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The
story of Black History Month begins a decade after the
founding of the association. When he
conceived of the
Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in
1915, Carter G. Woodson believed that publishing
scientific history about the black race would produce facts
that would prove to the world that
Africa and its people
had played a crucial role in the development of civilization.
As a Harvard-trained
historian, Woodson, like W. E. B. Du
Bois before him, believed that the truth could not be denied
and that
reason would prevail over prejudice. He thus
established a scholarly
journal, The Journal
of Negro
History, a year after he formed the Association. Scientific
history would counter racial falsehoods,
and the
community of white scholars would alter its view of the
black race, and the race problem would gradually
disappear.
A decade into his labors, Woodson began to think
differently
about the inherent power of scholarship, the
importance of the scholarly community in promoting the
truth,
and the place of the community in the Association's
mission. Scholarship had not transformed race relations.
Most white historians had not come to recognize the truth
when it was placed before them. Additionally, he had come
to understand that some of the people who needed
convincing the most were his own people! Hence forth, the
Association
would spread the news about Black history to
the general public as well as scholars.
Daryl Michael Scott
Howard
University
(C) 2006
Cyrus Chestnut
Baltimore Jazz Legend
A History in the Key of Jazz...
By Gerald Early, Professor of English and Afro-American Studies at Washington
University in St. Louis, Missouri
When Africans arrived in the New World as indentured servants and slaves
in the 17th and 18th centuries, they were entering an alien world. The languages, religious beliefs, kinship practices, dress,
food, and cosmic and moral philosophy of Europeans were significantly different from what Africans were used to, to how they
saw the world, to what they felt their traditions were. Yet this New World was not so alien; otherwise the entire enterprise
of chattel slavery would have collapsed, as Africans would never have adapted at all. Africans were used to agricultural work
and the tasks of farming; many had abilities as artisans and could work well with tools; they were not as susceptible to European
diseases as Native American groups.
There has been continued debate since the 1940s, when Jewish anthropologist Melville
Herskovits and black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier first started the argument about how much African culture was stripped
away from Africans in the process of being transformed to a new class people in the United States. (Frazier argued that blacks
had been entirely stripped of their African cultural background; Herskovits argued that blacks retained a number of significant
Africanisms.) Part of this concern about African sources and origins that has arisen most intensely since World War II has
been psychological and political, for as Ralph Ellison observed, "The white American has charged the Negro American with being
without past or tradition (something which strikes the white man with a nameless horror), just as he himself has been so charged
by European and American critics with a nostalgia for the stability once typical of European cultures."
more Ken Burns JAZZ @ PBS.ORG
Reginald F. Lewis Museum
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ASALH
The transition from slavery to freedom represents one of the major
themes in the history of the African Diaspora in the Americas. Under and against the rule of various powers, Africans experienced
emancipation during the course of the nineteenth century. In Jamaica and Brazil, freedom came peaceably, but bloodshed also
accompanied slavery’s death. In the United States, the rebirth of freedom resulted from what was at the time the world’s
most destructive civil war, a war in which liberated slaves and free Blacks played a vital role in determining the victor
and securing their own liberty. In Saint Domingue, the slaves, under the leadership of Toussaint L’Ouverture, engaged
in violent revolution and won their freedom and independence, establishing Haiti, the world’s first Black republic.
Regardless of the path to freedom, African peoples in the New World had to continue to struggle for liberation. Where ex-slaves
formed the majority, the quest for sovereignty, independence, and equality remained elusive or hollow. Elsewhere they
rarely enjoyed equal citizenship and the untrammeled right to pursue happiness.
ASALH dedicates its 2007 national theme
to the struggles of peoples of African descent to achieve freedom and equality in the Americas during the age of emancipation.
Over a half-century ago, the celebrated historian John Hope Franklin, a leading light of ASALH, identified the struggle for
slavery and freedom as the central theme of African American history. We take up this theme to honor him and to place before
the nation and the world the historical importance of slavery and freedom in the making of modern societies in the Americas.
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Douglass said, "What is possible for me is possible for you." By taking these keys and making
them his own, Frederick Douglass created a life of honor, respect and success that he could never have dreamed of when still
a boy on Colonel Lloyd's plantation on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
Fredrick Douglass link
February 1818 – February 20, 1895
Born a slave, yet determined to be free, Frederick Douglass escaped
from slavery and became one of the most influential figures of the 19th century. He became a powerful speaker in the anti-slavery
circuit, an author, an advocate for women’s rights, and held several government positions after the Civil War.
More on Douglass
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