how they would view history and whether they would write about history or reshape their view of history specifically because they are black or female. Novick cites an early black historian, John Hope Franklin, who denied that he was a "Negro historian":
His career was a demonstration that without sacrificing dignity, or pandering to whites, it was possible for a Negro to reach the heights of professional honor and respect, and to have warm relations of collegiality with leading white historians. . . Much of Franklin's work had nothing to do with blacks, which was the basis for his consistent claim, that he was not a "Negro historian" but a "historian of the South" who happened to be a Negro.
By the 1960s, though, being black had become something that a black academic had to take into consideration. This was the era of the development of black power and black nationalism as a major force. Black nationalism emerged as a response to the desire to escape from the confines of a racist society. It has been described as "the conglomeration of efforts of blacks to resolve problems of cultural identity and sociopolitical weakness as blacks." Black nationalism has a long history as a political movement, with varying impact at different points in American history. Black nationalism has its conservative and its liberal side. The integrationist strand holds that black nationalism is a justification to argue for equal participation in American pluralism. This approach sees blacks as another ethnic group that should have opportunities to rely on group resources to climb the socioeconomic ladder. The separatist strand hopes for an American society made up of semi- or fully-independent racial enclaves, each based on its own cultural definitions. Novick finds that these strands did have an influence on historiography and on how history was to be told for the black community. He cites the controversy over William Styron's novel The C...