The Columbia Guide to African American History Since 1939

Robert Harris Jr., Rosalyn Terborg-Penn

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780231510875
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

This book is a multifaceted approach to understanding the central developments in African American history since 1939. It combines a historical overview of key personalities and movements with essays by leading scholars on specific facets of the African American experience, a chronology of events, and a guide to further study.

Marian Anderson's famous 1939 concert in front of the Lincoln Memorial was a watershed moment in the struggle for racial justice. Beginning with this event, the editors chart the historical efforts of African Americans to address racism and inequality. They explore the rise of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements and the national and international contexts that shaped their ideologies and methods; consider how changes in immigration patterns have complicated the conventional "black/white" dichotomy in U.S. society; discuss the often uneasy coexistence between a growing African American middle class and a persistent and sizable underclass; and address the complexity of the contemporary African American experience. Contributors consider specific issues in African American life, including the effects of the postindustrial economy and the influence of music, military service, sports, literature, culture, business, and the politics of self-designation, e.g.,"Colored" vs. "Negro," "Black" vs. "African American".

While emphasizing political and social developments, this volume also illuminates important economic, military, and cultural themes. An invaluable resource, The Columbia Guide to African American History Since 1939 provides a thorough understanding of a crucial historical period.

PART I

Historical Narrative

ROBERT L. HARRIS JR. AND ROSALYN TERBORG-PENN

INTERPRETING AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY SINCE 1939

The period of African American history from 1939 to the present is one of the most important for understanding the black struggle for freedom, justice, and equality. The dean of African American history, John Hope Franklin, has affirmed the “interconnection between the history of a people and their drive for first-class citizenship.”¹ The writing of African American history has changed over time in relation to the socioeconomic, cultural, and political position of black people in the United States; as Earl E. Thorpe remarks, “It is because the past is a guide with roads pointing in many directions that each generation and epoch must make its own study of history.”² And Eric Foner has argued that “history always has been and always will be regularly rewritten, in response to new questions, new information, new methodologies, and new political, social, and cultural imperatives.”³ Under the influence of black opposition to racial oppression and segregation, black and white historians, after 1939, began to explore black resistance, agency, and self-determination. For the first time, African American history began to take on a life of its own, as black people became actors rather than pawns in the nation’s history. Historians began to develop a periodization for African American history that does not blindly follow the major eras in American history. Colin Palmer has explained that “a people’s internal trajectory, particularly that of an oppressed, marginalized group, and one that did not enjoy full citizenship rights, is not coterminous with the political history of the state.”⁴ As the great essayist and novelist Ralph Ellison wrote, “But can a people… live and develop for over three hundred years simply by reacting? Are American Negroes simply the creation of white men, or have they at least helped to create themselves out of what they found around them?”⁵

REVISIONIST, CONTRIBUTIONIST, VINDICATIONIST, AND AFROCENTRIC APPROACHES

Many of the post-1939 historians wrote to revise the errors, omissions, and distortions about black people that appeared in standard histories of the United States. Often, they focused on the contributions that African Americans made to America as a way of incorporating them into the nation’s history. Some wrote in what V. P. Franklin and Bettye Collier-Thomas have called a “vindicationist” mode “to deconstruct the discursive structures erected in science, medicine, the law, and historical discourse to uphold the mental and cultural inferiority of African peoples.”⁶ African American history is central to understanding American history, and there is an ongoing interaction between the two. Thus historians have begun to drill more deeply into the strata of the black past. They have examined black identity and cultural development. This approach to the African American past might be considered Afrocentrist, as an examination of the black experience from the inside out rather than from the outside in. Afrocentricity, as explained by Maghan Keita in Race and the Writing of History, is a challenge to the construction of knowledge that supports Western interpretations as universal and that disallows multiple perspectives based on non-Western traditions.⁷

THE INTEGRATIONIST OR NATIONALIST PARADIGM

In The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois writes about the world African Americans inhabited at the turn of the twentieth century, one that yielded them “no true self-consciousness” and that only let them see themselves “through the revelation of the other world.” He suggested that the history of African Americans was the tension between being “an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.”⁸ Harold Cruse, in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, contends that African American history has been either integrationist (focusing on freedom, civil rights, and racial equality) or nationalist (emphasizing group solidarity, self-help, and separatism).⁹ According to Kevin Gaines, interpretations of African American history since the 1970s have taken two approaches: the study of elites and middle-class reformers and their organizations on one hand and working-class resistance, mass mobilization, and labor politics on the other. For Gaines, the “framework of integrationism versus nationalism …failed to elucidate not only the complicated operations of race and class in social and power relations but their gendered dimension, as well.”¹⁰

MULTIDIMENSIONALITY

Today, historians such as Earl Lewis have broadened the dilemma posed by Du Bois to include people of African ancestry who have recently immigrated from Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and Central and South America. The binary that once confronted African Americans (American or Negro, integration or nationalism) has been expanded beyond the United States and Africa to experiences that black people in this country now bring from overlapping diasporas. Moreover, the post–civil rights era has made it possible to consider, as Lewis calls it, the multipositionality of African Americans to probe issues of class, sexuality, color, gender, religion, region, and profession.¹¹ Prior to the successes of the civil rights movement, it was difficult to examine the multidimensionality of black communities. Primarily for political reasons, African Americans had to put up a united front against racial oppression. As the walls of segregation began to crumble and as many African Americans were able to enter mainstream society, the need for racial unity was no longer as urgent. The study of African American history has become more complex, but also more rewarding, with a rich tapestry, especially for the period since 1939.

THE USES OF AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY

In his insightful essay “Black History’s Diversified Clientele,” published in 1977, Benjamin Quarles writes that African American history serves at least four publics: the black rank and file, black revolutionary nationalists, black academicians, and the white world (both scholarly and lay).¹² For the black rank and file, the purpose of African American history is to create a sense of racial pride and personal worth. This is African American history that is still written in the contributionist or vindicationist vein. Revolutionary nationalists, who are very critical of the United States and its oppression of African Americans through institutional racism and white supremacy, seek a past that supports a black aesthetic and identity. This approach looks to the past primarily for the purpose of nation building and is the goal of the Afrocentrist school of historiography today. The Afrocentrist school of interpretation places Africa at the center of historical development and examines the past from the cultural and racial unity of people of African ancestry more than their geographical or temporal location. Quarles did not dismiss the revolutionary nationalist school because it brought fresh perspectives by posing challenging questions and provoking multidisciplinary and comparative studies of the past. The black academician, according to Quarles, engages history as “a discipline, an attempt to recapture and mirror the past as accurately as possible.” The black academician combines both a citizenship role to improve the condition of African Americans and a scholarly role in the search for truth. The multidimensionality and complexity of African American history with tragedy and triumph, failure and success, stagnation and progress, influences the approach of the black academician. Quarles concludes that African American history is not just the province of African Americans but should be the concern of the white community as well, both scholarly and lay. As W. E. B. DuBois, in The Souls of Black Folk, so perceptively writes, “Your country? How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed we were here. Here we have brought our three gifts and mingled them with yours: a gift of story and song … the gift of sweat and brawn …a gift of the Spirit…. Actively we have woven ourselves with the very warp and woof of this nation…. Would America have been America without her Negro people?”¹³

MULTIDIMENSIONALITY AND INTRAGROUP RELATIONS

Although the revisionist, contributionist, vindicationist, and Afrocentrist approaches to the research, writing, and teaching of African American history are still prominent, there was a shift during the last decade of the twentieth century to a more multidimensional interpretation of the past. This shift was especially important to move beyond what Nell Painter identified as the “representative ‘men’ of color” who dominated most of the story about African Americans.¹⁴ Evelyn Books Higginbotham argues that African American history “has failed to examine the differential class and gender positions men and women occupy in black communities—thus uncritically rendering a monolithic ‘black community,’ ‘black experience,’ and ‘voice of the Negro.” While not losing sight of intergroup relations, there has been a change to examine more closely intragroup relations. Higginbotham has helped us to understand that the “metalanguage” of race (a social construction, not a scientific principle) has muted but not silenced conflict among African Americans. Especially with regard to women, she has concluded, “We must problematize much more of what we take for granted. We must bring to light and to coherence the one and the many that we always were in history and still actually are today.” There have always been differences among African Americans. Recognizing those differences does not diminish the past but enriches it.¹⁵

MAJOR PERIODS OF AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY SINCE 1939

This guide to African American history begins in 1939, a watershed year for the black experience in the United States. Marian Anderson’s concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial was witnessed live by 75,000 black and white Americans and heard on the radio by millions more, who recognized the irony of the world’s greatest contralto having to perform outdoors because of racial bigotry and discrimination at a time when the United States criticized Nazi Germany for its doctrines of Aryan supremacy. Moreover, in 1939, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the foremost champion of the rights of African Americans, incorporated the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which made it possible to receive tax-free contributions for its campaign in the courts against segregation. Prior to 1939, the NAACP had difficulty financing litigation. Now it could employ a dedicated staff of attorneys to battle against segregation and to establish the precedents that would lead to the momentous Supreme Court decision of 1954 that overturned the principle of “separate but equal” that had separated the races, especially in the South, since the rise of Jim Crow in the 1890s.

1939–1957

From 1939 to 1957, African Americans set the foundation for the civil rights struggle, which the Montgomery Bus Boycott Movement triggered in 1955 on the heels of the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which undercut the ground for de jure or legal segregation. With victories in the courts against segregation and momentum building for first-class citizenship for African Americans, supporters of white supremacy identified the NAACP as the main villain, assuming that if they could cripple the organization, they could stem the rising tide for equal rights. In many respects, this strategy backfired. As southern states curtailed the activities of the NAACP, other organizations emerged with a more local base to challenge segregation and disfranchisement.

1955–1965

During this period, the civil movement spread throughout the South to crumble the walls of segregation. It was also a catalyst for the nation, as the black freedom movement, according to Vincent Harding, served as a “wedge” that pried open the consciousness not only of African Americans but also of white students, women, Latinos, gays and lesbians, Native Americans, consumers, Asian Americans, environmentalists, and the elderly, to struggle for a more democratic society.

1965–1975

In 1965, when the Voting Rights Act passed into law, African Americans entered the post-civil rights era. By 1968, other laws had been placed on the books to recognize the rights of African Americans as first-class citizens of the United States. There were still questions of enforcement that would continue to plague African Americans, but the laws against racial discrimination and segregation were in place. The end of legal segregation, however, confronted African Americans with a stark reality. Although they had the right to public accommodations and transportation, they lacked the wherewithal to afford access, thereby giving the right small meaning. Moreover, African Americans in the North witnessed little change in their lives despite the publicity accorded to the so-called Negro Revolution. Uprisings or riots in the cities, primarily in the North, revealed the depth of deprivation and despair for many African Americans who remained mired in poverty. The Black Power and Black Consciousness movements arose in 1965, and over the next decade addressed the disparity between the promise of racial equality and the reality for most African Americans.

1975 TO THE PRESENT

After 1975, with the rise of black elected officials, a growing black middle class, and the incorporation of African Americans into many areas of American life—education, business, entertainment, government, and sports—it appeared, in William Julius Wilson’s words, that there was a “declining significance of race.” Moreover, the United States changed demographically after the 1960s with greater immigration from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Central and South America. As the Advisory Board on Race that President Bill Clinton appointed in 1997 discovered in conversations across the country and reported in One America in the 21st Century: Forging a New Future, the face of America had changed with a growing population of Asian ancestry and a Latino community that is now as large as the African American population. America has become an increasingly multicultural nation, marked by ethnic, social, and economic divisions of many kinds. For most of the nation’s history, with Native Americans isolated on reservations, the black/white divide had been central to the country’s laws and practices, especially in the South. The lingering problems of disproportionate poverty, inadequate education, incarceration, police brutality, racial profiling, and covert discrimination in employment, health care, and housing pose a dilemma for African Americans over whether previous race-based strategies are still appropriate for largely class-based issues. The narrative that follows examines the key periods of African American history since 1939 to the present and provides a context for understanding the changing contours of African American life and culture.

NOTES

1. John Hope Franklin, “On the Evolution of Scholarship in Afro-American History,” in The State of Afro-American History: Past, Present, and Future, ed. Darlene Clark Hine (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 22.

2. Earl E. Thorpe, “Philosophy of History: Sources, Truths, and Limitations,” Quarterly Review of Higher Education Among Negroes 25, no. 3 (July 1957): 172–185.

3. Eric Foner, Who Owns History? Rethinking the Past in a Changing World (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002), xvii.

4. Colin A. Palmer, Passageways: An Interpretive History of Black America (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998), 2:x.

5. Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1953), 315.

6. V. P. Franklin and Bettye Collier-Thomas, “Biography, Race Vindication, and African American Intellectuals,” Journal of Negro History (Winter 1996): 1.

7. Maghan Keita, Race and the Writing of History: Riddling the Sphinx (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

8. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), 5.

9. Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: Morrow, 1967).

10. Kevin Gaines, “Rethinking Race and Class in African-American Struggles for Equality, 1885–1941,” American Historical Review 102 (April 1997): 378–387.

11. Earl Lewis, “To Turn as on a Pivot: Writing African Americans Into a History of Overlapping Diasporas,” American Historical Review 100, no. 3 (June 1995): 765–787.

12. Benjamin Quarles, “Black History’s Diversified Clientele,” in Black Mosaic: Essays in Afro-American History and Historiography (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 202–213.

13. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 214–215.

14. Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas After Reconstruction (New York: Knopf, 1977), 16.

15. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “African American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs: Journal of Women in History and Culture 17, no. 2 (Winter 1992): 251–274.

FOUNDATIONS OF THE MOVEMENT, 1939–57

On Easter Sunday 1939, in Washington, D.C., a crowd estimated at 75,000 stretched from the front of the Lincoln Memorial along the reflecting pool to the base of the Washington Monument to hear a concert by the world-renowned contralto Marian Anderson. The concert had to be staged outdoors because the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) refused to rent Constitution Hall for the performance. Howard University, the historically black college in Washington, usually sponsored Marian Anderson’s appearances in the nation’s capital. As her popularity grew, Howard sought larger quarters for her concert. Constitution Hall, with excellent acoustics and four thousand seats, was the largest concert facility in the District of Columbia. In 1931, the DAR permitted a performance by the black tenor Roland Hayes and a benefit concert by the Hampton Institute Choir. To prevent the prospect of blacks and whites sitting together in the audience, the DAR, in 1932, adopted a policy of renting the facility for performances by white artists only.

When Howard University officials approached the DAR about renting Constitution Hall, African Americans in Washington had grown cautiously optimistic about improvement in race relations in the nation’s capital. During the 1930s, under the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, buses, taxicabs, railroad station dining and waiting rooms, and public libraries had become desegregated, as had meetings, lectures, and concerts in government halls and the Library of Congress. The First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, had been an outspoken champion of racial equality. The DAR decision not to rent Constitution Hall for a concert by Marian Anderson became major news nationally and internationally. The famous conductor Arturo Toscanini had hailed Anderson’s voice as one heard only once every hundred years. Many newspapers compared the DAR’s decision to racial bigotry in Nazi Germany. In her nationally syndicated newspaper column on February 27, Eleanor Roosevelt announced her resignation from the DAR because of its blatant racial discrimination. Although Howard University continued to press the DAR, as a backup the school sought use of the Central High School Auditorium from the Board of Education, which refused on the grounds that it could n...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Introduction
• Part I. Historical Narrative
• Part II. Key Themes in African American History Since 1939
• Part III. Chronology, 1939–2005
• Part IV. A–Z Entries
• Part V. Resource Guide
• List of Contributors
• Index