Page:Journal of Negro History, vol. 7.djvu/130

 

As Negro history has been so long neglected, it will require some time to develop in this field the necessary standard to secure a distinction between the significant and insignificant and between truth and fiction. On account of the emphasis which has been recently given to this study, many novices lacking especially the historical point of view have entered this field because it is so productive that it is an easy task to write a work therein. Benjamin Brawley whose chief preparation and efforts have been restricted to English is one of these novices. Among his first efforts were A Short History of the American Negro and The Negro in Literature and Art. In neither of these works does he exhibit the knowledge required by the standards of present day historiography. This more recent work although more extensive than the others has no better claim to its being called history.

There can be no question as to many valuable facts contained in this work, but it lacks proportion, style, and accuracy. The book begins with a study of African origins based largely on Wiener's Africa and the Discovery of America and upon Lady Lugard's Tropical Dependency. He next takes up the Negro in the Spanish exploration but has little or nothing to say about the Negroes in connection with other explorers. His treatment of the development of the slave trade and of the introduction of slavery shows a slightly improved conception of his task. In his discussion of the Negroes in the colonies, into which he works servitude and slavery, the Indian, the mulatto, the free Negro, and efforts for social betterment, he presents a veritable hodgepodge. Passing then to the study of the estrangement from Great Britain, the participation of the Negro in the Revolutionary War, and the effect of that movement upon the Negro's social and political situation, he exhibits no scientific grasp of the status of the Negroes during the eighteenth century or of what they were thinking and doing. The treatment of the new West, the South, and the West Indies, which follows this portion of the book is merely certain generalizations which may be obtained from an 