Charles Haley lecture, "The Historiography of Woodson and DuBois in the 1930s," at the University of Iowa, June 10, 1977

Speaker 1: The following was recorded June 10th, 1977, as part of the ninth annual Institute for Afro American Culture. The historiography of Woodson and Du Bois in the 1930s is the subject of this talk by Charles Haley, instructor in history at Colby College. He is introduced by Dr. Darwin Turner, chairman of the Afro American Studies Program at the University of Iowa. Dr. Darwin Turn...: The Institute. I wanted to have someone talking about historians of the period and talking about historiography. I speculated first about doing the usual, getting an historian from the period to talk about other historians. But about that time, I had an opportunity to read a section of a dissertation that was not on history or historiography as a specific subject. It was a dissertation in history. But I was quite impressed by the manner in which the historians were analyzed. And for that reason, I asked Charles Haley to come to this Institute to share some of that information with us, particularly perhaps with the literature teachers who may want to know which historians they should look at with the greatest respect. Dr. Darwin Turn...: Charles Haley received his bachelor's from State University of New York at Buffalo. His master's from SUNY at Binghamton, and he is now a PhD candidate in history at the State University of New York at Binghamton. This fall, he will be joining the faculty of Colby College as an instructor in history. Dr. Darwin Turn...: He has published a review essay in teaching history and in a forthcoming volume entitled Guide to Social Studies for Teachers prepared by the Delaware Historical Association. He will be presenting an essay on current trends in Afro-American historiography, but for the presentation today, he is going to go back a few years to talk about a history for the people, Carter G. Woodson and W.E.B. Du Bois., Professor Haley. Professor Charl...: Thank you, Dr. Turner for the introduction. And also, thank you for inviting me here today to share with you some thoughts on Carter G. Woodson and W.E.B. Du Bois. Professor Charl...: In these days as Americans are being increasingly exposed to the roots, the worldview, and the ethnicity of Afro-Americans, it may be pertinent, indeed necessary, for scholars and students of Afro-American history to examine that which has not really too often been discussed. The historiography of black historians. While such a discussion threatens to be boring to many, harbinger of ivory tower academe, nonetheless, such an examination is needed in order to begin to understand the purposes and innovative contributions, which black historians have made to the general knowledge of American history. Professor Charl...: Since such a consideration would obviously take more time than is allowed here, the following remarks will be confined to the writings and reception of the two best known black authorities in the area of black history, Carter G. Woodson and W.E.B. Du Bois. Professor Charl...: We should be concerned with the decade of the great depression. That period of time when black people throughout the country experienced severe economic suffering. The two black scholars under review, both highly prolific in their scholarship and writing, seem at first glance to have much in common, in terms of the general themes of black historiography. Professor Charl...: Yet, closer inspection and analysis reveals differences, not only in style and focus, but also in their philosophical orientation. No attempt will be made here to review all of the work, which these scholars have left us. Rather, we shall be looking at pertinent examples of their writing that emerged in the '30s. Examples which illuminate the divergent philosophies that each man developed concerning the place of blacks in the larger American historical framework. To that end, perhaps I should talk to you a few minutes about the writing and the purpose of black history. Professor Charl...: Now, the writing of black history has generally sought to serve three purposes. The elevation of the black race, the education of blacks and whites about the negro, and the eradication of racial bias in historical writing. Earl E. Thorpe, in his learned work on black historians, provides another purpose for black history. That of making "A contribution to the knowledge and understanding of mankind." Now such serious concerns are now solidly fixed within the structure of African American history, but during the decade of the Great Depression, and for some 20 years preceding it, the scope and focus of most black history involved itself, necessarily with uplifting the literate newly arrived black middle class, and combating racism in the arena of historiography. Professor Charl...: Despite the fact that the swampy waters of scientific racism was gradually being cleansed by liberal scholars during that decade, across the spectrum of the social sciences, the field of history held strong schools that subtly or blatantly displayed racist thinking with regards to the black presence in America. Particularly offensive were the immensely popular American Negro Slavery by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, William A. Dunning's Reconstruction: Political and Economic 1865 to 1877, and Claude G. Bowers The Tragic Era: The Revolution After Lincoln. All of these historical works and many more depicted black people in varying degrees of inferiority. Professor Charl...: So solidly entrenched were these works in the profession of history that serious revisions and corrections were hardly noticed. For example, W.E.B. Du Bois, in 1910, wrote a piece on reconstruction and its benefits, and it was hardly even received, much less looked at. But more on that in the moment. Moreover, the historical interpretations became a part of the popular culture that novels and films began to spread the distorted messages to the American masses. During the 30s, we get perhaps the most pronounced example of this cultural entrenchment in Margaret Mitchell's novel, Gone With the Wind, in 1936, which enjoyed then, and now immense popularity in it's motion picture adaptation. Professor Charl...: Faced with such a massive assault by white scholars, black historians were forced to redouble their efforts. Not only were they burdened with the task of providing black people with a sense of history, but they also had to combat the blatant distortions of those white scholars sympathetic to the south and to white supremacy. Entwined in this already complex set of motivations was the peculiar stance of black intellectuals had towards the masses of Afro-Americans. The desire to uplift morally and economically the Afro-American. Perhaps no other black historian exemplifies these complex motivations more than Carter G. Woodson. Correctly labeled the father of black historiography by Benjamin Quarles, Carter G. Woodson was vitally concerned with the miseducation of the Negro. Yet this learned man, who's the son of ex slaves was not as enchanted with the masses of black people as we might wish to believe. Indeed, recent scholarship has portrayed Woodson as a staunch racial chauvinist. A man who that only until Afro-Americans pledged total allegiance to the concept of the race, would they be able to progress economically socially or politically. Professor Charl...: Yet Woodson's greatest contradiction rested in his over class consciousness. Looking to the teachings of Booker T. Washington as the guiding force with which Afro-Americans should prepare themselves for a place in American society, Woodson nonetheless encouraged blacks to imitate pertinent white values. Woodson could be said to have modeled himself pretty much on the ethics of Washington, working his way up out of the coal mines of West Virginia. He completed his high school coursework in two years. He entered Berea college in Kentucky, traveled to France where he started graduate work in history at the Sorbonne, and arriving back into the states, he studied for a while at the University of Chicago, and finally landed at Harvard University where he obtained his PhD in history in 1912. Professor Charl...: On September 9th, 1915, after doing various teaching in high school and in public schools and colleges, Carter Woodson created the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. Formed with the purpose of collecting and publishing data on Afro-American history. The organization saw the subsequent creation of the Journal of Negro History in 1916, and the Negro History Bulletin many years later in 1937. Woodson's greatest contribution, most probably to black historiography is most probably the Journal of Negro History. Modeled on the American Historical Review, it has become a driving force in displaying, analyzing, and interpreting the presence of black people in America. Professor Charl...: But our concern here is with Woodson's conceptualization of black people. For inherent and his understanding of the black race is his belief that Afro-Americans must be equal to if not better than the white man, morally and intellectually. In this regard, his massive textbook, The Negro In Our History, which has seen many additions and is still used, as I was told about two weeks ago, it's still used today in many schools, is a resplendent is resplendent with black figures who have striven hard and made it admirably in the white world. Moral strength, and dowable courage, and sturdy perseverance for equal rights are displayed page after page. The book in many respects is a handbook to the evolution and character of the black middle class. Woodson filled his work with pictures and references to those exceptional blacks who made it. Pro race captions under pictures of known or little known Afro-Americans supplemented a text written for the most part in clear judicious historical assessment. Professor Charl...: For example, there's a picture of Bishop John Hurst and it's captioned distinguished by valuable services for freedom within and without the church. Well, the interesting thing about this is as you go through the text and everything, you don't have any other mention of Bishop John Hurst. You just have his picture and this caption. In his section chapter 29 on the Negro in World War One, Woodson affirmed black loyalty to America stating quote, "the Negroes of this country love their native soil and will readily die if necessary to defend it.". In line with this, we have photos of negro first, such as Colonel Charles Young, and the caption is the highest ranking negro graduate of West Point, or a group painting of the New York 15th in the World War. Professor Charl...: For the most part, however, the figures Woodson chose to display were members of the black middle class. Hardworking, morally upright, economically conservative individuals. Men such as C.C. Spaulding, Robert S. Abbott, and Edward Henry in business, journalism, and politics. Representative women even made it into the book. Women like Mary M. Bethune and Nannie Burroughs are among the scores of black figures who in Woodson's view had pledged allegiance to race loyalty. Significantly many, if not most of these people were contemptuous of the black masses who were mostly lower class. For instance, Nannie Burroughs, who was a journalist... we would call her a syndicated journalist today. She appeared in many black newspapers, her column did, and she was also the head of a black school for delinquent women in the thirties, based in Washington, DC, often excoriated the black lower class and her news columns in the black press. Professor Charl...: She chided the masses for their, "low self esteem", and unwillingness to lift themselves upward and onward. In many respects, the inclusion of these respectable black figures underlines the ruggedly individualistic character of Woodson himself, and provides us with some insight into the historical orientation, which he adopted. For Carter G. Woodson, the negro had been miseducated. The negro had been taught by white institutions to hate himself and his brothers and sisters. And as a result, Woodson came to believe that the major task of uplift would be to change the attitude blacks had towards themselves. Specifically during the thirties in black newspaper columns, Woodson urged black people to stop hating each other and to support race businesses and institutions. And I might also add, he was very, very difficult, very hard on black culture. In 1936, he even went so far as to praise Adolf Hitler for getting rid of jazz in Germany. Very strange. Professor Charl...: Thus whatever innovations Carter G. Woodson initiated in black history centered mainly around this pursuit of reeducating the negro. In 1933, he published his still widely read The Mis-Education of the Negro, in which he proclaimed that the educated Negroes have the attitude of contempt toward their own people because "in their own, as well as mixed schools, Negroes are taught to admire the Hebrew, the Greek, the Latin, and the Teuton, and to despise the African". Consequently in Woodson's estimation, what was needed was a thorough relearning of the history of Africans and African Americans, and in [inaudible] of much of the westernized literature, philosophy, history, and religion that white education had given blacks. Professor Charl...: Inspected closely, however Woodson's program for reeducation and in general, his approach to black history amounts to a little more than an extended discourse on the need for self-help and moral uplift. He espoused a tough racial attitude and called down black educators to develop "a program for the uplift of the Negro in this country, based upon a scientific study of the Negro from within to develop in him, the power to do for himself, what his oppressors will never do. To elevate him to the level of others". It's interesting because it seems to display in Woodson's mind, a feeling that he accepted that the majority of blacks were inferior. Professor Charl...: For the 1930s, such espousals were a tragic mistake, given the harsh economic realities of the period. By concentrating determinately on the problems of race, Woodson overlooked important class implications of the depression and their effects on all black Americans. Indeed had Woodson's program been fully realized, it would have been a further insinuation of racial and cultural inferiority. Such contradictions, however, were never quite resolved in The Mis-Education of the Negro or elsewhere in Woodson's writings. Professor Charl...: What remains significant about Carter Woodson's contribution to black historiography was and is his ability to provide blacks with the much needed data and presence of dignified, exemplary black models in American history. Fitted within the schools of American historiographical thought, Carter G. Woodson most probably would be seen as a progressive historian who saw the March of Afro-Americans moving ever upward, despite much suffering and conflict within a hostile environment. Professor Charl...: Now as a contrast, let us now turn to the other major black writer in Afro-American history during the thirties, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois. It was at Harvard, the preeminent university in the United States in the late 19th century, that W.E.B. Du Bois became fully aware of that seemingly contradictory twoness, which Afro-Americans held within them. The Negro, he would write later Souls of Black Folk is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil and gifted with second sight in this American world, one ever feels his twoness, an American, a Negro: two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn Asunder. Professor Charl...: This bifurcation inherent in the black experience in America never escaped Du Bois intellectual grasp, and through his writings in magazines, newspapers, letters, and delivered speeches, might seem in opposition to each other. It could be suggested that Du Bois well understood the dialectical tension that existed between black people's adaptation and existence in a basically foreign and hostile environment, and the overarching American class and economic structure. He stated, "the history of the American Negro is a history of this strife. This longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self". Professor Charl...: The contention here is that Du Bois, as a historian, and through his most persuasive historical work, Black Reconstruction superseded the racial and class antagonisms, and placed those concerns within a historical model that was connected to a critical theory of the political economics and social relations in reconstruction American society with the depression as a backdrop. Some have suggested that this approach was quasi Marxist, while others have stated that it was fully Marxist. Professor Charl...: Although that debate is not the central concern here, it is important to realize that Du Bois was very much interested in the ideas of Marx, despite his strong racial consciousness. Du Bois introduction to Marx and Marxism began while he was a student at the University of Berlin in Germany, that was there while studying political economy under Adolph Schmoller [Gustav Schmoller], and through attendance at the meetings of the rapidly growing social democratic party, Du Bois began to develop a feel for, and an understanding of dialectics. As he wrote later, I began to unite my economics and politics. In high school and college socialism meant to me some amelioration of the wages contract. More human relations between employer and employee, but it involved no fundamental study of Marxism. Although it would take more time than is required here to give a fully detailed explication of Du Bois's Marxian ideals, it should be noted that throughout the thirties, he held a sympathetic, but distant view of Marxism, vis-a-vis blacks in the United States. Professor Charl...: Much of his hesitation was grounded in racial self-consciousness and a skepticism concerning the solidarity of black and white workers in the communist party of the thirties. Du Bois just wasn't convinced that that solidarity, that the communists talked so much about was for real. On the other hand, he was highly sympathetic towards Marx's ideals. Concerning Karl Marx in the Negro, Du Bois wrote in the crisis, "it was a great loss to American Negroes that the great mind of Marx and his extraordinary insight into industrial conditions could not have been brought to bear at firsthand upon the history of the American Negro between 1876 and the World War. Whatever he said and did concerning the uplift of the working class must there must therefore be modified so far as Negroes are concerned by the fact that he had not studied it firsthand, the peculiar race problem here in America. Nevertheless, he did know the plight of the working class in England, France and Germany, and American Negroes must understand what his panacea was for those folks if they would see their way clearly in the future". Professor Charl...: This dialectical tension, attention between race and class remained with Du Bois throughout the thirties. Nonetheless, when it came to writing history, the theories of Karl Marx and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, provided a useful tool for explaining reconstruction. With that thought in mind, let us turn to what most white historians saw as a tragic era in American history, The Reconstruction. Professor Charl...: Although there are degrees of tone, nuance, and intention, the scholarship concerning the reconstruction period in the 1930s was heavily influenced if not dominated by the Dunning school. Dunning and his students... their position was that reconstruction was an unavoidable tragedy. Insofar as blacks were concerned, they were part of that evil vindictive group of Republicans, scallywags, carpetbaggers, who overran the south. Though many of the scientific theories concerning race were being challenged, American historiography persisted in seeing Afro-Americans during this period as inferior beings, unfit for government or social advancement. Professor Charl...: W.E.B. Du Bois first approached the subject of reconstruction in a paper presented for the American Historical Association entitled Black Reconstruction and its Benefits in 1910. Although William Dunning and Albert Bushnell Hart, Du Bois mentor at Harvard, praised the paper. Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, the southern apologist for slavery, was greatly exercised over the presentation. Du Bois set aside the paper on black reconstruction only to return to it in the thirties. Professor Charl...: He then set about creating what would become a bold new approach to black historiography. He developed a critical explication of the social forces surrounding the civil war and reconstruction, and their nations people, black and white. My thesis wrote Du Bois to Alfred Harcourt, who published Black Reconstruction, "is that the real hero in center of human interest in this period is the slave who is being emancipated, and that forgetting this most writers of reconstruction have thought of the influence of slave holders and that what the Negro thought has been glossed over and forgotten". Professor Charl...: When Black Reconstruction in America, 1860 to 1880 appeared in 1935, the response from black quarters was generously approving. Sterling A. Brown, who wrote Du Bois in late January of 1935, after having read the proof sheets, called the book, a first rate piece of work that has for a long time needed doing. The Philadelphia Tribune, ran an editorial that appropriated the books analysis as a means for pushing blacks towards greater economic success in Pennsylvania. The Philadelphia Tribune was a very conservative black newspaper during the thirties, and while they did not look at the Marxian applications, they nonetheless liked the book for what it was saying about black people. Professor Charl...: And yet the American Historical Review never once ran a review of Black Reconstruction. That was not as astonishing a fact as may be supposed, for since its inception in 1884, the American Historical Association had long been the elite core of those American historians who maintained a distinctive mainstream ideology as apologists for the American way of life. At best there were few progressive historians within the circle. In a lengthy historiographical essay published in The American Historical Review, Charles A. Beard and Alfred Vagts asserted, "American historians have no philosophy of history. They want none. They distrust it. They regard anyone who bothers with it as an intruder or mystic who is trying to impose something on them." If the established echelons would not review Dr. Du Bois's masterpiece, it did not necessarily mean others didn't or wouldn't review it. For some three years after its publication, the question of Du Bois's use of Marxian theory was heatedly disputed. Professor Charl...: On the one hand, the young black radicals of the 30s, such as Abram Harris and Ralph Bunche were critical of Du Bois's "brand of self-proclaimed Marxism". Their criticism was justified to a certain extent given Du Bois's previous espousals of such racially elitest concepts as the talented 10th, and support and belief in a separate economy. On the other hand, more serious students of the communist party chided Du Bois for deviating from Marx's ideas. Black historians of the period, however, were generally pleased with the effort. Rayford Logan praised Du Bois's Rendition of the Black Man. Charles Wesley proclaimed the books impartial treatment, while Carter G. Woodson reviewed Black Reconstruction brusquely as a more "detailed account from his point of view". Woodson and Du Bois, there was a very tense relationship between the two that Woodson, as well as other black historians would not attempt a critical analysis of Du Bois's Marxian interpretations should hardly be surprising. Professor Charl...: Most of these black historians, especially Woodson were concerned with the moral uplift of blacks, and integrating them positively within a progressive historical framework. Du Bois, of course, was challenging that kind of thinking while at the same time, revising interpretations of the reconstruction as having failed. Indeed much of Du Bois's analysis was not only an indictment of the American civilizations failure to its commitment of professed democratic ideals, but also to use Cedric Robinson's words, "a critique of the ideologies of American socialist movements and a revision of Marxist theory of revolution in class struggle". Such a revision of Marxian theory sought to understand the racial presence within the class struggle during reconstruction, for despite his Marxian beliefs, Du Bois was still keenly race-conscious. Concerning communism Du Bois wrote in 1939, "this philosophy did not envision a situation where instead of a horizontal division of classes, there was a vertical fissure, a complete separation of classes by race cutting square across economic layers. And this split depended not simply an economic exploitation, but on a racial folklore grounded on centuries of instinct, habit, and thought, and implemented by the conditioned reflex of color". Professor Charl...: Thus such an awesome task could not have been achieved without some mistakes or deviations in Marxian thought, but it is to Du Bois's credit as a historian and a scholar that essentially he succeeded in his purpose. In a letter to Augustus Kelley, a good friend of Du Bois's he commented on the criticism given to Black Reconstruction stating, "it has been criticized for its bias and enthusiasm, and I have sympathy for the ideal of cold and partial history, but that must not be allowed to degenerate as it so often has into insensibility to human suffering and injustice. The scientific treatment of human ills has got to give evil full weight, and vividly realize what it means to be among the world's oppressed". Finally then, Du Bois and Woodson were both men intensely involved in the intellectual study of black people.