A "Central Theme" in Black History: Teaching about the Black Past Requires Teaching about the South

Before taking on a full-time administrative position, for two decades I regularly taught an undergraduate lecture-based survey course entitled African American History Since 1876.In sixteen weeks, I ambitiously strove to introduce the basics of more than a century of Black history to diverse groups of Millennial and Gen Z undergraduate learners who had little to no pre-knowledge of the subject matter.Whether deliberately framed as such or not, much of this history is unequivocally the history of African Americans in the South.My own research doesn't focus on the history of the South. 1 As a budding historian, apart from a few graduate seminars on slavery, I had little exposure to the complex history and exhaustive historiography of this region. 2 Of the numerous doctoral candidates I've advised, only two completed dissertations grounded in the history of the South.Yet, as an African Americanist historian, my engagement with the history of the South-namely, how African Americans from this sometimes ambiguously identified area lived, thought, and made choices during various periods-has been inevitable in and outside the classroom.I was reminded of the ubiquitous influence of the South on Black history, and vice versa, during my term as editor of the Journal of African American History, when 40 percent of the published articles focused on African American life in the South.To be frank, I confess that I've not calculatedly pondered how I've taught about the South within the context of my Black history pedagogy.I'm sure that over my long career as a spirited lecturer I've