Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

44 Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States
professional historians. Except for a small group of Blacks (academics in
southern schools and amateurs) and a smaller number of Whites, there was
little interest in Afro-American life and history. By the fifties one might have
identified a subfield of American history called “Negro history,” but that
was something taught almost exclusively in Black schools. Less could be said
for Afro-American literature. Articles on Negro history could not be found
in the two major historical journals—The American Historical Review and
the Mississippi Valley Historical Review—unless they could pass as “southern
history.” As a consequence, the Journal of Negro History (Carter Woodson’s
creation) had its pick of the very best scholarly work being done.
The White scholarly establishment was not hospitable. There was a
predisposition among historians, for instance, to believe that Blacks could
not be objective about their history, especially since their interpretations
were likely to run counter to conventional wisdom. 28 The onus was on the
Black scholar to prove himself or herself unbiased; ideally such scholars
would produce scholarship that disguised the fact that the authors were
Black. Only Whites could be presumed unbiased. In the effort to gain professional
respectability, Black scholars were likely to try to make themselves
color-blind in their work.
Despite efforts at conformity, such scholars as Du Bois, Woodson,
Rayford Logan, and Benjamin Quarles were aware of the entrenched racism
in their profession. They were of a “progressive” generation, however, and
imagined that reason and demonstrated quality would in time be recognized.
Meanwhile, something should be done to educate Afro-American
young people to understand and appreciate their past, to see themselves not
only through the eyes of White American scholars whose interpretations of
slavery, Reconstruction, and the historical oppression of Blacks were by no
means disinterested. That was much of the reason behind the establishment
of the American Negro Academy and the Association for the Study of Negro
Life and History, that is, the creation and dissemination of a useable past for
Black Americans. Carter Woodson railed against what he called “the miseducation
of the Negro”: arguing that conventional schooling in America
(the North as well as the South) brainwashed Blacks into a belief in the superiority
of Whites and in Blacks’ lack of history or culture. To correct that,