Dr. Carter G. Woodson and the history of Black History

By Earnest McBride

JA Contributing Editor

Reprint: Feb. 28-Mar. 5, 2008

When he first rode into the vast plains encompassing the pyramids of Egypt in 1798, the 29-year-old Napoleon Bonaparte – the would-be conqueror of the known world and soon-to-be self-coronated emperor of his own self-defined Franco-European empire – told his men to feast their eyes upon this ancient land in wonderment.

“The splendor of 40 centuries of history is looking down upon us,” Napoleon reportedly said as he and his army of 100,000 engaged and finally defeated the more numerous Muslim Mamelukes (Arabic for “white slaves”).

Forty centuries before Napoleon, a less ambitious Black king of Ethiopia and Nubia – variously called Narmer, Memnon, Menes, Min – had swept down from the hills of his native land and into the lower Nile Valley, uniting the legendary two kingdoms for the first time, and thereby inscribing his name at the very top of the first page of history in the legendary city of Memphis.

Napoleon’s motives for conquering the world were spelled out by him shortly before launching his ultimately failed adventures in Africa and Russia:

“My glory is declining,” he bemoaned. “This little corner of Europe is too small to supply it. We must go east. All the great men of the world have there acquired their celebrity.”

Napoleon went on to meet his Waterloo and ended his days a prisoner on the Isle of Elba.

We are unlikely ever to know exactly what motivated King Narmer, the first Pharaoh. What inner force pushed him to engage, fight, and conquer the rulers of the lower kingdom? Was Narmer (Menes) the co-ruler of the land of Khemet (defined by Africans as the land of black soil) or an intruder? Was he as old as Napoleon was at the time of his grand African excursion?

Some historic confusion clouds the picture of whether Narmer and Menes (Min) were the same. Different accounts place the origins of the first Pharaoh at Tini in Nubia. Most accounts identify Narmer as Memnon, the dynastic king of Ethiopia.

LEGACY OF CARTER G. WOODSON

Four thousand years after the defining moment in both Black and universal history that culminated in 3200 B.C. at Memphis, the ancient city founded by King Narmer, Carter G. Woodson, a farm boy born in December 1875 in New Canton, Virginia, made his mark in history. Although Woodson is called “the father of Black history,” his roots stem from the very first moment of historical reckoning, when Narmer chased the pre-dynastic rulers. 

Among Woodson’s contemporaries, many of them had made a name for themselves in the writing of history and social science years before Woodson emerged as a bright star and champion of Black chronicles. W.E.B. Du Bois’ History of the Suppression of the African Slave Trade, his Ph.D. dissertation, his The Philadelphia Negro, and his writings for Max Weber’s international journal of sociology in the early 1900’s out-shone all the efforts Woodson had made in the field of history up to that point. Fredrick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, T. Thomas Fortune, and Martin Delaney were also noted for their historical writings when Woodson was still in the early stages of his development as an historian. John Roy Lynch’s book, The Facts of Reconstruction, remains one of the most insightful chronicles of the Black and Tan Republican era in Mississippi and Louisiana.

Throughout the known Black world of the post-slavery era, Haiti, Brazil, Cuba, French, and British African colonies had become the seedbeds of reputable Black historians. Baron P.V. Masters and Prince Sanders were forerunners of later masters J.V. Minuty and Jean Price Mars, who were listed among the most respected Black writers worldwide at mid-century.

Self-taught Jamaican immigrant scholar Joel A. Rogers and Puerto Rican photographer Arthur Schomburg were two others who also achieved great prominence for their focus on the history and graphic representations of Black Americans, as Woodson strove to make his own mark in the free marketplace of historical ideas.

Woodson’s real legacy derives from his systematic and formal training as both an historian and a purveyor of cultural truths little bothered with in a world of white supremacist scholarship. His great pioneering achievements were in the field of Black historiography, hyperhistory, and metahistory, all having to do with theoretical and esoteric aspects of the study of history. In reality, hundreds, if not thousands, of Black historians and writers of Black history came before Carter G. Woodson blazed his trail across the field.

Woodson, in truth, nevertheless, deserves the title of founder, or father of Black History Week, and subsequently, Black History Month in North America. He is nevertheless a product of – i.e., the child of – a long line of Black history, historians, and historic events, rather than the father of such.

BLACK WOMEN HISTORIANS

Although the academic world in Europe and America was thoroughly male-dominated, women historians and memoirists made some remarkable breakthroughs. Charlotte Forten (1837-1914) and Drusilla Dunjee Houston (1876-1941) demonstrated that the pen harbored no prejudices against their sex. Both boldly set forth their accounts of Black history and life from the ancient times to their present.

The Fortens were one of the most prominent Black families in Philadelphia. Wealthy sail maker James Forten and his wife, Charlotte Vandine Forten, headed the family. Their daughters were Margaretta (c. 1815-1875), Harriet (1810-1875), and Sarah (1814-1883). The Fortens were active abolitionists who took part in founding and financing at least six abolitionist organizations, and their home was always open to visiting abolitionists.

Charlotte Forten (later Grimké) was the granddaughter of James and Charlotte Forten, a school-teacher for the Freedmen Bureau and a sharp observer of the world about her.

Charlotte’s memoirs and journals are consistently listed among the most important documents of the Reconstruction era. Her two best-known books are: A Free Black Girl Before the Civil War: The Diary of Charlotte Forten (1854), and The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké (published in 1988).

Her reports from the classrooms of the newly-liberated African children are among the most touching to be found in any literature.

“The first day of school was rather trying,” she recorded in her journals. “Most of my children are very small, and consequently restless. But after some days of positive, though not severe, treatment, order was brought out of chaos. I never before saw children so eager to learn.” – Life on the Sea Islands

Called the first great Black female historian, Drusilla Dunjee Houston was the daughter of an academic father and had developed skills in journalism and magazine writing before moving to Oklahoma.

“Like many African American women writers swallowed up and languishing in the historical gap,” her biographer writes, “Houston is one of the most prolific and all but forgotten African American women writers of the 20th century. Considered a ‘historian without portfolio’ and dismissed as a serious historian and writer by leading Black male historians of Post Emancipation and the Harlem Renaissance, e.g., W.E.B. Du Bois, Alaine Locke, Carter G. Woodson, and others, Houston burst on the historical literary scene in 1926 with Volume I of her magnum opus Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire, Book 1: Nations of the Cushite Empire, Marvelous Facts from Authentic Records thought to represent the crowning achievement of Drusilla Dunjee Houston’s literary life. With this work, Houston is remembered as the earliest known and possibly the only African American woman to write a multi-volume study of ancient Africa where she boldly proclaimed in 1926, an African origin of civilization and culture during one of the most turbulent periods for Black Americans in American history.”

The son of formerly enslaved parents, Woodson saw the lingering mental and legal shackles that were foisted upon Blacks and Indians across post-Civil War America and determined that his mission was to break through restraints by means of his intellect and pen.

“When you control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his actions,” Woodson said in his most famous work of 1933, The Miseducation of the Negro. “You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his ‘proper place’ and will stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told. In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one for his special benefit. His education makes it necessary.”

To confront such a profound problem, Woodson first educated himself at the University of Chicago, then at the prestigious Sorbonne of the University of Paris, and capped it all off with a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1912.

To achieve his social mission, Woodson launched the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915. He founded the Journal of Negro History in 1916 and the Negro History Bulletin in 1926. His book, The Negro in Our History, published in 1922.

“By providing a psycho-cultural foundation rooted in the knowledge of self, Woodson reasoned that Africans in America could overcome self-hatred and reclaim our African identity,” writes educator and journalist Ron Daniels. The study of history would enable us to rediscover the distinctive traits and values of the African personality.” 

IMHOTEP THE TRUE FATHER OF HISTORY

We would be seriously amiss should we assist in perpetuating the myth Black history did not exist or get a fair hearing until the advent of Woodson. The first Black historian was the same man who gave us writing, the principles of healing medicine and the arcane techniques of architecture. So adept was Imhotep (circa. 2750 B.C.) that he built the first pyramid, instituted the system of medical hygiene that is still used today.

“Historian Will Durant offers Imhotep as the first real person to turn up in the historical record,” says John Lienhard, National Public Radio broadcaster based in Houston. “Before that we have only cardboard figures – legendary kings and patriarchs. Imhotep was the advisor to the Egyptian King Zoser. Zoser ruled soon after 2700 BC. He was the dominant king of the third dynasty and the first ruler of what we call the Old Kingdom.” Imhotep’s step-pyramid built for Pharaoh Zoser (a.k.a. Djer) is the first of the many pyramids built over the past 3,000 years.

Without question, the great Imhotep, the most amazing genius ever known to history to have walked this Earth, was also the first historian. The father of writing, the father of medicine, the father of architecture – naturally, he would have been the first great chronicler of his time. The vast resources on the walls of pyramids, sarcophagi, stelae, and papyrus scrolls dating back to the Fourth Dynasty (ca. 2700 B.C.) are a part of the core legacy of Imhotep.

BLACK HISTORY FROM EUSEBIUS TO LEO FROBENIUS

The early church chronicler and influential polemicist Eusebius is sometimes identified as a descendant of Africa, as was St. Augustine of Hippo and Seneca the Elder (60 B.C.–.A.D. 37), slave-scholar, rhetorician, and writer, born in the heavily Africanized colony of Corduba.

Eusebius’ exact date and place of birth are unknown. Some sources say he was born in 265, though little is known of his childhood and youth. He became acquainted with the presbyter Dorotheus in Antioch and probably received advanced religious instruction from him. In 296 he was in Palestine and saw Constantine, who visited the country with Diocletian. Eusebius eventually avenged his friends and co-believers Origen and Arius, dubbed “heretics” at the Council of Nicaea. Athanasius, the strong bishop to emerge from the controversy at Nicaea, was eventually pushed from his seats of power due to the handiwork of Eusebius.

Sextus Julius Africanus was a Christian traveler and historian of the third century AD. He was probably born in Libya, Africa, and may have served under Rome’s African Emperor Septimius Severus against the Osrhoenians in 195 A.D.

Leo Africanus was a brilliant 16th Century traveler and observer of north, northwest, and central Africa, whose works are more reliable than most of the works written 400 years later.

The writings of David Walker, the fiery champion of warfare against slavery, were grounded in solid historical principles and moved most of the nation’s free Blacks to support armed rebellion and an assault on slavery, a welcome occurrence when Southern members of the U.S. officers corps fired on the Fort Sumner, South Carolina, in April 1861. His Appeal of 1826 helped put a searing fire into the souls of otherwise tepid antislavery crusaders.

William Still’s two great works, The Underground Railroad and Men of Mark, were two of the major works of biography and the documented flight from slavery filled much of the gap in Black history that evolved after Reconstruction.

Leo Frobenius, the learned German historian of the late 19th and early 20th centuries spurred a new interest in Africa history throughout the Black world with the publication of his two famous works of another day. His two major works, The Voice of Africa and African Genesis, were at the roots of the African cultural revival that developed in tandem with the African anti-colonialist and independence movements that lasted from the end of World War I until shortly before the United States began its unwise excursion into Vietnam and beyond.

BLENDING OF RACES AND CULTURES IN THE OLD WORLD AND NEW

George P. Murdock, a transitional figure between the old, racist anthropology identified with social Darwinist Herbert Spencer and the rigidly empirical observational methods of recent times, was one of the greatest fact-gatherers in history. His 1956 book, Africa: Its People and Their Culture History on Africa, is still one of the standard references in the study of comparative African cultures. He developed one of the most remarkable frameworks for the study of all African cultures, the Human Relations Area Files.

Murdock’s account of Madagascar off the southeast coast of Africa, for example, was refreshing and unlike other accounts of an African nation and its peoples up to that time. It was remarkably free of the almost inherent racial bias most white historians brought to their writings on Africa and the Third World.

“Madagascar, the fourth largest island in the world,” Murdock wrote, “is about 1,000 miles in length and some 300 miles in width and has a total land surface of nearly 230,000 square miles and a population of more than 4 million. Despite its size and topographical diversity, its inhabitants reveal a considerable degree of homogeneity in language and culture. In ethnic composition, on the other hand, they represent a highly complex mixture of physical types – Negroid, Mongoloid, and Caucasoid. The Negroid element pre-dominates, especially in the coastal regions, whereas the Mongoloid element is strongest on the interior plateau. The Caucasoid element, much the least significant, is most noticeable in precisely the regions where there is definite historical evidence of Arab or European settlement.”

Similar observations were made as Europeans forced their way into the early colonies of the New World, particularly in Panama, Santo Domingo (Haiti and Dominican Republic), and Cuba. Eventually, the three major races of Africa, Indian America, and the European mainland both blended in a variety of colors and ethnicities.

PAN-AFRICANISM AND LA RAZA

Black scholarship would be sorely amiss to overlook the important historical writings of Marcus Garvey. Garvey’s organizational talents and burning ambition to unify and rescue the Black race from the lingering trappings of slavery and almost universal economic exploitation brought him worldwide fame. A well-trained writer, having served a long apprenticeship in a Kingston print shop before leaving his native Jamaica, Garvey supplied his followers with a constant stream of mind-opening history and philosophy, unlike any Black American purveyor up to that point in history. Garvey’s final outcome – death in prison after being charged with tax evasion and fraud – was both a tragic loss and an insult to the entire Black race.

Henry Sylvester Williams, the father of the Pan-African Movement, organized the first of such meetings in Trinidad in 1900. A British-trained attorney by profession, it was Williams who introduced W.E.B. Du Bois to the idea of Pan-Africanism.

Throughout Latin America, the notion of a synthesized unit – La Raza – took hold and applies across the board to the three races today. Red, Black, and white throughout the greater part of the southern hemisphere have a sense of common identity and destiny vis-à-vis the United States, despite the inevitable conflicts and disputes the Latinos might have among themselves.