black history experts

black history experts

Exploring the Contributions and Impact of Black History Experts

1. Introduction to Black History Experts

The authors of this volume have chosen to focus on a group of educators who, in search of employment opportunities during a time when many colleges and universities were not hiring Black history faculty members, became interdisciplinary Black history experts. In so doing, Black history experts began generating substantial bodies of scholarship, much of which interrogated traditional historiographical silences on the Black experience in the United States and around the globe. In addition, many of these early scholars developed methodology informed by significant contributions to other fields of historical inquiry – including sociology, anthropology, ethnography, literary criticism, as well as feminist, gender, sexuality, critical race, and queer theories.

Thus, one question informing this volume is: how might their diverse training and interdisciplinary contributions continue to be most effectively utilized, and how can the larger field of both Black history and African American Studies benefit from closer examination of the works of these innovative scholars? The authors’ approach extends recent research that celebrates the contributions of Black history scholars that cut across traditional historical guild boundaries and that employs training and professional skills acquired in other disciplines. The pedagogical impact these scholars have had (a topic not usually associated with the works of academic experts) can also be examined closely through the integration of known biographical data with an analysis of signature contributions to the fields of African American Studies and Black history.

2. Key Figures and Pioneers in Black History Scholarship

To articulate a discussion of the contributions and impact of Black historians, I need to make clear who in their ranks I consider to be key figures and pioneers and why. The field of Black history is an expansive one, rich with an array of foundational scholars, each of whom contributes a unique and critical perspective. Due to the vastness of the field and my restricted time frame, however, I focus not on all key figures in Black history, but rather on those who represent centers of gravity within the fields of Black political and Black social history specifically. This is not to say that the key figures in Black political and Black social history are not also foundational scholars of Black cultural history; indeed, the interests and approaches of these scholars dovetail and bleed seamlessly from one to another. This distinction instead is designed to provide a close, rich examination of the different ways in which Black history scholars in the main conceptualize their strengths and contributions, and in turn urge us to shore up the field’s weaknesses.

Why should we focus specifically on Black history’s pioneers? It is at least in part due to their elevated, unique capacity to highlight the relevance of Black social and political history scholarship, but it is also the case that Black pioneers in professional history often play a powerful symbolic role in the Black struggle. The historians who founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, authored textbooks, showed up in government documents, taught classes at black colleges, invited ministers and intellectuals to participate in their intellectual exchanges, and sent their publications to this array of Black opinion leaders have an especially good seat from which to discuss Black history in the specific contexts of their day. Attributions like “founder,” “first,” and “representative” carry immense political purchase with them. Moreover, the profession’s leaders hold, respect, and transfer knowledge, not just about history, but about the specific invisible and exotic challenges that Black students face at institutions of higher learning.

3. The Evolution of Black History Studies and Research

As institutions of higher education expanded in the United States, black individuals began to engage in scholarly study and classroom teaching on the black experience. The field of black studies developed alongside other area studies programs focused on race and ethnicity. Scholars who had developed their knowledge of African and African diaspora societies began to teach about race and intersectional discrimination within the societies that they and their students lived in. However, as the number of blacks in colleges and universities began to increase, the need to expand and deepen the knowledge base of both beginning and advanced black studies scholars and teachers grew. Institutions, individuals, and groups outside of academia itself developed institutional responses to this growing need for the creation of knowledge about black peoples and the fight against intersections of oppression that they endured. Today, while black scholars conduct research and teach, their work extends beyond the traditional spaces of HBCUs, black studies-focused higher education institutions, and predominantly white institutions.

In our opinion, to evaluate the possibility, contributions, and impact of creating a museum or center that focuses explicitly on the formal and informal knowledge that black history researchers create, it is necessary to explore why there was a need to develop black studies as a formal academic field and how its evolution shapes scholarly creation. The first scholars to conduct research about the African diaspora were, indeed, members of the black communities that produced this knowledge and not white scholars who also lived in the same societies. Researching and recording African diaspora history to ensure knowledge production that would refocus research away from whiteness and white supremacy constructs and instead emphasize the endurance, creativity, and resilience of black peoples was the driving force behind the creation of formal black history study within higher education. When black studies scholars engage in work that focuses on knowledge creation and transmission about race and intersectional discrimination, they are often critiqued as doing work that is “service” rather than “scholarship.”

4. Contemporary Issues and Debates in Black History Scholarship

Viewed from the perspective of today’s world, the growth and transformation of Black history scholarship is all the more noteworthy because much of this change has been stimulated by a range of social, political, and scholarly developments that are of relatively recent origin. The rise of the broader Black community to ascendancy in American society, the new emphasis in higher education upon the relevance and applicability of knowledge to the resolution of contemporary social concerns, the search to integrate a diverse American society – these are prominent among those forces that have influenced the development of Black history. Also closely related to that development, increasingly, have been a number of conflicts within Black academia, as well as between that sector and a wide spectrum of social and political interests in the broader society. The diversity – indeed, the contentiousness – of the current scene in Black scholarship has been the subject of growing attention in contemporary discussions of Black Studies.

It has become increasingly clear that Black history scholarship has a vitality and dynamism that are found only rarely in most other areas of historical research. For one thing, the sheer growth in the numbers of articles on Black history that are being published, reviewed, and cited is an unmistakable indicator of the field’s liveliness. As an important part of Black experience has found an ever-increasing variety of expressions, they have provided historians with a rich menu of subjects that offer substantial challenges and rewards. At the same time that historians have been probing for answers to these and other questions, there has been a remarkable growth in professionalism and concern for standards within the community of those who are involved in the enterprise of historical exploration. Not only have historians been taught much by Blacks, both lay and professional, who have come to be a part of the regular academic world in a way that was unimaginable by predecessors of some thirty-five or forty years ago who struggled to relegate White male academics talk alone to create and to control Black history, but they have learned more about how to tell others what they have learned from institutional changes that have been generated within the academic world and that are irrevocably changing some of the longstanding traditions of that sector of society. Central to the strengthening of Black history has been the growth of an institutional network at the collegiate level. This comprises formal programs of Black Studies and quasi-formal associations that have offered substantial support and encouragement to growing numbers of more dispersed scholars. At the same time, this same institutional infrastructure has both contributed to and reflected a growing intellectual tension between Black scholars whose disciplinary training takes place in more established – and more status–alternative directions within the academic economy.