Few today are interested in Negro history because they feel the matter already settled: the Negro has no history.
    This dictum seems neither reasonable nor probable. I remember my own rather sudden awakening from the paralysis of this judgment taught me in high school and in two of the world's great universities. Franz Boas came to Atlanta University where I was teaching history in 1906 and said to a graduating class: You need not be ashamed of your African past; and then he recounted the history of the black kingdoms south of the Sahara for a thousand years. I was too astonished to speak. All of this I had never heard and I came then and afterwards to realize how the silence and neglect of science can let truth utterly disappear or even be unconsciously distorted.  Black Folk Then and Now (1939) Dr. W. E. B. Dubois

Click on the titles below to read important history from the African American community of Haywood County, Tennessee.