Today’s must read: “Ten myths, half-truths and misunderstandings about Black history”
on June 18th, 2007 at 3:22 amI’ll just highlight two points on this list.
Found on diverseeducation.com (link to article)
Myth 1:
The Black Family Structure was Destroyed in Slavery.
This outdated perspective was developed in the early 1900s by a group of racist historians known as the Dunning School Unfortunately, it was adopted by Dr. Edward Franklin Frazier, an African American professor at Howard University, while working on The Negro Family in the United States (1939) Frazier believed that the family problems of African Americans during the 1930s could be explained by the “catastrophe of slavery.” In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who would join the U.S. Senate eleven years later, based much of his infamous report, The Negro Family in America: The Case for National Action, on Frazier’s work.
However, a wealth of new information reveals that earlier conclusions seriously underestimated the strength of the Black family According to Dr. John Hope Franklin, Herbert Gutman’s classic book, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom (1976), “successfully challenged the traditional view that slavery virtually destroyed the Afro-American family.” Black families were under incredible stress during slavery but they also evolved new structures to meet the crisis Blaming all of the problems of some Black families on the past influence of slavery underestimates contemporary factors such as racism, unemployment and drugs.
Suggested Readings Peter Kolchin’s American Slavery, 1619-1877 (1993); Alan Kulikoff’s Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake (1986); Theresa Singelton’s The Archaeology of Slavery and Plantation Life (1985); Genevieve Fabre and Robert O’Meally’s History and Memory of African American Culture (1994); Leland Ferguson’s Uncommon Ground: Archaeology and Early African Americans, 1650-1800 (1992); and John Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (1972).
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Myth 3:
Slave communities were clearly divided into two classes of people: House Negroes, who led easy lives, and Field Negroes, who bore the brunt of slavery’s brutality.
This myth reflects another of Frazier’s conclusions. As a sociologist, he was interested in the origins of class divisions in African American society. Newer research indicates that there were no distinct classes among enslaved African Americans. Most slaves who worked in houses were women who often suffered much abuse. In addition, some slaves–usually men who were blacksmiths, tanners, and other artisans–didn’t work in either houses or fields.
SUGGESTED READINGS: Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life (1993), edited by Ira Berlin and Philip Morgan; Ira Berlin’s and Roland Hoffman’s Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution (1983); Nathan Huggins’s Black Odyssey: The African American Ordeal in Slavery (1990); and Discovering the Women in Slavery: Emancipating Perspectives on the American Past (1996), edited by Patricia Morton.
