3.15 Black History Education and African American Studies

New Negro writers, artists and educators argued that American schools reinforced the idea that Black people had made no meaningful contributions to culture and were therefore inferior. They urged African Americans to take charge of their own education and study Black history and experiences to guide their future.

They also produced a body of books, journals and teaching materials proving that African Americans were not a people without history. The push to bring Black history into schools carried the New Negro movement's ideas to Black students of all ages.

The Black intellectual tradition in the US began about two centuries before African American Studies entered colleges in the late 1960s (1.1). It grew out of the work of activists, teachers, writers and archivists who recorded Black experiences.

In New York, the African Free School, founded in 1787, educated the children of free and enslaved Black families. Its students included future abolitionists such as Henry Highland Garnet (2.19).

• Arturo Schomburg: a Black Puerto Rican collector of books, manuscripts and art from across the African diaspora, including letters of Toussaint Louverture and poems by Phillis Wheatley. In his essay 'The Negro Digs Up His Past' (1925), he argued that Black people needed to recover their history to claim their place in the world. The New York Public Library acquired his collection, which became the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
• W.E.B. Du Bois: his research, such as The Philadelphia Negro (1899) and his Atlanta University studies, produced some of the earliest sociological surveys of Black life.
• Zora Neale Hurston: an anthropologist and writer who studied with Franz Boas and recorded Black folklore, stories and ways of speaking in the South and the Caribbean.
• Carter G. Woodson: the son of formerly enslaved parents and a Harvard-trained historian. He founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915 and created Negro History Week in 1926, which grew into Black History Month. He wrote many works of Black history, starting with African origins.

In this book, a required source, Woodson argued that the education Black Americans received taught them to look down on themselves and their heritage and to accept a lower place in society. He called for schooling that taught Black history and prepared students to serve and lead their own communities. The book remains a foundational text in debates about education and identity.