For decades, scholars and activist intellectuals have sought to define and redefine Black Studies while raising questions about the field's origin(s) and direction for future practitioners working to understand and attend to the most pressing matters of their day. This chapter began considering the importance of activist intellectuals David Walker, Frederick Douglas, and Harriet Jacobs as early Black Studies practitioners. Their work represented what activist intellectual James Garrett called the “Nascent Period” of Black Studies. This period began with institutions like the Free African Society, founded in 1787 by free Blacks in Philadelphia as a mutual aid organization. Garrett, one of the founding members of the first formal Black Studies department at San Francisco State College (now University) in 1968, was interested in the institutional and organizational spaces where Black people formally gathered to teach, study, and develop strategies for achieving freedom, justice, and self-determination. The Free African Society collected dues from its members and became a community fixture in Philadelphia, welcoming newly manumitted Africans following the American War for Independence. As free Blacks trickled into the city from the Upper South and rural Pennsylvania, the Free African Society offered resources for the homeless, widowed, orphaned, and those yearning to be literate and obtain some modicum of education.
The Free African Society was later foundational to the birth of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church. AME founders Richard Allen and Absalom Jones grew tired of the indignities of second-class citizenship and systemic segregation in white protestant churches. They merged many of the practices of the Free African Society into a religious institution. Their efforts would shape the direction of many Black churches and retain the mutual aid ethos of the Free African Society, which was civic-minded and committed to social justice and the fight for freedom.
The “Nascent Period” of Black Studies
The “Nascent Period” of Black Studies also included the African Free School, founded in 1787 by the New York Manumission Society, an anti-slavery organization created by wealthy white abolitionists committed to immediate emancipation. The African Free School became an educational spawning ground for influential Black leaders who would play a critical role in the struggle for freedom, justice, and equality. Some of these leaders included Alexander Crummell, an early proponent of Black people returning to Africa–namely Liberia. Similarly, a fellow graduate, Henry Highland Garnet, supported colonization efforts back to African soil. Garnet’s radicalism became the stuff of legends after his 1843 speech “An Address To The Slaves Of The United States Of America,” which was aimed directly at the enslaved and broke with some of the most radical abolitionists (including Frederick Douglas) by encouraging Black people to stand up to their masters and rebel. Five years later, in 1848, Garnet wrote a preface to David Walker’s Appeal and provided a “Brief Sketch of His Life” to readers unfamiliar with Walker’s background. Garnet noted, “this little book produced more commotion among slaveholders than any volume of its size ever issued from an American press.”[1] Garnet’s speech and Preface to David Walker’s Appeal were later republished in a single volume.
With the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the start of Reconstruction, Black Studies entered the “Conceptual Period” of its development with the creation of more than one hundred private and public “post-secondary institutions” devoted to educating newly emancipated freed people in an attempt to redress centuries of chattel slavery. Building on the work of James Garrett, Black Studies scholar Manning Marable argued that “it was from these underfunded and largely politically vulnerable segregated colleges that several generations of Black intellectuals produced the classical body of scholarship that now defines the field.”[2] The incomparable W.E.B. DuBois, who graduated from Fisk University and was the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard, was at the forefront of this intellectual ferment. In 1899 Du Bois published The Philadelphia Negro. This book virtually defined the field of sociology. It was a methodological classic that argued that the urban blight that afflicted Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward was the result of socioeconomic constraints as opposed to inherent cultural deficits attributed to Black people. He continued this line of research in the urban south through a series of publications and conferences at Atlanta University from 1898 to 1913.
Du Bois was a member of the American Negro Academy (ANA). The ANA was founded in Washington, D.C., in 1897 by Alexander Crummell and a host of prominent Black scholars and activist intellectuals to serve as an organizational body that encouraged and supported the production of academic work in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. The ANA boldly declared that its organizational purpose was to “lead and protect their people” and work diligently to “be a weapon to secure equality and destroy racism.”[3] (Stewart 2015, 88) In this vein, the ANA sponsored an “Occasional Papers” series, allowing Black intellectuals to share their ideas with the general public. With the exception of their board meetings, all ANA gatherings were open to the public and sought to put scholarship in service to the Black community.
The ANA was an organizational body whose membership was concerned with the social status and perception of African Americans in terms of their collective progress under the violent constraints of Jim Crow segregation after the Supreme Court ruling of Plessy vs. Ferguson that legalized segregation in 1896. Founded one year after Plessy, the ANA was duty-bound to racial uplift. It provided the intellectual ferment that supported Du Bois’s advocacy for the creation of a “Talented Tenth” that would be comprised of Black elites schooled in the humanities and the arts with the expressed mission to lead and serve the Black community in its broad struggle for freedom, justice, equality, and political power.
In 1903, under the editorial direction of Booker T. Washington, Du Bois and a coterie of Black intellectuals affiliated with the ANA would publish a group of essays in The Negro Problem. Washington’s essay, “Industrial Education for the Negro” outlined his beliefs that African Americans would be best served by focusing their efforts on acquiring manual skills and building economic wealth and power through hard work and industrial discipline. Du Bois’s essay, “The Talented Tenth,” opposed Washington’s views and would be one of the early public markers that shaped their ideological and political rivalry. Du Bois’s more extensive ideas opposing Washington would appear in The Souls of Black Folk—widely considered one of the most essential books in African American letters and, like The Negro Problem, was also published in 1903. The ideas and practices of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois will be examined more extensively in Chapter Three.
The “Conceptual Period” of Black Studies
Black intellectuals in the “Conceptual Period” often gravitated to the disciplines of history and the social sciences. This was particularly true with those working in more formal educational spaces. Sociologist Monroe Work, under the invitation of Booker T. Washington, became the head of the Department of Records and Research at Tuskegee Institute in 1908. Work was a tireless researcher who published the Negro Yearbook in 1912, which was one of the most expansive resources on all facets of Black life of its time. This was particularly important during an era where factual information on Black life was often unpublished or inaccessible. The Negro Yearbook was encyclopedic and published annually. In addition, Work also produced A Bibliography of the Negro In Africa and America, which contained some 17,000 entries about Africans in the United States, Africa, and the more significant diaspora.[4]
Monroe Work made Tuskegee a national resource for scholars, activist-intellectuals, and the general public interested in the social, political, cultural, and economic indexes that shaped Black life. The Department of Records and Research housed the most extensive collections of newspaper clippings on lynching. They became the go-to resource for chronicling domestic racial terror and violence throughout the country. Building on the prodigious anti-lynching research and activism of Ida B. Wells, who published Southern Horrors: Lynch Law In All Its Phases (1892) and The Red Record (1895), Work created an intellectual repository that not only documented the horrors of lynching but served as an irreplaceable resource for Black activists and organizations in the fight to end it.
Monroe Work passed away in 1945, but by the middle of the twentieth century, Black activist-intellectuals continued to use their academic training and talent to build institutions and publish papers and books that attended to Black people's historical and contemporary realities. Large-scale research projects, institutes, and a proliferation of books began to emerge across the United States. Manning Marable captured the ferment when he noted that
the sociologist Charles S. Johnson conducted a series of scientific investigations into the social development and political economy of blacks in the South. In 1944, Johnson initiated the Race Relations Institute at Fisk University, attempting to put scholarship into public policy practice. Other influential research in the fields of sociology and anthropology was produced by African-American scholars such as Horace Mann Bond, author of The Education of the Negro in Alabama: A Study in Cotton and Steel, published in 1937; Alison Davis, whole 1941 book, Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class, co-authored with Burleigh B. Gardner and Mary R. Gardner, was the best ethnographic survey of race relations under Jim Crow segregation published in the 1930s and 1940s; E. Franklin Frazier, author of Negro Youth at Crossroads in 1940 and many other influential studies; St. Clair Drake, who produced Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, in 1945; and Oliver Cromwell Cox, who in 1948 authored the most richly detailed theoretical study of Black America and U.S. race relations produced in the first half of the twentieth century, Caste, Class and Race.[5]
The intellectual output outlined by Marable grew out of the educational and organizational acumen of activists-intellectuals whose work was part of a growing network of colleges, universities, social justice organizations, churches, civic groups, newspapers, professional associations/societies, fraternities/sororities, and activist groups.
Perhaps the most momentous year of the “Conceptual Period” for Black Studies was 1915. It was during this year that historian Carter G. Woodson founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH). Woodson, the second African American to receive a Ph.D. in history from Harvard following Du Bois, envisioned the ASNLH to be a “collection of sociological and historical data on the Negro, the study of peoples of African blood, the publishing of books in this field, and the promotion of harmony between the races by acquainting the one with the other.”[6] The ASNLH recognized the inextricable linkages between the African diaspora and Africa and sought to be a United States-based organization attentive to the socio-historical conditions for Black people worldwide.
The first significant order of business for the ASNLH was the creation of the Journal of Negro History (JNH) in January 1916. The JNH became the primary scholarly journal for academics and activist intellectuals interested in publishing their work. In many respects, the JNH became the first scholarly journal within Black Studies. It was exceptionally difficult for Black activist intellectuals to find outlets to publish their research. The JNH came to fill that void and became a primary outlet for documenting the historical and contemporary realities of the Black world, particularly those in the United States. Moreover, the creation of the JNH was part of a more significant intellectual groundswell connected to the founding of the American Negro Book Collectors Exchange (ANBCE) in 1915. Black studies scholar James Stewart noted that the American Negro Book Collectors Exchange “was intended to serve as a clearing house for literature written by people of African descent. The organization planned to contact book collectors in Africa, the West Indies, South America, and Europe to acquire works written by black authors and to compile a list of authors and their works.” (Stewart 2015, 89)
Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Arturo Schomburg (Public Domain; New York Public Library via nypl.getarchive.net)
Both the ANBCE and the ASNLH grew out of networks established in the American Negro Academy. Carter G. Woodson joined the ANA in 1914. Bibliophile Arturo Schomburg and journalist Edward Bruce were also part of the ANA and co-founded the Negro Society for Historical Research, based in New York City. Notably, Du Bois became president of the ANA in 1908 after the death of founder Alexander Crummell.
One of the most enduring themes of the “Conceptual Period” of Black Studies was the serious attention paid to examining African history and its contemporary relationship with the diaspora. Africa and its people were subjects to be studied and heavily considered as part of the broad fight for freedom, justice, and self-determination throughout the Black world. The Pan-Africanist orientation of early Black Studies activist intellectuals had deep roots in the words of David Walker and the resistance initiatives of enslaved Africans who gave shape to the Black Radical Tradition. Pan-Africanists believed that Africa and its diaspora were tied into an essential unity that grew out of the shared experiences of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. Indeed, in 1900, Henry Sylvester Williams, a Trinidadian lawyer, spearheaded the First Pan-African Congress in London that assembled just before the Paris Exhibition. Booker T. Washington helped promote the Congress. Du Bois and activist educator Anna Julia Cooper attended the gathering with several dozen delegates and independent Congress attendees from across the Black world.
Du Bois had a longstanding interest in African history. His doctoral dissertation was a two-volume study titled “The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in the United States, 1638-1871." He published his thesis in a Harvard Historical Studies No. 1 series in 1895. This wide-ranging project examined the evolution of slavery in the eighteenth century and considered the impact of the Haitian Revolution in arousing fear in the white planter class in the US South. Du Bois’ knowledge of African history sat at the heart of his book, The Negro–published in 1915. DuBois broke with standard interpretations of African American history and began The Negro with an extensive examination of African history. It became a model text that anticipated the Afrocentric paradigm that would become a critical feature in Black Studies in the coming decades. Historians declared The Negro “pioneering” and noted “that [DuBois] showed that...just as knowledge of African history and its problems is necessary for the understanding of what has happened to [people] of African descent overseas, the African past cannot be fully understood without a recognition of the mark which the African diaspora has made on mainland Africa.”[7]
Endnotes
[1] Garnet, Henry H., and JH Tobitt. 2016. “The Address in Full - Henry Highland Garnet's “Address to the Slaves'” and its Colored Conventions Origins.” Colored Conventions Project. https://coloredconventions.org/garne.../full-address/.
[2] Marable, Manning. “Black Studies and the Racial Mountain.” SOULS, no. summer, 17-36. 2000. 19
[3] Stewart, James. 2015. “BLACK/AFRICANA STUDIES, THEN AND NOW: RECONSTRUCTING A CENTURY OF INTELLECTUAL INQUIRY AND POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT, 1915–2015.” the Journal of African American History , Vol. 100, No. 1, “Centennial Perspectives, 1915–2015” (Winter 2015), pp. 87-118 100, no. 1 (Winter): 87-118. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5323...s_tab_contents.
[4] Marable, Manning. “Black Studies and the Racial Mountain.” SOULS, no. summer, 17-36. 2000. 3
[6] Stewart, James. 2015. “BLACK/AFRICANA STUDIES, THEN AND NOW: RECONSTRUCTING A CENTURY OF INTELLECTUAL INQUIRY AND POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT, 1915–2015.” the Journal of African American History , Vol. 100, No. 1, “Centennial Perspectives, 1915–2015” (Winter 2015), pp. 87-118 100, no. 1 (Winter): 87-118. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5323...es_tab_content
