Daily Inspiration Quote by Carter G. Woodson

"Let us banish fear" lands like a correction, not a comfort. Woodson, a historian who made a career out of showing how power edits the past, isn’t offering a vague self-help mantra. He’s naming fear as an instrument: cultivated, distributed, and maintained to keep people from asking questions that would rearrange the social order.

The line’s genius is its pronoun and its verb. "Let us" turns courage into a collective project, not a solitary virtue. That matters in Woodson’s world, where institutions (schools, textbooks, public memory) teach not only information but permission: who gets to speak, who gets to lead, who gets to imagine otherwise. "Banish" is stronger than "overcome". It implies fear isn’t an internal flaw; it’s an unwelcome presence that can be expelled. The subtext is practical: fear is teachable, so it’s also unteachable.

Context tightens the message. Woodson wrote and worked in an America that policed Black ambition through violence, law, and humiliation, then rationalized it with pseudo-scholarship. His founding of Negro History Week (the seed of Black History Month) wasn’t merely celebratory; it was counter-propaganda. A people denied a usable past are easier to frighten into obedience, easier to sell a narrowed future.

So the intent isn’t just bravery. It’s intellectual emancipation: drive fear out of the classroom, the ballot box, the workplace, the imagination. Woodson’s quiet imperative carries a historian’s threat to oppression: once fear leaves, the record changes - and so does what people are willing to do.