From the OAH President

The National Significance for African American History Month

James O. Horton

Most of us are familiar with the exhausting activities of February as schools, community centers, libraries, and social clubs celebrate African American History Month. The sheer volume of cultural and educational programing crammed into this, the year’s shortest month, is often astounding. For many, February offers an opportunity to satisfy intellectual curiosity. There are those, however, who never think of African Americans in history at any other time of year, but who, during this month, frantically plan programs&emdash;panels, lectures, films, art and music presentations as a matter of educational fashion. It might be argued that one of the values of February is that it provides an excuse for Americans to focus on that part of history otherwise seldom noticed. It renders a separate chapter in our national history as a gesture to those whose history is assumed to stand outside the major American story.

Pioneer educator Carter G. Woodson worked tirelessly to bring the history of black America to the attention of the nation, and although the Jim Crow society of the early twentieth century forced him to work through racially specific organizations and institutions, he always saw what was then called Negro History as integral to the general American story. Despite the grinding poverty of his birth that forced him to spend much of his youth working in West Virginia and Kentucky coal mines, Woodson established an impressive record of educational achievement. At the age of twenty, he entered high school, graduating in only two years. Next he enrolled in Berea College in Kentucky where he received a degree in 1903. After teaching English in the Philippines and at Dunbar High School in Washington, DC, he returned to school and earned a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University in 1912, only the second African American to earn a Harvard doctorate in history. Three years later this determined educator established the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History to encourage the research and writing of black history. Significantly, Woodson always emphasized the interrelationship between the historical experience of black people and that of the nation more generally. In 1916, he began publication of the Journal of Negro History which, for almost nine decades, has remained one of the central history journals on the topic. When, in 1926, he sought to promote a national celebration of black contributions to the nation, he selected the second week of February during which Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass had celebrated their birthdays. He called it “Negro History Week.”

Woodson could not have dreamed what his efforts were to become. Emerging in the wake of the modern civil rights campaign of the 1950s and 1960s the Black Studies movement that spawned African American courses, programs, and departments on the nation’s college and university campuses immeasurably broadened the impact of his vision. During the early 1970s Negro History Week was renamed Black History Week and in 1976 became Black History Month, designating all of February for the recognition of African American history. Courses in black studies, including those that focused specifically on African American history have become a standard feature of most good history, American Studies, and general humanities programs. In the last decade or so, information from these courses has started to find its way into general American history courses, so that in some academic classrooms, students study a more realistic American historical experience than that routinely presented a generation ago.

Now at the opening of the twenty-first century, it is almost inconceivable that any American who does not live in total isolation could be unaware that African American history is celebrated in February. The significance of that history for the nation as a whole, however, is seldom understood by the general public and sometimes not fully appreciated in the classroom. I vividly remember during the early 1970s, when I was a beginning faculty member teaching what was then called Black History, being asked by well-meaning colleagues teaching the American history survey to give a guest lecture in that course on African Americans. “I want the students to get a little black history, and I don’t know any of that stuff” one senior professor explained. He routinely referred to black history as one of the “exotic new branches of history.” I was greatly disturbed by my colleague’s assumptions that relegated the African American experience to the outer margins of American history. At the time, I was sorely tempted to offer him a parallel opportunity to provide a lecture in my Black History class on the topic of American history. In the years since, I have tried to give this colleague the benefit of the doubt, appreciating that at least he professed an interest in black history and recognized his own limitations. Surely among many historians during that period, there was little respect for African American history as an integral part of American history. A generation ago, many saw African American history as a separate chapter in the American experience, only indirectly connected to the “mainstream” of national life. That impression is changing in the academy, but even there the transformation is it not complete. The general public has barely considered the centrality of the African American historical experience&emdash;and the significance of race&emdash;in the formation of American culture.

Under these circumstances, the federal government has taken on a complex task in its recent steps towards the establishment of a museum focusing on the African American historical experience. This is not the first time such plans have been laid. In 1928, President Calvin Coolidge signed a measure to create an African American museum that had been approved by Congress the year before, but the depression of the 1930s and World War II forced abandonment of the project. During the 1950s and 1960s, southern opposition in the midst of the rising postwar civil rights movement blocked efforts to revive plans for the museum. Finally, after fifteen years of lobbying led by John Lewis, the former civil rights leader and now representative from Georgia, Congress authorized a $3.9 million appropriation to study, design, and staff the National Museum of African American History and Culture as part of the Smithsonian Institution. The new museum will to be located on or near the National Mall in Washington, DC.

Lawrence M. Small, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, welcomed the news of the addition to his museum complex, and the Smithsonian Board of Regents named several high-profile national figures as members of a founding council. The nineteen-member council includes television personality Oprah Winfrey, musician and musical producer Quincy Jones, Franklin D. Raines, chairman and chief executive officer of Fannie Mae, and Robert L. Johnson, founder and chief executive officer of Black Entertainment Television. This council is advised by a panel of distinguished scholars and museum professionals, John Hope Franklin among them. Their task is daunting, but perhaps these efforts will produce an institution that will accomplish what few earlier attempts have been able to achieve, the integration of the African American experience into the national history, without losing its distinctive character. This was what Carter G. Woodson intended and hoped to encourage by establishing Negro History Week.

Such an accomplishment would be significant indeed, for it would remove African American history from its separate chapter of the national experience and encourage its centrality for any interpretation of American history. The African American experience might well be appreciated for what it has always been, a commentary on the American experience, making it more difficult to ignore the national contradictions in favor of oversimplified slogans that sometimes pass for national history. This will surely be a more troubling history for most Americans, but it will ultimately be more useful, providing the historical context for contemporary conversations on the nation’s most difficult and pressing problems. Issues of race have defined and still define much of American history and have shaped distinctive parts of American culture. Whatever your stand on the question of reparations or affirmative action, a knowledge of the life, work, suffering, and determined struggle of slaves has great relevance. It provides a different perspective on traditional assumptions about America as a rich country and insight into the historic production of national wealth. It also confronts American national mythmaking in profound ways.

This February, PBS will offer a rarely attempted look at the American self-image with its four-hour two-part series “Slavery and the Making of America.” With the advice and on-camera appearances of a number of prominent academic historians, it seeks to tell the stories of individual slaves who struggled to survive the horrors of slavery. They are pictured not simply as helpless victims of the system, but as strong and resourceful people struggling to survive slavery’s physical and psychological effects. At critical moments they also commit themselves to actions calculated to serve a country that held them in bondage, some giving their lives to establish, and to save the national union on the promise of freedom. This film series and other efforts in the National Parks where historians, many of them OAH members, have integrated issues of race into the presentation of American history would have pleased Carter G. Woodson. He would be impressed to see some of our most accomplished scholars working in classrooms and in the most influential of public venues to broaden American perspectives on race and its significance in the national history. Even in the presentation of American history adopted by Disney World in its “Hall of Presidents” exhibit, the fine hand of Eric Foner is clearly evident, placing slavery at the center of the sectional conflict that ultimately led to the Civil War.

My great hope is that these and other efforts by some of our most respected colleagues will help to move the public perception of African American history out of its separate chapter and into the main body of the national narrative where it belongs. Clearly, African American history is American history made by Americans in America. The message of African American History Month has relevance to every American and to those anywhere in the world touched by American culture.