Carter G. Woodson’s Historical Program After the Civil Rights Movement, The Journal of Negro History, 1969 to 1973

Carter G. Woodson

Periodical

Brewer, William M., and W. Augustus Low, editors. The Journal of Negro History from 1969 to 1973, carrying Carter G. Woodson’s scholarly program into the period when Black Studies was expanding within American universities and historians were reconsidering Reconstruction, slavery and resistance, racial violence, Black political participation, and the legal structure of segregation. Woodson founded the journal in 1916 as the scholarly publication of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, creating a sustained forum for research in a field largely excluded from the established historical profession. These eight issues, published two decades after Woodson’s death, show that institutional project developing during and immediately after the civil rights movement: contributors examine the Atlanta racial massacre of 1906, Tom Watson and Black Populism, slave resistance, Afro Indian relations in colonial Mexico, the Fugitive Slave Act, Florence Kelley’s campaign for racial equality, the Lloyd Gaines litigation against segregated higher education, and Woodson’s own place in the development of Black historiography.
The Journal of Negro History. Washington, D.C.: The Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, Inc., 1969 to 1973. Seven quarterly issues, comprising seven distinct numbers.

[1] William M. Brewer, ed. Vol. LIV, No. 2, April 1969. Max Welborn opens the issue with “Victor Schoelcher: A Superior Breed of Abolitionists,” followed by George M. Blackburn’s “Radical Republican Motivation: A Case History,” William H. Smith’s “William Jennings Bryan and Racism,” and Charles Crowe’s “Racial Massacre In Atlanta September 22, 1906”; the documents section prints material on Frederick Douglass and segregation.
[2] William M. Brewer, ed. Vol. LV, No. 1, January 1970. Articles address slavery and emancipation in Barbados, Garrisonian abolitionists and fears of slave violence, Booker T. Washington, and the Industrial Workers of the World and Black labor.
[3] William M. Brewer, ed. Vol. LV, No. 2, April 1970. Includes Charles Crowe’s “Tom Watson, Populists, and Blacks Reconsidered,” Valerie Quinney’s “Decisions on Slavery, the Slave Trade and Civil Rights for Negroes in the Early French Revolution,” Edgar F. Love’s “Legal Restrictions on Afro-Indian Relations in Colonial Mexico,” and documents concerning the Pan African Congress of 1919 and the aftermath of Nat Turner’s rebellion.
[4] W. Augustus Low, ed. Vol. LVI, No. 1, January 1971. W. Harrison Daniel examines “Virginia Baptists and the Negro in the Antebellum Era,” Thomas J. Davis interprets “The New York Slave Conspiracy of 1791 as Black Protest,” and David R. Maginnes treats the Anthony Burns fugitive slave case and the courthouse riots surrounding it in 1854; Merze Tate contributes an article on New Guinea and decolonization.
[5] W. Augustus Low, ed. Vol. LVI, No. 2, April 1971. Includes Daniel F. Littlefield, Jr. and Lonnie E. Underhill on Black marshals in Indian Territory; Arthur G. Pettit on “Mark Twain and the Negro, 1867-1869”; William C. Suttles, Jr. on African religious survivals and American slave revolts; Allan J. Kuethe on the free pardo in colonial New Granada; Jon Butler on the Black church in St. Paul; and Felix N. C. Okoye on South African historiography.
[6] W. Augustus Low, ed. Vol. LVI, No. 4, October 1971. Louis L. Athey’s “Florence Kelley and the Quest for Negro Equality” is followed by Daniel T. Kelleher’s “The Case of Lloyd Lionel Gaines: The Demise of the Separate but Equal Doctrine,” John Hoyt Williams on Black history on the Paraguayan frontier, and Richard D. Chesteen’s bibliographical essay on the legal validity of Jim Crow.
[8] W. Augustus Low, ed. Vol. LVIII, No. 1, January 1973. Rayford W. Logan opens the number with “Carter G. Woodson: Mirror and Molder of His Time, 1875-1950,” followed by Al Tony Gilmore’s “Jack Johnson and White Women: The National Impact, 1912-1913,” Carl R. Osthaus on Black financier Jesse Binga, Dorothy Provine on the economic position of free Black residents of the District of Columbia from 1800 to 1860, and Daniel Savage Gray’s bibliographical essay “Black Views on Reconstruction.”
The run records a period in which the historical questions Woodson had pressed since the founding of the Association in 1915 were being enlarged by a generation of scholars working amid the institutional growth of Black Studies. The contents repeatedly return to the relationship between Black political action and American law: the 1791 New York conspiracy is reconsidered as Black protest; Nat Turner enters through contemporary documentary evidence; the Anthony Burns case connects fugitive slave rendition to organized resistance in antebellum Boston; Tom Watson’s relationship to Black voters is reconsidered within Populist politics; and the Gaines article follows the legal challenge to Missouri’s exclusion of Black students from its law school, a case decided by the Supreme Court in 1938 that preceded the later constitutional attack on segregated education. The geographical range extends the journal’s inquiry beyond the United States through work on Barbados emancipation, the French Revolution and slavery, Afro Indian relations in colonial Mexico, New Granada, New Guinea, South Africa, and the Pan African Congress of 1919. The January 1973 issue turns the journal’s methods back upon its founder through Rayford W. Logan’s assessment of Woodson while placing that historiographical inquiry beside studies of Jack Johnson, Black finance, free Black economic life in Washington, D.C., and Black interpretations of Reconstruction. Several wrappers bear institutional markings, including library stamps and punched binding holes; wrappers show moderate toning, scattered staining and soiling, edge wear, and occasional corner loss. Interior primarily clean. Overall good condition. A compact record of Woodson’s institutional legacy at the moment Black history was expanding within the academy, linking the journal’s founding commitment to Black historical agency with scholarship on slavery, Reconstruction, racial violence, segregation, Black labor, political resistance, and the African diaspora.

Item #23900

Price: $385.00