African American Historiography and the Works of Benjamin Quarles

Abstract

BENJAMIN QUARLES (1904-1996) was professor of history at the historically black Morgan State University, from 1953 to 1981. During those years he quietly declined several invitations to positions at frontline research universities. These decisions represented neither the accommodation to segregation of Booker T. Washington, nor the Marxist PanAfricanism of W. E. B. Du Bois, for he rejected both postures, just as he rejected the black power separatism of the later 1960s. Notwithstanding his black college affiliation, Quarles' ideological stance formed a bridge between the assimilationist mission of Frederick Douglass in the late nineteenth century and the integration of crusade of the period 1954-64. Unassuming and steadfast, he embodied the antithesis of careerism, and he fostered-for unfathomable private reasons-the common, but mistaken, notion that he was not a historian of large concepts. If we have failed to recognize the metaphysical tide that surges through Quarles' work, it is because his ideology has become part of our collective consciousness and we take many of his presuppositions for granted. Quarles' ideas have become commonplace, mainly due to the success with which he, and others, have championed them. His work was a persistent statement of two themes that are a constant and often overlapping presence throughout all American history, but have their peculiar