Who will tell this story? Who will be responsible for keeping it alive in our national conversation from generation to generation? In the traditional societies of West Africa, the task would have fallen to the Griot. The Griot was a singer, a teller of tales, an historian, a genealogist, the bearer of the collective memory of the people. He or she—though it was most often a man—would learn by heart the epic stories of the origins of the people, of their great rulers and famous battles. Trained as an acolyte and apprentice by the older Griots, he would sing the old stories at feasts and celebrations, embellishing them with barbed and witty comments about recent events. Among some African peoples, the Griot was revered and feared, among others despised and outcast, but without him, the people would soon have forgotten their past, and so would have ceased to be a people.

America is a literate society, with books and archives and videotapes of inaugurations and funerals. It would seem that we have no need for the Griot. And yet, we do need singers of our national story who will commit their lives to remembering what we have been and what we have done.

Who will tell the real story of America? For many years, the task fell to a scattering of scholars who labored in the vineyards of historiography, all but ignored by White America—William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, perhaps the greatest social scientist, White or Black, ever to appear on the American scene; Carter Woodson, who founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History; Arthur Schomburg, whose vast collection of documents, papers, and artifacts now makes the Schomburg Library in New York an essential resource for the study of the Black experience. The story was told by novelists as well, by Richard Wright, whose collection of short stories, Uncle Tom's Children, matches but cannot surpass the horror of the newspaper accounts of lynchings; and by Zora Neale Hurston and James Baldwin and many, many more.