Black Studies

Development and Early History

In the broadest sense, black studies began in the late nineteenth century, when African American historians, in particular, began to write about people of African descent in America. More important, in its earliest forms, black studies involved an effort to write studies of black people that would challenge prevailing assumptions about racial groups. In the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century, it was commonplace for white people to regard African Americans as inferiors. Popular images and representations produced by whites supported these widespread beliefs.

The most significant figure among the first advocates of black studies was W. E. B. Du Bois, whose carefully researched work set the standard for future scholarship in the field. Later in the twentieth century, a group of African American historians, led by Carter G. Woodson and scholars connected to the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH), made important contributions.

The most influential contemporaries of Woodson and the ASNLH were a pair of European American intellectuals, sociologist Robert Park and anthropologist Franz Boas. Park was among the first to teach courses about black people at a predominantly white university. For his part, Boas consistently challenged prevailing social and cultural attitudes based in the notion of white racial supremacy.

Park, at the University of Chicago, and Boas, at Columbia University, trained a generation of scholars who would make influential contributions to black studies. Park's students would make a major impact on the American academy, especially African American sociologists Charles S. Johnson, E. Franklin Frazier, and Horace Cayton. Among Boas's more famous students who pursued black studies were the writer Zora Neale Hurston and anthropologists Elsie Clews Parsons and Melville Herskovitz.

By the mid-twentieth century, interest in black studies began to increase, and white and black scholars alike began to investigate the multiple facets of African American life. In 1935, Zora Neale Hurston published her at times lyrical and always insightful study of black folk life, Mules and Men. In 1941, Melville Herskovitz's important study of the African roots of black culture, The Myth of the Negro Past, appeared.

Meanwhile, in 1944, Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal published his highly influential American Dilemma. Several African American scholars conducted fieldwork for Myrdal's study, which concluded that the United States, because of white supremacy, had failed to live up to its primary values. In 1945, St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton published Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, a groundbreaking sociological and anthropological account of black people in Chicago, with a stirring preface by the novelist Richard Wright. Black Metropolis crackled with the tones of black life, many [Page 129]times depicting seething African American discontent over the racial order in the United States. In 1947, African American historian John Hope Franklin published the first edition of his classic text, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans. It remains in print to this day, a standard textbook in many college classrooms.

...