The Making of African America (3 page)

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.
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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 them 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.
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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

M
ore 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Others also remembered or learned through 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.”
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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.
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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.
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The significance of movement elevated the importance of place in African American life. Between these massive movements of men and women stand periods of physical—although rarely social—stasis, during which black people developed deep attachments to place, be it the eerie beauty of the Sea Islands, the rich alluvial soils of the Delta, or the maze of streets and alleys of South Side Chicago—that “baddest part of town.” In such places, men and women worked together, married and raised their families, worshipped, and socialized in ways that created trust and built solidarity, so that their attachments were ultimately about people. Such places were also celebrated in literature, song, and art. While Langston Hughes spoke of the “One-Way Ticket” from the South, Robert Johnson celebrated “Sweet Home Chicago.”
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Such attachments to place riveted black people to familiar ground; many could not conceive of life apart from their home.
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Because this contrapuntal narrative—movement and place; fluidity and fixity; or, in Paul Gilroy's phrase, “routes and roots”—ripped across some four centuries of black life in mainland North America, the alternating and often overlapping impact of massive movement and deep rootedness touched all aspects of the experience of black people, from language and theology to cuisine and music.
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Over the course of four hundred years, through slavery and freedom, the contrapuntal narrative—perhaps more than any other—informed the development of a distinctive African American way of thinking and acting, as black society unraveled and then was reknit. It produced, on the one hand, a malleable, flexible cultural style that became a touchstone of African American life, recognizable in such different spheres as art and politics and in such different times as the post-Civil War jubilee and the interwar cultural renaissance. It created, on the other hand, a passionate attachment to place, reflected in the earthy idioms of the rural South and the smashmouth street jive of the modern “hood.” Its drama was played out in the grand oratory of James Forten, Frederick Douglass, BookerT. Washington, and Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as the anonymous verbal duels of the hollers, toasts, dozens, and other forms of signifying. Taken together, movement and place informed the lives of peoples as different as enslaved tobacco hands and urban free people of color in the nineteenth century, the fastidious black bourgeoisie and the free-spirited zoot-suiters in the twentieth, and the hip-hop artists and buttoned-down buppies in the twenty-first.