Recovering the Soul of Black History from a Whitewashed American Myth
Starred review from January 1, 2023
An innovative reading of Black history, gracefully joining it to the larger history of all humankind. As podcaster and "self-proclaimed intellectual adventurer" Fowler observes at the beginning of this rich book, there's irony in the fact that the founder of Black History Month, Carter G. Woodson, believed we should study not Black history as such but "Black people in history." It's a subtle distinction, but nearly a century later, Woodson's vision "sits in the bargain bin of education, the place a thing goes after losing its value--its essence, its very soul." That Woodson is not better known supports Fowler's vigorous program of prowling the stacks to look at pioneering literature and those who kept it alive--people such as Arthur Alfonso Schomburg, who gathered thousands of books on Black life, and Lerone Bennett Jr., whose 1962 book Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America "mainstreamed 1619 as the most important date in Black American history." Fowler consistently turns up intriguing surprises. For example, the model for the kneeling figure in the Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C., who escaped from slavery in 1863, was the great-great-great grandfather of boxing legend Muhammad Ali, and the first donation for the memorial, dedicated in 1922, came from a formerly enslaved woman--ironic, again, since the memorial highlights not the enslaved but Abraham Lincoln, a Whitewashing of history that devalues Black Americans' vital role in their own liberation. Drawing on the work of Orlando Patterson in the project of joining the particular to the universal, Fowler examines slavery as a worldwide phenomenon. "If we look back on such an all-pervasive human institution and assume we are incapable of committing such atrocities ourselves, we will fail to prevent it in the future," he writes. Given revanchist White supremacism and its insistence "that slavery was benign," what remains is to counter untruthful narratives through constant self-education and well-formed knowledge, which Fowler accomplishes in this book. A timely, powerful approach to history that looks into the past to find a path into a better future.
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