In 1912, Carter G. Woodson, the son of formerly enslaved people and a former sharecropper and coal miner himself, became the second African American to earn a Ph.D. in History at Harvard University. W.E.B. DuBois had been the first, in 1895. In September 1915, in recognition of the 50th anniversary of Emancipation, Dr. Woodson founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, whose purpose was to research the history of African-descended people in the United States and to make this history available to them. A year later, he published his first book, The Education of the Negro to 1861, and, with the support of this new organization, he began the publication of the Journal of Negro History. Over the course of his career, Dr. Woodson would publish 20 books. and, in February1926, referencing the birthdays of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, he initiated “Negro History Week.”
With the rise of the civil rights and Black Power movements in the 1960s, young African Americans on college campuses were becoming increasingly conscious of the historic dimension of their experience. Younger members of the ASNLH (which later became the Association for the Study of African American History) urged the organization to shift to a month-long celebration of Black history. In 1976, on the 50th anniversary of the first Negro History Week, the Association officially made the shift to Black History Month.
Black history matters to ESFL twelve months a year, but we see February’s designation as an opportunity to shine our spotlight on its richness and complexity and its significance to all our experiences.
On February 10, two of our country’s most respected historians of African American workers, Dr. Joe W. Trotter, Jr., and Dr. William P. Jones, will discuss “African American Labor in the Making of America,” in a program co-sponsored by ESFL, the University of Minnesota History Department, the Ramsey County Historical Society, and the Labor and Working Class History Association. The following evening, historian David Roediger, who introduced the concept of “whiteness” into American labor history, will discuss his new book, The Sinking Middle Class, with a local panel.
ESFL will devote our monthly labor history conversations to the significance of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in 1960s-1970s Detroit. On the 12th, we will screen “Finally Got the News,” the acclaimed documentary in which African American autoworkers express their own perspectives about their work, their employers, and their union. On Tuesday evening the 16th, Harvard-based historian Jordan T. Camp will join us for a discussion of his essay, “Finally Got the News: Urban Insurgency, Counterinsurgency, and the Crisis of Hegemony in Detroit.”
ESFL will also participate in two additional collaborations. On the 17th, in partnership with Mississippi Market Food Co-op, we will host a conversation about the relationships between inequity in housing with inequity in access to food, drawing on the locally produced film, “Jim Crow in the North,” and a panel including the filmmaker, Daniel Bergin. And, on the 23rd, in a special edition of “History Revealed” with our colleagues at the Ramsey County Historical Society, we will host a conversation about Dr. Josie Johnson’s memoir, Hope in the Struggle.
We hope you will join us for these great learning opportunities.
Love and Solidarity,
Beth Cleary and Peter Rachleff