Quarles, Benjamin Arthur

Impact on the world

The son of a Boston subway porter who did not enter college until age 23, Quarles earned his Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin in 1940 and went on to publish essays in the Mississippi Valley Historical Review in 1945 and 1959 that were the first ever contributed by a Black historian to a major mainstream historical journal, at a time when white historians openly questioned whether Black scholars could write objective history or whether sufficient primary sources on Black history even existed. His 1961 book, The Negro in the American Revolution, was the first comprehensive study of African Americans' military and diplomatic roles during the Revolutionary War, documenting both those who fought for American independence and the thousands who sought freedom by joining the British; his earlier The Negro in the Civil War established, through careful statistical and documentary evidence, that some 180,000 Black soldiers served the Union cause among 3.5 million African Americans engaged in the broader struggle against slavery. As chair of the history department at Morgan State University in Baltimore from 1953 to 1974, Quarles trained two generations of Black scholars and later published Black Abolitionists (1969) and Black Mosaic: Essays in Afro-American History and Historiography (1988), for which the American Historical Association awarded him its Senior Historian Scholarly Distinction Award; fellow historian John Hope Franklin, also profiled in this collection, called him “one of the finest, most original historians of his generation.”

Life & background

Born January 23, 1904, in Boston, Massachusetts, Quarles earned his B.A. from Shaw University in 1931 and his M.A. and Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin by 1940. He taught at Shaw University and served as dean at Dillard University before chairing the history department at Morgan State University in Baltimore from 1953 until his 1974 retirement, and died in Baltimore on November 16, 1996, at age 92.

Sources

1. Encyclopedia.com; African American Registry; University of North Carolina Press