Grassroots Historians and African American Historiography in Alabama

In an october 1983 address at purdue university on african American history, John Hope Franklin stated that “there were inextricable linkages between the writing of history and the making of history.” Franklin argued that African American historians had “the solemn obligation to rewrite the African American story from the perspective of the experiences and struggles of their own generation.”¹ African American historiography in Alabama has been shaped by such “grassroots historians,” including ministers, educators, sociologists, novelists, poets, playwrights, and public historians, who not only recorded their history, but who were also the leaders of the communities and movements they documented. In this “participatory culture,” grassroots historians assisted in the creation of organizations to fund and promote the education and physical well-being of African Americans. They also developed curriculum and preservation programs that emphasized the achievements of African Americans in Alabama’s history. In the process, they confronted the forces of white supremacy, challenging the ideologies, scientific racism, and social inequality and brutality that have affected black communities throughout American history and which continue to challenge African American citizens today.²

Due to statutes like the 1833 Alabama slave code that prevented the education of enslaved and free blacks, the antebellum history of Alabama’s African Americans was recorded mostly in the ledgers kept by white elites such as the planters James Tait, Israel Pickens, and John William Walker, as well as in slave advertisements that appeared in regional newspapers like Huntsville’s Alabama Republican. Glimpses of life in black communities were also preserved in narratives of enslaved people, including those of James Williams (1838), James Curry (1840), and James W. C. Pennington’s biography of Jourden H. Banks (1861). Such works were published outside of the South by entities like the American Anti-Slavery Society, the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, and M. Rourke of Liverpool, England. Later, during the New Deal, the Federal Writers Project, assembled by the Library of Congress and the Work Projects Administration, collected oral histories of former Alabama enslaved people, preserving an oral history of remembrances of slavery.³

Despite the documentation of African American life in early Alabama, white historians including William Archibald Dunning, Alabama Baptist editor Edwin Theodore Winkler, Horace Fulkerson, and the members of the Southern Society for the Promotion of the Study of Race Conditions and Problems in the South (who met in Montgomery in May 1900), promoted the idea that African Americans were taken care of by their owners and better off as enslaved people than as freedmen, when they were subjected to “ill treatment, rowdiness and many wrongs from the whites.” The “Dunning school,” as this collective argument became known, stressed African Americans could become “industrious, self-respecting citizens of untold value to the white population” if they were “properly trained.”⁴ Despite the seeming ubiquity of this mindset, a number of black writers challenged this understanding of the past. For example, Alabama ministers Charles Octavius Boothe and Winfield H. Mixon produced the Cyclopedia of Colored Baptists in Alabama (1895) and the History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Alabama (1902), demonstrating that the black church had fostered an environment of socio-economic self-sufficiency for African American citizens. Such works became part of a “liberation historiography” which combated the white supremacist portrayal of African Americans as an inherently inferior people who failed to live up to the standards of white, Christian ideals.⁵

The African American minister’s role as historian for the black community extended as far back as 1794, when African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church founders Absalom Jones and Richard Allen wrote a pamphlet entitled A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People, during the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia describing the service black nurses provided during a recent outbreak of yellow fever.⁶ A separately-formed African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church published the first African American newspapers, entitled Freedom’s Journal and Rights of All, in the basement of the original “Mother Zion” church in New York City in 1827. These publishing activities led to the establishment of the AME...