Black History Month traces its origins to a Chicago YMCA

The seeds of Black History Month were planted on Chicago's South Side, in a former YMCA known as the Wabash. It was one of the only places Black people could stay in Chicago in the early 1900s, creating a hub of Black intellectuals and new city arrivals during the great migration.

A frequent guest was historian Carter G. Woodson, who was born to former slaves in 1875 in Virginia, and once worked in a coal mine before pursuing academics. He went on to graduate from the University of Chicago, and was the second Black person to earn a PhD from Harvard, after W. E. B. Du Bois.  

"If these walls could talk, the stories that they would say would probably reshape history," urban historian Shermann Thomas told CBS News.