ABSTRACT

From the very start, African American history was linked to the quest for freedom and citizenship. It was history with an agenda, which sought to use the past in order to address both the present and the future. Thus, for example, Nell “revived” Crispus Attucks (Minardi 2010, 138) and undertook to “rescue from oblivion” the black heroes of the Revolution (Nell 1855, 9) in an avowed eort to force the nation to live up to the promises of its founding documents. His Colored Patriots of the American Revolution clearly addressed the times in which he was living, his exposition of the eects of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law being a case in point. Resurrecting Crispus Attucks as the rst martyr of the American Revolution allowed Nell to denounce the fact that Thomas Sims in 1851 and Anthony Burns in 1854 were dragged back to slavery in the very city where Attucks had died, “both marching over the very ground that ATTUCKS trod” (Nell 1855, 18).1 As Stephen Hall has noted, this use of “black contributions to the American struggle for freedom” was also meant “to recongure the basis of American freedom, citizenship, and democracy” (Hall 2009, 86). Evidence of the “performative” nature of early African American history, which John Ernest has underlined (Ernest 2004, 9), was to be found long after the Civil War was over. Indeed, late nineteenth-century black historians such as George Washington Williams and Joseph T. Wilson, along with early twentieth-century historians like Carter G. Woodson, also wrote African American history in order to ght against the persistent “collective amnesia” of the nation (Lorini 1999, 31). In an oft-quoted remark, Woodson thus emphasized this continued need: “If a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in the danger of being exterminated” (quoted in Dagbovie 2014, 98).