African
American History: Micro-Fundamentals of
an Excellent Liberal Arts Education
Gary Marvin Davison, Ph. D.
Director, New Salem Educational Initiative
A Note to My Readers >>>>> Introduction to a Series, Micro-
Fundamentals of An Excellent Liberal Arts Education
So wretched are curriculum and teacher quality
at the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) that I have moved to expose the
deficiencies of the district in my Understanding
the Minneapolis Public Schools: Current
Condition, Future Prospect; and via
my Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal
Arts Education provide to my students in the New Salem Educational
Initiative with the education of excellence that they are not getting in MPS
schools.
In the cases of students who come to me
post-grade 8, time is of the essence;
thus, that I am now at work on a micro-version of Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, so that my
students may take ACT or SAT exams and apply for and gain entrance to colleges
and universities upon the essence of the education that they should receive but
do not in MPS schools.
Below, readers will find African American History: Micro-Fundamentals of
an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, the sixth of fourteen chapters that
condense my larger work to the most essential information pertinent to the
subject areas covered.
……………………………………………………………………..
African
American History: Micro-Fundamentals of
an Excellent Liberal Arts Education
Gary Marvin Davison, Ph. D.
New Salem Educational Initiative
I. African Origins
Africans: Ancestors to All Humankind
The ancestors of all human beings were from
Africa.
Hominids appeared in East Africa from 4
million years ago (mya), beginning with Australopithecus and followed by homo habilis (2.5 mya), homo erectus (1.5 mya), and homo sapiens (100,000 years ago). East Africa was the location for the first
use of tools (2.5 mya) and fire (one mya).
In Northeast Africa, the classical Egypt formed along the Nile River
beginning in approximately 3,500 BC and became one of the four (along with
Mesopotamia, Indus River Valley, and Yellow River Valley) first great
civilizations to evolve in river valleys. In the horn of Africa, the
civilizations of Kush and Meroe from the 7th century BC competed
with Egypt for military and political primacy, and Axum became a great state as
classical Egypt faded under attacks from powers of West Asia (Middle
East). During the first centuries AD,
Axum was a major power located in the African horn and in the course of time
the kingdom’s namesake city became the holy seat of Coptic Christians.
During the 8th to 16th
centuries AD, the great empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai flourished
successively in West Africa; the capital
of the latter two empires, Timbuktu, became one of the great urban centers of
Muslim learning. Elsewhere in Africa,
the states of Hausa (West Africa), Kanem-Bornu (Lake Chad region), Rwanda
(Southeast Africa), Buganda (Southeast Africa), Kongo (Central Africa), and Monomotapa
(South Africa) became major powers in their regions.
Throughout these magnificent kingdoms and
in those areas where a more decentralized style of governance prevailed, a wide
variety of cultural styles described the lives of Africans. West Africans were known for their skill as
farmers and artists. They excelled in
cultivating rice, building boats, and navigating along coasts. Many were experts in producing textiles and
baskets. Others fashioned clothing from
skins and fur. Some became expert in
producing weapons, utensils, and ceremonial objects from iron, copper, and
precious stones. Heights of artistry
were reached by many West Africans who used these same materials to produce
jewelry, metalwork, and sculpture.
The topography of Africa was and is
enormously varied, featuring tropical forests, expansive deserts, and broad
grassland. Many African societies are
matrilineal, with inheritance and property rights descended from the
mother. Many are also matrilocal,
meaning that the groom who leaves his own family to live with or near the
family of the bride. Kinship was very
important in traditional African society.
Ancestors are considered the links to the past, and descendants were
considered the bridge to the future.
Both were part of the family broadly construed. Typically hundreds of family members,
including people of several generations, gathered together in clan associations
to conduct common business and to maintain religious rituals preserving the
lint to those who had lived before.
People in West African traditionally
worshiped their ancestors, seen as the vital link between the supreme creator
and the people of humankind and nature.
The indigenous religions of West Africa are animistic: worshipers devote their ceremonies and ritual
observations to spirits believed to dwell in animals, forests, rivers, and
rocks. Nature was and is seen as a thing
worthy of respect, awe, care and caution.
The arrival of Europeans in the 15th
century would eventually alter the course of African history in ways that would
be important not only to the people of the vast continent, but for the entire
world, as well. Later, in the 19th
and 20th centuries, almost all of Africa would come under the
control of European colonial powers which exerted a might based on superior
military hardware and oceangoing prowess.
More immediately important to the history of people of African origin in
the Americas would be the slave trade that developed from the fifteenth
century, following a pattern of commercial interaction that included
participants of four continents: Africa,
South America, North America, and Europe.
Those people of African descent who were
torn from their homeland came with a rich store of cultural treasure that
people of European descent could not wrench from their brains, no matter how
disrespectfully the slave traders abused African bodies. The cultures of Africa, alive in the brains
and bodies of those people brought to the American from Africa as slaves, would
be one of the major cultural streams enriching the lives of people from the
Western Hemisphere, including the United States.
II. The Slave Trade and the Era of Slavery,
1500-1860
The Slave Trade
The slave trade developed as an extension
of mercantilism, the doctrine that prevailed among the rising monarchies of
Europe in the 15th century, whereby each nation-state sought to
maximize its profits via domestic and international trade in competition with
other nations. Control of territories
overseas increased national access to raw materials, goods, and markets beyond
the confines of the borders for Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, France, and
Great Britain. The mines and plantations
of these colonial powers required heavy input of labor. Great populations of Native American people
had been wiped out with small pox and yellow fever; those that remained knew the territory so
well that they became adept escape artists when the Spaniards tried to put them
to work on the plantations, whether as indentured servants or slaves. But on the coast of African, the Portuguese
and then the Spaniards discovered that the mighty nations the Dahomey, Ashanti,
and others who were willing to trade their captives of war, prisoners, and
criminals as slaves in exchange for weapons, metal goods, cloth, and alcoholic
beverages.
The system that developed was lucrative for
both African and European traders and devastating to the people traded and
their families. Europeans typically
established what they called “factories” at coastal edge in West Africa or on
nearby islands. There they would set up
large cages for the imprisonment of the human chattel for which they traded
with the agents of the Dahomey, Ashanti, and others. When enough slaves accumulated to fill a ship
at an economically viable level, the human cargo was hustled aboard the ships
and carried across the Atlantic Ocean through what was termed the Middle
Passage to America. The international
commercial exchange was known as the Triangular Trade, whereby slaves were
taken to work the sugar plantations and mines of South America, and the tobacco,
rice, and cotton plantations of in the Old South of colonial North
America; the agricultural goods of the
Americas were carried on to Europe for processing; and goods from those European factories were
then carried on to Africa, at which point the triangular process began again.
The trip across the Atlantic generally took
four to five weeks. There were three or
more levels to the ships, just three feet or so apart, with slaves packed in
horizontal position, scrunched into spots five and one-half feet long and about
sixteen inches wide. There the slaves
remained chained together, ankle to ankle and wrist to wrist as they lay in an
accumulating filth of urine and excrement.
Once a week or so, the slaves were taken on deck to get a rinsing from
pails of water, sometimes with requests from the crew to dance or skip or move
in some frivolous fashion as the cleaning was taking place.
So horrid were ship conditions that about
one in seven (approximately 15%) slaves died on the Middle Passage. But this was part of the calculation. The slave haul was so valuable in the
aggregate that a few lives lost did not matter in crude terms of profit and
loss. Outlays for food and provisions on
the ships were no more than necessary for the majority of the slaves to
survive, with a few dead bodies carried on into port considered a rationally
sustainable loss.
Slaves taken for work on the plantations
and mines of South America were sold in such numbers that the purchaser just
gave the hordes disembarking from the slave ships a quick look and packed them
off to the plantation. Slaves sold in
places such as Charleston and New Orleans in the Old South were given more
fastidious examination, in similar fashion to that of a horse trade. Teeth and gums were examined to determine
age. Backs were examined for any sign of
scars from cracking whips that might indicate a rebellious spirit. A woman’s facial wrinkles and the condition
of her legs and abdomen were assessed for child-bearing potential. Prices for slaves ranged over time and
place; in Louisiana, the price of a
field hand went up from about $500 in the early 19th century to
approximately $1,500 at the advent of the Civil War.
African Americans in The American
Revolution and the Founding to the United States
When war broke out between the British
imperial powerhouse and the upstart American colonists in 1775, people of
African provenance, whether free blacks or those of slave status, shrewdly
calculated their interests. A given
African American might well ask at least these two questions:
Should I fight with the British, believing
promises that doing so will bring freedom from plantation masters in the
American South?
Or should I fight with the Americans and
trust that a war for the cause of liberty will result in my own?
In all, approximately 5,000 African
Americans, mostly free blacks, fought on the side of the Americans. Another 1,000 people of African descent who
had been in slave status gained their freedom by fighting with the British
army. African Americans served as combat
troops with both armies. They also
conducted missions of espionage and performed a variety of practical
tasks: clearing roads, cooking meals,
hauling equipment, repairing bridges, and driving wagons transporting officers,
troops, weaponry, and supplies. Crispus
Attucks, Lemuel Haynes, Peter Salem, Primas Black, Epheram Blackman, Pomp
Blackman, Samuel Craft, Prince Estabrook, Caesar Ferrit, John Ferrit (Caesar’s
son), Barzillai Lew, and Cuff Whittemore are among African American male
soldiers for which we have good records.
African American women also fought on the American the side: The memoirs of African American poet Lucy
Terry Prince (1730-1821) tell how black women disguised as men fought the British
in various battles waged over the full course of the conflict.
Upon the founding of the new nation, and
after the first attempt at a general statement of constitutional principles in
the Articles of Confederation (1781) failed to provide for an effective central
government, James Madison took responsibility for writing the United States
Constitution of the United States that went into effect in 1789. Many of the founders, even those who were
slaveholders, realized that there was an abiding ironic cruelty in the
maintenance of slavery as an institution in a nation whose constitution
reflected the ideals of the Enlightenment or Age of Reason. They knew that as a matter of principle,
liberty and justice for humanity should include all of those who are
human. But slavery was a contentious
issue that could have torn the young nation apart in a sectional fight
involving those whose livelihoods depended on slave labor and those who were
not invested in, or morally objected to, the institution of slavery.
So Madison finessed the language a bit,
avoiding the term, “slave,” but at three points in the United States
Constitution, identifying issues of law that most definitely pertained
specifically to African Americans. In
Article I, Section 2 reference is made to “other persons” who were to be
counted as “three-fifths” of a full human being in each state for purposes of
determining level of representation in the House of Representatives of the
United States Congress. And in Article
I, Section 9, Madison writes that “the importation of certain persons” could
cease as of 1808 and empower the United States Congress to place a tax on such
persons brought into the United States thereafter; reference was clearly to the slave
trade. And in Article IV, Madison writes
that anyone escaping from bondage should be returned to the party who owned
their labor.
Thus it was that the world’s greatest
document of national governance, embodying the general principles of the
Enlightenment and embracing the phraseology of John Locke in guaranteeing
“life, liberty, and property” (5th and 14th Amendments)
to citizens, did little to protect life for African Americans, implicitly
denied them liberty, and not only failed to guarantee them right to property
but rather considered them property guaranteed for ownership by others.
Slavery on the Plantations of the
American South; African American Contributions Under Virulent Conditions
Slavery existed throughout the American
colonies during the 16th and 17thcenturies, and through
most of the 18th century in the run-up to the Revolutionary War
against the British. Slaves in the
American South most notably worked on large plantations given at first to
tobacco (especially in the Virginia and the Carolinas), rice throughout the
humid lower South from Florida to Louisiana), and sugarcane (especially in
Florida and Louisiana). But they also
work on small farms, some with just a few slaves, others with about
twenty. Status distinctions among slaves
followed an order that began at the Big House with those slaves who worked as
butlers, servers, cooks, sewers of clothes, tailors, nannies, carriage drivers,
and gardeners. Out in the fields,
working generally under a white overseer, was an often African American slave
driver.
Slaves who lived and worked in the Big
House ate better than did field slaves.
They often ate some of what the kitchen claves cooked for the family of
the master. Field slaves, though, made
do with a diet in which flour, cornmeal, and lard provided much of the caloric
value. Milk was plentiful on the farm,
and beans served as a good source of protein.
Slaves were ingenious about finding good things from nature’s bounty to
supplement the meals put together from rations put together by the slave
owner.
Although the life of the slave was
laborious and the working hours long, there was some time left over for
recreation, amusement, and personal accomplishment. Many slaves became superb hunters and
fishers, planted masterful gardens, and play tunes on homemade instruments that
would prove to be the progenitors of the blues and jazz genres that are at the
soul of American music. Slaves Wilcie
Elfe, James Derham, David K. McDonough and two known only by their first names
Oneissimus and Caesar made significant contributions to the fields of medicine
and pharmaceuticals.
Most African Americans eventually became
Christians, although some, especially at first, incorporated animistic beliefs
into their new faith. They also very
notably drew upon African music to enliven standard Christian hymns and to
create spirituals unique to African American people. From the African American Christian tradition
came much of the impetus for blues and jazz motifs that in turn shaped all
music that is American in origin.
According to the census of 1860, there were
488,070 free blacks in a total African American population of 4,441,770 (with
the slave population, therefore, at 3,953,700 [having grown from 697,897 since
1790]). Hence, free blacks constituted
about 11% of the total African American population in the United States just
prior to the Civil War. Over half of
these free African Americans lived in the South. Some free African Americans themselves owned
slaves; the 1830 census recorded 753 slaveholding
African Americans.
Paul Cuffe (1759-1817), James Forten
1766-1842), William Whipper (mid-19th century) were free African
Americans who compiled substantial fortunes in business. Benjamin Banneker (1731-1806) surveyed the
site for the capital in Washington. D.
C., for which he had been among planners. Norbert Rillieux (1806-1894) and Lewis Temple
(1800-1854) were among many African American inventors and scientists. African Americans were in large measure
responsible for establishing the economy and physical infrastructure of the
United States. They designed and
constructed churches, mansions, public buildings, and private plantations. John Hemings is famous for his role in
producing articles and fixtures for the Monticello, the plantation of Thomas
Jefferson in Virginia. African American
artisans, entrepreneurs, inventors, journalists, and professionals formed a
small but energetic black middle class.
But everywhere in the United States,
African Americans faced challenges of professional, residential, political, and
educational discrimination, and for the majority who were bound to slavery,
conditions were abhorrent.
III. Abolitionist Movement, Civil War, and
Reconstruction, 1861-1877
The Civil War
During the first decades of the 20th
century, a movement to free the slaves gained force. Sojourner Truth, Harriet
Tubman, and Frederick Douglass African American became famous leaders in the
abolitionist movement. Tensions between
the industrializing and urbanizing North and the mostly rural and agrarian
South increased. Efforts by people such as these helped create an atmosphere in
which the Republican Party was founded upon a platform for abolition that was
actually quite moderate and gradualist.
But the fact that a mainstream, white-dominated party could be
advocating for the termination of involuntary servitude was worrisome enough
for southern stakeholders to induce Civil War.
African Americans fought on both sides of
the Civil War that rocked the young republic during
1861-1865. Those African Americans who
fought on the side of the Confederacy in the Civil War were generally forced to
do so by their masters or were in such dire economic circumstances that the
proximity of an army offering food and shelter proved tempting, even with the
prospect of manumission should the Union army prevail. African Americans fought predominately,
though, and with much greater alacrity, for the Union, fleeing to Union ranks
in those states to which the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) applied (states under Union control), or
seeking out one of the Northern armies to fight for the military that seemed
positioned against the institution of slavery.
African Americans in the service of Union
forces not only served as soldiers but also cooked meals, repaired railroads,
constructed new roads, rebuilt bridges, carried fresh ammunition and additional
weapons to the troops, provided medical attention as nurses and attendants,
assisted officers with routine tasks, and rendered personal service. Harriet Tubman and Susie King Taylor were two
high-profile women who served Union forces.
The regiments of the U. S. Colored Troops served the Union with
distinction. The 54th
Massachusetts Colored Infantry, the first regiment of African American troops
raised in the service of the Union, showed great courage and skill in numerous
battles.
Although exigency often led Confederate
commanders informally to conscript African Americans into their units, only in
March 1865 (a month before war’s end) did the critical need for troops lead
Confederate president Jefferson Davis officially allow the recruitment of black
soldiers.
After Lincoln issued the Emancipation
Proclamation, newly freed slaves left the plantations in droves, and many found
their ways into the Union army. In all,
178,985 African Americans fought during the Civil War. At least 37,000 died in combat. Seventeen black soldiers received the
Congressional Medal of Honor, the highest award bestowed by the United States
government for feats of bravery.
Reconstruction
The Civil War ended in April 1865 when top
Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to his counterpart on the Union
side, Ulysses S. Grant. Soon after the
end of the war, Congress passed--- and
the states ratified--- the 13th
Amendment to the United States Constitution, ending slavery; the 14th Amendment granting citizenship
rights to people of all ethnicities and regardless of “previous condition of
servitude”; and the 15th
Amendment granting the right to vote to all adult males.
The postwar effort on the part of the
United States government to bring African Americans into the full participation
of life in the nation as citizens is known as Reconstruction. The key government agency charged with the
practical task of carrying out Reconstruction was known as the Bureau of
Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, which came to be called the Freedmen’s
Bureau. During Reconstruction, many
African Americans achieved success as state politicians. At the national level, fourteen African
Americans held positions in the House of Representatives; Hiram R. Revels (served for Mississippi,
1870-1871) and Blanche K. Bruce (also served for Mississippi, 1875-1881) were
the first two African Americans to serve in the United States Senate. Also notable in the spirit of Reconstruction
era action was congressional passage of the Morril Act (1862), which provided
funding of land grants to the governments of states taking the initiative for
opening institutions of higher learning, leading to the establishment to black
colleges and universities throughout the South.
The Freedmen’s Bureau and other federal
agencies achieved some lasting good in behalf of African Americans, but in the
end fell far short of what was necessary to bring African Americans into the
economic, social, and political life of the United States on an equal basis
with the white population.
Despite the promise of the Reconstruction
era, members of the Republican Party began to lose interest in following
through on the key initiatives aimed at bringing African Americans into the
civic and social life of the nation as full participants alongside the white
majority. Republicans increasingly turned toward big business interests in the
North as their key political constituency.
Whites in the South resisted Reconstruction from the beginning. Hatemongers formed the Ku Klux Klan in 1866,
and others of ill-will followed with the establishment of organizations--- such as the Knights of the Golden Circle and
the Midnight Raiders--- that
participated in similar acts of intimidation and violence.
In 1877, the Republicans cut a deal that
would cause at least another century of suffering for American citizens of
African descent:
The deal, the Compromise of 1877, came
about as a result of the disputed election of 1876. The contest was between Republican Rutherford
B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel J. Tilden.
Tilden won the popular vote but needed the electoral votes from the
state of Florida in order to claim victory in the Electoral College. The popular vote was very close; each party maintained that it had the
majority necessary to claim victory in the Electoral College.
But before any recount could proceed, or
independent election inspectors brought in, the Republicans and Democrats cut
an infamous deal. In exchange for
Democrats’ conceding the Florida votes and thus the election to them, the
Republicans promised that they would order the withdrawal of all federal troops
from the South. Without the enforcement
power represented by the federal troops stationed in the South, the
constitutional and civil rights laws that had held such promise for African
American citizenship would be ineffective.
In the aftermath of this cynical deal, whites returned to near-exclusive
power in the South, and an awful road was cleared for some of the darkest
moments in the history of African America.
IV.
The Misery That Never Should Have Been, 1877-1954
The era in history extending from the
Compromise of 1877 up to the Brown v.
Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas decision of 1954 constitutes a virulent era
in the experience of African America. Throughout the southern states, in the
aftermath of the withdrawal of federal troops, legislatures moved quickly to
establish Black Codes that left African Americans devoid of citizenship rights
and reduced to menial, low-paying jobs.
Under a system known as Jim Crow, public and most private facilities
became segregated. The Supreme Court, in
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), gave
affirmation to this system. The justices
ruled that as long as railroad car accommodations (and, by extension,
facilities of many kinds) were “separate but equal,” the law calling for
segregated facilities was consistent with the equal protection clause of the 14th
Amendment to the United States Constitution.
In the months and years immediately following the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, legislated their movements down the
path to a fully segregated and cruelly discriminatory South. And in the ensuing years, efforts to deny
African American political rights became ever more effective with the
establishment of poll taxes and literacy tests.
The key components of physical and economic
control that had undergirded the slave system also constituted the foundation
of the Jim Crow system. In the
countryside, where most southern African Americans lived, the economic terms of
life lay in the sharecropping system.
Sharecroppers had to pay for their cabins, clothes, food, tools, work
animals, and such items as flour, salt, and sugar. Most of these items were sold to them on
credit by the landowners to whom they owed their labor; when their crops came in, a large portion of
their profits went to pay for the items that had been purchased on credit. Sharecroppers were chronically in debt.
The Great Northern Migration
As the Black Codes, Jim Crow, and hatemongering
groups made life ever more oppressive for African Americans in the South, a
great spontaneous movement from South to North began. Between 1915 and 1930, about one million
black people migrated from the South to the North. New efficiencies in the burgeoning industries
of the North created jobs that drew African Americans to cities that, according
to the reports of loved ones and friends who had pioneered the migration,
offered wages and a social atmosphere making possible lives of prosperity and
freedom that were clearly denied to African Americans living in the Jim Crow
South. During the second and into the
third decade of the 20th century, the industrial and service
economies of northern cities absorbed into their work forces the labor of these
African American migrants, who took their positions alongside Italian, Irish,
Russian, and Eastern European immigrants who also flocked to the American North
during these years.
African Americans committed their lives to
the cause of World War I (1914-1918) and had great expectation that their
service would advance their quest for equitable treatment as citizens.
Approximately 370,000 African American
soldiers (11% of United States combat forces) and 1,400 black officers served
in the United States armed forces during World War I. Over 50% of African American soldiers served
in the all-black 92nd and 93rd divisions. These soldiers served with great
distinction: The all-black 369th
Infantry Regiment (known as the “Harlem Hell Fighters”) compiled the best record
of any United States Army regiment.
African American soldiers of the 370th Infantry Regiment
received sixteen distinguished Service Crosses and seventy-five Croix de Guerre
medals.
African Americans, though, faced great
discrimination in the context of their military service. And hopes that the “war to make the world
safe for democracy” (in the words of President Woodrow Wilson) might induce a
higher level of democracy for themselves were grievously disappointed.
In the context of these circumstances in
the urban North, the National Urban League was founded in 1910 to advocate for
better conditions of employment and living conditions. At approximately the same time, William Edward
Burghardt (W. E. B.) DuBois and others established the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which focused on matters justice and
law.
W. E. B. DuBois and the NAACP worked toward
a racially integrated society and the extension of the democratic ideals of the
United States Constitution. Booker T.
Washington (1856-1915) counseled a gradualist approach whereby African
Americans would get a good basic education, master their trades, demonstrate
solid citizenship and to go about their lives in ways that converted whites to
friendship over time. Marcus Garvey
(1887-1940) took inspiration from the philosophy of black self-help that he
found in Booker T. Washington’s Up From
Slavery but argued that trying to appeal to the sense of justice in white
people was useless. People in the
Americas of African descent should unite, work hard to make an all-black nation
within a nation economically strong, and in time transplant the nation to
Africa.
These, then, were the three key approaches
to attaining a life of civic dignity for people of African descent in the
United States: gradualist,
integrationist, and nationalist. The
latter two would inform the competing strategies of African American leaders in
the 1960s.
The Harlem Renaissance
In 1925, Howard University Professor Alain
Locke published The New Negro, a book
that captured the spirit and that great culture awakening among the African
American people that came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance. During the 1920s, African American poets: Georgia
Johnson Douglass, Jean Toomer, Jessie Faucet, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and
Countee Cullen were among the luminaries using the verse form to articulate
African American frustrations and hopes. Novelists included Rudolf Fischer, Wallace
Thurman, and Zora Neal Thurston.
Composers, musicians, and dancers such as Noble Sussie, Eubie Blake,
Florence Mills, Josephine Baker, Paul Robeson, Roland Hayes, Bill (“Bojangles”)
Robinson, Helmsley Winfield, Katherine Dunham , Harry T. Burleigh, and James
Weldon Johnson and John Rosamond Johnson pioneered with their presentation of
musical gifts to the American public.
The composition of the Johnson brothers, “Life Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” in
time became the “African American National Anthem.”
Blues artists Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and
Clara Smith. Jazz greats such as
Ferdinand (“Jelly Roll”) Morton, Joseph (“King”) Oliver, Louis (“Satchmo”)
Armstrong, Edward (“Duke”) Ellington, and Billie Holiday integrated African American
work songs and blues into this vibrant new form that sent an already great gift
from African America to people throughout the United States soaring to new
heights. Visual artists such as Henry
Ossawa Tanner, Louis Mallou Jones, Meta Vaux Warrick, William Henry Johnson,
Augusta Savage also gave creative force to art in the United States during the
early to middle decades of the 20th century.
Depression, War, and a New Deal for
African America
The Great Depression that began with the
stock market crash of 29 October 1929 fell hard on African America. Most blacks in the south toiled as
sharecroppers or as laborers on other people’s farms, so when landowners ran
into economic difficulty, black framers had to scramble for work. But in the South, other work was rare, and
the North did not offer much hope during the 1930s: Whites who had come to eschew certain kinds
of labor eagerly took jobs that they had formerly rejected. Left with few options, the downcast African
American worker of the South was the most economically devastated figure of the
Great Depression.
Asa Philip Randolph emerged as a major
figure in labor leadership, superintending the formation of the Brotherhood of
Sleeping Car Porters in August 1925 that culminated a dozen years later (25
August 1937) in better wages and work conditions for the African American
porters who worked for the Pullman Company, which dominated the sleeping car
industry aboard railroads.
Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal gave hope to
many in the United States. African Americans participated, albeit under
segregated conditions, in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), National Youth
Administration (NYA), Works Progress Administration (WPA), and the Federal
Writers Project (FWP). Eleanor Roosevelt
was instrumental in getting her husband to create a “Black Cabinet” that
included Mary McCleod Bethune, Robert L. Vann, William H. Hastie, Robert D. Weaver,
and Lawrence A. Oxley.
The New Deal put millions of Americans back
to work and lifted the spirits of the nation, but the economic stimulus provided
by the need for the material goods of warfare meant that World War II
(1939-1945) was really responsible for ending the Great Depression. About 1,000,000 African Americans served in
the armed forces during World War II, including several thousand women in the
women’s Auxiliary Army Corps (WACS).
About 500,000 soldiers served in either the European or Asia/ Pacific
theaters of the war, typically in segregated units in technically noncombat
positions (quartermaster, engineer, ordinance handler, and transport
provider). But the 92nd
Infantry, 93rd Infantry, 761st Tank Battalion, 614th
Tank Destroyer Battalion, and 593rd Field Artillery provide examples
of military units in which African Americans served with great distinction in
direct combat during World War II.
Bernie Robinson became the first African American officer in 1942; by war’s end there were 50 such African
American officers in the military forces of the United States.
African American pilots charted some of he
most remarkable achievements of World War II.
The most famous of these was the 332nd Fighter Group, better
known as the Tuskegee Airmen. Graduates
of the segregated pilot program in Tuskegee, Alabama, this accomplished group
of aiment flew escort planes, charged with the duty of protecting heavy
bombers; in more than two hundred
missions, they never lost an escorted plane to the Germans or other opponents,
and they managed to sink a German navy destroyer with aircraft gunfire. African American physician Charles Drew
oversaw establishment of the first blood bank in New York City, following with
similar efforts at the request of Great Britain and for the Red Cross back in
the United States.
V.
The Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1972
The Cases and Incidents that Galvanized
a Movement
In 1954, Thurgood Marshall led a team of
NAACP lawyers to landmark victory in the Brown
v. Board of Education of Topeka,
Kansas, ending segregation in public schools. In August 1955 fourteen
year-old African American Emmett Till of Chicago, visiting relatives in
Mississippi, sustained a fatal shot to the head from two white men who claimed
that the youth had “talked fresh” to a white woman. Till was beaten so badly that his face was
unrecognizable; his death and exoneration of his murderers by an all-white jury
provoked furor among African Americans and those whites capable of being roused
by the injustice. On 1 December 1955, a
department store seamstress named Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat at the
front of the black section of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, as requested by a
white person. Montgomery pastor Martin
Luther King, who led Dexter Avenue Baptist Church responded reluctantly to the
call to head a movement that burgeoned into a 12-month boycott that culminated
in the 13 November 1956 decision of the Supreme Court of the United States determiniung
that Montgomery’s segregated bus system was unconstitutional.
Martin Luther King, who had been satisfied
with developing himself professionally as a local pastor, knew that his gifts
now had to be employed in a wider effort that became the Civil Rights
Movement. He assumed the position at the
helm of the southern Christian Leadership Conference, employing a disciplined
nonviolent approach adapted from the satyagraha
movement of Mohandas K. Gandhi that had played a major role in winning
independence for India from Great Britain in 1947.
Multiple Assertions of African American
Rights, 1957-1963
The years 1957-1963 were replete with
nonviolent actions meant to induce changes in practices that had continued for
at least eighty years in the Jim Crow South, as well as for many decades in the
urban North:
In 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower at
first demurred but eventually called in the National Guard to protect the entry
of nine African American high school students (Minniejean Brown, Elizabeth
Eckford, Ernest Green, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Patillo, Gloria Ray, Terrance
Roberts, Jefferson Thomas, and Carlotta Walls) into Central High School of
Little Rock, Arkansas.
Martin Luther King continued to be the most
prominent Civil Rights leader, but other organizations formed to work for the
cause of African American Rights. The
Congress of Racial Equality (CORE, formed back in 1942 by James Farmer) worked
out of a head office in Chicago and was at the forefront of many sit-ins for
the desegregation of public lunch counters, restrooms, parks, theaters, and
schools.
In 1960, 300 students came together at the
behest Ellas Baker, a militant member of the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference, to form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). By 1962, a Harvard-educated SNCC teacher by
the name of Robert Moses came was heading SNCC, organizing a highly effective
and disciplined staff working to ensure the right to vote in the South.
Late in 1960, Martin Luther King was
arrested on a charge of disturbing the peace in Birmingham, Alabama. A call from Robert Kennedy, brother of John
Kennedy, made a call that culminated in King’s release. This action did a great deal to swing the
black vote in the 1960 presidential election toward Democrat John Kennedy in
his race against Republican Richard Nixon, thereby garnering the support of
needed votes in a close contest.
In 1961 came the Freedom Rides, producing a
dangerous showdown in Birmingham, Alabama, that induced Attorney General Robert
Kennedy to pressure southern bus companies and state governments to comply with
federal law regarding public transportation.
In 1962 the National Guard in Mississippi was called in to protect the
right of African American student James Meredith to enter the University of
Mississippi. Then on 28 August 1963,
came the March on Washington which catapulted Martin Luther King to even higher
national prominence. Following the
original vision of A. Philip Randolph, the various groups working in the Civil
Rights Movement worked with meticulous effectiveness to bring forth 250,000
people, who gathered at the Lincoln Memorial to hear a litany of speakers on
the cause of civil rights.
These many events from the momentous years
1957-1963, culminating in the enormously powerful March on Washington inspired
Lyndon Baines Johnson to use all of his political skills to induce the United
States Congress to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act, giving statutory enforcement
power to guarantees of citizenship in the 14th Amendment; and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, similarly
making clear the imperative for all states to follow the 15th
Amendment guaranteeing voting rights for all citizens. The assassination of President Kennedy in
November 1963; and Fannie Lou Hamer’s
unsuccessful but heroic effort to seat black members among the Mississippi
delegation at the 1964 Democratic Convention;
each in its own way impelled Congress to act favorably on the vigorous
requests from President Johnson.
Additions to Legal Foundation for
African American Rights, 1966-1972
In the course of the late 1960s, the
Johnson administration moved to establish the basis for a Great Society in
which poverty would be radically reduced and racism would recede. Johnson secured passage of legislation to
establish the Medicaid program to provide health care for people of low income,
and Medicare to take care of the health needs of elderly people. He oversaw the provision of food stamps to
people of low income for the purpose of purchasing nutritious food; additionally, the program for Women, Infants,
and Children (W. I. C.) provided milk and other items vital to the health of
pregnant women, infants, and young children.
Fair housing laws also went into effect, making residentially accessible
areas in cities that had previously operated under restrictive housing
covenants denying home purchases to people of certain national origins and
races. And the Johnson administration
founded the Job Corps to provide training in work skills to people of low
income.
Action to found social programs ebbed
during the years of the President Richard M. Nixon administration, but in 1972
a Democratic-controlled Congress to enact the Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Act and the Equal
Opportunity Act, the “affirmative action bills” that had the effect of
vigorously promoting job and higher educational opportunity for all United
States citizens.
In the course of the 1960s and into the
early 1970s, there came a voluble call for the assertion of Black Power. For Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame
Toure) as head of CORE; and Bobby Seal, Huey Newton, and Eldridge Cleaver of
the Black Panthers; the assertion of
Black Power came with a suggestion of violent means for establishing African
American control over both established institutions and new, revolutionary
organizations. Malcolm X, after a
pilgrimage to Mecca that turned him away from extreme racial antipathy for
white people that he had held as a member of the Nation of Islam (Black
Muslims), formed the Organization of Afro-American Unity that nevertheless also
held out the possible use of violence under an “any means necessary” assertion
of African American rights.
The Black Power Movement coincided with the
Black Arts Movement, a leading articulator of
which was Imamu Amiri Baraka, the name taken by the poet and essayist
who was born Leroi Jones. Through the
media of his several volumes of poetry, numerous essays, and plays staged in
Berlin, Dakar, Paris, and the United States (his drama, Dutchman, was an Obie Award winner in 1964), Baraka became a
leading proponent of Black Nationalism and Afro-Islamic culture.
The assassinations of Malcolm X (1965) and
Martin Luther King (1968) seemed to energize the Black Power Movement through 1972. But then, Shirley Chisolm, Jessie Jackson,
Carl Stokes, Thomas Bradley, Maynard Jackson, and Andrew Young were among those
turning from calls for revolution or violence toward mainstream political
activity. Left angry and restive was a contingent
of people still languishing in poverty, violence, and desperation at the urban
core, the inner cities of the United States.
VI. Unfilled Expectations and Uneven Progress, 1972-2019
A Time of Unfulfilled Expectations,
1973-1992
In the 1980s those pressures impinged with
a vengeance. Crack cocaine hit the streets
about 1980. Black gang activity became a
circumstance of urban life. School
systems that had seemed acceptable when serving substantially middle class
populations were now exposed as terrible, particularly in meeting the needs of
highly challenged populations.
Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980
and again in 1984; his vice-president George
H. W. Bush won in 1988. Jessie Jackson,
who headed Operation Breadbasket and the Rainbow Coalition, exerted a forceful
presence as a candidate in the Democratic primaries and caucuses in 1984 and
1988, giving voice to the concerns of the underclass, especially those of his
fellow African Americans. By 1992, the
United States was rent with divisions between black and white, and between
middle class and cyclically impoverished citizens.
A Time of Greater Hope, 1992-2015
William Jefferson (Bill) Clinton, defeated
George H. W. Bush in 1992 and won reelection (against Republican nominee Robert
Dole) in 1996. Clinton firmly supported
the key entitlement programs of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicare, which
got consistent COLA (Cost of Living Adjustment) boosts; and he prevailed upon Congress to expand the
Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) for the working poor. But Clinton also superintended replacement of
AFDC by a new program, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). This program put a five year time-limit on
the receipt of welfare payments, inducing women who had stayed at home to seek
additional education and employment for the long-term support of their
families.
George W. Bush was diverted from domestic
to foreign concerns by the bombing of the two World Trade Center buildings on
November 11, 2001. He did, though, secure
bipartisan agreement for the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Program that promoted
the disaggregation of data to determine educational outcomes for a bevy of
demographic categories, including those pertinent to ethnicity and economic
status. But the program was eventually
undermined by forces of both the Democratic left and the Republican right,
entailing a catering to teachers unions in the former case and a retreat to
rhetoric advocating local control in the latter.
In 2008 came the striking event of the
election of the first African American president and the entry into the
residential halls of the White House an African American family. Barack Obama achieved a formidable task in
significantly altering the nation’s health care system, securing passage of the
Affordable Health Care Act. Obama’s
foreign policy was been conducted with the expressed goals of extracting troops
from Iraq and Afghanistan; this was done
in Iraq, with mixed results and calls in many quarters for reentry to stabilize
the nation amidst sectarian Sunni-Shi’ite division and the regional threat of
the ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, also known as ISIS [Islamic
State of Iraq and Syria]). Obama’s
education initiative, Race to the Top, gained priority over the eviscerated No
Child Left Behind Program, offering waivers from NCLB requirement to states
that could gain approval for alternative programs for the achievement of
educational equity.
But Barack Obama, with a redefinition of
marriage that includes same-sex unions, an immigration policy that offers a
route to citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants, and the appointment
of many African Americans and other people of color to both major and minor
government posts--- communicated a
spirit of cultural inclusion that has captured the affective support of most
African American people. And for African
Americans, seeing someone at the pinnacle of power whose looks are recognizably
those of their own ethnicity was a historical occurrence of powerful symbolism.
Hopes ran high that Obama’s election had
signaled a post-racial society in which the nation could distance itself from the
brutalities of the slavery and Jim Crow eras.
But with the victory of Republican Donald J. Trump (forty-fifth
president, term 2016-2019 [to date of this article]) over Democrat Hillary
Clinton in the presidential election of 2016, the white nationalist stance of
one of his key constituencies conveyed to Americans that racial division and
resentments were lamentably still a definite part of the fabric of American
life.
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