|
Books by Wilson
Jeremiah Moses
Golden Age of Black Nationalism,
1850-1925 (1988) /
The Wings of Ethiopia
(1990)
Alexander
Crummell: A Study of Civilization and Discontent
(1992) /
Destiny & Race: Selected Writings, 1840-1898
(1992)
Black
Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary
Manipulations of a Religious Myth (1993)
Liberian Dreams: Back-to-Africa
Narratives from the 1850s
/
Afrotopia: The Roots of African American
Popular History
(2002)
Creative Conflict in African American Thought (2004)
* *
* * *
Books by By Benjamin Quarles
Frederick Douglass
(1948) /
The Negro in the Civil War
(1953) /
The Negro in the American
Revolution (1961)
Lincoln and the Negro
(1962) /
The Negro in the Making of
America (1964) /
Black Abolitionists
(1969)
Allies for Freedom and Blacks on John Brown
(1974) /
Black Mosaic: Essays in
Afro-American History and Historiography (1988)
* * * * *
Historiography and African Americans
Benjamin Quarles'
The Negro In The Making Of America
By Wilson J. Moses
Professor of History,
The Pennsylvania State University
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 front-line research universities. Modest,
steadfast, and unassuming, he embodied the antithesis of
careerism, and it is sometimes easy to forget that he
was 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
presence throughout all American history, but have their
peculiar manifestations in African American history—contributionism
and messianism—two overlapping ideas.
Contributionism, is
concerned with demonstrating that African Americans have
made useful contributions to the arts, sciences, and
economy of the United States.
Messianism refers to the
doctrine that African Americans stand at the center of
the American mission and destiny and that the African
American presence has defined American democracy in ways
that are singularly beneficial to American society and
to the world. Within this context, African Americans
hold an exceptional place in an American missionary
pageant that is itself historically exceptional.1
Some commentators on
black history have expressed the fear that excessive
identification with the latter of these themes could
undermine the credibility of African American
historians.2
Quarles’ career makes that assertion untenable. It
demonstrates, on the contrary, that these two ideas—contributionism
and messianism—represent the dominant and most accepted
conceptualization of African American history. There
are almost no American thinkers, either on the left or
on the right of the political spectrum, who have dared
to question them.3
Regardless of ideological stance, just about everyone
who writes on policy issues, from
Cornell West to
Abigail Thernstrom, becomes a teleological progressive
on the subject of African American history.4
Quarles
self-deprecatingly spoke of himself as “a narrative
rather than a conceptual historian.” This is curious,
since Quarles was by no means insensitive to “the grand
dynamic” of historical forces.5 Quite
the contrary, he viewed history as progressive and
teleological. He endorsed
Robert
Heilbroner’s view,
expressed in
The Future as History, that
Americans are obliged to maintain an optimistic attitude
towards history. In fact, I believe that Quarles went
further than Heilbroner in willingness to assert the
possibility of “a valid projection of the future as
history.”6
Convinced, however, that any projection of the future
must be founded in a solid grasp of the past, he
endorsed the progressivist contentions of
R. G.
Collingwood, “No fact has ever been wholly ascertained,
but a fact may be progressively ascertained.”7
I suppose it would be
fruitful to introduce the question of whether Quarles'
historiography was truly “progressive,” in the sense
that
Richard
Hofstadter used the term, or merely
“whiggish” in the sense defined by
Herbert
Butterfield.8
If by progressive, we mean a historiography dominated by
an emphasis on class struggle, it was not. But if we
mean that Quarles, like
W. E. B. Du Bois, saw
incremental additions to social scientific knowledge as
the means of advancing the American reform tradition,
then Quarles was a progressive historian.9
He accepted the progressive principle that humanity
advanced more or less inevitably insofar as people
possessed the will to replace superstition with
knowledge, and he believed “the New Testament adage
about the truth also making one free.” He asserted that
through the processes of historical scholarship, truth
might be “progressively ascertained.”10
In
That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question”
and the American Historical Profession.
Peter Novick devotes only a few
sentences to Benjamin Quarles, and those are in a
footnote. Novick’s project is to chart the rising and
falling expectations of professional historians in their
attempts at staking out an epistemological “vital
center,” or “transcending relativism,” or “arriving at a
permanent equilibrium in a ‘practical objectivity.’”
Within the context of his stated project, which is,
after all, “the objectivity question,” Novick focuses on
August Meier’s report, based on an interview with
Quarles, that historians at the University of Wisconsin
during the 1930s questioned the ability of African
Americans “to write ‘objectively’ about their own
past.” One must assume that Novick finds the anecdote
interesting, because of his fundamental skepticism
concerning the idea of objectivity, rather than because
of any particular emphasis on the problems that Quarles
encountered in the guild throughout his career.11
Despite the putative
attitudes of professors at Wisconsin,
William B. Hesseltine, Quarles' dissertation director allowed
Quarles to write on, “Frederick Douglass,” supposedly
because the proposed subject, overlapped Hesseltine’s
interest in U. S. Grant. Although there has been at
least one other excellent biography of Douglass, since
Quarles' was published in 1948, the work has stood the
test to time. It is true that present-day scholars lust
for a more probing treatment of
Douglass relationship
with Otillia Assing, the Prussian woman, who remembered
him generously in her will. It is understandable,
however, that Quarles may have felt compelled to treat
the relationship with scrupulous decorum. The several
more studies of Frederick Douglass, must be seen as
complementing that of Quarles’ work, rather than
superseding it.12
There can be no
question that Quarles was dedicated to the goal of
meticulous scholarship, and objectivity. But I think it
would be wrong to think of him as a man whose life was
shaped by his dissertation, or who like a docile
schoolboy devoted the rest of his career to the task of
proving to his mentors that he had met the objectivity
test—long after they were dead. It is interesting, by
the way, to note that quotation marks set off the word
“objectivity,” not only in Novick’s rendition of this
story, but also in the source from which he derived
it—August Meier’s fine 1980 article on Benjamin Quarles
in
Civil War History.
Novick considers the
noble dream of objectivity, unattainable, if sadly so,
and Quarles could hardly have been insensitive to the
problematic issue of truth in history, that Novick and
others before and since have raised. He was
unequivocally committed to writing balanced and
objective history, putting it in
Rankean terms, a
narrative of the past “wie es eigentlich gewesen ist,”
or as it actually was,13
While it is clear that Quarles had additional
objectives, and that he intended to assign to
African-Americans a role of cosmic importance in the
development of American Democracy, he claimed in the
preface to the 1987 edition of
The Negro in the Making of
America, that his goal in writing African
American history was, in fact, to reveal the truth, and
to set the record straight. “Whatever field of history
is being surveyed, to whatever extent we can restore its
lost boundaries and fill in the missing pages, so too we
come to a closer approximation of the true living past.”14
Quarles’ history is
essentially social history, sensitively written,
intelligently conceived, and solidly researched. It is
written in support of ideas found in earlier authors,
that African Americans did not sit passively waiting for
an alleviation of their difficulties, but took a hand in
their own deliverance.15
His work provides the reader much painstaking detail and
steady additions to the fund of data, but with few
astonishments. This data is not accumulated purely for
the aesthetic joys of fleshing out footnotes, however.
In the spirit of
R. G. Collingwood, by his own admission, he believed that the
accumulation of data must lead to truth, and truth must
lead to progress. His work thus embodies the
progressive ideology, articulated by
Comte in the
nineteenth century, and conforms to the absolutist
teleological definition of historicism that
Karl Popper
found unacceptable. It is also possible, however, to see
Quarles historicism within the relativistic and humane
definition that
Karl Mannheim, offered, and as an
unavoidable aspect of the twentieth century
Zeitgeist.16
Quarles assigned to
African-Americans a special place in that
Zeitgeist, a
civilizing mission and contributionist role in the
development of American Democracy. His approach was,
indeed, subtly teleological, and it bore more than a
slight resemblance to the view of
Joseph Washington who
sees the historical and political role of African
Americans as “God’s humanizing agents.”17 Martin Kilson has voiced strenuous opposition to the “view of
the special aura of righteousness accruing to the
oppressed and despised black man.” I think he is
correct in this, but
Kilson sees the problem as peculiar
to black nationalists, while my contention is that the
black messianic myth is common to nationalists and
integrationists alike. For I accept
Mannheim’s idea
that even historians are the products of history.18
While a secular version
of messianism is fundamental to Quarles' work,
manifestations of black nationalism receive very little
attention. He celebrates at length the often
told legend of “Crispus Attucks,” who died in the
Boston
Massacre of March 5, 1770. He is much more selective
when reporting the action of four lesser known black
Bostonians on April 20th, 1773, who petitioned the
legislature asking for their freedom. What Quarles does
not tell us is that the petitioners asked for the right
to set aside a portion of the proceeds of their labors
to purchase their freedom, and return to Africa.19
On the other
hand, Quarles provides a succinct, but poignant
discussion of the resettlement of Africans in
Sierra
Leone in a seminal chapter, of
The Negro in the American
Revolution, “Evacuation With the
British.” The chapter was typical of Quarles work in
terms of its original archival scholarship, but atypical
in its focus on a group of African Americans who chose
to leave the United States.
In
The Black Abolitionists, African repatriation is very sparsely
treated. The roles of
Martin Delany,
Edward Wilmot Blyden,
Augustus Washington and
Alexander Crummell, who
were highly visible spokesmen for emigration during the
late 1850s and early 1860s, are scarcely mentioned.
This is striking, because these figures had begun to
draw the attention of historians like Howard Brotz and
Harold Isaacs by the early sixties, even before the rise
of black nationalism among black college students.20
Crummell and Blyden do not appear in
The Negro in the Making of
America, and while Henry Highland Garnet
is mentioned, it is only as an abolitionist, not as a
founder of the
African Civilization Society. Alexander Crummell is mentioned twelve times in
The Black Abolitionists, without reference to the sixteen
years he spent in Africa between 1853 and 1872.
It is true that the
American Colonization Society sent only an infinitesimal
fraction of the African American population to Liberia.
But certainly numbers are not the only matter of
significance here, as Floyd Miller has demonstrated—not
to mention William and Jane Pease, and the numerous
other scholars who have found the colonization movement
important enough to warrant broader treatment.
Furthermore, as
John Hope Franklin has shown, the
motivations of whites who supported the American
Colonization Society fell into at least three
categories. They were far more varied and nuanced than
Quarles was willing to allow.21
In his unsympathetic
treatment of the Garvey movement Quarles made
observations that were either hyperbolic or untrue, but
he expressed one insight that is of great worth.
Unlike many historians of the Garvey movement, Quarles
did not accept the canard perpetuated by
Edmund David Cronon, that color consciousness and color conflict
within the Garvey movement were simply a matter of
Garvey’s importing Jamaican prejudices that were alien
to the United States. As Quarles accurately observed,
“Garvey well knew that there were color lines within the
color line, that many light-skinned Negroes held
themselves aloof from those who were black and brown, to
whom they felt superior, and he magnified and exploited
the natural resentment of dark Negroes.”
This was accurate, and
fair enough, but it was not true, as Quarles stated that
Garveyism rejected all black intellectuals because “a
goodly percentage of them were light skinned.” As the
excellent work of
Judith Stein has shown, Garveyism did
not reject either light skinned or intellectual
Negroes. The great irony of the Garvey movement as
Stein and others have demonstrated beyond question, is
that Garveyism was essentially a bourgeois movement that
welcomed middle class mulattoes, and other highly
literate persons into its leadership ranks. Garvey’s
most passionate opponent was Robert S. Abbott, who was
anything but a mulatto.22
Quarles wrote as an
American, not as a black national-separatist. My own
biases make me supportive of that agenda. I am not a
nationalist, and I would not have Quarles write as a
nationalist. But I do consider
black nationalism a
phenomenon to be studied as objectively as we would
study any other social or intellectual movement, and
Quarles was not an objective student of black
nationalism. His offense is mitigated greatly, however,
by the purity of his intentions; the exigencies of the
years during which he established his career seemed to
demand an uncompromising Americanism.
During late 1930s and
early 1940s, when
Senator Theodore G. Bilbo attempted to
revitalize the deportation movement of the 1800s, he
appropriated ammunition wherever he could find it,
whether it came from Communist Party documents or from Garveyite propaganda. Quarles, and others of his
generation, were reluctant to put anything into print
that might be adapted to the needs of Bilbo and his
ideological bedfellows. The necessity of an
uncompromising Americanism seemed even more urgent
during the Second World War.23
“The black
academician,” wrote Quarles, years after the departure
of
Senator Bilbo, “holds that his forbears helped to
build America, and this being the case no one should
sensibly expect him to pack his belongings and leave for
other shores.” Quarles agenda was contributionist; it
was to demonstrate, not only the Americanism of black
Americans, but to show how this Americanism had made
them useful and valuable citizens. The seminal book in
this contributionist tradition was, of course,
The
Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America,
by W. E. B. Du Bois. The similarity between the
sub-title of Du Bois’s book and the title of Quarles'
cannot be mere coincidence.24
Like any other
historian Quarles could make puzzling statements, such
as the assertion that “[Carter]
Woodson and his
black-oriented contemporaries could hardly have been
fully aware of the extent of racism in America, a topic
which has only recently been given the type of probing
scrutiny found, for example in
Winthrop Jordan. . . .”
Was this heavy handed irony? It is inconceivable to me
that Quarles could actually have meant anything so
bizarre.25
Another statement, painfully ironic in retrospect, that
should have been removed from the 1987 edition of
The Negro in the Making of
America had to do with the
Nixon Presidency. Quarles quoted Time magazine’s
assertion, “The race dilemma will be the President’s
toughest problem.” So much for the ability of
historians or journalists to predict the future, and so
much for overstatements of the centrality of the African
American experience to American history.26
Quarles did, in fact,
view history in terms of grand conceptual schemes. If
we fail to recognize this it is only a matter of missing
the forest for the trees. His views are part of the
main current of contributionism in African American
history, a tradition that was established by
W. E. B. Du
Bois in
The Gift of Black Folk, and popularized
by Martin Luther King, who invoked the name of the
twentieth century’s most flamboyant theoretical
historian,
Arnold J. Toynbee. A figure whom
Orlando
Patterson dismisses as a monumental failure.
|
This is a
great hour for the Negro. The challenge is
here. To become the instruments of a great
idea is a privilege that history gives only
occasionally. Arnold Toynbee says in
A
Study of History that it may be the
Negro who will give the new spiritual
dynamic to Western civilization that it so
desperately needs to survive.27 |
Quarles never expressed
himself with quite this degree of flamboyance, but the
underlying ideas that King voiced are always present in
the background of Quarles' writing. For example, in
the preface to the 1969 edition of
The Negro in the Making of
America he said, “Afro-American history is
increasingly viewed as a lesson-bearing component of the
current global struggle for human rights. Thus it would
not be wide of the mark to say that the story of the
Negro in America has had some effect in enlarging our
social awareness, if not also stirring our social
conscience.”
Such statements should
lead us to chew more thoughtfully on the assumption that
Quarles was harried throughout his career by the need to
demonstrate his capacity for “objectivity.” We may
certainly feel free to give greater credence to the idea
that Quarles was indeed a “conceptual historian.”
Notes
1The
bibliography on American messianism and exceptionalism
is immense. For example, see: Ernest L. Tuveson,
Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); Winthrop
S. Hudson, ed.,
Nationalism and Religion in America:
Concepts of American Identity and Mission (New York:
Harper and Row, 1970). Hans Kohn,
American
Nationalism: An Interpretive Essay (New York:
Collier, 1961); Frederick Merk,
Manifest Destiny and
Mission in American History (New York: Vintage
Books, 1963); Martin Marty, Righteous Empire (New
York: Dial Press, 1970);
Cushing Strout, The New
Heavens and the New Earth (New York: Harper & Row,
1974); Conrad Cherry, ed.,
God’s New Israel:
Religious Interpretations of American Destiny
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971). H.
Richard Niebuhr,
The Kingdom of God in America
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1937).
For a probing analysis
of “contributionism” in African American history see
Orlando Patterson, “Rethinking Black History,”
Harvard Educational Review, 41 (August, 1971), pp.
297-315. For a somewhat sardonic critique of the
messianic tradition, see Wilson J. Moses,
Black
Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary
Manipulations of a Religious Myth (University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982; 2nd ed.,
1992). For a treatment of progressive themes in
African-American thought, especially in relation to
George Bancroft, see Leonard I. Sweet, Black Images
of America, 1784-1870 (New York, Norton, 1976).
2See
Orlando Patterson, “Rethinking Black History,” p. 304.
It is interesting to note that in his discussion of contributionism, Patterson makes no mention of Benjamin
Quarles, who was, at the time, the most striking example
of African American history in the messianic-contributionist
mold. And yet, ironically, Patterson says that most
recent adherents of the contributionist view “either
play down the American contributions (which is to say
that they do not recognize the achievements of Blacks in
American music and art) or, more aggressively, by
adopting a “sinking ship” view of America, consider all
discussions of contributions to it either irrelevant or
insignificant.” Patterson’s statement is puzzling in
light of evidence to the contrary in standard textbooks
in print at the time, such as Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American
Revolution (New York:
Collier-Macmillan, 1964)
John Hope Franklin
From
Slavery to Freedom (New York: Vintage, 1969), and
Lerone Bennett,
Before the Mayflower, (New York:
Penguin, 1964).
3Robert
L. Harris, Jr. called for a departure from the messianic
mode in his level-headed and incisive article, “Coming
of Age: The Transformation of Afro-American
Historiography,”
Journal of Negro History
(Summer, 1982), pp. 107-121. Nonetheless, African
American historians of all ideological persuasions have
continued to write in the messianic mode since
publication of Harris’s article. A dominant theme in
the writings of Afrocentrist
Molefi Kete Asante is an
African contribution to “human transcendence.” He notes
that “All the world is addicted to the music of ‘popular
dance.’ This is the major African contribution to the
directed energies of the world.” See Asante,
The
Afrocentric Idea (Philadelphia: Temple, 1987), p.
192.
The Marxist,
Abdul Alkalimat foresees and rejoices at the coming of a
Marxist millennium with black people in the vanguard,
in
Introduction to Afro-American Studies: A People’s
College Primer (Chicago: Twenty First Century Books
and Publications, 1986), pp. 345-51. More recently
James Oliver Horton writes in this mode as he foresees a
day when African Americans will have taken the
leadership in throwing off “the historic burden of race
and sex and moved all Americans closer to genuine human
equality.” See Horton,
Free People of Color: Inside
the African American Community (Washington, D.C: The
Smithsonian Institution, 1993), p. 120.
4As
a “post-Marxist,”
Cornell West, is suspicious of
teleologies, including Marxist teleology, although he
demonstrates some faith in the teleological approach in
“The Historicist Turn in Philosophy of Religion” in
Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America (New
York: Routledge, 1993), p. 132. Exceedingly cavalier in
his use of the term “progressive,” West repeatedly
identifies himself with “progressivism.” See West,
Race Matters (Boston: Beacon, 1993), especially
chapters 4 and 5.
Abigail Thernstrom and
Stephen Thernstsrom,
America in Black and White: One Nation
Indivisible, argue that the pattern of black
progress over the past forty years demonstrates a tide
in the improvement of African American status and
American race relations that obviates the need for
affirmative action.
Orlando Patterson
endorses the Thernstrom teleology in the New York
Times, repr. International Herald Tribune Nov
20, 1997, “their [the Thernstrom’s] basic premise is
correct. Relations between the races are getting
better.” William Julius Wilson argued a similar secular
teleology twenty years ago in his
The Declining
Significance of Race (1978, 2nd ed. Univ. of Chicago
Press, 1980). In fairness to Patterson, Thernstrom, and
Wilson, while they envision a trend in which racism is
on the decline, they do not discount the need for
reforms in public policy (especially education) to
improve opportunities for the black lower classes.
5Quarles
is quoted by August Meier in “Benjamin Quarles and the
Historiography of Black America,” Civil War History
Vol. XXVI, No. 2. (1980), p. 113. Quarles borrows
Heilbroner’s phrase, “grand dynamic” in Quarles “Black
History Unbound” from Daedalus, 1974 reprinted in
Black Mosaic: Essays in the History and
Historiography of Black America (University of
Massachusetts Press, 1988), p. 201.
6Ibid.,
Quarles says, “A valid projection of the future as
history, for all its importance, requires a fresh look
at the past as history.”
7Robert
Heilbroner, in
The Future as History (New York:
Harper and Row, 1960) rejected the idea of the
inevitably of progress, but maintained that the West
“must preserve from the ruthless onslaught of history’s
forces the integrity of the idea of progress itself.” p.
208.
R. G. Collingwood,
Essays in the Philosophy of
History. In insisting on the necessity of the West
defending and maintaining its idea of progress,
Heilbroner foreshadowed a position later taken by
conservative historian
Robert Nisbet in
History of
the Idea of Progress (New York: Basic Books, 1970).
8Richard
Hofstadter in
The Progressive Historians: Turner,
Beard, Parrington (New York: Vintage Books, 1970),
p. xii, defines progressive historians as those who
“took their cues from the intellectual ferment of the
period from 1890 to 1915, from the demands for reform
raised by the Populists and Progressives.”
Herbert
Butterfield,
The Whig Interpretation of History
(New York: Norton, 1965).
Charles Beard’s progressivism
consists not in his flawed, but not entirely
wrong-headed,
An Economic Interpretation of the
Constitution, but rather in his
Comtean view of
progress, in his belief that history has movement, and
that “conceivably it might be better to be wrecked on an
express train bound to a destination than to moulder in
a freight car sidetracked in a well-fenced lumber
yard.”
See
Charles
A. Beard
and
Mary R. Beard,
The Rise of American Civilization
(New York: Macmillan, 1934), p. xv. While the
Beards are frequently viewed as having set out to attack
Bancroft, which, indeed, they do. The Beard’s
historicism was, however, and in its own way, no less
teleological, and no less committed to the idea that the
expansion of democracy was one of the identifying
features of progress and civilization American Spirit,
pp. 161-70, 580-582.
9The
height of Du Bois’s commitment to
Comtean
progressivism was during the years when he developed the methodology
of the
Atlanta University Studies. He describes
his goals in these studies in terms that epitomize
scientific progressivism, “I regarded it as axiomatic
that the world wanted to learn the truth and if the
truth was sought with even approximate accuracy and
painstaking devotion, the world would gladly support the
effort.” Du Bois,
Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an
Autobiography of a Race Concept (New York; Harcourt,
Brace, and World, 1940), p. 68. On Du Bois and
“scientism” see Vernon J. Williams, Jr.
From a Caste
to a Minority (Westport: Greenwood, 1989), pp.
26-29.
10Quarles,
“Black History Unbound,” in
Black Mosaic, 201;
“Black History’s Diversified Clientele,” in Africa and
the Afro-American Experience: Eight Essays
(Washington: Howard University Press, 1977), reprinted
in
Black Mosaic, p. 207
11Peter
Novick,
That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question”
and the American Historical Profession. (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 232.
12August Meier, “Benjamin Quarles,” p. 102. Benjamin Quarles,
Frederick Douglass
(Washington: Associated
Publishers, 1948), p. 338.
James McPherson in the
introduction to the reprint of this volume (Atheneum
1968) credits Quarles with exceptionally good treatment
of “the two white women (Julia Griffiths and
Helen
Pitts, who became his second wife) who played important
roles in his [Douglass’] life.” Drawing on the
unpublished work of Terry H. Pickett, as well as
Pickett’s “The Friendship of Frederick Douglass with the
German Ottilie David Assing and Rosa Ludmilla Assing,”
Georgia Historical Quarterly, 73 (Spring, 1989),
and on Douglass correspondence McFeely has developed the
Assing relationship somewhat more spicily in McFeely,
Frederick Douglass ((New York: Norton, 1991).
William Mc
Feely’s
biography is the most comprehensive study of Frederick
Douglass, to date. Also noteworthy is
Martin, Waldo E.,
Jr.
The Mind of Frederick Douglass. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984, which
like Quarles’ earlier treatment endows Douglass with
“symbolic and inspirational vitality [that] appealed to
all Americans,” p. 277. Also see Martin, pp. 281-84.
Henry Louis Gates provides excellent notes to the
Library of America edition of
Frederick Douglass,
Autobiographies (New York: Literary Classics of the
United States, 1994). Interestingly, Gates is less
cautious than Quarles in attributing white paternity to
Douglass (Gates, p. 1049).
Quarles says, “That
Douglass’ father was a white man is inferential from
such inconclusive evidence as a contrast of the ‘deep
black’ complexion of the mother and the brown hue of her
son.” p. 2. David Blight,
Frederick Douglass’ Civil
War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee is another recent work
of scholarship which stresses black American identity in
the creation of American national consciousness.
Nathan
Huggins’
Slave and Citizen: The Life of Frederick
Douglass (Boston: Little Brown, 1980) is a concise
biography, without footnotes, but very serviceable for
high school and undergraduate teaching.
13For
the influence of Ranke, see
Georg G. Iggers “The Image
of Ranke in American and German Historical Thought,”
History and Theory 2 (1962), pp. 17-40.
14Quarles,
The Negro in the Making of
America
(New York:
Collier-Macmillan, 1964); Revised edition (Macmillan,
1969); reprinted with a new preface and a new
introduction by V. P. Franklin (New York: Touchstone
Books, 1996).
15See,
for example,
Herbert Aptheker,
Essays in the History
of the American Negro (New York: International
Publishers, 1945, 1964). The chapters of this volume
were originally published as four pamphlets between 1938
and 1945. Three of the chapters handled themes that
Quarles later developed as more detailed books: The
participation of black people in the American
Revolution, in the abolitionist movement, and in the
Civil War. Aptheker spoke highly of the work of Quarles
in the preface to the 1964 edition.
16Mannheim
says “Historicism is the real bearer of our world-view,
a principle that, not only with invisible hand the total
intellectual-science-work organizes, but also the
everyday life permeates.” See
Karl Mannheim,
Wissensoziologie: Auswahl aus dem Werk, eingeleitet
und herausgegeben von Kurt H. Wolff (Berlin: Hermann
Luchterhand Verlag, 1964), p. 246. The present
translation is by Wilson J. Moses.
Karl Popper defined
historicism as “the belief in historical destiny,” which
is “sheer superstition.” In his view Mannheim not only
described historicism, but participated in it, for which
Popper attacked him. See
Karl Popper,
The Poverty
of Historicism (London: Cos & Wyman, Ltd., 1957), p.
67.
Bertrand Russell in
A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1965), p. 364 sees an underlying historicism,
derived from Jewish teleological patterns in Marxist and
Nazi historicism. It seems clear that the distinction
drawn by Comte, between the religious, the metaphysical,
and the “positivist” cannot always be neatly perceived.
J. B. Bury raises some objections to Comte in
The
Idea of Progress, also see Charles and Mary Beard,
The American Spirit: The Idea of Civilization in the
United States (1942; repr. New York: Collier Books,
1962).
17Joseph
Washington,
The Politics of God (Boston: Beacon,
1969), pp. 153-177.
18Martin
Kilson’s views are recorded in
Black Studies in the
University: A Symposium (New Haven: Yale Univ.
Press, 1969; repr. New: York, Bantam Books, 1969), pp.
14-15. Kilson sees the problem as peculiar to black
nationalists, but my contention is that the black
messianic myth is common to nationalists and
integrationists alike. See Moses,
Black
Messiahs and Uncle Toms, p. xiii, 1-16.
19The
petitioners, Peter Bestes, Sambo Freeman, Felix
Holbrook, and Chester Joie, asked that they be allowed
to work one day a week “to earn money to purchase the
residue of their time.” They expressed their
unequivocal determination “to leave the province” as
soon as their labors “should procure money to transport
ourselves to some part of the Coast of Africa, where we
propose a settlement.” The document is reprinted
in
Herbert Aptheker,
A Documentary History of the Negro
(New York: Citadel Publishers, 1971), pp. 7-8. For
further discussion see
Sidney Kaplan and
Emma Nogrady
Kaplan,
The Black Presence in the Era of the American
Revolution (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 1989), pp. 6-11, 206.
“Black Crispus Attucks”
is memorialized by poet
Melvin B. Tolson in “Dark
Symphony.” A typical, inspiring textbook presentation is
in
Carter Woodson and Charles Wesley, The Story of
the Negro Retold (Washington, D. C.: Associated
Publishers, 1959), p. 50. Another typically sentimental
view of Attucks is presented in
Lerone Bennett,
Pioneers in Protest (New York: Penguin Books, 1969),
pp. 3-9.
Martin Luther King, celebrates Attucks in
The Trumpet of Conscience (London: Hodder and
Stoughton, 1968), p. 25.
20Harold
Isaacs published, before the rise of campus black
nationalism,
The New World of Negro Americans
(Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
1963). Howard Brotz
Negro Social and Political
Thought, 1850-1925. (1st ed., Basic Books, 1966.
2nd ed., New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1992)
appeared shortly thereafter. Between the first edition,
(1964) of
The Negro in the Making of
America,
and the second edition (1969), Howard Holman Bell,
edited
Search For a Place: Black Separatism and
Africa, 1860. Introduction by Howard H. Bell. (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan, 1969).
21Floyd
Miller.
The Search for a Black Nationality: Black
Colonization and Emigration, 1787-1863. (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1975). Jane H. Pease &
William H. Pease.
They Who Would Be Free: Blacks'
Search for Freedom, 1830-1861. (New York: Atheneum,
1974). For motives of white colonizationists see John
Hope Franklin,
From Slavery to Freedom (New York:
Vintage,1969), pp. 239-40.
22The
Negro in the Making of America,
(1969), p. 230. Edmund David Cronon,
Black Moses: The
Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro
Improvement Association (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1966), p.38.
Ira Berlin asserts in
Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum
South (New York, 1974), that throughout the Western
Hemisphere, a brown skin generally assured free Negroes
a social standing well above that of the black slave,
although below that of all whites.”
Rhett S. Jones, holds
the opinion that North American race relations were
“unique,” and that color distinctions among
Afro-North-Americans were relatively
inconsequential. See his “Structural Isolation and the
Genesis of Black Nationalism in North America,” Colby
Library Quarterly (December, 1979) (253).
Judith
Stein, notes correctly, “Although Garvey’s rhetoric
alternately wooed and castigated black elites, he
consistently sought their wealth and talents.” p. 80.
See also p. 84 for participation of black intellectuals
in Stein, The World of Marcus Garvey: Race and Class
in Modern Society (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1986),
23For
a recent discussion of black American attitudes to
Senator Bilbo, see Michael W. Fitzgerald, “‘We Have
Found a Moses,’”: Theodore Bilbo, Black Nationalism, and
the Greater Liberia Bill of 1939” in Journal of
Southern History. Vol. LXIII, No. 2, May 1997, pp.
293-320. For the black loyalty issue during World War
II, see Robert A. Hill, ed.,
The FBI’s RACON: Racial
Conditions in the United States (Boston, 1995). Also
see Ernest Allen Jr. “Satokata Takahashi and the
Flowering of Black Messianic Nationalism,” Black
Scholar, XXXIV (Winter 1994), pp. 23-46; and Allen
“Waiting for Tojo: The Pro-Japan Vigil of Black
Missourians, 1932-1943,” Gateway Heritage, XV
(Fall 1994), 16-33. For intersection of Bilbo and the
Communist Party see Moses,
Black Messiahs, pp.
165-70.
24Religious
allusions and messianic rhetoric are constant in W. E.
B. Du Bois,
The
Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America, (Boston: The Stratford
Company, 1924). Quarles’s work is far more subtle. Of
particular interest is Du Bois’s statement: “In religion
as in democracy, the Negro has been a particular test of
white profession.” p. 338.
25Benjamin
Quarles “Black History Unbound” in Black
Mosaic ,
p. 182. For Woodson’s attitudes on the importance of
race and class, see Jacqueline Goggins,
Carter G.
Woodson: A Life in Black History (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1993), pp. 146-50 and
186.
26The Negro in the Making of
America,
(1987), p. 337. Although, ironically, it was, Frank
Wills, a black security guard, who discovered the
Watergate burglary.
27Martin
Luther King,
Stride Toward Freedom (New York:
Harper and Row, 1958), pp. 200-1, and Arnold J. Toynbee,
A
Study of History, Abridgment of Vols. 1-4 by D.
C. Somervell, (New York: Oxford, 1947), p. 129.
Source: History Teacher, Vol. 32: 1, Nov. 1998
* *
* * *
But the history
of the Negro in America is essentially the story of
the strivings of nameless millions who have sought
adjustment in a new and sometimes hostile world. . .
. I have given considerable attention to the task of
tracing the interaction of the Negro to the American
environment. It can hardly be denied that the course
of American history has been vitally affected by his
presence. At the same time it must be admitted that
the effect of acculturation on the Negro in the
United States has been so marked that today he is as
fully American as any member of other ethnic groups
that make up the American population.— Preface
From Slavery to Freedom,—The Man Who Changed
History
* *
* * *
From the very
beginning of my own involvement in the academy, the
goal I sought was to be a scholar with credentials
as impeccable as I could achieve. At the same time I
was determined to be as active as I could in the
fight to eradicate the stain of racism that clouded
American intellectual and academic life even as it
poisoned other aspects of American society. Both
challenges were formidable. While I set out to
advance my professional career on the basis of the
highest standards of scholarship, I also used that
scholarship to expose the hypocrisy underlying so
much of American social and race relations. It never
ceased being a risky feat of tight-rope walking, but
I always believed that if I could . . . improve
society it was incumbent on me to make the attempt.
Thus, in addition to teaching and writing, I served
as an expert witness in cases designed to end
segregation in education…and I marched in Montgomery
to make common cause with those who sought in other
ways to destroy racial hatred and bigotry.— Epilogue
to
Mirror to America,—The Man Who Changed
History
James Loewen on telling the truth about
Confederates
* * *
* *
* *
* * *
 |
Mirror to America
The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin
By John Hope Franklin
Franklin strove to evade the draft in
WWII after being treated shamefully by
the draft board when he tried to enlist,
and did research for Thurgood Marshall
in Brown v. Board of Education.
Every aspect of Franklin's life has been
influenced by the institutionalized
racism he's experienced since he was
six, when he was forced off a train for
sitting in a car reserved for whites.
Yet Franklin relates this all in dry,
flat prose steeped in minutiae. The
larger aspects of his life are glossed
over; missing entirely is the emotional
response to the ubiquitous racism. Nor
does Franklin contextualize his
experiences (e.g., in 1945, he refused
to move to the back of the bus, but he
fails to juxtapose this event with the
Rosa Parks incident 10 years later). |
This disappointing autobiography fails to depict
Franklin as the trailblazing iconoclast he was and is.—Publishers
Weekly
* *
* * *
|
The World of Marcus Garvey
Race and Class in Modern Society
By Judith Stein
Class more than
race was the key to Garvey (1887-1940)
and his Universal Negro Improvement
Association (UNIA), argues Stein
(History, City Coll., CUNY). Frustrated
bourgeois expectations motivated Garvey
and shaped the UNIA with the Black Star
Line steamship company at its core as a
middle-class movement that pushed
business enterprise as a solution to
black problems while taking on the black
elite's rhetoric of Pan-Africanism and
discovering the effectiveness of mass
mobilization, she says. Challenging E.
David Cronin, Theodore Draper, Robert A.
Hill, Tony Martin, Theodore Vincent, et
al., Stein offers a provocative but
overreaching view and contributes a
comparative analysis of black society in
the United States, the Caribbean, and
West Africa. Recommended for
African-American and social-history
collections.—Library
Journal |
 |
* *
* * *
 |
The Trumpet of Conscience
By Martin Luther King
In
November and December 1967, Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr., delivered five
lectures for the renowned Massey Lecture
Series of the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation. The collection was
immediately released as a book under the
title Conscience for Change, but after
King’s assassination in 1968, it was
republished as The Trumpet of
Conscience. The collection sums up his
lasting creed and is his final testament
on racism, poverty, and war.
Each oration in this volume encompasses
a distinct theme and speaks
prophetically to today’s perils,
addressing issues of equality,
conscience and war, the mobilization of
young people, and nonviolence.
Collectively, they reveal some of King’s
most introspective reflections and final
impressions of the movement while
illustrating how he never lost sight of
our shared goals for justice. |
* *
* * *
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