I teach history, but I am not a historian — at least not in a traditional sense. I’ve defended no dissertations and have no Ph.D. But for the past decade, I have been poring over primary source documents, conducting interviews and compiling my findings to create an ever-evolving historical archive.
That places me within a long legacy of Black public historians and citizen scholars constructing Black history beyond academia, away from the claustrophobic confines of the ivory tower. Black independent scholars have always existed, driven by a desire to recover lost narratives — while redefining what it means to be a historian.
Institutional racism has long excluded Black scholars from the academy. Out of almost 2,000 history doctorates awarded by 1935, only six were given to Black people. The desegregation of public schools in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s included colleges and universities, meaning that until that era, Black students were locked out of many of these institutions. As a result, the white men who maintained a monopoly on the subject have dictated a vast swath of American history. These have been the authorities gatekeeping our understanding of the past. They have had the most years of access to backroom archives, special papers and original documents and been best-positioned to get lucrative grants and funding from endowments.
