1900–1960s: (The Institutional Segregation of African History — Scholars Who Paid Attention to Early African History and Its Global Connections Before the 19…

1900–1960s: (The Institutional Segregation of African History — Scholars Who Paid Attention to Early African History and Its Global Connections Before the 1960s Being Almost Exclusively Faculty at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Including William Leo Hansberry at Howard University, the Evidence Having Existed Before the Mid-Twentieth Century for Anyone Who Cared to Look, and Independence Movements and the Civil Rights Movement Finally Forcing the Discipline to Reckon with Africa): Through all five periods, Africans were essential contributors to the defining trends and developments of human history. Even before the mid-twentieth century, a significant body of evidence on early African history and its wider global connections existed — provided that one cared to look for it. But until the 1960s, almost the only scholars who did pay such attention taught at Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the United States. They included William Leo Hansberry at Howard University and professors at other such institutions. The evidence was there; the willingness to engage with it was not — and the reason was not scholarly but racial. The segregation of African historical knowledge into Black institutions was the academic mirror of Jim Crow itself: the knowledge existed, but it was confined to spaces the white academy did not consider legitimate. It took the rise of independence movements across Africa, combined with the civil rights movement in the United States, to begin changing that. From the late 1950s and early 1960s onward, the course of world events forced the discipline to confront what it had spent centuries ignoring. The irony is bitter: the peoples who had to fight for their political freedom also had to fight for their historical existence — and in both struggles, the evidence of their humanity had always been available to anyone whose ideology did not require its suppression.