The Journal of Negro History, Volume 8, 1923

by Various

Research

For the first time in the history of the Association its researches have taken a definite course. Up to the year just ended, the Association had the benefit of merely what investigations the Director's manifold duties permitted him to conduct, or of what others of their own will worked out in the interest of unearthing the truth. Thanks to the appropriations of the Carnegie Corporation and the Laura Spellman Rockefeller Memorial, however, the Association can now outline a definite program of investigation and systematically carry it out. For the present the staff is engaged in the study of the Free Negro prior to 1861 and Negro Reconstruction History.

With the assistance of a copyist, Mrs. C. B. Overton, the Director has been preparing a report on the Free Negro in the United States. This report will be decidedly statistical, giving the names of the persons of color who were heads of families in 1830, where they were living, how many were in each family, how many slaves each owned, and what relation these free Negroes sustained to the white people. This research covers also the statistics of absentee ownership of slaves by whites. The first volume of the report will be published within the next six months. Using it as a basis, the Director will make further investigation of the Free Negroes to determine their economic status, their social position, the attitude of the southern whites toward this class, and the opinion of the North with respect to them as citizens.

Working in this same field, but developing special aspects of this history, are Mr. George F. Dow and Miss Irene A. Wright. Mr. George F. Dow has been employed to read the 18th century colonial newspapers of New England for facts bearing on the Negro. Up to the present, however, he has been unable to finish this task and does not promise to accomplish much until next fall. Miss Irene A. Wright is now extracting from the Archives of the Indies in Seville, Spain, some valuable documents showing the part the Negroes played in the early struggle between the British and Spanish in America and especially the records of the Mose Settlement of Negroes in Florida and the achievements of the Negroes in Louisiana. Miss Wright will also copy all accessible documents of Latin-America giving accounts of Negroes in higher spheres of usefulness. The Association is endeavoring to employ an investigator to render the same sort of service in the British Museum and the Public Record Office in London.

During the year the Association has had one worker in Negro Reconstruction History. This was Mr. A. A. Taylor, an alumnus of the University of Michigan, who has recently received the degree of Master of Arts for graduate work done at Harvard University under Professors W. C. Abbott, F. J. Turner, and Edward Channing. Although he has devoted only a part of his time to this research, he has produced one valuable dissertation, The Social Conditions and Treatment of Negroes in South Carolina, 1865-1880. He has also made a scientific study of the social and economic conditions of the Negroes in Virginia for the same period, but has not yet completed this treatise. It is expected that it will be ready for publication within the next twelve months. Mr. Taylor will continue this work as Associate Investigator, permanently employed by the Association to devote all of his time to this effort.

The Association continues its interest in the work of training young men for scientific investigation. As far as possible it will follow its program of educating in the best graduate schools with libraries bearing on Negro Life and History, three young men supported by fellowships of $500 each from the Association and such additional stipends as the schools themselves may grant for their support. These students are assigned to different fields, one to make Anthropometric and Psychological measurements of Negroes, one to study African Anthropology and Archaeology, and one to take up history as it has been influenced by the Negro.

Closely connected with these plans, moreover, are certain other projects to preserve Negro folklore. In this effort the Association has the co-operation of Dr. Elsie Clews Parsons, the moving spirit of the American Folklore Society. She is now desirous of making a more systematic effort to embody this part of the Negro civilization and she believes that the work can be more successfully done by co-operation with the Association. As soon as the Director can obtain a special fund for this particular work, an investigator will be employed to undertake it. For the present the Association is endeavoring to stimulate interest in this field by offering a prize of $200 for the best collection of tales, riddles, proverbs, sayings, and songs, which have been heard at home by Negro students of accredited schools.

The interest in the result of these researches has become all but nation-wide. Most advanced institutions of learning now make some use of historical works on the Negro. The Negro in Our History has met with the general welcome as a much desired volume giving the essential facts of Negro achievement. It has been extensively used as collateral reading and has been adopted as a text in more than a score of schools and colleges. The demand for this book is so rapidly increasing that the second edition has been almost exhausted. The third edition, which is now in preparation, will be revised and enlarged so as to give more attention to the Negro in freedom, a period of more concern to most students than that of the Negro before the Civil War.

In almost every center of considerable Negro population and in most of the large schools of the race there are clubs or classes engaged in the study of Negro life and history. Some of these were organized under the supervision of the Association and others sprang up of themselves in response to the increasing desire among Negroes to know about themselves and to publish such information to a world uninformed as to what the race has thought and felt and attempted and done. These groups thus interested in the scientific study of the Negro, moreover, are not restricted to the schools and communities controlled by this race. The Association has found little difficulty in interesting advanced students in large northern universities, and this work has extended to some of the best white schools of the South.