“Do everything!” That was the exhortation from Nell Painter that closed the Future of the African American Past conference, jointly sponsored by the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) and the American Historical Association, with...
African American History: Of Dreams and Struggles
OPENING ROUNDTABLE: The Long Struggle for Civil Rights and Black Freedom
“The Long Struggle for Civil Rights and Black Freedom”: The Past, the Present, and the Future
Photo: March from Church through Chapel Hill Stopping at Segregated Businesses. Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift of James H. Wallace Jr., © im Wallace.
OPENING ROUNDTABLE: The Long Struggle for Civil Rights and Black Freedom
The Politics of the Past in the Black Freedom Struggle
Photo: Policemen Use Police Dogs During Civil Rights Demonstrations, Birmingham Protests. Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, ...
OPENING ROUNDTABLE: The Long Struggle for Civil Rights and Black Freedom
“40 Million Ways to Be Black”: A Reconsideration of “Who Is Black America”?
The legendary blues musician Rufus Thomas once gushed to a white man, “If you were black for one Saturday night on Beale Street,...
SESSION 1: Who Is Black America?
“Who Is Black America?”: Historians Wrestle with the Complexities of Defining Blackness
“God wills us free, man wills us slave. I will as God wills, God’s will be done.” I begin my reflection of the first session of the Future of the African American Past with the opening lines on a headstone in a Concord, Massachusetts, cemetery. This epitaph, written by a British loyalist on the eve of the American Revolution, is in regards to John Jack, a black man born free in Africa but enslaved in Colonial New England.
SESSION 1: Who Is Black America?
Slavery and the Framing of the African American Past: Reflections from a Historian of the Transatlantic Slave Trade
Does the from slavery to freedom narrative still fit? Does the before-and-after framing of African American history around the pivotal event of legal emancipation still adequately organize the narrative arc of this field of studies? These were among the central questions session chair Eric Foner (Columbia Univ.) asked panelists to address in Friday morning’s “...
SESSION 2: Slavery and Freedom
“Slavery and Freedom”: The Difference that Emancipation Made
While the topics were serious, the setting of the conference on the Future of the African American Past was like a homecoming. So many of us have known each other for decades and have read and appreciated one another’s work.
SESSION 2: Slavery and Freedom
“Slavery and Freedom”: Historians Debate Continued Relevance of an Old Paradigm
As historian Eric Foner introduced the second Friday session on “Slavery and Freedom” at the Future of the African American Past conference, he described a photograph of himself, age 2, on Paul Robeson’s shoulders. It must have seemed, Foner reminisced, a “...
SESSION 2: Slavery and Freedom
Reflecting on “Race, Power, and Urban Spaces” and the Changing Landscape of African American Urban Communities
“There’s a lot of chocolate cities, around
We’ve got Newark, we’ve got Gary
Somebody told me we got LA
And we’re working on Atlanta
But you’re the capital, CC”
Parliament Funkadelic,
Lyrics – Parliament Funkadelic, Chocolate City, Chocolate City LP (Casablanca, 1975)
SESSION 3: Race, Power, and Urban Spaces
Black Urban Life and the Question of Property and Scale
Let me begin this account of session 3, “Race, Power, and Urban Spaces” with Carl Nightingale’s (Univ. at Buffalo, SUNY) observation in this session that ghetto entered the American lexicon, through St.
SESSION 3: Race, Power, and Urban Spaces
“On The Defensive? Aren’t We?”: Historians Ensnared in Land, Labor, and Wealth Questions
Booker T. Washington’s 1915 death encouraged the African American businessmen in a small Virginia village to organize a meeting revisiting the ideals he had outlined in his famous address to the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia.[1] Accepting the reality of racial segregation, Washington had insisted that African Americans could be included in the progress of the South.
SESSION 4: Capitalism and the Making and Unmaking of Black America
The Significance of the African American Relationship to Capitalism
Chair Steven Hahn (Univ. of Pennsylvania) opened session four, “Capitalism and the Unmaking and Unmaking of Black America” with the claim that the African American relationship to capitalism has been central to the system since its earliest stages of growth.
SESSION 4: Capitalism and the Making and Unmaking of Black America
A New Era in African American Religion
Edna Greene Medford opened the session, “What is African American Religion”? by describing the question as “simple, yet complex” and the panelists as “feisty rebels.” She was correct on both accounts. And, by the end of the presentations, I was convinced that a new era in the study of African American religion had been launched.
SESSION 5: What is African American Religion?
The Future of the African American Religious Past
“Among our people generally the church is the Alpha and Omega of all things,” the black intellectual, abolitionist, and nationalist Martin Delany wrote in The North Star in 1849. “It is their only source of information—their only acknowledged public body—their state legislature . . . their only acknowledged advisor.” Were Delany (not to mention W. E. B.
SESSION 5: What is African American Religion?
The Internationalization of African Americans
Martin Ritt’s jazz movie, Paris Blues (1961), with Sidney Poitier and Diahann Carroll is the sole film I can remember from my childhood that showed black American characters abroad and interacting with a foreign culture.
SESSION 6: Internationalization of African American Politics and Culture
The Politics of Narrative
It is in the nature of academic conferences that one leaves them with more questions than answers. But rarely have I had that feeling more keenly than I did at the conclusion of the "Future of the African American Past" conference. To some extent, my reaction bespeaks the richness of the papers and conversations, but it also reflects the unique occasion. As panelists presented their papers in the auditorium of the National Museum of American History, workers across 14th Street installed...
SESSION 6: Internationalization of African American Politics and Culture
African American History as Public History
“What is this thing we call Public History?” asked David Blight (albeit rhetorically) in the closing presentation to the panel entitled, “History, Preservation, and Public Reckoning in Museums.” One simple way of answering that question is to demarcate the terrain and to say that Public History is the practice of producing historical narratives in places outside of the classroom and texts of academia, such as museums and monuments, historic sites and the built environment, the digital...
SESSION 7: History, Preservation, and Public Reckoning in Museums
Are Historic Houses Circling the Drain?
Everybody is from someplace and that place evokes memories, perhaps good, perhaps bad, but often visceral. Places trigger thoughts of childhood and places mark the events in our lives—the place the family vacationed each summer, the place we were married—the place we went to school or played as children.
SESSION 7: History, Preservation, and Public Reckoning in Museums
Every Generation Has to Write Its Own History
During the late 1960s and early ‘70s, there was concern amongst some American historians that efforts underway to establish an African American history field were somewhat misguided. They insisted, among other reasons, that African American history was already included in American history. A panel session at The Future of the African American Past symposium, “African American History as American History,” certainly called to mind that discussion. It also called to mind a...
SESSION 8: African American History as American History
African American History Is American History
“Wow!” In the closing session, Andrew W.
