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Derrick Alridge's research focuses on the history of the social and educational ideas of African-American intellectuals, educators and social activists such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, Anna Julia Cooper and Nannie Helen Burroughs. ut more importantly, Alridge studies the relevancy of their ideas for contemporary realities in education such as low black student academic achievement and the negative effects of culturally irrelevant curricula on African-American students. Photos by Paul Efland.
Questions with... Derrick Alridge
Named one of the nation’s 10 outstanding young African-American scholars in 2005 by Black Issues in Higher Education magazine, the UGA education professor talks about his research into how history textbooks shortchange Martin Luther King Jr.’s life and thoughts, the Civil Rights Movement, and hip hop as a social movement.
Q: In your recent study, “The Limits of Master Narratives in History Textbooks: An Analysis of Representations of Martin Luther King Jr. ” (2006, Teachers College Record) you say that the master narratives of King in many history textbooks obscure important elements in his life because they depict him as heroic, one-dimensional and neatly packaged. What do you mean by that?
Alridge: Historians and scholars had been making this point about King in the popular media since the 1980s. However, no one had done any empirical research on how King was presented in history textbooks. So I decided to look at high school history books to see if King was being presented in a very one-dimensional perspective, as a messiah without flaws. And I found that that was, in fact, the case.
Q: How can we improve these textbooks?
Alridge: One way that we can improve how textbooks represent historical figures – not only King but other historical figures as well is by not looking at them as one-dimensional. We need to look at different aspects of their lives, not just their public lives, but their personal lives as well. We need to examine their relationship with their families, other individuals. I think if we examine the many dimensions of their lives, we present a more humane representation of historical figures. Moreover, we present more realistic representations of historical figures that are much more interesting to students than the one-dimensional figures typically present in history textbooks.
In my many years of studying King, his friends have told me very funny stories about him. I tell my son these stories and he’ll say, “Awwww, man. I can’t believe that Dr. King actually said that or did that.” That makes King a real person and more humane to him. Such first-hand knowledge and stories also make King a more interesting figure. I think that we need to be very deliberate in trying to go beneath the surface of the master narratives that history textbooks present of people and events if we want to obtain a comprehensive understanding of history.
Alridge: "In Du Bois’ writings, I found the framework and language I was looking for to help me better understand racial and class dynamics and that would have helped me better discuss the riots with my high school students."
Q: Wouldn’t this be true for other figures in history? What about FDR or JFK? And where do you start rehabilitating textbooks?
Alridge: Yes. We need to examine other historical figures such as Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, women in history, and try to present a more complicated and multi-dimensional picture of these historic figures in history textbooks. For example, enslaved Africans during the antebellum period are often presented as very docile, childlike individuals whereas the historical record and diaries from the period show that they were educating themselves and their children. They were also sneaking off to other plantations to teach other enslaved Africans. They weren’t docile, childlike people.
Also, consider the history of women in textbooks, particularly women of the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X are presented as the major figurers the civil rights movement while women like Ella Baker, Septima Clark, Dorothy Cotton, Elaine Brown and many other women are rarely mentioned, if they are mentioned at all.
Fannie Lou Hamer is another person who was very instrumental in the civil rights movement. Her story had been told in a book by University of Georgia historian Chana Kai Lee. Textbooks should do more to incorporate the story of Fannie Lou Hamer and teachers should consult Professor Lee’s book to help them in teaching about her and other women of the civil rights movement.
Q: And these are stories that have never been told?
Alridge: That’s right. We don’t know much about it because what happens is that we have these textbooks that are usually 600 to 700 pages and they have about two paragraphs to devote to certain aspects of history. It’s very difficult to tell these in-depth stories in such a short space.
You asked me earlier, so if we have these textbooks that are already huge and we have limited space to tell these stories, what do we do? Well, we teach different stories. We should not merely teach the same master narratives and add on to those narratives to improve history lessons. We need to reconceptualize history and think of it from a different perspective. The question is: Do we have to spend so much time focusing on the presidents. No. We could examine presidential administrations as part of a larger history that includes a variety of aspects of American history and life. That’s how we can do it.
We can also use technology. We need to move beyond the textbook as the main source of information for discussing history with our students. With technology we can access primary source documents from websites. Primary sources documents allow students to see history in motion, instead of passively accepting textbook authors and teachers interpretations of history. Today, you can go to the FBI Reading Room of the FBI website and access FBI documents from many periods of American history in the 20th century. Given today’s technology students can access primary sources from their school library or from the comfort of their home.
Q: Did this limited narrative on King bother you when you taught high school history in South Carolina in the late 1980s?
Alridge: It did. But at that time, I did not have the theoretical framework or language to understand the problem the way I understand it today. So, it wasn’t until I actually became immersed in courses in the history of education, historiography and historical methods, and critical pedagogy that I began to find a way to critique the problem of master narratives in history.
I’ll give you an example. When the LA riots broke out in south central LA in 1992, there was a big commotion at the working class high school in which I taught in South Carolina. Students in my history class wanted to talk about the issue, and administrators said we could. However, they also told us not to bring televisions into the classroom to watch the history unfold on CNN. They feared that a riot might start from students viewing the images of racial chaos on television. My students and I talked about the riots, but I remember not having the language or framework to describe the race and class issues that the riots evoked among my students and among people around the country.
A year later, I would study Du Bois in a course I took in the department of African-American Studies at Penn State. In Du Bois’ writings, I found the framework and language I was looking for to help me better understand racial and class dynamics and that would have helped me better discuss the riots with my high school students. One of the most influential of Du Bois’ works on my thinking was The Souls of Black Folk. Souls introduced me to the notion that the problem of the 20th century was the problem of the color-line. Of course, the color-line was still problem as a result of the riots in 1992 and continues to be a problem today. Had I read The Souls of Black Folk in 1992 I would have been better able to help my students understand the dilemmas of race and racism in the 20th century.
Alridge: "One of my favorite sayings comes from a scholar named Robert Weaver. He said that “ideas have consequences.” That has been a guiding theme in most of my work – to show the influence ideas have on people and how ideas can propel history. That was the impetus for me to study King. I wanted to know what ideas propelled King."
Q: Do you remember studying Martin Luther King as a youngster?
Alridge: Well, like many African Americans I remember pictures of Martin Luther King hanging up in my home. My parents tell a story that helped me understand how King was viewed during his lifetime. When King was alive, many people loved him, but many people despised him as well. My parents told me that some people actually believed that King was someone that you should not associate with. Many believed King was a “troublemaker.” My parents supported King and believed he was a great man, but they find it interesting that people they knew back in the day who did not support King embrace him today. I guess this reflects what I once heard Joseph Lowery, King’s friend and associate, say about King: “Now that King is dead, he is a convenient hero.”
You’ve got to remember that King, early in life, did not think he was going to be this historic figure that would basically change the world. He was propelled into that position by what he called the Zeitgeist of the “spirit of the time.” Little did King know that while a student at Morehouse (College), he was being trained for the epic saga of the civil rights movement that would rise to greater heights during the late 1950s and 1960s. At Morehouse, King studied with the educator Benjamin Mays. At Crozer Theological Seminary in Philadelphia and Boston College he was exposed to the thought of a number of other theologians that would greatly influence the trajectory of his own thinking as a philosopher and activist. Most importantly, King was influenced by the black Christian tradition – old-time country preachers in South Georgia, Atlanta and throughout other parts of the South. What makes King so fascinating was that he was able to blend the ideas and rhetorical style of Southern Baptist preachers with the ideas of Aristotle, Plato, Jefferson and others. This rhetorical style made King very appealing to a wide cross-section of the American populace.
Even 20 years later, when Lech Walesa, leader of the Solidarity Movement in Poland, led Poland from Communism, I remember watching scenes on television in which Poles carried banners emboldened with the picture of Dr. King. I found that very moving.
Q: In the past decade, you have worked on several historic multimedia projects such as the documentary film about the first two African-Americans to attend UGA, Horace Ward and Hamilton Earl Holmes, that aired on Georgia PBS in 2004 and the Foot Soldier Project for Civil Right Studies. Tell me how these projects began, what your role was in them and what they meant to you.
Alridge: The documentaries that we produced on Horace Ward and Hamilton Holmes originally emerged out of research done by professor Maurice Daniels, who is the dean of the School of Social Work. He wrote a book, called Horace T. Ward: Desegregation of the University of Georgia, Civil Rights Advocacy and Jurisprudence. That book was the launching pad for The Foot Soldier Project for Civil Rights Studies (FSP). The purpose of the FSP is to uncover, collect and disseminate the stories of unsung, unknown and unrecognized participants in the American civil rights movement.
Our research team has tried not to focus on the figures that we often hear about in history. We try to focus on individuals who were as Dr. King called them “foot soldiers” of the movement. The FSP tells the stories of individuals like Donald L. Hollowell, Dr. Martin Luther King’s lawyer and the lawyer for Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter who were the first people to gain admittance into the University of Georgia. Hollowelll and his wife also rode the backroads of Georgia defending African-American people’s legal rights against unjust laws of segregation. The work of the FSP played a pivotal role in putting Hollowell on UGA’s radar. UGA later honored Hollowell with an honorary doctorate. Currently, the FSP is completing a documentary on Hollowell, which we hope will be aired by the end of the year.
Q: How long have you and Dr. Daniels worked on the Footsoldier Project?
Alridge: We’ve been working on this project since 2001. The idea came from Maurice’s book about Horace Ward but also from my work as a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow studying the Civil Rights Movement at Harvard University in the summer of 2000. As a fellow, I had the opportunity to study with scholars of civil rights and democracy, such as Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Cornel West, Leon Litwack, and Julian Bond to name a few. This experience also provided an impetus for Professor Daniels and I to move forward with the FSP.
Q: Are you looking at “foot soldiers” in other parts of the country besides Georgia?
Alridge: Oh yea. There were foot soldiers all over the country. Since we’re at the University of Georgia, the project is focusing on Georgia but we’re not limited to the state. Atlanta is considered the home of the civil rights movement by many scholars, so we’ve been going to little towns throughout Georgia and interviewing people who did the little things… like had lunches for civil rights activists or let them stay in their houses overnight. There are so many stories of people who contributed that we want to get on record. We want to get their voices, we want to get their pictures because all of the activists of the civil rights movement are old now.
Q: What did this project mean to you?
Alridge: My three main areas of research are the history of African-American education, African-American intellectual history and civil rights studies. What I try to do in my work is to create a synergy between those three areas of research. One of my favorite sayings comes from a scholar named Robert Weaver. He said that “ideas have consequences.” That has been a guiding theme in most of my work – to show the influence ideas have on people and how ideas can propel history. That was the impetus for me to study King. I wanted to know what ideas propelled King. I also wanted to know how we, as historians and people in the present, interpret and misinterpret King’s ideas. I look at the ideas of people who were involved in the civil rights movement. What they thought and felt about the movement? What larger ideas in society influenced their participation.
Q: Tell me about your research on hip hop.
Alridge: This is research that evolved out of my civil rights studies. I found a disconnect between members of the civil rights generation and those of the hip hop generation and it pertains to our understanding of issues of democracy, equality and civil rights.
Instead of just engaging in debate and rhetoric about the tension between these two generations, I decided, as a historian of ideas, to study both of these movements and both of these generations to see where the conflict and tensions were based. What I actually found out was that there were many similarities in their ideas. The tensions arose over how these ideas have been articulated.
Q: What’s driving the disconnect?
Alridge: The problem is that the two generations have not been communicating with one another. Recently, there have been conventions, seminars and institutes in which the two generations have begun to speak but that should have started long ago.
Many members of the hip hop generation see their struggle as very different from that of the civil rights generation. They don’t see their struggle occurring in the streets or in protest movements. They see their struggle or move toward equality and equity coming through acquisition of wealth and moving up into the middle class. So that’s a different dilemma for them, whereas members of the civil rights generation were fighting for just the basic right to be able to eat in a restaurant or go to a public institution or be treated fairly in society. So these are the tensions driving the disconnect.
Many of the civil rights generation are also very disturbed with the negative imagery and messages they see in mainstream hip hop music and videos portraying African-American people, especially women, in very negative ways. This has also disturbed many in the hip hop generation as well.
What I have tried to do in my research is illuminate the socially and politically conscious rap and hip hop music by groups such as Common, Dead Prez, and local rappers such as Ishues, Bad Cat and Marcel Mincey who create rap songs about learning African-American history, learning your ABCs, learning about adjectives and adverbs. I want the civil rights generation to understand that hip hop music is much broader than what we see on BET or MTV and VH1 – that there’s an entire hip hop community out there that’s very socially and politically conscious. Socially and politically conscious hip hop is what may save save hip hop.
Alridge: "I believe that if we carefully examine other social and cultural movements, such as the blues, bebop, jazz, funk, the black arts movement, the civil rights movement and the hip hop movement… I think they are all on the same continuum."
Q: What’s the difference between hip hop and rap?
Alridge: Hip hop is a culture and a movement. Rap is one component of the larger hip hop community. In hip hop, you have DJs and MCs which is rapping. You have break dancing and graffiti writing. All of those are elements of hip hop. So when you think about hip hop people think its just rap but it’s also break dancing which is a very strong culture in and of itself. What is exciting about hip hop is that it’s very multicultural. Athens has a very strong underground hip hop scene. It’s very multi-racial. You have white and Asian, breakdancers. You have black rappers, white rappers, Asian rappers. You have female DJs, you have graffiti artists. It’s a very multicultural environment. So when I think of hip hop, as a scholar and as someone who grew up between the civil rights and hip hop generations, I think of positive hip hop not the very negative hip hop we see on heavy rotation on television.
Q: Why do you think there‘s so much of the negative hip hop?
Alridge: It’s very simple. It’s capitalism. I think some people are more excited about buying music that deals with issues revolving around sex, alcohol, drugs and negative African- American culture than they are about buying music that says… “Let’s have a march on the White House to try to stop the war on Iraq.” There are artists who are stating the latter, but they are not the ones making the money.
Q: As an historian how do you see the future of hip hop? Is money going to always rule?
Alridge: No. There’s always going to be that element but as consumers we can do something about that. That message has to get out and as a historian what I want to show is that hip hop should not be a movement that’s disconnected from previous social movements in African-American history. I believe that if we carefully examine other social and cultural movements, such as the blues, bebop, jazz, funk, the black arts movement, the civil rights movement and the hip hop movement… I think they are all on the same continuum.
Q: Is it encouraging to see jazz players like Wynton Marsalis reaching out to the hip hop generation with his latest CD, From the Plantation to the Penitentiary.
Alridge: Yes. He’s making a connection. I think where Wynton’s going is great. But I also think there are many hip hop artists that are doing the same thing. There are hip hop artists who connect their movement, their culture and their music to the civil rights movement, to the jazz era, to the blues era, to slave narratives, etc. And if you want examples of those groups you need only to look at people like Dead Prez, Jill Scott, and Common. And we cannot forget Public Enemy who was very popular in the ‘80s and ‘90s. We must also remember Tupac Shakur. His mother was a member of the Black Panther Party so Tupac was very influenced by the ideas of the Panthers. Given, some of Pac’s music is derogatory toward women. At the same time, much of his music is also revolutionary and emancipatory. There’s that tension that you find in hip hop as in other genres of music.
Q: Maybe it’s just anti-establishment.
Alridge: Well, hip hop emerged out of the very bad social conditions of the post industrial period of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Inner cities were hit hard by economic downturn and many black veterans came back to inner cities to see that not much had changed in terms of social or economic conditions for blacks. In fact, it had gotten worse. Hip hop music emerged from this context and was a response to many of the problems that people faced in urban centers. Hip Hop also provided a means for youth to voice their opinions about government and to speak out against the establishment that contributed to blacks’ abysmal social conditions. So, knowing this history of hip hop, I am not bothered by the fact that hip hop illuminates conditions that are occurring in cities, urban centers, etc. Where hip hop falters for me is when it turns on the very people it attempts to liberate, when it degrades black women, and sends out other violent messages to youth.
But we should not critique hip hop without critiquing the context within which it thrives. that the larger society espouses violence, sexism, racism, etc in movies and music. Like many rappers have said, “If you want to see violence, you merely need to watch an R-rated movie like those starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and others… you’ll see the same sexist, violence messages.” So we need to be very careful not to solely identify hip hop as the problem here.
Q: So how do conversations go with your students in your course on the history of hip hop?
Alridge: For the most part, pretty similar to our conversation. Most of my students are vehemently opposed to the vulgar lyrics and misogynistic images found in much of mainstream hip hop. Most students listen to the socially and politically conscious hip hop. They listen to Michael Franti, Erykah Badu, Ms.Dynamite, Jean Grae, Blackalicious, Jurassic 5 and The Roots. I find that very interesting. I think this type of consciousness in my hip hop class is a function of being in a college town where students are encouraged to critique and seek out knowledge. Also, the people who take my course know what perspective I’m coming from, so that lets me know what kind of music they are into.
From day one I let my students know that we are going to critique the negative aspects of hip hop, but that we will also illuminate and promote the positive aspects of socially and politically conscious hip hop that is often ignored by mainstream media outlets. While history is a very important part of my course, I also try to educate the students on what kind of music is emancipatory and liberatory. And they educate me as well. In fact, I learn a lot about the newest, hottest underground socially and politically conscious music from students who take my course.
For instance, on Thursday in my class, we’re actually having a Cypher… a poetry reading and rap session… we’re going to have rappers, DJs, breakdancers and poets who will be there from 5-8 p.m. and we’re just going to be doing our thing.
Alridge has has spent much of his career placing educational issues in a historical context.
DERRICK P. ALRIDGE
Associate Professor
Department of Lifelong Education, Administration, and Policy
Qualitative Research Program
Ph.D. in Educational Theory and Policy (Specialization in History of American Education)
The Pennsylvania State University dalridge@uga.edu
Alridge, an associate professor in the department of lifelong education, administration, and policy, has spent much of his career placing educational issues in a historical context. His research focuses on the history of the social and educational ideas of African-American intellectuals, educators and social activists such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, Anna Julia Cooper and Nannie Helen Burroughs. But more importantly, Alridge studies the relevancy of their ideas for contemporary realities in education such as low black student academic achievement and the negative effects of culturally irrelevant curricula on African-American students.
Books
Alridge, D. P. (in press). The educational thought of W.E.B. Du Bois: An intellectual history. Teachers College Press, Columbia University.
Alridge, D.P. (under contract). The Hip Hop Mind: An Intellectual History of the Social Consciousness of a Generation. University of Wisconsin Press.
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