Notable People and Concepts: History of Black Scholarship and Thought on African-American History

1827 - 1829 - John Russwurm: Freedom’s Journal

• First African American newspaper in the US 

• Newspaper which strongly opposed colonization and slavery 

• Its editors were convinced that African-Americans could not defeat slavery and racism without pleading their own cause 

• Was “devoted to the dissemination of useful knowledge among our brethren, and to their moral and religious improvement” which wished to “plead [its] own cause. Too long have others spoken for [it]”

• The namesake founder published his first essay in it, “The Mutability of Human Affairs,” which traces the history of African Americans back to Egypt, and emphasizes that Egypt had close ties to Ethiopia

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• Newspaper which was significant for its role in establishing an independent Black voice in American journalism, challenging racist media, promoting education and abolition, and laying the foundation for the African American press and civil rights activism

1829 - David Walker: An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World

• Work which was a fiery protest against slavery and colonization 

• Work which lambasted white people for enslaving and oppressing people of color 

• Work which critiqued blacks for acquiescing to white domination 

• Work which critiqued American slaveholders for being “tyrants and devils” 

• Work which was significant in many ways because it

  • Helped galvanize a new generation of blacks who

    would lobby for abolition and civil rights for many years to come

  • Helped shift the focus of the antislavery movement among whites from colonization to emancipation 

  • Helped William Lloyd Garrison see its “valuable truths,” who, shortly after its publication, renounced colonization and dedicated himself to the immediate abolition of slavery 

1831 - 1865 - William Lloyd Garrison: The Liberator 

• The most famous antislavery newspaper of its time 

• Condemns slavery as immoral and contrary to Christian principles

• Calls for immediate and uncompensated emancipation

• Opposes colonization

• Promoted many of the reforms of its time including

  • Women’s rights

  • Prison Reform

  • Temperance

• Promoted the speaking career of Frederick Douglass

• Published the speeches of Maria Stewart 

• Published the sensational interview with Ona Judge, who had been enslaved by George Washington but who had escaped from his household 

• Its founder believed slavery could be ended and society perfected through a change in the human heart, not through political action

• Its founder argued that the Constitution was a pro-slavery document and the federal government was corrupted due to its pro-slavery connections

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• Newspaper which was significant because it transformed the fight against slavery into a national moral crusade, gave voice to both Black and white reformers, inspired new organizations, and helped create the moral conditions that made emancipation inevitable

• Though small in circulation, its moral force and radical clarity changed the course of American history

1847 - 1863 - Frederick Douglass: The North Star

• Explicitly abolitionist newspaper that aimed to 

  • “Attack slavery in all its forms and aspects

  • Advocate universal emancipation

  • Exalt the standard of public morality

  • Promote the moral and intellectual improvement of the colored people

  • Hasten the day of freedom to the three million of our enslaved fellow countrymen” 

• Attracted both Black and White readers

• Its longevity both derived from and contributed to the namesake founder’s stature as the preeminent black leader of his day 

• It was published as a means of separating from “The Liberator” and William Lloyd Garrison, its namesake founder’s mentor, on the basis of an increasing level of independence and a difference in views given that Garrison and other white abolitionists did not always treat Black activists like the namesake as equals and seemed more committed to freeing slaves than to securing equal rights for Blacks 

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• Newspaper which was significant because of its role in transforming Black journalism into a tool of leadership, linking abolition to broader struggles for equality, and demonstrating the political and intellectual capacity of African Americans on a national and global stage

1852 - Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin 

• Sentimental yet graphic depiction of slavery’s devastating effects on families

• Helped the process of building empathy with slavery’s victims in order to increase support for abolition

• Based loosely on Reverend Josiah Henson’s life, an African Methodist Episcopal Minister

• Work which was significant because it sold 300K copies and

  • Portrayed the horrors of slavery

  • Boosted the abolitionist cause

  • Greatly angered the South 

1855 - John Swanson Jacobs: The United States is Ruled by Six Hundred Thousand Despots

• (See notes from Book Report)

1941 - Melville Herskovits: The Myth of the Negro Past 

• Work which found that many cultural retentions / survivals 

• Work which found continuity between African and African-American cultures 

• Work which exposed and countered the myths that 

  • African cultures were primitive

  • Africans had not contributed to world civilization 

  • Slavery destroyed all traces of African culture outside of music and dance 

• Identified “patrilocality,” “hoe agriculture,” and “corporate ownership of land” as part of the creolization process working among Africans

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• Work which was significant because it demolished the racist myth that African Americans had lost all connection to Africa, proving instead that African cultural traditions endured and shaped Black life in the Americas — a breakthrough that transformed anthropology, history, and Black identity itself

1944 - Eric Williams: Capitalism and Slavery

• Agues that slavery was not a product of racism but rather that racism was the consequence of slavery

• Argues that the slave trade and slavery powered British industrial development and was the foundation upon which capitalism was erected

• Argued that, once mature, industrial capitalism necessitated the destruction of slavery

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• Work which was significant because it fundamentally changed historians’ understanding of the relationship between slavery, capitalism, and the Industrial Revolution

1959 - Stanley Elkins: Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional Life 

• Argues that psychological shocks “pulverized” the African captive’s spirit 

• Equates the plantation with a Nazi concentration camp 

• Contends that African captives were forced to identify with their master 

• Demonstrates that African Americans were transformed into the “Sambo” Type 

  • “Sambo” - child-like, submissive, amoral, and unintelligent personality 

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• Work which was significant because it introduced the idea of slavery as a “total institution” that psychologically shaped enslaved people, an argument that provoked intense debate and ultimately inspired a wave of new research emphasizing enslaved people’s culture, agency, and humanity

1963 - E. Franklin Fraizer: The Negro Church in America 

• Argues that enslavement stripped Africans of their social heritage

• Argues that African-Culture was the result of socioeconomic position and racial oppression

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• Work which was significant in establishing the Black church as the cornerstone of African American community life: a source of survival, identity, and political mobilization

• Work which was significant for having launched the modern sociological study of Black religion in America

1972 - John Blassingame: The Slave Community

• Identifies three personality types on the plantations: 

  • John / Eliza - The Average Slave 

  • Nat / Harriet - The Rebels 

  • Tom / Mammy - The Sambos 

• Refutes the work of Stanley Elkins

• Captives created a viable culture from African retentions and through creative acculturation they created invisible institutions 

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• Work which was significant for being one of the first major works to portray enslaved African Americans as complex, autonomous human beings rather than passive victims

1972 - Walter Rodney: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

• Points out that, all over Africa, inferior but mass-produced European goods undermined African small-scale craft producers

• One example of this is the Portuguese destroying the Kongo Kingdom’s economy 

• Posited that the total calculation of mortality of the European Slave Trade must consider 

  • The numbers killed during raids on villages

  • The march to the coast

  • Imprisonment in forts awaiting debarkation

  • The Middle Passage 

• Applies “Dependency Theory” to the history of the European Slave Trade 

• Contends that the “African Slave Trade” should be known as the “European Slave Trade” because the shipments were made by Europeans to markets controlled by Europeans and that like the “Arab Slave Trade,” he argued for consistency… if other slaves trades were named after their controllers than how come this slave trade was named after its victims? 

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• Work which was significant because of its role in transforming African historiography, empowering anti-colonial movements, and establishing a lasting critique of capitalism and imperialism as intertwined systems of exploitation

1988 - Sterling Stuckey: Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America

• Work which posed two questions:

  • How were a single people formed out of many African ethnic groups on the plantations of the South?

  • How was a single culture formed out of the interaction of African ethnic groups in North American slavery? 

• Work whose questions speak to the acculturative process, also known as Creolization 

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• Work which is significant because of its role in redefining the enslaved as active cultural and intellectual agents and as the true founders of Black America

1999 - Michael Gomez: Exchanging Our Country Marks

• Addresses the significance that Africans were / are from diverse backgrounds 

• Says that Africans had lived as members of specific societies in Africa

• Says that their lives were altered by enslavement

• Says that they continued to be informed by both the African antecedent and by the unique combinations of their distinctive backgrounds in the various locales of the Americas

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• Work which was significant because of its role in connecting African and African-American histories, deepening understanding of diaspora identity, and emphasizing African agency in the making of the New World

2007 - Marcus Rediker: The Slave Ship: A Human History 

• Work which gives an account of The Middle Passage

  • Work which calculates that 1.8M died during the Middle Passage

• Argues that the slave ship was a factory that manufactured not just labor power but also race

• Argues that the slave ship made labor power for the world market by helping to create the commodity called “slave” and in that process it helped produce categories of “race”

• Argues that the slave ship was an instrument of terror and that terror was essential to the commodification of people into “slaves” and production of categories of “race”

• Argues that the slave ship was crucial to the formation of modern capitalism saying that the slave ship was “a war machine, a mobile prison, and a factory”

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• Work which was significant because it changed the way the slave ship was thought about, transforming the slave ship from a mere vessel of trade into a powerful symbol of the modern world’s birth; revealing how capitalism, racism, and empire were built on human suffering, and restoring the voices of those who endured and resisted it

2024 - David Waldstreicher: Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification 

• Argues that the Constitution is pro-slavery 

• Argues that given the 3/5th clause, any power delegated to the House of Representatives favored the slave states 

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• Says that “‘The compromises of 1787 welded together two dimensions of the politics of slavery: slavery as a form of governance over certain people, and slavery as an economic institution. Even to contemplate, much less codify, this much governance, and that much economic regulation, was itself risky after a revolution against imperial governance and regulation. In the end, the founders used slavery to limit government while allowing slaves to be governed both locally and nationally. In fewer, smaller ways, slavery was itself limited. More decisively, slavery was alternately winked at and silenced as a subject of political debate and adjudication. In the process, it was not so much forgotten as contained”

• Work which was significant because it revises the founding narrative of the United States by showing that slavery was structurally embedded in the Constitution. It opens up new avenues of inquiry about how race, bondage, and political power shaped the American republic from its earliest moments, and it has influenced both scholarly work and teaching about the intersection of slavery and constitutional law.

Dependency Theory (All Facts)

• Explains how wealthy nations created impoverished nations

• Contends that more powerful wealthy nations created relations of dependence with other nations through which they acquired natural resources, labor, and a market for antiquated goods through exploitative practices

• Developed after the World Wars to explain why Latin American, African, and Asian countries became increasingly poor from the trade with European nations and the United States 

David Walker (Some Notes)

• Was the most militant Black abolitionist of his era 

• Was convinced that African Americans could not defeat slavery and racism without pleading their own cause 

William Whipper (All Notes)

1961 - Basil Davidson: The African Slave Trade

• Work which challenges Eurocentric narratives about the African Slave Trade and highlights African suffering

• Work which details how the transatlantic slave trade was a catastrophic disruption of Africa’s natural development, driven by European greed, aided by unequal collaboration from some African elites, and resulting in deep, lasting damage to African societies — yet Africans showed remarkable resilience and cultural survival despite it

1974 - Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman: Time on the Cross

• Argues that American slavery was economically efficient, profitable, and not on the verge of collapse before the Civil War — claims that shocked the academic world and sparked decades of debate about how to understand the economics, morality, and human realities of slavery

1975 - Herbert Gutman: Slavery and the Numbers Game, A Critique of “Time on the Cross” 

• Scholarly rebuttal to Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s Time on the Cross (1974). While Fogel and Engerman used quantitative (“cliometric”) methods to argue that slavery was economically efficient and that enslaved people were relatively well treated, Gutman’s book systematically dismantles their statistical, moral, and historical claims