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Woodson’s Employment Struggle at Howard University Imperiled the Journal of Negro History a Century Ago
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Woodson’s Employment Struggle at Howard University Imperiled the Journal of Negro History a Century Ago

At the 101st Annual ASALH Business Meeting, when she tried to justify signing a contract for the University of Chicago to publish the Journal of African American History, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham pointed to a 1920 effort by Woodson to get the integrated National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to purchase (not simply publish) the Journal. Providing no context, she believed his effort proved that Woodson was willing to work with whites–as if ASALH had not always worked with whites. The issue was self-publishing–being ultimately in control over the content, financing, and legal liability of the journal–not selling to or working with whites. As a historical matter, she begged the question: Why was Woodson trying to permanently let go of the Journal of Negro History? Indeed, at the time it was virtually ASALH’s first and only program, and it was the reason he founded the Association. What was going on in the Winter of 1920?

As it turns out, the first part of 1920 was a period of great personal and professional travail for the Founder. In summer of 1919, years after taking his doctorate at Harvard, Woodson finally was able to leave the District of Columbia Public Schools and become the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the Howard University. Yet it was a move that proved almost fatal to the Association and the Journal of Negro History. Within no time Woodson fell out with the white president of Howard, James Stanley Durkee, who was also in his first year as president of the university. Within the campus circle, their dispute over matters large and small were open discussions in print. He refused to monitor whether his faculty attended religious services as required; he opposed red-baiting, censorship of the library, and he sought to establish, without permission, an extension program for district teachers. By the end of his first semester, Woodson started looking for funding for the Journal, seeming to know he was unlikely to last more a single academic year at institution called the capstone of Negro education.

His disputes with President Durkee mattered greatly for the Association, especially the Journal, because Woodson had been its main source of funding. Over the previous five years, he had been putting $1,500 a year–$35,000 a year today with inflation–into the Journal. He had been paying for it with his job as a teacher and then a principal in the public schools. His move up in the world appeared to be his professional undoing. Soon, he recognized, he would need a source of revenue for his own survival and would not be able to care for the Journal that he breathed life into. Ironically, he had previously thought of Howard as a potential home for the journal, and six months after taking his post, the potential solution had become the problem.

The fact that Woodson needed to invest so much of his personal resources into the Journal is a sad testimonial about the state of the Association’s board. Clearly, the members were not doing as board members have always been expected to do–give money or get money–for the operations of the Association. The idea that Woodson could approach the NAACP on his own and attempt to sell the property of the Association speaks volumes. He could make such a presumptuous move because he was paying the freight that was the board’s obligation. Like many directors, he had bosses who could tell him what to do even if as they neglected their charge. Yet, the limits of their power ended with Woodson’s self-funding of what amounted to his Journal and his association. For certain, they could have stopped the sale of the Journal but they would not have been able to keep it alive unless they were willing to pay for an editor and pay for costs of the Journal. Had they been willing to do that the crisis would not have existed.

Trying to sell the journal was not his only out of character behavior. Though never the radical or black nationalist some scholars have thought him to be, Woodson was a progressive liberal, a member of the local branch of the NAACP, and an advocate of greater democracy. It was during this moment of desperation that Woodson found himself exposed by the Washington Bee for behaving radical and public and posing as a conservative to a powerful white Senator in hopes of raising funds for the Journal. In a public meeting in Washington, Woodson called the socialist A. Philip Randolph a prophet to great public applause.

For anyone who thinks of Woodson as a radical and a black nationalist, this letter is an eye opener. Here’s Woodson’s often repeated position that the Association should stay above politics and history should not be political is revealed to be signal to whites with money or access to it that his objectivity was the better alternative to the approach of “hot-headed radical” only seeking to make a name for themselves. Rather than seeking to empower black people through self-knowledge–that ethnic if not black nationalist approach to identify building–Woodson here suggested that the goal was to “interpret the Negro to the white man” to ease negative white attitudes towards black people. Here was the accommodationism of Booker T. Washington, not the militancy of Du Bois, Trotter, and now Randolph.

Woodson’s response to his Janus face being revealed by the Washington Bee is unknown, but his resort to playing to conservatives is a measure of the desperation he felt for the survival of the journal that he was soliciting funds from to keep the Journal and the Association alive. Within six months, the selling of the journal to the NAACP and the currying favor of powerful conservative whites came to an end. No sooner than he “resigned” from Howard, he was hired by John A. Davis, the president of West Virginia Institute for Colored Youth, both efforts stopped. A fellow member of the Washington, DC NAACP, Davis provided Woodson a two-year position at his institution as a dean, which allowed the founder to take care of himself and the Journal.

Moving forward, Woodson stayed the path of independence and black self-determination. To be sure, he would and did take money from foundations, usually liberal ones, but eventually that came to an end. Shortly thereafter he would wage battles with W. E. B. Du Bois and others whom he felt took the easy road by relying on funds from white sources that were trying to control black people. In the decade of the 1920s, Woodson succeeded in parlaying his salary from grant money into a successful publishing house and expanding the fundraising among black people to make real his vision of a scholarly magazine published a black controlled organization not beholding to whites.

It is unlikely he would have thought highly of ASALH putting the Journal he founded under white management in 2017. There was no financial crisis–the Journal was paying itself way in the world generating a surplus for other activities? While journal revenues were declining over time, a modest increase in dues could address the problem with an organization with over 2,000 active members. A century later the Journal is not self-managed and there is no such justification except the desire for the status that comes–in the minds of some–by being affiliated with a major white institution.

Woodson Was a Rare Bird
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Woodson Was a Rare Bird

When Carter G. Woodson fell out with the imperious white president of Howard and was about to lose his job during his first and only year as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, it imperiled the Journal of Negro History. It was his pride and joy, his labor of love on behalf of the race. Today, many members of ASALH only join to attend the Annual Meeting. Others, to stay financial as members of their branch. Never get it twisted, for him ASALH was about the journal, the publication of knowledge about black folks. The Annual Meeting and eventually Negro History Week were vehicles to spread the word about the scholarship being researched and published. Without gainful employ, he would never be able to sustain the journal because he was largely funding it from his salary first a high school principal and then as a Howard professor. For five years, as we see below, he gave $1,500 a year–that’s the equivalent of $35,350 annually.


Now the Association had a board which was supposed to give or get money, but boards often mean well and do little. This is the case quite often among small not-for-profits and major universities. Woodson was pulling the journal weight by himself and was not only paying for the journal but serving as the editor and the director at his own expense, too.

Little has changed in ASALHland. Black history thrives as a discipline because of Woodson but there are few professional historians who would put money on the table to keep their journal alive. In 2017–despite there being no financial reason for doing so–a group of modern boomers of the golden age of black activism sent the JAAH to be managed by white folks. When asked why would Chicago do it when they wouldn’t make much money, we literally heard that the white folks loved the journal and that was the reason for their wanting to publish it. (Don’t doubt this account, there were almost 200 witnesses to this.) Then we heard from the national president that Woodson was willing to sell the journal to the NAACP, which meant he was willing to take white assistance. What was left out of that tale told by a leading scholar was that Woodson was desperate because he was about to be jobless. Moreover, there was no comparison between the ASALH of then and now because 1. The journal was making a profit of nearly $40K a year, and 2. everyone involved (except me) was being paid. Moreover, a group of us came in the meeting with $55k to show the seriousness of our intentions–only for another leading scholar to question whether I had $50k. (I don’t live high like some of us, so I had it.)

If the academy ever finishes with its Negro project, it is not clear whether black folks would have a scholarly journal of African American history. Black Studies in the academy was born of protest and it is a dependent field of study. To be sure, it deserves to be funded, but for most it is a career, not a calling. Woodson was a rare bird.

Reflections on the 104th Anniversary of ASALH
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Reflections on the 104th Anniversary of ASALH

Yesterday, September 9th, marked the Association’s 104th anniversary. As long as Carter G. Woodson’s association lives there is hope that organization will get back right with its founder. This site exists to remind people who know ASALH that its founder’s first and foremost purpose was to create an organization for black people to publish–publish–the truth about themselves. He dedicated the remainder of his life and his resources to publishing the Journal of Negro History, now the Journal of African American History. In 2017, when ASALH’s Executive Board signed to a contract to make the University of Chicago Press its publisher, it broke faith with the past. It lost its way.

Publishing is a business, and once you leave a business, getting back into it is difficult. Most of the members on the board at the time of the sellout, did not understand what it took to publish a journal. Indeed, most some made the inane argument that we lacked a physical printing press, not know that the University of Chicago Press did not literally “press” books any more. Most of the tasks of publishing are outsourced by most publishers–even if they call themselves a “press” or a “publishing house.” Publishing is about making a publication happen financially and being legally responsible for the content. To be sure, anyone with cash and integrity can re-enter publishing, but the business of publishing also requires accomplishing all the tasks and making all the decision that make the final product viable. How this work is done and coordinated changes over time. All businesses change.

This means that as each year passes, ASALH will become more, not less, dependent on the University of Chicago or some other publisher to publish Woodson’s journal. Once fully deskilled as a publisher, ASALH will have to pay the cost of dependency. From the beginning, ASALH decided to cease self-publishing on the basis of status, not money–the new arrangements meant less, not more, net revenue. Indeed, those involved confused revenue for profit, and boasted ASALH would have the money to buy itself the things it needed. Instead, the lasting result was the loss of staffing, as predicted.

Anyone knowledgeable about academic publishing knows that a journal like Woodson’s is shrinking in university library sales, which are the source of the revenue to sustain the journal. As history shrinks as a discipline and as university libraries get their budgets cuts or frozen, they subscribe to fewer title. The carnage is real as the academy contracts, and yet ASALH, through its publishing arrangement with Chicago, is more rather than less dependent on libraries sales. The gambit by publishers with their own platforms is to make an increasing percentage of their revenue from old rather than new articles. They want to compete with JSTOR as an archive. Libraries are committed to continuing access to old journals even when they cannot afford the latest, more expense articles. The long and the sort of this that if ASALH’s publisher cannot make a living off of Woodson’s journal, it will cut it royalties to ASALH, and, if necessary, charge ASALH to publish its journal. In any event, ASALH will have to go along or find another publisher. After all, Woodson’s association is losing its publishing knowledge.

Overtime, my knowledge of academic publishing will be outdated. Frankly, I volunteered by time to ASALH for 13 years, from 2003 to 2015, because of a bookshelf I saw in Marquette’s library that looks like the one here. If you notice, there are bound and unbound issues of the journal. Moreover, there are missing numbers from the early 1980s. Those reflect neglect, not by the libraries, but by ASALH. The journal was being published irregularly, and I vowed to do what I could to change that situation if I had the chance. Everyone comes to ASALH through a door. For some it’s the journal. For others, the Black History Bulletin, the annual black history kit, or the Annual Meeting. I came for the journal and learned publishing to put the business back on its footing. This would have been impossible without V. P. Franklin, and self-publishing would have ended without me. He was the poorly paid editor, and I was the unpaid business manager. Well, ASALH is paying for the expertise of the University of Chicago because it, not ASALH, is the shot caller and gets 50% of all revenue from the labors of new editors–and the old ones too. Yes, Chicago gets a cut of all sales from 1916 to present.

What’s left of ASALH’s in-house publishing program is the Black History Bulletin. A publication for teachers by teachers, it is now one of the oldest self-published journals having been around since 1937. Those on ASALH’s board who care about the tradition of self-publishing should become involved in that publication. It is right with Woodson, and it is the hope for the future.

Chicago as an In-house Publisher
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Chicago as an In-house Publisher

Those on ASALH’s board who justified taking on the University of Chicago as the publisher of the Journal of African American History knew very little about the publishing business. They claimed that we lacked the capacity to publish even though we had been publishing the JAAH for a hundred years without many in-house services, including a printing press and distribution. Indeed, the sellouts had an obsession with our lack of a printing press. Talking to people who knew as little as they did about publishing, ASALH, and our history of outsourcing publishing tasks, they were persausive to some.

The notion that the University of Chicago Press (UCP) has this robust in-house publishing operation whereas ASALH does not would have been scandal if these folks were not as sincere as they were ignorant. There are a number of companies that provide publishing services to publishers–even though they are sometimes publishers themselves.  While we have used Tapestry Press, a small company from Massachusetts, many have used Sheridan, a firm out of Pennsylvania and others have used Cenveo.  Sheridan’s clients include or have recently included the University of Illinois Press, Penn State University Press, and the University of California Press, and–yes–the University of Chicago.

  • Copy editing at the University of Chicago Press is outsourced, too.  Here is a link to a blog by Carol Saller, who wrote a book published by Chicago about how to succeed at freelancing as a copyeditor based on her experience with them at UCP.  It is not difficult to hire the same free lancers used by major presses.  In fact we at ASALH have done so and continue to do so–just not for the Journal of African American History.  We used the services as part of a package from a vendor, Tapestry.  Here is Chicago free lance copy editor, Rachel Karmins.
  • Composition (Layout and Design)
  • Proofing
  • Printing It is very unlikely that the University of Chicago Press prints journals with lots of copies (roughly 300 or more) in-house because it is more expensive.  Through its Chicago Distribution Center, the press has short-run printing capabilities.  This is probably why the original proposal emphasized digital distribution and left out print as a benefit for ASALH members and charges $20 per member.  The agreement calls for Chicago to provide branch and life members copies of the journal, and they come from Sheridan, which is used by many scholarly journals, and, of course, could have been used by ASALH. Here is the mailer from Sheridan with the latest issue of the JAAH, edited by Pero Dagbovie. See, publishers outsource.

  • Digital Services and Hosting  While the University of Chicago now has its “own” digital platform that allows it to provide access to digital versions of journals, it actually does not have a platform, per se.  It is rather a client of Atypon, which owns the software (Literatum)  and the hardware that houses that allows Chicago to host its own and other folks’ journals.  This is not in-house.  Prior to this year, Chicago used JSTOR–just like we do.   In turn, JSTOR, until this year, used Atypon’s services, too.  It has invested in its own platform, and JSTOR provides us with the platform and the hosting services for a fee.  In a twist of fate, Atypon has been purchased by the major journal publisher, Wiley, which means Chicago is now on a commercial publisher’s platform.
  • Shipping  The University of Chicago Press, just like ASALH, does not ship the journals to subscribers from their offices precisely because they are not in-house printers.  That would not be cost effective.  As in most of the modern world today, the product is often shipped right where is is created.  In this case, from the printer.  This is why Chicago tells anyone who wants a hard copy of an article or a journal to contact their printing house, Sheridan.
  • Reprints of Journal and articles  There is not much money in reprints of articles as there used to be.  Rather than sell individuals individual articles as reprints, ASALH keeps a number of journals on hand and sells whole issues and makes sales this way that goes as revenue from the “ASALH Store” not the journal.  Now this minor stream of revenue, probably a few hundred dollars a year, is not worth Chicago’s time.  At times, however, members might buy a dozen or two dozen copies of their issue or a special issue.  One year, a customer wanted 400 copies of the Hip Hop Special issue.  I have printing and bind capabilities, so I did the project and ASALH made $8,000 as I swallowed the time and materials cost.  Go to Chicago and they would control this.  But they outsource this too to Sheridan.  Here Sheridan provides folks a page on their site to order reprints of Chicago journals.  For complete back issues, they outsource that function to the Periodical Services Company and Schmidt Periodicals Gmbh.
Vote Right with Woodson
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Vote Right with Woodson

Our journal was independent and more profitable until a crew of people, led by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Gilbert Smith, Sharon Harley, and Mr. Self-Determination, VP Franklin, decided that a century of self-publishing was enough.  To achieve this feat, they misrepresented the truth about the finances and ultimately disenfranchised the membership, and now the JAAH is under the management of the University of Chicago.   Yes, we still own Woodson’s journal but now we are so mis-educated that we need managers to make the very same arrangements we had been making.  Go figure.  You have seen the first product of the University of Chicago and the ink covers the page the same way it did when we directed a printer to do it.  They changed the font on the cover, but gee we could have done that too.  And the pictures look just as cheesy as always.  That is the nature of black-and-white images on non-glossy paper.

For Officers

ASALH is currently electing new folks for the board–though not enough of them.    For officers, please vote for Lionel Kimble and Kaye Wise Whitehead.  They were right with Woodson.  Unfortunately, no one would run against Evelyn and Gilbert, so just don’t vote for those positions.  And please do not vote for Barbara Dunn.  I have known her for years, and supported her for most everything.  Yet despite being an advocate of Woodson’s Mis-education of the Negro, folks she was a leading spirit of selling out tradition.  Hurt my heart, but yes, it’s true.

For the Executive Board

Among the people who sold out Woodson who are running for re-election are Janet Sims-Wood, Sharon Harley, James Harper II, and Dorothy Bailey.  Please do not vote for them.  Let them go about their business. They have done enough damage.

In general, I am for people I know are right with Woodson.  Lionel Kimble has organized a slate, and I am for that slate.  I also am For Anita Shepard of the Jacksonville Branch.  She is Right with Woodson.  Please vote for her or one of the following on Lionel’s slate.

 

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Do You Still Have Confidence in the CPA Who Reported Revenue as Profit?

In the wake of the 101st Business Session in Richmond in 2016, the leadership of ASALH defended their treasurer, Gilbert A. Smith, against this blog’s assaults on his performance. Though he had misrepresented a $100,000 proposal to the membership as profit rather than revenue, the ASALH board gave him a vote of confidence a few months later in February of 2017. For the sake of ASALH’s financial credibility, they need to reverse their course and take a vote of non-confidence against him. They would be wise to not let him run for re-election as well. Bad financial leadership erodes trust.

Here and in correspondence to branch members, I pointed out that Smith, along with other leaders on the board, was making a significant financial error and misleading the membership.  Smith knew that the Chicago proposal to publish the journal came with $100,000 that was revenue, not profit. And he should have known that the contract with the University of Chicago would leave ASALH cash starved. Indeed, no long after the contract was signed, ASALH found itself in need of a loan from Chicago to make up for the revenue the journal normally brings.  Gilbert Smith is both a certified public account (CPA) and a credentialed Project Management Professional (PMP). While others who said this should have known better, a certified public accountant cannot be excused for either lying or incompetence. A trained project manager cannot be forgiven a botched transition from self-publishing to contracting with a publisher.

The error of his statement was plain to anyone who had a copy of the Chicago proposal because it made clear that ASALH had to pay for the Journal of African American History’s editorial offices from that royalty.  It listed the cost as $45,000 when in fact the costs associated with the journal, even when published by Chicago, would be much more. All activities include overhead, and this one also includes staff salaries.  While ASALH would receive $100,000, it would have to pay for the editorial office and other journal expenses out of those funds.  In short, the money is revenue, not profit.

 

A CPA not knowing revenue from profit is akin to a chemist not knowing atoms from molecules or a butcher not knowing muscle from fat.  Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, who should have known better herself, defended Gilbert Smith on a manner of grounds that he is a Christian gentleman, a phrase that smacks of late nineteenth century respectability politics, which lets you know you’re on to something.  If a Christian gentlemen is not above falsehoods and a CPA certifies nothing, then I guess we are all supposed to throw up our hands and say no one is accountable either here on earth or in heaven.  In a defense of Smith, Evelyn, misrepresenting the truth about ASALH’s financial record keeping, pretended that he had brought order and regularity.  The truth is financial record keeping and transparency had been in place a decade before Gilbert Smith’s arrival as evidenced by the fact that over that period we received major sponsorships totaling over $2,000,000 from corporations that scrutinized our financial statements, audits, and IRS filings.  No, what Gilbert Smith brought has been financial reports that lack the supporting documentation in reporting to the board and the membership–despite their existence.  This is the method of people who want their way without transparency.  Despite this lack of accountability, Evelyn wrote a letter to the branch presidents touting the moral and professional worth of the treasurer who assisted her in selling out Woodson’s tradition of self-publishing.  She closed her letter:

Of course, if the truth were not on my side, Gilbert Smith would likely sue me, but the truth and witnesses are on my side.  We cannot we cannot expect Evelyn to correct the historical record–even though she now knows the proposal was misrepresented to the membership and the board.  That would be to admit an error.  Yet the board cannot afford to allow their deference to her continue undo the best interest of ASALH.  As a consequence of misrepresenting the Chicago proposal as $100,000 in profit, the board, in the same meeting that it gave Smith a vote of confidence, voted to undergo the expense of moving off Howard University’s campus.  Once again, it did so without documenting the cost.  This method of doing business is happening with the support of a CPA\PMP.

Well, Gilbert A. Smith has been wrong about money before.  In 2016, merely weeks before he misrepresented revenue as profit, Gilbert Smith’s now defunct telecommunications company, Gateway Communications, was embroiled in a dispute with Verizon about how much he owed them.  At stake was nearly $60,000, and without his relationship with Verizon he could not continue his business. The oversight board in State of Maryland was having none of Gilbert’s claim, would not even hear it, unless he could escrow the amount in dispute.  Billing disputes rarely rise to such a level, especially when one party is claiming the other off by tens of thousands of dollars.  When Gilbert failed to place the money is escrow, the commission ordered him shut down. Failing in his own business affairs is one thing, tragic as it is, but it’s quite another to fail to perform due diligence for a not-for-profit as they serve the public good.  Following his financial leadership, the board believed it had $100,000 that was free of expenses, profit as he told everyone.  Simply put, it did not.  The Association is now scrambling for new revenue sources, and will likely continue its pattern of making decisions without sound budgets and projections.  This is the new pattern under the leadership of the Christian accountant and Evelyn of Harvard.

The question before the ASALH board when it meets later this week is whether it will hold Gilbert Smith accountable.  Will it take another vote of confidence on Gilbert Smith as treasurer?  Will it hold accountable the other officers of the organization who also represented revenue as profits, including Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, the president.  Professors should be able to read a contract and see the stipulation that ASALH had to pay for its editorial offices and forthrightly say that the money would not be all profit.  Moreover, the president of any non-for-profit organization making such an important decision should insist on a cost benefit analysis that should have been shared with the members.  And we should never forget, the president must be held accountable for disenfranchising the members of ASALH at the 101st Business Session in Richmond.  Well the board stand up, or will it lay down, once again?  Why sit on a board that refused to do due diligence and your number one responsibility is the financial well-being of the organization?

A Tragic Black History Month Fact
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A Tragic Black History Month Fact

For the first time since Carter G. Woodson established Negro History Week in 1926, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) is no longer the publisher of the Journal of Negro History, now known as the Journal of African American History. From 1916 through 2017, the history magazine stood as the oldest black-published scholarly journal in the world.  101 years of tradition, of unquestioned excellence, over.  Casting it aside, the ASALH board, under the leadership of Harvard’s Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham and with the concurrence of Editor VP Franklin signed a contract for the University of Chicago Press to publish the journal beginning in 2018.  The erstwhile advocate of black self-determination, Franklin now labors under the management of the university where received his doctorate.  ASALH prides itself on still owning the land that it now farms under the direction of white management.

None of this, of course, is right with Woodson.  He fretted for the future of the Association and the journal.  He imagined the journal would not always be published by the Association he founded.  As if it were his personal property, he left a provision in his will that the journal cover bear his name as founder.  He assumed that it would go to one of the black colleges and universities.  Beating all odds, the journal remained independently published by the Association for sixty-seven years after his death.  Moreover, for the last decade, it became profitable and remained so when the decision was made to give up publishing it.  Not only did it pay the editor a modest stipend, it pulled the equivalent of an extra employee through the Great Recession. Indeed, it was the reason that the Association never had to lay anyone off as many did.   Indeed, the Association moves under white management at a financial disadvantage. The Association will make less than it did on its own last year and what it was projected to make in 2018.

How did this happen?  What plagues ASALH afflicts many black organizations nowadays.  People with little experience and financial ability want to leave their mark, and they do so in a manner that flies in the face of sound stewardship.  Initially laboring under the illusion that the move would be more profitable, the president told the members of ASALH in the 2016 Business Session that ASALH would have the money pay for many of the things that ASALH needs.  As this blog has shown that was a mirage born of a lack of due diligence, and they had every reason to know better.  When confronted about the revenue loss, the treasurer, Gilbert Smith, said there was other money that ASALH could attract.  Perhaps, but before the first issue of the University of Chicago Press journal could be printed, ASALH had to borrow money from Chicago for fear of not being able to pay its bill.   Let us hope we do not look up one Black History Month and discover that ASALH has had to close its doors under such stewardship.  Were Woodson still alive perhaps he would add a chapter to The Mis-Education of the Negro.  

Let us hope better for the Journal of Negro Education, founded in 1932 by Charles  H. Thompson.  It is now the oldest scholarly journal published by black people in the world.

The Journal of African American History Goes under White Management
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The Journal of African American History Goes under White Management

After one hundred and two years of successful publishing by a black organization, The Journal of African American History is now published by a predominately white institution, the University of Chicago.  This was not done out of economic necessity;  the journal will now make less money than it did when it was self-published.  The membership of Carter G. Woodson’s once proud organization has largely shrugged its shoulders. They have lost their way in the wilderness.

The Future Is Dim When Stewards Don’t Clean House
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The Future Is Dim When Stewards Don’t Clean House

 

It has been over two months since the Officers, the Board, and the members who attended the 102nd annual meeting heard our Treasurer, Gilbert A. Smith, try to amend the minutes to say that he never represented revenue as profits at the 101st Annual Meeting.  Everyone on the board that I have spoken to feels disappointed, as are a good number of members, but no action has taken place.  An organization must have stewards to survive, people who look out for the well-being of the organization.   ASALH’s board lacks stewards who will tell it like it is and hold people accountable.  When a treasurer reports revenue as profits, he must go, especially when he is certified public accountant.  That he is still there and the board has taken no action taken speaks loud.  For this reason the future of ASALH is not bright.

The treasurer’s misrepresentation of the truth about the Chicago proposal is merely the tip of the iceberg with ASALH’s financial problems under his watch.   Besides not providing a truthful comparative numbers of the Journal of African American History for the board to examine, the organization is functioning without other board members having adequate financial information to make decisions.  Ever since we cleaned out the financial records in 2003 and 2004, ASALH generates financial reports as a matter of course.  Those reports used to be disseminated to all members of the board and financial reports that have expenditures and revenues broken down to the category were provided to members at the Annual Business Session.  This worked this way because it was the charge of the Executive Director to provide it.  No more.  All the financial matters are in the hands of the treasurer and the audit and finance committee and most of the board is in the dark about ASALH’s money.  Rich or poor, for better or worse, most board members hear nothing but what comes out in the annual discussion of the audit.  In less than two years, people have come to see this as normal when it is not–nor should it be.

In the Executive Council meetings that I have attended over the last two years, decisions are made without reference to the budget or the finances in general.  Oh to be sure, some might look at the treasurer and see if he is okay with this or that–but there is no budget documents and any attempt to talk about how something impacts the budget.  So the board has made decisions to raise staff salaries, move from Howard University, and lease office space without an assessment of the impact on the finances of the organization.  The board decided to move from Howard on the basis of the square footage cost provided by a board member who did not provide a written report or any other documentation, especially a lease.  Given that there was no document spelling out the other costs such as for telephones, internet, or heating and cooling, the vote should not have been allowed by the president or the board.  But there was a vote; yes that took place.  So ASALH has left a free space after fifteen years and no a board member whom I’ve spoken to can tell me what it will cost.  Mind you, I have not spoken to all or most board members, but the ones I have know no more than I do–and some have the same concerns.  What was the impact of leaving Howard?  What is the impact of the pay raises?  In the case of the Journal of African American History, I had the proposal and could warn it was a bad deal, but here I know nothing but this:  Any decision made without due diligence being performed on its impact on the budget is a bad deal for ASALH.

We would expect better from an Executive Board when it has learned that its Treasurer lorded his credential over everyone at the 101st Session and then turned around and represented revenue as profit–and was proven to be wrong.  We would expect that after the fact someone would report out the truth about the Chicago proposal–vetting the numbers provided by me–and show the mistake is costing ASALH roughly $35,000.  When the decision was made to give pay raises and leave Howard it passed so easily because people had the false impression that there would be $100,000 in profit from Chicago to pay for these things.  Knowing better, the board should hold Gilbert A. Smith accountable, demand full financial disclosure, and send him packing.  But that, folks, would be too much like stewardship.

This failure to clean house will impair ASALH for years to come, and it jeopardizes the life chances of the organization.  What serious persons will serve or give when they learn how affairs are being run?  Poor organizations must have better management than rich ones.  That goes without saying, but most often they don’t.  While I don’t know the finances, I know the general expense and revenue patterns of ASALH like I know my personal budget.   The revenue and expenses are out of order by $70,000 a year because of the University of Chicago Press deal and the cost of paying for a headquarters.  Given that ASALH had to borrow $50,000 from Chicago because they did not understand the journal’s cash flow, Woodson’s organization starts the new year roughly with $120,000 less revenue for its budget than in 2018 than in 2017.  Without considering the soft-money grants, $120,000 represents about 20 percent of ASALH’s typical budget.  Much of this will be news to board members if they were told this, but they won’t be.  No, who would do this work?  The treasurer?  The president? Either vice president?  The audit and finance committee? Who?

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