Black Indians: From Concept to Birth
William Loren Katz
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"Your work has not only coined the term 'Black Indians,' it has inspired an intellectual wave. Thank you from someone who has learned from your vision and research."— Professor Tiya Miles (November 10, 2006, at "The First and the Forced" Conference on Black Indians, Lawrence, Kansas)

Introduction
The year 2006 marked the twentieth anniversary of Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage published in 1986. For these twenty years it has remained in print with its only publisher, Atheneum Books for Children, which also issued a paperback edition five years later under the publisher's Alladin imprint (also still in print).

During my attendance at this fascinating conference (The First and the Forced) devoted to the growing interest in the new discipline of Black Indians (and also participating as a keynote speaker) I was asked by Professor James Leiker to submit a contribution to the conference's e-book.

My presentation at this conference was a PowerPoint lecture based on my large collection of photographs. I thought that those who plan to enter this field of study might wonder how this concept "Black Indians" arose to a particular author in the first place, and how it took shape as a published book. I decided that the time and setting of the conference were appropriate to discuss the origin and eventual birth of Black Indians.

Black Indians as a concept and book was born out of a melding of four disparate elements: 1) a consuming interest in little-known aspects of African American history that began during my high school days in World War II; 2) an immersion in the pioneering research of Professor Kenneth Wiggins Porter in the 1960s; 3) a surprise conversation with Langston Hughes about my first book; and 4) the unforgettable faces of people of African lineage who peered at me from my collection of Native American photographs.

My Interest in People of African Descent in the Americas
My interest in the history of people of African descent in the Americas began with a love of jazz that sprouted in high school and by my senior year led to a 200-page thesis that used documents and photographs. In this pursuit I had followed my father, Ben Katz, whose love of jazz began in the 1930s and led to a unique record collection (78s), an avid interest in "Negro History," and a growing number of books on the subject. This passion to unearth a buried past also led him to collect articles and pictures from nineteenth-century magazines and by the late 1930s brought him and this young kid to the Schomburg Research Center in Harlem.

After graduating from Syracuse University in 1950 with a BA in history and New York University two years later with a MS in secondary education, I taught social studies for fourteen years in New York public schools. Appalled by the neglect and consistent distortion in school history texts and the complete absence of the subject in the state curriculum, I began to introduce African American materials to my classes. By 1967 I found a publisher willing to publish my collection of materials and pictures in a black history text for secondary schools called Eyewitness : The Negro in American History . I felt the information was too startling for a straight narrative so I relied heavily on first-person accounts, antique prints, and old photographs to prove the validity of the story. It was an early contribution to what would soon be called Black Studies.

The Research and Kenneth Wiggins Porter
In December 1967, when Eyewitness had just appeared, I was contacted by the president of Arno Press, a New York Times Company that issued scholarly reprint series for libraries. I was asked to create and serve as general editor for a reprint series of 212 historic accounts on African American history. I appointed a distinguished editorial board of seven African American researchers and archivists and white scholar James M. McPherson to assist in the selection process. In 1970, as this publishing effort wound down, I suggested and the editorial board approved publication of the most salient essays of University of Oregon professor Kenneth Wiggins Porter, a Kansas poet and Harvard-trained historian and expert on African Americans in US Western history. His book The Negro on the American Frontier appeared in 1971, with my introduction, the same year as my The Black West: A Documentary and Picture History. My introduction to his fine book of essays and The Black West acknowledged the scholarly importance of and my enormous debt to Porter's ground-breaking labors. Professor Porter and I never met, but our dozens of phone conversations made it clear that he was a gracious, diligent, professional with unmatched knowledge, understanding of, and devotion to his subject.

On Professor Porter's death in 1981, his widow, Mrs. Annette T. Porter, whom I found equally gracious and charming, asked me to serve as curator of his unpublished manuscripts, and collections of microfilm, notes, and books. I agreed and soon informed Mrs. Porter that I thought the Porter collection's permanent home should be New York City's Schomburg Center, where the public and scholars would have access to them. She was very pleased with the choice. Almost as soon as they arrived at the Center and were catalogued, the Porter papers became the most-used Schomburg collection, and this continued for at least a decade.

Langston Hughes' Good Advice
To backtrack in time for a moment: in 1966, in the course of seeking official permission to use various authors' writings in my Eyewitness documentary, I wrote to Langston Hughes. One evening at dinner time in late 1966 or early 1967, my phone rang, and it was Langston Hughes. Before he gave his permission to use his words, he asked the nature and scope of the book. I had hardly finished telling him that it was designed as a school history text when he said, quite firmly, "Don't leave out the cowboys!" He may have said it twice. I told him, somewhat defensively, that I had included two chapters on black Westerners in Eyewitness , and he responded, again quite firmly, "Good, good, that's very important!" His one bit of advice hit me as a directive, and my brief telephone conversation with Langston Hughes was over. However, his firm words stayed with me. As I read about his life, I found he had grown up in Lawrence, Kansas, had an Ohio frontier lawyer relative, John Mercer Langston, who defended Underground Railroad agents (including his own brother!). Another Langston Hughes relative was Lewis Sheridan Leary, a harness maker and student at Oberlin College in Ohio, who became one of the five African Americans to join John Brown in his 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry. I had also read that Langston Hughes could trace his ancestral tree back to the legendary Pocahontas.

So Langston Hughes, speaking from his own personal experience, as well as his knowledge of history, was informing me that exposure to the role of African Americans in the West should be a priority for school children and for Americans of all ages and races. As I wrote in the introduction to the 2005 edition of The Black West:

If African American youths were to feel a part of the country, and if whites were to see them as a part, Langston Hughes was saying, the West's real cast of characters had to be revealed. African American men and women had to ride across the pages of textbooks just as they rode across the western plains. His insight inspired The Black West.

Langston Hughes' prodding command helped push me to a book, this time one about the history of black Indians such as Langston Hughes.

Genesis of a Book
In 1983 these four forces seemed to unite within me, and I wrote a proposal for a young adult book on Black Indians and sent it off. I wanted to write a book for young people, one that would also attract adults who might turn away from the language and complexity of a scholarly publication. After Eyewitness , I had written ten more books for young adult audiences, and this medium appealed to me for this project. Although I sent my proposal to three young adult publishers, only Athenaeum's Marcia Marshall responded. She had edited previous books in African American history, and this project intrigued her. When we met, she told me the ground rules for young adult titles. The book should be limited to 200 pages, should clearly explain basic concepts, engage students from grades five to ten, use dramatic pictures, and should not include footnotes, sources, nor an extensive bibliography. Aimed at the U.S. public school market, the book should focus on the United States almost entirely. Though I accepted the conditions, through this book I would capture the attention of interested adults and reviewers and might stimulate further investigation of the subject.  With the manuscript I submitted a two-page introduction stressing the significance of the subject, and a short annotated bibliography.

I began to reread my research materials and turned to my typewriter, since I did not have a computer. The result was a cut-and-paste manuscript that editor Marcia Marshall returned each time with severe criticisms. I began to realize the criticisms largely stemmed from the manuscript's messiness and illegibility, and I bought a Macintosh computer to finish the manuscript

However, a few problems lay ahead. Seeking a US school market, the publisher insisted that the three chapters devoted to African and Indian alliances in the Caribbean and Latin America had to be reduced to one chapter. I considered the total American connection too significant to truncate so drastically and instead compressed my material into one and a half chapters. This was the first instance of many in which I found that the dramatic, even poetic nature and magnitude of the subject influenced my choices and organization of material. The result was both a more emotional and less thoroughly organized work than my previous books. My previous books for children observed a rigid chronology, but not this time. Even the chapter titles within Black Indians did not follow the simple, clear categories (such as The Civil War or Presidential Reconstruction) of previous books but were fragments of moving quotations used in the chapters.

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