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. Dr. Irene Diggs (Irene was her preferred name) was the first Black woman to write about race relations and the African diaspora in the Americas. She spent her whole academic career fighting against and researching racism, as well as the cultural and historical contributions of Africans and the African diaspora in the Americas. Alongside her academic mentor W. E. B. Du Bois, she co-founded Phylon: A Review of Race and Culture, and published her scholarly research across multiple journals.
She was also the first Black woman ever to receive a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Havana.
Biography Diggs was born in Monmouth, Illinois, on April 13, 1906, to a low-income working-class family, which was supportive of her and her academic pursuits. 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.Seaton, Corey. “On the Periphery: Three African Americans.” Kola 27, no. 1 (2015): 64–77.
Her parents, Henry Charles Diggs and Alice Scott, always encouraged her reading and intellectualism, as well as enforced the value of education.Deegan, Mary Jo. Women in Sociology: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook. Greenwood Press, 1991. 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.Boyd, Herb. “Ellen Irene Diggs, Early Anthropologist and Assistant to Du Bois.” New York Amsterdam News (New York, N.Y., United States), October 3, 2024. She later became Du Bois’s research assistant from 1932 to 1942, where she helped him publish multiple research articles and five academic books.
After almost a decade working for Du Bois, she resigned from her position and pursued a doctoral studies in anthropology at the University of Havana, Cuba, earning a Ph.D. in 1945. Later on, she returned to the United States, worked again for a short time with Du Bois, and began extended fieldwork in Latin America.
After returning from her fieldwork, Diggs received her appointment as a professor of Sociology at Morgan State University. She worked from 1947 to 1976. At Morgan State, she encountered wage discrimination; her salary of $5,100 was ineligible for an increase since her doctorate was not granted by an American institution.Holden, Constance. “What Would You Suggest That I Do Next?”: The Rival Geographies of Ellen Irene Diggs. n.d.
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).
Some examples that illustrate the breadth and depth of Black Chronology include:
C.3000 B.C “Imhotep, a learned black physician, the earliest known physician and history’s earliest known scientific genius, lived in Egypt. In the course of time, he was deified and became for later generations the special god of medicine” (p. 2) C.1 A.D “The skills of metal-working began to be understood and practiced, perhaps beginning with copper in the regions of modern Katanga, and northern Zambia. They soon began working in iron. Population was small. There is evidence of early farming and cultivation of millet.” (p. 10) “Sailors from Egypt and Arabia visited the East Coast of Africa for trade, buying African ivory, tortoise shell, and other products. There is increasing evidence that African slaves were being transported to India before and at the beginning of the Christian era.” 1511 “First blacks brought to Cuba from Spain” (p. 47) 1517 “Bartholome de Las Casas appealed to King Ferdinand of Spain that Africans be sent to America to substitute for Indians in the mines.” (p. 48) 1705 “The Virginia slave code defined slaves as being real state” (p. 90) 1710 “There was a widespread slave conspiracy in Brazil (…) Mohammedan blacks revolted repeatedly.” (p. 92) 1838 “Abolition of slavery in the dominions of Great Britain” (p. 183) 1888 [last year covered by Black Chronology] “Slavery is abolished in Brazil. There were approximately 725,000 slaves in Brazil at this time.” (p. 288) “The total number of slaves imported is not known. It is estimated that nearly 900,000 came to America in the sixteenth century, 2.75 million in the seventeenth century, 7 million in the eighteenth, and over 4 million in the nineteenth—perhaps 15 million in total. Probably every slave imported represented, on the average, five corpses in Africa or on the high seas. The American slave trade, therefore, meant the elimination of at least 60 million Africans from their fatherland. The Mohammedan slave trade meant the expatriation or forcible migration in Africa of nearly as many more. It would be conservative, then, to say that the slave trade cost Africa 100 million people.” (288–289)
There are very limited academic reviews of Black Chronology and that the relevance and reach of this piece might be limited. While the contribution to African and Afro-American History could be considerable, particularly around her documentation of slavery, salve trade, and resistance, there might be some inconsistencies and issues with this publication. G.S.P. Freeman-Grenville, historian and author of Chronology of African History (1973) 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.Freeman-Grenville, G. S. P. “Ellen Irene Diggs, Black Chronology: From 4000 BC to the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Boston, Mass.: G. K. Hall, 1983, Xii + 312 Pp.” Africa (London. 1928) 56, no. 4 (1986): 506–7. https://doi.org/10.2307/1160022. 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.
Work in the US
Research work Diggs worked with Du Bois while being a graduate student at Atlanta University, and for almost a decade after graduating, amounting to almost 14 years. Her graduate work for her MA in Sociology concluded with a dissertation titled "A Study of Delinquency Among Negro Girls in Atlanta.” As a graduate student research assistant, and afterwards, as a full-time assistant, Diggs supported multiple of Du Bois' publications and major works, including Black Reconstruction in America (1935), Black Folk: Then and Now (1939), and Dusk of Dawn (1940). Part of her contribution to US American scholarship on race and racism was through her support of Du Bois' scholarship, and co-creation of Phylon: The Clark Atlanta University Review of Race and Culture, and The Encyclopedia of the Negro (1945).Vásquez, Jorge Daniel. “W.E.B. Du Bois and Irene Diggs: Gender, Erasures, and Knowledge Production in the Sociology of the Global Color Line.” Gender & Society (Los Angeles, CA) 38, no. 3 (2024): 317–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/08912432241252609.
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. Some of her most well-known works include "The Biological and Cultural Impact of Blacks on the United States" (1960) Diggs, Irene. “The Biological and Cultural Impact of Blacks on the United States.” Phylon (Atlanta, Ga) 41, no. 2 (1980): 153–66. https://doi.org/10.2307/274968. and "Colonial Sexual Behavior."Diggs, Irene. “Colonial Sexual Behavior.” Negro History Bulletin (United States) 37, no. 2 (1974): 214–16.
Relationship with Du Bois