Ellen Diggs

Ellen Irene Diggs (1906–1998) was an American anthropologist, sociologist, and historian. She was the writer of a major contribution to African American history, Black Chronology: From 4,000 B.C. to the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Her academic work aimed to empower and visualize Afro-American chronology as a way to contest the idea that Africans and African Americans had no history and provided no contributions to modern culture. She was exposed to multiple forms of inequality, from poverty to unequal wages in the most marginalized areas of her town. It is this personal experience around inequality that would later on inspire her work on the living conditions of Black people in the US and across the Americas.

Her parents, Henry Charles Diggs and Alice Scott, always encouraged her reading and intellectualism, as well as enforced the value of education. Her outstanding academic achievements in high school that led Diggs to obtain an academic college scholarship. Diggs first enrolled in Monmouth College, and then transferred to the University of Minnesota, where she studied sociology and completed a minor in psychology. She graduated from college in 1928. Afterwards, she enrolled in Atlanta University's MA program in Sociology, having Du Bois as her academic mentor. She later became Du Bois’s research assistant from 1932 to 1942, where she helped him publish multiple research articles and five academic books.

Black Chronology Black Chronology from 4000 B.C. to the Abolition of the Slave Trade was Diggs' major contribution and only single-authored book, and was originally published in 1983. Edited by Charles T. Davis and Henry-Louis Gates Jr., this book traces the chronology of Africans' and Afro-Americans' history, from 4777 B.C., with the first of three Egyptian empires, all the way to 1888, when all enslaved people in Brazil were emancipated. Black Chronology establishes a detailed historical timeline that directly reflects on the slave trade, and the impact on both White and Black people, as well as the inhumane institutions that slavery created, and the struggles against it (page X). This book's main broad aim is to increase “our knowledge and understanding of the Afro-American past” (page X). The project relevance is articulated by Diggs on page XI:A chronology of Afro-American history is important because there is so widespread belief that Africa and Africans have no history, have not achieved, have made little or no contribution to culture; that Africa is dark, mysterious continent, isolated, and insulated from the rest of the world; that what happened in Africa does not matter. Diggs hopes her historical project tackles the incongruences, distortions, and obscurities of the African past, and also the history of Afro-Americans. In addition to creating a compilation of Black life, key milestones, and inventions in Africa, Diggs also connects African history all the way to modernity, in particular around slavery and the slave trade. Black Chronology fills in the gap, systematizes, and revisits the history of slavery, paying attention to the particular systems of violence created, and also to the modes of resistance that were enacted against those systems themselves. Regarding slavery and the slave trade, Diggs makes the case that the struggles in the 1950s and 1960s for racial equality and social justice in the US are an accelerated representation of the struggles that began as soon as the first 20 Black people arrived in the Americas (page X). This becomes crucial considering the understanding that slavery and the slave trade system, particularly in the US, were foundational for the development across the globe, as Diggs articulates (page X). and The New Atlas of African History (1991) offers a diverse perspective on Black Chronology. Freeman-Greenville argues that Dr Diggs' work provides disconnected information until the 18th century, and omits key information, including the Bantu Expansion. Most critically, he challenges her notion that the belief that Africans have no history is widespread across the world. He asserts that History has become a rigorous subject across African schools, libraries, and academia, and that Africans have been active in the teaching and development of their own histories.

She supported and also led major research into the color line in the US and Latin America, becoming a leading expert in both territories on the history and experience of people of African descent and their racialized experience. and "Colonial Sexual Behavior." The “Introduction To The Transaction Edition” reveals Dr. Diggs and Du Bois' closeness. She reveals, for example, Du Bois’ feelings towards the speech given on his 70th birthday, and how he felt they were reading his eulogy. In the summer of 1943, she attended Ortiz's class and institute to gain fluency in Spanish, and afterwards she enrolled as a full-time graduate student. She became a Franklin D. Roosevelt Fellow from 43 to 45, which allowed her to support her studies as a doctoral student.

Her main focus for her doctoral research was on the survival of West African customs in Cuba. She was interested in particular in how the survival and integration of African culture reduces anti-Black racism. She looked at “African-Survivials.” Her experience in Cuba was foundational for her development as a scholar. It is worth noting that being able to study in Cuba allowed Diggs to forge her own academic path separate from Du Bois, and that most of Du Bois’ perspective in Latin American studies of Black people was indebted to his collaboration with Diggs.

In Havana, she had issues finding housing, encountered multiple forms of discrimination, and differences from white and white US American students at the University of Havana. However, Ortiz, as her mentor, introduced her to a web of academics and other critical people and provided and accompanied her while in her studies.

Work In the Rio De La Plata (Uruguay and Argentina) Dr. Diggs became the first Black woman supported by the State Department to study the social conditions and relationships in South America, focusing on the history of African slaves brought to Montevideo by ship. From her research in Uruguay, she asserted that Uruguayans of African descent still maintain their cultural habits and values despite racial amalgamation. Furthermore, she sustained that even though there is a conservation of their African costumes and cultures, Black Uruguayans align themselves with people of their same class, and how in the mid-20th century, those of European descent were equally disenfranchised as Black Uruguayans. While she provides a general overview of the changing legal, social, and economic status of enslaved Africans and their descendants, she also looks to shed light on the ways they resisted against slavery, as well as their overlooked social and cultural contributions (from language to music and gastronomy).

Race Relations and Amalgamation Right in the middle of the 20th century, Dr Diggs was one of the leading experts on the topic of race, race relations, and the color line in Latin America. She also placed a focus on the experience of violence against racialized women. She argues that it is the racial amalgamation of the Spanish and Portuguese with the Indigenous populations and African slaves that formed a “new species,” (criollos, those of mixed ancestry), who are looking to build a more equal future for all. She argued that Black people in the US encountered more violence than Black people in South American countries. This paper was published in Negro History Bulletin, May 1971. In this paper, she explored the story and history of Zumbi and quilombos in Brazil, particularly in Os Palmares. Zumbi was presented both as a folk hero and an actual historical figure who died fighting for his freedom and as a symbol of the anti-savery movement. Zumbi escaped his owners and fought to be free, landing in one of the biggest quilombos (a place of active anti-slavery resistance where African slaves would reside and organize) in Brazil, where he would later become the main leader. He died on November 20 of 1695, fighting against the Portuguese colonial rule.

In a paper titled "Israel", Diggs begins to explore the question of cultural and identity amalgamation in the formation of the country of Israel. She was interested in how, through understanding the cultural relationships development in Israel, she could better understand those in the US. Diggs analyzed what type of artistic, scientific, and socio-economic organizational practices people who were coming to Israel, from across cultures, were inventing or reproducing from their country of origin. Music development, for example, is mentioned to have been in an early stage, and that it might be future generations, those born in Israel, and not migrants, who might be best equipped to develop it. In terms of the political economy, Diggs argues that they had chosen mutual aid and an equitable distribution of services and goods. (422–426)