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Black History Is American History: Teaching African American History in the Twenty-first Century
Allison Dorsey
History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, and if faced with courage, need not be lived again.
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| —Maya Angelou, "On the Pulse of Morning," 1993 |
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In the spring of 2003, I received an invitation to the screening of the hbo film Unchained Memories: Readings from the Slave Narratives at the Prince Music Theatre in Philadelphia. The film features black actors reading from the text of the 1930s Works Progress Administration—sponsored Federal Writers' Project interviews with former slaves. At the reception following the screening, I overheard the conversation of a group of professional thirty-something African American women, all of whom seemed stunned by the film. Most remarked that they had no previous knowledge of the Works Progress Administration project, and many reported being amazed that "slaves" could have articulated their life experiences so clearly. Reluctant to enter the conversation as a know-it-all historian, I remained silent until one of the women remarked that she would have to figure out how to get to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., so she might gain access to the narratives herself, to find "our own history that has been hidden away from us." "Hidden?" I sputtered in response. "No, it is not hidden. And you don't have to go to Washington, D.C. You can go to a library and ask for all or part of George Rawick's many volumes of The American Slave!"1 |
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My spirited outburst sparked a spontaneous, lengthy "teach-in" session that left me feeling socially inept and intellectually frustrated. How was it, I wondered as I boarded the train home, that in 2003, a group of college-educated, professional black women were so unaware of the tremendous body of work, researched and written by hundreds of scholars, about slavery or African American history and culture in general? Equally perplexing, why did some of the women in question, with computers and knowledge of the World Wide Web, continue to hold the rather dated belief that "our" history was "hidden" and inaccessible? And, just as troubling, if middle-class and rising black women did not know their history, what might that mean for other people of color or whites in the larger society? |
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I strode into class the next day determined to teach with such intensity and passion as to ensure that no Swarthmore College student would leave school without knowing the history of African-descended people in the United States and that this history is readily accessible and belonged to all Americans. Sadly, I do not have the power to compel any student at Swarthmore to take African American or any other type of history course. Still, I continue to teach the African American history survey in service to the Department of History, to the Black Studies Program, and to my core belief that knowledge of American history is vital for all citizens. For the American story simply cannot be told without discussion and analysis of the experiences of black people whose labor created the nation's wealth, whose enslavement undergirded and undermined the concept of democratic freedom, and whose civil exclusion sparked the political revolutions of the twentieth century. |
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