Early Black historiography mirrored dominant white history’s monumentalist forms.

Evidence

Black history thus began in the shadow of the national myths and as their dialectical negation. Consequently, it contained its own contradictions (e.g., the trivialization of social action) while enveloping those that occurred within the dominant American history. Generations later it would give rise to a more critical and truer opposition, but for the time being, it was to match American history in the coin of the realm; monument for monument, civilization for civilization, great man for great man. George Washington Williams, the first of the major Afro-American historians, left no doubt about these concerns. In 1882, Williams had published his mammoth classic, A History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880; it consisted of two volumes totalling almost 1,100 pages. One may have already surmised that despite his titular boundaries, Williams had not confined himself to the events that began in the seventeenth century. Indeed, like many of his contemporary spokesmen, he had found it appropriate to begin his search into the past by reviewing the role of Africans in the pre-Christian eras when “Western civilization,” owing its immediate stimulus to Egyptian culture, had been centered around the Mediterranean. The contrast between these eras, the apogee in Williams’s mind of African development, and the centuries of Negro enslavement that followed two millennia later, provided him with the opportunity to enunciate his beliefs: His [the Negro’s] position, it is true, in all history up to the present day, has been accidental, incidental and collateral… — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 888

Categorization

• XREF: The monumentalist ‘great man for great man’ compensatory history recurs across colonized and subaltern historiographies; connects to how national founding myths are contested via counter-myths.