Historiography against History: The Propaganda of History and the Struggle for the Hearts and Minds of Black Folk

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Notes

1. Thomas Bailey, “The Mythmakers of American History,” Journal of American History, 55 (1968), 15.

2. Ibid.; see also C. Vann Woodward, “Clio with Soul,” Journal of American History, 56 (1968), 6–16.

3. W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Atheneum, 1971), 718–19.

4. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 74.

5. Rayford Logan, Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson (New York: Collier Books, 1969).

6. Novick, That Noble Dream, 76.

11. Quoted, Novick, That Noble Dream, 229.

12. Quoted in William Loren Katz, Teacher's Guide to American Negro History (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971), 6.

7. See C. Vann Woodward, Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction (Garden City: Doubleday, 1956).

8. See Mary Francis Berry, Military Necessity and Civil Rights Policy (Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1977).

9. See Logan, Betrayal, ch. 13: “The Negro Portrayed in the Leading Literary Magazines,” 242–75.

10. All the following quotations in this paragraph are from Novick, That Noble Dream, 75.

13. Malik Simba, “Joel Augustus Rogers: Negro Historians in History, Time, and Space,” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History, 30(2) (July, 2006), 51–52.

14. Carter G. Woodson, The African Background Outlined (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1936).

15. Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro (Hampton: U.B. & U.S. Communications Systems, 1992).

16. William Patterson and Paul Robeson, We Charge Genocide: The Crimes of Government Against the Negro People (December 17, 1951).

17. John Henrik Clarke, ed., William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), vii.

18. Nation of Islam, The Secret Relations Between Blacks and Jews (Chicago: NOI Historical Research Department, 1991).

19. William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner (New York: Random House, 1967).

20. Malik Simba, “The Association for the Study of African American Life and History: A Brief History” (2010), Blackpast.org

21. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro, 84–85.

22. August Meier and Elliot Rudwick, Black History and the Historical Profession, 1915–1980 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 55.

23. See the excellent survey of these street scholars in Ralph Crowder, John Edward Bruce: Politician, Journalist, and Self-Trained Black Historian (New York: New York University Press, 2004).

24. Joel Augustus Rogers, One Hundred Amazing Facts about the Negro (New York: Helga M. Rogers, 1957).

25. Vincent Harding, “Beyond Chaos: Black History and the Search for the New Land,” in John A. Williams and Charles F. Harris, eds, Amistad (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 274.

26. Patterson and Robeson, We Charge Genocide (note 16).

27. Harding, “Beyond Chaos,” 269.

28. Ibid.

29. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Modern Library, 1996).

30. Earl R. Thorpe, Negro Historians: A Critique (New York: William Morrow, 1971), 81.

32. Du Bois, in Amistad 2, 172.

31. W.E.B. Du Bois, The World and Africa (New York: International Publishers, 1965), “The White Masters of the World,” as quoted in John A. Williams and Charles F. Harris, Amistad 2 (New York: Random House, 1971).

33. Ibid. 173.

34. Fifth Pan African Congress, Manchester, England, 1944; see George Padmore, Pan-Africanism or Communism (Garden City: Doubleday, 1971).

35. Julius Lester, Look Out Whitey! Black Power's Gon' Get Your Mama! (New York: Grove Press, 1968).

36. Quintard Taylor, Black Seattle; Joe Trotter, Black Milwaukee (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985); John Blassingame, Black New Orleans (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973); Mary Frances Berry, Black Resistance/White Law (New York: Penguin Press, 1994).

37. Allison Berg, “Trauma and Testimony in Black Women's Civil Rights Memoir: The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It, Warriors Don't Cry, and From the Mississippi Delta,” Journal of Women's History (Fall, 2009) 84–107. See also David J. Garrow, Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987).

38. Pero Gaglo Dagbovie, African American History Reconsidered (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 103.

39. Deborah Gray White, ed., Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 4–7.

40. Meier and Rudwick, eds, Black History and the Historical Profession (note 22), 131.

41. Dagbovie, African American History Reconsidered, 103; see also Stephanie Shaw, What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do: Black Professional Women Workers during the Jim Crow Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 1.

42. White, Telling Histories, 7.

43. In 1973 Carter G. Woodson's Association for the Study of Negro Life and History was changed to its current name Association for the Study of African American Life and History

45. Toni Cade Bambara, The Black Woman: An Anthology (1977), 9.

44. Akasha Hull, “Renaissance Woman,” Women's Review of Books, 14(10/11) (July, 1997), 31–32.

46. Sharon Harley and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, eds, The Afro American Woman: Struggles and Images (Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1978).

47. Ibid., 15.

48. Ibid., 95.

49. Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South, By a Black Woman of the South (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969).

50. Harley and Terborg-Penn, eds, The Afro-American Woman, 2.

51. Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women and the Struggle for the Vote (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).

52. Other works by Terborg-Penn: Women in Africa and the African Diaspora (Washington: Howard University Press, 1996); Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); African Feminism: A World Perspective (Washington: Howard University Press, 1987).

53. Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies (New York: Feminist Press, 1982), xxv.

54. Barbara Smith, “A Press of Our Own Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women's Studies, 10(3), Women and Words (1989), 11.

55. Hull, Scott, Smith, Some of Us Are Brave, xxv.

56. Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family: From Slavery to the Present (New York: Vintage Books, 1985).

57. Ibid., 7.

58. Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: Perennial Harper Collins, 1984), 31, 57.

59. Lerone Bennett, Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America (Chicago: Johnson Publication Company, 1987); John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1988 [1948]); William A. Williams, The Contours of American History (New York: Norton, 1988).

60. Darlene Clark Hine, Hine Sight: Black Women and the Re-Construction of American History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), xx.

61. Ibid., xxi, xxiii.

62. Darlene Clark Hine, ed., The State of Afro-American History: Past, Present, and Future (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 249.

63. Darlene Clark Hine, Black Women in White: Racial Conflict and Cooperation in the Nursing Profession, 1890–1950 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).

64. White, Telling Histories (note 39), 97.

65. Deborah Gray White, Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: Norton, 1985), 22.

66. ¹Nell I. Painter, “The Shoah and Southern History,” in James L. Conyers, Jr., ed., Afrocentric Tradition (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2005), 35.

67. Wilma King, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in 19^th Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). Introduction.

68. Painter, “The Shoah and Southern History,” 39.

69. Thomas Bogle, Toms, Mammies, Mulattoes, Coons, and Bucks (New York: Continuum, 1989).

70. H. Viscount Nelson, The Rise and Fall of Modern Black Leadership: Chronicle of a Twentieth Century Tragedy (Lanham: University Press of America, 2003), xii.

71. Ibid., xv.

72. Gerald Early, “Understanding Afrocentrism: Why Blacks Dream of a World Without Whites,” Civilization Magazine (July/August, 1994); see also Molefi Asante, The Afro Centric Idea and Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change (Chicago: African American Image-African World Press, 1988), and Maulana Karenga, Introduction to Black Studies (Santa Monica: Sage Publications, 2001).

73. Harding, “Beyond Chaos” (note 25), 273.

74. Unknown Author, “Willie Lynch Speech,” TalkingDrum.com/wil.html

75. Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afro-Asiatic Origins of Greek Civilization (Piscataway: Rutgers University Press, 2006).

76. John G. Jackson and Willis Huggins, Introduction to African Civilization (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969); Chancellor Williams, The Destruction of Black Civilization (Chicago: Third World Press, 1974); Cheik Anta Diop, The Cultural Unity of Black Africa (Chicago: Third World Press, 1978) and The African Origin of Civilization (Westport: Lawrence Hill, 1974); George G.M. James, Stolen Legacy: Greek Philosophy Is Stolen Egyptian Philosophy (New York: Philosophical Library, 1954); William Leo Hansberry, The Re-Birth of African Civilization (Hampton: U.B. and U.S. Communications System, 1993); Yosef ben-Jochannan, Black Man of the Nile and His Family: African Foundations of European Civilization and Thought (New York: Alkebu-lan Books and Associates, 1972).

77. See Molefi Asante, Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change, rev. ed. (Chicago: African American Images African World Press, 1988).

78. See Gerald Early who makes this point in “Understanding Afrocentrism” (note 72).

79. See Tony Martin, C.L.R. James and the Race/Class Question (Santa Monica: Sage Publications, 1972).

80. E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie (Glencoe: Free Press, 1957); cf. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro. See also Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's song, “The Message” and the lyrics “Don't push me ‘cuz I'm close to the edge, I'm trying not to lose my head” or in the same song the lyrics “It's like a jungle sometimes it makes me wonder /How I keep from going under” (Sing365.com).

81. Malik Simba, Black Marxism and American Constitutionalism: An Interpretive History from the Colonial Background to the Great Depression (Dubuque: Kendall Hunt Publishing Company, 2010). See also Herbert Shapiro, ed., African American History and Radical Historiography: Essays in Honor of Herbert Aptheker (Minneapolis: MEP Publications, 1998); James Boggs, Racism and the Class Struggle: Further Pages from a Black Worker's Notebook (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970).

82. Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: International Publishers, 1963 [1943]).

83. Wilfred D. Samuels, Five Afro-Caribbean Voices in American Culture, 1917–1929 (Boulder: Belmont Books, 1977); see chapter III, “Harlem's Political Radicals: Wilfred A. Domingo, Richard B. Moore, and Cyril V. Briggs.” These men and others composed the African Blood Brotherhood. A number of them joined the Communist Party.

84. Philip S. Foner, American Socialism and Black Americans: From the Age of Jackson to World War II (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1977); Philip S. Foner, Black Socialist Preacher (San Francisco: Synthesis Publications, 1983); Philip S. Foner and James S. Allen, American Communism and Black Americans: A Documentary History, 1919–1929 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987).

85. John H. McClendon, III, C.L.R. James's Notes on Dialectics: Left Hegelianism or Marxism-Leninism (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005), and “Black/Blackness: Philosophical Considerations,” in Carol Boyce Davies, ed., Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora, vol. 1 (2008), 202.

86. Jake Carruthers, “Marx and the Negro,” The Afrocentric World Review: Journal of the Association of African Historians (Winter, 1973), 8.

87. Clarence E. Walker, DeRomanticizing Black History: Critical Essays and Reappraisals (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991); see chapter 1 with the controversial use of the N word. However, the chapter is not about the N word and Marx. Walker tries to argue “race first” as a tool of historical analysis.

88. Ibid., 24.

89. Clarence J. Munford, Production Relations, Class and Black: A Marxist Perspective in Afro-American Studies (Amsterdam: B.R. Gruner, 1978); Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (Boston: South End Press, 1983); Simba, Black Marxism and American Constitutionalism (note 81).

90. Ralph A. Austen, “The Uncomfortable Relationship: African Enslavement in the Common History of Blacks and Jews,” Tikkun, March/April 1994, 63.

95. Cudjoe, “Time for Serious Scholars to Repudiate …” B6.

91. Tony Martin, The Jewish Onslaught: Dispatches from the Wellesley Battlefront (Dover: The Majority Press, 1993).

92. Harold Brackman, Farrakhan's Reign of Historical Error: The Truth Behind the “Secret Relations Between Blacks and Jews” (Los Angeles: Simon Wiesenthal Center, June 1992).

93. Selwyn R. Cudjoe, “Time for Serious Scholars to Repudiate Nation of Islam's Diatribe Against Jews,” Chronicle of Higher Education, May 1994, B5.

94. Oliver Cromwell Cox, Race Relations: Its Meaning, Beginning, and Progress (Detroit: Wayne State Press, 1970).

96.  Clarke, ed., William Styron's Nat Turner (note 17). See also Melvin J. Friedman and Irving Malin, The Confessions of Nat Turner? A Critical Handbook (Belmont: Wadsworth, 1970), and Lerone Bennett, “Nat's Last White Man,” in Clarke's edited book, 10.

97. Ernest Kaiser, “The Failure of William Styron,” in Clarke's edited book, 51.

98. Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981).

99. Nick Aaron Ford, Black Studies: Threat or Challenges (Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1973), 154–55.

100. Famous oral history “hearsay” quote spoken by a Black student leader involved in the April 19, 1969, Willard Straight Hall takeover during “Parent Weekend” at Cornell University. The contentious issues of racial attacks on Black female students and the establishment of Africana Studies precipitated the takeover.

101. Introduction to Afro American Studies (Chicago: People College Press, 1979).

102. John H. McClendon III, “Marxism in Ebony: Contra Black Marxism: Categorical Implications,” ProudFlesh: Journal of Culture, Politics, and Consciousness, Issue 6 (2007), and “On the Nature of Whiteness and the Ontology of Race: Toward a Dialectic Material Condition, Presumptive Context, and Social Category,” in George Yancy, ed., White on White, Black on Black (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).

103. See Karenga, Introduction to Black Studies.

104. Allan Bloom, Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987).

105. Victor Davis Hanson, John Heath, Bruce S. Thornton, Bonfire of the Humanities: Rescuing the Classics in an Impoverished Age (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2001); see also Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom (New York: Encounter Books, 2001).

106. Hanson et al., Bonfire of the Humanities, 256. Interestingly, in this chapter they also attack Shelley Haley, “a self-labeled Black feminist classicist” who claims Cleopatra was a black signifier of the double issues of male oppression and survival for black women in the present era (275).

107. Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land (New York: Penguin Press, 2010), as cited in book review by Timothy Rutten, “The Treatise of a Dying Scholar,” Los Angeles Times, March 22, 2010, D6.

108. Jean Fagan Yellin, Harriet A. Jacobs: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written By Herself (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987). This version is an enlarged edition with Harriet's brother John S. Jacobs' slave narrative, A True Tale of Slavery, added to help clarify the salient gender differences between black male enslavement and black female enslavement.

109. Yellin, Harriet A. Jacobs, “Introduction,” xxxvii.