African American Historiography Research Articles

W. E. B. Du Bois’s universal history in Black Folk Then and Now (1939)

Abstract While debates about ‘Eurocentric’ versus ‘Afrocentric’ theories of history have driven previous studies of Du Bois’s writings on ancient Africa, I read his account of African antiquity in Black Folk Then and Now in the context of the moral and educational projects articulated within both Greco-Roman and African American historiography. I pay special attention to conventional ancient views of history that Diodorus expresses in his Bibliotheke, which treats history as a source of morally instructive examples and ‘universal history’ as especially educational because it synthesizes different historical narratives: these concepts of history were broadly influential into the nineteenth century, including among African American writers. An ancient model of universal history allows Du Bois to tell the story of a distinct human community and nevertheless insist on the unity of peoples, a principle which is central to his philosophy of race and of human history writ large.

Grassroots Historians and African American Historiography in Alabama

Grassroots Historians and African American Historiography in Alabama

David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City by Graham Russell Gao Hodges (review)

David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City. By Graham Russell Gao Hodges. (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Pp. 266. Cloth, $30.00.)Reviewed by Scott HancockHistorians of black America have had at best a loose grasp of David Ruggles's significance. There have been no scholarly biographies explicating exactly how and why Ruggles became a seminal figure in American history. This is perhaps in part because during the necessary but eclipsed era of contributionist and triumphal historiography, Ruggles, who died young, appeared to be overshadowed by longer-lived or more unique luminaries like Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth. Over the last few decades, African American historiography largely left behind contributionist histories and biographies.Graham Hodges, though, makes clear that his biography of Ruggles is right in line with that tradition. Hodges's work is a kind of Sankofa - he manages to hark back to that once necessary tradition while simultaneously moving it forward. For instance, he centers abolitionist history - not simply black abolitionist history, but abolitionist history - on David Ruggles. He also places Ruggles within the antebellum hydrotherapy medical movement by describing how Ruggles first sought hydrotherapy for his serious health maladies, and then started his own well-respected hydrotherapy business in the latter years of his abbreviated life. The overarching thrust of the biography is not, however, to tell the story of developments in antebellum American society. The focus stays fixed on David Ruggles, and the image that emerges is of a militantly determined young man who adhered to a core set of principles throughout a life filled with adversity. His commitment, bravery, and activism exerted a powerful influence on black and white Americans. Ruggles answered David Walker's appeal.Growing up on Bean Hill in Norwich, Connecticut, was an important formative experience during what Hodges labels a Revolutionary childhood. The Revolutionary spirit persisted among white and black residents. The chapter on Ruggles's childhood is a well-constructed, if occasionally a bit speculative, argument. Hodges describes Ruggles's father as a blacksmith who commanded respect because blacksmiths in general earned prestige due to the physical demands of their labor, and characterizes Ruggles's mother as a highly regarded cook in the area. His parents' strong work ethic, and the status this earned them, shaped Ruggles early on. In addition to Hodges's reading of that formative setting, however, it is possible that for black men like Ruggles's father, evolving racial ideologies led to jobs that demanded great strength - simultaneously garnering respect and feeding racist perceptions that enabled many whites to think of the black body as fit only for hard physical labor. Though David Ruggles likely did inherit his impressive work ethic from his parents, he may have also learned that his father's blacksmith labor and his mother's work as a cook could carry contrasting meanings in American society - respect from some, derision from others.Nonetheless, Hodges's interpretation is certainly consistent with the man that Ruggles would become. After a brief period in early adulthood when he seemed more committed to fun than activism, in his early twenties Ruggles began to connect with black and white antislavery activists in New York City. Steadily radicalized through personal confrontations with racists, signing on as a traveling agent for the Emancipator newspaper, and vocally criticizing the American Colonization society, Ruggles fairly quickly came to lead and epitomize the younger, more militant black leadership of the 1830s. …

Silences Kept: The Absence of Gender and Sexuality in Black Press Historiography

AbstractApproaches to scholarship on the early 20th century black press has marginalized gender and sexuality in the historiography of black newspapers. Historians of black newspapers published between 1910 and 1945, the peak of black newspapers’ popularity, emphasize the political role of the black press. This image has continued to predominate in African American historiography. Scholars have made very little effort to integrate an analysis of gender and sexuality into the work on black newspapers. Consequently, the persistent focus on the political role of the black press has narrowed the definition of “political” in African American historiography and grossly overlooked the value of understanding the black press through its coverage of gender and sexuality.

Democracy’s New Song

W. E. B. Du Bois’s (1935/1998) Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 is commonly regarded as the foundational text of revisionist African American historiography. But Black Reconstruction did more than correct the historical record, it also interrogated the very limits of historiography—what it can communicate, and what and who its “appropriate” subjects should be. Drawing on Susan Gillman’s concept of race melodrama as the dominant framework for late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century racial thinking, this article posits Black Reconstruction as a race melodrama par excellence, with special emphasis on the text’s strategic invocations of music in emotionally and spiritually charged moments. To this end, it traces Du Bois’s use of song, scenes of singing, librettos, and lyrics as both an affective and de-familiarizing device through which he is able to yoke the former slaves’ messianic/religious experience of freedom and their understanding of democracy.

Africana cultures and policy studies: scholarship and the transformation of public policy

PART I: PUBLIC POLICY FOUNDATIONS AND CULTURE CRITIQUES The Field and Function of African American Studies and Public Policy N.Norment A Law Unto Themselves: Historical Consequences and Cultural Realities from the Neglect of Africana Studies in Policy-Making S.Vaught Framing the Discussion of Racism W.Reed PART II: URBAN CULTURE AND PUBLIC POLICY The Wire: Media Placement and Post-Industrial Landscapes R.Smith & D.Smith Institutionalized Terror: A Social Systems Analysis of Police Brutality Loretta Prater African American Administration of Predominately Black Schools: Segregation or Emancipation in Omaha, NE T.A.Johnson et al. PART III: GENDER AND POLICY CONSTRUCTION Born to Rebel and Born to Excel: Black Religious Intellectuals, Benjamin E. Mays, and the Development of Black Male Leadership Z.Williams America Has the Laws and Material Resources to Ensure Justice for All: Historical Trajectory of Legal Critique and Experiential Voice in Black Women's Political Activism G.Childs The Policy of Dating: The Effect of Romantic Relationships on African American Adolescents K.Phelps et al. Gender and Culture: The Shaping of British Colonial Educational Policy in West Africa T.Jabbaar-Gyambrah PART IV: AFRICAN/AFRICAN DIASPORAN CULTURE, IMMIGRATION, AND POLICY A History of Black Immigrations into the United States and Canada with Culture and Policy Implications B.M'aye et al. Speaking of Africa and Singing of Home: The Trope of Africa in African American Historiography T.Lake

Introduction: Symposium on African American Historiography

Introduction: Symposium on African American Historiography

Re-Imaging and Re-Imagining history: African-American history in hypertext

Will current trends in hypertext and hypermedia technology influence the way we study the past? This essay builds on recent hypertext scholarship and African-American historiography to address this question. As scholars investigate the ramifications of hypertext upon contemporary epistemology, historians of African-American history are exploring how black Americans constructed notions of time, the past and identity. The two fields of study converge on the issue of print culture and its ability to structure knowledge in a linear manner. Current ideas of history continue to privilege printed text over orality, thereby marginalizing oral-based cultures and societies. This has been especially challenging for scholars of African-American history, who study people whose personal histories through the mid-twentieth century were predominantly based on oral tradition. Only when transcribed for readers did these oral narratives assume a measure of authority as documentary evidence. However, the advent of hypertext technology allows acoustical cultures to tell their ‘histories’ alongside those based on print. In the process, a new approach to narrating history has emerged, potentially emancipating us from using terms such as marginal and dominant as numerous stories share the stage of history. The implications of hypertext history, then, is to alter the linear and teleological study of the past by reviving a traditional acoustical approach in which history is the story of ‘a society of conversations in which no one conversation, no one discipline or ideology, dominates that of the other’.

Islam in Black America: Identity, Liberation, and Difference in African-American Islamic Thought. By Edward E. Curtis IV. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. xii, 174 pp. Cloth, $54.50, ISBN 0-7914-5369-3. Paper, $17.95, ISBN 0-7914-5370-7.)

Most early works on African American Islam, even C. Eric Lincoln's The Black Muslims in America (1961) and E. U. Essien-Udom's Black Nationalism (1962), generally dismiss black Muslims as either quasi-religious racial separatists or heretical Muslim cultists. Recent scholarship has sought to correct that prevalent tendency by evaluating African American Islam on its own terms. Toward this end, Edward E. Curtis IV has crafted an impressive slender volume that serves as both a history of religion and a history of ideas that squarely situates Islam within the African American experience. Although he is engaged in an exhaustive investigation of African American Islam in the twentieth century, his book also offers great insights into the evolution of such vital concerns within modern African American historiography as the Great Migration, New Negro militancy, pan-Africanism, black nationalism, and the civil rights and Black Power movements. The introductory chapter of the book succinctly outlines the author's governing assumptions about two distinctive ways of understanding African American Islam. First, instead of treating African American Islam as a religion per se, Curtis argues for a greater consideration of Islam as a religious “tradition” subject to more dynamic interpretations and complex adaptations. Making the semantic distinction between religion and tradition is crucial to the author's main argument. Second, the author examines how the diametrically opposed notions of universalism and particularism have shaped the evolution of modern African American Islamic thought over the last century. Each of five chapters analyzes one prominent black intellectual—Edward W. Blyden, Noble Drew Ali, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and Wallace Deen Muhammad—and how he grappled with Islam as a universal faith for all people, a faith for a specific group of people, or some combination of the two. In his treatment of those five figures, Curtis provides assessments of each thinker's intellectual and religious development that are both fresh and provocative.

African American Historiography and the Works of Benjamin Quarles

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

Up From Exclusion: Black and White Workers, Race, and the State of Labor History

Up From Exclusion: Black and White Workers, Race, and the State of Labor History Eric Arnesen (bio) Over a quarter century ago, historian Herbert Gutman complained with good reason about the “absence of detailed knowledge of the ‘local world’ inhabited by white and Negro workers” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 1 The studies of black urban communities that were proliferating within African-American historiography had relegated black workers to the margins of community development led by black professionals and middle-class activists. Within labor history, an older tradition influenced by industrial relations scholarship emphasized institutional union structures and paid little attention to rank-and-file workers of any race. With the exception of a few studies, black workers remained largely outside the traditional narratives of labor history, entering the picture only as strikebreakers or as a “problem” that white labor had to confront. Writing in 1969, a year after Gutman, James Gross similarly complained that a quarter century’s scholarship on the subject merely “amounted to classifications of the racial practices of organized labor: laissez faire, equalitarian, discriminatory, or those unions excluding Negroes by constitutional provision or bylaws.” What was needed, Gross proposed, were explorations not of “attitudes toward the Negro workers . . . but the ideas and ideals of the Negro worker.” 2 In the ensuing decade, the first flowering of the new labor history revolutionized the study of the American working class, but through the early 1980s, its emphasis lay with skilled artisans, white industrial workers, and immigrant communities. With few exceptions, neither black workers nor race were the focus of attention, and the agenda proposed by Gutman and Gross remained unaddressed. 3 Since the late 1980s, labor historians themselves have grown increasingly critical of their field’s failure to address issues of race. Inspired in part by the writings of the former National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) labor secretary-turned-academic, Herbert Hill, they charge that labor history has a serious “race problem.” Over the years, Hill has offered the strongest academic criticism of the American labor movement’s racial practices and, recently, of the new labor history for its treatment of race and racism. Hill has repeatedly denounced white trade unions as racist [End Page 146] vehicles for excluding black, Asian, and other minority workers. At the same time, he charged labor historians with denying the centrality of race because of their blind devotion to Marxist social theory. 4 Hill’s charges have struck a deep chord. The new labor history, Noel Ignatiev similarly argues, has treated racism as “peripheral to the main line of working-class formation and struggle.” Historians’ search for “the famous ‘usable past’” has led them to “denial, and denial [has] led to apologetics.” 5 If the late 1960s complaints of Gutman and Gross accurately reflected a paucity of scholarship, the same cannot be said of the 1990s charges. The characterizations of labor history’s encounter with race by such writers as Hill, Ignatiev, and David Roediger are, to say the least, overdrawn. There is no denying that the first generation of new labor historians did not put white labor’s racial practices and beliefs or minority workers’ perspectives and strategies at the top of its research agenda. Today, however, these issues are central topics in their own right. Since the mid 1980s, labor historians have begun to engage issues of race in significant ways. The past decade has witnessed a veritable outpouring of new scholarship on trade union racial practices, black and other minority workers’ experiences and activism, and on white working-class racial identity. Far from being the academic backwater it was in the late 1960s, the study of race and labor has become an academic growth industry. “Scholarship on race in American labor history steadily grows in quantity and quality,” concluded Joe Trotter, Jr. and Alan Dawley in a recent special issue of Labor History devoted to race and class. “Every month seems to bring added understanding of the intersections of race and class, racial segmentation of the labor market, and the impact of race on culture and community.” 6 What is striking is not only that the scholarship on race and labor is...

Biography, Race Vindication, and African-American Intellectuals: Introductory Essay

Previous articleNext article No AccessBiography, Race Vindication, and African-American Intellectuals: Introductory EssayV. P. Franklin and Bettye Collier-ThomasV. P. Franklin Search for more articles by this author and Bettye Collier-Thomas Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 81, Number 1-4Winter-Fall 1996Vindicating the Race: Contributions to African-American Intellectual History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/JNHv81n1-4p1 Views: 12Total views on this site Citations: 4Citations are reported from Crossref Journal History This article was published in The Journal of Negro History (1916-2001), which is continued by The Journal of African American History (2002-present). Copyright 1996 The Association for the Study of African American Life and HistoryPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Bettye Collier-Thomas A Life of Research and Writing on the Civil Rights Movement, The Journal of African American History 102, no.33 (Mar 2018): 294–300.https://doi.org/10.5323/jafriamerhist.102.3.0294Pero Gaglo Dagbovie Over Forty Years of “Defending the Race” and Writing Black History, The Journal of African American History 102, no.33 (Mar 2018): 319–340.https://doi.org/10.5323/jafriamerhist.102.3.0319 Justin Behrend FACTS AND MEMORIES: JOHN R. LYNCH AND THE REVISING OF RECONSTRUCTION HISTORY IN THE ERA OF JIM CROW, The Journal of African American History 97, no.44 (Nov 2017): 427–448.https://doi.org/10.5323/jafriamerhist.97.4.0427 V. P. Franklin Introduction: Symposium on African American Historiography, The Journal of African American History 92, no.22 (Nov 2017): 214–217.https://doi.org/10.1086/JAAHv92n2p214

Radical History: Toward Inclusiveness

The news that no reverse Gresham's law operates in Clio's realm will not surprise those who remember that once upon a time the work of U. B. Phillips shut that of Herbert Aptheker out of the academy, as that of Claude Bowers did the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, points made by Jonathan Wiener in reconstructing the dynamic of professional legitimation. It is not enough for historians to be intelligent and hardworking to earn respectful peer consideration - it was certainly not enough for the radical historians discussed here. Wiener's reasonable contention is that what changed the way many historians now understand their discipline were the social and political upheavals generated by the civil rights and antiwar movements. He reiterates the coeval significance of the former, by my count, four times Blacks have shown the role history plays in defining a social movement, proclaims the 1970 Women's Liberation issue of Radical America. Is it then picayune, if not paranoid, of me to be dismayed by the virtual invisibility of African-American historians among Wiener's radicals? I would have thought that the duree in radical historiography of Du Bois's Black Reconstruction deserves more than the ceremonial sentence it receives here, and that Eric Williams's seminal Capitalism and Slavery also deserves citation, even if, arguably, the polemical scholarship of Rayford Logan does not. I would also have anticipated at least an obligatory sentence mentioning the 1971 anatomical study of law and race by Mary Frances Berry and the 1976 bottom-up monograph on black migration by Nell Painter, as well as the 1977 structuralist Reconstruction study by Thomas Holt, works clearly in the spirit of radical revisionism. Their omission has a large and deplorable significance in an essay about the coming-of-age of a school of history that gives flesh and voice to non-elites and, by influence if not by mandate, provides an analytical framework for the empowerment of ordinary men and women. It suggests, whatever the intention of the individual historian, an arrogance of vision, an unconscious proprietariness, vis-a-vis African-American historiography quite analogous to the professional mind-set identified and relentlessly exposed in Edward