Resisting the Master Narrative: Building the Alternative Black Counter-Canon

Murray, Alana D.

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-91418-3_4

Alana D. Murray²

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Abstract

This chapter will examine the process of “narrative rewriting” of a counter-canon as an essential part of the development of the alternative black curriculum. First, the Chapter will consider the different institutional visions of Carter G. Woodson and W.E.B. Du Bois as they sought to define the contours of the alternative black curriculum. Two periodicals will be presented: The Brownie Book and The Negro History Bulletin. Edited by W.E.B. Du Bois and Jessie Redmon Fauset, The Brownie Book was the first literary magazine targeting African American children. This chapter then examines the career of Leila Amos Pendleton who wrote A Narrative of the Negro (1912), one of the few textbooks written by black women during the Progressive Era. In addition, I will compare the texts Unsung Heroes by Elizabeth Ross Haynes and Missing Pages in American History by Laura Eliza Wilkes as exemplars of books which also challenge narratives in textbooks. Finally, the Chapter will examine the books The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933) and Black Reconstruction (1935) as exemplars of the counter-canon that are embodied in the alternative black curriculum.

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Notes

1.
Jesus Garcia, Donna M. Ogle, and C. Frederick Risinger, eds., Creating America: Beginnings through Reconstruction (Geneva, CH: Houghton-Mifflin, 2008).
2.
Gary B. Nash, “The ‘Convergence’ Paradigm in Studying Early American History,” in Knowing, Teaching, and Learning: National and International Perspectives, eds., Peter B. Sexias, Sam Wineburg, and Peter Stearns (New York: The New York University Press, 2000), 103–120.
3.
Wayne Au, Anthony Brown, and Dolores Calderon, Reclaiming the Multicultural Roots of the U.S. Curriculum: Communities of Color and Official Knowledge in Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 2016).
4.
Novick, That Noble Dream, 61.
5.
Bruce VanSledright, “Narratives of Nation-State, Historical Knowledge, and School History Education,” Review of Educational Research 32 (February 2008): 113.
6.
Frances Fitzgerald, America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1979), 83.
7.
James Loewen. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (New York: Touchstone, 1995).
8.
Anthony Brown, “Counter-memory and Race,” 55–63.
9.
David Jenness, “Making Sense of Social Studies,” 67.
10.
Chara Bohan, “Early Vanguards of Progressive Education,” 73–94.
11.
Jenness, “Making Sense of Social Studies,” 73.
12.
Pero Gaglo Dagbovie, “Black Women, Carter G. Woodson, and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History,” 26.
13.
Dagbovie, “Black Women, Carter G. Woodson, and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History,” 30.
14.
LaGarrett J. King, Ryan Crowley, and Anthony L. Brown, “The Forgotten Legacy of Carter G. Woodson: Contributions to Multicultural Social Studies and African American History,” 211–215.
15.
King et al, “The Forgotten Legacy,” 212.
16.
Carter G. Woodson, “The Negro History Bulletin,” April 1939.
17.
Dagbovie, “Black Women, Carter G. Woodson, and Association for the Study of Negro Life and History,” 30.
18.
Ibid.
19.
Traki Taylor, “Womanhood Glorified”, 398.
20.
Dagbovie, “Black Women, Carter G. Woodson, and Association for the Study of Negro Life and History,” 30.
21.
Ibid., 31.
22.
James V. Hatch and Ted Shine, eds., Black Theatre USA: Plays by African-Americans (New York: The Free Press, 1974), 87.
23.
Hatch and Shine, Black Theatre USA, 87.
24.
Courtney Vaughn-Roberson and Brenda Hill, “The Brownies’ Book and Ebony Jr.!: Literature as a Mirror of the Afro-American Experience,” The Journal of Negro Education 58 (Autumn, 1989): 494–510.
25.
Vaughn-Roberson and Hill, “The Brownies’ Book,” 495.
26.
Katharine Capshaw Smith, Children’s Literature of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004).
27.
Vaughn-Roberson and Hill, “The Brownies’ Book,” 495.
28.
Ibid., 495.
29.
W.E.B. Du Bois, “The True Brownies,” The Crisis (1919), 285–286.
30.
Vaughn-Roberson and Hill, “The Brownies’ Book,” 495.
31.
W.E.B. Du Bois, “As the Crow Flies” The Brownies’ Book, 1920, V2.
32.
Viola J. Harris, “Race Consciousness, Refinement, and Radicalism: Socialization in The Brownies’ Book,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 14 (1989): 195.
33.
Joy James, Transcending the Talented Tenth: Black Leaders and American Intellectuals (New York: Routledge, 1997), 43.
34.
Joy James, Transcending the Talented Tenth, 44.
35.
Abby Arthur Johnson, “Literary Midwife: Jessie Redmon Fauset and the Harlem Renaissance,” Phylon (1978): 145.
36.
Carolyn Wedin Sylvander, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Black American Writer (Troy, NY: The Whitson Publishing Company, 1981), 116.
37.
Johnson, “Literary Midwife,” 143.
38.
Johnson, “Literary Midwife,” 147.
39.
LaGarrett King, “A Narrative to the Colored Children in America”: Leila Amos Pendleton, African American History, Textbooks, and Challenging Personhood,” The Journal of Negro Education 84 (4), 519–533.
40.
LaGarrett King, A Narrative to the Colored Children in America, 521.
41.
Leila Amos Pendleton, A Narrative of the Negro (Washington, DC: Press of R.L. Pendleton, 1915), 9.
42.
Pendleton, A Narrative of the Negro, 38–44.
43.
Pendleton, A Narrative of the Negro, 44–53.
44.
Pendleton, A Narrative of the Negro, 54–63.
45.
Pendleton, A Narrative of the Negro, 74–80.
46.
Pendleton, A Narrative of the Negro, 83.
47.
Pendleton, A Narrative of the Negro, 101.
48.
Pendleton, A Narrative of the Negro, 156.
49.
Pendleton, A Narrative of the Negro, 139–142.
50.
Pendleton, A Narrative of the Negro, 101.
51.
Iris Carlton-LaNey, “Elizabeth Ross Haynes: An African American Reformer of Womanist Consciousness, 1908–1940,” Social Work 42(6), 573–583.
52.
Carlton-LaNey, Elizabeth Ross Haynes, 577.
53.
Carlton-LaNey, Elizabeth Ross Haynes, 578.
54.
Elizabeth Ross Haynes, Unsung Heroes (New York: Du Bois and Dill, Publishers, 1921).
55.
Ross Haynes, Unsung Heroes, 11.
56.
Ibid., 41.
57.
Ibid., 117.
58.
Ibid., 87.
59.
Ibid., 209.
60.
Laura E. Wilkes, Missing Pages in American History: Revealing the Services of Negroes in the Early Wars in the United States of America, 1614–1815 (London: Forgotten Books, 2015).
61.
Wilkes, Missing Pages in American History: Revealing the Services of Negroes in the Early Wars in the United States of America, 1614–1815, 56.
62.
Ibid., 17.
63.
Ibid., 26–30.
64.
Ibid., 5.
65.
Ibid., 76–84.
66.
Ibid.
67.
Ibid.
68.
Jeffrey Aaron Snyder, “Progressive Education in Black and White,” 273–293.
69.
Snyder, “Progressive Education,” 280.
70.
Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro, 1–8.
71.
Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro, 150.
72.
Ibid., 19.
73.
Ibid., 7.
74.
Ibid., 18.
75.
Ibid., 21.
76.
Brown, “Counter-memory and Race,” 62.
77.
Jeffrey Aaron Snyder, “Race, Nation and Education,” 86.
78.
These scholars included W.E.B. Du Bois, Rayford Logan, Charles Wesley, Lorenzo Green, and Anna Julia Cooper.
79.
Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 667.
80.
Ibid., 718.
81.
Ibid.
82.
Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 712.
83.
Ibid.
84.
Ibid., 713.

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Montgomery County Public Schools, Rockville, MD, USA
Alana D. Murray

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Murray, A.D. (2018). Resisting the Master Narrative: Building the Alternative Black Counter-Canon. In: The Development of the Alternative Black Curriculum, 1890-1940. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91418-3_4

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91418-3_4
Published: 27 June 2018
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-91417-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-91418-3
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