by Chester J. Fontenot, Jr., Ph.D.,
Baptist Professor of English and Director Africana Studies Program, Mercer University

I entered college in Whittier, CA with a basketball scholarship. This financial aid was necessary for me since when I enrolled at the predominately white college as a freshman, scholarships for African American students were few and far between. So, despite graduating from high school with a very high and scoring well on the SAT, my high school counselor told me that my best option was to accept the athletic scholarship, play basketball in college, maintain respectable grades, and try to play professional basketball. So, I followed my counselor’s advice, but found once I enrolled in college, that my scholarship didn’t cover all of my expenses. While it paid for my tuition, fees, housing and meals, it didn’t cover my living expenses during the summers. This was problematic because basketball players were required to participate in on campus training during the summers.

The college made an attempt to help me and my teammates by finding part-time jobs for us, but the money we earned didn’t come close to covering our expenses. Nearly all of my teammates had parents who helped them financially, but my parents did not have the resources to help me. Both my mother and father had emigrated to Los Angeles from Louisiana, but the segregated South had deprived them of the ability to compete for jobs alongside the better educated population in Southern California. Also, I didn’t have the option of going back home and finding a job, since when my parents moved us to Compton, the community rapidly began to change into a low-income area infested with crime and drugs.

So, there I was, a college student who, after successfully navigating my freshman year, was trying to find a place to live and a job to earn enough money for the summer and to pay for some amenities during the next academic year. One of my classmates was aware of my plight. Without my knowledge, he asked his parents in San Diego if they would help me find a job and allow me to live with him and his family for the summer. His parents agreed, and I found myself living with a wonderful Jewish family.

Other than my friend, this family also had two other children, and one of them was an 11-year-old boy. This young boy and I became close — he was especially captivated by my basketball abilities and asked me to teach him how to play. One day when I came back to this family’s home after working, I expected to see this lad in his basketball clothes waiting for our daily workouts, but instead I saw him sitting at the dining table with a number of pamphlets, a writing tablet, and a pen. I asked him if he was enrolled in summer classes — he said he wasn’t. Then, I asked him what he was studying for, and he told me he was reading materials he had brought home from the synagogue. When I looked at the pamphlets, I found they were about famous Jews in history: Dr. Albert Einstein, Karl Marx, Elie Wiesel, and others. This boy’s parents heard the conversation I was having with him, came in the kitchen, and joined the dialogue. The father told me that their synagogue had an age-appropriate curriculum for Jewish children. Then, he said something I will never forget: “You don’t think that we’d allow people who tried to kill us to control what our children learn, do you?”

This man’s statement hit me like a ton of bricks. When the summer ended, and I returned to campus for the fall semester, I began to search for books and other reading materials about Black history. Years later, I found a copy of Dr. Carter G. Woodson’s “The Miseducation of the Negro,” published in 1933. As I read this book, the question that this Jewish father asked me came to life. I began to see that many of the problems that African Americans experience are the result of institutional racism and our miseducation.

Dr. Woodson, the second Black to graduate from Harvard University with a Ph.D., worked alongside Dr. W.E.B. DuBois, Dr. Alaine Locke, and other Black intellectuals, writers, artists, social activists, and political figures, to try to change the misrepresentations of Black people that had become ingrained in Western culture. Dr. Woodson, the founder of Negro History Week (in 1970 it became Black History Month), and the first Black scholarly association, The Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, argued that Black people would only be uplifted when they are taught Black History.

Now this may seem like a bold claim to many of us, but Dr. Woodson offered a convincing analysis of the reasons that Black people, as a whole, hadn’t, in 1933, made the progress that he and others had expected. He argues the following:

First, instead of learning the truth about the history of people of African descent, Black people were taught with a Europeanized curriculum that, at its very core, held that Black people are inferior. The educational system privileged European traditions, languages, cultures, religions, etc., over those of people of African descent. And Dr. Woodson argued that it didn’t matter if Black people attended predominately White or Black schools — they studied the same curriculum that misrepresented Black people. He also found that in nearly all of the colleges in the US, courses focused on Black history and culture were practically nonexistent. Dr. Woodson concludes from this that the inability of Blacks to make significant progress is grounded in their miseducation. And to make matters worse, he argued that Blacks had internalized this incorrect education.

Second, Dr. Woodson argued that this system of miseducation was maintained not only by white supremacists, but also by Blacks who had bought into the subjugation of their own people for personal profit. These Black people had attained higher education, but the more of this miseducation they received, the less value they had for their own race. Europeanized education embraced individualism while Black history emphasized the collective nature of Black people. Without being taught Black history, many highly educated Black people adopted a model of success that required them to separate themselves from the masses of Black people. This split in the Black populace contributed to the development of ghettos, or what young people now call “the hood.” As more upwardly mobile Blacks removed themselves and their resources from traditional Black communities, those who were left found themselves trapped in areas without the capacity to sustain their betterment.

Third, Dr. Woodson maintained that the absence of Black history in academic curriculums produced African Americans who did not see the need to return to the communities from which they came, and to contribute to racial uplifting by, for example, helping Black businesses succeed. This left less educated African Americans to fend for themselves, so to speak, without the guidance and support from members of their own communities who had “made it.”

Fourth, Dr. Woodson believed that white supremacy would only be eradicated when White people are taught the truth of the history of Black people. During the 19th and most of the 20th centuries, American popular culture was immersed in misrepresentations of Black people as a bastard race, with no history other than US slavery. These stereotypes characterized Blacks as Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, Bucks and Pickanniny’s, personages that were either comical, pitied, or feared. And these images of African Americans were at the foundation of racist, segregationist thinking, policies, and legislation. We can see these racialized misrepresentations of Blacks in our contemporary society as we struggle against political, social, and economic policies and programs designed to constrain African Americans and keep them in their subordinate place.

Dr. Woodson argued, and I agree, that the solution to the problems I’ve discussed above is to inject a healthy dose of authentic, positive Black history into academic curriculums, and to infuse it into other areas of African American and general American culture. Further, it is important that people of African descent control their own historical narrative to prevent any miseducation from being introduced. As I first read Dr. Woodson’s book, and contemplated the question the Jewish father asked me, I came to realize that teaching Black history is important to Black people for the reasons I’ve written above, and to non-blacks who are imbued, miseducated about the nature and value of people of African descent. And it is also important for Blacks to study, research, and publish on African American history and culture(s) to generate their own narrative(s), and not allow those who believe that Blacks are inferior to control their representation.