black history essay examples

black history essay examples

Exploring the Significance of Black History Through Key Essay Examples

1. Introduction to Black History and its Importance

The following section intends to provide a background to the importance of examining black history. During Black History Month, numerous celebrations, and African history month or African heritage month, recognition is on full display for at least twenty-eight days in February (and sometimes through to March) in North America and Europe, for the struggles and achievements of black diaspora peoples, particularly those American born in the United States. Some people limit their acknowledgement to the accomplishments of a handful of individuals such as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Rosa Parks. While their moral, intellectual, and physical leadership, resistance, and triumphs, as well as many others involved in the global struggle, are certainly deserving of praise and emulation, there is more to black history. Indeed, more is recognized during this month beyond these few individuals. These valiant leaders have left a body of autobiographical writings, reflective speeches, and other revelatory documents that provide fundamental knowledge of their leadership and the lessons they learned from their efforts. However, the full examination of historical scholarship is more comprehensive, detailed, and contextually understood from the experiences, consequences, contributions, and responses of the leaders.

Black history is a vitally important component of recorded world history. Though many aspects of black history and its dismissive reception in academia, politics, and wider society have put a damper on its comprehensive examination, this should not and has not diminished the interest from the broad public in discovering and acknowledging its rich history and its relationship with other world civilizations and societies. Although black history can refer to the examination of one black group historically disadvantaged by race-based oppression, it represents a world history perspective on the group. From this perspective, it considers the various experiences, achievements, and struggles of all black peoples and their substantial contributions to world history, as well as the limited and often twisted information on this subject. The practice of teaching and engaging with black history has recently been shaped by the efforts of multiracial community organizations, businesses, policymakers, state legislation, K-12 educators, and curators.

2. Analyzing Essays as Powerful Tools of Black History Preservation

In an era barely removed from slavery and when Blacks held few rights, essays on race were written by a plethora of scholars through a solitary lens that can fairly be described as unfair. These individuals became authors by articulating world almanac topics for a Northern White audience. The discursive nature of these essays signifies the important meaning, purpose, and reasons for the continued existence of essays exploring human rights and freedom. Before visual media and today’s innovative technology spurred our consciousness, essays preserved freedom and rights as the Black advocacy pieces best acted to energize a social movement. At times, essays even influenced public policy as well as individual social action. Thus a basis exists that essays played a part in the ability to respond as if independent.

As the American people continue to explore the significance of Black history, it may be of value to focus on the written documents from other periods that best represent that history. Within a free society, the role of speaking out critically, even if in dissent of the majority, is invaluable. One of the most direct ways of publicizing sentiments is that of writing essays. Essays articulate the conceptual elements of Black thoughts, history, and rights as no other form of written recordation can. The most important thing about essays is that they are personal. They highlight cutting-edge rhetoric on discrimination, contemporary forms of racial segregation, urban economic well-being, affirmative action, and the prospects for legal reform for Blacks, while integrating these issues into the broader social and political context.

3. Key Essay Examples in Black History: Themes and Impact

Exploring these key essay examples broadens the students’ historical analysis and understanding of significant issues. Both the narrative authors and the quality of their stories became critically important to our classroom discussions. On a literary level, the narratives met the criteria of an autobiography. They described real events, personal experiences and feelings, and knowledge about slavery. The narratives met the criteria of being authentic African-American voices that have become more important in America’s cultural history. Also, the narratives contain a history of the black experience that has expanded the freedom discourse in America. Oh, students also felt that the narratives included information about black slave resistors.

The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative describes a slave narrative as “the autobiography of a man or woman who was born a slave and who gained freedom by running away to the North or who was liberated with the end of the Civil War.” After the Civil War, over 6,000 individual ex-slaves published accounts of their lives. In 10 years between 1860 and 1869, 600 former slaves authored narratives. In the NHD 2007 packet, I chose 18 slave narratives to explore black history and the 2008 theme “Conflicts and Compromises.” I wanted students to understand the significance of their selection in writing these narratives. For example, I had them explain the value of learning about this segment of American history. We also talked about relations to modern-day people who face inequities, segregation, and discrimination. Students noted that the individuals’ accounts of personal experiences offer “eyewitness” descriptions about slavery.

4. The Evolution of Black History Essay Writing: From the Past to the Present

In interpretation of the history, the known events were expanded upon through the related fiction, introduced as proven fact, and the writings, which are characterized as fact and fiction woven together in unique form, gave originality, color, and life to a history that possessed no existing physical evidence. This accepted folk history, serving as a board of knowledge, fit into the framework of religion, tradition, and superstition to excite and fuel the embers of Black people’s passion associated with its culture and life.

Black history is very rich and it expresses itself around us every day. Since Marcus Mosiah Garvey, the writings on Black history and related topics have been varied and plentiful. Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association and the many newspapers, periodicals, books, articles, essays, and songs of Black writers serving as his direct contemporaries or as his ancestors in writing all related their own personal unique likenesses of interwoven aspects of the historic fabric of Black history. This assemblage of Black writers has increased the existence and significance of Black history within itself through the expression of the Black writers’ varied, individual thoughts. The historical events occurring in Black history, existing for the benefit of one group of Black people and held captive by constraints and restrictions of receipt, interpretation, and mental acknowledgement, now became a documented existence of knowledge to encompass all Black people.

5. Conclusions and Reflections on the Enduring Legacy of Black History Essays

Publishing black history essays and extending their wealth of topics and approaches can only have a positive effect by, in the words of one of the contributing authors, making young black public school pupils aspire to being students of serious black history at major universities. While it would be romantic to hope for an absence of racial segregation in the public and private school systems, both within and without the South, the least we can do is to insist that students emerging from these systems have access to black history essays that can lead them to discovering the centuries of black history that are beneficial to learn about.

There is plenty of opportunity and challenge for future black history essays as well as those already extant. Firstly, the fact that black history can encompass so much territory in time, space, gender, sexuality, politics, and culture means that there are few firm, traditional scholarly boundaries that cannot be explored using African American history. An exchange of expertise between historians of the African American experience and those researching other groups should be profitable for all. More specifically, educators can contribute to this tradition of passionate work as well by choosing relevant topics to explore from both the classical era and by yielding to the inevitable temptation to create new great essays. Despite an emphasis on African American history and the above points on the crucial importance of education, the essays contained in the two anthologies examined in this work are primarily directly relevant to historians after all; the overwhelming number of contributors are historians of African Americans for whom writing black history essays is an integral part of their desire to publicize a historical area of expertise which they hope is overlooked by many in academia, both professors and students.

The essays and other primary material discussed in this work have their origins in an almost overwhelming variety of times and places, from the Danish Virgin Islands in the early years of the twentieth century to the New England coast at the time of the American Revolutionary War, to the Mozambique Coast in the Age of Exploration, to the halls of Egypt’s Cairo University in the second half of the twentieth century. Their topics are equally wide-ranging, from selected black women’s experiences in speculative fiction to how the experiences of those who lived in slave communities have been preserved for modern historians, from helping comprehension by using visual writing strategies to turning around teacher neglect of African American history in the classroom. Yet these essays are united in being the products of a very recognizable genre, distinguished by their approach in advancing the study of black history. This genre, and the masters of it, should be taught in all lower-level courses in African American history. Their strength and unity are all the more remarkable because their authors are writing in a tradition of black history essays, which starts out primarily from one chapter on the topic in W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk, written when very few African Americans were writing about their history at all, let alone women, and has remained in print ever since.