Teaching Negro History

Like other minorities, black Americans have a history of their own—peculiar sufferings and peculiar experiences, as well as special forms of resistance or of protective evasion. But this history is distinguished from the history of all other minorities in that no member of the race has been able to escape it. Baptism does not wash off the color of the skin or the memory of slavery, integration even at its best does not eradicate the experience of the ghetto. This feeling of history as a prison from which there is no escape has been enshrined in many admirable testimonies— autobiographies, novels, and above all, in Negro music and poetry. But despite the great effort of W. E. B. Du Bois, we still need a history of the Negro in America which is more than a record of facts. Blacks have nothing to compare with Louis Adamic’s Plymouth Rock and Ellis Island or with Oscar Handlin’s The Uprooted. There are scholarly studies of certain aspects such as the slave economy, there are social studies and psychological studies but nothing that gives the American Negro a past to look back to with pride and anger, a history that identifies him and describes his place in this society.

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