History We Have not Learned
REDDING, SAUNDERS
History We Have not Learned NORTH OF SLAVERY By Leon F. Litwack Chicago. 317 pp. $6.00. Reviewed by SAUNDERS REDDING Author, "No Day of Triumph," "They Came in Chains" Perhaps nothing has...
...Negro protest, then, is very old...
...and, though in the North he risked his livelihood and in the South, frequently, his neck to acquire it, "education was lost on the Negro" (Dodd...
...Negro historians of first-rate training and talents have been trying unsuccessfully to destroy these bewitching canards since at least 1882, when George W. Williams' two-volume History of the Negro Race in America was published...
...sit-ins would not exist...
...And, never having learned it truly, they are forced to repeat it...
...B. Phillips...
...there would be no "freedom-riders...
...How familiar it all sounds...
...This had to be done, he told them, because "Integrated schools would not only afford Negro children a better education...
...history with open eyes and unprejudiced minds...
...For certainly it is true, and this solidly documented book makes it clear again, that the American people have never truly been taught their history...
...Thus the myths of yesterday persist: The Negro "was happy in slavery" for "slavery was essentially a benevolent institution" (U...
...Recently, however, a group of brilliant white scholars has been reviewing U.S...
...History's one enduring use is diagnostic, but only when it presents in objective terms the intractable facts of the past...
...the Negro received "even-handed justice," (George Bancroft), although he could not serve on a jury, or testify against a white man, or, in the South, raise his hand in self-defense against a white attacker...
...In the second, there is a failure of objectivity, honesty and historical perspective, resulting in a perfect mirroring of the oppugnant dual image of the Negro in the popular mind...
...Other works by Negro historians have followed steadily, right down to the present...
...Even the most reputable of them have invariably done one of two things: mentioned the Negro tangentially in a condescending line or two, as Samuel Eliot Morison does...
...In the first instance, there is always a failure of knowledge and therefore of judgment...
...Because standard U.S...
...Then as now, Negroes, supported by some whites, protested discrimination in places of public accommodation, Jim Crow travel, restrictive legislation and segregated schools...
...but I would be the last to say that there are no new lessons in it which could save both black and white from errors today—errors of attitude, errors of means, errors of ends...
...The latest of this group is Leon F. Litwack, whose North of Slavery marshals an array of sober facts bearing upon issues usually ignored...
...Scholars of the caliber of C. Vann Woodward at Johns Hopkins University, Kenneth Stampp at California, and Guion Johnson at North Carolina, are reaching a broad audience with these studies...
...The trouble is that, except for a few "left-wing" intellectuals and other "crackpots," and of course Negroes themselves, no one has been interested...
...North of Slavery is not an argument...
...Such myths have spawned a host of others, including some now current: e.g., "if left alone" Negroes would not agitate for the right of first class citizenship...
...Responding to a report of a Massachusetts legislative committee, the directors of a Northern railroad replied "that public sentiment required separate cars for Negroes," though they could stand "on the front platforms of any cars...
...Either the Negro counts historically for nothing at all, or he counts as the object of blame, a sort of Typhoid Tom, for the near-fatal infection of the American body politic...
...Litwack's purpose is not to prove...
...or, like U. B. Phillips, devoted thousands of words to a defense of slavery and its consequences...
...Negroes sought relief from "conditions intolerable to the spirit of man," then as now in the courts, by petitioning both state and Federal legislative bodies, and by "boycotting companies which sanctioned segregation...
...The facts speak for themselves, and they add up to solid proof that the social struggle now joined in the South was going on in the North 100 years ago...
...school desegregation would not be an issue...
...In 1838, "Negroes demanded an end to segregation on trains, steamboats, and stagecoaches...
...history has ignored most of the facts and some of the issues pertaining to the Negro in the past, it has failed to instruct the present...
...they would strike a fatal blow at racial segregation and create an atmosphere in which Negroes could work more effectively for equal political and social rights...
...Also, the "unprecedented" efforts of Negroes to attain equality are "Communistinspired" and directed...
...Reviewed by SAUNDERS REDDING Author, "No Day of Triumph," "They Came in Chains" Perhaps nothing has been more indicative of the Negro's situation in American life than the kind of notice historians have traditionally given it...
...The great Negro leader, Frederick Douglass, admonished his people in 1850, "The point which we must aim at is, to obtain admission for our children into the nearest school house, and the best school house in our respective neighborhoods...
Vol. 44 • November 1961 • No. 38
