ABSTRACT
The movement from Negro History to Black History has amazing parallels to the political encounter, partly because they are both really a part of the larger issue. Black History is that plunge which refuses to fall prey to the American dream, which is romanticism and childlike avoidance of tragedy and death. Black History does not seek to highlight the outstanding contributions of special black people to the life and times of America. Black History looks at the slave codes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and it reminds a society obsessed by pseudo-law-and-order that the first law and order we knew was the law of our repression and our bondage, the order that comes naturally out of death. Black History is the constant demand that the cancerous state of America be seen and known. Black History cannot help but be politically oriented, for it tends toward the total redefinition of an experience which was highly political.
