Envisioning Women of Color as the First Historians of Slavery

This poster presents the images and texts of several important historians of slavery working between 1890 and 1939, overlooked in the historiography because they are women of colour. I argue that in centring lived experience of enslavement, these women were envisioning a new history of slavery, one which resonates with our contemporary world and which foregrounded stories of being a victim-survivor of trauma and of community resistance as a form of resilience.

During this period African Americans knew that remembering and understanding slavery was important to their own racial uplift and sense of self and community as Americans and as part of the African diaspora. For some, talking about slavery seemed the wrong thing to do, and they hoped to focus on a new story of freedom, agency and political and economic power. As a Fisk oral history project interviewee explained ‘I think it is against the race to tell how the white people done us back in slavery. I don’t want to do anything to tear down, I want to build up’ (Unwritten History of Slavery, 1968 reprint, p. 74). But many African Americans understood that remembering slavery was important for healing trauma, for creating a sense of community history and for understanding the racial and economic dislocation suffered by black people in the generations following the Civil War. They were also aware that many white Americans were keen to manipulate the narrative about the history of slavery, to make it appear benign and part of a longed-for golden age. They were viscerally aware of how this nostalgic rendering of slavery might also be used to perpetuate injustice and violence against black people in the present and future. So, talking about slavery and ensuring their story of slavery was not forgotten was not an intellectual exercise, it was a matter of life and death. This poster foregrounds the work of Ida B.Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, Ophelia Settle Egypt and Pernella Mae Anderson . The first three of these women are relatively well known, although I argue that their legacies as historians are downplayed. Anderson was the only black women interviewer working on the WPA narrative project in Arkansas. There is no image of her in the public domain, but the words and stories that she gathered presented here serve as testament to her warranted status as an historian of slavery. This poster argues for a rethinking of the conventional historiography of slavery in this period, centring the voices of white Southern men in the academy, and shows that, like us, these women of colour realised that acknowledging the lived experience of African Americans has always been fundamental to understanding slavery's past.