The Future of the African American Past Video Resources
On May 19–21, 2016, the American Historical Association (AHA) and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) co-hosted The Future of the African American Past, a landmark conference that brought together over 60 scholars to celebrate the opening of the NMAAHC and consider the future of the study of African American history. The Future of the African American Past was made possible by generous support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and HISTORY.
This video library features excerpts from the opening roundtable and eight conference sessions that can be used in K–12, community college, and undergraduate classrooms to guide understanding of major themes in this evolving field. NMAAHC founding director Lonnie Bunch and AHA executive director Jim Grossman provide introductory remarks for each video.
For more about The Future of the African American Past and full video recordings of the sessions, visit the conference website.
Videos produced by Intelligent Television
Contents
Introducing The Future of the African American Past
Opening Roundtable: The Long Struggle for Civil Rights and Black Freedom
Session 1: Who is Black America?
Session 2: Slavery and Freedom
Session 3: Race, Power, and Urban Spaces
Session 4: Capitalism and the Making and Unmaking of Black America
Session 5: What Is African American Religion?
Session 6: Internationalization of African American Politics and Culture
Session 7: History, Preservation, and Public Reckoning in Museums
Session 8: African American History as American History
Additional Teaching Resources on African American History
Introducing The Future of the African American Past
Why hold an academic conference in the midst of opening a new museum? Lonnie Bunch, founding director of the Smithsonian’s NMAAHC, and Jim Grossman, executive director of the AHA, reflect on the museum’s mission to make scholarship more accessible to the public at a time when African American history is growing into one of the most active fields in the discipline.
Opening Roundtable: The Long Struggle for Civil Rights and Black Freedom
Thursday, May 19, 2016
Rasmuson Theater, National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC
The conference opened with a roundtable conversation about the last half-century of African American political activism. In this video, scholars and activists, including a member of the Little Rock Nine, give personal reflections on the circumstances in which they entered the civil rights movement and examine how the movement both stimulated and was shaped by scholarship on African American history. An activist from Black Youth Project 100 puts recent struggles into historical context.
Speakers
Barbara Ransby, University of Illinois, Chicago (chair)
Clayborne Carson, Stanford University
Sara M. Evans, University of Minnesota
Jessica Pierce, Black Youth 100 Project
Terrence Roberts, Terrence Roberts Consulting
Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, Morgan State University
Resources
- NEH “Created Equal” film project on civil rights
Session 1: Who is Black America?
Friday, May 20, 2016
Warner Bros. Theater, National Museum of American History, Washington, DC
“Who is Black America?” explores the various forms of diversity that have existed within African American communities from the earliest days of enslavement into the modern day. Historical changes to the meaning of “black” culture and identity are examined through the lenses of class difference, religion, social movements, and other topics.
Speakers and Contents
00:12 - Introduction by Lonnie Bunch (NMAAHC) and Jim Grossman (AHA)
03:51 - Panel chair Ira Berlin (University of Maryland, College Park) describes how the common perception of a singular “blackness” arose when Africans of highly varied cultural and geographic backgrounds were forced into the shared experience of slavery.
09:26 - Elsa Barkley Brown (University of Maryland, College Park) explains how she uses the medium of film to teach “silent” or suppressed histories in introductory undergraduate classes on African American history.
16:37 - Tiya Miles (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) discusses the ways in which African American and Native American communities forged transformative relationships under conditions of exploitation.
27:29 - Dylan C. Penningroth (University of California, Berkeley) describes how many African Americans became fluent in legal procedure via the process of establishing churches, and how they began to apply this knowledge to struggles against racial injustice.
38:05 - Deborah Gray White (Rutgers University, New Brunswick) considers the evolution of black identities within the context of the New Negro Movement of the early 20th-century and newer conceptions of “postmodernity.”
Resources
- Tree Shade (1998)
- The Watermelon Woman (1996)
- James M. Simms, The First Colored Baptist Church in North America Constituted at Savannah, Georgia, January 20, AD 1788. With Biographical Sketches of the Pastors (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1888
- Godfrey v. Walker, 42 Ga. 562 (1871), 569.
- “Financial Papers of the New Hope Baptist Church,” Yancey Papers, Special Collections, University of Virginia.
- “Recommendations to the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church for the Fiscal Year 1954–1955,” September 5, 1954, Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., vol. 2, pp. 287–94.
- Martin Luther King, Jr., “Guidelines for a Constructive Church,” manuscript notes, ca. 1966, R66-06-05, King Center online.
- Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”
- Claude McKay, “If We Must Die,” (1919)
Session 2: Slavery and Freedom
Friday, May 20, 2016
Warner Bros. Theater, National Museum of American History, Washington, DC
In “Slavery and Freedom,” panelists discuss historiographical trends in the study of slavery and postemancipation society, illuminating how the dominant “freedom narrative” has been rethought and rewritten by various generations of scholars. Recent debates have centered on the tensions between emancipation as a turning point in American history and the limits of its aftermath.
Speakers and Contents
00:12 - Introduction by Lonnie Bunch (NMAAHC) and Jim Grossman (AHA).
04:32 - Chair Eric Foner (Columbia University) asks the panelists to consider whether the “slavery and freedom” paradigm of teaching the history of emancipation, central to John Hope Franklin’s landmark 1947 textbook From Slavery to Freedom, still stands as a useful model in the 21st century.
14:33 - Walter Johnson (Harvard University) addresses the ethical concerns of suggesting that slavery “dehumanized” enslaved people.
31:55 - Eric Foner reads Brenda E. Stevenson’s (University of California, Los Angeles) paper on how former slaves harnessed family rituals, such as marriage ceremonies, to reinforce their new legal status as free people.
42:43 - Thavolia Glymph (Duke University) disputes the notion that emancipation had a limited impact on freedom, citing examples of enslaved people that participated in the Union war effort who recognized that the road to full equality would be a much longer struggle.
58:55 - Annette Gordon-Reed (Harvard University) discusses recent controversies surrounding the removals of Confederate memorials from public spaces, and whether these acts constitute an erasure of the past.
Resources
- The Federal Writers’ Project Slave Narratives
- “Abraham Lincoln to Hon. Charles D. Robinson, August 17, 1864,” Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 7, p. 501
- “William T. Sherman to Thomas Ewing, Memphis, Aug. 10, 1862,” in Sherman’s Civil War: Selected Correspondence of William T. Sherman, 1860–1865, ed. Brooks D. Simpson and Jean V. Berlin (Chapel Hill, 1999), 263–64.
- John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of American Negroes (first published 1947)
Session 3: Race, Power, and Urban Spaces
Friday, May 20, 2016
Warner Bros. Theater, National Museum of American History, Washington, DC
“Race, Power, and Urban Spaces” investigates African American urban history, a field based heavily on the themes of labor and property. Panelists explore both the lived experiences and theoretical notions behind the issues facing African Americans in urban centers, such as the impact of public policy on individuals who migrated to cities in the 20th century.
Speakers and Contents
00:12 - Introduction by Lonnie Bunch (NMAAHC) and Jim Grossman (AHA)
05:11 - Thomas J. Sugrue (New York University) gives an overview on the historiography of urban scholarship and shows how studies on the processes of racism and discrimination can be used to help understand recent events unfolding in places like Baltimore and Ferguson.
16:27 - Leslie M. Harris (Emory University) discusses how public perceptions of urban success and prosperity often disregard the African American experience.
26:43 - N.D.B. Connolly (New York University) investigates the role of land-owning African Americans during the Jim Crow era and how they attempted to negotiate segregated public services.
42:10 - Joe William Trotter Jr. (Carnegie Mellon University) discusses how the word “ghetto” came to be applied to black communities and the role of government housing policy in creating community divisions.
57:30 - Carl Nightingale (University at Buffalo, State University of New York) discusses the history of urban racial segregation from a global and diasporic perspective.
Resources
- August Maier and Elliott Rudwick, From Plantation to Ghetto (Macmillan, 1976)
- Barack Obama 2016 Howard University commencement speech
- N.D.B. Connolly, A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014)
- St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton Jr., Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (Harcourt, 1945)
- Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Harvard University Press, 1998)
Session 4: Capitalism and the Making and Unmaking of Black America
Friday, May 20, 2016
Warner Bros. Theater, National Museum of American History, Washington, DC
“Capitalism and the Making and Unmaking of Black America” grapples with the complex and often painful history of the effects of capitalism on African American work lives, using a range of contexts and stories, from America’s first black millionaire to the ongoing problem of poverty in urban and rural America.
Speakers and Contents
00:12 - Introduction by Lonnie Bunch (NMAAHC) and Jim Grossman (AHA)
03:14 - Steven Hahn (University of Pennsylvania) discusses the exploitative impact of capitalism on African American communities, and alternately how African Americans seized opportunities to turn capitalism to their own advantage.
12:07 - Adrienne Monteith Petty (City College of New York) argues that black landownership was more important to the black freedom struggle than previous narratives have suggested, pointing particularly to how black sharecroppers served as the “vanguard” of economic justice in the South.
23:03 - Shane White (University of Sydney) highlights forgotten narratives and successes in 19th-century black business life, centering on Wall Street’s first African American millionaire, Jeremiah Hamilton.
34:03 - Eric Arnesen (George Washington University) discusses how African Americans challenged trade union exclusion from postwar emancipation to the civil rights movement.
50:41 - William Julius Wilson (Harvard University) discusses the social impact of jobless-driven poverty and black male engagement with American capitalism.
Resources
- Interview with Samuel Lee by Hudson Vaughan, 31 May 2012, U-0986, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
- Pigford v. Glickman
- Joseph Vargas v. Jeremiah G. Hamilton, Equity Case Files of the US Circuit Court for the Southern District of New York, 1791–1846, National Archives, Microfilm Publications, M884, Roll 14, x-116.
- “The Only Black Millionaire in New York,” Frederick Douglass Papers, March 1852
- “Death of a Colored Millionaire,” Hudson Evening Register, May 20, 1875
- “Leader of March on Capital Links Freedom and Jobs,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 26, 1963
- Testimony of A. Philip Randolph, “Federal Role in Urban Affairs. Part 9,” Hearings before the Subcommittee on Executive Reorganization of the Committee on Government Operations. US Senate, Eighty-Ninth Congress, Second Session, December 6, 1966 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1967), 1994.
Session 5: What Is African American Religion?
Saturday, May 21, 2016
Warner Bros. Theater, National Museum of American History, Washington, DC
“What Is African American Religion?” explores the centrality of religion to African American culture. Though Protestant Christianity is known to be the normative topic of study, the panelists push for a more nuanced understanding of the African American religious experience, arguing that black communities practiced a multiplicity of faiths.
Speakers and Contents
00:12 - Introduction by Lonnie Bunch (NMAAHC) and Jim Grossman (AHA)
11:12 - Edna Greene Medford (Howard University) introduces the panel by discussing the ways African Americans fought to preserve their sacred beliefs.
17:21 - Eddie S. Glaude Jr. (Princeton University), citing his 2010 essay “The Black Church is Dead,” argues that common terms like “African American religion” and “the Black Church” fail to adequately describe the complexity and ambiguity of religious experiences, especially non-Protestant faiths.
26:59 - Judith Weisenfeld (Princeton University), using images to frame her presentation, highlights non-Christian religious groups such as Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam.
39:31 - Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (Harvard University) discusses the historical focus on “Bible politics,” or the ways in which Biblical conceptions of justice have shaped African American political ideas for social transformation.
57:20 - Anthea Butler (University of Pennsylvania) expands on Glaude’s call to abolish the conception of “the Black Church” and argues that refocusing on alternative narratives will bring historians closer to “the whole story” of African American religious history.
Resources
- Eddie Glaude Jr., “The Black Church is Dead,” Huffington Post, April 26, 2010.
- The Blood of Jesus (1941)
- Virginia Slave Laws, 1660s
- Henry Highland Garnet, “An Address to the Slaves of the United States,” 1843 speech
- African-American Religion: A Documentary History Project
Session 6: Internationalization of African American Politics and Culture
Saturday, May 21, 2016
Warner Bros. Theater, National Museum of American History, Washington, DC
Speakers and Contents
This session moves beyond the national framework that defined the rest of the conference to examine the role of African Americans on the international stage, touching on topics such as global political movements, the progression of cross-cultural alliances, and transnational influences on African American ideas.
00:12 - Introduction by Lonnie Bunch (NMAAHC) and Jim Grossman (AHA)
05:02 - Chair David Levering Lewis (New York University) explains that the panel will bring to light certain globalized narratives that have been neglected by a narrower national framework.
16:36 - Carol Anderson (Emory University) recounts the efforts of NAACP leaders to prevent the World Bank from granting loans to South Africa’s National Party “apartheid” government.
33:27 - T. Ruby Patterson-Myers (Vanderbilt University) examines the role of women in Pan-African politics through the voices of two female activists, Addie Hunton and Vicki Garvin.
56:34 - Barbara D. Savage (University of Pennsylvania) draws on the travel diary of African American scholar Merze Tate and explains the influence of international ideas on Tate’s work.
1:17:08 - James Sidbury (Rice University) studies a group of black loyalists (African Americans who sided with the British during the American Revolution) and their relocation to international communities.
Resources
- Merze Tate, Travel Diary, 1931, Merze Tate Papers, Moorland Spingarn Collection, Howard University
Session 7: History, Preservation, and Public Reckoning in Museums
Saturday, May 21, 2016
Warner Bros. Theater, National Museum of American History, Washington, DC
What happens when past meets the present? “History, Preservation, and Public Reckoning in Museums” analyzes the relationship between history and the preservation of historic places, especially in the context of former plantation sites. Panelists reflect on the challenges of interpreting slavery and emancipation, and the reactions of diverse public audiences.
Speakers
Lonnie G. Bunch III, NMAAHC (chair)
George W. McDaniel, Drayton Hall
David W. Blight, Yale University
Dolores Hayden, Yale University
Dorothy Spruill Redford, Somerset Place State Historic Site
Session 8: African American History as American History
Saturday, May 21, 2016
Warner Bros. Theater, National Museum of American History, Washington, DC
The final session of the conference is a roundtable discussion about the process of “centralizing” African American history instead of relegating it to an ancillary role in the greater American historical narrative. In thinking about the purpose of the new museum and what the public should expect when they walk through its doors, scholars address topics such as the changing imperatives of public culture, diasporic frames, and the evolution of democracy.
Speakers
Earl Lewis, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Darlene Clark Hine, Northwestern University
Thomas C. Holt, University of Chicago
Jacqueline Jones, University of Texas at Austin
Jim Grossman, AHA
Nell Irvin Painter, Princeton University
Additional Teaching Resources on African American History
- National Museum of African American History and Culture - a database of the museum’s artifacts and other media, searchable by topic and date
- National Archives and Records Administration - a digital collection of primary sources on African American history
- American Historical Association - classroom materials on African American history, including sample assignments
- African American Intellectual History Society - an affiliated society of the American Historical Association. Site includes syllabi for teaching about the history of racial violence.
- Association for the Study of African American Life and History - an affiliated society of the American Historical Association. Site includes resources about teaching African American history.