Although there is much to consider in this time period, I’d like to focus briefly on the work of Carter G. Woodson. Woodson is often thought of as the “father of Black History” but situating him in the intellectual currents of the time helps give a clearer view of the uniqueness and innovations of Black thinkers in the early 20th century. In some ways the challenges facing Black people in Jim Crow America necessitated the generation of cultural and racial theories which seem at home in discourses around race and society today.
It’s important to recognize the expansiveness of the White Supremacist project of this era. Following reconstruction, it seems as if almost the entire nation engaged in an aggressive purposeful forgetting of the causes of the Civil War and its immediate aftermath. Textbooks, for example, promoted racist attitudes and race science to “settle” the issue of including Blacks in American society. There’s a great article in the Chronicle of High Education about how the academy worked to sustain white supremacy. I recommend it because it gives a good view of just how fucked up we really are. Also, these attitudes constructed the racist discourse currently active in our politics and society.
In short, white academics constructed racist justifications for suppressing Black citizens. This included appeals to “science” to prove that Black children were incapable of learning anything beyond what was required for manual labor, that Black people were inherently lazy and needed white supervision to accomplish anything, and that Black men were constantly lusting after white women. It’s an incomplete list but you get the picture. This is ground better covered elsewhere, as in the article linked above, or the exhaustive work of Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Yes, that one!)
So, what response did Black people have to such ideas, at an academic level? There were a few. One response was the call for Black intellectual leadership. W.E.B. duBois argued that there needed to be a class of talented, educated, and eventually wealthy Black individuals and families to lead the masses of Blacks still relegated to sharecropping and manual labor. Opposed to this view was Booker T. Washington who felt that approach was too limited and, possibly, created a class of leaders who had little in common with their people. Instead, he felt there should be broad programs to focus on education. He specifically felt that education should help laborers gain skills which could be used to better their local communities. If the average Black person had to rely on skilled white labor, they were forever subject to the capricious and racist attitudes pervading white society. So, the argument became over whether to develop the capacity for self sustaining communities from the top down or the bottom up.
The racist stereotypes and the preeminence of the Dunning school of thinking intruded on these debates and created a more urgent need to challenge racialist thinking. Flowing from the work of Alain LeRoy Locke, the argument for a “New Negro” emerged. This was a view not far from what we would probably call cosmopolitan today. Locke felt that people of all races, and whites especially, would benefit from more contact with people unlike themselves. He urged the increasing presence of Blacks in media, journalism, and the arts. Through this social and cultural interaction society at large would develop a “new psychology” of Blacks in America and around the world. This is only a portion of Locke's work so please do not construe this as the whole of his thought.
Woodson critiqued this idea as failing to undo the harm of these stereotypes. If, as Woodson felt, the white view was one in which Black people had no history beyond that of enslavement and barbarism, how does saying ‘look how far we’ve come’ negate that view? The “New Negro” in some sense legitimized the white racist stereotypes and, therefore, was unable to adequately combat them. Woodson felt that instead of showing the world how great Black people were now, or could be soon, that the world needed to know that Black people were always great. Woodson’s life work grew out of this idea. Informed, in part, by the lack of any attention to Black history while pursuing his doctorate (the first African American to earn a doctorate in history) Woodson began to document Black history in detail.
Beyond publishing academic articles, he started journals, weeklies, newspapers, and other publications meant for consumption by the general public. Woodson wrote dozens of textbooks for use in segregated schools, and instituted Black History Week as a way for any school to focus exclusively on and celebrate the history of Black people. This later turned into Black History Month. He was specifically critical of the idea of “mis-education”. He felt that neglecting to teach Black children about their history denied them a chance to build a sense of self, place, and purpose in the world. Curriculum which purported to be educative was, in fact, precisely the opposite and only served to push Black children out of school.
Woodson's view of history of Black History was to its totality. He would write one day of the ancient metallurgists in Ethiopia who smelted iron before any Greek or Latin culture had emerged and then turn the next day to discussing how white universities could not hope to train teachers of Black children because they had no sense of the immediate conditions of Black people in their communities or in the country. In some ways, I feel like Woodson outlined the idea of culturally responsive pedagogy decades before it entered the mainstream of educational thinking. He may be one of the earliest thinkers to recognize that classrooms weren't simply communicating cultural norms and values but were active participants in constructing those norms and values. Hence his critique that "the 'educated Negroes' have the attitude of contempt toward their on people" because "he went to be educated in a system which dismisses the Negro as a nonentity" (Woodson, 1933, p1.). Curriculum, he felt, was central to communicating and reproducing the ideology of white supremacy and, crucially, even approaches which were not outright racist contributed to white supremacy through omission. This was just as true in Black schools as in white ones. Woodson articulated the groundwork of the hidden curriculum and the null curriculum some 70 years before they were published by white men in largely still white institutions of higher learning.
To return to my first statement, I think it's a stunning encapsulation of Woodson's critique that Kliebard's historical overview of educational thinking neglects to mention even a single important Black educator, administrator, or intellectual of the era including Woodson himself. It is made even more gobsmackingly omissive by the fact that its first edition was published not in 1926 but in 1986. The third edition was published in 2004!
I'll leave you today with Anna Julia Cooper's 1892 A Voice from the South which begins,
IN the clash and clatter of our American Conflict, it has been said that the South remains Silent. Like the Sphinx she inspires vociferous disputation, but herself takes little part in the noisy controversy. One muffled strain in the Silent South, a jarring chord and a vague and uncomprehended cadenza has been and still is the Negro. And of that muffled chord, the one mute and voiceless note has been the sadly expectant Black Woman,
An infant crying in the night,
An infant crying for the light;
And with no language--but a cry.
The colored man's inheritance and apportionment is still the sombre crux, the perplexing cul de sac of the nation,--the dumb skeleton in the closet provoking ceaseless harangues, indeed, but little understood and seldom consulted.
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