Lest I give the impression that I believe African American thought in the nineteenth century to have been unremittingly obsessed with the concept of decay, I introduce the historiography of progress in this chapter as a counterbalance to the historiography of decline. The idea of progress seems to hold a perennial fascination for historians, and its significant recent treatments include those of Robert Nisbet, Christopher Lasch, and Bronislaw Bazcko. A classic treatment is that of Herbert Butterfield, who approaches the topic under the rubric of “the whig conception of history.” I have used the term “civilizationism” to indicate this whiggish or progressive ideology that dominated African American conceptions of racial uplift during the nineteenth century. “Civilizationism” had both religious and secular forms. The unilinear conception of progress could sometimes assume the rhetoric of Darwinism, as in the case of Frederick Douglass and, later, Marcus Garvey, or it could be viewed in terms of religion, as with Alexander Crummell and Pauline Hopkins, or it could be viewed in terms of an Afrocentric Marxism, which, as we shall see, was the eventual formulation of W. E. B. Du Bois.

The preceding chapter outlined the development of an African American historiography of decline, a feature of which has been explaining why the Egyptians were not recognized as “black,” a question that often reflected bitter irony or a sense of “black humor.”