History and Memory: The Tyranny and Prejudice of Experience

This commentary serves as a brief response to Bernard Bell’s account of the formation of the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies—titled “Passing on the Radical Legacy of Black Studies at the University of Massachusetts”—featured in this same volume. This rejoinder raises critical questions about the fallibility of memory and memoirs by exploring the chasms between self-recollection and history; autobiography and historical investigation; and retrospect and nostalgia. The commentary also offers a rough outline of the important contextual elements shaping the creation of the Du Bois Department and its remarkable early growth in the 1970s, describing it as a notably different intellectual and bureaucratic environment from that which gave birth to the doctoral program in the 1990s.