“A Narrative to the Colored Children in America”: Lelia Amos Pendleton, African American History Textbooks, and Challenging Personhood

Abstract

Challenging the subpersonhood status of the Black race has been a primary purpose for African American historians and educators' writings of African American history (Brown, 2010; Mills, 1998). This writing agenda became more important as literacy rates of young Black children increased as they attended schools in great numbers after emancipation and into the new century. It has been well documented that mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century mainstream academic discourses (as well as popular culture) typically provided problematic constructions about African Americans' civility, morality, and intellectual capacity (Ernest, 2004; Gould, 1996; Hall, 2009; Woodson, 2000). These mainstream academic discourses were a part of an ongoing political that involved indoctrination and an ideological conditioning of African Americans to view themselves as fully human, not of equal worth, or as Charles Mills (1998) proclaimed: 'subpersons. ' Scholars have documented how these ideologies not only prevailed in the academy but were also reinscribed and constructed in primary and secondary school settings through social studies textbooks (Elson, 1964; Foster, 1999). What has been missing in the education literature, however, are thorough historical examinations of how school textbooks written by African American advocates, educators, and historians responded and repudiated the racialization of African Americans.Therefore, this article attends to the absence of relevant research by examining the textbook, A Narrative of the Negro (1971), written by a little-known and under-researched African American female public school teacher and clubwoman-Leila Amos Pendleton. Her work was originally published in 1912 and is used to illustrate how African American educators during the early twentieth century used African American history textbooks to challenge traditional ideas of subpersonhood (Mills, 1998). Mills' notion of revisionist ontology is used to provide a theoretical understanding to how A Narrative of the Negro constructed African American history. This author argues that Pendleton did not simply write an additive or contributionist history (Patterson, 1971). Instead, she challenged the racist definitions of Blackness of the early twentieth century through what Mills (1998) stated as the multidimensional and broad descriptions of the epistemic, and characteristics of humanity. Analyzing Pendleton's textbook showcases how she and other Black educators of the early twentieth century constructed African American history (through text and images) to challenge the subpersonhood status and racial theories about African Americans.The textbook was examined using literary analysis as the primary methodology. This process involved* reading the literature,* noting the themes,* discussing the themes, and* supporting conclusions with examples (Alridge, 2006).A page-by-page reading of the textbook was conducted, noting important elements that carefully identified historical content and themes, including the choice of topics, people, images, and events that represented narrative (Prior, 2003). Then, this author identified chunks of texts and images from A Narrative of the Negro that represented common themes about how African American persons were constructed by grouping words and images into categories. Through this process, coding of the textbooks began based on the three aspects of the theoretical framework, which included focusing on the moral, epistemic, and somatic characteristics of personhood. Last, the themes were compared with the racial theories of mid-nineteenth and early twentieth textbooks. Therefore, the analysis goes beyond simply focusing on the textual representation of African Americans in her textbook. Instead, this process allowed one to understand the document in relation to its milieu or social context (McCulloch, 2004, p. 6). The analysis of Pendleton's textbook, A Narrative of the Negro, examined how she constructed African American history (through text and images) to challenge racial theories and notions of subpersonhood about African Americans. …