African-American history

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What has come to be known as "Black history" (also known as African-American history) developed out of the same forces that shaped the Civil Rights Movement. While African-Americans and their African ancestors played a central role in creating and defining the United States, these Americans had few people to tell their stories. Some noted scholars, such as W.E.B. Dubois, shed light on the African-American experience. But that experience was often ignored by white historians.

By the end of the 19th Century, African-Americans were commonly depicted in derogatory ways. The days of slavery were portrayed as a time when black people were happy and content. And many historians came to view the aftermath of the Civil War as a tragic time when blacks and carpet-baggers ran wild. In this history, it was the Klu Klux Klan (KKK) that came to save the day.

This portrayal of African-Americans was popularized by filmmaker D.W. Griffith in the Birth of a Nation. The 1915 film glorified the KKK. But it was a view that dominated film and literature into the 1930s when Gone with the Wind offered a romantic story of the Old South full of blacks who appeared content to play inferior roles.

Black history attempted to reverse centuries of ignorance. While black historians were not alone in advocating a new examination of slavery and racism in the United States, the study of African-American history has often been a political and scholarly struggle to change assumptions.

One of the foremost assumptions was that slaves were passive and did not rebel. For decades, historians sought to find explanations for this alleged reality. Eventually, a series of historians transformed the image of African-Americans, revealing a much richer and complex experience. Historians, such as Leon Littwack, showed how former slaves fought to keep their families together and struggled against tremendous odds to define themselves as free people. Others wrote of rebellions small and large.

In the Twenty-First Century, black history is regarded as mainstream and is celebrated every February in the United States during "Black History Month."


Bibliography

Surveys

Emancipation and Reconstruction Era: 1860-1890

Jim Crow: 1890-1954

  • Anderson, James D. The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 (1988) online edition
  • Bayor, Ronald H. Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta (1996)
  • Brundage, W. Fitzhugh, ed Booker T. Washington and Black Progress: Up from Slavery 100 Years Later (2003)
  • Bullock, Henry Allen. A History of Negro Education in the South: From 1619 to the Present (1967)
  • Cartwright, Joseph H. The Triumph of Jim Crow: Tennessee Race Relations in the 1880s (1976)
  • Fields, Barbara J. "Ideology and Race in American History," in J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson , eds., Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward (1982),
  • Fredrickson, George M. The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (1971),
  • Gatewood, Jr., Willard B. Black Americans and the White Man's Burden, 1898-1903 (1975)
  • Gatewood, Jr., Willard B. Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880-1920 (2000)
  • Hahn, Steven. A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (2003)
  • Harlan. Louis R. Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856-1900 (1972) the standard biography, vol 1
  • Harlan. Louis R. Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee 1901-1915 (1983), the standard scholarly biography vol 2 online edition vol 2
  • Harlan. Louis R. Booker T. Washington in Perspective: Essays of Louis R. Harlan (1988) online edition
  • Harlan. Louis R. "The Secret Life of Booker T. Washington." Journal of Southern History 37#3 (1971). pp 393-416 Documents Booker T. Washington's secret financing and directing of litigation against segregation and disfranchisement. in JSTOR
  • Linda O. Mcmurry. George Washington Carver, Scientist and Symbol (1982)
  • Jones, Jacqueline. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (1985)
  • Lewis, David Levering. W. E. B. DuBois, 1868-1919: Biography of a Race (1993). vol 1, winner of Pulitzer Prize; W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century 1919-1963 (2000) vol 2
  • Logan, Frenise A. The Negro in North Carolina, 1876-1894 (1964),
  • Logan, Rayford. The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson (Originally Published as: The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir: 1877-1901) (1970)
  • McMillen, Neil R. Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow (1989).
  • Meier, August. Negro Thought in America, 1880-1915: Racial Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Washington (1963),
  • Meier, August. "Toward a Reinterpretation of Booker T. Washington." 23 Journal of Southern History 22#2 (1957) in JSTOR
  • Rabinowitz, Howard N. "More Than the Woodward Thesis: Assessing The Strange Career of Jim Crow", Journal of American History 75 (Dec. 1988): 842-56. in JSTOR
  • Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow (3d ed., 1974), [ in ACLS E-books]
  • Woodward, C. Vann. Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 ( 1951)
  • Cary D. Wintz, African American Political Thought, 1890-1930: Washington, Du Bois, Garvey, and Randolph (1996)

Primary Sources

See also

External links


notes

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