Komozi Woodard

African American history is an important window into the history of the United States and the rise of the modern world. This course explores classic narratives and examines major developments. The classic slave narratives are stories of self-emancipation and self-determination. The major developments range from the Atlantic Slave Trade to the Black Renaissance. On the one hand, students examine the dynamics of modern racism; on the other, students explore the contours of African American social, cultural, and intellectual history. In this course, there will be weekly conferences for the first six weeks and biweekly conferences thereafter.

Who owns history? Did Black lives ever matter? Who is visible in our textbooks? Tragically, white supremacy is the master narrative that dominates the US history textbooks, insisting that white men were center stage in building America. The new historians have challenged that master narrative, directing the spotlight to the folks who built America. This lecture includes readings, discussions, and film screenings that shed new light on the role of Black workers who wrote self-emancipation narratives under the lash; on African American women writers, directors, actors, dancers, and artists in the Black Chicago Renaissance and the Harlem Renaissance, who shaped urban culture during the Popular Front and the Great Depression; on the rise of African American Muslims, who built communities and resisted racism; and on the historical voices of Rosa Parks and Maya Angelou, who retold the epic of the Black Revolt and reclaimed the role of women in the making of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. The screenings shed light on the many people who together made America, including the tremendous obstacles they overcame from the Dred Scott decision and the Chinese Exclusion Act to political barriers against Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans. Alongside Maya Angelou, Rosa Parks, and Fannie Lou Hamer, the women in the Young Lords, the IWK (I Wor Kuen), and the Black Panthers insist that their voices matter.

This is a history of urban poverty and public policy in America. Was the postwar urban crisis in cities like Detroit, Philadelphia, and Newark caused by the howling contradictions between the New Deal for White America and the Raw Deal for the Other America? What did those savage inequalities mean for employment, housing, and schooling, as well as for public health? What happened when grassroots movements aimed a death blow at Jim Crow public policies?

By the 20th century, African Americans produced distinctive ethos and aesthetics of pleasure in music and dance. Artists like Paul Robeson, Bessie Smith, Ma’ Rainey, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Lester Young, and Duke Ellington were paradigmatic in that cultural production. In turn, the Blues ethos and Jazz aesthetics influenced the African American imagination in social, political, economic, and cultural life. Students in this seminar are encouraged to research music, dance, art, theatre, film, sports, or architecture.

This yearlong history lecture examines four dimensions of the 1960s Black Revolt: Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, and the Black Arts Movement. The new scholarship on Malcolm X and Black Power re-examines important primary sources, including Malcolm X’s siblings. The trajectory of the Black Panther Party (BPP) has its roots in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Lowndes County and Greene County, Alabama. In turn, Malcolm X, SNCC, and BPP leaders inspired the Puerto Rican Young Lords. Finally, the Black Arts Movement links those groups to the Black Cultural Revolution.

Why do we know so little about the crowded field of women in the leadership of the black freedom struggle? When students imagine the leadership of the Civil Rights Movement, most see figures only like Martin Luther King, Jr and Thurgood Marshall; however, a new generation of historians is rethinking the freedom struggle so that students might begin to see the leadership of Gloria Richardson at the helm of the Cambridge Movement in Maryland, Ella Baker at the helm of New York’s NAACP, Diane Nash at the helm of the Freedom Rides, Septima Clark at the helm of the Citizenship Schools, Fannie Lou Hamer at the helm of the Mississippi Movement, Ericka Huggins at the helm of the Black Panther’s Oakland Community School, Amina Baraka at the helm of the African Free School and the Black Women’s United Front, and Johnnie Tillmon at the helm of the National Welfare Rights Organization. This seminar will interrogate the role of Yuri Kochiyama in the founding of the Black Panther Party and the Republic of New Africa, Denise Oliver in the development of the Young Lords Party, and Vicki Garvin in the building of the National Negro Labor Council. Those women claimed a tradition that they traced back to Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells, and Claudia Jones. Historians are recovering the stories of hundreds of women writers, artists, actors, and activists in the Black Renaissance. Thus, students in this seminar will research some of those important subjects.

By the 20th century, African Americans in the city produced the genius of blues and jazz, including distinctive aesthetics of pleasure in music and dance. Artists like Bessie Smith, Ma‘ Rainey, Billy Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Lester Young, and Duke Ellington were paradigmatic in that cultural production. Those aesthetics influenced the black imagination in social, political, and cultural development, including not only the Harlem Renaissance and Chicago Black Renaissance but also the Black Arts Movement. With that cultural and historical background, students in this seminar will explore a variety of research projects.

By the 20th century, African Americans had produced a distinctive ethos and aesthetic of pleasure—not only in music and dance but also in sports, including the Negro Leagues and boxing clubs. In Harlem, an early Black professional basketball team played its games on a dance floor. Excluded from the early white professional basketball leagues, African Americans developed their own styles and strategies in street ball. They introduced those styles to Black college leagues. As African Americans finally entered the NBA, they transformed the American game with their strategic thinking. Similar dynamics developed in Negro League baseball, football, and boxing clubs. Weekly film screenings complement the readings in this lecture.

The history of poverty and public policy in the United States did not begin with President Roosevelt’s New Deal or with President Johnson’s War on Poverty. Before the Great Depression and the Other America, the public policy toward urban poverty began with the humiliating and punitive institution of the poorhouse. And subsequently, public policy and social welfare in America developed in the shadow of the poorhouse. If one school of experts suggests that American social welfare has been obsessed with the social control over poor people, then a second school of experts has been engrossed in dividing the poor into two moral categories: the deserving poor and the undeserving poor. Unfortunately, many experts were preoccupied with “improving” the morality of poor people rather than with ending economic poverty amid American bounty. By contrast, there is another tradition—one of social-justice movements that demand an end to American economic poverty and savage inequality. How did those dynamics shape the contours of American citizenship during the New Deal and the Great Society? Those issues will be explored in the lectures, discussions, and films in this course.

For decades, students sought the origins of Jim Crow in the South; however, Jim Crow was born in New York City. Thus, recent history has focused serious attention on the rise of the Jim Crow North, beginning with northern slavery and the Atlantic Slave Trade in important port cities such as Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. Some historians think that those northern roots amount to a serious gap in the knowledge of how racial oppression took shape in American democracy.

Is history solely possessed by the rich and powerful? Or did poor people ever have their say? Is history the story of a “master race” or the history of all of humanity? Do oppressed people matter? What voices count in the making of history? Who owns history? For more than a century, the master narrative of the Atlantic slave trade, American slavery, American freedom, and black Reconstruction after the Civil War was monopolized by white supremacy. The antiracist history and historians were banned not only from white colleges and universities but also from the educational establishment and academic journals. A new history is challenging the monopoly of white supremacy on the master narrative, and that new history is reclaiming the American past. This lecture introduces those new voices against the so-called master race. African Americans, Mexican Americans, and Asian Americans—as well as indigenous, immigrant and working people—are reclaiming the making of American democracy and the story of world history.