3.15 - Black History Education and African American Studies
Why the New Negro Movement Pushed for Black History Education
Writers, artists, and educators associated with the New Negro movement recognized a serious problem in American schools: the curriculum reinforced the idea that Black people had made no meaningful cultural contributions, effectively teaching Black inferiority as fact. In response, they urged African Americans to become active agents of their own education, studying Black history and experience directly, both to correct the record and to inform their future advancement as a people.
Artists, writers, and intellectuals connected to this movement worked to directly refute the idea that African Americans were a people without history or culture, building an entire body of literature and educational material to prove otherwise. This early push to get Black history taught in schools helped ensure that the intellectual and cultural contributions of the New Negro movement reached Black students of every age, not just adult readers of literary journals and scholarly works.
A Black Intellectual Tradition That Predates African American Studies
It's worth understanding that the Black intellectual tradition in the United States is actually much older than the formal academic field of African American Studies, which wasn't introduced into American colleges and universities until the late 1960s. This tradition had already been building for roughly two centuries before that, carried forward through the work of Black activists, educators, writers, and archivists who documented Black experience long before it had institutional recognition.
This tradition stretches back at least to the late eighteenth century, when the African Free School began providing education to the children of both enslaved and free Black people in New York. The school played a real role in preparing early Black abolitionists for the leadership positions they would go on to hold.
The New York Manumission Society opened the school in 1787. Its students included the abolitionist minister Henry Highland Garnet, the physician James McCune Smith (the first African American to earn a medical degree), the actor Ira Aldridge, and Alexander Crummell, the scholar Du Bois later wrote about in The Souls of Black Folk.
Several key figures carried this intellectual tradition forward into the twentieth century, each contributing in a distinct way. Arturo Schomburg, a Black Puerto Rican bibliophile (book collector) who moved to New York in 1891, spent decades building an extraordinary personal collection of books, manuscripts, and art by and about people of African descent. In 1926, the New York Public Library acquired the collection with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation, and Schomburg later served as its curator. It became the foundation of what is now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. His collection included genuinely rare artifacts reflecting the diverse artistic, literary, and political contributions of the African diaspora, including personal correspondence belonging to Toussaint L'Ouverture, original newspapers published by Frederick Douglass, and poems written by Phillis Wheatley.
W.E.B. Du Bois, working as both a sociologist and activist, produced some of the earliest sociological surveys ever conducted on African American life, grounding the study of Black experience in rigorous empirical research rather than assumption or stereotype.
His study The Philadelphia Negro (1899) went door to door through the city's Seventh Ward, collecting data on Black residents' jobs, housing, families, and health, and showed that their problems came from discrimination and poverty, not from any inborn inferiority. At Atlanta University he also led a long series of yearly studies of Black life.
Zora Neale Hurston, working as an anthropologist, documented African American culture and linguistic expression directly, treating Black folk traditions and speech as worthy subjects of serious scholarly study at a time when few others did.
Hurston studied anthropology at Barnard College under Franz Boas and went back to the South, including her hometown of Eatonville, Florida, to collect folktales, songs, and religious practices, which she published in Mules and Men (1935). Her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is written largely in the Black Southern speech she had recorded, treating it as a full, expressive language.
Carter Godwin Woodson, a historian and the son of formerly enslaved parents, made perhaps the most lasting institutional mark of all. He founded what is now the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, created Negro History Week (which would later expand into Black History Month), and published numerous works chronicling Black history and experience, spanning all the way from African origins through the early twentieth century.
Woodson, who earned a PhD in history from Harvard in 1912 (the second African American to do so, after Du Bois), founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (today's ASALH) in 1915 and started the Journal of Negro History in 1916. He launched Negro History Week in February 1926, timed to include the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. It grew into Black History Month, which the federal government officially recognized in 1976.
Required Sources
"The Negro Digs Up His Past" by Arturo A. Schomburg, in The New Negro: An Interpretation, edited by Alain Locke, 1925
This essay reflects Schomburg's own belief in the necessity of recovering and preserving Black history, the same conviction that drove him to build his own remarkable personal collection of diasporic artifacts. Reading his argument directly connects to the broader mission described above, using historical documentation as a direct tool against the myth that Black people lacked a meaningful cultural or historical legacy.
The essay first appeared in Survey Graphic's 1925 Harlem issue and was reprinted in Locke's The New Negro. It opens with the line "The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future." Schomburg argues that people of African descent have a long, documented record of achievement, in Africa, in scholarship, and in the fight against slavery, and that recovering it is the best answer to the claim that Black people have no history.
The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future. Though it is orthodox to think of America as the one country where it is unnecessary to have a past, what is a luxury for the nation as a whole becomes a prime social necessity for the Negro. For him, a group tradition must supply compensation for persecution, and pride of race the antidote for prejudice. History must restore what slavery took away, for it is the social damage of slavery that the present generations must repair and offset. So among the rising democratic millions we find the Negro thinking more collectively, more retrospectively than the rest, and apt out of the very pressure of the present to become the most enthusiastic antiquarian of them all.
Vindicating evidences of individual achievement have as a matter of fact been gathered and treasured for over a century: Abbé Gregoire's liberal-minded book on Negro notables in 1808 was the pioneer effort; it has been followed at intervals by less known and often less discriminating compendiums of exceptional men and women of African stock. But this sort of thing was on the whole pathetically over-corrective, ridiculously over-laudatory; it was apologetics turned into biography. A true historical sense develops slowly and with difficulty under such circumstances. But to-day, even if for the ultimate purpose of group justification, history has become less a matter of argument and more a matter of record. There is the definite desire and determination to have a history, well documented, widely known at least within race circles, and administered as a stimulating and inspiring tradition for the coming generations.
Gradually as the study of the Negro's past has come out of the vagaries of rhetoric and propaganda and become systematic and scientific, three outstanding conclusions have been established:
First, that the Negro has been throughout the centuries of controversy an active collaborator, and often a pioneer, in the struggle for his own freedom and advancement. This is true to a degree which makes it the more surprising that it has not been recognized earlier.
Second, that by virtue of their being regarded as something "exceptional," even by friends and well-wishers, Negroes of attainment and genius have been unfairly disassociated from the group, and group credit lost accordingly.
Third, that the remote racial origins of the Negro, far from being what the race and the world have been given to understand, offer a record of credible group achievement when scientifically viewed, and more important still, that they are of vital general interest because of their bearing upon the beginnings and early development of culture.
With such crucial truths to document and establish, an ounce of fact is worth a pound of controversy. So the Negro historian to-day digs under the spot where his predecessor stood and argued. Not long ago, the Public Library of Harlem housed a special exhibition of books, pamphlets, prints and old engravings, that simply said, to skeptic and believer alike, to scholar and school-child, to proud black and astonished white, "Here is the evidence." Assembled from the rapidly growing collections of the leading Negro book-collectors and research societies, there were in these cases, materials not only for the first true writing of Negro history, but for the rewriting of many important paragraphs of our common American history. Slow though it be, historical truth is no exception to the proverb.
[...]
Of course, a racial motive remains, legitimately compatible with scientific method and aim. The work our race students now regard as important, they undertake very naturally to overcome in part certain handicaps of disparagement and omission too well-known to particularize. But they do so not merely that we may not wrongfully be deprived of the spiritual nourishment of our cultural past, but also that the full story of human collaboration and interdependence may be told and realized. Especially is this likely to be the effect of the latest and most fascinating of all of the attempts to open up the closed Negro past, namely the important study of African cultural origins and sources. The bigotry of civilization which is the taproot of intellectual prejudice begins far back and must be corrected at its source. Fundamentally it has come about from that depreciation of Africa which has sprung up from ignorance of her true rôle and position in human history and the early development of culture. The Negro has been a man without a history because he has been considered a man without a worthy culture.
But a new notion of the cultural attainment and potentialities of the African stocks has recently come about, partly through the corrective influence of the more scientific study of African institutions and early cultural history, partly through growing appreciation of the skill and beauty and in many cases the historical priority of the African native crafts, and finally through the signal recognition which first in France and Germany, but now very generally, the astonishing art of the African sculptures has received. Into these fascinating new vistas, with limited horizons lifting in all directions, the mind of the Negro has leapt forward faster than the slow clearings of scholarship will yet safely permit. But there is no doubt that here is a field full of the most intriguing and inspiring possibilities. Already the Negro sees himself against a reclaimed background, in a perspective that will give pride and self-respect ample scope, and make history yield for him the same values that the treasured past of any people affords.
Arturo A. Schomburg (credited as Arthur A. Schomburg), "The Negro Digs Up His Past," in The New Negro: An Interpretation, ed. Alain Locke (1925), pp. 231 to 232 and 237. Source: Internet Archive scan of the 1925 Albert and Charles Boni first edition
The Mis-Education of the Negro by Carter Godwin Woodson, 1933
Woodson's landmark work argues that American education itself had failed Black students by teaching them, whether directly or through omission, to see themselves as inferior. Given that Woodson went on to found what became Black History Month and dedicated much of his career to documenting Black history, this book reads as both a diagnosis of the problem and a personal explanation for why he devoted his life's work to correcting it.
Woodson argues that the schooling Black students received taught them to admire European history and culture while looking down on Africa and on themselves, so that even educated African Americans often accepted an inferior place. As he put it, "When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions." His answer was for Black communities to study their own history and for educated Black people to use what they learned to serve their own communities.
Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933)
Woodson, the historian who started Negro History Week in 1926 (today's Black History Month), wrote this book after decades as a teacher. He argues that schools taught Black students to admire Europe and look down on Africa and on themselves, so even well-educated Black Americans often accepted a lower place in society. His answer was to teach Black history and to have educated Black people serve their own communities. That's why the book still comes up whenever people talk about why Black history education matters.