Quarles, Benjamin

January 28, 1904
November 16, 1996

The historian Benjamin Quarles was born in Boston, Massachusetts. The son of a subway porter, Benjamin Quarles entered college at the age of twenty-three and received degrees from Shaw University (B.A., 1931) in North Carolina, and the University of Wisconsin (M.A., 1933; Ph.D., 1940). He taught at Shaw, served as dean at Dillard University in New Orleans, and chaired the history department at Morgan State University in Baltimore.

Quarles began his scholarly career at a time when racist assumptions hampered research and writing on African-American history. White historians questioned whether blacks could write history objectively, and they believed that African-American history lacked sufficient primary sources for serious research and writing. Quarles proved both notions were false. Building on the pioneering research of Carter G. Woodson (1875–1950) and other black historians of the previous generation, Quarles confirmed the existence of a rich documentary record of African-American life and culture. His early writings demonstrated both his careful research and his ability to present a balanced historical narrative. His essays in the Mississippi Valley Historical Review in 1945 and 1959 were the first from a black historian to appear in a major historical journal.

Quarles's first scholarly article, "The Breach Between Douglass and Garrison," appeared in the Journal of Negro History in 1938 and revealed his interest in race relations. Many of his subsequent studies explored the way in which blacks and whites have helped shape each other's identity on individual and collective levels. In Lincoln and the Negro (1962) and Allies for Freedom: Blacks and John Brown (1974), Quarles investigated the relationship between blacks and two notable whites in American history. He focused on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly the collective contribution of African Americans in two dramatic events, in The Negro in the Civil War (1953) and The Negro in the American Revolution (1961). In Black Abolitionists (1969), he highlighted the participation of blacks in the nation's most important social reform movement.

Quarles shared with his contemporary John Hope Franklin (b. 1915) an optimistic appraisal of racial progress in American history. He brought his scholarship to the classroom through two textbooks, The Negro in the Making of America (1964) and The Negro American: A Documentary History (1967, written with Leslie H. Fishel Jr.), and he has advanced African-American history as a contributing editor of Phylon and as associate editor of the Journal of Negro History. On February 6, 1997, Morgan State University honored his legacy with a special event called the Memorial Convocation Celebrating the Life and Legacy of Benjamin Quarles.

See also Franklin, John Hope; Historians/Historiography

Bibliography

McFeely, William F. "Introduction." In The Negro in the Civil War, by Benjamin Quarles. New York: Da Capo, 1989, pp. 3–6.

Meier, August. "Introduction: Benjamin Quarles and the Historiography of Black America." In Black Mosaic: Essays in Afro-American History and Historiography, by Benjamin Quarles. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989, pp. 3–21.

michael f. hembree (1996)