Teaching Negro History

...but to see the other side of the picture is not a matter of "abstract justice or a desire to be fair to the enemy...

...There are pages of glory and pages of sadness and shame in both...

...By the same token, Crispus Attacks belongs in a history of the Boston massacre and the color of his skin may be mentioned proudly in Fourth-of-July speeches, but he has a very small claim to be incorporated into Negro history...

...The Sunday New York Times recently allowed beautiful Barbara Ann Teer to assert that Negroes are more graceful than other people and that "integration (in the theater) is merely a subterfuge for white domination...

...It was depressing to see recently on TV how black children are being subjected to the Pavlovian treatment of repeating "I am black I am beautiful...

...Minorities always fear "losing" members...

...Negro history does not show that it is impossible, nor does the history of other minorities indicate that people have to abandon their ethnic ties in order to succeed in the dominant culture...

...Jazz music has a black soul but the contributions of black inventors, black engineers, black discoverers, black actors, or black scientists do not constitute Negro history...

...Maturity and real equality will be evident when Negroes—like Jews, like Italians, like women, too!—no longer look around self-consciously, counting themselves and checking whether they are present in the right proportion...

...it also was the topic of two major events in the Grand Ballroom of the Statler-Hilton in New York...

...Black history is deeply enmeshed with the history of the country...

...but fully to understand it, we must see it as part of American history...

...All this may be necessary and unavoidable to give black people some pride...

...instead of the false heroism that one finds in all histories of young nations, the false heroics of the oppressed races and the tearful recital of their suffering...

...They are not helping either black individuals or the black people a whit...

...If we blind ourselves to everything noble and . . . virtuous in the ruling class, how do we account for its hegemony...

...But gradually this interest will become truly historical, a thing of the past like feminism, and it will be a happy day when we shall need as few chairs for the teaching of Negro history as we do now for the teaching of feminism, of the labor movement, or of Catholicism in the United States...

...LIKE OTHER MINORITIES, black Americans have a history of their own—peculiar sufferings and peculiar experiences, as well as special forms of resistance or of protective evasion...

...At the least one of the problems, I discovered, is that Mr...

...On the other hand, the social historian might be interested in Jean Baptiste Pointe de Sable's trading post which later received the name TEACHING NEGRO HISTORY Chicago...

...If Negroes wish to go the same way, they may have to overcome greater handicaps and greater prejudices...

...The statisticians tell us that the incomes of minority families are rising more slowly than the incomes of WASP families, but the proponents of "black studies" refuse to analyze the figures...

...But let a traditional college contritely submit to such insults and hire a black man to teach black history—in the nature of things that man would have to come from a "black" college, and as Professor Melvin Drimmond explained, such hiring-away is stark colonialism and racialism...

...I have suggested that we must distinguish between (a) contributions which Negroes have made as individuals, regardless of their racial or other affiliations...

...Baptism does not wash off the color of the skin or the memory of slavery, integration even at its best does not eradicate the experience of the ghetto...

...I do not deny a Negro who is a physicist the right to be a black nationalist, if that is his desire...

...Images, even mistaken images, have a way of becoming legends, and spiritual realities have a way of becoming oppressive...

...They disregard or are ignorant of the information which might point the way to improvement, namely that these are the incomes of needle workers, garbage collectors, and grape pickers...

...but the third generation is again proud of its origins...

...Therefore history must not glorify or gloss over the ugly sides of the past...

...for it is their daily bread to know, describe, and comment on cultures remote in time and place...

...Wesley does not know that we don't teach history any longer, 155 HENRY PACHTER like Carlyle, as hero-worship, and therefore even the wisest among the African kings can interest only the specialists...

...King met his death when he tried to help the garbage collectors...

...They no longer think of themselves as "invisible men" but have emerged into the mainstream...

...The myth of the Negro keeps the black man captive, and it is understandable that he should look for a countermyth to justify his existence as a rebel...

...Rather, one gains the impression that they would like to teach in the Negro colleges and in the ghetto schools something that would simply be the obverse of the patriotic gore that still dominates the elementary and high schools...

...Black people are neither entirely passive in the stream of that history, nor are they isolated from it or connected with it merely through resistance...

...Not that I deny either the suffering or the heroism...

...But history may have a lesson which I hold is more beautiful as well as more mor al: that salvation is an ever-continuing effort, not the return to some state of nature before the Fall...

...Dr...

...Marx, Freud, Einstein, Bergson, Proust, Hoffmannsthal, and other Jews, baptized Jews and half-Jews have exercised enormous influence on the mind of the 20th century, a fact which might interest the psychologist...

...Neither the black nor any other apocalypse can save us from civilization and history...

...it exalts the hallowed tradition which blots out the identity of the individual and substitutes for it a collective identity...

...Black colleges are being robbed and raped—so it seems—by the white man's integration effort...

...Hence Negroes, like others, must decide for themselves at which point they wish to leave the protection of their ethnic subculture...

...If insipid glorification of self leads to fatalism, a doctrinaire refusal to recognize the self's place within the system results in self-deception or in infantile dreams: Brecht's Jenny the Pirate Bride, the prototype of all lumpenproletarian dreamers, has no future—her hope is that the ship will come to take her away...

...People cannot long be held down by force alone...

...If these rise, minority groups will increase their standing and go on to better jobs...

...I don't know whether Adam was black, but I don't believe with Herbert Marcuse that after so many thousands of years of history we could simply conjure up the lost, primitive-but-good creature whom God had conceived at the beginning of the creation...

...But this history is distinguished from the history of all other minorities in that no member of the race has been able to escape it...

...Slavery, to be sure, was no idyll, and part of the slave economy was capitalistic rather than paternalistic...

...Charles Wesley...

...Mis Teer may be more graceful than the guilt-ridden editor of the White Liberal Establishment paper...

...but no such history could omit the Negro and the Caribbean influence in modern music and dance any more than the Slavonic elements in Dvorak and Smetana...

...They dream of the Day of Abolition as the beginning of an eternal Sunday...

...But the history of American Negroes not only had its fair share of academic panels...

...But despite the great effort of W. E. B. Du Bois, we still need a history of the Negro in America which is more than a record of facts...

...By all means, let "black history" set the record straight...

...As Professor Genovese remarked, it is all too easy to be carried away by our passionate commitment to the cause...

...Is white brainwashing to be replaced by black brainwashing...

...but I implore black nationalists not to prevent Negroes from becoming physicists...

...there are some who still need to repudiate the "Negro" image (which partly accounts for their wish to be called "blacks...

...The revolution appears as one big parade—and if that fantasy does not materialize, the students will either drop out of the movement or resort to acts of desperation which discredit it...

...the former may be subjects of specialized academic studies, with category (b) probably eliciting a somewhat greater interest at colleges that have a predominantly minority population—but then again, we hope that such colleges will in time be on the way out...

...Nat Turner, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Rosa Parks, Duke Ellington, and—to end the list arbitrarily—Martin Luther King belong in American history by force of the contribution they made to Negro history in the United States...

...Since they have previously refused to learn the methods of the social sciences, they are content to show that their people are worse off than others...

...Postscript AT THE RECENT CONVENTION of the American Historical Association, African history was somewhat underrepresented...

...but there is no link between their culture and today's Afro-Americans or the present state of Ghana, which is not coextensive with its namesake either geographically or ethnically...

...It involves political judgment...

...As the black community becomes more confident of its own worth, the need to stress the number of blacks who did the same things as whites will disappear...

...This feeling of history as a prison from which there is no escape has been enshrined in many admirable testimonies— autobiographies, novels, and above all, in Negro music and poetry...

...Speakers at the Convention denied that Negro history in America is part of American history and, instead, they tried to see "black history" as part of "the Third-World struggle...

...But do they need myths rather than the truth...

...But none of them belongs in Jewish history or can be called a Jewish thinker, in the way Martin Buber is a distinctly Jewish thinker...

...Young Marx had such fanciful notions of the proletarians, as Rousseau had of the noble sauvage...

...The black militants feel the same need and, not surprisingly, their idea of Afro-American history is an exact replica—a projection or reflection-of the national American celebration: instead of patriotic gore, antipatriotic gore...

...Even their resistance movements have at various times contributed to the shaping of American character...

...The dissenter who does not wish to be absorbed into that collective monster, or who cannot participate in that national celebration, can withdraw from this community by joining another which either encompasses a group smaller than the nation or transcends it: a political philosophy, a party or movement, a church or other sect may provide him with a spiritual home...

...In another context, no history of music needs to mention that Mendelssohn, Mahler, Schoenberg were Jews...

...let there not be a different kind of half-truth or legend, let there be truthfulness...

...Let me be absolutely clear about this...

...it debunks heroes of all colors...

...All oppressed classes are told that they are "beautiful" or closer to nature and that their apocalypse will precede a general renovation of mankind...

...But let it not put one false image in the place of another...

...the other was a joint session of the National Council for the Social Studies and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, chaired by the latter's Mr...

...To change the metaphor, America remains a jigsaw puzzle, especially at election time, in matters relating to the kitchen, in drinking habits and marriage rites, but above all in patronage—the mutual promotion of kin (a valid concern of "black power...

...Nevertheless, if we wish to understand the durability of that system over long periods of history, we must study the multiple bonds of cultural, psychological, social, and even physical comradeship (think of Faulkner) between the dominant and the submerged castes...

...Alas, that cannot be done by a mere act of will, and it cannot be done by pushing Bigger Thomas out of sight...

...There are scholarly studies of certain aspects such as the slave economy, there are social studies and psychological studies but nothing that gives the American Negro a past to look back to with pride and anger, a history that identifies him and describes his place in this society...

...Likewise, the fact that Arizona was "discovered"— meaning that a non-red man set foot on its soil once for the first time—by a Negro named Estavanico, is hardly worth mentioning except in a history of Arizona...

...No amount of racial pride or of African studies can increase the wages of hospital workers, garbage collectors, shepherds, grape pickers, and sewing machine operators who happen to be black, Puerto Rican, or Mexican...

...but to say that "black men [in the mass media] are either white black men or shuffling Uncle Toms" certainly is no help to the Negroes who wish to break out of the ghetto...

...Most nationalities also have thrown off the immigrant image...

...It has done it to George Washington and to Patrick Henry...

...The effort to base black pride on archaeology would have results as disastrous as those Teutonic pageants Bismarck's novelist-historians prepared for German adolescents...

...Its subject was: "Teaching Black History in America—What Are the Problems...

...Some quite consistently denied that a white person is capable of teaching Negro history—of all people historians resent such insinuations most...

...Proponents of Afro-American culture studies actively prevent Negroes from learning the skills that are necessary to advance in our highly technological society and that might even be necessary to win a revolution or to organize a society after a revolution...

...with the single exception of the Indians has looked at the sweatshops and segregated quarters as a station to be passed—perhaps we should say "overcome...

...They seem to be "natural" identifications in contrast to the artificial or imposed unity of a national culture...

...Blacks have nothing to compare with Louis Adamic's Plymouth Rock and Ellis Island or with Oscar Handlin's The Uprooted...

...History delivers no proof that black is beautiful...

...These other aspects, in fact, contribute to and explain the psychological plight of the Negro down to this day—they explain why James Baldwin cannot "get the whites off my back...

...Mr...

...Maybe the time schedule has been elongated for Negroes...

...nor do I ignore the need to correct certain untrue, prettified, and deceitful accounts of slave-holding paternalism...

...Social studies have shown that second-generation Americans tend to be ashamed of their parents and to have a high incidence of criminality...

...To sharpen the point, I shall refer to another race...

...James Baldwin has rightfully insisted that it is not the Negro's image of himself but the white man's image of the Negro that he must get off his back...

...Black history" as conceived by its proponents at that meeting seems to be intended as a means to impose apartheid on Negro students, not as a means to increase the understanding of Negro problems for both white and black students...

...LACK HISTORY" can be studied inde pendently...

...a doctorate in Afro-American studies should be reserved for scholars in this field, and it cannot be a substitute for individual skills and technological and professional training...

...In both cases we find that the apologetic or official historians overstress both the original oppression and the glory of liberation, with the result that almost nothing can be learned about the true nature of the fight and of the relationships between dominant and submerged class...

...It is true that the famous "melting pot" about which one learns in TEACHING NEGRO HISTORY school seems to cook rather slowly...

...Moreover, they might individually figure in other histories: one in a history of slavery, another in a history of education, a third in a history of jazz, etc...

...The nearest thing to a nation, however, is an ethnic group or inherited religion...

...b) those which the Negroes have made either as an ethnic subculture or within that culture...

...What some well-meaning people mean by "black history," however, is not the critical, painful history which now is gaining ground in the college departments...

...Wesley and his Association are still entertaining conceptions about the uses of history that were discarded by the profession after Nietzsche's indictment of its abuses...

...We might cite the examples of either young nations or labor his HENRY PACHTER tory...

...These names would figure monumentally also in a special history of the American people or in one of the blacks of the world...

...To confirm their identity, such groups must establish historical roots (one reason why the student movement in this country keeps collapsing is that no generation knows about its predecessors...

...Denounce them we may, but we cannot ignore their society-building aspects either...

...and (c) the history of Negro movements as part of American history...

...The history of the civil-rights movement and the history of the black minority overlap, but they are not identical...

...It gives the citizens an identification with a nation...

...We understand the temptation to say: "My ancestors were no bums either...

...and again, that decision may be made individually rather than collectively...

...It must be truthful or even painful...

...it is a country which black people (however much against their will) will have helped build and to whose resources they have an equal claim...

...That famous "great empire of Ghana," which is casting its spell on current "black history," was a worse mess than the great empire of Ethiopia today...

...Both must be studied critically— not so much in order to "learn" from the mistakes of the past, but perhaps to understand how mistakes came to be made and what tortuous ways history sometimes will take to achieve its ends...

...History must record when the first Negro entered the Supreme Court (there is still no woman there) or becomes vice-president of one of the 100 biggest corporations...

...Every minority in the U.S...

...Black is beautiful...

...If Negroes need legends they should turn neither to good novels nor to good history writing...

...I wish it were not necessary historical parallels show the dangers of romanticizing, of selfglorification and self-commiseration, of pattingone's-own-back...

...Unfortunately, the proponents of "black history," in contradistinction to Negro history, are trying to misuse history in a similar way: for purposes of propaganda and power politics...

...I do not doubt that some of them were as powerful in their own spheres...

...The latter, I think, should be taught not in ghetto schools but in every school...

...The entire notion is unhistorical...

...Wesley invited historians to study Ghana's kings who, he said, were as interesting and as powerful as the English kings whom we do study...

...The first honored W. E. B. Du Bois on the 100th anniversary of his birth...

...Yet, they should not rush to the conclusion that it is impossible and that they must be condemned to stay forever in their subculture...

...Black studies" is no substitute for learning a skill...

...HENRY PACHTER I I F NEGRO MILITANTS expect to be elevated by Negro history, they may come in for some surprises...

...I need not insist that today interest is distributed just the opposite way: Negro movements are studied either in graduate schools or apart from the context of American history, but elementary and high school teachers in the ghettos stress the irrelevant themes of individual Negro contributions and of the ghetto subculture...

...There are also the "free universities...

...a sociologist trying to find out what makes revolutions may be more interested in the fact that he was—so they say—a ruffian and might today, again, be a victim of police brutality...

...But what matters is how the wretched came to be respected...

...The danger here is the same we encountered in the Jefferson School and other Proletkult ventures, or in the works of Herbert Aptheker: all labor history appears as one long preparation for The Day...

...he had read the figures correctly and he showed Negroes the way to gain higher status in society...

...but de Sable did not make "Negro history," and many of the others whom proud militants now ask us to admire did not make history qua Negroes...

...The pious distortions of such history breed illusions which lead to bad political decisions...

...Nevertheless, if one were to write the history of Italo-Americans, it would be largely one of losing "identity," with Antonini becoming Anthony, as Krotsziner became Kay...

...The avowed purpose of such instruction is to give people of all races and classes a feeling of belonging together...