RBB Archive Weekly Peek
Posted by: Rebecca Vnuk
Here’s another post for Black History Month.
It was a dream of W. E. B. Du Bois to produce an African encyclopedia, and he conceived of an “Encyclopedia of the Negro” as early as 1909. His plan was for a five-voume work that would be published between 1909 and 1913, but he was unable to find the necessary funding. In 1931, group of scholars and public figures met at Howard University to plan a Pan-African encyclopedia similar to the 1909 project. Since he had not been invited to attend, Du Bois wrote a letter of protest, and at a second meeting he was elected editor-in-chief. He served as editor-in-chief of the new (renamed) Encyclopaedia of the Negro from 1932 to 1946, publishing a preparatory volume in 1945. But once again, funding was a problem, and Du Bois faced opposition from several quarters, including the NAACP, where he had made some enemies. It seemed the project would finally come to fruition when Du Bois was invited to Ghana in 1960 to edit the encyclopedia there. By the time of his death in 1963, his ambition was for an “Encyclopaedia Africana,” a scholarly project with African editorial control, written from the African point of view. For a fuller history of Du Bois’ encyclopedia, click here.
Enter Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who became interested in Du Bois’ idea in 1969 when he was a student at Yale. In 1999, ninety years after Du Bois first articulated the need for “the equivalent of a black Encyclopaedia Britannica,” Gates and others realized his vision, first in the form of a CD-ROM called Encarta Africana, and then as the one-volume Africana: The Encyclopedia of African and African American Experience, published by Perseus. In its second edition, published by Oxford in 2005, Africana grew to five volumes. It is part of the Oxford African American Studies Center, a database first launched in 2006 and also edited by Gates.
