Benjamin Quarles, American Historian

Benjamin Quarles, American Historian Reginald Kearney Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Benjamin Quarles died at the age of 92 on November 16, 1996. 1 was living in Japan and only learned of his death when I received from Dr. Ruth Brett Quarles, his wife, a newspaper clipping of his obituary reported in the Washington Post and notification that Morgan State University planned to hold a Memorial Convocation Celebrating the Life and Legacy of Dr. Benjamin Quarles on February 6, 1997. 1 felt obliged to attend. Benjamin Quarles was easily one ofthe finest human beings whom I have had the pleasure ofknowing. He was also an extraordinary historian. I first met him in 1961, when I matriculated at Morgan State College in Baltimore, Maryland. Although Dr. Quarles at that time was chairman of the history department, I first became aware of him as the spouse of Dr. Brett, who had responsibility for Promethean Kappa Tau, Morgan's freshman honor society. Ben Quarles taught course 351, "The Negro in United States History," and the word on the grapevine was that one should not miss taking it before graduation. I was a senior political science major when I signed up. The room in which he lectured was rather small, too small to accommodate easily all of the students who wanted to take the course that semester. It was crowded with history majors, and I considered myself fortunate to have gotten a seat. I made it a point to go to class early so that I would not be among those who had to bring a chair from another room or stand at the back of the class. Being in his class was a mind-expanding experience. Although I grew up in New Jersey, I had never had an American history course in which Black people appeared at center. Quarles explained why that was: "The role of the Negro in the making of America is generally neither well known nor correctly known. Often the positive contributions ofthe Negro have escaped the eye ofthe historian , and hence do not find their way into the pages of his work."1 As a youngster in Hackensack, I remember once using an American history textbook in which the word "Negro" had been erased with such vigor that a jagged hole 1 Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the Making ofAmerica (New York: Collier, 1964), 18. Civil War History, Vol. xliv No. 3 © 1998 by The Kent State University Press 2l8CIVIL WAR HISTORY with blackened edges was left wherever the word had appeared. Making the erasures was not a formidable task; the word appeared only during what were labeled the antebellum and post-Civil War periods. In the former period it was associated with slavery and in the latter with scalawags and carpetbaggers. Except for this brief time span, Black people had been expunged from the history books available to me. Other than a calendar from Bullock's funeral home touting the "firsts of notable Negroes" such as Crispus Attucks, Peter Salem, Salem Poor, and Frederick Douglass and some writings by Joel A. Rogers, much of what I read treated Black people as peripheral to the American experience. Conventional histories were marred by "significant omissions" and distortions or did not allow Black people a real role in the making of the United States. Passed on as basic facts of American history were themes such as the following: the first Blacks arrived in the United States as slaves; Blacks were incidental commodities; they came devoid of any significant or worthy cultural heritage; White Americans, North and South, gave their lives for noble causes while Blacks sat back on the plantations and strummed their banjos; andAbraham Lincoln was the "Great Emancipator" who gave the slaves their freedom. In Quarles's class, students learned differently. Quarles began and ended his class punctually. I seem to recall that he began by calling the roll. Neatly attired in suit and tie, he stood tall, almost regal in bearing, behind a lectern with his notes spread before him. When he lectured, Quarles was soft-spoken, almost as if sharing a confidence, allowing his students to become privy to information that was not yet a part of the...