Hettie Williams
“History must restore what slavery took away, for it is the social damage of slavery that the present generations must repair and offset,” states Arthur A. Schomburg in his essay, “The Negro Digs Up His Past,” published in Survey Graphic in 1925. Closed out of the archive and prominent institutions of higher education in the post-Emancipation Era, the first Black historians were ordinary people and autodidacts such as William Wells Brown and George Washington Williams, identified by Stephen A. Hall in his important text A Faithful Account of the Race. These men and women were soon followed by a generation of highly educated Black professional historians, including Anna Julia Cooper, W.E.B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, Rayford Logan, Dorothy Porter Wesley, Merze Tate, and Marion Thompson Wright. Black historians have long pushed the boundaries of historical studies and, in the process, shaped the discipline through innovative methods in their studies of racism in America and around the globe…