African American Experience Historiography 2018

African American Experience

1. "Perhaps in the future, there will be some African
history to teach. But, at present there is none: there
is only the history of the Europeans in Africa. The rest
is darkness… and darkness is not a subject of history.“
-Hugh Trevor-Roper, 1933
African American Historiography
“Black History is engaged . . .to emphasize the discipline’s stress
on the indispensability of the historical perspective in
understanding social and human reality.”
“Sankofameans ‘to return and recover it.’”
Maulana Ron Karenga, Introduction to Black Studies, p. 77

2. I. African American Historiography
A. White Nationalist Historiography
1. John Ernest, Liberation Historiography
2.Characteristics
B. The Professionalization of American Historical Writing
C. Origins of African-American Historical Writing
D. Black Reconstruction and American Historical Writing
E. Revisionism
F. The Seminal Role of Carter G. Woodson
G. Other Efforts
H. The Battle over Black History in the 1960s and 1970s
I. African-American Historical Writing Today

3. Key Persons and Terms
David Walker, Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World
(1829)
William Dunning School = John W. Burgess, Walter
Fleming, James Ford Rhodes
“Negro History Movement”
American Negro Academy Occasional Papers, vols 1-22
(1897-1924)
Earl E. Thorpe: “The Central Theme of Black History is
the quest of Afro-Americans for Freedom, Equality and
Manhood.” –Thorpe, Black Historians: A Critique(1971)

4. Historiography: the study of the writing of
History; the methodology and principles of
history; a chronological analysis of the historical
writing in a specific field.

5. African American Historiography
Key Points
•African-American History IS American History
•African-American History was excluded from American
History
•African-Americans have had to agitate, lobby, picket,
boycott, and literally raise Hell to have their history
(contributions and participation) included in American
history!

6. Three Key Events That Have
Influenced the Study and Writing of
African-American History
•Slavery (1660s-1865)
•Reconstruction (1863-1877)
•Civil Rights Movement (?-1968)

7. Pero Dagbovie
Michigan State University
John Ernest
University of Delaware

8. “White Nationalist Historiography”
•A white supremacist ideology that is fundamental to white Western
life and thought and to its political and social practice.
•According to its terms, one has an agreement to misinterpret the
world, to learn to see the world wrongly, but with the assurance that
this set of mistaken perceptions will be validated by white epistemic
authority, whether religious or secular.
•An epistemology of ignorance—producing the ironic outcome that
whites will be unable to understand the world they themselves have
made.
•The epistemology of ignorance is not simply an effect of incomplete
knowledge or of other gaps in the archive; it is, in fact, the purpose of
a historical misunderstanding shaped by and devoted to white
supremacist ideology.
John Ernest, Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the
Challenge of History, 1794-1861(2004), pp. 4-5.

9. Four Major Periods in the Writing of African-American History
1.Period of Paternalism (1890s-1920s)
Dominated by Dunning School –openly racist
2. Period of Transition (1920s-1950s)
Revisionism -a search for a usable past by DuBois, Franklin,
Woodson and others
3. Period of Maturation (1950s and 1960s)
Egalitarian period influenced by the Civil Rights Movement,
includes new revisions of the interpretations of slavery and
Reconstruction
4. Period of Accommodation (1970s to the present)
Recognition of African-American subculture, nationalist and
afrocentric interpretations of the African-American
experience

12. James W. C. Pennington, The
Origin and History of the
Colored People(1841)
Rev. James T. Holly (1829-1911)
VINDICATIONISTS

13. George Washington Williams,
History of the Negro Race from
1619 to 1880(1882) in two
volumes
First comprehensive book on the
history of African Americans.

14. William A. DunningJohn W. Burgess
“The Dunning School” –Reconstruction
Historians, Columbia University
Characteristics of the “Tragic Era” Interpretation
1.Vindictive Northern Congressman tried to punish the South by imposing
negro suffrage and negro misrule on the good white people of the South.
2.“Carpetbaggers” and “scalawags” joined with “ignorant negroes” to misrule
and overtax the good white people of the South.
3. negrophobia
Walter L. Fleming

15. “The claim that there is nothing in the color of skin from the point of view of
political ethics is a great sophism. A black skin means membership in a
race of men which has never of itself succeeded in subjecting
passion to reason, has never therefore created any civilization of
any kind. To put such a race of men in possession of a state government in a
system of federal government is to trust them with the development of political
and legal civilization upon the most important subjects of human life, and to
do this in communities with a large white population is simply to establish
barbarismin power over civilization.”(John W. Burgess, Reconstruction
and the Constitution, p. viii, 1906)
“. . . All the forces [in the South] that made for civilization were
dominated by a mass of barbarous freedmen.”(William A.
Dunning, Reconstruction, Political and Economic,1865-1877,p.
212, 1907)

16. The Facts of Reconstruction
1.Address the status of 4 million formerly
enslaved people.
2. Re-admit the South to the United States
3. Rebuild the devastation caused by the war
Results: 13
th
, 14
th
and 15
th
Amendments; Civil
Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875; Force Acts of
1871 and 1872; Freedman’s Bureau

17. W. E. B. DuBois
(1868-1963)
The Suppression of the
Atlantic Slave Trade-
1895
The Philadelphia
Negro-1899
Carter G. Woodson, 1875-1950
ASNLH -1915
Journal of Negro History–1916
Associated Publishers –1921
Negro History Week –1926
“Father of African American History”

19. “In the midst of all these difficulties the negro
governments in the South accomplished much of
positive good. We may recognize three things
which negro rule gave to the South:
1.Democratic government
2.Free public schools
3.New “social legislation”
Source:
W. E. Burghardt DuBois, “Reconstruction and Its
Benefits,” The American Historical Review15 (July
1910): 795.

20. John Roy Lynch, The Facts of Reconstruction (1913)
John Roy Lynch, “Some Historical Errors of James Ford
Rhodes,” Journal of Negro History(May 1917)
“I was there!”
John R. Lynch (1847-1939)
Speaker of the House in the
Mississippi state legislature
Three-term U. S. Congressman
from Mississippi

21. James W. C. Pennington, The Origin and History of the Colored
People(1841)
George Washington Williams, History of the Negro Race from
1619 to 1880 (1882)
John Roy Lynch, The Facts of Reconstruction (1913)
John Roy Lynch, “Some Historical Errors of James Ford
Rhodes,” Journal of Negro History(May 1917)

22. Rayford W.
Logan
Charles H.
Wesley
Benjamin
Quarles
The First African American History Scholars

23. John Hope Franklin
From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African
Americans (12
th
Edition)

24. Cornell University Student Protest, 1969

25. Maulana Ron
Karenga
Founder of
Kwanzaa
Nathan Hare
Chair of the First Black
Studies Department at SFSC
Founder of The Black
Scholar

26. Dr. Molefi K. Asante
Temple University
Dr. Henry Louis Gates
Harvard University

27. Nell Irvin PainterDarlene Clark
Hine
Mary Frances Berry
Leading African-American Women Scholars in the Field

28. Peter Wood,
Black Majority
(1974)
Eric Foner,
Reconstruction: America’s
Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877
(1988)
Revisionists

29. Ulrich Bonn
Phillips
Herbert Aptheker John W.
Blassingame
Kenneth M.
Stampp
Stanley M. Elkins
Interpretations
1. Phillips –“sambo thesis” and the earliest justifications for
slavery
2. Aptheker –in constant rebellion
3. Stampp –“white men in black skins”
4. Elkins –blacks infantilized like Jews in concentration camps
5. Blassingame –no slave typology
6. Fogel and Engerman –slavery beneficial and productive
7. Berlin –time and space must be considered; “Five
Generations”
8. White –the female slave experience ignored