Black scholarship creates and promotes knowledge of blacks, as well as racial, ethnic, gender, and class relations, in the United States and world. Its core creators and promoters before the 1960s were black secondary and higher education faculty in humanities, behavioral and social sciences, and their associations. It saw growing acceptance with desegregation of learned societies, colleges, and universities, which elected to membership and recruited to white faculties black scholars who helped establish Black Studies programs and promote research and teaching on race and the black experience. The programs indeed energized inquiry, instruction, and community service; minority group and women's studies; and demands to integrate academia.

African American history clearly provides a microcosm of black scholarly inquiries. Its development as a field, according to Earle E. Thorpe's Black Historians: A Critique (1971), is traceable via the lens of various schools, some historians contributing to more than one school. An increasing number of whites contributed. Schools researched and interpreted not only white racism and racial injustice but also the complexity and richness of black heritage and culture, institutions and organizations, and movements for justice.

The Beginning School (1800–96) affirmed African and African American humanity, dignity, and freedom. Chroniclers (slaves, free blacks, freedmen and women) renounced slavery and color caste. They championed abolitionism, Christianity, literacy, the Union, emancipation, black citizenship and uplift in their columns, essays, memoirs, sermons, and histories. William Wells Brown, former slave and abolitionist, defended The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements (1863). Union veteran, Baptist minister, and legislator George Washington Williams did so in his A History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880 (1882). Slave-born educator Anna J. Cooper's A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South (1892) urged educating girls and women to elevate “the whole Negro race.” Episcopal rector Alexander Crummell preached black pride, self-help, and African repatriation. Former missionary in Liberia, he authored Africa and America (1891) and mentored W. E. B. Du Bois.

The Middle School (1896–1930) instituted black historiography. Members mostly had ties to Negro colleges, the American Negro Academy, and Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH).