The Making of African America
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Behind this prickly matter of nomenclature stand more substantial issues involving experience and its meaning which emerge in matters as intimate as marriage partners or as public as electoral debates. “Barack Obama claims an African American heritage,” asserted Alan Keyes, the black Republican candidate for an Illinois Senate seat in 2004, about his equally dark-skinned Democratic opponent. But, he continued, “we are not from the same heritage. My ancestors toiled in slavery in this country. My consciousness, who I am as a person, has been shaped by my struggle, deeply emotional and deeply painful, with the reality of that heritage.”18 Eventually African Americans embraced Obama, especially when it was discovered that he was too black for some white Americans. The differences that sparked the momentary hesitation created similar controversies. In a like, if less publicized, conflict in the District of Columbia, one longtime African American leader dismissed aggressive foreign-born challengers, noting that “They look like me, but they don’t think like me.”19
While important matters of access to resources—jobs, housing, and college scholarships—underlie such contests, the past also looms large in these struggles. Consensus-minded black leaders try to find common ground between those who are historically African American and others who are literally African American, but the differences that continue to emerge and manifest themselves point to how historical circumstances give new meaning to familiar circumstances. When Ethiopian American businessmen proposed to rename the historically African American Ninth Street in the District of Columbia “Ethiopian Boulevard,” longtime black residents responded that “Ethiopian businesses have the money to afford the $45 per square foot that it costs to have business here, but that doesn’t mean it’s their history.”20
This controversy over who owns African American history and, by extension, what is the meaning of the African American experience and who is (and was) black—although particularly intense at the beginning of the twenty-first century—is certainly not new. The entire African American experience can best be read as a series of great migrations or passages, during which immigrants—at first forced and then free—transformed an alien place into a home, becoming deeply rooted in a land that once was foreign, unwanted, and even despised. In the process, they created new understandings of the meaning of the African American experience and new definitions of blackness.
The reemergence of the old struggle over history within the black community suggests how understanding past migrations can lead to a greater appreciation of the changes that are remaking African American life at the beginning of the twenty-first century. More significantly, these migrations provide a glimpse of the future, for the new history has not one story line but many and has not one direction but several. Exploring this complex struggle does not create a single culture, produce an established political goal, or culminate in a preestablished outcome. Rather it raises questions about the character of the master narrative of African American history.
Viewing the history of African Americans as a series of migrations offers an alternative to the linear story that has informed black society at least since the American Revolution. Brilliantly captured in the title of John Hope Franklin’s classic text From Slavery to Freedom, this master narrative has been articulated in everything from spirituals to sermons, from folktales to TV docudramas.21 Like Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery, Alex Haley’s Roots, and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream,” it retells the nightmare of enslavement, the exhilaration of emancipation, the betrayal of Reconstruction, the ordeal of disfranchisement and segregation, and the pervasive, omnipresent discrimination, along with the heroic and ultimately triumphant struggle against enslavement, Jim Crow, and second-class citizenship. Its heroes—real and fictive, from Frederick Douglass to Kunta Kinte, W. E. B. DuBois to John Henry, and Monroe Trotter to Oprah Winfrey—personified the master narrative.22
Such narratives articulate a sense of collectivity and what has been called, in another context, “imagined communities.”23 They affirm social unity by reminding men and women how a shared past binds them together, even when distance and radically different material circumstances and experiences create diverse interests. The insoluble bond of history infuses otherwise innocent events with a collective meaning, for—ultimately—“we are who we were.”
For black people, the slavery-to-freedom narrative also integrates their history into an American story of seemingly inevitable progress. While recognizing the realities of black poverty and inequality, it nevertheless depicts the teleological trajectory of black life moving along what Martin Luther King, Jr., referred to as the “arc of justice” in which exploitation and coercion yields, reluctantly but inexorably, to fairness and freedom.24 By its very name, the narrative of slavery to freedom suggests that, however slowly, liberty replaced slavery, and the coercive and exploitative system that followed it.
Yet, for a growing minority of African Americans—perhaps a prospective majority—the story of slavery to freedom has little direct relevance. Their forebears did not labor as slaves in the cotton fields of the South, follow the drinking gourd to freedom in the North, thrill at the words of the Emancipation Proclamation, or suffer the indignities of disfranchisement and the humiliation of segregation. Rather than being descended solely from those who were sold, some trace their ancestry to the sellers of slaves. Others interpret the slave experience differently than African Americans, perhaps because emancipation left them as an empowered majority rather an abused minority. Rather than condemn their forced removal from Africa, they celebrate their arrival in America, in the words of Barack Obama’s father, as a “magical moment.”25
Fleeing from poverty of the sort rarely experienced even by the poorest of contemporary black Americans and from tyranny unknown to even the most oppressed, many of the new arrivals have little sympathy for the narrative of the freedom struggle and some are quick to embrace a society that offers them far greater opportunity than any they had previously known in their homelands. Rather than dwell upon the grievances of the past, these new immigrants recognize their reality and then seize the opportunities of American life, going about the business of establishing their families, educating their children, and building their fortunes. While subjecting themselves to the grossest sort of exploitation and self-exploitation by working long hours and underconsuming to save for the future, they often ignore the connection between their own travail and that of generations of African Americans.
The long and ultimately successful struggle against Jim Crow might be admired and embraced by new arrivals, but it is not their story and it is perhaps only vicariously their victory. Richard Allen, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Luther King, Jr., might be heroic figures, but they are not their heroes or even their forebears. As in the past, new circumstances require a new history.
Such a history neither denies nor contradicts the old master narrative, whose value remains incalculable. Indeed, any new narrative must incorporate the familiar elements of the slavery-to-freedom story that gave it its lasting power: the long struggle against slavery; slavery’s aftermath of poverty, disfranchisement, and segregation; and the ubiquity of the virulent racism that for centuries has color-coded the larger Atlantic world. In short, a new history reemphasizes the global reach of the slavery-to-freedom narrative in a globalized age.
Whether viewed from the reeking bottoms of seventeenth-century caravels or the antiseptic seats of twentieth-century jets, the great crossings cannot be understood apart from the ever-changing demands of global capitalism and its voracious appetite for labor which has reduced men and women—whether slave or free—into factors of production that can be extracted from one place and located elsewhere.26 Between the sixteenth and the twenty-first centuries, peoples of African descent rarely moved as mere tourists or visitors, but in response to the constantly changing requirements of the plantation and then of the industrial order. The same demands for labor that forced Africans into the stifling holds of ships and propelled the
m across the Atlantic to mainland North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and then shipped these slaves across the North American continent in the nineteenth century uprooted still others once slavery ended. The movement of peoples in the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century—whether it be open and legal immigration, the infamous surreptitious movement of undocumented peoples, or illegal trafficking of human beings—is part of the continued transformation of the global economy. Transnationalism, which tries to capture the contemporary movement of people, is just another name for massive movements of people set in motion by the joining of Africa, Europe, and the Americas centuries earlier.
Labor requirements established by the men who controlled production—be they masters or employers—determined, in considerable measure, who stayed and who left. Some migrations moved men while others demanded women; some required skilled workers and others strong backs. The brain—and muscle—drains created by these vast diasporas rest upon a yet larger process.27
Long after the shackles of slavery were broken, people of African descent entering the United States were quick to see the racial inequities of American life, if for no reason other than that those same painful restrictions were applied to them. Many saw the connections between the racial imperialism of American life with that of European colonizers in their homelands. They understood the common root of modern racism in slave societies that shaped relations between Africans, Europeans, and Native Americans for the last five centuries. For them, the connections between W. E. B. DuBois, a founder of the NAACP, and John Langalibalele Dube, a founder of the African National Congress, or between Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela were—and remain—manifest.
The old master narrative of slavery to freedom—which has framed the identity and informed the political consciousness of black people for so long—thus becomes a matter of some contention, sometimes gaining new adherents and sometimes becoming an ancient article of curiosity, much as it did for those who were earlier dragged across the Atlantic to an unknown land and for those who fled the rural South for the urban North. As the old narrative waxes and wanes, the themes derived from centuries of migration, both forced and free, grow in significance, and notions of the diaspora become central to the study of African American life. The multiple strands, nonlinear character, and unpredictable outcomes may better fit a history whose moral complexity has long militated against teleological certainty and Whiggish notions of progress.
A new narrative offers the opportunity not only to incorporate recent changes in African American life into the existing story but also to see the entirety of African American experience afresh, give old themes a new perspective, and in the process broaden the reach of the African American experience. Rethinking the history of black America not only places recent changes in the light of the long durée of the African American past, but also sharpens awareness of how African American history is, in the end, of one piece. As always, however, the story begins with the Middle Passage.
CHAPTER ONE
Movement and Place in the African American Past
More than any other single event, the Middle Passage—the transit from Africa to America—has come to epitomize the experience of people of African descent throughout the Atlantic world. The nightmarish weeks and sometimes months locked in the holds of stinking ships speak to the traumatic loss of freedom, the degradation of enslavement, and the long years of bondage that followed. But the Middle Passage also represents the will of black people to survive, the determination not to be dehumanized by dehumanizing circumstances, and the confidence that freedom would eventually be theirs and that they—or at least their posterity—would take their rightful place as a people among peoples.1 In its largest meaning, the Middle Passage represents the burdens of the past and the hopes for the future.
The designation “Middle Passage,” strictly speaking, refers to the transatlantic journey from Africa to the Americas that forcibly propelled some eleven million Africans across the Atlantic between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.2 But for people of African descent in North America—what became the United States—it was only the first of many massive relocations. The Making of African America is a history of the three great migrations that made and remade African and African American life in the United States, as well as a glimpse of a fourth, which is presently transforming African American—and American—society. Over time, the great migrations swelled like some giant tsunami increasing in mass and velocity, engulfing larger and larger numbers of men and women and sweeping them, their loved ones, and their possessions into a vortex for which none could fully prepare.
The first of the great migrations, the forcible deportation from Africa to mainland North America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, enslaved roughly 400,000 free men and women and transformed the many peoples of Africa—Angolans, Igbos, Kongos, Minas, Mandes, and others—into Africans and, in time, African Americans.
The second forced transfer—more than twice the size of the first—transported some one million men and women from the Atlantic seaboard to the Southern interior during the first half of the nineteenth century to create a new slave regime in the Deep South. It transformed tobacco and rice cultivators into growers of cotton and sugar, setting African American life on a new course.
That course changed in the middle decades of the twentieth century, when some six million black people—about thirty times the number of the original African transit—fled the South for the cities of the North, making urban wageworkers out of sharecroppers and once again reconstructing black life in the United States.
Finally, at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries, people of African descent entered the United States from all over the world—Africa, the greater Caribbean, South America, and Europe—again changing the composition, character, and cultures of the black population of the United States. The pace of these massive movements increased with their size, as ever-greater numbers arrived during a shorter period of time.3
Each of these massive migrations incorporated, in varying proportions, unspeakable brutality, dispossession, and death. They also provided the occasion for extraordinary acts of kindness and generosity, generated astounding creativity, and gave birth to new life. While it is impossible to calculate fully losses and gains, happily the latter increased and former decreased over time. But none of these passages was entirely free of either tragedy or triumph, either moral degradation or moral elevation. They changed the migrant’s world and everything that surrounded it. Status was transformed, cultures remade, and politics reshaped. The great migrations dehumanized, but they were all too human. Although the movement from the South to the North and the late twentieth-century diaspora never equaled the violent degradation that attended the transatlantic and transcontinental slave trades, they too pushed men and women to their limits.
Whether the transit was from Africa to America, Virginia to Alabama, Biloxi to Chicago, or Lagos to the Bronx, the upheavals that accompanied the physical uprooting would touch the lives of generation after generation of black people. For many, perhaps the vast majority, it was the single most important event in their lives-a moment that would mark them and their descendents forever.
The forced march from the seaboard to Arkansas during the middle years of the nineteenth century deeply affected Helen Odom’s grandmother, much as the seventeenth- or eighteenth-century Atlantic transit had earlier burdened Odom’s forebears. Years later, in the fourth decade of the twentieth century, grandmother Odom’s passage still gripped her granddaughter. “I heard this told over and over so many, many times before grandmother died,” Helen Odom told an interviewer for the Works Project Administration in the 1930s. “Seemed it was the greatest event of her life,” Odom reiterated. “She told other smaller things I can’t remember,” but grandmother Odom never forgot her long march to Arkansas. Neither did her granddaughter. 4
Others also remembered or learned thro
ugh their memories, for the immigrant experience resonated across generational lines. Jacob Lawrence, whose great work visualized the epic journey of black people from the agricultural South to the industrial North, was raised in a household that knew nothing but movement. Lawrence was born in the North and did not travel south until he honeymooned with his Southern-born bride. But he, like many children of immigrants, nonetheless insisted that he “was part of the migration, as was my family: my mother, my sister, and my brother.” He explained, “I grew up hearing tales about people ‘coming up,’ another family arriving.” At age thirteen, living in Harlem with his Virginia-born mother and his South Carolina-born father, he himself had already experienced a move from Atlantic City, New Jersey, to Easton, Pennsylvania, and then to Philadelphia. Rapid-fire sequential migrations were so central to Lawrence’s life that when asked to explain the origins of his pictorial characterization of the northward migration, he reflectively replied: “This was such a part of my life.”5
From Frederick Douglass’s Narrative to Paul Dunbar’s Sport of the Gods, from Richard Wright’s Native Son to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Toni Morrison’s Jazz, migrants have been as much a part of African American literature as they have been part of African American life.6 Much the same can be said for African American music, from the spirituals of the Jubilee Singers to the blues of Bessie Smith and Riley “B. B.” King, not to mention other artistic accomplishments such as Langston Hughes’s poems, Gordon Parks’s photographs, August Wilson’s plays, and of course Lawrence’s Migration Series paintings. These extraordinary works and the symbols connected with the migratory theme—the slave ship, the auction block, the railroad pointed north—announce movement as a central theme of the African American experience. Langston Hughes was doubtless only one of many young black men and women in St. Louis who would periodically “walk down to the Santa Fe station and stare at the railroad tracks,” just as Otis Redding was only one of many, who—while “sittin’ on the dock of the bay”—calculated the benefit of a trip from Georgia to Frisco.7