...to recognize that what emerges from a study of Black History is the image of a people with deep and inextricable roots in the soil of America.  And that image tells us that the destiny of this land is tied up with the destiny of this people.  More than one hundred years ago, Fredrika Bremer, a European visitor, told white Americans, “The romance of your history is the fate of the Negro.”  Her words are still true.

 

    For over one hundred years now, we have evaded the implications of that truth, to the detriment of both blacks and whites.  We tend to identify the American heritage with the Euro-American experience and to call the history of Euro-Americans thehistory of America.  Even today, most history textbooks project a White national image of a multinational reality.  The history of African-Americans is a standing refutation of that presumption.  African-American history tells us that there is another history, another reality, another America.  It tells us further that it is impossible to create “American” history without recognizing the false universality of the white history our media propagate.

 

    Within recent years, largely as a result of the work of black historians and the direct action of black demonstrators, there has been a new appreciation of the centrality of African-American history.  But despite the gains, many people still regard African-American history as an intellectual ghetto.  Even worse, some people regard it as a minor-league pastime involving the recitation of dates and the names of black greats.  But African-American history, read right, is a much more fateful encounter than that.  Read right, within the context of social forces struggling for dominance, African-American history raises total questions about the meaning of the historical process and the orientation of our lives.  In its essence African-American history is a radical reappraisal of a society from the standpoint of the men on the bottom.  And this means that black people have experienced violation and exclusion as the truth of the American Experience.  Because of what they have been through, because of the irrefutable  evidence of their scars, they are the creative negation of all the placid myths about American history.  And if truth, as Jean-Paul Sartre noted, is the perspective of the truly disinherited, then the history of the black man is the truth or close to the truth of our reality.

 

    This is the story of a history which is inside you, working; it is the story of a history which is engraved on your skin in your viscera, the story of a history which made you and which you are now making, perhaps without even knowing it.

 

    A final and perhaps even more important reason for the importance of African-American history is that it mirrors in microcosm the history of the overwhelming majority of the people of the earth.  One could even say that the history of the African-American, which is also the story of man, is a story of slavery, segregation, blood, cotton, roaches, rats.  But it is also a story of human faith, human strenfth, and human weakness, which is to say that it is a story relevant to the lives of all men.  Ralph Ellison put it very well, saying: “Any people who could endure all that brutalization and keep together, who could undergo such dismemberment and resuscitate itself, and endure until it could take the initiative in achieving its own freedom is obviously more than the sum of its brutalization.  Seen in this perspective, theirs has been one of the great human experiences and of of the great triumphs of the human spirit in modern times, in fact, in the history of the world.”