Association for the Study of Negro Life and History
This source is a journal article written by Ruth Anna Fisher that chronicles the 31st annual meeting of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History which was held in Philadelphia from October 25th to 27th, 1946. In this article, Fisher demonstrates her talents as a historian and archivist while drawing on her knowledge and involvement in the Pan-Africanist movement to recount the themes of the meeting. Further, Fisher expands upon these topics to discuss the crucial role of historians in recognizing and celebrating black history, which has often been disregarded and silenced well into the twenty-first century. The themes of the 31st meeting include the state of African, Latin American, and West Indian affairs as well as the status of schooling for black children, black suffrage, and the neglect of American history to acknowledge African American contributions. Fisher, as an African American historian having resided in London, employs her identity as a black woman American expatriate to express sentiments about racism and white privilege in the United States, England, and across the world. However, Fisher refrains from drawing on her own personal experiences, and rather highlights the racial struggles of her peers and contemporaries as highlighted in the work and lectures of these speakers.
The Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH) was established in Chicago in 1915 and still exists as the oldest and the largest historical society for African American History. The Association’s mission statement is “to promote, research, preserve, interpret, and disseminate information about Black life, history and culture to the global community.” In 1972, the organization’s name was changed to the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH). The organization’s primary founder, Dr. Carter Godwin Woodson, also established The Journal of Negro History as a source for professionally trained scholars studying black history as well as The Negro History Bulletin, a publication intended for an audience of high school teachers in order to promote black history in their curricula.[i] In addition to attending the Association’s meetings and chronicling the 31st annual occurrence for The Negro History Bulletin, Fisher also often published her other works in these two journals.
Ruth Anna Fisher’s involvement with the ASNLH makes sense given that the bulk of her archival and analytical work focused primarily on black history, thus making her a significant voice in both the organization and more broadly in the movement as a whole. It is clear that the ASNLH recognized Fisher’s skills as a historian and archivist in that she was selected to chronicle the 31st annual meeting. Not only was Fisher chosen to literally archive the meeting into a formal document that historians of the future could analyze, but her own personal work reflected the goals of the ASNLH as well. Fisher’s articles, including “Granville Sharp and Lord Mansfield” and “Manuscript Materials Bearing on the Negro in British Archives,” discussed questions of racial inequality, the history and legacies of slavery, Pan-Africanism, and analyzed the state of black history in the archives as a contested institutional space. Especially towards the ending of the piece, Fisher’s detailed article about the 31st annual ASNLH meeting demonstrates her status as a scholar of history by emphasizing the importance of historians to “tell the truth” and recognize the contributions of African Americans and black people throughout the history of the United States and the world, which she actively does in her scholarship.
Despite women like Fisher being trailblazers in the emerging discipline of black history, in the mid-twentieth century, the ASNLH was still a very male-dominated organization. Thus, given Fisher’s identity as a black woman, it is interesting to note that despite the large majority of people who spoke during the meeting having been men, Fisher cited one woman as having spoken: Miss Wilhemina M. Crosson. Crosson was a representative from the Boston Public Schools and discussed intercultural education in Mexico and her article on this topic was published in the same issue of The Negro History Bulletin as Fisher’s meeting notes. It makes sense that Fisher would emphasize Crosson’s work as they were certainly in the minority at the meeting as female scholars. However, it is interesting to consider the relationship between Fisher’s womanhood and her work as an archivist and historian since she frequently wrote about black history, but rarely expanded her analyses into discussions of gender.
Fisher’s primary focus was not on the disparities between black women and black men or white women, but more generally on inequalities along the color line both historically and contemporarily. Her archival work centered mostly around the trade of enslaved people in British and American history which was based on the sources available in various archives and private libraries in London. Fisher genuinely practiced what she preached in making public the achievements and contributions of black people in history. For example, in this article, Fisher poignantly states that,
“There are many historians now who are invalidating these statements, substituting for them the truth for which they cite chapter and verse. Yet they should never be permitted to forget that while it is easy to wrong a people by withholding or coloring facts either because they deliberately wish to distort the truth or are ignorant of it, the harm which they do in one classroom or in one article or book is incalculable and may require years to right, if indeed it is ever righted.”
Thus, it is the goal of historians like Fisher to mend the harm done by previous historians that have not only erased black people from the annals of history but have vilified and denigrated them as well. Fisher’s archival and historical work is inherently activist in nature given her very identity as being a black woman operating in spaces dominated by white men, and she goes beyond this baseline activism to tirelessly work towards correcting the narrative and organizing the archive to allow for the historical contributions of the black community to be recognized more honestly and completely. Fisher’s very existence as a black woman intellectual contradicts and breaks down the offensive and incorrect ideas that black people are traditionally and stereotypically characterized by what Fisher herself recognizes as “laziness and indolence.” It is even more impressive, then, that Fisher was able to work past these harmful stereotypes in her own work and succeeded in advancing the early movement to publicize and rectify black history in the wider study of the discipline.
[i] Malik Simba, “The Association for the Study of African American Life and History: A Brief History,” Black Past, January 14, 2010. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/association-study-african-american-life-and-history-brief-history/