As February draws to a close and schools, communities and politicians across the country wrap up their commemorations of Black History Month, they will be remiss if they don't discuss the coal fields of Fayette County, W. Va.

There, in the 1890s, a teenage African American named Carter Woodson followed his brothers into the coal mines to serve what he called his life's "six-year apprenticeship." In the evenings, the young Woodson would gather with other black coal miners, read the newspapers and listen to their extraordinary stories of life underground and their struggles during the Civil War and Reconstruction.

The daily history lessons of these African Americans in Appalachia were not lost on Mr. Woodson, who went on to become the founder of Black History Month and one of our country's most celebrated historians. He later wrote that his "interest in penetrating the past of my people was deepened and intensified" during his talks with the coal miners of Fayette County.

Mr. Woodson was born in Virginia, the son of former slaves, and his father moved the family to Huntington, W.Va., when he learned that the community was building a high school for blacks, which were hard to come by further south. Mr. Woodson earned his diploma in two years and, after teaching for a while, was appointed principal of his high school. Before long, he moved on to earn a degree at Berea College, which had been founded in the hills of eastern Kentucky by abolitionists in 1855, followed by a stint at the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in history at Harvard University.

It is not widely known that West Virginia again played a prominent role in Mr. Woodson's career in 1920, when the young professor lost his job at Howard University and became a dean at the West Virginia Collegiate Institute. While he was there, Mr. Woodson received a substantial grant from the Car- negie Foundation that allowed him to return to Washington, D.C., and set his Association for the Study of Negro Life and History on a course to world acclaim.

Mr. Woodson's and Black History Month's largely overlooked origins in West Virginia are not the only casualty in our selective memory of Appalachian and American history.

Nearly a century after Mr. Woodson had worked in the coal mines of Fayette County, a new type of mining was introduced there in 1970. The first mountaintop removal operation was launched on Cannelton Hollow in an area once called Bullpush Mountain. Thirty-eight years later, mountaintop removal -- which involves blowing up mountains and dumping the waste into waterways and valleys in order to cheaply remove coal -- have destroyed more 450 mountains and neighboring communities, displacing miners and strip mining the cultural landscape of Appalachia.

In a speech at Hampton Institute in Virginia, Mr. Woodson once reminded the audience: "We have a wonderful history behind us ... If you are unable to demonstrate to the world that you have this record, the world will say to you, 'You are not worthy to enjoy the blessings of democracy or anything else.' They will say to you, 'Who are you anyway?' "

Appalachians understand this bitter historical reality more than any other citizens in the United States. Black Appalachians, especially.

Last year, I was supposed to speak at a Chicago school during Black History Month. But the organizer called me at the last moment and asked to reschedule until April because a book I had written about "those people down there" ("The United States of Appalachia") didn't relate to Black History Month.

But Black History Month was launched by an Appalachian coal miner, I told my host. Booker T. Washington, the most celebrated black spokesman of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, also emerged out of the coal mining communities of Appalachia. Martin Delany, the first black nationalist of the 19th century, who had helped to launch Frederick Douglass' first newspaper, came out of West Virginia. So did Henry Louis Gates, the prominent present-day African-American literary critic at Harvard University.

And did you know that the United Mine Workers have always been integrated? Coal miners and coal-mining communities in Appalachia and around the country should be celebrated during Black History Month, not dismissed or forgotten.

"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting," author Milan Kundera wrote about his native Czech Republic. He added in an interview with American novelist Philip Roth, "Forgetting is a form of death ever present within life."

There is a lot of "forgetting" and death taking place in our nation's memory about Appalachia today.

Carter Woodson, who was mocked when he first arrived in Washington, D.C., for his "hayseed clothes," never forgot the importance of his origins.

Let us hope that brave men and women today will act to preserve Mr. Woodson's and Appalachia's great heritage before it is strip mined into oblivion.