U.S. Textbook Portrayals of African Americans

Anyone who has young or adolescent children, especially within the public school system, however “progressive” (pardon the wordplay), can relate to my observations that follow. I find myself constantly reeducating my sons, ages thirteen, fifteen, and seventeen, about American history, so much so that they are now reluctant to ask me for help with their social studies homework. For they know that with each question, I will provide them with more information than they need or care to know. Because of this informal homeschooling, they have become hypersensitive about how black people have been treated and are depicted by their social studies and history teachers and the textbooks that they often rely on.

One of my sons is in the ninth grade. His American history textbook is American Anthem: Reconstruction to the Present, published in 2009 by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. The authors include veteran historians Edward L. Ayers, Jesus F. de la Teja, Robert Schulzinger, and Deborah Gray White. The senior program consultant for the project is history education guru Sam Wineburg, author of the prize-winning Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts (2001). The authors do a superb job of explaining the purpose of history and outlining the goals of thinking historically. I empathize with those who attempt the herculean task of synthesizing centuries of America's past in one volume, and I am keenly aware of the pitfalls of teaching U.S. history with textbooks in secondary schools as well as in colleges and universities. I appreciate their primary function. Simply put, they provide a basic roadmap for young students of history and, in a more utilitarian sense, prepare high school students for the various standardized tests that they are required to take and endure. When compared to the history textbooks from my high school years, my son's book is excellent. Nonetheless, the volume still has some inevitable shortcomings.

My son's heavy textbook is about 500 pages in length and contains two chapters devoted to the Progressive Era, “Life at the Turn of the Century, 1880–1920” and “The Progressives, 1898–1920.” This textbook defines “the Progressives” as those “who fought to make America's economic and political systems more fair,” especially “the living conditions of the urban poor.”Footnote ⁵ Unsurprisingly, the textbook does not problematize historians’ demarcation of the period from about 1880 until 1920 as the Progressive Era or historians’ broader use of time periods as strategies to help us better organize the vast historical landscapes that we are called upon to teach about. As one historian has reminded us: “No single event began progressivism, as no event ended it. Even designating these dates as an era, and labeling it as such, suggests a temporally limited historical period. Historians do not always like to have beginning and ending dates, however, without them a book would never finish.”Footnote ⁶ Of the sixty-six pages from the two chapters in my son's textbook dealing with the Progressive Era, African Americans are mentioned on seven pages, usually as passive, background figures within the context of presidential administrations and broader social and cultural transformations.Footnote ⁷

Though there are brief biographical sketches of lesser-known black female Progressive Era educators like Alberta Virginia Scott (1875–1902) and Otelia Cromwell (1874–1972), representative blacks and events like Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) are relegated to the “shaded boxes,” while other casual nods are made to the black presence. There is absolutely no reference to the period following Reconstruction until the early decades of the twentieth century as representing what those of us who teach black history routinely call “the Nadir” of black America's enduring quest for equality and advancement. The closest statement is: “Progressive efforts had limits, particularly when it came to securing the rights of African Americans.”Footnote ⁸ In one brief section, the authors also discuss disenfranchisement and segregation but avoid delving into the monumental issue of anti-black violence, or what historian Hasan Kwame Jeffries has called “racial terrorism.”Footnote ⁹ The authors of American Anthem state that lynching

Compare this paragraph with the assessments of lynching offered by Philip Dray in his award-winning At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America; Dray has boldly labeled lynching “a holocaust.” In my book African American History Reconsidered (2010), I have analyzed lynching within the context of genocide as defined by the United Nations Genocide Convention and genocide studies scholars. Dray's straightforward, jargon-free description of lynching would most likely resonate with millennial learners. He notes:

Like Dray, the authors of arguably the most popular African American history textbook in the twenty-first century depict lynching in a much more affecting manner than American Anthem:

Unsurprisingly, American Anthem does not contain any lynching photos (we now have access to more than one hundred of these gruesome images) or any of the innumerable accounts from newspapers that appear in volumes like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's (NAACP's) Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889–1918 (1919), Ralph Ginzburg's 100 Years of Lynching (first published in 1962), Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (2000), Christopher Waldrep's Lynching in America: A History in Documents (2006), and Dora Apel and Shawn M. Smith's Lynching Photography (2008). I distinctly remember the perplexed looks on my sons’ faces when we paged through Without Sanctuary. In the end, I translated for them into layperson's terms one scholar's explanation of the power of childhood and adolescence anti-black socialization.Footnote ¹³

Unpacking the Booker T. Washington—W. E. B. Du Bois Paradigm

American Anthem also reinforces the Booker T. Washington–W. E. B. Du Bois dichotomy of black leadership, as if there were no other black leaders during the Progressive Era. Under the header “Prominent Black Leaders,” one reads:

Surprisingly, there is more discussion in American Anthem of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) than of the NAACP. This is refreshing and was most likely included because leading black clubwoman, historian Deborah Gray White, is one of the text's authors.Footnote ¹⁵

To follow this case further, I looked at a stack of U.S. history textbooks at the university level and noticed similar patterns to those found in high schools. In a recently published and wide-selling college U.S. history textbook spanning from early America until contemporary times, published by Pearson, black people are talked about in considerable length when dealing with the antebellum era and Reconstruction. This is easily explained. After the ratification of the U.S. constitution, the issue of slavery preoccupied American political culture for close to eight decades. During Reconstruction, as the indefatigable Eric Foner notes in his undergraduate-friendly Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction, “The story of four million slaves and their transformation from bondage to citizenship is one of the great and inspiring events in world history.”Footnote ¹⁶

However, the above-mentioned college textbook by Pearson, and many others like it, largely ignores the black experience during the Progressive Era beyond surface-level references. Such mentions include: blacks’ roles in the Spanish American War and World War I; the role of the NAACP as the so-called epicenter of the black protest tradition; D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (while ignoring the parallel institution of a black film industry); and, predictably, the grossly misinterpreted debates between Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois.

The flawed portrayal of the Washington–Du Bois conflict is an all-too familiar one that celebrates Du Bois as the epitome of the protest tradition, while Washington becomes the poster child for black conservatism and accomodationism. One of the most recent readers on the Progressive Era, which has been praised as an essential classroom resource for professors, does acknowledge African Americans, but when dealing with black leadership reinforces the Du Bois–Washington dialectic.Footnote ¹⁷ There are numerous problems with this formula.

For a start, there were obviously many other important black leaders during the Progressive Era who did not explicitly align themselves with these two titans. Moreover, there were certainly many more conservative black spokespersons than Washington during the Nadir. This list notably includes the “Negrophobe” William Hannibal Thomas, whom John David Smith describes in his intriguing Black Judas: William Hannibal Thomas and the American Negro (2002). Second, historians should thoroughly compare and contrast Washington and Du Bois in a similar way that we would Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Simply put, Washington, born a slave in 1856 in Hales Ford, Virginia, and Du Bois, born in 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, were molded by distinctly different circumstances and operated as leaders in varied regions and spaces in the country. Jacqueline M. Moore's Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Struggle for Racial Uplift (2003) is an excellent, still relevant, undergraduate-friendly study of the differences between Du Bois and Washington. While their differences were undeniable, they both embraced a belief in racial uplift that demanded sacrifices from those who had the means to help the less fortunate. They occupied distinctly dissimilar positions as leaders, and their legacies reveal this. In any event, the mere focus on Du Bois and Washington when dealing with African American life during the Progressive Era reinforces the archaic, great-man notion of history. For millennials, who are already dazzled enough by the lives of celebrities, this can be misleading. After all, “history from below” has been a defining characteristic of African American historiography for more than four decades.

And, lastly, as historians we are certainly entitled to have our own favorite historical figures and idols, but we should be open enough to acknowledge the myriad approaches to addressing the so-called “Negro Problem.” Knowing what we do about the copious challenges that blacks faced during the Progressive Era, it is only natural that an assortment of tactics would emerge, many of which, in their own unique ways, played a role in chipping away at white supremacy's hold and creating a better world for the masses of African Americans. Students should not be encouraged to side with either Du Bois or Washington. They should be, at a minimum, persuaded to see the value in each leader's stance, along with those of others.

Washington's role in history and legacy has been jeopardized most by the Du Bois–Washington paradigm. In textbooks, anthologies, and monographs alike, Washington's so-called depoliticized vocational/industrial education program has all-too-often been oversimplified. Further, the main documents used to analyze his leadership are his famous, ingenius 1895 Atlanta Exposition address and his propagandistic autobiography Up From Slavery (1901), both cautiously constructed works, each calibrated with several target audiences in mind. African Americanists tend to buttress anti-Washington sentiments. As a specific type of modern-day Bookerite, I do not have any problems finding colleagues to debate with about Washington. At a recent Black History Month event at Michigan State University, I found myself uncomfortably squirming around in my chair as a leading scholar in the field chastised Washington, while the audience seemed to gulp down his words as if they were established facts etched in stone.

I have been studying Washington and the historical scholarship on him for more than a decade.Footnote ¹⁸ I put forward the following description of this intricate black leader, a portrayal that is digestible by millennial learners.

Almost immediately following a five-minute speech that Washington delivered on September 18, 1895, at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia, this former slave and founder of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute became black America's white-appointed race representative. In this multilayered speech that magnetized many publics, Washington offered temporary solutions to the “Negro Problem” that did not disrupt the white South's racial hierarchy. He meekly instructed blacks to remain in the South, to accept their positions as agricultural laborers, to obey the South's intricate system of racial etiquette in the public sphere, to clinch onto vocational and industrial education, and to place notions of political and social equality on the back burner. Washington reassured southern whites that they would be “surrounded by the most patient, law-abiding, and unresentful people that the world had seen” and accepted segregation, declaring: “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet, one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”Footnote ¹⁹ This singular speech has unfortunately become synonymous with Washington's philosophy, despite the fact that he delivered countless speeches for the next two decades, many of which diverged significantly from his 1895 sermon.

At the same time, with his famous 1895 oration, Washington, the “trickster” and seasoned interracial mediator, devised a plan that he would employ with minor changes during the next twenty years of his life. He wore what Paul Laurence Dunbar identified as “the mask,” presenting himself as a non-threatening “safe Negro” in order to gain financial and political support and resources from powerful whites. Washington, who adjusted his speeches, writings, and persona depending on his particular audience, used his status as the white-appointed black spokesperson of the Progressive Era, and more importantly the millions of dollars that he was able to solicit, to subsidize Tuskegee Institute and its many viable reform activities that served thousands of poor southern blacks. As numerous historians have demonstrated since the 1950s, he sought to undercut white supremacy without appearing to do so.

Between 1895 and 1915, Washington wielded so much power and influence within African American communities and influential white circles that in his enduring From Slavery to Freedom (1947), historian John Hope Franklin called this period, peak years of the Progressive Era, “The Age of Booker T. Washington.” Washington was among the few black celebrities of his time to achieve national and worldwide fame. Though despised by white supremacists, in 1901 Washington dined in the White House with Theodore Roosevelt; he had tea with Queen Victoria in England; he received honorary degrees from Yale, Harvard, and Dartmouth; he advised Presidents William McKinley, Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft; and he received funding from various benevolent organizations and was supported by wealthy white industrialists and businessmen including J.D. Rockefeller, Collis P. Huntington, J.P. Morgan, Henry H. Rogers, George Eastman, Robert C. Ogden, William H. Baldwin, John Wanamaker, Julius Rosenwald, and Andrew Carnegie, who in April 1903 pledged $600,000 in U.S. steel bonds to Tuskegee.

Washington remains an enigmatic historical figure and icon. For some, his life “up from slavery” typifies the Horatio Alger “rags to riches” success story, while he embodies black economic self-determination and racial uplift. For others, the majority I would argue, he epitomizes a conservative, materialist post-antebellum era “sell-out.” Today's high school and college students tend to perhaps know Washington best for his tumultuous relationship with W. E. B. Du Bois and his controversial approach to coping with white supremacy in the Jim Crow South.

Since his death, Washington's leadership has been widely debated. The historical scholarship on Washington is exhaustive. In the new millennium alone, ten books have been published on him, promising to provide new-fangled perspectives. A large group of African American intellectuals, scholars, and historians still consider him a power-hungry accomodationist who stifled the black struggle for civil and political rights, equality, and liberation. A much smaller school of revisionist historians have begun to more adamantly dispute the indifferent and negative portrayals of Washington's leadership and legacy, instead showcasing the distinct historical context that shaped his approach and world view, his clandestine attacks on lynching, discrimination, and segregation, as well as his resourceful self-help programs, many of which were replicated decades later by Marcus Garvey, the Nation of Islam, and even the Black Panther Party. David H. Jackson's Booker T. Washington and the Struggle Against White Supremacy (2008), Michael Bieze's Booker T. Washington and the Art of Self-Representation (2008), and Robert J. Norell's Up From Slavery: The Life of Booker T. Washington (2009) are among the more refreshing new works on the Tuskegeean. These studies, and a few preceding them, challenge the still-popular Louis R. Harlan school of thought.

Much more than any other African American Progressive Era reformer, Washington's legacy has been memorialized in diverse ways. In 1922, sculptor Charles Keck completed “Lifting the Veil of Ignorance,” a large bronze statue of Washington located in the center of Tuskegee's campus. In 1929, Liberia's first agricultural and vocational school was founded and named in honor of Washington. In 1940, Washington became the first African American to be depicted on a U.S. postage stamp, and between 1946 and the early 1950s he was he first African American to be featured on U.S. money, a memorial half-dollar silver coin. In 1956, Washington's birthplace in Franklin County, Virginia, was designated a national historic site. For five decades, scholars have had access to the Booker T. Washington Papers (approximately 375,550 items) housed at the Library of Congress Manuscript Division, the largest collection of primary source materials on an African American historical figure. Following his death thousands of black males have been named after Washington, including Booker T. Jones, organ and piano player for Booker T. and the M.G.'s, various jazz musicians from the mid-twentieth century, and former World Championship Wrestling and World Wrestling Entertainment Heavyweight champion Booker Tio Huffman whose rings names include Booker T., Booker, and King Booker. Countless elementary, middle, and high schools as well as other institutions have also been named after Washington. In the new millennium, many black conservatives have claimed the Tuskegeean, and organizations like the Chicago-based Heartland Institute have called upon African Americans to return to Washington's philosophies of self-help and entrepreneurship.

It should be remembered that less than two decades following the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, Washington opened Tuskegee Institute on July 4, 1881, with about thirty students, three teachers, and two crudely constructed log-cabin structures. When he died on November 14, 1915, Tuskegee Institute had more than 100 buildings, 2,345 acres of land, 185 teachers and staff members, 1,527 students, and an endowment of at least two million dollars. Literally working himself to death (he died of high blood pressure), Washington devoted his life to uplifting southern rural blacks through the platforms of economic self-help, vocational and industrial education, interracial cooperation, and “character building.” Members of Du Bois's “Talented Tenth” (yes, Du Bois and Washington did indeed have some similarities), Tuskegee graduates were expected to become educational reformers and living “object lessons.”

For the last two decades of his life, Washington strategically presented himself to various publics in different ways. Convinced of the U.S. government's failure to help blacks during the post-Reconstruction era, Washington called upon blacks to focus on uplifting themselves with a self-help, materialist ethos that downplayed the struggle for social and political equality. He ultimately believed, or at least hoped, that their success would eventually gain them their civil rights, which he secretly fought for from time to time. Washington's approach to African American uplift was multidimensional, complex, and dynamic. The circumstances of his early years and upbringing help explain his oftentimes hard-to-decipher character and actions.

I know that it is not possible to include such descriptions of Washington as well as the range of people, events, and controversies in American history during the Progressive Era and other periods in American history in textbooks. Still, the alternative—broad, over-generalized narratives of the American past that often oversimplify and trivialize blacks’ experiences—leads to myths, uncritical thought, and shallow historical thinking.

African American History Textbooks and the Nadir

To counter the oversimplifications of black history that I have alluded to, members of the African American historical enterprise (mainly African American historians) have maintained a tradition of black history textbooks that challenge normative, whitestream representations. Since 2000, about a half dozen major textbooks have been published devoted exclusively to African American history.Footnote ²⁰ This is an African American intellectual project that dates back to the Progressive Era. The titles of these early books—many of which were published by amateur historians—reveal this. These include books like Edward Augustus Johnson's 1891 School History of the Negro Race in America, John Stephens Durham's 1897 To Teach the Negro History (A Suggestion), C.V. Roman's A Knowledge of History is Conducive to Racial Solidarity (1911), reformer Leila Amos Pendleton's A Narrative of the Negro (1912), and Du Bois's The Negro (1915).

Toward the end of the Progressive Era, in 1922, Carter G. Woodson released The Negro in Our History. This was the most popular, multipurpose black history textbook until John Hope Franklin's From Slavery to Freedom was first published in 1947. Woodson's text went through nineteen editions during his lifetime (he died in 1950), and by March 1941 had sold more than 40,000 copies. This book was especially important because Woodson was one of the few black historians to have professional credentials during the Progressive Era.

Between 1895 and the mid-1920s, only three black men earned doctorates in history in the United States, all from Harvard University: Du Bois (1895), Woodson (1912), and Charles H. Wesley (1925). The first black woman to earn a PhD in history did so outside of the United States, Anna Julia Cooper in 1925 at the Sorbonne in Paris. The first black woman to earn a PhD in history in the United States was Marion Thompson Wright in 1940. As historian Julie Des Jardins has pointed out, already in 1893 Kate Everest Levi had become the first white woman to earn a doctorate in history.Footnote ²¹

To place this in a larger context, according to scholar Horace Mann Bond, between 1876 and 1919, no more than two dozen African Americans earned doctorates compared to more than 10,500 whites during the same period.Footnote ²² Between 1882 and 1935, 2,005 PhDs in history were awarded in the United States. By the late 1930s, fourteen blacks had earned history PhDs.Footnote ²³ Although J. Franklin Jameson was personally sympathetic to Woodson's efforts during the early black history movement, overall blacks faced enormous racism in academia during the Progressive Era and through the interwar period. Many of the period's leading U.S. historians accepted the theory that blacks were inferior and had no history worth acknowledging. There are countless examples. For instance, in The Southern South (1910), Harvard historian Albert Bushnell Hart, who trained several black scholars (including Du Bois), argued that African Americans were subordinate and deficient. “Race measured by race,” he surmised, “the Negro is inferior, and his part in history in Africa and in America leads to the belief that he will remain inferior in race stamina and race achievement.”Footnote ²⁴ Peter Novick, among others, convincingly demonstrates that a “consensual” and “near unanimous” racism connected white historians from across the nation during the Progressive Era.Footnote ²⁵

Now, back to my discussion of recent African American history textbooks’ representations of Progressive Era life. First released in 1999, The African-American Odyssey by Darlene Clark Hine, William C. Hine, and Stanley Harrold is currently the most popular black history textbook, used in numerous college and university courses and in some cases at the secondary level. In 2005, Philadelphia's School Reform Commission mandated that all high school students take an African American history course before they graduate, with the concise version of The African American Odyssey becoming the required text. More recently, in 2013, the widely acclaimed Freedom on My Mind: A History of African Americans by Deborah Gray White, Mia Bay, and Waldo Martin, Jr. appeared.

Both of these textbooks devote about sixty pages each to black life during the Progressive Era. The chapter in Freedom on My Mind is appropriately entitled “Black Life and Culture, 1880–1915.” Both textbooks approach black life during this period in a comprehensive manner, highlighting both the oppressive historical context and black agency within and against these circumstances. Unlike standard U.S. history textbooks, which give token mention to blacks, these books “strike a balance” between what sociologist Orlando Patterson called the “catastrophic” and “survivalist” interpretations of black history.Footnote ²⁶ They demonstrate the need to maintain a delicate equilibrium between notions of victimization and oppression and resistance and perseverance during one of the most violently anti-black periods, when racial terrorism was the norm more than the exception.

These and other African American-centered textbooks cover countless topics in black history from the 1880s and 1890s until the beginning of the first phase of the Great Migration. The figures, images, and statistics alone in Freedom on My Mind are revealing. The authors include the extensive lynching statistics gathered by Tuskegee Institute. They reprint an impressive variety of illustrations ranging from graphic images of four lynchings between 1897 and 1911 to images from the convict lease system that flourished in the South from the 1880s until the 1920s and beyond, as well as paintings from Henry Ossawa Tanner. Freedom on My Mind further offers poetry from the likes of Paul Laurence Dunbar; a detailed map of segregation practices; writings and speeches from black leaders, male and female (far beyond the utterances of Booker T. Washington and Du Bois); and numerous photos of and testimonies from ordinary black people.

To reiterate, I recognize the limitations of textbooks and the fact that we cannot expect them to cover everything or close to it. In his classic Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (1995), James W. Loewen underscores the flaws of these educational devices. At the same time, when comparing the information about African Americans during the Progressive Era and other periods provided in mainstream U.S. history textbooks with African American history textbooks, the differences are crystal clear, especially in scope, analytical frameworks, and perspective. Most conventional U.S. textbooks mention African Americans when dealing with slavery, Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, and the conventionally defined civil rights movement. Unfortunately, scholarship on the teaching of African American history is still relatively underdeveloped. Few professional historians have published blueprints or advice on how to best teach black history at various levels. In a brief online essay for the National Humanities Center's “Freedom Story: Teaching African American Literature and History,” Glenda Gilmore has suggested that black life during the Nadir should be placed within the context of “the long war for civil rights.” While she acknowledges the discrimination that blacks faced during this period, she stresses how blacks, inspired by a profound sense of “hope,” fought against disenfranchisement and segregation and discovered a sense of salvation through education and landownership.Footnote ²⁷ Although I agree that we need to highlight how African Americans fought back and persevered, Gilmore's point becomes more profound and comprehensible if we acknowledge the almost unimaginable challenges that African Americans faced during the Progressive Era.

Suggestions for Teaching Black Life in the Progressive Era

So, how should we teach about African American life during the Progressive Era? What should we showcase and highlight? With the millennial generation in mind, let me respond to these loaded inquiries by focusing on a handful of ways that I think we can constructively provide an overview of the black experience from the 1880s or 1890s until the early 1920s. First of all, millennial learners should be aware that periodizations that historians usually use for U.S. history in general are not adequate for teaching about the African American experience. The period from about 1880 to 1920 was an ambiguous era in the history of African Americans in the aftermath of more than seven decades of slavery under the federal republic and a dozen years of Reconstruction following civil war and emancipation.

On the one hand, African American reformers, scholars, and spokespersons born during slavery and Reconstruction developed innovative uplift programs and made unprecedented sacrifices for the advancement of their people. As Gilmore stresses, blacks did make some unprecedented advancements. Many black colleges and universities were training young blacks, and the African American literacy rate increased by leaps and bounds following the end of Reconstruction. A noticeable number of blacks began migrating from rural to urban areas and from the South to the North and elsewhere. Black landownership in the South increased—during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, about 25 percent of black farmers owned the land that they worked on. Blacks created numerous important self-help, race-vindicationist organizations between 1896 and 1915, such as the NACW, the American Negro Academy, the Negro Business League, the National Negro Press, the National Urban League, Akim Trading Company, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. There were many pivotal black firsts: in 1908 Jack Johnson became the first heavyweight champion of the world, in 1893 Daniel Hale Williams performed the first successful open heart surgery, and Madam C.J. Walker (1867–1919) became a millionaire. Black culture also “crossed the color line” in provocative manners.Footnote ²⁸ I could go on and on.

On the other hand, these expressions of activism, reform impulses, and creative resistance strategies were byproducts of the widespread anti-black culture of the Progressive Era. For some, at a semantic level, using the term “progressive” to describe the realities of African American life during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can be misleading. In the words of Gilmore, “One group's attempts to introduce order into society might depend on controlling another group's behavior.”Footnote ²⁹ The vast majority of African Americans faced great struggles. In 1900, 90 percent of blacks lived in the South, 80 percent in rural areas. Seventy-five percent of black farmers were sharecroppers. According to the census of 1890, from the total black population of about 7,500,000, only a very small black professional class existed: 431 lawyers, 909 physicians, and 14,100 teachers.Footnote ³⁰ In 1900, W. E. B. Du Bois concluded: “There is today one college-trained person in every 3,600 Negroes.”Footnote ³¹ The Progressive Era was synonymous with widespread Jim Crow segregation, unprecedented racial intolerance and violence (from the lynchings of the 1880s to the Red Summer of 1919), political disenfranchisement, labor restrictions, and economic exploitation. Simply put, during the era of Jim Crow segregation, “every institution in the United States—the academy, the churches, the courts, the sciences, even foreign policy—gave vent to the most violent forms of racism, including torture and lynching.”Footnote ³²

In 1954, historian and activist Rayford Logan—who grew up during the Progressive Era (he was born in 1897)—published his pathbreaking The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877–1901. Few history books published have endured for so long. Believe it or not, in 1952 the University of North Carolina Press rejected the manuscript.Footnote ³³ It was finally published by England's Dial Press and sold very well for a densely footnoted academic monograph. It complemented works like C. Vann Woodward's The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Logan suggested that the crucial period from 1877 until 1901 marked the low point of African Americans’ collective status in U.S. society. Roughly a decade following its first edition, Logan published a revised edition, maintaining that “the lowest point” in African Americans’ struggle for universal freedom lasted from the end of Reconstruction until as late as 1923. Though Logan is praised for popularizing the term “the Nadir” in African American historiography, he credited others before him with first introducing this notion. Logan noted that one of the founders of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity (Cornell University, 1906), the physician and Howard University professor Henry Arthur Callis, described the first decade of the twentieth century as being “a low, rugged plateau.” Logan also observed that John Hope Franklin once termed the period following Reconstruction through the early 1920s as “The Long Dark Night.”Footnote ³⁴

Why specifically did Logan call the period from 1877 until 1901 and later 1923 “the lowest point in the American Negro's struggle for equal rights?” He underscored that U.S. presidents from Rutherford B. Hayes to William McKinley and beyond, as well as the Supreme Court, consolidated white supremacy. Legal and extralegal forms of oppression, including widespread violence, flourished. Blacks were removed from political office—by 1901, the last black congressman was gone. The most negative racial stereotypes permeated popular culture. Booker T. Washington's Atlanta Compromise of 1895 helped white southerners justify their continued oppression of blacks, even as blacks were ensnared economically, in defiance of Washington's goals. Though it can of course be debated, Logan's notion of the Nadir can serve as an effective, thought-provoking starting point when dealing with and teaching about black life during the Progressive Era.

Scholarship on black life during the Nadir has evolved significantly since Logan's opus or since August Meier published his classic Negro Thought in America, 1880–1915 (1963). African American history is now certainly an established and flourishing field of scholarly endeavor with its own frequently invoked traditions, visible institutions, distinctive theoretical constructs and methods, lively sub-specialties, vast historiography, and recognizable niche in the mainstream U.S. historical profession. Today, it is easy to conclude that we know a great deal about African American life during the Progressive Era and that African American history has a secure presence in the mainstream academy.

It is now embarrassing for research universities not to have experts in African American history in their history departments. Mainstream university and popular trade presses now regularly publish books on African American history, and new series in the field are popping up. In April 2012, recently deceased historian Manning Marable won a Pulitzer Prize for History for his biography Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (2011). According to the American Historical Association's most recent Directory of History Departments, History Organizations, and Historians (2010), African American history is one of the three “topical fields” that has shown “an increase among recent Ph.D.s” from 2001 until 2010.

Such recent progress must, however, be viewed critically and properly historicized. The problem is similar to easy assumptions about African American advancement since the election and then reelection of Barack Obama as the nation's first black president (he has even erroneously been called “the first hip-hop president”), assumptions that demand deconstruction and deromanticization. The struggle of African American history as a field mirrors the African American historical experience. Like many African Americans vis-à-vis mainstream U.S. institutions, it could be argued that African American history still operates on the margins of the mainstream U.S. historical profession. The legacy of its once-marginal status is still evident.

For instance, there is still only one major journal devoted to African American history, the Journal of African American History, founded as the Journal of Negro History during the Progressive Era in 1915. Most mainstream U.S. historical journals do not showcase scholarship on African American history, especially if it is written from the black studies activist orientation, or what Marable dubbed the “corrective” approach of the black intellectual tradition. While mainstream historical associations like the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Southern Historical Association have routinely included panels on African American history for the last several decades, the annual conventions of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History continue to be the most important intellectual space for scholarly exchanges about black history. These meetings are predominantly attended by African Americans.

Many African American historians, the primary practitioners of the field, continue to face a wide array of challenges at predominantly white institutions of higher education. Courses in African American history continue to serve as elective supplements to the normative U.S. history surveys offered by colleges and universities throughout the nation. Certain types of historical scholarship on African American history have been better received in the mainstream than others. For instance, the 2012 volume of the Journal of African American History openly supported the reparations movement, which has roots in the Progressive Era, as revealed by Mary Frances Berry's brilliant 2005 book on Callie House and the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty, and Pension Society that she founded in 1898. The controversial notion of reparations is not likely to receive such a rigorous and sympathetic hearing in mainstream circles.