The Making of African America (36 page)

25
Robert N. Brown and John Cromartie, “Black Homeplace Migration to the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta: Ambiguous Journeys, Uncertain Outcomes,” Southeastern
Geographer
46 (2006), 189—214. Quoted on 190—92.

26
Quoted in Cobb,
Away Down South,
269.

27
Tony Burroughs,
Black Roots: A Beginner's Guide to Tracing the African American
Family
Tree
(New York, 2001).

28
Richard Wright,
Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth
(New York, 1966), 284. Similar sentiments were voiced by the Harvard-educated historian Elizabeth Arroyo, declaring that she felt “southern the same way an Irish American feels Irish. My roots are in the South, and southern worlds and ways are a part of me.” See Cobb, Away Down South, 287. See also Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York, 1978), 364.

29
Piri Thomas, Down These Mean Streets (New York, 1967), 138. For a similar journey back to Africa, Saidiya V. Hartman,
Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route
(New York, 2007). The general phenomenon is brilliantly addressed in James T. Campbell,
Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787—2005
(New York, 2006). I would like to thank Julie Greene for the reference to Piri Thomas's autobiography.

30
A point made with great concreteness by Anthony E. Kaye,
Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South
(Chapel Hill NC, 2007).

31
Morrison, “Rootedness,” 343.

32
The black belt refers to the three hundred mainly contiguous counties that stretched across the South from South Carolina to Texas in which, by the mid-nineteenth century, black people composed the majority.

33
Shane White and Graham White,
Stylin': African American Expressive Culture from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit
(Ithaca NY, 1998), 37—62, 168—91.

34
Sterling Stuckey,
Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America
(New York, 1987), 3—5; Michael A. Gomez,
Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South
(Chapel Hill NC, 1998), 209—13; Benjamin Quarles, “The Revolutionary War as a Black Declaration of Independence” in Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman, eds.,
Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution
(Charlottesville VA, 1983), 283—301; Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.,
Exodus!: Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America
(Chicago, 2000); Molefi Kete Asante, An
Afrocentric Manifesto: Toward an African Renaissance
(Cambridge MA, 2007).

35
Brilliantly demonstrated by Matory,
Black Atlantic Religion,
the phrase is drawn from p. 43.

36
Levine,
Black Culture and Black Consciousness,
6; Alan Lomax, “Folk Song Style,”
American Anthropologist
61 (1959), 930; Ronald Radano,
Lying up a Nation: Race
and Black Music (Chicago, 2003), 96—102; LeRoi Jones,
Blues People: The Negro Music in White America
(New York, 1965), x. For Ralph Ellison, “the blues were a total way of life, and major expression of an attitude toward life,” see
Shadow and Act
(New York, 1964), 78. The same might be said for the spirituals in an earlier age and hip-hop in a later one. Also see James M. Trotter,
Music and Some Highly Musical People
(Chicago, [1880] 1969).

37
Brown and Cromartie, “Black Homeplace Migration,” 191. There is a long history of essentializing the musical nature of black people. Ronald Radano follows that strand of romantic thought in “Denoting Difference: The Writing of the Slave Spirituals,”
Critical Inquiry
22 (1996), 506—44.

38
Toni Morrison makes the same point about the sermon in “Rootedness”; quoted in B. B. King with David Ruiz,
Blues All Around Me: The Autobiography of B.
B.
King
(New York, 1996), 17.

39
J. H. Kwabena Nketia,
The Music of Africa
(New York, 1974); Dena J. Epstein and Rosita M. Sands, “Secular Folk Music” in Mellonee V. Burnim and Portia K. Maultsby, eds.,
African American Music: An Introduction
(New York, 2006), 37—43; John M. Chernoff,
African Rhythm and African Sensibility: Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms
(Chicago, 1979), chap. 4; Levine,
Black Culture and Black Consciousness,
6—7.

40
Jefferson,
Notes on the State of Virginia,
140; Shane White and Graham White,
The Sounds of Slavery
(Boston, 2005), xix; Levine,
Black Culture and Black Consciousness,
186; Joe W. Trotter, “The African American Worker in Slavery and Freedom” in
The African American Experience: An Historiographical and Bibliographical Guide
(Westport CT, 2001), 364.

41
What John and Alan Lomax said about the origins of the Blues—the unknown moment “when a lonely Negro man plowing in some hot, silent river bottom” raised his voice—can be extended to the spirituals, jazz, and hip-hop.
American
Ballads and Folks Songs (New York, 1924), 191.

42
Oscar Handlin,
The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that Made the American People
(Boston, 1952), 3.

43
Carl Russell Fish, “The Pilgrim and the Melting Pot,”
Mississippi Valley Historical Review
7 (1920), 187—205; Lerone Bennett,
Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America,
4th ed. (Chicago, 1969); quoted in Reed Ueda, “Immigration in Global Perspective” in Mary C. Waters and Reed Ueda with Helen B. Murrow, eds.,
The New Americans: A Guide to Immigration since
1965 (Cambridge MA, 2007), 27.

44
Steven Shulman, ed.,
The Impact of Immigration on African Americans
(New Brunswick NJ, 2004), x; Allan H. Spear,
Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890—1920
(Chicago, 1967), 228—29; Nell I. Painter, “Forward” in Trotter, ed.,
Great Migration,
viii.

45
Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, “Migrations, Migration History, History: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives” in Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, eds.,
Migration, Migration History, History
(Bern, 1997), 11—14.

46
Rediker,
The Slave Ship,
106; Stephanie E. Smallwood,
Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
(Cambridge MA, 2007), 7—8.

47
Frank Thistlewaite, “Migration from Europe Overseas in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries” in Rudolph J. Vecoli and Suzanne M. Sinke, eds.,
A Century of European Migrations, 1830—1930
(Urbana IL, 1991); Mark Wyman,
Round Trip
America:
The Immigrants Return to Europe, 1880—1930
(Ithaca NY, 1993).

48
John Cromartie and Carol B. Stack, “Reinterpretation of Black Return and Nonreturn Migration to the South, 1975—1980,”
Geographical Review
79 (1989), 298.

49
Charles Tilly, “Transplanted Networks” in Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, ed.,
Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology, and Politics
(New York, 1990), 83. However, David Eltis sees chain migrations created by “shipping patterns and credit arrangements,” even where—in the case of the slave trade—the migrants lacked choice. David Eltis, “Free and Coerced Migration from the Old World to the New” in Eltis, ed.,
Coerced and Free Migration
(Stanford CA, 2002), 27.

50
David R. Roediger,
The Wages of Whiteness,
rev. ed. (London, 1999); Matthew Frye Jacobson,
Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race
(Cambridge MA, 1998); Thomas Guglielmo,
White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890—1945
(New York, 2003).

51
Russell A. Kazal, “Revisiting Assimilation: The Rise, Fall, and Reappraisal of a Concept of American Ethnic History,”
American Historical Review
100 (1995), 437—71, quoted on p. 444. Also see Philip Kasinitz,
Caribbean New York: Black Immigrants and the Politics of Race
(Ithaca NY, 1992), 4—6.

52
Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan,
Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City,
2nd ed. (Cambridge MA, 1970); Michael Novak,
The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics: Politics and Culture in the Seventies
(New York, 1973).

53
Victoria Hattam connects race with heredity, body and blood, fixity, singularity, homogeneity, boundedness, and hierarchy, while ethnicity is identified with culture, language and religion, malleability, plurality, heterogeneity, openness, and equality.
In the Shadow of Race: Jews, Latinos, and Immigrant Politics in the United States
(Chicago, 2007), quoted on p. 2. Also see John Higham, “The Amplitude of Ethnic History: An American Story” in Nancy Foner and George M. Frederickson, eds.,
Not Just Black and White: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States
(New York, 2004), 61—82. “[I]t sometimes seems as if the people who study immigration or race or ethnicity—or all these together—inhabit two different intellectual worlds.” Stephen Cornell and Douglas Hartmann, “Conceptual Confusions and Divides: Race, Ethnicity, and the Study of Immigration,”
ibid.,
p. 23.

54
Roediger,
The Wages of Whiteness;
also see note 47, above.

55
For a heroic attempt to do just this, see Dirk Hoerder,
Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium
(Durham NC, 2002). The process remaking black society—“creolization”—is given a different name than the processes remaking of European American society—“transformation.” Rarely are these two concepts addressed collectively, although the processes they describe are precisely the same. Few scholars maintain that African American nationality, like white ethnicity, can be—and have been—reinvented in the course of the American past.

56
“Historians probably view,” writes David Eltis in a broad-ranging discussion of free and forced migrations, “most migrations as forced at some level as social and ecological conditions at the point of origins might be such that individuals have no choice but to leave.” Eltis, “Introduction” and “Free and Coerced Migration from the Old World to the New” in Eltis, ed.,
Coerced and Free Migration,
5—6, 49—60.

57
Although the slave trade remains the largest forced migration in human history, the number of forced migrations seems to be increasing. See Reed Ueda, “Immigration in Global Historical Perspective” in Waters and Ueda, eds.,
The New Americans,
20.

58
Alan Kraut,
Huddled Masses: The Immigrant in American Society, 1880—1921
(Arlington Heights, IL, 1982), 57; Peter C. Marzio, ed.,
A Nation of Nations: The People Who Came to America as Seen Through Objects and Documents Exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution
(New York, 1976), 431, 438.

1
In the era of the transatlantic slave trade, “national” identities had little meaning to most of the peoples of Africa. The African economies and societies promoted parochial identifications with village and family. Large states existed in some parts of the continent, but they had a weak hold on individual men and women. Joseph Miller, “Central Africa during the Era of the Slave Trade, 1490s to 1850s” in Linda M. Heywood, ed.,
Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora
(Cambridge UK, 2002), 35—39, 41—43, 48—49; James H. Sweet,
Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African Portuguese World, 1441—1770
(Chapel Hill NC, 2003), 22—30; James Horn and Phillip D. Morgan, “Settlers and Slaves: European and African Migrations to Early Modern British America” in Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas, eds.,
The Creation of the British Atlantic World
(Baltimore MD, 2005), 40—41.

2
The confusion, sometimes purposeful, of the identity of captive Africans is manifest in the complaint made upon the arrival of a slave ship in Barbados: “Those ... by whom you stild good Gold Coast negroes we here found not to be so, but of several nations and languages as Alampo the worst Negroes, Papas & some of unknown parts & a few right Gold Coast negroes amongst them.” Quoted in Stephanie E. Smallwood,
Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
(Cambridge MA, 2007), 106. Also Herbert S. Klein,
The Atlantic Slave Trade
(Cambridge UK, 1999), 115. Klein emphasizes the ignorance of the European traders of the interior: “They only had the vaguest notions of the names of interior groups or their placement and relative importance.”

3
For some historians of Africa even these national affiliations like Igbo were a product of contact with Europeans. Elizabeth Isichei,
A History of the Igbo People
(New York, 1976).

4
Rolfe quoted in Winthrop D. Jordan,
White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550—1812
(Chapel Hill NC, 1968), 73; also see John Thornton, “The African Experience of the ‘20. and Odd Negroes' Arriving in Virginia in 1619,”
William and Mary Quarterly
55 (1998), 421—34. For the struggle over what black people were called and what they called themselves, see Patrick Rael,
Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North
(Chapel Hill NC, 2002), chap. 3, and more generally Randall Kennedy,
Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word
(New York, 2002).