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Reflections on Conventional Portrayals of the African American Experience during the Progressive Era or “the Nadir”1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2014

Pero Gaglo Dagbovie
Pero Gaglo Dagbovie*
Affiliation:
Michigan State University
*
dagbovie@msu.edu
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Abstract

This essay, a slightly revised version of the distinguished historian address presented to SHGAPE in April 2013, suggests that millennial learners are oftentimes inadequately introduced to the African American experience during the Progressive Era, a period that historians of the black past, sampling from Rayford W. Logan's 1954 opus, customarily call “the Nadir” or “the lowest point” in the African American struggle for social justice. When discussing the Progressive Era, normative U.S. history textbooks at high school and college and university levels tend to relegate blacks to the margins of cultural and historical change, minimize lynching and other forms of anti-black violence that characterized the period, and endorse the archaic W. E. B. Du Bois–Booker T. Washington dichotomy of black leadership at the expense of oversimplifying and even denigrating Washington's accomplishments and legacy. On the other hand, specialized African American history textbooks and monographs equip their readers with critical interpretations that challenge what historian Manning Marable called the “master narrative of American history.” In this essay, I offer my thoughts on these subjects and propose some basic suggestions for more effectively teaching, problematizing, and thinking about the African American experience during the complex Progressive Era.

Type
2013 SHGAPE Distinguished Historian Address
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , January 2014 , pp. 4 - 27
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2014 

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Footnotes

1

This essay was originally entitled “Integrating African American History into Master U.S. Historical Narratives” and was presented as the Distinguished Historian Address for the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE) luncheon at the Organization of American Historians annual meeting in San Francisco, CA, April 13, 2013. In addition to changing the title of the paper, I have made a few other minor revisions. I interchangeably use the terms the Nadir and the Progressive Era to refer to the period from approximately 1880 until 1920. The same applies for the terms African American experience, black history, and African American history, and black and African American. I wish to thank SHGAPE for the opportunity to share my thoughts with the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era readership.

References

2 H-SHGAPE, http://www.h-net.org/~shgape/.

3 The term “classic civil rights movement” refers to the period in the longer black freedom struggle from approximately the mid-1950s until the mid-1960s. In part sparked by an essay by Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91 (Mar. 2005): 1233–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar, historians have been abandoning the once conventional belief that the civil rights movement was mainly a post-World War II phenomenon. It is now common practice to include expressions of twentieth-century black civil rights activism as being part of a long civil rights movement. Many have traced the long civil rights movement to the Progressive Era. See esp. Cha-Jua, Sundiata and Lang, Clarence, “The ‘Long Movement’ as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies,” Journal of African American History 92 (Spring 2007): 265–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 For an intriguing discussion of the “millennials,” Joel Stein, “Millennials’ Moment: They're Narcissistic, Lazy, Entitled and Coming to Our Rescue,” Time, May 20, 2013, 26–34.

5 Ayers, Edward et al. , American Anthem: Reconstruction to the Present (Austin, 2009), 520–23Google Scholar.

6 Flanagan, Maureen A., America Reformed: Progressives and Progressivisms, 1890s–1920s (New York, 2007)Google Scholar, 283.

7 It should also be noted that other “people of color”—Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans—are more marginalized in American Anthem than African Americans.

8 Ayers et al., American Anthem, 545.

9 Jeffries, Hasan Kwame, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama's Black Belt (New York, 2010)Google Scholar.

10 Ayers et al., American Anthem, 509.

11 Dray, Philip, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (New York, 2002)Google Scholar, viii, xi, 17. Scholarship on lynching since Dray's broad-sweeping narrative has continued to develop. One of the most recent, award-winning books on this subject is Wood, Amy Louise, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940 (Chapel Hill, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Hine, Darlene Clark, Hine, William C., and Harrold, Stanley, The African-American Odyssey (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 2003)Google Scholar, 320.

13 DuRocher, Kristina, Raising Racists: The Socialization of White Children in the Jim Crow South (Lexington, KY, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Ayers et al., American Anthem, 509 (emphasis added).

15 White's study on black clubwomen remains the best general overview of middle-class black female activism during the Progressive Era. White, Deborah Gray, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994 (New York, 1999)Google Scholar.

16 Foner, Eric, Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction (New York, 2005)Google Scholar, xi.

17 Link, William A. and Link, Susannah J., The Gilded Age and Progressive Era: A Documentary Reader (Malden, MA, 2012)Google Scholar, ch. 9.

18 Dagbovie, Pero Gaglo, “‘Shadow vs. Substance’: Deconstructing Booker T. Washington,” ch. 2 of African American History Reconsidered (Urbana, 2010), 127–57Google Scholar.

19 Washington, Booker T., Up From Slavery: An Autobiography (New York, 1901), 221–22.Google Scholar

20 See esp. Kelley, Robin D.G. and Lewis, Earl, To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans (New York, 2000)Google Scholar; Trotter, Joe William, The African American Experience (New York, 2001)Google Scholar; Carson, Clayborne, Lapsansky-Werner, Emma J., and Nash, Gary B., African American Lives: The Struggle for Freedom (New York, 2005)Google Scholar; Hine, Hine, and Harrold, African American Odyssey; Painter, Nell Irvin, Creating Black Americans: African-American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present (New York, 2006)Google Scholar; White, Deborah Gray, Bay, Mia, and Martin, Waldo E., Freedom On My Mind: A History of African Americans, combined volume (New York, 2012)Google Scholar.

21 Jardins, Julie Des, Women and the Historical Enterprise in America: Gender, Race, and the Politics of Memory, 1880–1945 (Durham, NC, 2002)Google Scholar.

22 For statistics on early African American doctorates, Bond, Horace Mann, Black American Scholars: A Study of Their Beginnings (Detroit, 1972)Google Scholar.

23 According to August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, fourteen African Americans earned doctorates in history and the history of education prior to 1940. Meier, August and Rudwick, Elliott, Black History and the Historical Profession, 1915–1986 (Urbana, 1986)Google Scholar, 94.

24 Hart, Albert Bushnell, The Southern South (New York, 1910)Google Scholar, 105.

25 Novick, Peter, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (New York, 1988), 74–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a discussion of African American historians and the discrimination they endured in the profession during the Progressive Era, Dagbovie, Pero Gaglo, “Inspiring, Historicizing, and Defending the Race: African American Historians during the ‘Nadir,’ 1890–1920.” Contours: A Journal of the African Diaspora 3 (Fall 2005): 113–38.Google Scholar

26 Patterson, Orlando, “Rethinking Black History,” Harvard Educational Review 41 (Aug. 1971): 297–315CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, “‘Somewhere’ in the Nadir of African American History, 1890–1920,” Freedom's Story, TeacherServe, National Humanities Center, http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/freedom/1865-1917/essays/nadir.htm (accessed June 14, 2013).

28 Carson, Lapsansky-Werner, and Nash, African American Lives, 333.

29 Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth, “An Overview of the Progressive Era,” in , Gilmore, ed., Who Were the Progressives? (Boston; Bedford, 2002)Google Scholar, 3.

30 Marable, Manning, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (Cambridge, MA, 2000)Google Scholar, 198.

31 Bois, W. E. B. Du, The College-Bred Negro (Atlanta, 1900)Google Scholar, 42.

32 Goings, Kenneth, Mammy and Uncle Mose: Black Collectibles and American Stereotyping (Bloomington, IN, 1994)Google Scholar, 4.

33 For a detailed treatment of Logan's life and scholarship, Janken, Kenneth, Rayford W. Logan and the Dilemma of the African American Intellectual (Amherst, MA, 1997)Google Scholar.

34 Logan, Rayford W., The Betrayal of the Negro From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson, new enlarged ed. (New York, 1968)Google Scholar, 11, 12.

35 Piott, Steven L., Daily Life in the Progressive Era (Santa Barbara, CA, 2011), 177–220Google Scholar.

36 Gaddis, John Lewis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (New York, 2004)Google Scholar, 3.