Reclaiming the Black Past
The Use and Misuse of African AmericanHistory in the Twenty-first Century
Pero Gaglo Dagbovie
First published by Verso 2018
© Pero Gaglo Dagbovie 2018
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-203-6
ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-201-2 (UK EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-202-9 (US EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Typeset in Minion Pro by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed by Maple Press, US
Contents
Introduction
The Enduring Mystique of Black History
1.“None of Our Hands Are Entirely Clean”
Obama and the Challenge of African American History
2.Honoring “The Gift of Black Folk”: The Contested Meaning of Black History Month
3.Dramatizing the Black Past: Twenty-first Century Hollywood Portrayals of Black History
4.“Everything is Funny?”: Humor, Black History, and African American Comedians
5.“So Long in Coming”: Political and Legal Attempts to Right Past Wrongs
Afterword Displaying the Black Past
Notes
Index
The Enduring Mystique of Black History
“What do you do?” asks someone I am meeting for the first time.
Like clockwork, I respond, “I am a university professor.”
“What do you teach?” is the next question posed to me in this familiar dialogue.
“History,” I say, trying to keep things as simple as possible.
“Really? I love history,” this eager conversationalist keeps the chitchat going, “What type of history do you teach?”
“American history,” I reply, in anticipation of what the next question will most likely be.
“What area of American history?”
“Black history,” I answer.
“Oh.”
I often find myself having this type of friendly small talk when first encountering people my age and older in a variety of settings. Professional historians are undoubtedly familiar with this type of exchange. Over the years, I have noticed that after meeting people, particularly white people, for the first time and telling them what I do for a living, they tend to share with me their ardent interest in popular subjects in United States history such as the Civil War, World War II, the American presidency, or some notable historical icon or monumental event. It is not uncommon for my new acquaintances to share with me a book (usually authored by a journalist with whom I am not familiar) that they have recently read or a documentary that they saw on the History Channel, A & E, American History TV, Military History, and, from time to time, PBS. They rarely, if ever, share with me tidbits of information that they have learned about my area of expertise. Contemporary black culture permeates through American life, but black history does not explicitly shape most Americans’ worldviews. The past experiences of black Americans, especially during the troublesome eras of slavery and Jim Crow segregation, do not make for friendly, lighthearted topics of conversation.
A different dynamic often occurs when engaging with elderly African Americans. I am almost always told a story about their experiences “back in the day” or an entertaining anecdote. Sometimes they fervently school me about how “history repeats itself” and how black America’s past and present are inextricable. I particularly enjoy these conversations because they allow me to practice oral history and probe into an insider’s perspective.
If the “facts” of those playing amateur historians are what I perceive to be inaccurate or imprecise, I hardly ever bother to correct them. Instead, I customarily participate in these brief exchanges by attentively listening to my acquaintance’s rundowns of past events and personalities, nodding my head in appreciation of their curiosity about bygone days. After all, many people find history in its academic expression to be mundane, tedious, and off-putting. For those of my generation, this is epitomized by a popularly hilarious scene from the 1986 film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off when actor Ben Stein lectures to bored-to-death high school students about the Great Depression. When I have the opportunity to alter such perceptions about history, I make modest efforts to do so.
For a host of reasons, the numbers of young Americans earning bachelor’s degrees in history in the digital-centric twenty-first century is steadily declining. As cognitive psychologist and history education expert Sam Wineburg and others have argued, people’s lack of enthusiasm toward the study of history is in part related to how they were taught history in secondary school. Most weren’t and still aren’t taught the value of “thinking historically” or the benefits of unraveling a “usable past.”1 US high school history, often subsumed under the broad and illusive category of social studies, is regularly reduced to the memorization of so-called “facts” and important names and dates. Time and time again, high school students are expected to demonstrate their historical knowledge by taking multiple choice, fill-in, and short-answer tests based upon so-called objective information from dry and conventional textbooks in which African Americans are at best discussed during slavery and Reconstruction and in the sidebars. With the exception of high school students in Philadelphia who, since 2005, have been required
