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• About The Forgotten Fifth
• National Center for History in the Schools
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Tavis: We continue our month-long celebration of Black History Month tonight with Gary Nash. The UCLA professor and author has spent much of his distinguished career writing about matters of race, class and U.S. history. His most recent book is called "The Forgotten Fifth, African Americans In The Age of Revolution.' Professor Nash, nice to have you on the program.

Gary Nash: Good to be here, Tavis.

Tavis: Glad to have you. Let me start by asking the obvious question, at least for me. What it is you think that we missed, since your life has been dedicated to this. What are we missing by not being clued in to the contributions, the struggles, the triumphs, of Black folk in the early part of this country? The founding years?

Nash: Well, there is no American history that's worth considering if Black history isn't a big part of it. Because African Americans, from the very beginning, were a part of it. So, we've collectively suffered from a bad case of historical amnesia. And maybe the cure is in sight.

Tavis: Tell me why it is you think, and I say this with all due respect, obviously. Why it is that among White folk, you are a rare person who gets that? And I say that, again, not to cast aspersion on our White viewers, but the point is that there are so few historians who make that case, dedicate their lives to making that proposition reality.

Nash: Well, it's changing. That would have been true up until 30 years ago, but more and more now, historians, if they're worth their salt, have seen that race is at the heart of American history, and African Americans are part of the story, very important part of the whole story. So, I think we might one day, if we live long enough, say, well how did we forget all this? But we're glad we regained our memory.

Tavis: Let me challenge you on that, respectfully. 'Cause when I suggest that there's still too few people who get that, I base that in large measure, as you might suspect, on the fact that there still is not the African American story being taught as a part of history.

As a matter of fact, every Black person has heard the phrase history, 'his story;' that they ain't really telling our story, it's 'his story.' So that the contributions of African Americans are still not being taught as a part of American history in schools.

Nash: Yes, that's true. There's a trickle-down effect, but the trickling takes an awful long time. And there's so much still to be done.

Tavis: Do you remember back in the day, back in the nineties, I guess, when you and Lynne Cheney, now, of course, the wife of the Vice President. of course, she was his wife then, but now the wife of Dick Cheney. At the time, the two of you had a very public debate about how Black history ought to be taught as a part of American history. You remember this debate, I take it?

Nash: Oh, (laugh) I can show you some scars, if you want, but.

Tavis: Take me back to that debate, and tell me what it was about and what you remember about that debate.

Nash: Well, her punch line was the standards you created, and they were created by teachers from all over the country.

Tavis: We should explain who she was, and what her role was at the time.

Nash: She was the head for the National Endowment For Humanities.

Tavis: Exactly.

Nash: She paid to have the National Center For History in the schools at UCLA that I was co-directing to create these standards. What should the kids learn in school about history, world history, U.S. history? And we brought together many, many teachers from all over the country, historians from all over the country, and we spent three years on it.

She didn't like the result. And if I can reduce it to one of her comments, she said this is multicultural to a fare thee well. And I would ask her on television programs, well, explain to the audience what it means to be multicultural to a fare thee well. And she really didn't want to answer that.

But what she meant was there's too much Black history; too much Latino history; Indian history; too many women in the story. And that doesn't leave enough room for the people who are really the ones who made the country.

Tavis: I take that to mean White men.

Nash: Yes.

Tavis: Yeah. (laugh)

Nash: Sure.

Tavis: I guess I'm coming back at this 'cause I'm still, before I get to the details of this book, which I'm going to get to, I promise. But I'm still fascinated by this notion of how it is, and I've said this many times, that we live in the most multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic America ever, and that can still be modus operandi?

Nash: Yeah. Some people won't look. Some people won't listen. And some people won't read. And what does one do? Well, my work is to keep writing history, multicultural history, and I love working on African American history. Because it's one of those stories that's untold. You don't want to tell the same story over again. And here's where the real stuff of American history is out there still to be discovered.

Tavis: As a historian, what's your sense of why, for whatever reason or reasons, we are afraid to confront that part of our history?

Nash: Well, some people would prefer a stainless steel history. They don't like the founding fathers to have warts. They want a heroic story. They want a happy face story. And so, we are very happy to have the Germans. We want the Germans, the kids to learn about the Holocaust, and we want Japanese kids to learn about the Manchurian invasion and the sex slaves, Korean women as sex slaves. But when it comes to our own history, we won't apply, in the minds of many people, we shouldn't apply, the same standards.

Tavis: You write very poignantly in this text, 'The Forgotten Fifth, African Americans In The Age of Revolution,' about the fact that there really are two sets of founding fathers. The ones we know about, the ones we don't know about. So, talk to me, then, about African Americans in the age of revolution.

Nash: Well, it is a great moment in African American history. There'd been slavery around for nearly two centuries. And there'd been slave resistance. But this was the first opportunity to pull off what amounted to a great slave revolt, because the British offered freedom to slaves who would join them. And this was a dawn of a new era at hand if they could reach the British lines.

The Americans didn't offer them freedom, the British did. And so, it's a great irony that the unalienable rights that the founding fathers spoke of could come to Black Americans primarily by joining the British. But it was a great moment. And there were a set of Black founding fathers. We're very fond in our history books of talking of the genius of the founding fathers.

Nothing quite like it before. How they would take this leap into the dark, how they would leave all tradition behind them and sail bravely forward. Well, you could say that even more so about the first Black founding fathers. Founding churches, founding schools, literary societies, and building communities of free Black people.

Tavis: You argue that, in this text again, that abolition, we all know the abolition of slavery was not forthcoming after the war. But you argue that that could have happened. It was possible.

Nash: I do. I do.

Tavis: Talk to me.

Nash: It's not to a popular notion.

Tavis: Yeah.

Nash: But it does seem to me that while we congratulate the founding fathers for political and military leadership, we shy away from the notion that when leadership could have abolished slavery in this period, they tucked in under their shells, and they would not step forward on this issue. They would not spend the moral and political capital that they had accumulated in bringing the nation through the war and into an independent new nation. They wouldn't spend the capital that they'd accumulated on the issue of slavery. I think it was a failure of leadership.

Tavis: What was the reason for them not spending this capital?

Nash: Well, there were economic costs, they said, and they were too high. Someone else will have to figure this out. But we have so much invested in these 500,000 slaves. Who will pay the piper? And then there was the social problem. If we free the slaves, are we willing to admit them into the new nation's society to create a biracial democracy?

And that's where courage failed them, both on the economic side, I think, and on the social side. The notion of Black and White people living together in a democracy. Some did believe it, and some fought hard for it. And there were many - Washington freed his slaves at his death, and there were many of his planter friends who did free their slaves in Virginia.

But Jefferson and Madison and most of the others would not follow. It's not as if there weren't precedents, though. Many large planters were hoping that Jefferson and others would follow.

Tavis: These African Americans, then, did who did have the courage and the conviction and the commitment to step forward and to serve and to lead, where in that time did they find that kind of boldness, quite frankly, to step forward in that way?

Nash: Well, each story is something of its own. And these are the remarkable stories that I try to recover from the dustbin of history. Richard Allen is such a person.

Tavis: A.M.E. Church, yeah.

Nash: A.M.E. Church. (laugh) It's the largest Black Protestant church in the world. And who started it? What do the kids learn about this man? Well, Richard Allen was a slave, a young man, but he purchased his own freedom from his master, because he saved up money working on the Sunday or the holiday.

And he finally, it was a self-purchase. And here is a very young man without any education. He became a self-trained preacher with spiritual gifts, and within 15 years, he built a free Black church, which became A.M.E.

Tavis: If I'm watching this program right now, and I'm an African American, I find this conversation empowering and enlightening. If I am watching this program right now and happen not to be a Black American, I may also find this program enlightening and empowering. So, I don't want to cast aspersion on anybody watching.

I am interested, though, from your perspective - I asked a similar question of Manning Marable, another professor, the other night on this program. But from your perspective, what is the value not of me learning this, I think I can answer that question. What's the value of folk who don't look like me getting this?

Nash: Well, Black history belongs to all Americans. To Japanese-Americans, Mexican-Americans. It's part of our story. It's part of our national story. So, it behooves everyone.

Tavis: How is my life empowered or bettered by knowing what the Black folk did back in the day? Why does that matter to me?

Nash: Well, because these are great models for everyone. Skin collar isn't so relevant here. These are stories of people who started with little and accomplished a lot. Well, that's an American story. And the more we learn that this kind of boldness and perseverance comes in different skin colors and different genders and different packages, then the better we are able to solve some of these unfinished agendas that are still with us.

Tavis: Let me end where I began, and that is with this notion of the progress that you suggested that is being made. We both know in the city of Philadelphia, they now operate under these guidelines where every kid in a Philadelphia classroom has to be taught before they graduate African American history. How likely you think that kind of model is to be replicated across the country?

Nash: I don't think it will be replicated very often. I applaud it, and I've said so publicly. If they were learning only African American history but not U.S. history and world history, then I wouldn't be so enthusiastic about it. But they already had in place a requirement to take a course in world history and a course in U.S. history. So this was the third course. Well, this is a commitment to history itself that very few school districts have made.

Tavis: The new book by Professor Gary B. Nash is "The Forgotten Fifth, African Americans In The Age of Revolution, Forgotten No More." Thanks to Professor Nash. I'm delighted to have you on the program.

Nash: Thank you very much. A pleasure to be here.

Tavis: My pleasure. All the best to you. Up next on this program, author and poet Paul Beatty, with his controversial new text, "Hokum." Stay with us.