Liberation Historiography: African-American Historians before the Civil War

In his 1925 essay "The Negro Digs Up His Past," Arthur A. Schomburg characterizes previous publications on African-American history as being largely "compendiums of exceptional men and women of African stock" that were "on the whole pathetically over-corrective, ridiculously over-laudatory; it was apologetics turned into biography" (231). Arguing that "a true historical sense develops slowly and with difficulty under such circumstances" as those faced by earlier students of African-American achievement, Schomburg celebrated the fact that, by his day, history had become "less a matter of argument and more a matter of record" (231). But whatever a "true historical sense" might be, its development must still be underway, for it has yet to arrive. Indeed, African-American history, like all history, remains as much a matter of argument as a matter of record. One might note that "compendiums of exceptional men and women of African stock" still remain one of the primary popular genres of African-American writing; ¹ but beyond the work of recovering and publicizing the lives and achievements of African Americans that is still necessitated by the relative absence of those achievements in the popular media and public consciousness, approaches to the scholarly "matter of record" itself remain a "matter of argument."

Consider, for example, Wilson Jeremiah Moses's Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History (1998), an attempt to recontextualize heated arguments over the nature, validity, and value of Afrocentrism as a scholarly framework. Moses reminds us that "a limitless range of opinion has been attached to the term Afrocentrism by authors across the political spectrum, most of whom are less interested in scholarly investigations of African American cultures and historical traditions than in forwarding myriad self-serving political agendas" (9). Moses here follows Schomburg, and the historical profession generally, in distinguishing between matters of record and of argument, and also in contesting the grounds by which one might claim the authority of "scholarly investigations." Although Moses asserts "that popular conceptions of history among a people are worth understanding," he is clear about what that understanding comes to in the hands of a professional historian: "I am certain, I realize, to offend both the advocates and the opponents of sentimental Afrocentrism and romantic Egyptocentrism by stating my belief that they are usually harmless and inoffensive, if sometimes extravagant, folk traditions. They are whimsical, entertaining, and often charming fantasies developed by nineteenth-century journalists, preachers, novelists, and vernacular storytellers" (17). Moses does an admirable job of historicizing the historical consciousness of the past, though he is never in any danger of believing that the historians of the past pose any significant challenge to current historiographic frameworks and methods. ²

Although many today, like Moses, are engaged in the search for a "true historical sense," few seem willing to consider the possibility that African-American historians of the past might have something to say about approaches to African-American history. ³ In this essay I'd like to suggest that we would benefit by taking seriously the work of those historians of the first half of the nineteenth century who faced the specifically textual challenge of creating an approach to history that could promote the development of a unified African-American community. Scholarship on the African-American historical consciousness of this period has focused largely on oral culture, and while I recognize the centrality of African-American oral culture I am interested here specifically in struggles over written representations of black history and identity. My operating assumption is that, visions of a "true historical sense" or of an objective ideal of scholarship aside, conceptions of historical truth are culturally generated and necessarily reflect struggles for cultural authority—struggles that inform Moses's book as well as those popular or folk historians that he studies and sometimes critiques. ⁴ I suggest in this essay that African-American historians were and are inevitably metahistorical, for the nature and condition of their subject make the...