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Incorporating African American History into the U.S. History Survey Course
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by Kevin Gaines
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, Michigan
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| | Professor Kevin Gaines delivered the following speech during the AP Luncheon at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians in April 2003 in Memphis, Tennessee.
A Global Perspective on U.S. History
I know that you're expecting me to offer some suggestions about how to incorporate African American history into the U.S. survey. I intend to do this, but now that we are involved in a war that will radically transform global politics, it seems to me that the U.S. survey, particularly the post-1865 period, should give our students a better understanding of America's historical relation to the world. While this is certainly a major undertaking, it does not preclude the matter of incorporating African American history.
What I have in mind is an approach that illustrates the connections between America's changing relationship to the world and struggles over racial justice, citizenship rights, and civil liberties, particularly free speech. Toward that end, I want to focus on two decisive moments in the survey that lend themselves to this global perspective on U.S. history. The first is the so-called "progressive era" (roughly, 1877-1920), noteworthy for America's wars of expansion and the origins of the U.S. empire. I will conclude with an overview of the post-World War II era. Here, my focus will be on the national and international context for African American intellectual and cultural production during the post-World War II period.
I certainly support bringing African American history into the survey. But to my mind, the real objective is challenging the presumption among many of our students that American and African American history are fundamentally different areas of study. (I would add that we ought to challenge assumptions of American exceptionalism that isolate the nation from the rest of the world.) How can we as instructors overcome the tendency of many of our students to marginalize African American history (or gender history, for that matter) in comparison with their common-sense notions of "the real" U.S. history? This objective means much more than trying to persuade students that African American history is important and worthy of their interest. Instead, a more effective approach might be to emphasize a perspective within which issues of race, democracy, and citizenship rights are central to American politics and culture.
Thinking About Race
Before I address how to think of a survey in ways that link struggles over the meaning of race in the U.S. with the relationship of America to the world, I want to touch on the crucial question of how to conceptualize race. This is a subject for which we need to cultivate a high tolerance for complexity. Students need to know that the meaning of race has varied over time and place. Here, I am drawing on Thomas Holt's recent study, The Problem of Race in the Twenty-First Century. For Holt, race is an ever-changing, elusive, historically variable entity that requires us to engage its complex meanings within a specific historical moment rather than attempt a fixed and transhistorical definition.
You are certainly aware of the commonplace idea that race is a social construction. This is a crucial corrective to persistent notions of a biological basis for racial differences. After all, geneticists have found greater genetic variation within so-called racial groups than that which exists between them. Yet for our students, their lived experience of racial differences may be too immediate, vivid, and painful for them to "get" the somewhat abstract idea of race as a political and social phenomenon. A more effective approach would be to encourage students to see the changing meaning and significance of race over time. How might a time-traveler from our country's racial past view our contemporary racial situation? Such an experiment should help students see that attitudes about race and racism are not rooted in human nature. To give an example, African American soldiers in World War I discovered that white Europeans perceived race far differently from white Americans of that era. That's why many of them refused to return to the U.S., choosing to remain in France. The experience of black Americans abroad taught them that racial attitudes were not determined by one's ancestry or background.
Holt and others also remind us that race shapes social structures and institutionalized power relationships. In short, racism is reproduced within a given social formation, and it is that structural aspect that conditions attitudes about race, not the other way around. Racism's images, narratives, and practices are expressed in the political economy of a given moment, remaking themselves in tandem with changing political, cultural, and economic relationships.
Illustrating Race: Visual and Popular Culture
One important way to make the purportedly all-too-familiar matter of race and racism in American history strange is to use visual culture to demonstrate the changing meanings of race. With the mass-circulation of visual images during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one can illustrate the relationship between racial stereotypes and such concepts and phenomena as social Darwinism, ideologies of civilization, lynching, miscegenation, and citizenship. At the same time, racial images in visual culture indicate a struggle over the representation of racial meanings. Black people resisted pervasive antiblack stereotypes by depicting themselves with dignity and respectability. This can be seen in the photographs of prominent blacks, as well as in countless portraits of African American working people produced by black studio photographers early in the twentieth century. You can collect images that illustrate both sides of this struggle over the visual representation of race from antique stores and shows, flea markets, and print ephemera dealers.
Racial representations and meanings are also fought out in the realm of popular culture. Holt's discussion of the controversial career of the black heavyweight champion Jack Johnson suggests the possibilities for analyzing struggles over racial meanings within popular culture. Similarly, one might explore the career of Josephine Baker as a means of analyzing the different meanings of race that obtain across national boundaries and within different racial systems. Baker could only hope to be a chorus girl within the racially segregated U.S. In France, she achieved stardom as a musical comedy performer. Yet while the French were sufficiently enlightened to embrace Baker, her persona was defined by a romantic racial primitivism that exoticized black female sexuality.
The example of Baker, one of several African American expatriates in France, suggests thematic possibilities for the inclusion of African American historical actors within the study of American and European modernisms. Baker and other black expatriates of the 1920s' New Negro Renaissance would be relevant within a lecture on American expatriate writers and cultural modernism. Recent scholarship such as Thadious Davis's biography of the black woman writer Nella Larsen has situated the so-called Harlem Renaissance within the broader currents of American literature.
When we talk about struggles over the representation of race in visual and popular culture, it's extremely important for students to know that dominant notions of race and racism were challenged and resisted by not only the people of color who were stigmatized by them but also by people of conscience, regardless of their background. The fact that these ideas and images did not go uncontested belies the possible explanation that historical actors were merely expressing views that were commonly held at that time. While there is some truth to this claim, to leave it at that divests historical actors of free will and agency. Moreover, such a view ignores the existence of those who resisted racist ideas and practices.
The Progressive Era and the Age of American Expansion
What happens to our traditional notions of periodization when we not only include African American historical actors but foreground issues of race? What we once understood as the "progressive era" becomes something quite different. While contemporaries seeking social reform of business and political institutions certainly laid claim to the term "progressive," historically speaking, this was the period in which America decisively broke from its isolationism and asserted itself as a global power in competition with European imperial nations. The Spanish-Cuban-American war of 1898 and the U.S. war against nationalists in the Philippines globalized the controversies raging within America on race, citizenship, and the capacity for self-government. African American soldiers served in these foreign wars, even as the system of Jim Crow segregation, disfranchisement, and lynching consolidated the decline of black political power and participation in the post-Reconstruction South. The political crisis facing African Americans led to spirited debates in the black press on African Americans' relationship to American imperialism. While some African American leaders and journalists believed that blacks' participation in the war would gain equal rights, others linked the conquest of the dark Filipinos with antiblack racial oppression in the U.S. South. The documentary Savage Acts by the American Social History Project demonstrates the impact of racism both in domestic U.S. culture and overseas, in the genocidal "pacification" of the insurrectionists in the Philippines.
As some scholars have observed, "progressive" is perhaps not the most appropriate designation for this period. The period witnessed dramatic setbacks to political participation and democracy. This was seen both in the disfranchisement of African American male voters throughout the South beginning in 1890 in Mississippi and in the effective disfranchisement of many unlettered immigrant voters in northern cities with the establishment of the Australian, or secret, ballot. Disfranchisement, as C. Vann Woodward argued in The Origins of the New South, constituted white Southern elites' response to the political and economic challenge posed by fusion coalitions of dispossessed whites and black voters in the populist movement. As he memorably assessed the situation, the question was not so much one of white supremacy as which whites would be supreme.
The horrific institution of lynching, which peaked in the South during the 1890s, posed a stark challenge to the rule of law. The foremost antilynching activist, the black journalist Ida B. Wells, argued both in America and overseas in England that lynching placed the United States on trial, casting doubt on its claims to be a Christian civilization. Wells's activities as crusading journalist, settlement house reformer, and women's suffragist make her a consummate progressive reformer, even though she is usually perceived (if at all) solely within the context of African American leadership. Her powerful antilynching writings suggested that Wells shared in the progressive reformer's belief that an enlightened and informed public would demand the remediation of social problems. In the case of lynching, Wells's faith in rational discourse was perhaps misplaced. She was exiled from Memphis, and her newspaper, The Free Speech, which contained her exposés of lynching as an instrument of political and economic terror, was destroyed by a mob. Wells was much more effective, and quite modern, in terms of leadership strategies, in organizing African Americans' protests against lynching, including self-defense, out-migration, and economic boycotts. Wells also requires a consideration of gender politics in public life, both within African American and American public cultures.
The 1915 film The Birth of a Nation was a watershed moment in the history of race in America. It exposed to nationwide audiences the Southern, neo-Confederate version of the history of Reconstruction. In the film, based on the racist novels of Thomas Dixon, the white South was rescued from Negro political domination and misrule by the heroic Ku Klux Klan. The global reach of the film's white supremacist ideology, which was endorsed by President Woodrow Wilson, can be glimpsed in the U.S. Marines' invasion of Haiti in that same year. The all-white invading force imposed a violent occupation of that island that lasted until 1934 (cf. Mary Renda, Taking Haiti). The story of the progression of Dixon's best-selling novels to the screen is powerfully told in an essay by John Hope Franklin in his collection Race and History. Franklin argues persuasively that Dixon's fictions, cinematically amplified by D. W. Griffith, came to shape historical writing on Reconstruction for a generation. Of course, one should mention in this context W. E. B. DuBois's Black Reconstruction (1935), which challenged the partisan white Southern view of Reconstruction and established the model for subsequent, more balanced assessments of the period.
Again, it is important for students to know that these practices and expressions of racism were resisted by African Americans and their allies.
Image of Frederick Douglass courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number LC-USZC2-1720]
Next: Race and Global Politics in the Post-World War II Period
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