Note:
Gunnar Myrdal died in 1987, less than 70 years ago.
Therefore, this work is protected by copyright,
restricting your legal rights to reproduce it.
However, you are welcome to view it on screen, as you do now.
Read more about copyright.
Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IX. Leadership and Concerted Action - 35. The Negro Protest - 9. Negro History and Culture
<< prev. page << föreg. sida << >> nästa sida >> next page >>
Below is the raw OCR text
from the above scanned image.
Do you see an error? Proofread the page now!
Här nedan syns maskintolkade texten från faksimilbilden ovan.
Ser du något fel? Korrekturläs sidan nu!
This page has never been proofread. / Denna sida har aldrig korrekturlästs.
Chapter 35. The Negro Protest 751
the historical background of the Negro people, he stole weapons from his
enemies, the Negro intellectuals.
For a long time, even before the Civil War, diligent work had been
going on to provide the Negro people with a respectable past. In a sense the
numerous slave biographies—the most important of which was Narrative
of the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass^^—served such a purpose.
Any Negro who emerges to prominence has usually had a remarkable life,
and autobiographies have always played an important role among Negro
writings.® Still more directly the searching of historical sources to unveil
the deeds of Negroes in the American Revolution and in other American
wars is part of this movement. So Is also the eager attempt to reveal partial
Negro ancestry of prominent individuals all over the world (Pushkin,
Dumas, Alexander Hamilton and others).
Much of all this is zealous dilettantism, sometimes of a quite fantastic
nature.^® But increasingly it is coming under the control of historical
methods of research. White historians have usually been biased by their
preconceptions about the Negroes’ inherent inferiority and by the specific
rationalization needs these preconceptions have been serving.^ Even apart
from this, they have not had much interest in the Negroes except as objects
of white exploitation and contests. The Negro people have, in their hands,
become more a part of the natural resources or the scenery of the country.
Negro historians see tasks both in rectifying wrong notions of the white
historians and in concentrating upon the neglected aspects of the Negroes*
history.® This movement was given Impetus in 1915 by the organization
of The Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and its chief
publication. The Journal of Negro History. The moving spirit behind the
organization, and the editor of the Journal is Dr. Carter G. Woodson.^
* These Negro autobiographies have sometimes ranked among the classic American
autobiographies. Besides Douglass’ Autobiografhy^ there is Booker T. Washington’s Uf
From Slavery, James Weldon Johnson’s Along This Way (his famous Autobiography of
an Ex~Coloured Man is fictional) j James D. Corrother’s In Spite of the Handicap -,
Claude McKay’s A Long Way from Home-, Langston Hughes’ The Big Sea-, Du Bois’
Dusk of Down (and, in a sense, several earlier books, including the tremendously influ-
ential The Souls of Black Folk).
^ See footnote 32 to Chapter 20.
* An excellent illustration of the “protest” nature of Negro history is given by the
fact that one of the popular books of this type has the title The Negro, Too, in American
History (by Merl R. Eppse [1939]).
®Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune is the present president, and there are other oflficers and
directors.
Dr. Woodson is also the leader of the whole modern Negro History movement. Lawrence
Reddick puts it: . . the history of Negro historiography falls into two divisions,
before Woodson and after Woodson.” (“A New Interpretation for Negro History,” Tke
Journal of Negro History [January, 1937], p. ai.)
<< prev. page << föreg. sida << >> nästa sida >> next page >>
