Afterword: Black Migrations and Urban Realities

Abstract

BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 81, NO. 2 | 29 28 | BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 81, NO. 2 81 81 No.2 No.2 30 | BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 81, NO. 2 81 No.2 AFTERWORD: BLACK MIGRATIONS AND URBAN REALITIES By Greg Wiggan Through the enduring influence of Mary McLeod Bethune, educator and philanthropist, Carter G. Woodson founded the Black History Bulletin (BHB) in 1937, which makes it one of the oldest Black history journals in the United States. Born in New Canton, Virginia, in 1875, also the year of Bethune’s birth in Mayesville, South Carolina, Carter G. Woodson was the first and only African American of slave parentage to earn a doctorate in history.1 It is important to note that one year before Woodson’s birth (in 1874), Patrick Francis Healy, who was of mixed parentage with a Black slave mother (mulatto) (Mary Eliza) and White Irish father (Michael Healy), became the first Black president of a university in North America, Georgetown University (1874–1882). Because Healy could pass as White, his father sent him to study in Europe at the University of Louvain, Belgium, where he earned his doctorate in philosophy in 1865.2 Upon returning to the US, he later taught at and became twenty-ninth president of Georgetown University. Although Healy probably avoided being associated with Blackness because of racial stigma, the fact that he was racially mixed points to the privilege of “White” as a social construction. Also, one year after Woodson’s birth, in 1876, Edward Alexander Bouchet graduated from Yale University with a PhD in physics, making him the first African American to receive a doctorate from an American university.3 In honor of the eightyfirst volume of the BHB and the 104th year of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, both founded by Carter G. Woodson, this volume addresses the central theme of “Black Migrations.” In doing so, the volume is both local and international in scope. It also addresses the newly approved 2017 standards of the National Council for the Social Studies, which will affect all social studies teachers. The eighty-first volume honors the vision and pioneering work of Carter G. Woodson and the development of Black History Week (Negro History Week), which evolved into Black History Month; for these and many other accomplishments, Woodson has been rightfully crowned the “Father of Black History.” In fact, Woodson’s Education of the Negro Prior to 1861,4 though a lesser known work, is still a must read for all educators, as it provides some of the best documentation on Black education before the Civil War. During the time of Woodson, Joel Augustus Rogers also held a commanding audience with his many publications on Black history. Rogers’s books such as 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro, Facts about Ethiopia, and World’s Great Men of Color vols. 1 and 2 were widely read among the global Black population. Together, Woodson and Rogers (and Ida B. Wells, Hubert H. Harrison, W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, etc.) represented a commanding educational force against the global “miseducation” of Black people. International Black Migrations As we usher in the four hundredth year since Africans involuntarily entered North America as slaves in the newly formed colony at James Town, Virginia (1619), there is much to explore in the context of “Black Migrations.” Africans were brought to the Caribbean and enslaved as early as the 1500s. In 1492, with the approval of Pope Alexander VI and funding from King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, Christopher Columbus’s voyages would set in motion global slavery, international Black migrations, and race relations the world had never known. This would prove to have enduring legacies in modern societies (e.g., unemployment, underemployment, school and neighborhood segregation, “White flight,” the prison industrial complex, etc.). On January 8, 2018, Congress passed H.R. 1242, the 400 Years of African American History Commission Act, which is supposed to legally provide support and resources to set up a commission to explore the four hundred years of African Americans being in North America. Although the Commission will end on July 1, 2020, suggesting a rather brief...