| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

John David Smith. Black Judas: William Hannibal Thomas and The American Negro. Athens: University of Georgia Press. 2000. Pp. xxvi, 386. $34.95.

Rightly frustrated by mainstream America's long-term attraction to harmful racial stereotypes, contemporary historians of the black experience have been reluctant to engage in research that might serve to validate negative views. While fully warranted, scholarly counterproposals that celebrate subcultural values and lifestyles have done little to enhance understanding of black America's ideological diversity and have obscured the workings of its complex internal class structure. Over time, this sort of selective historical amnesia has the potential to produce a dangerously skewed, overly self-conscious racial narrative dominated by longsuffering strivers and courageous "race men." Here, of necessity, the discordant voices of black nay-sayers are muted to highlight an assumed communal consensus. Political correctness is well served, but objectivity suffers and new stereotypes threaten to replace the old. John David Smith's meticulously researched intellectual biography of William Hannibal Thomas provides a useful antidote to any such romanticization of the African-American past. . . .

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