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  • “Among the vitalizing tools of the radical intelligentsia, of course the most crucial was words”1Carter G. Woodson’s “The Case of the Negro” (1921)
  • Pero Gaglo Dagbovie

In an unpublished manuscript completed in 1921, historian Carter G. Woodson wrote:

The whole history of the white race has been cruelty in the extreme, justified by its claim to be the sole representative of God in remaking the world and shaping the destinies of nations . . . Violating the law is the prerogative of the white . . . In spite of these facts as to superior qualities of the Negro, the average white man is of the opinion that the Negro has a feeling of inferiority in his presence. Nothing can be so far from the truth.”2

Woodson (1875–1950) is most widely recognized in United States—specifically African American—academic and popular cultures for many pioneering and enduring accomplishments, including founding the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASNLH) in 1915, The Journal of Negro History (now Journal of African American History) in 1916, Associated [End Page 81] Publishers, Inc., in 1921, and The Negro History Bulletin in 1937; authoring numerous books, journal articles, newspaper columns, and book reviews; mentoring generations of African American scholars and historians; and creating “Negro History Week” in 1926 that in the immediate post–Black Power era developed into what we celebrate today as Black History Month, a concrete, modern manifestation of the successful, though at times commercial, popularization of African American history. He was, simply put, a black history institution builder.3 Woodson’s most famous and widely read book is The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933), an open and harsh critique of “highly educated Negroes,” the black middle-class, and black leadership.4 Viewed within the context of the black intellectual production of the Great Depression era and black thinkers’ responses to Woodson’s charges, this polemic was in many regards radical. This diatribe has served as a consciousness-raising road map for generations of young black thinkers, especially scores of radical Black Power era activists, black scholar-activists, and Afrocentric social critics. A decade ago hip-hop “nation-conscious” emcee and soulful R & B singer Lauryn Hill sampled from Woodson’s 1933 classic in naming her debut and Grammy Award winning album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998).

Though not as influential as The Mis-Education of the Negro, Woodson’s lost-now-found manuscript entitled “The Case of the Negro,” written in 1921, is an important document pertaining to early twentieth-century black status and a changing American society during the dawning of the 1920s or the later years of what historian Rayford W. Logan dubbed “the nadir” of black life. This newly discovered collection of essays clearly places Woodson within a trajectory of black intellectual radicalism or black radical thought. In “The Case of the Negro,” Woodson challenged the conventional racism and Eurocentrism of the U.S. academy, popular culture, and historical profession, called for drastic changes and reforms in the social order of American society, chastised white America for its collective mistreatment of blacks, and critiqued the normative and widespread worldviews of black middle-class and elite leadership. As his sentiments cited at the opening of this article reveal, the tone of Woodson’s observations and rhetoric were often bold, iconoclastic, and unapologetic. Generations of black scholars and historians before him, professionally trained and amateur, shared and articulated Woodson’s candid critiques of white America and his celebration of black Americans’ and Africans’ cultural contributions, but his unique status as one of the very few [End Page 82] African Americans to have earned a Ph.D. in history by the early 1920s adds complexity to the radical nature of his sentiments. When Woodson wrote “The Case of the Negro,” the U.S. historical profession, grappling with the enduring “objectivity question,” was clearly dominated by racist overtures.5 To earn their doctorates at white institutions, the few African American doctorate holders during the early 1920s had to strategically embrace a seemingly conservative version of objectivity, especially when confronting historical and contemporary issues related to race relations and African American culture. As educational historian Derrick P. Alridge has...

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