Providing a "Usable Past": Reconciling Secondary and Primary Sources in Black Education History

• In Event: 68.021 - Innovations: Exploring Theoretical and Methodological Approaches in the History of Black Education

Abstract

Sound historical inquiry must reckon with, and even rely on, the groundwork laid in existing scholarship. Secondary sources test a researcher’s bias, and provide the foundational breadth of knowledge necessary to contextualize deeper inquiry into particular historical circumstances. However, secondary materials, particularly in black education history, also present difficulties. Overreliance on the claims and findings of those before risks repeating predictable, yet loosely-founded, interpretations (Gaddis 2002). On the other hand, those who seek to amend such routine analyses risk dismissing opposing arguments wholesale, finding in the archives “only what they want to find” (Gallagher 2001, p. 845). Historian Ronald Butchart (1988) conjectures that in the end revisionism may not yield a collective body of knowledge, but tend toward “unique lines of interpretation, each leading to exclusive conclusions” (p. 360). For those who study black education history, this proves problematic as both Butchart and V.P. Franklin (1973) underscore our obligation to uncover a past usable for “charting a relevant educational future for black children” (p. 484).

Researchers must at once examine secondary sources with openness to confronting our own bias, and examine primary sources with attention to how they complicate or corroborate prior claims, neither dogmatically accepting previous interpretations, nor skeptically discrediting all that came before. Underlying this tension is the question: How do we, as scholars of black education, objectively consider existing research while remaining attentive to what the primary evidence has to tell us? Per Chris Gallagher (2001), good revisionist history requires that we not allow “our enthusiasm for revisionism to outstrip our ability or our willingness to confront the tough questions it poses for us… at issue here is how we enact this work” (p. 844). This paper examines our confrontation with discontinuities between secondary and primary materials, and how we work through them.

Using my own research on Louisiana’s gens de couleur libres, I offer up my challenges with these tensions, and the new understanding made possible through reconciling primary evidence and secondary accounts (Johnson 2015). I have encountered historians’ claims that this community aped, mimicked, and obsessively emulated white society (Berlin 1974; Brasseaux et al., 1994; Blassingame 1973; Sterkx 1972). At the same time, some scholars have helped to illuminate the subtle complexities found in the primary evidence (Clark 2013; Hall 1992; Mills 1977). Additionally, seeking to understand the role that antebellum Louisiana’s culture played in the educational attainment of its community of color, the secondary literature has contested my own assumptions about French racial liberalism. This has compelled me to reconsider and ask new questions of the primary sources. Importantly, interpretive disagreements regarding Louisiana’s early society have challenged me to moderate my claims and clarify my research questions.

Butchart’s (1988) assessment of revisionism is apt: the best revisionist studies remain “sensitive to contradiction and conflict among competing visions” (p. 335). That is, we must face the dissonance between not only primary and secondary evidence, but between our own understanding and what is to be found in these sources. The difficult task here is not just to revise, but to come to a new understanding.

Author

• Alisha Johnson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign