In podcast #9, Dr. Bezio discusses how history is more than what we are led to believe. History is supposed to inform us why any person, place or thing is the way it is. While this is true, before the printing press and other technological advances, we didn’t have a way to mass record history. There also wasn’t a quick way to do it. People would use a typewriter or before that, only ink. Because of this, only the important stuff was written down, and in early history this meant only events or facts having to do with important white men were recorded. While this is true, we have deterred other things about culture in that time period from other sources. It’s important to consider that the majority of our population is common people, so why do we focus on the great leaders.
Speaking of leaders, a term that Dr. Bezio discussed that caught my eye was invisible leadership. I learned about it last semester, but I had forgotten how important it is to consider when analyzing early history. Invisible leadership includes those who helped create history but aren’t recognized for it. For example, when we think about the civil rights movement, our minds usually go to Martin Luther King Jr. What we tend to disregard is the fact that there were so many other people involved in this movement. For example, we can consider all the black women who helped King with this movement to be invisible leaders because they aren’t mentioned in history records.
The Hayter reading was interesting because I felt like he recognized some of history that isn’t normally recorded. One thing that really stuck out to me in the reading was the fact that in the mid 1960’s, Richmond’s black voter population had out registered and out organized white voters. The reason this stuck out to me so much is that (maybe this is just me) it isn’t a fact that has ever really been taught to me when learning about the civil rights movement. It was always that one day black people were given the right to vote, but only as 3/5 of a person and then another day, they were given the right to vote. None of these small facts about the black population gaining the right to vote were ever taught to me, especially ones that said black people out registered white people.
I think it’s really interesting the “small” facts and details that are left out of history books that in reality have had profound impacts on the course of events, such as black people gaining the right to vote. A lot of times, I think that it is the small details that are crucial to depicting a more complete history.
I really liked the fact that you brought up “invisible leadership”. i think that one of the most difficult thing about the history of leadership is the fact that these invisible leaders probably did just as much as the famed characters we hear about (MLK and Rosa Parks etc…) but we don’t hear about them because they may not have drawn enough attention to be talked about. Lastly, I also was surprised by Hayter’s reading. We often hear about racial prejudice and discrimination but it was crazy to read the statistics that showed how much power the black population could have had if they weren’t restricted.
I liked how Professor Bezio pointed out that while MLK did amazing things and successfully mobilized his supporters, his followers are the ones who made the Civil Rights Movement possible. I remember discussing this idea in 101 with Bezio, about how a few leaders are considered figureheads of the civil rights movement, such as MLK and Malcolm X, but Black Lives Matter does not have one or two leaders who are recognized as in charge. I wonder what this says about our desire to recognize one or a few great leaders — is this really necessary? Or does group leadership work just as well, or better?