Historically Black Colleges and Universities (1866-present)
During Reconstruction, African Americans immediately began to organize educational institutions for their communities at all levels, including historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) built to nurture social and academic skills and citizenship perspectives for newly freed African Americans after the Civil War. As these institutions developed, they both taught the Euro American canon and built repositories of African American community knowledges to pass on to generations of scholars who have contributed to folklore studies with skills since the late 1860s. Their dedication to nurturing Black educational achievement and scholarship, built pride in the intellectual pursuits of African Americans and established a commitment to broaden the enduring scope of that work. For example, Hampton University opened the first museum dedicated to exhibiting African American cultural and artistic production in 1868. These institutions have served as vibrant centers of theorizing, scholarly research, and presentation of African American folklore scholarship as well as of educating African American folklorists since the late 19th century. They have been primary caretakers of many of the voices and scholarship from African American communities in the U.S. and the diaspora.
For generations, late 19th and early 20th century scholars at HCBUs researched the cultural traditions and practices of African Americans especially in the areas of music, language and oral traditions, history, and community structures and practices to preserve traditional knowledge and practices and to counter stereotypes of African American intellectual and cultural inferiority during segregation. (See table above). Their perspectives ranged from literary and autoethnography to oral and musical transcriptions, musical analyses/and compositions, to community studies and oral history interviews. W.E. B. DuBois illuminated sorrow songs by discussing them as a unique cultural expression of the suffering of Black people. During their early 20th century research, John B. Cade, Marcus Christian, Ophelia Settle Egypt, Willis Laurence James, Charles S. Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, Roscoe Lewis, Lawrence Reddick, Thomas Talley (1870-1952), and John Wesley Work II sought to document and understand the histories and traditions embedded in the experiences of formerly enslaved generations who were reaching the end of their lives. At Fisk University, generations of the Work family educated students in both African American sacred music traditions and European choral traditions. This intergenerational family of musicians and ethnographers were among the earliest African American documenters and presenters of African American traditional music, maintaining much of the original character of the sacred in performances by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, and recording traditional rural blues and other secular music from Southern regional musicians. Willis Laurence James, music faculty at Spelman College in Atlanta, theorized the performance practices of Black sacred music, while J.W. Johnson subscribed to the idea that the merit of spirituals laid in the foundation they could provide for the composition of a truly American classical music tradition. In 1940, Willis Laurence James, co-founded the Fort Valley State Folk Festival, and between 1938 and 1943, James, Jones, and Work III judged competitions and recorded and documented blues, gospel, and other genres of Black music at the annual summer Fort Valley State Folk Festival in Georgia. Lorenzo Dow Turner, faculty at both Howard and Fisk Universities during his career, meticulously demonstrated connections between the linguistic practices of African Americans and the languages of continental Africa in the 1930s and 1940s.
Several scholars from various HBCU’s collaborated in team field projects, often with Fisk graduate students. Notable in interdisciplinary, collaborative research endeavors was Charles S. Johnson, a sociologist who developed and directed the Race and Race Relations Institute at Fisk, organized field teams, and trained numerous African American graduate students in the ethnographic methods of sociology by conducting team community studies in Black communities. C. S. Johnson, John Wesley Work III, and Lewis Wade Jones investigated the lives and traditions of Blacks in transition from an agrarian to urban lifestyle. Seeking to counter racist ideologies and accounts with accurate data and evidence of creativity and humanity in Black lives, these interdisciplinary teams collected folklore through oral interviews and ethnographic observation in order to reclaim their communities’ histories and provide informed descriptions of African Americans lives against the demeaning and distorting stereotypes of racism and segregation. Among the scholarship produced by Johnson’s teams were some of the earliest sets of interviews of formerly enslaved people in Tennessee and Texas, and a project documenting the lives and musical creativity of Black men in the Mississippi Delta. Many of C. S. Johnson’s graduate students later developed stellar careers teaching at other HBCUs and institutions, including Ophelia Settle Egypt (Howard), Lawrence Reddick (Kentucky State and Dillard), Lewis Wade Jones (Tuskegee), Andrew Polk Watson (1894-1969) (Wiley College), Ulysses S. Young (1914-1991) (Bowie State). Samuel Adams, Jr. (1920-2001), also a student of Johnson, became a highly respected international diplomat.
Howard University has particularly cultivated scholars who advocated for realistic and representative images of African American life and history and championed the presentation of African American folklore research and scholarship. Carter G. Woodson (1875-1915), a history professor at Howard University broke ground in leading Black scholars in recovering Black history and built several organizations dedicated to reclaiming and sharing Black history with the public. Sterling A. Brown, renowned English faculty at Howard, was hired as the Director of Negro Affairs for the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) of the Works Project Administration to supervise the inclusion of Black history and folklore in each of the state guidebooks, as well as to write the Black history guide for the nation’s capital. Despite racist resistance to his measured suggestions as a Negro during segregation, his influence helped to minimize the publication of damaging stereotypes in the state guides and increased visibility of a more realistic and representative Black history and folklore collected by the Negro Units of the FWP. Among folklore scholar/ancestors who taught on Howard’s faculty were Ophelia Settle Egypt (Social Work), Patricia Jones-Jackson (1946-1986) (English), John Lovell, Jr. (1907-1974) (Literature), Lorenzo Dow Turner (English). Stephen Henderson (1925-1997), also an English faculty member at Howard, facilitated and hosted the organizing meetings and two international conferences for the Association of African and African American Folklorists (AAAAF) in 1975 and 1976 at the university. Several outstanding Howard University alumni became scholars contributing to folklore studies including Roscoe E. Lewis (1904-1961), Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), Robert McNeill (1917-2005), Gladys-Marie Fry (1931-2015), Kathryn Morgan (1919-2010), Lorenzo Dow Turner, and Toni Morrison (1931-2019).
Later generations of HBCU alumni also conducted groundbreaking research on African American traditional culture. John Blassingame (1940-2000), a historian whose examination of slave testimony, interviews, letters, and diaries, revolutionized the scholarly understanding of the cultures of enslaved people and overturned the stereotypes of Black incapacity to have cultural traditions of their own. Gerald L. Davis offered a powerful analysis of oral sermons performed by African American preachers. Gladys-Marie Fry (193l-2015) was an ancestor/scholar who explored textiles made by people of African descent as they became African Americans, and critically examined African American community legends about nightriders. As a member of a multidisciplinary team, she also uncovered Bantu cosmological symbols of enslaved African material culture in the Chesapeake Bay area.
Also, the Hampton Folklore Society (1893-1899), based at Virginia’s Hampton Institute, drew an interracial group of community scholars from the teachers, staff, and alumni of Hampton Institute and from the Mid-Atlantic region, who embraced the mission of collecting, intellectually examining, documenting, and presenting traditional Black cultural traditions. They sought to research Black folklore to inform African American literary expression through a practice of racial uplift, based in the belief that this would contribute to Black people being seen as fully human with a cultural history, worthy of full citizenship. Two of its most illustrious members were educator Anna Julia Cooper (1858-1964), and Frank D. Banks (1855-1930), the first African American to publish scholarship in the Journal of American Folklore.