Reflections on the African American experience, social history, and the resurgence of conservatism in American society

Journal of Social History, Mid-Winter, 1995 by Joe W. Trotter

The struggle for a broader U.S. history is deeply rooted in American immigration, ethnic, labor, and women's history, but it is perhaps most apparent in the field of African American history. Even a cursory consideration of the African American experience is instructive, because it highlights the ongoing connection between the struggle for a fuller history and the fight for a more inclusive, just, and democratic society. A brief examination of the African American experience also suggests the need for a more sensitive treatment of the obstacles that its founders faced, the choices that they made, and the histories that they wrote.(1)

Research on the African American experience emerged in the teeth of slavery, the fall of Reconstruction, and the rise of Jim Crow. The earliest writers, the 19th-century pioneers, confronted the expansion and consolidation of human bondage. As the slavery system moved from the tobacco-growing regions of the upper south to the cotton-producing areas of the deep south, the nation moved away from a tenuous commitment to emancipation following the American Revolution to a new commitment to slavery, as a right guaranteed by the constitution and sanctioned by God and nature. Jurists, scholars, and the clergy not only sanctioned the subordination of blacks as slaves, but justified the disfranchisement of all women, the brutal removal of Native Americans from their land, and the military conquest of Mexican territories.

George Bancroft and other early chroniclers of the nation's history explicitly used religious beliefs and moral judgments to guide their narratives. They defined the enslavement of blacks, the disfranchisement of women, and the conquest of Mexicans and Native Americans as the white man's "manifest destiny." As such, early 19th-century historians excused social injustice and crafted a narrow white male nationalist history of the United States. As George Bancroft put it in his multivolume History of the United States, "Go forth, then, language of Milton and Hampden, language of my country, take possession of the North American continent! Gladden waste places with every tone that has been rightly struck on the English lyre, with every English word that has been spoken well for liberty and for man!"(2)

Understandably, the obstacles to writing and making African American history during the antebellum era might well have caused despair. Yet, a small number of black writers - Robert Benjamin Lewis, William Cooper Nell, James C. Pennington, and Martin R. Delaney among others - rose to the occasion and produced seminal works on the black experience. Much like their white counterparts, these scholars wrote narrative rather than analytical works and emphasized the hand of God in human affairs, but unlike their white counterparts they discerned a divine hand that liberated rather than enslaved African peoples. In his Light and Truth: Collected from the Bible and Ancient and Modern History (1836, 1844), R. B. Lewis hoped to advance "correct knowledge" of both "Colored and Indian people," so that "oppressors shall not consider it an indispensable duty to trample upon the weak and defenseless."(3) J. C. Pennington was even more direct, "God is not only the all-glorious author . . . of the black man's mind as well as of that of the white man. . . . but he has produced it in the same way identically."(4) In short, despite the force of antebellum slavery and its intellectual, religious, and cultural rationales, African Americans produced an alternative history that reinforced their own humanity.

The Civil War and the emancipation years opened a new chapter in African American history. To many, a fuller and more inclusive society and history seemed imminent. Passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the constitution brought African Americans into the body politic as citizens, who theoretically shared the same rights and obligations as white Americans. Yet within less than two generations, African Americans faced the onset of a new white supremacist regime, which instituted a plethora of legal and extralegal measures which deprived them of their citizenship rights and reinforced their subordinate position not only within southern agriculture, but within the expanding urban industrial economy as well. Lynchings, disfranchisement, segregation, and racist portraits in popular and scholarly books and journals, all proceeded apace. Historian Rayford Logan described this period as "the nadir" in African American life.(5)

At the same time, a second generation of American historians announced the arrival of a new, more scientific, and professional history. These scholars denounced the old narrative, moral, and religious approaches to American history as the work of romantics, often ministers and especially philosophers whose work they believed distorted reality by idealizing and spiritualizing life. As John Higham noted three decades ago, "the early professional historians dreaded most an entangling alliance with philosophy."(6) Still, the new so-called scientific history left intact the earlier portrait of blacks as inferior, but substituted so-called scientific or factual data for biblical or other forms of impressionistic evidence. Unfortunately, the subsequent rise of the so-called progressive historians with their relativistic emphasis in historical scholarship did little to loosen the grip of the racist paradigm in scholarship on the African American experience. As the southern historian U. B. Phillips put it during the early 20th century, African Americans were innately inferior peoples whose documents of their own past were biased, unreliable, and invalid accounts which should be ignored by professional historians.(7)