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The Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (now ASALH) 20th anniversary planning committee in 1936. (Courtesy Chicago Public Library.)
When Sen. Chris Murphy questioned President Trump’s nominee for secretary of education, Linda McMahon, during the Senate’s Feb. 13 confirmation hearing, Murphy asked how McMahon would expect public schools to interpret the Trump administration’s executive order commanding federal agencies, including the Department of Education, to eliminate grants to organizations and entities that support DEI. “My son is in a public school. He takes a class called ‘African American History,’” Murphy said, adding that the class has been taught for decades. “If you’re running an African American History class, could you perhaps be in violation of this executive order?” That was a question, McMahon replied, that she would need to look into.
For the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) — established 110 years ago by Carter G. Woodson, the founder of Black History Month — questioning whether African American history should be part of public-school curriculum is a matter of history is repeating itself. “You can see mirrors of what’s happening now at different points in history,” Augustus Wood, a member of the ASALH executive council, told Convene. “When Dr. Carter G. Woodson first founded the association, he was facing similar threats that we’re facing. When Dr. Woodson first proposed African American scholars taking hold of African American history, it was at a time when he was combating this very whitewashed history that often depicted African Americans as being childlike, docile, and uncivilized” until Americans enslaved them and gave them skills, he said, “that they otherwise would not have gotten — that kind of stuff, misinterpretation and miseducation.”
Augustus Wood, member of the ASALH executive council.
An African American history scholar and author of the soon-to-be-published book Class Warfare in Black Atlanta: Grassroots Struggles, Power, and Repression Under Gentrification, Wood is assistant professor in the School of Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He spoke with Convene in his role as program chair for the ASALH’s 110th annual conference to be held Sept. 24-28 in Atlanta, Georgia.
“We’re going through the exact same thing today because the similarities between both moments is that those in power in the current administration, as well as multiple groups in the local and state levels, are adamant about removing African American history — a ‘war on truth’ is what I call it,” Wood said. “The idea that learning African American history is detrimental to the empowerment of people is one of the grossest lies that we’ve ever been told. In fact, the studies show that when African Americans, when Latinx Americas — even white Americans — learn true history, it gives them a better sense of self, it gives them a better sense of community, and it gives them a better sense of pride in [understanding] the history of the world.”
Wood said that he thinks “the biggest challenge we face right now is a redistribution of resources away from African American history as well as federal, state, and local spaces that belong to the public to either [provide] African American history or to open spaces for people to be able to learn about their own past, to study about it.”
Planning for Atlanta
Confronting that challenge is helping to inform the agenda for the upcoming conference in Atlanta, which is themed around African Americans and labor. “Our conference is about both celebrating and learning history,” Wood said, “but also using that history as a functional tool to understand our present-day predicament.” ASALH opened the call for session proposals in January, and “since then, we’ve gotten a flurry of panelists who are incredibly excited about, not just labor, but talking about and collectivizing our issues around African American history — how to protect it, how to expand it. We are engaging in a Freedom School movement at ASALH right now, which has got a lot of different groups around the country incredibly excited that we’re essentially going back to the roots of what Dr. Carter G. Woodson wanted — which is to control our own history and use our resources to deliver a history that empowers people.”
The ASALH Freedom Schools, patterned after the Freedom Schools first established in the 1960s during the Civil Rights Movement, are free, community-based Saturday programs dedicated to teaching “the truthful history of Africans and African Americans in the founding, formation, and development of American society and culture” to any child in kindergarten to 12th grade, according to the ASALH Manasota branch in Florida, a state where six new ASALH Freedom Schools recently have been added. The ASALH Freedom Schools — more new branches are emerging in Dallas, Indianapolis, and Urbana-Champaign, Illinois — help fill educational gaps for Black students, according a recent post in Word in Black, a collaboration of 10 Black news publishers.
Jacksonville History Lesson
Convene asked Wood whether he expected DEI backlash and government funding cuts would result in a decrease in the association’s typical 3,500-person attendance at the ASALH conference in Jacksonville next September — or the opposite, that the current environment would spur a larger number of members of the Black history academic community to find the means to gather as a community. It’s too early to say about the first scenario, Wood said. “There have been literally dozens of challenges to the current administration’s dismantling of federal resources that relate to African American history and research. On the one hand, you have these executive orders going out. On the other hand, you have a bunch of amazing organizations and lawyers working together 24 hours a day to combat it using the legal system.”
Regardless of the “federal situation,” ASALH has always been community-based, Wood said, “meaning that our people and those in the public, whether they be individuals or organizations or Fortune 500 companies, whether they be fraternal organizations, we’ve always been financed by people who believe what we’re doing is going to make a better world.”
As for the second possibility, that the current environment would increase attendance, Woods pointed to ASALH’s 2023 conference in Jacksonville, Florida — which attracted the annual event’s highest number of participants in over a decade — as a good indicator. “When we had our conference in Jacksonville, it was right after [Gov. Ron DeSantis] of Florida issued a declaration to attack African American studies, essentially creating the blueprint for the current administration’s dismantling at the federal level,” he said. DeSantis “was doing it at the state level, saying that he was going to remove funding for the teaching of African American studies and African American studies as an advanced placement course.”
That move galvanized ASALH to bring its conference to Jacksonville, Wood said. “We took the opportunity to rally everybody to say, ‘We’re not going to allow this inhumane and ignorant push against the truth and the history that enriches us all.’” ASALH made the decision not to run away from — but towards — the fight, Wood added.
“We see a similar trajectory happening today,” he said. “The more and more we talk about why our history is necessary for us to grow as humans, the more we allow other people to have a say in the really innovative way that we run our conferences, have different topics, have these engaging plenaries and other outside events, the more people are saying, ‘That’s how you run to the fight.’
“We come together to showcase what a beautiful space it is for multiple groups across the world coming to an ASALH conference to debate, to discuss, to celebrate, and to experience African American history in all the different ways,” Wood added. “That’s what we see happening right now, that people are running to the fight alongside us. That’s our moniker. We expect everyone to be there with us. We have local community members. We have activists on the ground. We have public school teachers. We have elected officials. We have all these different groups who believe what we’re doing is going to make the world better.”
Stay tuned for more articles from Convene on ASALH’s upcoming annual conference.
Michelle Russell is editor in chief of Convene.