Since the origins of the field in the late 19th century, historians
and intellectuals have offered various answers to the question: "what is
African-American history?" Some have seen it as an extension or corollary
to American history, some have stressed the influence of Africa on
African-American history and still others have viewed African-American history
as vital to black liberation and power.
Late 19th Century
An Ohio lawyer and minister, George Washington Williams, published
the first serious work of African-American history in 1882. His work, History
of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880, began with the arrival of the
first slaves in the North American colonies and concentrated on the major
events in American history that involved or affected African Americans.
Washington, in his "Note" to volume two of his opus, said that his
purpose was to "to lift the Negro race to its pedestal in American
history" as well as "to instruct the present, inform the
future."
During this period of history, most African Americans, like Frederick Douglass stressed their identities as Americans and did not look to
Africa as a source of history and culture, according to historian Nell Irvin
Painter. This was true of historians like Washington as well, but during the
early decades of the 20th century and especially during the Harlem Renaissance,
African Americans, including historians, began to celebrate Africa's history as
their own.
The Harlem Renaissance, or The New Negro Movement
W.E.B. Du Bois was the foremost African-American historian during
this period. In works like The Souls of Black Folk, he stressed
African-American history as the confluence of three different cultures:
African, American and African-American. Du Bois's historical works, such as The
Negro (1915), began the history of African Americans in Africa.
One of Du Bois's contemporaries, historian Carter G. Woodson,
created the forerunner of today's Black History Month--Negro History Week--in
1926. While Woodson felt that Negro History Week should emphasize the influence
of African Americans on American history, he, too, in his historical works
looked back to Africa. A professor at Howard University between 1922 and 1959,
William Leo Hansberry, developed this trend even further: he conceptualized
African-American history as the experience of the African diaspora.
During the Harlem Renaissance, artists, poets, novelists and
musicians also looked toward Africa as a source of history and culture. For
instance, artist Aaron Douglas regularly used African themes in his paintings
and murals.
Black Liberation and African-American History
In the 1960s and 1970s, activists and intellectuals, like Malcolm
X, saw African-American history as an essential component of black liberation
and power. In a 1962 speech, Malcolm explained: "The thing that has made
the so-called Negro in America fail, more than any other thing, is your, my,
lack of knowledge concerning history. We know less about history than anything
else." As Pero Dagbovie argues in African American History Reconsidered,
many black intellectuals and scholars, such as Harold Cruse, Sterling Stuckey
and Vincent Harding, agreed with Malcolm that African Americans needed to
understand their past in order to seize the future.
Post-Sixties Era
White academia finally accepted African-American history in the
1960s, and it was during that decade that many universities and colleges began
to offer classes and programs in African-American studies and history. The
field exploded, and American history textbooks began to incorporate
African-American history (as well as women's and Native American history) into
their standard narratives.
As a sign of the increasing visibility and importance of the field
of African-American history, President Gerald Ford declared February to be
"Black History Month" in 1974. Since then, both black and white
historians have built on the work of earlier African-American historians,
exploring the influence of Africa on the lives of African Americans, creating
the field of black women's history and revealing the myriad ways in which the
story of the United States is the story of race relations.
History in general has expanded to include the working class,
women, Native Americans and Latino Americans in addition to the experiences of
African Americans. Some historians concentrate solely on telling the history of
the human impact on the environment or the history of labor. All of these
histories have become intertwined in today's U.S. history textbooks.
African-American history, as practiced today, is interconnected
with all of these other sub-fields in U.S. history. Many of today's historians
would probably agree with Du Bois's inclusive definition of African-American
history as the interaction among African, American and African-American peoples
and cultures.
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