The Father of Black History

He wrote 16 books on African-American history. In 1915, at Chicago, he founded the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History. The next year he began publishing the Journal of Negro History, and in 1926 instituted Negro History Week (officially changed to Black History Month in 1976). He is the son of former slaves, born in 1875 at New Canton, Buckingham County, Virginia. He is known as the “father of black history.”

Self-taught in the school subjects of his time, Carter Goodwin Woodson labored in the coal fields of Fayette County Virginia until at the age of 20 he was able to enter Douglass High School in Huntington.

After graduating from Bera College, Kentucky, in 1901, Woodson, t came back to Douglas High School as its principal. Later, he would be a school supervisor in the Philippines, earn B. A. and M. A. degrees from the University of Chicago, and a Ph. D. in history from Harvard University, teach languages in Washington D. C. high schools, and become the Dean of the School of Liberal Arts at both Howard University and West Virginia State College. During a year of study in Asia and Europe and a semester at the Sorbonne Woodson would master several languages.

Given a grant to study the 1830 census wherein he found there were blacks who owned slaves convinced Woodson a need existed for special research into black history. He believed the neglect, ignorance and misrepresentation that had clouded the Negro’s past could be dispelled by scholarly works. “If a race has no history,” wrote Woodson, “if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated.” Woodson set out to give his people an authentic history.

In 1915 Woodson published The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861. That book was followed by A Century of Negro Migration (1918), The History of the Negro Church (1927) and The Negro in Our History. This last book has gone through several editions and was revised by Charles Harris Wesley in 1950. It is considered “one of the finest full-length works on black history.” Among other works of Woodson’s are The Mind of the Negro as Reflected in Letters Written During the Crisis, 1900-1860, The African Background Outlined, and The Mis-Education of the Negro.

In 1920 Woodson organized the Associated Publishers for the purpose of putting into print books on African-American culture and history. The Negro History Bulletin first issued by Woodson in 1937 was created for elementary and high school teachers.

Woodson contemplated compiling a six-volume Encyclopedia Africana. He died in April 1950, before completing the project.

In 1992, the Library of Congress honored Dr. Woodson with an exhibition entitled “Moving Back Barriers: The Legacy of Carter G. Woodson.” The Library has a collection of 5,000 items from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries donated by Woodson.

Dr. Woodson and W. E. B. DuBois, another Harvard graduate, are credited with laying the foundations of modern Afrocentric scholarship. Since its beginning, Afrocentricism has attracted numerous followers and much controversy. It has gained the support of the internationally authoritative Association For the Study of Classical African Civilizations.

Afrocentric scholarship denies its discourse is the product of flawed evidence or pseudoscience, and champions the concept of Africa as the birthplace of mankind and the wellspring of civilization. It argues that Anglo-European religion, philosophy and science has ignored, or consciously suppressed and distorted African heritage and its contribution to civilization’s progress. The role of Afrocentricism and Pan-Africanism is to restore Africans to their rightful place in world history.

• • •

Among Anglo-European nineteenth century evolutionists there were, according to Stephan Jay Gould (The Mismeasure of Man), two modes of thinking about “racial ranking”: monogenism (from a single source), and polygenism (from many sources).

The single-source backers “upheld the scriptural unity of all peoples in the single creation of Adam and Eve. . . . Human races are a product of degeneration from Eden’s perfection. Races have declined to different degrees, whites least and blacks most.”

The many-sources advocates “abandoned scripture as allegorical and held that human races were separate biological species, the descendants of different Adams. As another form of life, blacks need not participate in the ’equality of man.’”

Either argument could be used without a twinge of misgiving in the nineteenth century to uphold the enslavement of Africans.

Gould explains that the single-source idea of “degenerationism was probably the more popular argument, if only because scripture was not to be discarded lightly.”

But the idea that the races had originated from different Adams (many-sources) reinforced the idea of pure racial stock. Josiah Nott preached this doctrine in the ante-bellum South and was looked upon as a benefactor who defended the South’s “peculiar institutions,” and aided “most materially in giving the negro his true position as an inferior race.”

The only problem with the many-sources argument was that it cast aside the literal interpretation of the story of God’s creation of Adam. Nott attempted to solve this dilemma by setting the natural history of mankind apart from the Bible, and placing “each upon its own foundation, where it may remain without collision or molestation.”

Nott’s solution, said Gould, “forced the defenders of slavery into a quandary. Should they accept a strong argument from science at the cost of limiting religion’s sphere? Degeneration of blacks under the curse of Ham was an old and eminently functional standby.”

The book of Genesis says that Noah, Ham’s father, for some event that is open to interpretation, placed a curse on Ham’s son, Canaan: “a slave of slaves shall he be to his brothers.” Says one Biblical authority: “Some of Canaan’s descendants, the Gibeonites—in line, apparently, with Noah’s prophecy—were told by Joshua, ‘You shall always be slaves, hewers of wood and drawers of water.’” To many interpreters of the Bible this implied a sanctioned precedent for slavery, and an opinion that the descendants of Canaan were black Africans.

On the other hand the African-American church in its formative stage in the early 1800s turned to the Bible to, in the words of Dr. St. Clair Drake, “‘prove’ that Black people, Ethiopians, were powerful and respected when white men in Europe were barbarians. Ethiopia came to symbolize all of Africa . . . ‘Ethiopianism’ became an energizing myth in both the New World and in Africa itself for those pre-political movements that arose while the powerless were gathering enough strength for realistic and rewarding political activity.”

Arguments from a time before the Civil War may seem irrelevant today considering scientific findings about the origins of all humankind. But the racial bigotry they inspired on both sides still lingers as a stumbling block to a true and workable solution to “interracial” accord.

Mars in Aquarius

In the summer of 2003 the planet Mars, at one of its closes approaches to Earth,

could be seen as a small brilliant light in the constellation of Aquarius.

It may be written at some distant day, in another century, that during the first decade of the twenty-first century there appeared in the night sky a fiery light that outshone all others except the Moon and Sun. It came into the sky from the east growing brighter each night. Long ago named Ares and then Mars, this ancient God of War is known as a wanderer along the Sun’s path, often mostly obscure and hardly noticeable, except when lit by an infrequent brightly burning light. Eventually Ares falls into the blaze of sunlight and is not consumed, but is resurrected at dawn by his brother, Phoebus Apollo, and sent on his way.

An omen of ominous portent, this God of War, to those who divine the heavenly script written in starlight. The Greeks believed Ares did not come alone. Attending him in his journey were Discord and Strife, and the Goddess of War, Enyo. Terror and Trembling and Panic were at her side. “As they move,” said Edith Hamilton (Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes), “the voice of groaning arise behind them and the earth streams with blood.” And, she says: “Homer calls him, murderous, bloodstained, the incarnate curse of mortals; and, strangely, a coward, too, who bellows with pain and runs away when wounded.”

The Romans gave Ares another name, Mars, and took a more heroic view of his character. In Virgil’s poem Aeneid, he is a warrior, “magnificent in shining armor,” wrote Hamilton, “redoubtable, invincible.” On Mars’ field of battle, Roman soldiers seek a glorious death, “and find it ‘sweet to die in battle.’”

• • •

In ancient Sumero-Babylon texts historians have found references to a deity named “Nergal,” associated with the planet Mars. In this context he has been cast out of heaven and rules the underworld as the “raging king.” Nergal’s gifts to humankind are War, Pestilence, Fever and Devastation.

So it appears that from most ancient times the planet Mars has sent us a subliminal message, subject to decoding and interpretation.

Mars and the other celestial lights challenged man’s imagination for an explanation of their origin and meaning.

To long-ago watchers of the night sky in the deserts of the Mideast, Mars would have been the most intriguing of celestial wanderers. Over a 25 to 27 month period the size and brightness of Mars varies more than any other planet. About every 2 years 2 months Mars reaches its highest point in the sky, at midnight.

At its brightest, when the Earth and Mars are closest, Mars can be brilliant. But during its journey around the Sun in an elliptical orbit Mars fades to a faint object in a field of brighter stars. And Mars has another peculiarity, at times it appears to turn back on its path. This is also true of the apparent movement of the other planets whose orbits are beyond Earth’s. This illusion is caused by a change in perspective as Earth on an inside track swings past those planets.

• • •

It seems clear that some concept of time first grew out of the observed phases of the Moon and the summer and winter solstices and their relationship to the seasons. (The sky, it appears, was mankind’s first clock and calendar.)

The Sun might rule the day, but the realm of the planets is confined to that interval between dusk and dawn, that mysterious time of sleep and dreams. The meaning of the celestial lights in the nocturnal sky lies in the realm of occult invention.

To imagine the process that created a mythology, a religion, a calendar and an almanac from celestial evidence is pure speculation. But we could suggest that by translating what was observable into some fanciful anthropomorphic and zoomorphic iconography the hoped for occult meaning of the heavens were eventually revealed and the message defined in words.

If the Sun was pictured as a metaphorical king, seemingly the largest and most powerful object in the sky, then those traveling the king’s journey across the heavens in his absence, the Moon and seven observable planets, were lesser nobles. The development of an astral-theology might have begun with this thought: The seasons and thus planting and harvesting appeared to be a decree of the Sun as his path moved annually north to south and back again. This power is beyond human comprehension. The Sun controls all earthly vital activities including the migration of game herds, the cycle of animal reproduction, the growth and flowering of plants, etc., as they respond to this king’s yearly movement along that sky path known as the “ecliptic” to astronomers and the “Zodiac” to astrologers. It also can be seen that the sea tides rise and fall in response to the dictates of the Moon. These powers are unearthly and supernatural. Those other heavenly minions who follow the Sun’s path, are they not also of a supernatural, unearthly nature? What powers do they have over mankind’s activities?

For example, what interpretation could be made of Mars as it slowly grew in size and brightness? It had the ominous color of a distant fire. Fire when uncontrolled is deadly; when controlled it is life giving. Not surprising then is that in some cultures the deity associated with the planet Mars has a dual nature—God of War, and a God of Agriculture.

Along the king’s path there are several “houses.” These are constellations which can be resolved into 12 designs and given names. The house of each figure occupies 30 degrees of that circular path, the Zodiac. “Broadly speaking,” says an explanation of the Zodiac, “the 12 signs of the Zodiac can be divided into both masculine and feminine, positive and negative, or, active and passive. The masculine signs are Aries, Gemini, Leo, Libra, Sagittarius and Aquarius, whereas the feminine signs are Taurus, Cancer, Virgo, Scorpio, Capricorn and Pisces.” Thus by projecting opposing human attributes on the signs a resonance between heaven and Earth was established and channels of communication opened.

It was observed that Sun, Moon and planets moved through these signs of the Zodiac in orderly but different combinations. Was this the key to decoding celestial communion?

In 2003 Mars appeared and reached its brightest in the constellation Aquarius during August. Ten years before, Mars occupied the constellation Gemini and was brightest in January. To the astrologer who would compare Mars’ position to the Moon, Sun and other visible planets, each of the two appearances would deliver different messages.

Eventually, throughout centuries of observation and interpretation celestial revelations were made known, the physical is made metaphysical, mythologies written and religions founded. And astrology (knowledge and interpretation of the stars) gave birth to the empirical science of astronomy (laws and knowledge governing the stars). This is a historic process so complex as to fill volumes of explanation.

Ancient astral-cosmology underlies our Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian theological heritage; Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism and Islam contain remnants of it. One cannot escape the idea that Mars’ companions, War, Terror, Trembling and Panic, or Nergal’s deadly plagues, War, Pestilence, Fever and Devastation, were the ancestors of the Four Horsemen (Conquest, War, Famine and Death) in the Revelation to John; or that Saint Michael the Archangel inherited Mars’ sword and became “the patron and defender of Israel against its enemies.” Is it merely coincidence the angel Lucifer, as was Nergal, was cast out of heaven and became the king of the underworld?

Horoscopes based on those 12 Zodiacal icons are still with us. Days of the week are named for Sun (Sunday) and Moon (Monday). Tuesday is taken from the Scandinavian “Tiwdag,” or “Tiw,” (Mars) God of War. Wednesday, “Onsdag,” can be traced back to a Scandinavian name for Mercury. Thursday is “Tosdag,” Jupiter; Friday, “Fredag,” Venus, and Saturday, “Lordag,” Saturn. The month of March owes its name to Mars. If your name is Martin, look up, the origin of your name shines brightly in the darkness.

For anyone looking up, do not be intimidated by the vastness of the starry heavens. Don’t say it makes you feel so small and so humble. We are all children of those celestial lights. A heavy element, for example, such as iron, which is a component of hemoglobin and allows your blood to carry oxygen from your lungs to the cells of your body, was forged in the belly of a forgotten star—a supernova that exploded long ago and fertilized space with life sustaining elements.

We in fact are made of stardust. And if it happens that we are the only sentient beings in the whole universe, then we have the great and exclusive privilege of allowing the universe to look back upon itself through our eyes!

Breakfast in Valhalla

Note: I wrote this essay several years ago. At that time a veterans group called the Vintage Squadron met twice a month for breakfast at the local VFW. The breakfasts are no longer held there, but continue at a local restaurant. 

It is 8:00 a.m. on a Wednesday morning at the VFW in Kankakee, Illinois, The chairs at the tables in the banquet room are slowly filling until within fifteen or twenty minutes 80 to 100 men have gathered. All once members of one or another branch of the military (a few currently serving in the reserve); all now sharing an hour or two of memories and fellowship. Their experiences range from World War II to Desert Storm, from the Bataan death march to combat in Iraq; from high-altitude streams of bombers over Europe to the last bombing of Japan; from the shell cratered beaches and tropical jungles of Pacific islands to the shooting gallery rice paddies of Vietnam; from the frozen Chosin reservoir in Korea and the landing at Inchon to the D-day invasion of Europe and the Battle of the Bulge; from naval battle groups and carriers steaming westward, to silent running beneath enemy flotillas; from bomber fighter escort to helicopter rescue; from jeeps to tanks, single-engine, bi-wing trainers to supersonic jets; from orderly rooms and supply depots to weather stations and control towers; from base hospitals, guard houses and mess halls to lonely foxholes on the perimeter of hell. Flight One of the Vintage Squadron is present and accounted for. It is breakfast time in Valhalla.

    One of the greatest of privileges is to be among these men. Not that they would ever characterize this breakfast or any of the other twice a month meetings as a gathering of heroic warriors, such as the title of this little essay might indicate. But in the aggregate they embody unwritten volumes of a vast collection of experience, of service and sacrifice to their country for over half a century, some of it workaday, some of it truly heroic, where humor and pathos shade the telling.

    I once sat between two veteran infantrymen of different eras. One had been a platoon sergeant, who survive the December 1944 German onslaught on Bastogne; the other a private trying to stay alive while engaged in an uphill battle on some obscure enemy outpost in Korea. Said the platoon sergeant, it was the replacements, they came in in the morning and were dead by evening, I never had a chance to even know their names. Said the private, I just ran as fast as I could, firing as fast as I could. My gun got so hot that the Cosmoline remaining where I hadn’t been able to clean it out melted and ran down across my hands and blistered them.

    Pilots and crew members of all types of military aircraft recall, sometimes humorously, sometimes with self-deprecating candor, the moments of terror and moments of exaltation during aerial combat. One B-29 pilot and crew finish a record 30 missions over Japan insuring them a ticket home, except that on this final bomb run flack and Japanese fighters knock out the B-29’s starboard engines. The pilot manages a titanic struggle to keep the bomber in the air until it reaches Iwo Jima, where it makes a crash landing on an emergency runway. The crew survives. Tragically, this incident is only a prelude to a second crash two weeks later off Kwajaline Atoll, involving the same pilot and crew, who are flying to Hawaii on another B-29. Minutes after takeoff this aircraft plummets into the water. Three crew members survive—the pilot and two of his gunners. Then there is the story of a crippled B-17 returning to England after a raid on Germany. An inflatable life raft stowed in a compartment is shaken lose and inflates inside the fuselage. It hits one of the waist guns and causes the gun to swivel and fire toward the rear of the aircraft. A round strikes the tail gunner in the butt. Undoubtedly the only aircrew member ever to be shot by a life raft.

    Some men for short periods of their lives held positions of command, made life and death decisions, were asked to lead other men to what Lincoln defined as “the last full measure of devotion.” The dark deeds of necessity on the battlefield are not easily told, very rarely. Only rows of crosses and white grave markers in distant fields remain as silent testaments.

    Occasionally into this venerable gathering comes a young man in spiffy dress class A. Close cropped hair and the ruddy flush of desert tan still garnish his cheeks. Just back, he says. And soon old men recall how they once in military duds stood tall and lean in solid ranks on parade. Memories find voice. Not forgotten the dead and gone. And so the coffee cools, the rosy blush of morning fades, and one by one the men depart. 

    Into this now quiet Valhalla the Valkyries summon members of those legions lost on bloody fields of war. Ghostly banners, flags and ensigns unfurl to mark the eternal bivouac of the dead. Not forgotten! is passed from file to file. Rest easy. Not forgotten, echoes. Not in vain we died. The price we paid to purchase liberty not too dear—was it? Youth cut short, a promise unfulfilled. An honored death. 

    And so Valhalla awaits the next Wednesday morning communion of the tried and tested, brother patriots and men at arms, and those who served behind the lines of battle. They come, as do winter birds to sunny shores, to bask in the warm glow of friendship, to share with aging comrades another breakfast in Valhalla.

“Negroes in the Servitude of our Planters”

“‘Me come say ha-do . . .’ and then they all troop off as noiselessly as they entered, like a procession of sable dreams.” 

Opposition to slavery in the American colonies began with the Quakers in Pennsylvania in the 1680s. For the next hundred years the problem of slavery was discussed in “instructions” issued at monthly meetings: “. . . we have thought proper to make our advice and judgment more public, that none may plead ignorance of our principles therein; and also again earnestly exhort all, to avoid in any manner encouraging that practice, of making slaves of our fellow creatures.”

    Malachy Postlethwayt (c.1707–1767), writer on economics and publicist) argued that the advantages of African and West India trade “are the most nationally beneficial of any we carry on. . . . that Traffic only affording our Planters a constant Supply of Negroe-Servants for the Culture of their lands . . . owing primarily to the Labour of Negroes; who, as they were the first happy Instruments of raising our Plantations; so their Labor can only support and preserve them, and render them still more and more profitable to their Mother-Kingdom. . . . But I never heard it said that the Lives of Negroes in the Servitude of our Planters were less tolerable than those of Colliers and Miners in all Christian Countries.”

   Condemnation of slavery by European and North American religious leaders and philosophers during the 1700s fueled arguments about human rights and God-given law. But as a practical matter, “The issue of slavery, as if formed in the eighteenth century, was based on fear, defense, and profit—not morality. (Great Issues in American History) As they came to recognize the problems of a large slave population, most Southern colonies tried to impose a highly restrictive import duty to discourage if not prohibit the importation of slaves. The British, over a period of fifty years, struck down these attempts, which encouraged Jefferson in the first draft of the Declaration to include in his indictment of the king the statement, ‘He [the king] has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce,’ an assertion that was eliminated in the final version because it offended New England merchants and certain Southern planters.” 

   The Revolutionary War, fought to protect the universal “natural rights of men,” caused many Americans to see slavery as a violation of those rights.

   Thomas Paine became one of the most influential voices for the abolition of slavery in colonial America. In 1775 he published an essay on African slavery.

   “. . . . Too many nations enslaved the prisoners they took in war,” wrote Paine. “But to go to nations with whom there is no war, who have no way provoked, without further design of conquest, purely to catch inoffensive people, like wild beasts, for slaves, is an height of outrage against Humanity and Justice, that seems left by Heathen nations to be practiced by pretended Christians. How shameful are all attempt to colour and excuse it!

   “As these people are not convicted of forfeiting freedom, they have still a natural, perfect right to it; and the Governments whenever they come should, in justice set them free, and punish those who hold them in slavery. . . .”

   On April 14, 1775, the first anti-slavery society in America was organized in Philadelphia. Paine became a member.

   Antislavery protests after 1817 were led by the American Colonization Society. The American Antislavery Society, founded in 1833, supported William Lloyd Garrison’s crusade against slavery. 

   Antislavery politicians founded the Liberty Party in 1840.

•   •   •

It is believed generally among historians that the idea of the abolition of slavery grew out of the philosophical sea change in Anglo-European thinking labeled the “Enlightenment.” 

   Peter Gay described the Enlightenment as “A loose, informal, wholly unorganized coalition of cultural critics, religious skeptics, and political reformers from Edinburgh to Naples, Paris to Berlin, Boston to Philadelphia . . .united on a vastly ambitious program . . . of secularism, humanity, cosmopolitanism, and freedom, above all freedom in its many forms . . .” 

   There are scholars such as Hilary Beckles who suggest that there was an “‘indigenous anti-slavery movement’ among Africans in America. That is, abolitionism was as much a BLACK response to slavery as a European phenomenon, and hence the concentration on the abolition movement in the standard literature as a WHITE, European movement is only part of the story.” 

   Paul E. Lovejoy explains that “Institutions of servitude, including slavery, that were acceptable in Africa and to which many Africans had been exposed even before their own enslavement were no longer acceptable in the Americas.” The conditions in America “were such that the ideological framework that countenanced slavery was transformed into abolitionism.”

•   •   •

   The names of Americans who supported the abolitionist movement during the years before the Civil War—Elijah P. Lovejoy, William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown, Wendell Phillips—have become legendary. One name, Fanny Kemble, remains in relative obscurity. She was the wife of a plantation owner on Butler’s Island, Georgia. Yet some say she had as much to do with the abolition of slavery as the celebrated Harriet Beecher Stowe.

   The condition of the slaves at Butler Place on Butler’s Island was far different from those seen by Stowe at Brentwood Plantation in Kentucky. 

   Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was inspired by stories of runaway slaves and tales of the Underground Railroad she had heard while living in Cincinnati, and by a mystical vision; Kemble experienced firsthand absolute human degradation on Butler’s Island. During the critical year of 1863, when England was on the verge of recognizing the Southern Confederacy, Kemble published in London and New York her memoir, A Residence on a Georgia Plantation. 

   Critics and historians still argue the authenticity of Kemble’s book and the influence it had in England’s decision to not recognize the Confederacy. 

   “But, fact or fiction,” wrote Margaret Armstrong in Fanny Kemble, a Passionate Victorian, “its worst enemies could not deny that the horrid story was interesting. . . . Mrs. Kemble’s account of plantation life was accepted at its face value, as the statement of an eye witness and a dreadful indictment of slavery.”

   Before her marriage to Pierce Butler, Fanny, the niece of the noted tragedienne Sarah Siddons, had been an actress who charmed audiences with her beauty and talent in England and America. Appalled by the conditions she found in the slave quarters on Butler’s Island, Fanny shocked her husband and the plantation’s overseer by entering hovels in which slaves lived and attempting to improve the intolerable conditions she found there. But her fearless ministry only antagonized her husband who resented her “northern” prejudices, and who saw himself as a wise and benevolent ruler of contented subjects. 

   In a letter Fanny wrote from Butler Place in 1840 she said: “I found an old negro named Friday lying on the floor of the damp, dark, filthy room; his glazed eyes and rattling breath told me that he was dying. . . . There he lay—the worn out slave whose life had been spent in unrequited labor for me and mine, without one physical alleviation, one Christian solace, one human sympathy—panting out his last breath like a forsaken beast of burden rotting where it falls. As I bent over him, blinded with tears of unavailing pity, there was a quivering of the eyelids and falling of the jaw—and he was free. How I rejoiced for him; and how, as I turned to the wretches who were calling to me from the inner room, I wished they were all gone with him, freed by death, from bitter, bitter bondage.”

In Search of Africa’s History

“The Africans who came to the United States as slaves started their attempts to reclaim their lost African heritage soon after they arrived in this country. They were searching for the lost identity that the slave system had destroyed. Concurrent with the Black man’s search for an identity in America has been his search for an identity in the world, which means, in essence, his identity as a human being with a history, before and after slavery, that can command respect.”

    The above passage was written by Dr. John Henrik Clarke in an “Afterward” to the 1986 republication of J. C. DeGraft-Johnson’s 1954 ground-breaking book, African Glory: The Story of Vanished Negro Civilizations (Black Classic Press, Baltimore, MD).

    “African Glory is a general history of Africa written by an indigenous African scholar,” said Dr. Clarke. “This book was published in 1954, the eve of the ‘Independence explosion’ in Africa and the beginning of the Civil Rights movement in the United States. Colonialism and the attitudes that went with it were being challenged by African people and people throughout the world. In demanding the right to rule their land, they were also demanding the right to interpret their history.”

    When DeGraft-Johnson sat down to write African Glory in the early 1950s he faced a dilemma: Should he write an overall history of Africa without detailing racial types; or, in his words, “regard Africa as the ‘Land of the Negroes’ and give a history of the Negro race[?]” He was aware that a whole section of South Africa’s Witwatersrand University was devoted to research into the origins and distribution of the “Negro race,” but ancient bones found in Africa were still the center of heated controversy. He knew some learned men believed there were “no Negro skulls of any antiquity—the oldest known is about 6000 B. C.” 

    “It must be noted that we have not yet succeeded in finding out the original home or the evolutionary area of the Negro,” DeGraft-Johnson concluded. He then set aside the arguments and wrote: “In this book we can only hope to touch on some of the salient landmarks in the history of this vast continent.”

    Anyone who has watched Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s Wonders of the African World on PBS will find familiar ground in African Glory. Histories of lost kingdoms, of African empires, of African literati and the diaspora of the slave trade are common themes. Citing a lecture given by Professor Emil Torday in Geneva in 1931, DeGraft-Johnson wrote that the slave trade broke up or undermined the various and once peaceful “peasantry” of indigenous African cultures. Then came slave traders “and millions of de-tribalized or decentralized Africans were let loose upon each other. . . .”

•   •   •

    In Haiti the 1791 slave rebellion overthrew a French government. For eight years Toussaint L’Ouverture ruled a free black republic. Afrocentrism surfaced in Haiti during the 1820s and declared the origins of black African civilization lay in ancient Egypt. 

    In the United States Afrocentric thought and the Black Nationalism movement began at least 100 years before the publication of African Glory. William J. Moses (The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850-1925, 1978), suggests that the Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Law, marked “a point at which several black leaders began to turn in the direction of the back-to-Africa movements.”

    Moses noted in the introduction to his book Africans living in a “Westernized” culture recognized “differences between African societies and the self-confident, civilized, Anglo-Saxon culture.” A movement began that advocated African civilization, “which embodied a sense of obligation to aid in the uplifting of the continent and its ‘backward’ peoples as an initial step in the elevation of black people everywhere. . . . If Africa could be uplifted, the slave trade would cease. Africans living abroad could take pride in their homeland. The humanity of the Negro would be vindicated and the link between blackness and slavery would be destroyed, once an African civilization had been established.” Out of “Pan-Africanism” evolved an authoritarian collectivist ideal, “a belief that all black people could and should act unanimously under the leadership of one powerful man or group of men, who would guide the race by virtue of superior knowledge or divine authority towards the goal of civilization.”

    Black separatism, the secular form of the Black Nationalism movement, and the religious form, Ethiopeanism (inspired by the Old Testament story of enslaved Israelites in Egypt), were practiced by Westernized Africans of the late nineteenth century. 

    Ironically, said Moses, “Black chauvinism” was a stepchild of European racial theory. “Strangely, the black nationalists of the nineteenth century tended to accept the descriptions of the various races and their innate characteristics almost exactly as they had been described by the European philosophers. . . . Racial chauvinism therefore often consisted of arguing that nature had actually been kinder to the sensitive and gentle African than the stolid, frigid European.” 

•   •   •

    What was known about the history of African people in the late 1800s? 

    During the 1400s the Portuguese had explored the west African coast and by 1488 Diaz had reached the southern Tip of the continent. Slave trade began in 1442, when 10 Africans were brought to Lisbon. For over 350 years trade along the coasts of Africa, and trade with the sub-Sahara kingdoms by Muslim states of the Near East, brought many parts of Africa under the influence of Eastern and Western countries, and Christian and Islam religions. It wasn’t until 1880 that European powers began to divide Africa into colonies. However, travelers, explorers and missionaries had collected enough information by 1875 so that a series of histories of a sort could be compiled and published in England by Rev. Dr. J. G. Wood. A two volume set of Wood’s works including the African histories was printed in the United States in 1878 under the title The Uncivilized Races of Men in All Countries of the World. 

    The author’s Preface states that because of “the extraordinary variety of the native customs which prevail in that wonderful land [Africa]. . . . It will be seen . . . how necessary it is to devote to that one continent a considerable portion of this work.” Six hundred and ninety-three pages of the first volume and 185 engravings are allotted to African cultures. 

    The American publisher’s Preface recognizes the Rev. Dr. Wood as “among the most popular and foremost writers of Great Britain,” and recommends that The Uncivilized Races of Man was worthy of a place in every household library.

    The Uncivilized Races of Man indoctrinated the general public with a view of Africa held by white Christian missionaries and judged by Victorian morality. Africa appeared to be a continent of contrasting cultures, cruel practices and pagan “fetish” religions. In Wood’s words: “We have, for example, on one side of the river, a people well clothed, well fed, well governed, and retaining but few of the old savage customs. On the other side, we find people without clothes, government, manners, or morality, and sunk as deeply as man can be in all the squalid miseries of savage life.” In a discussion of Dahome, Wood complained that the West African had not been uplifted by his association with Europeans, “men wiser and more powerful” than himself. Instead, he had “only increased his barbarity by the additional means which he obtained from the white man.”

    DeGraft-Johnson expressed a different opinion: “Tribes had to supply slaves or be sold as slaves themselves, for this was the age of the gangster. Violence, brutality, and ferocity became the necessities of survival, for generosity and good neighborliness had lost their meaning.”

In the North Woods with the Bobbsey Twins

“Cedar Camp was in what was called the ’North Woods,’about forty or

fifty miles from Lakeport. It was a wild, desolate region, especially in winter. . . .”

                               —The Bobbsey Twins at Cedar Camp

Long ago, as the only child of a widowed mother, during a summer stay with my grandparents in southern Illinois, I discovered a delightful series of books in my aunt’s bookcase. There was a half dozen or so volumes about the adventures of two sets of twins named Bobbsey. Freddie and Flossie were the youngest; Bert and Nan were older. They lived in a place called Lakeport. Their father was in the lumber business. 

    One book, The Bobbsey Twins at Cedar Camp, remained in my memory long after that summer. Back then, I had never been any farther north than Chicago’s Loop. Cedar Camp was in the “North Woods” a magical and potentially dangerous place, or so it seemed, where, “it was fun just to walk through the woods and breathe the sweet, spicy odors of the pine and cedar trees. . . .” and where, as happened to Bert and Nan while in the woods gathering chestnuts, “there was a quick darkening of the air, the wind began to blow, and, so suddenly as to startle the children, they found themselves enveloped in such a blinding, driving squall of snow that they could not see ten feet on either side!”

    Eventually, both sets of twins became lost in the swirling snows and have exciting experiences before they are rescued. Nan finds shelter with old Mrs. Bimby, the wife of Jim, a woodcutter. Self-reliant Bert braves the storm in an attempt to find the Mrs. Bimby’s husband, whom his wife believes has lost his way home in the snow. Bert, wanders through the woods, becoming hungry and thirsty. He remembers that it is possibly fatal to eat “dry” snow, but melting the snow and drinking the water are safe. (A cautionary instruction for young readers.) For a time Bert is pursued by a wildcat. And he fends off the creature temporarily with “snowball bullets,” then takes refuge on a large rock with smooth sides that the wildcat cannot climb. Freddie and Flossie follow a dog named Rover to where Bert is stranded, and Rover chases off the wildcat. The three children are soon found by their father who is leading a search party.

    Many years later I did get to the north woods several times—northern Wisconsin and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. At some time during those trips, the memory of the Bobbsey Twins at Cedar Camp would always creep back into my consciousness. 

And then, several years ago, while visiting our daughter, Alice, in Wisconsin, the Bobbsey Twin connection came full circle. The very same books that I had read as a preteen now belong to her. As I sat down on a dark, cold afternoon in a house in the north woods and began to read once again The Bobbsey Twins at Cedar Camp.

    Thirteen Bobbsey Twin books preceded The Bobbsey Twins at Cedar Camp. Laura Lee Hope is cited as the series author. I was surprised to learn recently that Laura Lee Hope never existed. The name was one of many pseudonyms created by an entrepreneurial giant in the publishing business, Edward L. Stratemeyer, who employed a team of writers. Under the name Stratemeyer Literary Syndicate of New York (1906), Stratemeyer provided the characters and formulaic plots. He and the other writers produced more than 800 books, using some 60 pen names, and brought to life some of juvenile literature’s most popular characters. One biographer estimates that Stratemeyer probably wrote an additional 220 books himself.

    By 1921, the year Grosset & Dunlap published The Bobbsey Twins at Cedar Camp. “Laura Lee Hope” (probably several writers using that pen name) appears also to have written eleven Bunny Brown books and seven Six Little Bunkers books. 

    Other book series created by the Stratemeyer Literary Syndicate includes the adventures of the Motor Boys, Tom Swift, the Hardy Boys, and Nancy Drew.

    Stratemeyer began his writing career in 1888 at the age of 26, as a contributor to and an editor of several magazines. He then wrote one of his first books using the pen name “Oliver Optic”, and eleven books as “Horatio Alger Jr.” Stratemeyer died in 1930, but his syndicate of ghostwriters continued to churn out the most popular juvenile books of the century.

Human Bondage Red and Black: a Dark Chronicle

In 1995 the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency and the Illinois Association of Museums published a booklet titled Generations of Pride: African-Americans in Illinois, A selected Chronology. Katheryn M. Harris compiled a calendar of events arranged by date from 1619 to 1994. The first entry, 1619, tells of a Dutch ship that brought twenty Africans to Jamestown, Virginia. They were, surmises Harris, “the first permanent involuntary settlers of the black race in what is now the United States of America.” And presumably the beginning of Black History in this country.

    “Slaves as property” were recognized by Virginia law in 1661. According to the Chronology, the Virginia slave codes protected white society from “‘an alien and savage race.’ Though modeled after indentured servitude laws, the codes prohibit any rights for slaves.”

    The French government agreed to sanction slave trade within the Louisiana colony in 1712. Traffic in human flesh then dealt not only in Africans but also in Native Americans. 

    “Before the French established themselves in the Mississippi valley,” wrote N. M. Miller Surrey in The Commerce of Louisiana During the French Regime, 1699-1763, “there was trade in slaves carried on by the Indians of that area.” Surrey said that Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle while on the Mississippi in 1681 learned “it was necessary to buy war captives in order to deal successfully with the natives. . . . His plan was to buy the slaves and carry them back to their people and there offer them for sale. The parent tribe, La Salle discovered, would pay more liberally for one of their own than [one] of foreign blood.”

    Slaves were kept and traded by many Native American tribes. Alvin M. Josephy Jr. wrote in The Indian Heritage of America: “ A principal object of most raids was to secure slaves, one of the main elements of wealth.” 

    The French accused the British of creating wars among different Indian tribes “solely for the purpose of securing the captives.” French traders in the south and southeast took up the British practice of pitting tribe against tribe and dealing in prisoners. This trade was outlawed by the French king, but the traders continued in secret. “In May, 1709, the Alibamon fell upon the Mobile Indians,” said Surrey, “killed the men and carried some twenty-seven or twenty-eight women and children as slaves to the French at Mobile.” 

    Colonial officials in Louisiana made a request in 1708 to the crown (it was rejected) to be allowed to exchange Native Americans for Negro slaves in the French West Indies at the rate of two Indians for three Negroes. Indians slaves being in their native land often escaped. It was believed the imported Africans would have less reason to escape. 

    In 1712 Sieur Antoine Crozat’s patent gave him exclusive right to bring annually to the province of Louisiana from the Guinea coast one cargo of Negroes. It seems Crozat did not import many slaves. 

    The Company of the Indies, a French syndicate, in 1719 received a patent to govern Louisiana. The Company owned a right to the slave trade. Two years later 1,312 Africans were bound into French servitude in Louisiana by the Company. The total would rise to close to 7,000.

    French colonists utilized slaves to clear fields and plant and harvest crops such as tobacco, rice and indigo. The indigo plant is a source of grayish blue dye.

    “The Negroes were drawn from Caye, Goree, Juida, Angola and Senegal,” wrote Surrey, “though by far the greater number was obtained from the coast last named. The mortality while on the journey across the ocean was high.” Slaves that arrived in good health often soon fell sick and many died within weeks.

    According to Surrey the first man aboard a newly arrived Company slave ship was the health inspector. Each African was examined. The sick were sent to a hospital for treatment, or sold at auction. “Since the supply never was adequate, the bidding was usually brisk, sick Negroes often bringing quite as much as healthy ones. There were some persons in the province who made a business of buying them, taking the chance of being able to cure them and when well of selling them at a considerable advance on the cost. These doctors, it was said, were careful ‘to put their curative secrets in practice only for themselves.’” 

    In 1720, 500 black slaves from the Caribbean island of Santo Domingo were brought to the upper Mississippi valley by a French mining entrepreneur, Phillip Renault. 

    LeCode Noir ou Recueil de Reglements (The Black Code), rules for managing slaves in Louisiana, was adopted by the French in 1724.

    Between the end of the Revolutionary War and the establishment of the Northwest Territory, Virginia held title to the Illinois country. On giving up that claim in 1784, the Virginia legislature insisted that the French of the Northwest be allowed to keep and practice all their ancient rights and privileges.

    The U. S. Congress soon passed the 1787 Northwest Ordinance, which was a code of laws for the newly acquired land north of the Ohio River and south of the Great Lakes. Less than 1,000 blacks remained among the descendants of the French settlers in the old colonial villages of the Illinois country.

    Although Article VI of the Northwest Ordinance outlawed slavery, Territorial Governor Arthur St. Clair believed it was not applicable to the slaves then in servitude. St. Clair said Article VI “was intended to prevent the further introduction of slaves into the territory.”

    The first Territorial Legislature legalized the “Indenture System.” It has been described as follows:

    “All Negroes under 15 years of age were required to serve till the age of 35 (women, 32). Children born of slaves then in the territory must be registered with the county clerk within 30 days, and must serve out the full term. Transfers of slaves were permitted and masters were allowed to leave the territory with their property.” 

    The Northwest Territory then adopted a slave code similar to the one used in Virginia and Kentucky.

    Later, between 1800 and 1809, while Illinois was part of the Indiana Territory, laws were enacted to allow slaves to be brought in as indentured servants. The time of indenture could be for 99 years.

    Indiana became a state in 1809. Illinois would become a state nine years later. The Census of 1810 enumerates 781 African-Americans within the Illinois Territory. One hundred sixty-eight are slaves; 613 are free persons of color. Free blacks were prohibited from entering the territory and slaves could be imported as hired labor for 12 month periods for work at the Shawneetown salt works.

    Although the 1818 Illinois State Constitution prohibited slavery it sanctioned the indenture system. Later legislative acts called “The Black Laws of 1819,” based on the old territorial precepts that slaves were property without legal rights, were enforced. The importation of slaves for emancipation was prohibited. Blacks could settle in Illinois only by possessing certificates of freedom.

    Paul Finkleman (“Slavery, the ’More Perfect Union’ and the Prairie State”) wrote that the “The Black Laws had little effect on the actual migration of blacks into Illinois, although many individuals suffered anxiety from registration procedures and fear of prosecution. Between 1820 and 1860 the state’s total black population increased by more than 500 percent, from 1,374 to 7,628.”

    In 1852 the Illinois courts concluded all blacks were free—fugitive slaves were the exception—but it wasn’t until 1865 that the Illinois General Assembly repealed The Black Laws of 1819, and became the first state legislature to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, which abolished slavery in the United States.