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“What do you do?” asks someone I am meeting for the first time.

Like clockwork, I respond, “I am a university professor.”

“What do you teach?” is the next question posed to me in this familiar dialogue.

“History,” I say, trying to keep things as simple as possible.

“Really? I love history,” this eager conversationalist keeps the chitchat going, “What type of history do you teach?”

“American history,” I reply, in anticipation of what the next question will most likely be.

“What area of American history?”

“Black history,” I answer.

“Oh.”

I often find myself having this type of friendly small talk when first encountering people my age and older in a variety of settings. Professional historians are undoubtedly familiar with this type of exchange. Over the years, I have noticed that after meeting people, particularly white people, for the first time and telling them what I do for a living, they tend to share with me their ardent interest in popular subjects in United States history such as the Civil War, World War II, the American presidency, or some notable historical icon or monumental event. It is not uncommon for my new acquaintances to share with me a book (usually authored by a journalist with whom I am not familiar) that they have recently read or a documentary that they saw on the History Channel, A & E, American History TV, Military History, and, from time to time, PBS. They rarely, if ever, share with me tidbits of information that they have learned about my area of expertise. Contemporary black culture permeates through American life, but black history does not explicitly shape most Americans’ worldviews. The past experiences of black Americans, especially during the troublesome eras of slavery and Jim Crow segregation, do not make for friendly, lighthearted topics of conversation.

A different dynamic often occurs when engaging with elderly African Americans. I am almost always told a story about their experiences “back in the day” or an entertaining anecdote. Sometimes they fervently school me about how “history repeats itself” and how black America’s past and present are inextricable. I particularly enjoy these conversations because they allow me to practice oral history and probe into an insider’s perspective.

If the “facts” of those playing amateur historians are what I perceive to be inaccurate or imprecise, I hardly ever bother to correct them. Instead, I customarily participate in these brief exchanges by attentively listening to my acquaintance’s rundowns of past events and personalities, nodding my head in appreciation of their curiosity about bygone days. After all, many people find history in its academic expression to be mundane, tedious, and off-putting. For those of my generation, this is epitomized by a popularly hilarious scene from the 1986 film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off when actor Ben Stein lectures to bored-to-death high school students about the Great Depression. When I have the opportunity to alter such perceptions about history, I make modest efforts to do so.

For a host of reasons, the numbers of young Americans earning bachelor’s degrees in history in the digital-centric twenty-first century is steadily declining. As cognitive psychologist and history education expert Sam Wineburg and others have argued, people’s lack of enthusiasm toward the study of history is in part related to how they were taught history in secondary school. Most weren’t and still aren’t taught the value of “thinking historically” or the benefits of unraveling a “usable past.”¹ US high school history, often subsumed under the broad and illusive category of social studies, is regularly reduced to the memorization of so-called “facts” and important names and dates. Time and time again, high school students are expected to demonstrate their historical knowledge by taking multiple choice, fill-in, and short-answer tests based upon so-called objective information from dry and conventional textbooks in which African Americans are at best discussed during slavery and Reconstruction and in the sidebars. With the exception of high school students in Philadelphia who, since 2005, have been required to take an introductory course in African American history before graduating, countless millennials and centennials or postmillennials were most likely first introduced to notions of African American history during their schools’ annual perfunctory and token Black History Month activities.

Nonetheless, history—as memory, compelling and often unimaginable “facts” and details, the tales of influential people, artifacts that are housed in museums, and a record of consequential past events—does indeed fascinate many Americans across ethnic and generational lines. History is appealing in part because we all have our own personal histories that have profoundly influenced who we are and will become. Millions of Americans have used services offered by Ancestry.com LLC, and other genealogy companies and television shows like PBS’s Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Genealogy Roadshow; NBC-TV’s and The Learning Channel’s Who Do You Think You Are? are popular. From family customs to national holidays to ethnic observances, historical traditions and rituals shape Americans’ everyday lives.

Whether we are conscious of it or not, we all think historically on a routine basis. More than eighty years ago, historian Carl L. Becker argued just this, stressing that “every normal person” knows “some history”—“the memory of things said and done”—and practices rudimentary forms of historical research “at every waking moment” in order to resolve quotidian impediments and navigate their daily work life and existence. Without “historical knowledge,” this former president of the American Historical Association maintained, peoples’ “to-day would be aimless” and “to-morrow without significance.” Ultimately, for Becker, “it is impossible to divorce history from life”; history “is so intimately associated with what we are doing and with what we hope to do.” Becker also suggested that everyday Americans received heaps of historical information from their own personal experiences and from countless sources and outlets prior to “imaginatively” refashioning and interpreting these details and “facts” to create some sense of order and truth.² If Becker’s “Mr. Everyman,” as he contended, had trouble pinpointing the “mass of unrelated and related information and misinformation,” then it would surely be impossible for Americans living in the information-overloaded twenty-first century to fully discern or explain how they know what they think they know about the past.

But one thing is a reasonably safe bet. In the late twentieth century and the twenty-first century, many Americans’ perceptions of US history, including African American history, have not necessarily been shaped by professional historians but instead have been strikingly impacted by popular culture, journalists, political pundits and politicians, Hollywood films, and, of course, information from the easily accessible Internet.

Close to 20,000 doctorates in history have been doled by major research universities throughout the nation since the dawning of the twenty-first century. In 2014, as many as 1,043 PhDs in history were awarded in the United States, an all-time record at the time.³ Notwithstanding the efforts of public historians, historians who have joined the ranks of public intellectuals, and the authors of historical narratives that have made the New York Times Best Sellers list, very few professional historians have released books or created institutions that have profoundly, directly, and speedily molded the public’s opinions about US history.

Simply put, in this digital age, when social media, the Internet, and other forms of “new media” predominate, Americans, especially younger “digital natives,” do not necessarily need to directly rely on the interpretations offered by professional historians when seeking to make sense of something from the past.

According to a recent report from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the “average” American spends very little time reading each week.⁴ In the current digital era, as historian and archivist Abby Smith Rumsey has convincingly argued in When We Are No More: How Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future, we now have “more knowledge than we know what to do with,” “information travels at the speed of electrons,” and an infinite numbers of “facts” that we can accumulate “sometimes get in the way of thoughtful concentration and problem solving.” As Rumsey stresses, it is therefore important that we develop a digital literacy with an effective digital filtering system that will allow us to be able to, among other things, “read with appropriate skepticism” and discern which sources are reliable and trustworthy.⁵ Similarly, in their recently published book on leadership in the United States following 9/11, Martin Dempsey and Ori Brafman highlight the challenges of living in what they call “the era of the digital echo,” a time during which “facts” are no longer debated. On the other hand, they suggest that “competing narratives” prevail and that it is difficult to determine “what’s real and accurate.” In this era, “information passes from individual to individual more quickly, but in the process often becomes distorted.”⁶ Developing digital historical literacy for African American history during the “era of the digital echo” can be an especially challenging undertaking, particularly for those with little or no contact with African American people or culture.⁷

Although many blacks’ views of African American history in general are informed by many of the same forces that shape whites’ perspectives of their history, generally speaking African Americans have inevitably cultivated intimate relationships with black history. During each major phase or period of the black historical experience, young African Americans have drawn great inspiration from the black past that is characterized by perseverance, resistance, and survival in the midst of mind-boggling oppression. Black history is a vital part of contemporary black culture. African Americans’ sense of history is shaped most by black institutions and traditions, such as the church, historically black colleges and universities, local and national organizations, and perhaps most significantly, the family. Since the era of emancipation, family reunions have played an important role in African American life and culture. History, specifically oral history, is the bedrock of these rituals. Epitomizing “living history” and functioning as direct links between the past and the present, elder generations share their past experiences and personal histories with younger generations. Younger African Americans are routinely reminded by their elders of the struggles that they, their parents, and their ancestors endured.

Some of today’s millennial and postmillennial black activists have explicitly situated themselves within a history of black struggle. Founded in the summer of 2013, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has actively sampled from past black freedom struggles. Though its founders have stressed how they are distinctly different from mainstream civil rights era black leaders, one of BLM’s goals is to “(re)build the Black liberation movement.” In doing so, those affiliated with BLM have marched, engaged in nonviolent direct action, and even organized a “Freedom Ride” to Ferguson, Missouri, in the summer of 2014. They have been inspired by who they view as being radical civil rights era leaders. For instance, the “Who We Are” section of their website pays tribute to civil rights strategist Diane Nash. Perhaps most important, in fostering a decentralized structure, BLM is modeled after the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 2015, in the midst of a resurgence in black student activism, students at the University of Missouri-Columbia founded an organization called Concerned Student 1950, named in honor of the year that the first African American student was admitted to the university. Such examples of new millennial black historical revivalism are not uncommon.

Historiography—simply put, historical scholarship or the writings of historians on historical subject matter—significantly influences how historians interpret the past. While historians must analyze a range of primary sources when deciphering and making sense of former times and the thoughts and actions of personalities from days of old, they are also expected to engage with the interpretations of their colleagues—other historians. At the end of the day, professional historians strive to generate original and innovative renditions of what transpired in the past. The same of course goes for experts in African American history, a subspecialty and distinct field of US history that has expanded at an exponential rate since it gained attention in the mainstream US historical profession during sometime between the late 1960s and mid-1970s. Influenced by Generation Xer and millennial black historians (what I broadly call “hip-hop generation historians”), the study of black history has significantly changed during the twenty-first century.

Yet notwithstanding recent innovations in the study of the black past, African Americanist historians, with few exceptions, are not usually socialized to make their scholarship deliberately relevant to the present and, therefore, do not strive to write for lay audiences. Many, moreover, tend to criticize their postmillennial students’ and the general public’s lack of historical knowledge, yet little has been written on the messages that the American public receives about black history from outside the province of the community of African Americanist historians.

Not only have historians undervalued contemporary black history, but very few have explored the contemporary implications of the actual African American experience and how African American history has been brought into play, juggled, decoded, and represented in US politics and popular culture in the first decade and a half of the twenty-first century. Addressing this contributes to contemporary black history while also shedding light on how black history has been interpreted outside of the “ivory tower.”

What we are told about African American history through Hollywood films, the mainstream media, Internet sites, entertainers, politicians, Black History Month commemorations, and museums can reveal a lot about how the general public thinks about black America and may conceptualize the black experience. For instance, one reason that many whites oppose race-based affirmative action and reparations has something to do with their inability to relate to black people’s collective memory and historical consciousness, which is the byproduct of a lack of knowledge of black history, particularly prior to the passage of the Voting Rights Act. We must be critical of how black history is portrayed in US popular culture and politics. Framed largely by those who are depicting and interpreting it, the implications and meanings of black history are numerous.

Reclaiming the Black Past: The Use and Misuse of African American History in the Twenty-first Century seeks to explore how African American history has been regarded, depicted, and treated by a variety of spokespersons and public figures outside of the ranks of professionally trained historians—from politicians to comedians to filmmakers to hip-hop artists—and institutions (such as museums, mainstream Hollywood culture, and the US government) in the late twentieth century and the twenty-first century, the so-called pinnacle of “postracial” American society. This book underscores the ubiquitous nature of African American history in American thought and culture. Each of the following chapters focuses on unpacking and deciphering how black history has been represented, interpreted, and remembered by people and institutions that arguably have at least as much (if not more) influence on the general public’s impressions of black history than the vast majority of historians of the black past do.

How has black history been memorialized and, more specifically, packaged for publics and constituencies by an assortment of spokespersons in non-academic spaces? How might diverse historical message-bearers have shaped their depictions of the black past for their intended audiences? Though this book traverses many time periods, the “Age of Obama” is a common thread. How have developments in the twenty-first century and the years of Barack Obama’s presidency impacted the ways in which black history has been unraveled in US politics and popular culture? How have these twenty-first century portrayals of black history persuaded their sometimes-uninformed consumers’ views of African American culture?

I begin in chapter one by unpacking President Obama’s complex philosophy of black history as revealed in many of his speeches and symbolic gestures. Obama’s depictions of black history have foremost been influenced by his background and identity as well as inevitably by the particular context and the racial makeup of his audiences. Certain elements of his black history worldview have remained relatively constant, but Obama’s representations of African American history were consistently carefully calculated.

Today, Black History Month is an established American custom. Yet, since widely acclaimed actor Morgan Freeman called Black History Month “ridiculous” in a 2005 interview with Mike Wallace on the popular CBS newsmagazine television program 60 Minutes, debates about the purpose and relevance of Black History Month have increased. In chapter two, I explore the debates about the status of National African American History Month celebrations within a vast historical context. It becomes clear that the contemporary disagreements about the significance of Black History Month are not new.

During the new millennium, there has been an explosion of mainstream, commercially successful films that dramatize dimensions of black history. While most of these films have redemptive and educational qualities, all of them are problematic in their own ways. Chapter three unpacks how a collection of films released since The Help (2011) have interpreted and in many cases oversimplified and misinterpreted episodes and historical icons from the annals of black history.

Often employing the medium of films and digital shorts, black comedians and satirists have offered their renditions of black history. Many have skillfully incorporated clever, yet often inaccurate, discussions of slavery, racism, and past racial injustices in their stand-up performances, albums, and sketches. In chapter four, I analyze how a group of black comics, satirists, humorists, and (for lack of a better term) jokesters have used their craft and positions as public spokespersons to put forward commentaries, sometimes sparking controversy, on the black past.

In 2005, the US Senate approved Resolution 39, in which it apologized for its predecessors’ failure to enforce anti-lynching legislation. Four years later, the Senate unanimously passed a resolution apologizing for slavery. Beginning in the late twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, US politicians have apologized for a range of past atrocities committed against African American people while others have sought posthumous pardons for African American historical icons and the victims of legalized racial repression. Chapter five examines the implications and deeper meanings of US politicians’ and the US government’s revisiting of the past.

Opened in September 2016, the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the nation’s capital became the world’s largest African American history museum. In theory, the primary function of museums is to amass, display, protect, and exhibit historical materials and artifacts to the public for educational and entertainment purposes. In the “Afterword,” I offer a brief appraisal of how the recently opened and critically acclaimed National Museum of African American History and Culture functions in this manner and portrays African American history, while considering how this representation might shape the general public’s perceptions of the African American experience.

Reclaiming the Black Past is my contribution to understanding how African American history has been conceived, discussed, memorialized, and tinkered with by various groups and in different social spaces in US popular culture and politics.