History as a Core Subject Area of African American Studies

Abstract

This article examines and theorizes the function of African American history as a valuable African American Studies' core subject area by analyzing the scholarship and historical worldviews of a group of influential African American historians. Although they did not formally earn doctorates in history, at various points from the early 1960s until the mid-1980s, Malcolm X, the recently deceased Harold Cruse, Angela Davis, and Lerone Bennett, Jr., helped validate African American history as an essential core subject area of African American Studies. Challenging conventional Eurocentric notions of what the historian and history constitutes in U.S. academic culture, this article demonstrates (a) how Malcolm, Cruse, Davis, and Bennett embraced the Afrocentric view of history's function as a pragmatic tool for African American liberation and consciousness building and (b) how they provided insightful historical epistemologies, conceptualizations of African American history, and analyses of the African American experience.