The Making of African America (34 page)

In Obama's speech on race in Philadelphia in March 2008, his tone was philosophical and his subject historical as he unraveled the American dilemma from the site where three centuries earlier the Founding Fathers had drafted their call for a more perfect Union. Obama emphasized that the Union created with the ratification of the Constitution had never been perfect but “a union that could be and should be perfected over time.” Thus the nation, like himself, was made and remade.
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Beginning with the “nation's original sin of slavery,” Obama traced the American struggle through the “successive generations... [of] protest and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience—and always at great risk—to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.” Obama thus retold the tale of the “long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America.” It was a progressive tale, which conceded past errors but celebrated “the greatness and the goodness” of the American people.
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Obama's remarks on race were politically astute as well as historically informed. In placing the question of race within the familiar confines of the master narrative of African American history, he then found his own place in the story as the “son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas... raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a depression to serve in Patton's Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. “I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners,” Obama continued, “an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters.”
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In reiterating the story spanning from slavery to freedom Barack Obama affirmed his place in the long course of African American history. He was at one with the Africans who had crossed the Atlantic in the Middle Passage, with Frederick Douglass, for whom a slave “was pegged down to one single spot,” with the African Americans who had crossed the continent and whose children Booker T. Washington advised to “cast down your bucket,” and with Martin Luther King, Jr., whose “arc of justice” always bent toward freedom.

But even as Obama retold the story of slavery to freedom, he too had lived the story of movement and place. The contrapuntal narrative—fluidity and fixity, routes and roots—began with the Middle Passage and continued through the massive migrations that propelled peoples of African descent across the continent, first from east to west and then from south to north, and finally the diaspora which brought Obama's father and millions of others to American soil.

Each of these titanic passages had created major discontinuities in the lives of black men and women. They broke families, impoverished peoples, despoiled communities, and produced worlds of oppression and exploitation that wore on self-worth and promoted the most heinous inhumanity. Yet these same migrations also promoted hope, opportunity, and life. They forged new families, strengthened peoples, and promoted mutuality and reciprocity and revealed the best of human qualities. They produced new expectations and institutions, at once altering the migrants' material world and moral sensibility and setting the ground for a creative cultural explosion. In remaking African American life blackness was redefined both for the enslaved, and later for the free. What had been true in the seventeenth century was also true in the twenty-first.

The same can be said of place, which, after all, was a product of movement. As a people often forced to be on the move, black men and women developed a firm attachment to place. They became, in succession, the archetypal agriculturalists, with a deep knowledge, appreciation, and love of the land, and then the quintessential urbanites, with a streetwise understanding of city life. A love of locality celebrated—by turns—Africa, the South, and the inner city, which became the stock in trade of a succession of black artists who wrote, painted, photographed, and sang about the particular places that were at the heart of the black experience. Frederick Douglass's postemancipation return to the eastern shore of Maryland and the Great House Farm, Booker T. Washington's visit to the mines of Malden in West Virginia, the reverse migration of thousands of immigrants to the rural South, and the swelling number of heritage tourists who pilgrim to the Door of No Return all reflect the hold of place on African American life.

The cumulative impact of the repeated interplay between movement and place has required continued innovation in black society: movement set loose the creative impulse and place gave it a platform to develop. Over the course of four centuries, cultural innovation—in language, cuisine, rhetoric, theology, music—became the signature of the African American experience. The repeated reinvention of self and society created patterns of expression that prized the originality of an Edisto Island spiritual, a Bessie Smith blues, a John Coltrane riff, or an LL Cool J rap. Looking backward while moving forward, black people created a society with a deep reverence for what was as well as an obsessive concern for what would become. Memories of what had been done to them as well as of what they had done for themselves helped to create a sense of peoplehood.

The transformation of peoples of African descent was about more than an exchange of bib overalls for a zoot suit, for with it came new meanings of blackness. The definition of race has changed even as the concept may seem impervious to alteration. Some of the new meanings had been foisted upon unwilling subjects by white slave masters, planter-merchants, xenophobic politicos, or well-meaning reformers. But in a more important sense, it was black people themselves who did much of the making, refusing to be the product of others, no matter what their power or intentions. The repeated reinvention of self created new identities, as newcomers became Americans.

As a representative of the most recent passage—the renewed diaspora of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—Barack Obama embodies the collective experience of those who have journeyed, found new places, and constantly remade themselves—as well as African American life and, with it, the nation. Obama—like so many before him—articulated the master narrative of slavery to freedom. But, also like many before him, he has lived the narrative of movement and place. His experience—like theirs—suggests the utility of the new narrative.

The conjunction of the two great histories returns me to my memorable discussion with the group of black Americans for whom the Emancipation Proclamation was part of a great history—even a heroic history—but not their history. Like previous new arrivals, they are remaking African American life by combining their own histories with the histories they inherited in a new land. How and when it happens will be a new chapter in the story of African America.

M
ore than most fields of study, history is artisanal work, often the solitary labor of a lone mechanic tapping away at a word processor. Fortunately, that work goes on within a larger community, and while I have spent much time roaming stacks by myself and even more facing the blank screen of my PowerBook, I have also enjoyed—and profited mightily from—the conviviality of my fellow historians, archivists, and librarians as well as the editors, publishers, and booksellers who compose the larger community of historical scholarship. While this book could have been written and perhaps published and distributed without them, it would be a lesser product and I would be much impoverished by their absence.

I would like to thank all of those who helped to grow this book from a fledging idea. My colleagues at the University of Maryland—most especially Elsa Barkley Brown, David Freund, Julie Greene, and Richard Price—listened to the ideas that form the basis of
The Making of African America
and provided the kind of nurturing intellectual environment in which they could grow. The Freedmen and Southern Society Project has been my intellectual home, even after I left home; a new member and an old hand—John McKerley and Susan O'Donovan, respectively—took a special interest in my project, for which I am most grateful. Professor O'Donovan, now of the University of Memphis, permitted me to quote from her own work on slave mobility. A grant from the University of Maryland's Graduate Research Board allowed me to launch this study, and a fellowship at the W. E. B. DuBois Center for the Study of the African Diaspora at Harvard University provided quiet time to think through the ideas and begin to put them on paper. The Center's director, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and my fellow fellows—Vincent Carretta, Prudence Cumberbatch, Derek Hydra, Marisa Parham, Jeffery Steward, Wole Soyinka, and Ermien van Pletzen—provided an intellectual perspective that reached from Cape Cod to Cape Coast to Cape Town. When the manuscript was complete, Skip Gates read key chapters with his usual discerning eye.

Others have also read parts of the manuscript and saved me from numerous errors of fact and judgment with the kind of encouragement that only friends can provide. I would like especially to thank Ronald Hoffman, Ted Maris-Wolf, and Sally Mason—good friends from the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture—who shared their thoughts while we collectively contemplated the meaning of the Middle Passage during the institute's historic conference in the shadow of the great slave factory at El Mina. William Chafe and Gary Gerstle, along with David Freund and Julie Greene, helped me navigate what to me was the strange terrain of twentieth-century historiography. Finally, Eric Foner, Steven Hahn, Leslie Harris, and Marcus Rediker read the entire manuscript, offering guidance on the whole.

Early on in my research on migration and place, while sitting at one of Chris Vadala's jam sessions in the Clarice Smith Center for the Performing Arts, I—as much from naïveté as from ignorance—saw connections between African American migrations and African American music. Thereafter, I called upon two friends, Harvey Cohen and Bill Ferris, to help me enlarge those connections. Their deep knowledge of the development of black music allowed me to make connections I otherwise would have missed.

Among the most important members of the community of historians are those apprentices we have come to call students. There is no better testing ground for ideas than the classroom, where the tolerance for sloppy thinking and shallow thoughts is small indeed. I would like to thank my many students at the University of Maryland for their impatience as well as their patience as I tested untried ideas. In addition, several more advanced students have aided this study in a variety of practical ways, tracking down fugitive texts, checking endnotes, and proofreading yet incomplete texts. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Katrina Keane, Megan Coplen, and Kimberly Welch for their good cheer and keen eye.

Also of good cheer and keen eye, Wendy Wolf, my editor, oversaw the development of
The Making of African America,
herself making knowing corrections to keep the matters on course and on time. Her imprint has made a difference. So has the timely interventions of Sandra Dijkstra, agent and friend, who poked and prodded until I made critical changes which made this book more accessible and better.

Like much artisanal work, making history—at least my history—is done within the bounds of a household. Members of my extended household—now, thanks to Samantha, three generations deep—proved it was possible to balance the world and the world of ideas. Lisa and Bob, Richard and Kara, and now Samantha gave meaning to this whole enterprise. Martha, as always, made it not only possible, but also great fun.

John Hope Franklin and I began with shared interest and rather uneven knowledge of free people of color in the antebellum South, with the balance heavily in his favor. He encouraged my interest and expanded my knowledge, providing sage advice and an example that only a master craftsman could offer. Later, he became a dear friend as well as the archetype of what a scholar should be. He left this world as
The Making of African America
was in the final stages of completion. It is dedicated to him with respect, gratitude, and love. He is missed.

1
Ira Berlin, “Emancipation and Its Meaning in American Life,” Reconstruction 2 (1994), 41—44. For the National Public Radio interview, see Talk of the Nation, July 13, 1994, number 513640, National Public Radio Archives.

2
Jacqueline A. Goggin,
Carter G. Woodson: A Life in Black History
(Baton Rouge LA, 1993); William Fitzhugh Brundage,
Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory
(Cambridge MA, 2005), chap. 4.

3
A point made most forcefully by Melville J. Herskovits,
The Myth of the Negro Past
(New York, 1941).

4
“Governor McDuffie's Message” to the South Carolina legislature reprinted in the Boston
Liberator,
Dec. 12, 1835. Punctuation has been altered for readability.

5
Aristide R. Zolberg,
A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America
(Cambridge MA, 2006), 334. Also John Higham,
Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860—1925
(New Brunswick NJ, 1955); Philip Gleason, “American Identity and Americanization” in Stephan Thernstrom, ed.,
Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups
(Cambridge MA, 1980); quoted in Mary C. Waters and Reed Ueda with Helen B. Murrow, eds.,
The New Americans: A Guide to Immigration since 1965
(Cambridge MA, 2007), 8. Congressman Emanuel Celler, a cosponsor of the legislation, declared “there will not be, comparatively, many Asians or Africans entering the country ... since the people of Africa and Asia have very few relatives here, comparatively few could immigrate from those countries because they have no family ties to the U.S.”
Congressional, Record,
89th Congress, 1st session, pp. 21, 758.