Black History Is American History: Teaching African American History in the Twenty-first Century

Abstract

In the spring of 2003,1 received an invitation to the screening of the hbo film Unchained Memories: Readings from the Slave Narratives at the Prince Music Theatre in Philadel phia. The film features black actors reading from the text of the 1930s Works Progress Administration-sponsored Federal Writers' Project interviews with former slaves. At the reception following the screening, I overheard the conversation of a group of professional thirty-something African American women, all of whom seemed stunned by the film. Most remarked that they had no previous knowledge of the Works Progress Administra tion project, and many reported being amazed that slaves could have articulated their life experiences so clearly. Reluctant to enter the conversation as a know-it-all historian, I remained silent until one of the women remarked that she would have to figure out how to get to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., so she might gain access to the narratives herself, to find own history that has been hidden away from us. Hidden? I sputtered in response. No, it is not hidden. And you don't have to go to Washington, D.C. You can go to a library and ask for all or part of George Rawick's many volumes of The American Slave\1 My spirited outburst sparked a spontaneous, lengthy teach-in session that left me feeling socially inept and intellectually frustrated. How was it, I wondered as I boarded the train home, that in 2003, a group of college-educated, professional black women were so unaware of the tremendous body of work, researched and written by hundreds of scholars, about slavery or African American history and culture in general? Equally per plexing, why did some of the women in question, with computers and knowledge of the World Wide Web, continue to hold the rather dated belief that our history was hid den and inaccessible? And, just as troubling, if middle-class and rising black women did