History As a Field of Struggle: The Making of Black Archives, 1915–50

“History must restore what slavery took away”: such was the urgent—if haunting—imperative articulated by black bibliophile Arturo Schomburg in the opening decades of the twentieth century.  As world war, mass migration, and escalating racial violence from the 1910s to 1940s unsettled the present, the past, too, became a field of struggle.  At a moment when the very category of black historicity aroused doubt, key African American movements called for acts of historical recovery, embracing Schomburg’s declaration that “the American Negro must remake his past in order to make the future.” I ask how—and with what results—this remaking of the past occurred. 

I examine what history meant to post-emancipation generations in the United States, who not only faced the scholarly charge that blackness was void of history, but also found much of their personal lineage obscured by the erasures of enslavement.  At the same time, they encountered a veritable assault of documentary attention, as sociologists sought data to explain the contemporary “Negro problem” and ethnographers raced to capture authentic folk expressions before the Negro became “too modern.”  The stakes of such efforts were clear: a contest to define black subjectivity at a moment when the contours of freedom remained profoundly uncertain.  In response, a growing number of black thinkers initiated their own documentary agenda, either digging for traces of written history or meticulously recording the present to serve as the future’s past.  Using the hidden archives of archives, I reconstruct their projects to collect and classify black books, preserve records, and build public archives.  More than simply bequeathing a storehouse of research materials to the future, I argue, this collective search for the past suffused black social and intellectual movements and made historical recuperation an enduring idiom of black resistance in the twentieth century.