For more than 40 years, the historian Benjamin Quarles was a valued member of the faculty of Morgan State University here in Baltimore. At his death in 1996, he was considered one of the country’s foremost historians of the Black experience in America. Having published the first modern biography of Frederick Douglass in 1948, Quarles was a leading exponent of “Black agency,” the concept that African Americans had been active shapers, and not passive bystanders, of American society and culture even before their emancipation from slavery.

The start of Quarles’ journey as a historian, however, was anything but easy.

As a young graduate student at the University of Wisconsin in the early 1930s, Quarles was told by his white faculty adviser to drop any plans he might have to focusing on the history of Black Americans. The prevailing view at the time was that too little information existed on Black life in America to make it anything more than a “marginal specialty.” More damning still, most historians felt that African Americans writing about Black politics and culture might turn their research into propaganda.

Quarles, the son of a black Boston railway porter and his white Irish housewife, received his undergraduate degree from Shaw University in North Carolina, a historically Black college/university, where ironically his interest in African-American history was promoted by a white history professor, Florence Walter.

At Wisconsin and other major universities in the 1930s, however, such thinking was discouraged. American academic and popular culture had been dominated for decades by what’s known as “the Lost Cause,” a false interpretation of why the South fought the Civil War that helped facilitate the violent restoration of Southern white political and economic control that decimated Black rights and implemented Jim Crow laws that created a new subservience for Black people.

So, having arrived at Wisconsin, Quarles was told to focus on white political figures. He did so, but with a twist, outmaneuvering his advisers by selecting a Radical Republican congressman from the Civil War and Reconstruction era who Quarles believed was a champion of the concept of “Black agency.” Quarles wrote his master’s thesis on George S. Boutwell, a political ally of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant who steadfastly fought for Black voting rights and universal education as essential for giving Black people the political power needed to defend their rights.

Having finished his thesis on Boutwell, however, Quarles renewed his campaign to study Black life in America. He succeeded when his next adviser, William Best Hesseltine, described as “a crusty Virginian,” said yes to Quarles writing his Ph.D. thesis on Frederick Douglass, the outstanding Black orator and public intellectual of the 19th century. Quarles finished his thesis on Douglass in 1940, becoming the first Black historian to receive a Ph.D. at Wisconsin, and then published it as the first significant biography of Douglass in 1948.

Over the length of his career, Benjamin Quarles published dozens of scholarly articles and 10 books, including “The Negro in the Making of America,” all of which established him as one of the foremost historians of the Black experience in America. He taught at Morgan State for most of that time, occasionally turning down offers to teach from more “prestigious” (white) universities around the country. The year he died, 1996, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.

Viewing Quarles’ legacy, the historian August Meier noted that “one of the striking, persistent themes” in Quarles’ work was the “interrelations between Blacks and whites who became their allies.” Toward the end of his life, perhaps Quarles reflected that it all began with his master’s thesis on a white politician, George S. Boutwell, who he said exhibited “a high degree of courage” in fighting for Black rights. So it is that Quarles, having been forbidden to write about the Black experience in America, did the next best thing by selecting a white champion of Black agency and America’s democratic ideals through which to tell the story of Black America.

Jeffrey Boutwell is the author of “Boutwell: Radical Republican and Champion of Democracy” (W.W. Norton). A retired policy specialist and historian, he lives in Columbia, and shares a common ancestor with George Boutwell. He and Prof. Herbert Brewer of Morgan State University will host a book conversation at Pratt Library on Tuesday.