Today, celebrations of “Black History Month” stretch from Kwanzaa, through Martin Luther King’s birthday, through February, and sometimes through Malcolm X’s birthday in March. It is easy to forget that just thirty years ago some people wondered if there was enough Black history to even fill up a week. In 1968 a CBS television special, Black History Lost, Missing or Stolen?, captured the then-current feeling that no one knew, or had preserved, the true story of African American contributions to this society.
In the nearly thirty years since then, a generation of scholars and activists have created an explosion in the growth and celebration of Black art, history and culture that ends the myth that the story of African Americans was unrecoverable.
Those scholars and cultural activists were able to draw from a wealth of materials that had been collected and preserved since the early nineteenth century but which were long neglected by mainstream historians. Those objects, documents, photographs, oral histories, and folk songs that are the raw materials of history-making were collected by a variety of people who had different and sometimes conflicting ideas about which parts of the African American experience were important enough to keep
Preserving African American History, 1820-1900
The earliest known attempts to preserve African American history were autobiographies of Africans in America — once known as “slave narratives” — whose authors sought to record their own stories for posterity. Some were published in Spanish and Dutch as early as the 1500s.
Because they were relatively powerless African Americans had few opportunities to preserve their history until the 1820s, when communities of free Black people grew large enough to give birth to Black newspapers and other institutions. The first literary and historical society was founded in Philadelphia in 1828.
During the 1830s slave narratives became more widespread in the United States when abolitionist organizations published dozens each year, constituting some of the earliest white efforts to preserve and disseminate African American history. The detailed personal memories of slavery, exemplified by the autobiographies of Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, put forth a philosophy of heroic personal striving in the face of massive violence and repression.
