#BlackLivesMatter and African American History

I began my African American history survey class with a discussion of the history of the study of African American history. I have taken this approach in past iterations of the course because I felt it was important for students to understand the context in which the study of African American history emerged. I wanted them to understand its political significance—that black and white scholars argued against claims of the lack of historical significance and subsequent marginalization of black people. And I wanted them to understand the intellectual significance—that studying black people and their lives changed the discourse about how we know what we know and even the narrative of American history. In the context of the police killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Tamir Rice and so many others and the emergence of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, this discussion took on a different and more contemporarily relevant valence. Black history matters.

I began the class by telling my students about the emergence of black scholars and writers who wrote about and tried to make sense of the history of black people in the United States. These scholars of the 19th century and earlier, which Laurie Maffly-Kipp describes in Setting Down the Sacred Past, connected black lives to the religious contexts of the Christian bible. These first historians of black life grappled with the greatest inconsistency in the American national ideology—that problem of slavery and freedom. I then introduced them to the work of Nathan Huggins and his very perceptive call for the inclusion of the history of slavery into the American history. Including slavery disrupts the narrative of progress and causes us to explore the very conundrum that 19th century scholars of black life grappled with.

I add to this narrative the very important work of Carter G. Woodson who, in developing the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and Black History Week, simultaneously sought to promote historical research that informed the broader story, but also was useful to black people. Woodson and other scholars like W. E. B. Du Bois not only tried to explain to America the problems of race and slavery, but also to assert the value of black lives. Black people have history. Black lives matter, their works insisted. Putting black people at the center of study by making space to explore black history, creating resources to share knowledge about black life and marking the temporal landscape commemorations of black life and black history was a tremendous response to the repression and denigration of black lives in the early 20th century.

As I prepared this discussion for class, I meditated on the #BlackLivesMatter movement’s unflinching assertion of the value of black lives and the ignorance of and invisibility black people’s lives that it called out. I was struck by the resonance between black history scholars work and today’s activists and organizers. Black history matters because it offers some context to this contemporary fight for recognition of black humanity. And it makes me think that if we are to have progress in our current context, we must also have it in our history classrooms.

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