From the President
With its refrain “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story,” Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton reminds us of the fundamental importance of authorship and ownership in shaping our national memory. Systematically excluded on the basis of race for decades from elite universities and publishing houses, Black historians under the leadership of Dr. Carter G. Woodson resorted in 1916 to founding the Journal of Negro History (still publishing today, as the Journal of African American History). It would be another fifty years and more before Black historians began to be appointed in predominantly white universities. It was also in the last quarter of the twentieth century that African American history, along with the various fields within Africana Studies, began to establish itself in the academy. Against that backdrop, this special issue of History Now is devoted to the African American historians who have contributed to this journal in its first fifteen years of existence, bringing together twenty-nine essays by twenty-four different historians on topics from the founding era to the twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement.
From the beginning, the Gilder Lehrman Institute has integrated African American history into the broader American story, while also honoring and drawing on the talents of some of the most accomplished Black historians of the past two generations. We have benefitted from the contributions of scores of African American scholars across all our programs—including the book prizes, public lectures, teacher seminars, exhibitions, and publications—from the moment the Institute was founded. When the Institute’s Scholarly Advisory Board was formed in 1995, Professor James O. Horton of George Washington University served as co-chair. Among countless other projects, Jim Horton curated a major exhibition in 1995 on Freedom: The Story of US and in 1997 chaired one of the Institute’s earliest public forums, a daylong symposium on the story of the Amistad and the Spielberg film that raised it to visibility. For more than a dozen years, Jim generously advised us on curriculum, recommended top scholars, wrote and gave talks, and shared wise counsel. Meanwhile, dating from the early 1990s, the oldest of our book prizes, the Lincoln Prize, has recognized the writings of such illustrious historians as Professor Barbara Fields (with Ira Berlin), for Free At Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Emancipation, and the Civil War; Richard Blackett, for The Captive’s Quest for Freedom: and John Hope Franklin (with Loren Schweniger), for Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation. The Frederick Douglass Prize, founded in 1998 and co-sponsored with the Gilder Lehrman Center on Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale, has honored a host of distinguished Black historians for their work, including Stephanie Smallwood, Leslie Harris, Thavolia Glymph, Christopher Leslie Brown, Carla Peterson, Erica Dunbar, Tiya Miles, and Annette Gordon-Reed.
Over the years, innumerable African American historians have participated in our programming for teachers, students, and the general public, including Adele Logan Alexander, Daina Ramey Berry, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Christopher Leslie Brown, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Allyson Hobbs, Jonathan Holloway, Rashauna Johnson, Martha Jones, Peniel Joseph, Randall Kennedy, Charles McKinney, Lucas Morel, and Clement Price. Past presenters of our National History Teacher of the Year Award include historian Earl Lewis and television host Robin Roberts, who also recorded an interview about her father and the Tuskegee Airmen for our archives. Our online MA program (co-sponsored with Pace University) is enriched by the teachings of Peniel Joseph, Lucas Morel, Kristopher Burrell, and Daina Ramey Berry. It is with gratitude for all their many contributions that we dedicate this special issue to all these scholars, and in particular to those we have lost over the years: John Hope Franklin, Jim Horton, and Clem Price. We hope that their published works and the example of their careers will be an inspiration to students everywhere.
Under the leadership of General Editor Carol Berkin (Professor Emerita, CUNY) and Managing Editor Dr. Nicole Seary, History Now has drawn on an extensive and varied array of historians as they commissioned issues on themes and topics from every period in American history. Publishing three issues per year online, with an occasional special issue or a spin-off printed collection, History Now has published more than fifty-five issues on a wide variety of topics, ranging from the American Revolution, the Constitution, and Abolition, to Civil Rights, Jazz and American Identity, and Black Women in Leadership. The twenty-nine essays reprinted here are pulled from across that expanse of writing, to bring together the writings of twenty-four African American historians who have contributed to this journal, which is specially designed for K−12 teachers and their students. The essays are presented in chronological order, roughly, according to the period of their historical focus.
The first three are about the Founding Era. William Blakey examines the history of the African Burial Ground in New York City, while James Horton discusses race and the Constitution and Annette Gordon-Reed places the connection between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson in a modern perspective. Then comes a section of seven essays primarily on Frederick Douglass, beginning with Randall Kennedy’s “Douglass and the US Constitution” and Quandra Prettyman’s treatment of Douglass and fellow abolitionists, followed by three essays by Jim Horton, Marsha Tyson Darling, and Lucas Morel on different aspects of the struggle to achieve freedom and rights for African Americans in the second half of the nineteenth century. The last two writers in this section are Adele Alexander, who tells of a forgotten encounter between Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, and Noelle Trent, who reflects on Douglass as “An Example for the Twenty-First Century.”
Margaret Washington’s essay on “Black Women and the Abolition of Slavery” begins a section of five essays on Black women in history. Two touch on the suffragist movement: Adele Alexander’s story of her remarkable ancestor Adella Hunt Logan and Sharon Harley’s discussion of “African American Women and the Nineteenth Amendment.” The final two focus on the lives of individual women who achieved remarkable success: Earnest Bracey’s account of the activist and political leader Fannie Lou Hamer and Gary Ford’s recent essay on the civil rights trailblazer Constance Baker Motley.
Next is a section of seven essays on African American soldiers during wartime, beginning with two about World War I—Jeffrey Sammons’s essay on “Harlem’s Rattlers” and Maurice Jackson’s general overview of Black soldiers “Fighting for Democracy in World War I.” Then come two essays about African American soldiers’ experience in World War II, by John Morrow and Clarence Taylor, complemented by an oral history of World War II veteran Calvin D. Cosby, presented by Cecilia Hartsell. The final two pieces are intensely personal writings about more recent wars: Sharon Raynor’s “Vietnam War Story” and Maurice Decaul’s “On My Way to War in Iraq.”
The last seven essays in this special issue all deal with aspects of the twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement. Wendell Pritchett takes up the situation immediately after World War II in “A Local and National Story,” Clarence Taylor focuses on “African American Religious Leadership,” and Charles McKinney examines the impact of the Civil Rights Act at the local level, in “A Small Southern City.” A second essay by Clarence Taylor considers “Civil Rights Leadership and the 1964 Civil Rights Act,” while the following piece by Robert Pratt zeroes in on voting rights in the deep South in his “Lessons from Selma.” Mark Anthony Neal gives us an entirely different angle of vision in his essay “Pop Music and the Spatialization of Race in the 1990s,” while Jim Horton reflects on the overarching significance of our nation’s first holiday in honor of a Black American in the final essay, “A Place in History: Historical Perspective on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.”
The issue closes with links to three videos that cover very different phases of the long history of the civil rights struggle. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., delivers a stirring account of the failure of Reconstruction and the long duration of Jim Crow as he discusses on camera his recent book Stony the Road. The second is Robin Roberts’s inspiring and emotional account of her father Colonel Lawrence Roberts’s experience as a Tuskegee Airman in World War II and after. Finally, the issue concludes with a quiet but deeply moving conversation with civil rights leader C. Herbert Oliver recalling the tragic, murderous bombing of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 1963. Every essay in this issue testifies one way or another to the fundamental truth that Black Lives Matter, and that they have always mattered. This is the truth that these historians have helped us to keep in view, at the center of the American story, and it is the truth we hope these essays will help teachers and students take to heart now and in every generation to come.
VIDEOS
Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. gives a book talk at Pace University on Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (Penguin, 2019)
Television broadcaster Robin Roberts talks about her father, Tuskegee Airman Colonel Lawrence Roberts
Civil rights leader C. Herbert Oliver recalls his report on the bombing of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 1963