What Goes Around Comes Around: The Gilder Lehrman Collection Documents in African American History

In an enormously important and indeed poignant sense, the Gilder Lehrman Collection of documents on African American History reaffirms an aspiration of the old Negro History Movement. It unfolded during the late decades of the nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth century. The founders of that Movement, most notably George Washington Williams (1849-1891), W. E. B. DuBois (1868-1963), Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950), and Benjamin Brawley (1882-1939), believed that the lives and times of African Americans in slavery and in freedom were at the center of the making of the American Republic. The contributions those historians made to a credible historical narrative for the nation were followed in the 1940s by the formidable presence of Benjamin Quarles (1904-1996) and John Hope Franklin (1915-2009). They, among others in the post-World War II years, were instrumental in bringing Negro History out of the shadows. By the 1960s, the story of America reflected the work of such scholars, as the history profession took up a more discerning consideration of the role of race, slavery and agitation against injustice in the making of the nation. That so-called New American history, which populated the past with all sorts of historical actors, persuasively argued, not unlike the founders of Negro History, that African Americans had an indelibly persuasive presence on American soil.

The first and second generation of Negro historians were, however, at a distinct disadvantage. That their scholarship challenged contemporary perceptions of race and slavery, which asserted the inferiority of Africans and the essentially benign quality of the South’s peculiar treatment of its black population, placed them at odds with far more influential white scholars. They were writing in the face of the stiff winds of racial intolerance. Pioneering historians of the African American narrative also lived at a time when the academic profession was largely segregated and at a time when few white Americans believed that Africans had contributed much of value to the nation’s past. All the more, the pioneers labored in the vineyards of scholarship when the archival substance of the black past was scattered, not easily accessible and, to an extent, still unknown. The Gilder Lehrman Collection fulfills the aspirations of those scholars for an abundance of credible documentary evidence on the importance of the black experience to the making of the nation. The Collection addresses the curiosity of a broad cross-section of the American public-citizens in need of a more believable narrative about their nation. Indeed, in its vastness and depth, and in its persuasiveness, the Gilder Lehrman Collection significantly enhances the stature of African Americans in our past and enlivens the larger story of the American people.