Tag Archives: African Diaspora

Happy Birthday, Una Marson! A Profile of this Great Cultural and Literary Nationalist by Lisa Tomlinson

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Una Marson, image from AAIHS

Una Marson: Cultural and Literary Nationalist

Una Marson was born on May 5, 1905 in the rural parish of St. Elizabeth, Jamaica, sixteen years after the novelist and poet Claude McKay. Following in the literary footsteps of McKay, Marson valorized African working-class cultural aesthetics and engaged with the wider African diaspora through her literary and political work. Although her work has not received the same attention or accolades as her fellow countryman Claude McKay, Marson has, without a doubt, made a significant contribution to Caribbean and diasporic literature. She was certainly a key figure in twentieth century black internationalist politics.

Fortunately, conversations around the life and work of Una Marson have been kept alive and archived in a few libraries throughout the world. Writers such as Erika Smilowitz, Honor Ford Smith, and Alison Donnell have also written critical essays on Marson’s literary and political involvement inside and outside of Jamaica. Additionally, her biographer Delia Jarrett-Macauley has provided a comprehensive documentation of Marson’s life and writing. Therefore, their works are most instructive in offering more information concerning Marson’s life and activism.

Not surprisingly, Marson’s early works of literature reflected her colonial education. Marson’s writing in her first collection of poems, Tropic Reveries (1930) and Heights and Depth (1931), adapted traditional European literary structure and spoke to pastoral style poetry. As her travels abroad strengthened her race consciousness in the mid-1930s, Marson’s literary work departed from the conventions of British Victorian and Romantic literature. As such, her third volume of poems, The Moth and the Star (1937), articulated themes that resonated with the experiences of African women entrapped within received notions of white beauty standards.

In her poem “Cinema eyes,” for example, the narrator tries to protect her daughter from procuring a “cinema mind” under the influence of white supremacy, which “saw no beauty in black faces.” Two other poems, “Kinky hair blues” and “Black is Fancy,” reveal black hair politics and many black women’s desire to alter their physical appearances:

I hate dat ironed hair
And dat bleaching skin
Hate dat ironed hair
And dat bleaching skin
But I’ll be alone
If I don’t fall in 2

Over time, Marson’s work also became more rooted in Jamaican experiences, and she integrated the indigenous culture of the black Jamaican working-class. In her poem “Stone Breaker, ”Marson sheds light on the experiences of black working-class Jamaican women using the native language, Jamaican, to express class and racial inequalities that inform life on the island: “De big backra car dem/ A lik up de dus’ in a we face” 3

Maintaining a bond to her Jamaican roots, “Quashie Comes to London,” a more lighthearted poem, highlights the immigrant experience of homesickness in the metropolis of London. Quashie’s diasporic journey in cold dreary London and yearning for familiar food items such as “some ripe breadfruit / Some fresh ackee and saltfish too / An’dumpins hot will suit,” later becomes common threads in the works of Caribbean diasporic writers living outside of the region.

Marson further developed her use of African Jamaican cultural aesthetics and experiences in her popular plays, London Calling and Pocomania. In Pocomania, for instance, she includes the local vernacular, folklore, and African-centered religious practice called Pocomania to challenge middle-class respectability and Christianity. She does this through Stella, the middle-class character in the play, who journeys to the world of the black Jamaican working-class in a bid to experience the forbidden religious rituals of Pocomania. Given the fact that the reference to anything “African” was frowned upon in colonial Jamaica, Marson’s plays and poems reflected a transgressive intervention in conventional Jamaican literature.

In many ways, Marson unselfishly employed her literary status to foster and build upon the development of a Caribbean literary canon. In her desire to advance Jamaican literature and culture, Marson formed the Writers Club, the Kingston Drama Club, and the Poetry League during the 1930s. Marson was also responsible for starting a publishing press.

una1While living in England, Marson developed the BBC radio program, “Caribbean Voices,” which evolved into a significant literary show, one that would have a crucial impact on the development of new writings and writers from the Anglophone Caribbean. Caribbean cultural luminaire Kamau Braithwaite has characterized the forum as the “single most important literary catalyst for Caribbean creative and critical writing in English.” 4

In addition to her literary engagement, Marson was also very politically active in local and international affairs. In 1928, at the age of 23, she became the first woman in Jamaica to own and edit a magazine, The Cosmopolitan. Marson used this publication as an outlet to express social concerns in Jamaica (i.e., race and class prejudices) and also to address gender issues. In her editorials, Marson consistently advocated for the expansion of educational and employment opportunities, the development of women’s self-help groups, and the granting of women’s suffrage.

As a feminist, Marson worked in various overseas women organizations and was the only black woman to attend the 12th Annual Congress of the International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship conference in Istanbul, Turkey in 1935. Motivated by wider diasporic experiences, she used the opportunity to advocate for the rights of black woman globally and called on the conference to recognize African women in their daily struggles.

Coupled with her feminist work, Pan-Africanism became a dominant feature of Marson’s activism. Marson’s Pan-Africanist vision, for example, was invested in the need for educational reform on her island, a reform that would reverse the colonial education to which she was subjected and instead teach Jamaican children about their African past. Equally, Marson worked as a secretary for the Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie, where she used this position to highlight the separation of families and Italian atrocities against women and children in Ethiopia. As his private secretary, Marson also accompanied him to Geneva where he pleaded his country’s case to the League of Nations on the matter of the Italian invasion and occupation.

Marson’s last years of political activism focused on advocacy for the Rastafarian community in her native Jamaica, where she successfully established a home for Rastafarians. She also created the Save the Children Fund, an organization that helped to fund poor children’s basic education.

According to published sources and acquaintances, Marson’s extensive work and travels later contributed to her frail health. Marson struggled with depression and was hospitalized several times in mental health facilities before she died of a heart attack in Jamaica in 1965.

Like Claude McKay, Una Marson’s literary and political work emerged out of their native country Jamaica and later became a part of a wider community of diasporic Africans who sought to assert a distinct national voice and identity. Both writers combined their work with the indigenous cultural expression of the island but were also open to bridging the conversation with other black art forms as evident in the jazz poems of Marson and her brief experimentation with the African American vernacular.

Unlike McKay, however, Marson remained in Jamaica to witness the fruition of her goal toward a cultural and literary renaissance. The 1950s and 1960s defined a literary and cultural rebirth for Anglophone Caribbean people as seen in the dramatic growth in the number of artists, musicians, and creative writers working regionally and internationally. Writers such as Jamaican Andrew Salkey, Barbadian George Lamming, and Trinidadian Samuel Selvon all began to make their mark as renowned Caribbean writers and cultural activists in various parts of the globe.

Therefore, Marson’s commitment to gender politics, race, class, and her impulse to divert from British literary style shaped a generation of writers who aspired to attain cultural and political sovereignty. Indeed, Marson belongs to a long line of black internationalist intellectuals and activists, whose works have been fundamental to struggles for cultural assertion and self-hood.

  1. D. Jarrett-Macauley, The Life of Una Marson 1905-65 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 73
  2. Una Marson, Moth and the Star, 91.
  3. Una Marson, Moth and the Star, 70; Like Professor Carolyn Cooper and some Caribbean linguistics I have chosen to use Jamaican (rather than patois) because the term “patois” has a negative linguistic connotation of inferiority.
  4. Kamau Brathwaite, History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry (London: New Beacon, 1984).

This piece was originally published at the African American Intellectual History Society blog on March 26, 2016, and published here when under a Creative Commons license

~ Lisa Tomlinson is a Jamaican researcher and scholar residing in Kingston, Jamaica. Her area of specialization includes literary and cultural studies of the Caribbean and African diaspora, Black literary criticism and anti-colonial studies. She holds a degree in English Literature from Carleton University and a Ph.D. in Humanities (Comparative Perspective and Culture) with a graduate diploma in Latin America and Caribbean Studies.

Lisa has worked in tertiary institutions in Ontario, Canada where she taught courses in English literature, humanities, and visual culture. She is currently a lecturer at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus in the Department of Literatures in English. Some of her publications include book chapters in Jamaicans in the Canadian Experience: A Multicultralizing Presence, Archipelagos of Sound: Transnational Caribbeanities: Women and Music, Critical Insights: Harlem Renaissance, as well as encyclopedia entries in the Dictionary of Afro-Latin American and Caribbean Biography. (Bio credit: AAIHS)

~ Ordinary Philosophy is a labor of love and ad-free, supported by patrons and readers like you. Any support you can offer will be deeply appreciated!

*All views and opinions expressed by guest writers are their own and do not necessarily express those of Ordinary Philosophy’s editors and publishers

Happy Birthday, Una Marson! A Profile of this Great Cultural and Literary Nationalist by Lisa Tomlinson

Posted on by

Una Marson, image from AAIHS

Una Marson: Cultural and Literary Nationalist

Una Marson was born on May 5, 1905 in the rural parish of St. Elizabeth, Jamaica, sixteen years after the novelist and poet Claude McKay. Following in the literary footsteps of McKay, Marson valorized African working-class cultural aesthetics and engaged with the wider African diaspora through her literary and political work. Although her work has not received the same attention or accolades as her fellow countryman Claude McKay, Marson has, without a doubt, made a significant contribution to Caribbean and diasporic literature. She was certainly a key figure in twentieth century black internationalist politics.

Fortunately, conversations around the life and work of Una Marson have been kept alive and archived in a few libraries throughout the world. Writers such as Erika Smilowitz, Honor Ford Smith, and Alison Donnell have also written critical essays on Marson’s literary and political involvement inside and outside of Jamaica. Additionally, her biographer Delia Jarrett-Macauley has provided a comprehensive documentation of Marson’s life and writing. Therefore, their works are most instructive in offering more information concerning Marson’s life and activism.

Not surprisingly, Marson’s early works of literature reflected her colonial education. Marson’s writing in her first collection of poems, Tropic Reveries (1930) and Heights and Depth (1931), adapted traditional European literary structure and spoke to pastoral style poetry. As her travels abroad strengthened her race consciousness in the mid-1930s, Marson’s literary work departed from the conventions of British Victorian and Romantic literature. As such, her third volume of poems, The Moth and the Star (1937), articulated themes that resonated with the experiences of African women entrapped within received notions of white beauty standards.

In her poem “Cinema eyes,” for example, the narrator tries to protect her daughter from procuring a “cinema mind” under the influence of white supremacy, which “saw no beauty in black faces.” Two other poems, “Kinky hair blues” and “Black is Fancy,” reveal black hair politics and many black women’s desire to alter their physical appearances:

I hate dat ironed hair
And dat bleaching skin
Hate dat ironed hair
And dat bleaching skin
But I’ll be alone
If I don’t fall in 2

Over time, Marson’s work also became more rooted in Jamaican experiences, and she integrated the indigenous culture of the black Jamaican working-class. In her poem “Stone Breaker, ”Marson sheds light on the experiences of black working-class Jamaican women using the native language, Jamaican, to express class and racial inequalities that inform life on the island: “De big backra car dem/ A lik up de dus’ in a we face” 3

Maintaining a bond to her Jamaican roots, “Quashie Comes to London,” a more lighthearted poem, highlights the immigrant experience of homesickness in the metropolis of London. Quashie’s diasporic journey in cold dreary London and yearning for familiar food items such as “some ripe breadfruit / Some fresh ackee and saltfish too / An’dumpins hot will suit,” later becomes common threads in the works of Caribbean diasporic writers living outside of the region.

Marson further developed her use of African Jamaican cultural aesthetics and experiences in her popular plays, London Calling and Pocomania. In Pocomania, for instance, she includes the local vernacular, folklore, and African-centered religious practice called Pocomania to challenge middle-class respectability and Christianity. She does this through Stella, the middle-class character in the play, who journeys to the world of the black Jamaican working-class in a bid to experience the forbidden religious rituals of Pocomania. Given the fact that the reference to anything “African” was frowned upon in colonial Jamaica, Marson’s plays and poems reflected a transgressive intervention in conventional Jamaican literature.

In many ways, Marson unselfishly employed her literary status to foster and build upon the development of a Caribbean literary canon. In her desire to advance Jamaican literature and culture, Marson formed the Writers Club, the Kingston Drama Club, and the Poetry League during the 1930s. Marson was also responsible for starting a publishing press.

una1While living in England, Marson developed the BBC radio program, “Caribbean Voices,” which evolved into a significant literary show, one that would have a crucial impact on the development of new writings and writers from the Anglophone Caribbean. Caribbean cultural luminaire Kamau Braithwaite has characterized the forum as the “single most important literary catalyst for Caribbean creative and critical writing in English.” 4

In addition to her literary engagement, Marson was also very politically active in local and international affairs. In 1928, at the age of 23, she became the first woman in Jamaica to own and edit a magazine, The Cosmopolitan. Marson used this publication as an outlet to express social concerns in Jamaica (i.e., race and class prejudices) and also to address gender issues. In her editorials, Marson consistently advocated for the expansion of educational and employment opportunities, the development of women’s self-help groups, and the granting of women’s suffrage.

As a feminist, Marson worked in various overseas women organizations and was the only black woman to attend the 12th Annual Congress of the International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship conference in Istanbul, Turkey in 1935. Motivated by wider diasporic experiences, she used the opportunity to advocate for the rights of black woman globally and called on the conference to recognize African women in their daily struggles.

Coupled with her feminist work, Pan-Africanism became a dominant feature of Marson’s activism. Marson’s Pan-Africanist vision, for example, was invested in the need for educational reform on her island, a reform that would reverse the colonial education to which she was subjected and instead teach Jamaican children about their African past. Equally, Marson worked as a secretary for the Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie, where she used this position to highlight the separation of families and Italian atrocities against women and children in Ethiopia. As his private secretary, Marson also accompanied him to Geneva where he pleaded his country’s case to the League of Nations on the matter of the Italian invasion and occupation.

Marson’s last years of political activism focused on advocacy for the Rastafarian community in her native Jamaica, where she successfully established a home for Rastafarians. She also created the Save the Children Fund, an organization that helped to fund poor children’s basic education.

According to published sources and acquaintances, Marson’s extensive work and travels later contributed to her frail health. Marson struggled with depression and was hospitalized several times in mental health facilities before she died of a heart attack in Jamaica in 1965.

Like Claude McKay, Una Marson’s literary and political work emerged out of their native country Jamaica and later became a part of a wider community of diasporic Africans who sought to assert a distinct national voice and identity. Both writers combined their work with the indigenous cultural expression of the island but were also open to bridging the conversation with other black art forms as evident in the jazz poems of Marson and her brief experimentation with the African American vernacular.

Unlike McKay, however, Marson remained in Jamaica to witness the fruition of her goal toward a cultural and literary renaissance. The 1950s and 1960s defined a literary and cultural rebirth for Anglophone Caribbean people as seen in the dramatic growth in the number of artists, musicians, and creative writers working regionally and internationally. Writers such as Jamaican Andrew Salkey, Barbadian George Lamming, and Trinidadian Samuel Selvon all began to make their mark as renowned Caribbean writers and cultural activists in various parts of the globe.

Therefore, Marson’s commitment to gender politics, race, class, and her impulse to divert from British literary style shaped a generation of writers who aspired to attain cultural and political sovereignty. Indeed, Marson belongs to a long line of black internationalist intellectuals and activists, whose works have been fundamental to struggles for cultural assertion and self-hood.

  1. D. Jarrett-Macauley, The Life of Una Marson 1905-65 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 73
  2. Una Marson, Moth and the Star, 91.
  3. Una Marson, Moth and the Star, 70; Like Professor Carolyn Cooper and some Caribbean linguistics I have chosen to use Jamaican (rather than patois) because the term “patois” has a negative linguistic connotation of inferiority.
  4. Kamau Brathwaite, History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry (London: New Beacon, 1984).

This piece was originally published at the African American Intellectual History Society blog on March 26, 2016

Lisa Tomlinson is a Jamaican researcher and scholar residing in Kingston, Jamaica. Her area of specialization includes literary and cultural studies of the Caribbean and African diaspora, Black literary criticism and anti-colonial studies. She holds a degree in English Literature from Carleton University and a Ph.D. in Humanities (Comparative Perspective and Culture) with a graduate diploma in Latin America and Caribbean Studies.

Lisa has worked in tertiary institutions in Ontario, Canada where she taught courses in English literature, humanities, and visual culture. She is currently a lecturer at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus in the Department of Literatures in English. Some of her publications include book chapters in Jamaicans in the Canadian Experience: A Multicultralizing Presence, Archipelagos of Sound: Transnational Caribbeanities: Women and Music, Critical Insights: Harlem Renaissance, as well as encyclopedia entries in the Dictionary of Afro-Latin American and Caribbean Biography. (Bio credit: AAIHS)

~ Ordinary Philosophy is a labor of love and ad-free, supported by patrons and readers like you. Any support you can offer will be deeply appreciated!

*All views and opinions expressed by guest writers are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Ordinary Philosophy’s editors and publishers

History As A Communal Act: The History of Black History Month, by Stephen G. Hall

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Frederick Douglass as US Recorder of Deeds, Library of Congress image, sign at D.C. Court of Appeals

Frederick Douglass as US Recorder of Deeds, Library of Congress image, sign at D.C. Court of Appeals

African Americans have always imagined and constructed history as a communal act. At the inception of the African American historical enterprise in the early 19th century, Jacob Oson’s Search for Truth (1817), one of the first examples of a textual African American historical production, offers insights into these communal sensibilities. Oson delivered the address in New Haven and New York, the locations of two dynamic free black communities, addressing communal concerns such as the African past, contemporary treatment, and identity. He also received help in publishing the address from Christopher Rush, Bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, one of the largest black church organizations in the country. From inception to publication, history existed not as the purview of the few, but as a communal product.

Oson’s work was no mere isolated incident. Writers were largely community advocates: ministers, abolitionists, autodidacts, and bibliophiles. James W.C. Pennington’s A Textbook of the Origin and History of the Colored People (1841)  offered important insights into African American history. Maria Stewart’s speeches blended piety with calls for communal action and awareness of racial injustice. Robert Benjamin Lewis’s interracial heritage (Native American and African) served as a springboard for his humanistic and universal history of African-descended people titled Light and Truth (1844). Black writers also envisioned their community as transnational. They engaged the African past as well as the complexities of the African Diaspora. They ruminated on the history of Haiti and Latin America. For these writers, African Americans were more than mere products of North American slavery. Their history was intertwined with the social, political, and cultural fabric of Africa and the Diaspora. In short, African American intellectuals understood their unique role as African-descended people whose history shaped the global experience.

Communal engagement proved central in dramatizing and reflecting the sentiments of historical periods. As African Americans laid the groundwork in the nation’s transition from slavery to freedom, Black history heralded these changes. William Wells Brown’s The Black Man (1863) and The Negro in the American Rebellion (1867) provided the first blueprints for the future. William Still’s The Underground Railroad (1871) reconstructed black heroism in the fight to end slavery. Black remembrance of the past focused less on individual achievements and more on the community’s collective ability to overcome obstacles to achieve clear goals. Freedom’s advent emanated from and served communal purposes.

Sculpture of John Brown by Edmonia Lewis

Sculpture of John Brown by Edmonia Lewis

Black history’s communal manifestations were not merely textual. West Indian Independence Day and Juneteenth and Emancipation Day Celebrations, to name a few, permeated the communal landscape throughout the 19th and into the 20th centuries. Artistic representations, especially the work of Edmonia Lewis and Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, were very important. Both of these women used sculpture to powerfully reconstruct the black past. Lewis’s John Brown (1864–65) and Robert Gould Shaw (1867–68, marble) depict historical figures subsequently revered in black communities. Her communal representation, Forever Free (1867, marble), celebrated the ratification of the 13th Amendment. The original title of the piece was “Morning of Liberty.” Fuller’s Ethiopia Awakening (1914), Mary Turner (Silent Protest Against Mob Violence) (1919) and Ethiopia Awakening (1930) highlight themes of racial pride, cultural awareness, and awakening and resilience in the face of adversity.

The outgrowth of these communal sensibilities naturally impacted the growth of the professionalized African American history project. Carter G. Woodson’s establishment of the Association of the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH) in 1915, the Journal of Negro History (1916), and the Associated Publishers in 1916 built on preexisting traditions of communal engagement and representation. These traditions were already extant in the African American historical enterprise for at least a century prior to their professionalization. Woodson used the “Documents” and “Notes” sections of the JNH to present communal offerings, the living and breathing history found in the attics and basements of African Americans around the country. Due to the small number of professionally trained historians, Woodson understood that the African American historical project must embrace the larger community as well as the professional and lay classes. Woodson utilized the broadest cross-section of the black community, drawing on everyone from K-12 educators and administrators to physicians, politicians, and pastors and ordinary people who displayed an interest in the historical past.Black literary and historical societies, bibliophiles, and collectors were also prominent in this regard. Groups such as the American Negro Academy, the Negro Society for Historical Research, and the Mu-So Lit Club played a prominent role in promoting the study of history. Their efforts were complimented by bibliophiles such as Arthur Schomburg and Jesse Moorland. Schomburg, a Puerto-Rican immigrant, collected books about the global black experience in his Harlem apartment. His extensive collection was purchased by the New York Public Library in 1925. Today it comprises the nucleus of the Schomburg Collection in Harlem, New York. Jesse Moorland, an avid bibliophile, YMCA activist, and close friend of Carter G. Woodson, donated his sizable collections to the institution, which today are housed at Howard University’s Moorland-Springarn Room.

Abraham Lincoln's walking stick, Mary Todd Lincoln's gift to Frederick Douglass

Abraham Lincoln’s walking stick, Mary Todd Lincoln’s gift to Frederick Douglass

Given more than a century of deep engagement with history in black communities in textual, commemorative, artistic, organizational (literary and historical societies and libraries and repositories), and professional projects, it is not surprising that Negro History Week (1926) and later Black History Month (1980) emerged. Instituted as a communal celebration of black possibility and reality, Negro History Week continued earlier themes of accentuating black communal achievements, charting communal possibility and using institutional spaces to shape historical understanding within black communities and more important, in the national and global spheres. Its celebration in February acknowledges its communal roots. February is the birth month of two revered figures in African American life and history in the 19th and early 20th centuries: Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. Douglass and Lincoln loomed large in the black imagination because of their associations, tangible and symbolic, with Emancipation. The commemorative celebrations of the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment, as well as the long communal struggle to eradicate slavery from the order of things, resonated in the chords of memory in African-descended populations well into the 20th century.

In 1926, the Annual Meeting of the ASNLH was held at Morgan State College (now university) in Baltimore. A “Negro History Week Roundtable” featured educators primarily from the State of Maryland and the District of Columbia. Given the prominence and activism of the black communities in these two locales, they serve as a representative sample for how “the movement,” as it was commonly labeled, impacted black communities. The comments of the educators, one of whom was Dr. Otelia Cromwell, Head of the Department of History and English in the public schools in the District of Columbia, emphasized the importance of the work. They also highlighted the impact of the celebration on young people in urban and rural communities. According to Cromwell, the observance of Negro History Week not only proved of great interest to students, faculty, and staff in the District of Columbia, but it also “had the effect of improving the tone and atmosphere of the school room.” The summation of Cromwell’s remarks unquestionably demonstrates the immeasurable nature of history’s communal reach. The report read: “These results which cannot be easily set forth in words or mathematically measured she believed to be the most important of all.” Cromwell knew that history’s import and meaning transcended the solidarity of a single moment in time. It permeated the classroom and seeped into the collective strivings of untold generations. It informed one hundred years of historical engagement and interrogation. It gave rise to textual writing, commemorative celebrations, artistic representations, literary and historical societies, black bibliophiles and collectors, and finally the professionalization of African American history in the first half of the twentieth century.

These same communal sensibilities informed the rise of the African American museum movement in the 1960s: The DuSable Museum of African American History (1961), the International Afro-American Museum in Detroit (1965), the Anacostia Community Museum in Washington (1967), and the African American Museum of Philadelphia (1976). Other community-inspired projects include The Blacks in Wax Museum in Baltimore (1983) and the National Afro American Museum and Cultural Center in Wilberforce, Ohio (1987). All of these museums used history and historical artifacts to dramatize the black past and present it to the community. These efforts culminated in the creation of the National African American Museum on the National Mall in 2016.

Our contemporary moment has witnessed the continuation of these communal projects. It has spawned the use of digital spaces (Internet and social media such as Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, Snapchat, Instagram) to present African American history and historical ideas in new and dynamic ways. The construction of syllabi to educate diverse publics about contemporary events is a direct outgrowth of this communal focus. These efforts are too numerous to name them all, but a few examples will suffice: Dr. Marcia Chatelain’s #Ferguson Syllabus and the work of Drs. Chad Williams, Kidada Williams, and Keisha Blain with the #CharlestonSyllabus, The D.A.TT Freedom Summer 2015 Syllabus, the #BlackPantherSyllabus, the #The Baltimore Syllabus, the BlackLivesMatter Syllabus, the Welfare Reform Syllabus, the Trump Syllabus 2.0, and the Trump Syllabus 2.0: Supplementary List.

Black History Month, then, is more than a month-long celebration or an obligatory relic of an outmoded past. Rather it is and continues to serve as the catalyst for the transmission of a dynamic historical memory embedded in the collective striving of a global people to celebrate their historical past, affirm their humanity, and share the richness and vibrancy of their history as a communal act.

This piece was originally published at The African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) blog

Stephen G. Hall is the Program Coordinator of History at Alcorn State University. He is the author of A Faithful Account of the Race: African American Historical Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (UNC Press, 2009).  He is currently completing an edited book entitled History as A Communal Act: African American Historians and Historical Writing Past and Present (Routledge Press, forthcoming). His second book project is entitled Global Visions: African American Historians Engage the World, 1885–1960. (Bio credit: AAIHS)

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