Black History as a Weapon of Intellectual and Political Struggle

Dr. Russell L. Adams

We have many unprovoked enemies, who begrudge us the liberty we enjoy, and are glad to hear of any complaint against our color, be it just or unjust; in consequence of which we are more earnestly endeavoring all in our power to warn, rebuke, and exhort our [fellow] African friends, when stigmas or oppression appear pointed at, or attempted against them, unjustly...

Written in 1794 by Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, both leaders of Philadelphia 's Black community, these words are found in the first known Black history document produced by African Americans. In some 27 pages, these two self-educated men wrote a historical and sociological treatise to counter published stereotypes of Blacks as disease-free exploiters of white Yellow Fever victims in that city's malaria epidemic of 1793. A widely read publication by whites asserted that Blacks were immune to Yellow Fever and guilty of grossly overcharging sick and dying whites for services rendered. By using what we now call history, sociology and statistics, these two men brilliantly demolished the immunity stereotype and the money gouging allegations. Thus from America 's beginning, Black history has been used by African Americans as an instrument of truth during periods of heightened racial strife. This article is an outline of Black history as a weapon of intellectual and political struggle from Richard Allen to Carter G. Woodson.

During the decade of the 1820s, free Blacks were first attacked as a group. In 1826, the Blacks of Boston organized the Massachusetts General Colored Association to combat slavery and colorphobia. This group met at the used clothing store of David Walker, who summed up many of their ideas in his 1829 Appeal in Four Articles to the Colored Citizens of the World . Three of Walker 's articles were historical accounts of the evolution of Christianity and slavery, with Article II being one of the earliest expressions of historical Afrocentrism as indicated by these words:

I am indeed cheered...when we take a retrospective view of the arts and sciences--the wise legislators--the Pyramids, and other magnificent buildings--the turning of the channel of the river Nile, by the sons of Africa or Ham among whom learning was originated, and carried thence into Greece ...

During the 1829 Depression, working-class whites of Cincinnati attacked Blacks in order to take their jobs. Some 800 of the city's 1,200 African Americans fled to Canada . Clusters of free Blacks throughout the North protested colonization proposals. In 1830, Richard Allen presided over the first of many pre-emancipation "national” or Northern conventions on the problems and status of Black America. Convention proceedings and addresses were published to advise the Blacks and persuade whites.

With less than two percent of the numbers literate, by 1860, free Blacks had formed over 200 local mutual aid and discussion groups, many of them setting up "Reading Rooms" and conducting debates and elocution contests using available Black history materials. Philadelphia led the way with over 40 such groups.

After the Civil War and reconstruction period, the nation left Southern Blacks to the untender mercies of their former masters, who were eager to reduce them as close to slavery as possible without re-igniting the Civil War. In 1872, the National Equal Rights Convention declared that it was time "to create a national historical and statistical association." Beginning with the Bethel Literary and Historical Society in Washington , D.C. , in 1882, African Americans organized the Boston Society for the Collection of Negro Folklore, the Philadelphia-based American Negro Historical Society, the New York Society for Historical Research and ended the 19th century with the founding of the American Negro Academy in 1897. Holding convention and publishing paper, this 40-person group flourished for 30 years. The spread of Black history associations was a direct response to the increased racial oppression and separatism made "legal" by the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Plessy V. Ferguson . Mainstream American ideology held Africans to be genetically inferior and unfit to share in the operations of society.

Rabidly anti-Black books such as The Negro a Beast , 1900; The Leopard's Spots , 1902; and The Clansman , 1905, prepared the way for the Ku Klux Klan. In response to the accumulating denigration of African Americans, in 1915, Carter G. Woodson organized the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, an organization still pursuing the goals stated in its original name. Of all previous Black historical associations, this association alone survived to become a national free-standing institution with its own journal and bulletin.

Dr. Russell L. Adams is a professor and chair of the Afro-American Studies Department at Howard University in Washington, D.C. His best known publication is Great Negroes Past and Present.

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