The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920

This is not merely a journal. It is an act of survival. In 1920, at a time when Black history was systematically erased from textbooks and silenced in public life, Carter G. Woodson and his collaborators built an archive of resistance. Volume 5 of The Journal of Negro History stands as proof that Black scholars were documenting their own story when the nation preferred they have none. The articles gathered here examine the history of Negro education from colonial-era private initiatives through Reconstruction, tracing how formerly enslaved people and their descendants clawed toward literacy despite laws designed to prevent it. The volume also explores the complex relationships between Black Americans and Indigenous peoples during westward expansion, and documents the early stirrings of the Great Migration that would reshape America. Each page carries the urgency of a people refusing to be written out of their own history. For anyone interested in primary sources, the history of Black intellectual life, or the long arc of archival resistance, this volume is indispensable.