Lewis Woodson (January 1806 – January 1878) was an American educator, minister, writer, and abolitionist. He was an early leader in the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) in Ohio and Pennsylvania. Woodson started and helped to build other institutions within the free African-American communities in Ohio and western Pennsylvania prior to the American Civil War.
Woodson was among the original 24 trustees to found Wilberforce University in Ohio in 1856, in a collaboration between the AME and the Cincinnati Methodist Council. When the college faced financial difficulties during the American Civil War, the AME Church bought it from the Methodist Church in 1863, making it the first historically black college to be owned and operated by African Americans.
Early life Lewis Woodson was the oldest of eleven children born to Thomas and Jemima Woodson. Both parents were mixed-race. Both parents had been born into slavery and both effectuated their freedom, Thomas while still a teenager. Lewis was born in January 1806 in Greenbrier County, Virginia (now part of West Virginia). According to oral history, Thomas left Monticello in his early teenage years. He became an orphan, but, fortunately, a free orphan. It is uncertain how and where he met Jemima. It is reasonable to think that had he married a girl younger than himself, say thirteen, the couple would have been unprepared to face the future. Jemima was older than Thomas and Jemima came with an unmarried mother, who, in a fashion, likely served as Thomas' surrogate mother. Jemima also had a resourceful older sister and with her a brother-in-law, Lewis Leach. Thomas and Jemima's first child, Lewis, was named after his uncle.
Woodson family oral history, dating to the early nineteenth century, has claimed that Thomas Woodson was the eldest child of Sally Hemings and her master President Thomas Jefferson.Byron W. Woodson Sr., A President in The Family, (Westport CT, Praeger, 2001), 61 That account has been disputed by Jeffersonian historians.
In addition, results of a 1998 Jefferson DNA study conclusively showed that there was no genetic link between the Jefferson male line and the Woodson male line. The study's major findings were that the Y chromosome of the Jefferson male line matched that of Sally Hemings' son Eston's descendant. The Woodson Y chromosome did show northern European ancestry.
The Jefferson family Y chromosome did show eastern African (Somalian tribal) ancestry. The 1998 DNA report was inconclusive, unethical, unobjective, and unscientific. It was inconclusive because Thomas Jefferson's DNA was not used. It was unethical because DNA donors were promised that historians would be kept far away from the project. In contrast Joseph Ellis and Annette Gordon-Reed went on PBS News Hour to announce the results (not Dr. Foster). Foster objected to the manner in which results were released and wrote New York Times in protest. NYT printed Foster's letter. It was unobjective also because Ellis and other historians who had mishandled the historical evidence were in control of the release of the DNA report. PBS News Hour 11/02/1998. Unscientific because genetic data cannot solve a historical and genealogical matter through six generations on its own. Woodson, A President in the Family, Praeger, 2001, 221-235. Ellis, Gordon-Reed and others engage the same premise as the 1660 law that banned the testimony of black Americans. The fact is that DNA samples came from human beings. Promises were made to those human donors as to the integrity of the process then promises were broken. Foster told Byron Woodson, "this will be lifted from the hands of historians to create objective evidence." In fact, Foster was pushed out of control, the project was "lifted" from him. The hijacking was not entirely covered up but this matter is still mishandled by historians and others. Ellis went on national television and claimed that "we created" "scientific evidence." Foster's entire self-proclaimed objective was to create evidence set apart from the historians.
Thirty Million American have watched the movie funded by CBS. CBS rejected the DNA report. The filmmaker bought rights to the Brodie book and rejected the DNA report. Who has objected to the movie except for Ellis, Gordon-Reed and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation?
Move to Ohio and later to Pittsburgh The Woodson family moved from Virginia to Chillicothe, Ohio about 1821. Chillicothe had a strong community of numerous free blacks; it was a center of abolitionist activity. Soon the Woodsons helped establish an African Methodist Episcopal congregation there, the first west of the Allegheny Mountains.
In 1829 Thomas Woodson acquired a 50-acre farm in Jackson County, Ohio, which he grew over time to 382 acres. He had a large herd of cattle (400), hogs (150), and "fine horses."Renick-Waddles papers in the Ross County Historical Society. This sentence referring to the Woodsons was found among the papers, "They were genteel and industrious people, the Old man and his sons always going well dressed and riding fine horses." Livestock from Philanthropist newspaper, Cincinnati, June 1842. He must have come to Ohio with a stake, otherwise he is made out to be a genius or a miracle worker; he was neither. Nor did he win the lottery or inherit money, while living as an orphan. The best speculation is that the Hemings family 'misappropriated' cattle and horses from Jefferson's Bedford plantation (near Lynchburg), taking them to Greenbrier County and Thomas skillfully grew a herd from there. The word Jefferson used for unsanctioned liberties taken by the Hemings family was 'mismanagement.' Lewis Woodson moved with his wife and children to Pittsburgh in 1830/31. He remained connected to his family in Ohio.
Lewis and two brothers, Thomas and John, became ministers in the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME),Foner, Phillip and Branham, Robert (eds.), Lift Every Voice: African American Oratory, 1787–1900 Univ. of Alabama Press, 1997, pp. 384-385 a new, independent, African-American denomination started in Philadelphia in 1816. The Woodsons helped establish new congregations in what was then thought of as the western United States.
Marriage and family In Chillicothe, Lewis Woodson married Caroline Robinson, also born in Virginia. The Woodsons had ten surviving children, many of whom followed their models in gaining education and contributing to their communities. One of the ten Woodson children married a member of the Tanner family and another married a member of the Highgate family, who had lived in Pennsylvania since well before the American Revolution as free black Americans.This is the Tanner family, that produced Henry O. Tanner, who was born in Pittsburgh. Woodson, A President in the Family, 127-8.
A son of Lewis and Caroline Woodson, Granville S. Woodson served on the executive committee of the National Equal Rights League.Samuel W. Black, Jubilee of Freedom, Western Pennsylvania History Winter 2015-16,18-19. https://journals.psu.edu/wph/article/viewFile/60212/60161 Their grandson George Frederick Woodson earned degrees from Drew University and Morris Brown University. He served as Dean of the Payne Theological Seminary at Wilberforce for over three decades, ending in 1937. Their grandson Howard D. Woodson earned a degree in civil engineering from what is now the University of Pittsburgh in 1899. He contributed to the design of Union Station in Washington, D.C., and also became a civic activist. H.D. Woodson High School is named in his honor.
Greenwood-Praeger published a highly acclaimed non-fiction best seller in 2001, written by a great-great-grandson of Lewis and Carline Woodson. C- Span aired this video of one of the author's presentations. The book covered Woodson family genealogy and history. https://www.c-span.org/video/?165070-1/a-president-family
A great-great-great-grandson of Lewis and Carline Woodson, Timothy K. Lewis, became a United States District Judge in Pittsburgh in 1991 and became a United States Circuit Judge in 1992.
AME conferences
Freedom's Journal, was the first widely distributed black American newspaper. It operated for only two years March 1827 to March 1829. The newspaper printed one letter each from Richard Allen, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal church, and Rev. Lewis Woodson of the same denomination. Both letters denounced proposals for expatriation or removal of black Americans to Africa, as supported by the American Colonization Society. Woodson advocated colonization in separate black communities in the United States as an alternative.Woodson has been often labeled as a separatist. He was a separatist in a certain context. He advocated 'colonization' in the U. S. as an alternative to being cajoled and manipulated into emigration from the land where his parents, grandparents, and great grandparents were born, into Africa. President James Monroe zealously supported the relocation of free black Americans to Africa, sort of a Middle Passage in reverse. Woodson wanted land for his people and some other considerations were secondary for him. Woodson's deep ancestry was rooted in Africa and Britain. The deep ancestral roots of the black American ethnicity are linked two distinct continents in the Old World; that ethnicity was created in the New World on land, stolen from indigenous inhabitants.
Reverend Lewis Woodson served as secretary for an AME Conference in Hillsborough, Ohio (near Cincinnati) while Bishop Morris Brown presided. The riots of 1829 in Cincinnati had driven out much of the African-American population. Labor competition had led to whites' attacking blacks, who had been establishing a thriving free black community. Nearly 1200 blacks left Cincinnati for Canada as a result.Carter G. Woodson, Charles Harris Wesley, The Negro in Our History, Associated Publishers, 1922, p. 140 (digitized from original at University of Michigan Library), accessed January 13, 2009
In Pittsburgh, Woodson joined with John B. Vashon to establish the African Education Society. One of the students in Woodson's school was George Boyer Vashon, who was taught by Woodson until black students were allowed to attend publicly financed schools. George Vashon was the first African American to graduate from Oberlin College.George Vashon's graduation from Oberlin had an importance and significance that was much larger than personal achievement. Oberlin gained the support of abolitionists the year after it opened. It opened its doors to black American students; the uplift of the black ethnicity was part of the school's mission. However, despite the admission of black students, none of them graduated in the first seven years of the school's history. Key abolitionist such as Arthur and Lewis Tappan supported the school. If there was a failure to graduate black students, these key abolitionists would have become discouraged and the abolition movement itself might have been damaged. Thus, George Vashon's graduation was a giant step forward. That success was in part due to the education Vashon obtained under Woodson's instruction. Oberlin graduated 23 blacks before the Civil War, making a significant contribution to the uplift of the Antebellum African American community. Martin Delany was also one of Woodson's students. Woodsn's one teacher school was one of the first to be operated by an African American. As Secretary to the AME Ohio Conference of 1833, Woodson advanced a resolution urging the AME to establish or assist "...common schools, Sunday Schools and temperance societies..." It was the first such resolution to urge the AME denomination to support education. Lewis Woodson filled a key role in the establishment of the Third, or Ohio District, of the AME denomination. The AME Church founded Union Seminary near Columbus, Ohio in 1847.