Early Black historians’ emancipatory project was premised on Black elite leadership.

Evidence

The confusion in Williams’s thought was real. He wrote from both a Puritanical perspective with its echoes of God’s election, but was, as well, mindful of the racialist nature of his people’s degradation and oppression. But in the latter, he was again perversely diverted since his resolve to write a “true history of the Black man” stemmed from his wish to “incite the latter to greater effort in the struggle of citizenship and manhood.” While attacking the most extreme ideological forms that hatred of Blacks had assumed (“sons of Ham,” the “curse of Canaan”) and while denouncing the institution of slavery, he still demonstrated a certain ambivalence. Tacit but unspoken, of course, was the notion that only a Black elite could realize the task of Negro resurrection. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 890

Categorization

• XREF: The hidden assumption that only an elite class can resurrect a degraded race echoes similar class-elitism in other uplift movements and connects to Robinson’s broader thesis that the radical tradition is distinct from bourgeois Black reform.