The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (24 page)

I have suggested that the African colonization movement contributed to this nationalistic hope not only by founding Liberia and prophesying the messianic achievements of an Americo-Liberian civilization but by dwelling on the futility of individual progress for blacks living in a society dedicated to white supremacy. While conveying this message, the ACS bitterly alienated blacks by its equivocations on slave emancipation, its use of racist language and racist threats, and its refusal to respect black organizations and leadership. Perhaps because God spared the United States from devastating plagues, at least until 1861, the ACS showed little interest in finding or negotiating with a black Moses. Yet there was a complex dynamic between racist contempt and black pride, between the white desire to expel and the black quest for independence, between white nationalism and black nationalism. It was no accident that in later years Edward
Blyden and Marcus Garvey both welcomed incidents of
racial oppression that might enable more blacks to perceive the true character of American society and thus make them want to emigrate to Africa. Blyden, who worked closely with the ACS in the 1880s, rejoiced when the Supreme Court struck down the
Civil Rights Act of 1875. As he wrote
William Coppinger, the secretary-treasurer and most active leader of the ACS: “I think that God who has His hands both upon Africa and America will deepen the prejudice against the Negro in the United States. He will continue to harden Pharaoh’s heart, until the oppressed shall be driven from the house of bondage, as Israel was from Egypt, to do his work in the land of his fathers.” Thirty-six years later, Marcus Garvey defended
Jim Crow laws, thanked white Southerners for having “lynched race pride into the Negroes,” and held a two-hour conference in Atlanta with
Edward Clarke, the second-ranking national leader of the
Ku Klux Klan.
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When all these emigration or “repatriation” movements are viewed over time, from the height of a mountaintop, two features
stand out: the continuity of their arguments and their repeated failures. By 1861 even Frederick Douglass, the archenemy of all previous
emigration schemes, had become so discouraged by the Republican party’s extreme caution regarding slavery that he agreed to join
James Theodore Holly and
James Redpath on an exploratory trip to
Haiti, which once again was inviting black settlers from the United States.
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As the Civil War began, virtually every prominent black leader had shown a willingness to accept aid from the ACS or from other white colonizationists, such as the Republican politicians who advocated “homesteads” for black settlers in
Central America. Yet at no time in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries did a significant proportion of the black population seem willing to leave the United States. Historians may well have underestimated the number of antebellum free blacks who would have emigrated had they been offered adequate transportation and reasonable opportunities abroad. This point applies with greater force to rural freedmen in parts of the South following the grim failures of
Reconstruction.
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The fact remains that references to “emigration fever” or “Liberia fever” are based on the inquiries or expressed interest of a few thousand people, not tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands. However disillusioned they may have become, too many American blacks knew at least vaguely of the genuine
malarial fever and
yellow fever that decimated the Americo-Liberians. As
Edwin S. Redkey also points out, the American blacks who emigrated to Liberia did not send money back to friends and relatives to help them reach the Promised Land, as often happened among Europeans who scouted out America; instead, the Americo-Liberians asked for money to help them return home.
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Redkey, Moses, and other historians have traced the threads of continuity that led from the antebellum emigrationists to the “back-to-Africa” projects of
Henry McNeal Turner, a bishop in the
African Methodist Episcopal Church, and on to
Marcus Garvey. While the appeal of such projects is remarkable, they would have been far more successful if it had not been for the
Great Northern Migration, which lasted five decades and saw some 6 million blacks flee the former Confederate states, seeking new lives in the North.
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Bearing in mind the earlier doctrinaire hostility to the ACS, one is first struck by the widespread acceptance of the ACS coupled with the growing importance of black initiatives. It was the Liberian missionary
Alexander Crummell who first converted Turner, a South Carolinian, to the idea of African repatriation. After the collapse of
Reconstruction, when Southern freedmen were deprived of the hope of land, political power, or economic improvement, Turner revived the old arguments of the ACS, invoking the example of the
Plymouth
Pilgrims, declaiming on the immutability of white prejudice, and finding the hand of God in the American blacks’ mission to redeem their African fatherland—following their providential enslavement, emancipation, and gradual absorption of Christianity and civilization. The enfeebled ACS, now happy to make use of eloquent black nationalists, elected Turner an honorary lifetime vice-president and in 1889 invited Edward
Blyden to return from Liberia and address blacks throughout the South.
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No doubt the abolition of slavery helped to make the ACS more palatable for black leaders who had long insisted that the organization was part of a proslavery conspiracy. From this standpoint, it is noteworthy that white interest in black colonization declined precipitously in the decades following the Civil War despite the persistence of racism and a marked increase in lynching and other kinds of antiblack violence. Racial prejudice, in other words, was not sufficient to overcome an understood need for cheap black labor and resistance to the expense of subsidizing massive emigration. Weakened by
falling revenues, the ACS was thus unable to meet the requests for aid from former enemies like
Martin Delany, to say nothing of thousands of Southern sharecroppers and farmworkers. While keeping in close touch with the ACS, Delany and Turner both supported independent black ventures, such as the
Liberian Exodus Joint Steamship Company, which in 1878 sent a bark jammed with more than two hundred emigrants on a disastrous voyage from
Charleston to
Monrovia. After sending more than two thousand blacks to Liberia in the four years following the Civil War, the ACS recorded declining receipts and a mere trickle of colonists during the next three decades; emigration projects were increasingly taken up by poorly funded and sometimes fraudulent black organizations.
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The number of blacks who sailed to Liberia and other African destinations is not nearly so significant as the way emigration movements continued to nourish the desire for black economic and political self-determination. When Bishop Turner visited Liberia in 1891, at the beginning of a decade of persecution and catastrophic defeats
for
American blacks, he wrote that “one thing the black man has here, and that is manhood, freedom and the fullest liberty; he feels like a lord and walks the same way.”
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This “one thing” had been the objective of the early black ship captain,
Paul Cuffe, who had transported the first American blacks to
Sierra Leone; it had been the reward promised by the
ACS; the goal sought by a long succession of male and female black nationalists who vacillated over the course of a century, in response to changing conditions, on the possibility of achieving genuine freedom within a white society.
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Finally, in the 1920s, it was this vision that ignited the first mass movement in African American history.

We may pass over the politics and internal contradictions of the
Garvey movement, limiting our attention to the light it casts, like the final act in a play, on the preceding century’s colonization debates. In 1834, abolitionists of both races would have been dumbfounded to know that in 1924 America’s most charismatic black leader, speaking in New York’s Liberty Hall, would talk of fulfilling the vision of the American Colonization Society! As he prepared to send off to
Liberia an advance party of “civil and mechanical engineers” to set up camps for some twenty to thirty thousand families who were supposed to arrive in the fall, Garvey, who had been deeply influenced by
Edward Blyden, eulogized Liberia’s founders and rulers: “They have been able,” he said, “to arouse the sleeping consciousness of the 400 million Negroes of the world to go to the rescue, to help build Liberia and make her one of the greatest nations of the world. And we are going to do it.” In a newspaper advertisement appealing for funds to

DEVELOP COLONIES IN LIBERIA AS PEACEFUL HOMES FOR NEGROES—SIMILAR TO HOMELAND IN PALESTINE FOR JEWS,

Garvey tacitly repudiated the long struggle of American abolitionists to discredit the ACS, applauding what he called “the white friends of the Negro in America” who “over a hundred years ago” had helped establish “the only independent nation on the West Coast of Africa.” The ACS, according to Garvey, had anticipated the glorious hour when American blacks would liberate and repossess the African continent.
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Garvey had founded the
Universal Negro Improvement Association in Jamaica, in 1914, after working in Costa Rica as a timekeeper on a United Fruit Company plantation, taking courses at Birkbeck
College in London, and doing miscellaneous jobs in the office of
Dusé Mohamed Ali’s
African Times
and
Orient Review.
Impressed by
Booker T. Washington’s achievements at
Tuskegee Institute, Garvey was primarily concerned with racial uplift and self-improvement, the key issues we will focus on in
chapter 8
. The entire world, he pointed out, looked down upon blacks as inferior and degraded beings, as a people devoid of national, commercial, or social status. In 1914 Garvey called on the sons and daughters of Africa to defy

Despite this litany of prominent leaders, Garvey castigated the “representative and
educated negroes” who set themselves apart and who thought it degrading and ignominious to identify themselves with the masses of the people who “are still ignorant and backward; but who are crying out for true and conscientious leadership, so that they might advance into a higher state of enlightenment whence they could claim the appreciation and honest comradeship of the more advanced races who are to-day ignoring us simply because we are so lethargic and selfish.”
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After attacking the privileged blacks for shirking their responsibility, Garvey pointedly observed that this same elite, for all their pretensions, “are snubbed and laughed at just the same as the most menial of the race, and only because they are Negroes.”
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This need for racial solidarity was the very heart of Garvey’s early message, although his proposed solutions soon changed, especially after his move to Harlem in 1916. Like earlier black nationalists—and, for that matter, like white colonizationists—he accepted a theory of historical decline. In antiquity, black Africans had created a “glorious civilization” and had dispensed it to the world. White men, including the Israelites, had once been the servants and subjects of black Egyptians. But in what Garvey termed the “process of time,” the African “reverted into savagery,” and “subsequently became a slave even to those whom he
once enslaved.”
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This set of beliefs had an obvious bearing on
Garvey’s views of
Liberia and the mission to civilize Africa. It also helps to explain his sense of affinity and competition with Jews.

We have already taken some note of the extraordinary significance American slaves and free
blacks found in the biblical Exodus narrative, which was dramatized in sermons and such spirituals as “Go Down Moses,” and even read aloud by slave mothers to impressionable children like
Booker T. Washington.
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From the pre–Civil War decades to the 1890s, when few American blacks had ever seen a Jew, such diverse figures as
Douglass, Delany, Washington, and
Blyden not only drew frequent parallels between the persecution of modern
Jews and blacks but urged their fellow blacks to emulate the Jews’ unity, pride, and quest for knowledge and achievement. In 1899 Booker T. Washington summarized the message repeated for many decades by the black elite: “Unless the Negro learns more and more to imitate the Jew in these matters, to have faith in himself, he cannot expect to have any high degree of success.”
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From the
National Negro Convention at Rochester in 1853 to the horror Booker T. Washington expressed over Russia’s pogroms and his affirmation in 1904 that “my heart goes out to our Hebrew fellow-sufferers across the sea,” blacks often specified Jews as the single group that had suffered more oppression historically than they had. For a time this example was immensely reassuring, since it proved that prejudice could be conquered. As Douglass put it in 1863, “The Jews were treated with every species of indignity, and not allowed to learn trades, nor to live in the same part of the city with other people. Now kings cannot go to war without the consent of a Jew. The Jew has come up, and the negro will come up by and by.” A generation later a black Cleveland lawyer,
John P. Green, compared the bloodstained path Jews had traversed since the Roman destruction of Jerusalem with their present attainments in science, art, literature, and finance, concluding, “we may well cheer up and persevere along the same lines until victory crowns our efforts.”
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While blacks and Jews naturally absorbed some of the negative stereotypes that prevailed in the surrounding culture, it would be a serious mistake to project later conflicts backward into the early twentieth century. As hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants arrived in Northern cities that were already beginning to attract a
massive black migration from the South, the Yiddish press devoted an extraordinary amount of space to black cultural achievements, glowing biographies of black leaders, attacks on
Jim Crow laws and racial discrimination, denunciations of lynching and race riots, and parallels between the Jewish and black experience. Although Yiddish and English-language Jewish newspapers represented a wide spectrum of religious and political views, they took a common stand against whites (including Jews) who victimized blacks, and devoted far more space to blacks than to the
Irish,
Italians,
Greeks,
Germans, or
Chinese. Where earlier immigrant groups had often established their “Americanism” by joining in the common white ridicule of blacks, Jews tended to affirm their special American identity by invoking the ideals of Lincoln and the Founding Fathers and by launching a united campaign against racism and anti-Semitism.
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