William Mulligan
Contributing Writer
Thanks to the opinion editor for the invitation and encouragement to write about African-American History Month. I am often asked about my interest in African-American history – why do you research African-Americans during the Civil War in West Kentucky? Why are you teaching a course on African-American history — you’re white/Irish? The same questions, posed in different ways, with different degrees of wonder over many years. There is no simple answer, and there is a simple answer. The short answer is that it is impossible to understand American history without coming to grips with the African-American experience. I say come to grips with instead of understand because the vicious racism and violence directed at African-Americans over centuries defies understanding, lest understanding somehow absolve.
I am a historian who studies the American experience and have been trying to understand it for more than fifty years now. I have focused my original research on people and communities left out of the main narrative. I first became interested in history when I read my father’s high school history textbook. It referred to the United States as a great Protestant nation. Where did I, a Catholic, fit in? Why had my grandfather, who fought in both World Wars, my father and all my uncles but one fight in World War II for this Protestant nation? When I began my career as a historian I quickly noticed that white ethnics, women, and, most of all, people of color were largely excluded from the core narrative and in older works treated with contempt or dismissal. Before he became president, Woodrow Wilson wrote a multi-volume history of the U.S. that refers to happy slaves benefiting from their contact with superior Europeans. That, I was certain, could not be right.
Having spent my career doing that, I confidently state: It is not possible to understand American history at the most basic level without dealing with the African-American experience – i.e. African-American history. It cannot be done. The experience and history of white and black Americans are so interwoven that neither can be understood without a serious effort to understand the other. Being Irish, it turns out, is part of it, in that I am aware of the prejudice, discrimination and violence my ancestors faced and have largely overcome. I dealt with it directly, if briefly, in graduate school. I quickly realized that what we Irish faced pales in comparison to what African-Americans have faced and still face far too often. I study the African-American experience because it is a part of American history that we might want to ignore. My hope is that it does not get ignored because, in a very real way, it is our assessment as a nation.
When we announced our arrival on the world stage as a nation we proudly declared, “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is to insure these rights that governments are instituted among men ….” The man, Thomas Jefferson, who wrote this held hundreds of human beings in bondage. The new nation held several million. BUT – we had stated our founding principle as EQUALITY form the Creator. More than any group, other than Native Americans, the experience of African-Americans is the test of how well we are doing in living up to what we announced to the world as our founding principle. We all have to study and understand that experience if we are to have any sense of what we are as a nation and how we are doing in terms our goals. In 1776, all men may have been created equal, but they were far from it. How much progress have we made? How can we do more? We need to study African-American history as a way of charting our progress as a nation toward our self-defined goal.
For example, NASA has finally acknowledged Katherine Johnson and her female African-American colleagues who did the mathematical calculations for early NASA flights. NASA even had her check their early computers for accuracy. Ponder that for a minute. Inferior, good Lord, NO. Why did we not know this at the time? Why were she and her colleagues not celebrated then? Benjamin Banneker (1731-1806) was an accomplished mathematician and astronomer who published an Almanac in 1792. He was born a free black. He wrote and published an Almanac in 1792. There is a long history of accomplishment in difficult, if not near-impossible circumstances. American history is replete with women like Katherine Johnson and men like Benjamin Banneker. They happen to be black. We honor white people who overcame less.
Their lives and many others reveal the great reality our imperfect founders declared – All men (people) are created equal. African-American History Month reminds us of that basic and important American principle.
William H. Mulligan, Jr., PhD
Professor of History
