept with his books at Howard, in the research center that carries his name.
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