I. African Origins
Africans: Ancestors to All Humankind
The
ancestors of all human beings were from Africa.
About
4 million years ago, the hominid Australopithecus
dwelt in East Africa; this
creature had a much smaller brain than would be the case for homo sapiens (modern human), but
its body featured many characteristics of the human. Around 2.5 million years ago, the hominid homo habilis appeared alongside Australopithecus and put its larger
brain to work fashioning tools of rock and wood.
Approximately
1.5 million years ago, the hominid homo
erectus walked upright and put its still larger brain to work to
produce fire for cooking food and generating warmth. Homo
erectus was the first hominid emigrant
population, heading generally on a northeastwardly trek, into Southeast, South,
Central, and East Asia.
Approximately
200,000 years ago the modern human, homo
sapiens, with three-pound brain and the full physical and mental
characteristics of humanity, appeared in places just a bit northward in the
same general region of East Africa as homo
erectus. Homo sapiens became the second emigrant population to make its way
out of Africa but followed a different trek than that of homo erectus, heading most notably to what we today know as Europe,
encountering the creature homo
neanderthalensis (Neanderthal
human). The Neanderthals coexisted with homo
sapiens but by about 75,000 years ago had been variously absorbed or
competitively overwhelmed by these true humans.
Human beings then spread out with remarkable swiftness over the
globe: Eurasia by about 150,000 B.C.,
Australia by 100,000 B.C. (BCE), the Bering Strait into the Americas by about
12,000 B.C. (BCE).
So
by 12,000 B. C. (BCE), descendants of common African ancestors covered the
globe. The people who populated the
globe developed many distinct cultures and many varieties of tools, diets,
social arrangements, and early religious expression as they adapted to
particular geographic settings and climatic demands. Skin pigmentation developed in evolutionary
fashion, according to the processes of natural selection, producing a range
between the very light-skinned northern Europeans and dark-skinned Africans.
People
on the continent of Africa were among the first to make tools. They were the first to make bone tools, and
they were among those producing tools in five main traditions: Oldowan
(simple chopping and flake tools), biface
(hand axes chipped on both sides for cutting), flake (small cutting and flaking tools), single-stone blade (many usable blades from a single stone), and microlith (small tools used as
projectile points and for carving softer materials). Around 800,000 years ago fishers living in
the basin of the Congo River invented sophisticated tackle to catch giant
catfish.
In
Africa, as elsewhere, people came to discover that implantation of certain
seeds can produce a predictable crop, yielding the possibility of settled
village life. When this happened,
humanity moved from the Paleolithic (Old Stone Age) phase into the Neolithic
(New Stone Age) phase. People in Egypt
were among the first to cultivate crops, doing so along the majestic Nile
River. Neolithic societies arose in
sub-Saharan Africa during 6,000-3,000 B. C. (BCE), about the same time that
agricultural societies were also developing in Europe.
Classical
Egypt
About
3100 B.C. (BCE), King Menes of Upper (southern) Egypt superintended victory
over a competing kingdom in Lower (northern) Egypt, setting up a capital at
Memphis, just south of the fertile Nile Delta region. King Menes and his successors during an early
stage lasting until about 2700 B. C. (BCE) were considered divine, the living
embodiment of the falcon-god Horus.
Farmers tilling the rich soil along the Nile River irrigated their
fields and used some of the world’s first plows.
During
the period of 2686-2181 B. C. (BCE) known as the Old Kingdom, Egyptians
constructed the pyramids. Among the most
notable of these were the first product of this kind of construction, the Step
Pyramid in Memphis in honor of the pharaoh Zoser, designed by his vizier (prime
minister), Imhotep; and the
multi-chamber Great Pyramid at Gaza, highly advanced in technique and
intricacy, overseen by the pharaoh Khufu.
Internal
rivalries and invasion by Asiatic tribesmen from the Sinai caused chaos,
decline, and the eventual fading of the Old Kingdom into the First Intermediate
Period (2181-2050 B. C. [BCE]). The
pharaoh Montuhotep II inaugurated a new dynasty that began the period of c.
2050-1786 known as the Middle Kingdom.
Montuhotep II and successors such as Amenemhat I and those in the
familial line Senruset I, II, and III superintended military campaigns
southward to Nubia and northeastward to Palestine and Syria. Motivation for the pharaohs’ sponsorship of
these campaigns focused on certain raw materials for which the Egyptians had
more need than supply: ivory, gold, and
other precious metals in Nubia; timber
and precious stones and metals in Palestine and Syria.
The
period of the Middle Kingdom featured vigorous activity of many sorts: A large-scale reclamation and irrigation
project in the area of Fayum increased Egypt’s supply of food; the development of the cuneiform writing
system increase the efficiency of scribes in recording governmental decrees,
religious events, and commercial transactions.
The creations of Egyptian statuary and jewelry conveyed a sense of the
wide geographical universe inhabited by the Egyptians, whose artists and
artisans used numerous materials of foreign origin.
By
1786, processes pf late dynastic decline set in, and Egyptian history entered
the Second Intermediate Period, for the last half of which (1674-1570 B.C. [BCE]) the technologically advanced
Hyksos people stormed across Central and West Asia to enter Egypt, utilizing
their chariots and iron weapons to subdue the local Egyptian population. They constructed a new capital named Avaris
and for the most part satisfied themselves with rule of Lower (northern) Egypt,
probably commanding tribute from but not exerting direct control over Thebes
and other southern areas traditionally under the rule of the pharaohs.
In
1570 B. C. (BCE), the locally powerful Theban ruler, Kamose, worked with his
brother (Ahmose) to conquer Avaris, expel the Hyksos from Egypt, and inaugurate
the first dynasty of the New Kingdom (c 1570-1085 B. C. [BCE]). During the rule of the New Kingdom pharaohs,
Egypt reasserted itself as one of the major powers of the ancient African and
Mediterranean world, stretching territorially from the Sudan to Syria, and
edging close to the Nubians of the Horn of Africa, conquering them for a time
and gaining direct access to their gold mines
Religious focus was directed toward Amun-Re (Amon-Ra), conjoining the chief
Theban deity Amun (Amon) with the sun god Re (Ra) long worshiped throughout the
land of the pharaohs.
Notable
pharaohs of Egypt during the period of the New Kingdom included Hatshepsut (r.
circa 1417-1379 B. C. (BCE), one of several female pharaohs who took power
during a stretch of time when the line of male heirs ran thin; Akhenaton (Ikhnaton, 1370-1362 B. C. [BCE]),
a dynamic ruler who attempted to redirect worship toward Aton, the sun’s disk,
and constructed a new city named after himself (on the site of the modern Tel
el Amarna); and Ramesses (Ramses) I, II,
and III--- who during the decades
after1320 (when Ramses I took power) expanded to areas, such as Palestine and
Nubia, typically held when the power of the Egyptian pharaohs was greatest.
The
last pharaohs of the New Kingdom were not as successful as had been earlier
occupants of the throne in contending with Hittites to the east, Libyans to the
west, piratical “sea peoples” to the north, and Nubians to the south. The New Kingdom fell under pressure from such
outsiders, and from internal divisions, in 1085 B. C. (BCE). During much of the 9th and 8th
centuries B. C. (BCE), Libyans controlled Egypt, at first in the dynastic style
of the pharaohs and then as an array of city-states. The Nubians controlled Egypt for several
decades after 712 B. C. (BCE) and the Assyrians asserted dominance for a while
before the pharaoh Psamtik I (r. 664-610 B. C. [BCE]) established a line of
native Egyptian rulers. Then, weakened
by military confrontations with the Babylonians, the Egyptians submitted to
conquest by the Persians, who controlled Egypt for most of the years from 525
until 323 B. C. (BCE).
In
323 B. C. (BCE), the forces of Alexander the Great smashed their way into Egypt
to establish the magnificent city of
Alexandria and reorient Egyptian civilization towards that rich blend of Greek,
Roman, and Arab influences known as Hellenistic civilization. Then, some ten centuries later (7th
century A. D. [CE]), another great invading force--- that of the Muslims--- reoriented Egyptian civilization once again,
the Muslims were hugely important for
their intellectual prowess in incorporating the scholarly, literary, and artistic works of Graeco-Roman
civilization into a cultural realm that was dominated religiously by Islam.
Kush,
Meroe, and Axum
Under
pressure from the Assyrians, the Nubian pharaoh Taharqa retreated southward in
the 7th century B. C. (BCE) to Kush, where the Nubians (Kushites) mastered the
iron-making skills learned from the Assyrians and built a stable and prosperous
kingdom focused at the Fourth Cataract, in the great “S” bend of the Nile, and
eastward into the regions that we today know as Ethiopia and Somalia. This land at the time was very fertile and
able to support large herds of cattle;
by the 6th century B. C. (BCE), the borders of Kush stretched
to the south of present-day Khartoum.
As
years of grazing depleted the soil, the people of Kush trended toward Meroe,
south of the Atbara River’s confluence with the Nile. The great state of Meroe had abundant
resources in iron ore and the wood necessary to smelt it; heaps of slag that to this day appear across
this land bear witness to the thriving iron industry of Meroe. Protected by a well-armed cavalry, traders of
Meroe exchanged goods with counterparts in Egypt, Arabia, and India. The empire’s artists and artisans blended
influences from Egypt, the Hellenistic world, and India to produce works
stunning in their adaptation of these diverse styles to themes appropriate to
the geographical setting of Meroe.
Desiccation
of the land induced a decline in the wealth and military might of Meroe, which
left the land vulnerable to an attack from nearby Axum in 350 A. D. (CE). Here the mostly black Africans of
Meroe
blended with a population that had in the 7th century B. C. (BCE)
migrated from today’s Yemen across the Red Sea to the Horn of Africa. The Axumite court was stage for ethnically
diverse representatives from West Asian and the Mediterranean, bringing
Hellenistic, Greek Orthodox, Arabian, Persian, and Indian influences. The Muslim conquest of the Arabian peninsula
and then Egypt disrupted the sea trade on which much of Axum’s power and
prosperity had depended, precipitating a decline. But from time to time the Axumite society
reasserted the cultural greatness of the days of glory, and particularly during
the medieval era underwent a renaissance.
The modern urban center of Axum is the holy city of the Coptic
Christians.
Great
West African Empires
In
the 8th century there arose in West Africa the first of three great
empires that would for many centuries dominate the Sudan, the region south of
the Sahara Desert and north of the tropical forests running from Senegal in the
west to the Nile valley in the east.
This first of the three great West African empires was Ghana, which initially
consolidated power among their own people, the Soninke, then asserting power
over a strong and dynamic trading state stretching between the Senegal and
Upper Niger Rivers. Ghanaian traders
bartered for gold with traders who lived intermediately between themselves and
the gold miners who lived and labored to the far south. The Ghanaians then sold the gold to merchants
who crossed the desert and gathered in the southernmost oases at the northern
edge of the Sudan and served as terminal points for caravans that gained fame
for their journeys across the Sahara.
During
1076-1077 A. D. (CE) the Almoravids (a fierce Berber nomad configuration that
typically guided trade caravans across the desert) broke out of the western
Sahara desert to lead a holy war northward through Morocco and all the way to
Spain (where they conquered the Umayyad Moors);
and southward to lands that included the Ghanaian empire. Several smaller kingdoms survived the Almoravid
invasion, among which was the well-organized petty kingdom of Mal. Under the rule of three dynamic
rulers--- Sundiata, Mansa Uli, and Mansa
Musa--- Mali expanded in the course of
1220-1340 A. D. (CE) to occupy an area
in West Africa larger than had Ghana.
Ghana covered much of the western Sudan and featured one of the world’s
most opulent and cultured cities, Timbuktu.
Sundiata, Mansa Ul, and Mansa Musa embraced Islam, which had become such
a powerful cultural force throughout West Asia, North Africa, parts of
Southeast Asia, and into stretches of West and Central Africa. In 1324, Mansa Musa made a pilgrimage to
Mecca, carrying with him and spending so much gold in route that he upset the
money market in Cairo and caused an inflationary period to ensue in the trade
of the Mediterranean area that lasted for decades thereafter.
Mali
continued strong until about 1450, at which time Songhai, the wealthiest and
most powerful of these great West African empires, established rule over the
region. For at least a century and a
half, Songhai featured one of the world’s greatest civilizations. The heart of the empire nwas at about the
midpoint alog the Niger River, where the kind of trade that had made Ghana and
Mali such formidable forces in West Africa continued to flourish. Songhai reached its height during the rule of
Sonny Ali (r. 1464-1492) and Askia the Great (r. 1493-1528). Urban life thrived on the basis of the
region’s commercial vitality and on the elements of high civilization found in
Islamic law, medicine, math, science, literature, architecture, art, and
theology. Djenne was on great city of
Songhai. Timbuktu was even greater. To this latter scholars came from all over
western Asia and Africa to exchange ideas, just as merchants exchanged goods
and services. Songhai’s great mosque of
Sankore provided a fertile meeting ground for Muslim thinkers and people of all
faith endeavoring to visit one of the world’s most important urban
centers. The mosque of Sankore
represented a cultural continuity between the empires of Mali and Songhai,
having been designed in the 14th century by As-Saheli, one of the
Egyptians brought back to Mali by Mansa Musa after his pilgrimage to Mecca in
1324.
Other
Kingdoms and Societies of Africa
To
the east of Songhai lay the Hausa states, including the notable Kano and
Katsina, the development of which seems to have extended back into the 11th
century. Bu the 14th century,
powerful kings ruled these domains, which feature substantial urban centers
where craftspeople and merchants built prosperous livelihoods connected to the
regional and trans-desert trade. The
Hausa states were particularly famous for their leatherwork, which yielded much
sought-after items from the North;
European traders obtained these leather goods in the journeys to North
African and came to them collectively as Moroccan leather.
In
the central Sudan, around Lake Chad, lay another great state, Kanem-Bornu, the
rulers of which had been Muslin from as early as the 11th
century. One of the oldest and largest
of the African states, Kanem-Bornu retained its independent existence until the
latter years of the 19th century, when European traders finally
succeeded in bringing it under control.
In
the mountains toward the eastern end of the Sudanic belt lay Ethiopia, a
Christian empire that was the successor state to Axum. Monarchical states made a later appearance
south of the Sudan, but empies such as the Benin and the Oro in Yorubaland
(Nigeria), whose people produced some of the world’s great sculptures,
flourished well before the arrival of the Europeans in the 15th
century. African peoples in other part
of the continent also established kingdoms and empoires, especially in the
expansive territory south of the equator into which the Bantu language had
spread.
Over
several millennia, a cluster of kingdoms flourished between the great lakes of
East Africa, including Rwanda and Buganda.
South of the Congo (Zaire) forests lived the peoples of the Luba-Lunda
group of kingdoms, and the monarchical state of Kongo emerged as a dominant
force south of the river estuary that in colonial times (from the late 19th
century) would bear its name.
Much
farther to the South, on the Zimbabwe-Rhodesian plateau, was the empire of
Monomotapa, the wealth of which was derived from a lucrative trade in gold on
the East African coast at sofala, a coastal outpost of the rich trading city of
Kilwa. Associated with this kingdom of
Monomotapa was the Great Zimbabwe, a walled enclosure built mainly in the 14th and 15th
centuries n a site that ahd been used for ritual purpose since 1000 A. D. (CE).
General
Characteristics of African Societies
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 it is the groom who leaves his own family t
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
Enduring Legacy of Africa for African-Americans
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. Since raw materials, finished goods, and
markets could all be powerfully augmented by expanding the national territory
across the globe, imperialism and colonialism became conceptually associated
with mercantilism: 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.
Portugal
was for a time in the very late 15th century the leader in voyages
of exploration. The immediate motivation
was direct access to the Spice Islands (today’s Indonesia). At the time, Arabs operating across West Asia
and Italians plying the Mediterranean Sea and surrounding areas frequently
acted as two layers of middlepersons with which the nations of Europe had to
deal in securing the spices that came mostly via overland routes to the
Mediterranean. Prince Henry the
Navigator of Portugal navigated very little himself, but in 1488 he did send
Bartholomew Dias down the western coast of Africa to the Cape of Good Hope at
the southern tip of the continent; and
in 1498 his court trained and sponsored Vasco da Gama and his the crew aboard
ships that went all the way around the Cape of Good Hope and on to the eastern
coast of India in 1498. Subsequent trips took the Portuguese on through the
seas of Southeast and East Asia, where they exerted a presence in today’s
Indonesia, Malaysia, China, and Japan;
and establishing territorial
control at Macau, to the west of Hong Kong in southern China.
Meanwhile,
the monarchical duo Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain sponsored four voyages of
Columbus during 1492-1502. That first
voyage of 1492 landed on the island of Hispaniola, which in today’s world is
split between the nations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. This was close enough to the American
mainland to be credited for the European discovery of the Americas. Native Americans had long since come through
the Bering Straits from Asia and expanded over the territory that today is
identified with North America, Central America, and South America. But For Europeans this was very big news that
Columbus did not find the Spice Islands that he set out to find via and
all-water westerly route--- but did
discover what for them (and also Asians and Africans) was a whole New World.
Having
sailed for Spain, other Spaniards soon came to the Americas after
Columbus. Hernando Cortez conquered the
Aztecs in 1521. Francisco Pizarro
conquered the Incas in 1536. Vaso Nunez
de Balboa looked out from the Isthmus of Panama to see that another ocean on
the west--- the Pacific---- was looming close to the Atlantic that he could
still see behind him to the east.
The
Portuguese did establish a colony in today’s Brazil, but for a while, by the
Treaty of Tordesillas, the Portuguese and Spain divided the previously
imperialistically unclaimed world between them, with Spain presiding over the
Western Hemisphere and Portugal roaming over the Eastern Hemisphere . The Spaniards swept in with a vengeance to
set up colonies in South American, Central America, islands of the Caribbean,
Mexico, today’s Florida and the American Southwest from Texas to
California. In the Caribbean and South
America especially, the Spaniards set up huge sugar plantations and mines that
were enormously productive of silver and gold.
Both
the mines and the plantations required heavy inputs 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 mighty the might 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.
The
slave trade was big business. The
imperial and eventually the industrial might of European empires depended on
the goods that resulted from unpaid labor.
Slave ship owners and speculators regularly realized three-fold returns
on their investments. Returns could be
even greater when the goods for which slaves were in exceptionally high
demand. But the vagaries of weather and
health could also wipe out an investment and bring economic ruin to a ship
owner who had bet too heavily on the returns of single ship. On balance, though, the slave trade was
hugely profitable and a huge factor in the economic growth of the nascent
capitalist economies of Europe, especially those of Great Britain, Belgium, the
Netherlands, and Germany.
In
the course of the late 17th century and the 18th century,
Great Britain defeated Dutch and French rivals in wars and secured agreements
that gave that nation preeminence in the slave trade. Wealth gained from the slave trade played a
vital role in the growth and maintenance of the British Empire. Two-thirds of the African slaves sold by
British traders went to non-British purchasers;
one-third went to fellow Britons.
Through the 17th century, ship owners from London still
played an important role, but in the course of the 18th century the
cities of Bristol and Liverpool came to overshadow London as locations for ship
owners and investors. By 1795, Liverpool
dominated five-eighths of the British slave trade and three-sevenths of the
entire European slave trade.
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.
From
the beginning, African Americans were involved in famous events leading up to
and through the American Revolution.
Crispus Attucks was among those killed in the Boston Massacre of 5 March
1770. Lemuel Haynes was among the
Minutemen who gathered to defend the Concord Bridge in Concord, Masschusetts,
on the day (April 1775) of the “shot heard round the world.” Peter Salem also fought at Concord, and he
was a mainstay in the battles of Bunker Hill (1775), Saratoga (1777), and Stony
Point (1779); he is credited with some
for fatally wounding British Major General John Pitcairn at Bunker Hill, and he
appears in a painting by John Trumbull, an artist who captured many key moments
in the American revolution on canvass.
Primas Black and Epheram Blackman of Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boys
participated in the capture of Fort Ticonderoga. Other male African American soldiers whose names
gained a place in historical records for having fought in the American
Revolution against the British are Pomp Blackman, Samuel Craft, Prince
Estabrook, Caesar Ferrit, John Ferrit (Caesar’s son), Barzillai Lew, and Cuff
Whittemore. African American women were
among those who fought on the American 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.
Up
until the end of the colonial period, white colonists prevented African
Americans from serving as soldiers.
Whites feared that giving blacks guns would encourage black-on-white
violence and even full-scale revolution.
Some whites perpetuated the myth that blacks were inferior and incapable
of acquiring the skills of the soldier.
But when war came, many of the colonies, especially those of the North,
gave permission to African Americans to wield guns against the British. Apparently the fear of African Americans bearing
arms returned in the aftermath of the American Revolution: In 1792, Congress passed a law restricting
military service to free white men.
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
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.
In the North, slave owning tended to be on a small scale, with slaves to
work as personal and household servants, on loading docks, in workshops and
then in small factories; only a few
worked on the small farms of New England, upper New York, Jew Jersey, and
Pennsylvania. In the aftermath of the
American Revolution, the northern states one after another terminated slavery,
so that during the more than half-century that ensued before the Civil War,
there developed great economic and social distinctions between the North and
the South.
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 Lousiana). But they also
work on small farms, some with just a few slaves, others with about
twenty. Then there were huge plantations
of hundreds and even thousands of acres where slaves worked on large-scale
agricultural operations that brought owners enormous wealth. The largest of the plantations had the look
of towns and even small cities, featuring a coterie of slave laborers who wove
cloth, sewed clothes, made shoes, constructed furniture and buildings, shoed
horses, sawed lumber, forged iron implements, and milled flour.
Most
slaves, though, were field hands who did backbreaking, intellectually empty work
day after day, from sun up to sun down, at least six days a week. With the invention of Eli Whitney’s cotton
gin in 1793, the separation of seeds from the main fiber became much easier and
cost-
effective,
motivating planters to give at first more and then most acreage to cotton
plants. Slaves laboring in the nasty
work of cotton picking were typically expected to fill sacks of 250 pounds of
cotton a day or face a whipping. The
most adept pickers of cotton might raise their productivity to 400 pounds--- although many with that capability refrained
from doing so in order to promote rising expectations on the part of the
plantation owner, overseer, and slave driver.
Even
at nightfall the work of the slave went on.
Slaves still chopped wood, mended tools, and fed the cows, pigs and
chickens. By the time they could even
return to their quarters, many slaves had little time to do much else than to
fall into bed and get a good enough night’s sleep to begin another round of
work the next day.
Children
of slaves automatically assumed the status of their parents. At the age of five or six, slave children
might do minor tasks in the “Big House” of the master and family, or they might
help in the fields, fetching water, picking up stones and other clutter, or
collect and dispose of garbage. At about
ten years old, both female and male slave children began to do regular field
work, very often meaning picking cotton.
Slave
quarters were typically one or two room shacks holding as many as twelve residents. During the 17th and 18th
centuries, the dwellings were generally roofed with thatch, then in the 1th
century log cabins were common. The
cabins were hot in summer and cold in winter, particularly overnight in the
latter case, since the slave generally was issued little more than a thin
cotton blanket to use as she or he slept on a mattress made of straw. Slaves generally made their own simple wooden
furniture and adapted gourds for use as bowls and jugs; sometimes the master would provide forks and
spoons, but frequently slaves had to fashion these for themselves, as well.
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. Slave drivers wielded a high
level of authority, but the elevated rank of position came awkwardly, because
success depended on exploitation of fellow African Americans; the slave driver had to be careful about
acquiring a reputation for unnecessary cruelty, because he still had to dwell
among and command the cooperation of other slaves, who could make life
uncomfortable for him if he was judged to wield his power with little regard
for their welfare.
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.
They hunted all manner of wild game and gathered a wide variety of
edible plants, fruit, and nuts from the fields and forests in and near the
farm. Inventively using herbs and animal
fats, slaves turned the wild game and plants of their immediate environment
into masterpieces of the culinary art.
Living
Lives of Accomplishment in the Face of Injustice
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. Some
resourceful
slaves cultivated reputations for good behavior that won them off-plantation
passes from lenient masters; given
access to a wider circle of associations, some slaves learned how to read and
write. This knowledge might also come
from a comparatively compassionate member of the master’s family, either with
or without the master’s permission.
Free
blacks also often reached out to their fellow African Americans by providing
instruction in reading, writing, and subjects for which those skills served as
gateway. African Americans of free
status occasionally founded schools, as did those among the white population
who opposed slavery and sought to elevate the educational and cultural level of
slaves and former slaves. A free black
by the name of Elias Neua, who had been born in France, operated a school for
African Americans by 1704. Records
indicate that a couple of slaves whose given names were Harry and Andrew
(surnames unknown) ran a school for basic reading and writing instruction in
South Carolina during the early 18th century. For a period beginning in 1751, missionary
and teacher Joseph Ottolenghi taught slaves in Georgia at the behest of the
Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.
The
Quaker Anthony Benezet ran an evening school for African Americans out of his
home during 1750-1760; a group of
Quakers also came together in 1774 to run a school for African Americans in
Philadelphia. And in 1787, the New York
Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves established the New York
African Free School, generally credited as the first full-curriculum school for
African Americans.
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.
For
a mostly enslaved people, contributions in many fields were mighty. In 1721, a Massachusetts slave named
Oneissimus taught the famous religious leader Cotton Mather how to inject a
patient with a small amount of the small pox virus to create a vaccine
effect. A South Carolina slave named
Caesar developed antidotes to rattlesnake venom. Also in South Carolina, the slave Wilcie Elfe
gained medical knowledge from an owner-doctor, opened a successful
pharmaceutical practice in Charleston, patented effective medicines, and sold
his curatives throughout the state.
Similarly, the slave James Derham studied under owner Dr. Robert Dove,
from whom he purchased his freedom and then set up his own medical
practice. During the 18th
century, former slave David K. McDonough gained fame for his skill as a vision
and hearing specialist, displayed at his own Eye and Ear Infirmary in New
York.
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.
Freedom
had come in a variety of ways. Some
white masters freed offspring that resulted from intercourse with black slaves,
thus hoping to avoid social censure.
Once in a great while, a slave was so enterprising as to secure
off-plantation wage labor, in addition to her or his toil as human chattel, and
make enough money to purchase freedom from masters implicitly more lenient and
empathetic than most. As the
abolitionist movement gained momentum, some southerners felt the tweak of
conscience that could give a slave her or his freedom, as reward for faithful
service, or just because it seemed the right thing to do. Other slaves were freed by the terms of
wills. Some survived the mad dash for
freedom, moving across fields and through woods just ahead of sniffing dogs and
scurrying agents of the master, against the intent of the fugitive property
provisions of the United States Constitution and statutory law.
Some
free African Americans themselves owned slaves.
Some of these were carpenters, shoemakers, and tailors who bought slaves
and made them apprentices. The 1830
census recorded 753 slaveholding African Americans. The 1850 census recorded that 19% of black
tailors in Charleston, South Carolina, owned slaves. Slaves worked for free blacks as maids or day
laborers and, in a few cases, they worked the fields picking cotton or
harvesting, much as they did for white slave owners.
William
Johnson, a freed slave living in in Natchez Mississippi became a multi-business
entrepreneur, running barbershops, purchasing and renting out property, and
superintending a money-lending business;
hiring managers to run businesses selling toys, wallpaper, coal, and
sand; renting carts and other
vehicles; offering a service watering
down the streets of the hot southern
city of Natchez; and accumulating 350
acres of land on which he put fifteen slaves to work chopping down timber and
farming the fields. New Orleans merchant
Cecee McCarty trained slaves as salespeople who peddled imported dry goods
across the state of Louisiana; in time,
she amassed a fortune.
But
black slave owners were a tiny portion of the free African American
population. Most free African Americans
worked as laborers or skilled crafts people;
some entered the professions or started businesses. Paul Cuffe (1759-1817) operated a thriving
shipbuilding business in Connecticut, gained great wealth, and trained other
African Americans to start businesses of their own. James Forten 1766-1842) also made a fortune
in the maritime industry, inventing a device to handle sails more efficiently
and launching a company that employed a total of 40 employees, including on his
payroll both African American and white workers. At mid-19th century, William
Whipper of Pennsylvania began his entrepreneurial career as a clothes cleaner,
became an expert in steam scouring, and prospered so greatly as to pour investments
into multiple successful business ventures.
Tax records from the mid-19th century indicate that there were 21
African American entrepreneurs in New York City making over $100,000 per year,
thus earning what for that era was a huge amount of money.
African
Americans of the pre-Civil War era made huge contributions with their
scientific inventions. Benjamin Banneker
(1731-1806) compiled The Pennsylvania,
Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia Almanac and Ephemeris, published annually
from 1791 to 1802; he also served on the
commission that planned the construction of a new capital at Washington, D. C.,
in 1789, then from 1790 was among those commissioned to survey the site for the
future capital. Henry Blair received a
patent for a unique seed planter in 1834.
Norbert Rillieux (1806-1894) received a patent in 1846 for a vacuum
evaporator that produced white sugar crystals from sugarcane juice and proved
also to have
utility
in the production of soap, gelatin, and glue.
Lewis Temple (1800-1854) invented a harpoon that revolutionized the
whaling industry, given the enhanced effectiveness of his invention for hunting
the huge oceangoing mammals whose bodies were used for the production of many
commercially lucrative goods; Temple,
though, never gained much from the commerce induced by his invention: he never was able to gain a patent and died
penniless in the very city of Bedford, Massachusetts, whose economy had boomed
on the strength of his invention.
The
entrepreneurial success and inventiveness of African Americans in the early
19th century was not rewarded with citizenship, which was obviously denied to
slaves but also withheld from free
blacks. Free blacks in Maryland and North Carolina
had to have special licenses to sell corn, wheat, or tobacco. In most states of both the North and the
South, free blacks could not vote, hold public office, or testify in courts
against whites. African Americans could
not carry weapons in this era of commonplace white gun-wielding. Failure to pay off debts or remit tax
payments resulted in fine or imprisonment for free blacks of the North; in the South, such a debtor or tax offender
could be sold into slavery as means to collect the sums owed.
African
American artisans, entrepreneurs, inventors, journalists, and professionals
formed a small but energetic black middle class that grew restive with the
conditions of American life, at the same time that their success provided
powerful arguments against the racist pronouncements and assumptions that
pervaded white-dominated society.
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. Hemings was a
slave at Monticello, but he was no field hand.
He was a joiner by trade and a genius who created numerous exquisite
pieces of furniture in the woodworking shop that he ran on Jefferson’s
plantation. Following Jefferson’s
sketches, Hemings turned out chairs, tables, benches, fine railings, arches,
and window shutters.
African
Americans in the growing urban centers of the North generally faced prospects
of inadequate public education facilities, inferior housing, and lack of legal
protections that white citizens held as a matter of birth. And they face numerous challenges beyond the
strictly legal: A white mob attacked a
community of predominately African American residents in Cincinnati, Ohio, in
1829; similar incidents occurred in a
number of northern cities where newly arrived black immigrants competed with
workers for jobs. During the decade
after the riot in Cincinnati, most southern and some northern states limited or
banned the immigration of free blacks.
In
this context of the sheer cruelty perpetuated against slaves and the vexing
legal injustices inflicted against free blacks, an inexorable momentum built
for the abolition of slavery and the establishment of full citizenship rights
for all African Americans.
African
Americans in the Abolitionist Movement
African
Americans were prominent in the abolitionist movement. Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and
Frederick Douglass have gained considerable recognition in most standard
accounts of the abolitionist era:
Sojourner
Truth was born into slavery in 1797 then, after years of physical and emotional
abuse, gained her freedom when the state of New York terminated slavery as a
legal institution in 1827. Sojourner
Truth cut a formidable figure as a tall, forceful speaker who gave ringing
orations, some planned and others spontaneous, at numerous conventions. She was a suffragette and women’s rights
advocate, as well as abolitionist.
Sojourner Truth famously rose from her seat at a gathering in upstate
New York in 1851 to time and again issue the refrain, “Ain’t I a woman?” as a
rhetorical response to a man who had characterized women as fragile creatures
needing help to get into carriages and step over mud puddles. She said, for example,
Nobody
helps me into carriages and over mud puddles, or gives me any best place!
And
ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted
and
gathered into barns, and no man could head me!
And ain’t I a woman?
I
could work as much and eat as much as a man---
when I could get it--- and
bear
the lash, as well! And ain’t I a woman?
Frederick
Douglass (1817-1895) was born to slavery in Maryland but escaped to New York in
1838. He taught himself to read and
write, read voraciously, and used his gift for oratory to propel him to the
forefront of the abolitionist movement.
His North Star was one of the
first abolitionist newspapers in the United States. Douglass continued to be a figure of major
importance, the greatest advocate for African American rights, in the years
after the Civil War (1861-1865) and even after the Compromise of 1877 ended
Reconstruction. Douglass worked through
his disappointment with the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln and a
putative advocate of citizenship rights for all, by calling for a clear-eyed
view of that party’s failure to fulfill its promises to the African American
people. But he never lost faith in the
United States Constitution as a document enunciating principles on the basis of
which liberty for all could eventually be realized:
If
the Republican Party cannot take a call for justice and fair play, it ought to
go
down… Parties were made for people, not people for
the parties… if liberty, with us,
is
but a sham, and our suffrage thus far only a cruel mockery, we may yet
congratulate
ourselves
upon the fact that the laws and institutions of our country are sound, just,
and
liberal.
Harriet
Tubman gained her fame especially for her work as a “conductor” on the
Underground Railroad, the system of pathways and hideaways by which escaped
slaves made their way to freedom in the North, to states such as Ohio and
Pennsylvania, and often on to Canada.
She was born a slave in Maryland but in 1849 walked a hundred miles to
freedom in Pennsylvania. Tubman made the
trip back to the South fifteen times to guide at least 100 slaves to
freedom; these included her parents and
six of her ten siblings. A $400 bounty
was placed on her head, but neither she nor her “passengers” ever got caught.
Less
famous but hugely important were African abolitionists such as Letitia Still
and William Still, who time after time offered their home as a station for
passengers on the Underground Railroad.
Arthur Tappan, Lewis Tappan, and Theodore Dwight Weld brought several
small groups together as the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. Martin Delaney helped Frederick Douglass
launch the North Star and then penned
many a pungent anti-slavery tract.
Prominent Philadelphia church leaders Thomas Gray, Absalom Jones, and
Richard Allen wrote lengthy essays against both slavery and discriminatory
treatment of African Americans. John B.
Russworm and Samuel E.Cornish were among the first prominent African American
journalists, having established the very first black newspaper in 1827.
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.
III. Civil War and Reconstruction, 1861-1877
The
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, 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. Tubman served as a spy, nurse,
and occasional combatant;
the
men who fought alongside the irrepressible and high-spirited woman held her in
high esteem, affectionately dubbing her “General” Tubman. Taylor trained under American Red Cross
founder Clara Barton and served with diligence and courage in tending to the
medical needs of soldiers; in her spare
moments she taught many fellow African Americans to read and write, and she
continued her advocacy for full rights of citizenship when whites in the
postwar South flagrantly violated both constitutional and statutory law.
Despite
his leadership of the antislavery party, Abraham Lincoln had no intention of
immediately freeing the slaves upon taking office; rather, he envisioned a gradual process over
a number of years, giving plantation owners time to adjust and striving to
reduce sectional acrimony. But when the
leaders of the South showed themselves recalcitrant, and as many Union leaders
disobeyed presidential orders by accepting African American soldiers into their
ranks, Lincoln did not crack down. He
himself had a change of heart at the midpoint of the war, issuing the
Emancipation Proclamation and formally inviting black participation as soldiers
and in other army posts. The
Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves only in those states not yet under Union
control: Lincoln issued this order as
part of his war powers, pragmatically avoiding raising the ire of plantation
owners in the border states and those southern states claimed victoriously by
Union forces. Runaway slaves and
military leaders, though, filled in the gaps of this very incomplete document
of freedom, so that slaves eagerly sought out and responded to commanders all
too ready to capture the energy of African Americans who were highly motivated
in the effort to defeat the Confederacy.
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. One of its members, Sergeant William H.
Carney, was awarded the Medal of Honor for his heroic acts during the 1863
assault on Fort Wagner, of the harbor of Charleston, south Carolina. A mail carrier in New Bedford, Massachusetts,
for most of his postwar career, Carney moved to Boston in 1901 to take employment
as a messenger in the State House. A
flag of the 54th Massachusetts Colored Infantry that Carney had
guarded tenaciously while wounded during the battle for Fort Wagner was
enshrined in that government building
where he spent every work day. Upon
Carney’s death in 1908, the State House flag flew at half-mast and the chaplain
of the state senate gave a eulogy in his honor.
Given
the distinction with which African Americans served the Union (and in a fewer
cases, the Confederacy, the racism and discrimination that they faced in the army
was particularly abhorrent. Unless
necessity dictated otherwise, blacks were given the most menial duties, and
they generally worked at half-pay for work equivalent to that done by whites. The Confederacy treated African Americans
they captured with an inhumanity not usually evident in the way that they dealt
with white Union captives. 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 lease 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.
Congress also passed two notable pieces of statue law: the Civil Rights Act of 1866, reinforcing the
same essential citizenship rights as given in the 14th
Amendment; and the Civil Rights Act of
1875, which stated that all people should have access to public accommodations
and the right to serve on juries, with penalties for contravention of the law.
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 Bureaus for short.
Between 1865 and 1869, the bureau distributed about 21 packages of
rations sufficient to sustain an adult for one week; fifteen million of these packages went to
African Americans, while six million went to displaced and hungry whites. Officials at the bureau, led by General
Oliver Otis Howard, committed two million dollars in improving the health of
freedmen, vaccinating them for smallpox, establishing over 40 hospitals, and
treating more than 500,000 cases of illness.
During its years of operation in the south, the Freedmen’s Bureau
established (either directly or in support of local efforts) 4,239 schools
employing 9,302 teachers and serving 247,333 students.
Freedmen’s
Bureau officials also established courts to intervene when local, district, and
appellate courts issued decisions suspected as prejudicial; oversaw fair labor contracts for those
emerging from conditions of unpaid labor;
and distributed government-owned land in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida,
Louisiana, and Mississippi to those newly freed from servitude. But these efforts fell short: The bureau’s court system tried few cases
after 1866, and most former slaves became wage laborers or sharecroppers rather
than landowners. Officials also proved
unable to provide a stable financial institution capable of properly handling
monetary deposits from African Americans:
The Freedmen’s Savings and Trust Company mishandled much of the money
from deposits totaling $55,000,000 in 1874, the year that the company went
defunct and left many depositors penniless.
Authorities eventually refunded 62% of deposits but never located many
small depositors.
In
the end, the activities of the Freedmen’s Bureau and Freedmen’s Savings Bank
symbolized those of the Reconstruction period in general. They held great promise, achieved some
lasting good, 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.
Although
in the end offering just a tantalizing and evanescent experience with what full
citizenship could mean, the Reconstruction era did extend to African Americans
a head-spinning array of opportunities that must have seemed a dream life away
from cotton fields and the lash of the whip.
White powerholders during the Civil War and Antebellum South were barred
from holding office; especially in
Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina, where the African American
population was substantial and replete with tide-turning possibilities in state
elections , voters propelled a number of black politicians into office.
South
Carolina voters placed the most African Americans in public office: At various times, black officials occupied
the positions of lieutenant governor, secretary of state, treasurer, and
speaker of the house. African American
governor P. B. S. Pinchback of Louisiana served several months as governor
after the white governor was dismissed from office.
At
the national level, fourteen African Americans held positions in the House of
Representatives. Five southern states
had one African American in the House, as follows: Florida (Josiah T. Walls, served 1871-1877),
Georgia (Jefferson E. Long, 1870-1871), Louisiana (Charles E. Nash, 1875-1877),
Mississippi (John R. Lynch, 1873-1877 and 1882-1883), and North Carolina (John
A. Hyman, 1875-1877). Alabama sent three
African American Representatives to the United States Congress: Jeremiah Haralson (served 1875-1877), James
T. Rapier (1873-1875), and Benjamin S. Turner (1871-1873). But South Carolina sent by far the most
African Americans to the House of Representatives, with six: Richard H. Cain (served 1873-1875 and
1877-1879), Robert C. DeLarge ((1871-1873), Robert B. Elliot (1871-1875),
Joseph H. Rainey (1870-1879), Alonso J. Ranier (1873-1875), and Robert Smalls
(1875-1879 and 1881-1889); the service
of these South Carolina African Americans
thus spanned the years 1870-1889.
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:
Revels
hailed originally from North Carolina, born into free status in 1822. He studied at Quaker Seminary in Indiana and
Darke County Seminary for Negroes in Ohio prior to his ordination as minister
into the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in 1845. He served as an AME minister to congregatios
in Illinois, Indiana, and Missouri and as chaplain in the Union army, to which
he had recruited numerous African American soldiers. After the war, he moved to Natchez,
Mississippi, upon appointment as presiding elder of the city’s AME
congregation, and in 1868 began his political career as an alderman. The frist African American in the Senate,
Revels held the seat that Jefferson Davis had held prior to becoming president
of the Confederacy. He served for just
one year but during that time joined forces that defeated an amendment that
would have accommodated the advocates of segregation in Washington, D. C. In the aftermath of his aborted senatorial
career, Revels served as editor of the Southern
Christian Advocate and then served a long tenure as president of Alcorn
State University.
Bruce
(1841-1898) was a born a slave In Virginia, eventually moving with his master
to Missouri and acquiring knowledge of
the printing trade. He escaped from his
master and fled to Hannibal, Missouri, where he presented himself as a free man
and started a school for African Americans.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, Bruce attended Oberlin College in
Ohio for two years, then moved to Mississippi.
Settled in that state, Bruce purchased considerable land, using his
status as a wealthy planter as a springboard to an array of political
positions: county superintendent of
schools, levee board, sheriff, and tax collector. He was elected to the United States Senate as
a Republican in 1874, served his full term, and then settled in Washington, D.
C. In the national capital, he saw
service in the presidential administrations of James A. Garfield, Benjamin
Harrison, and Grover Cleveland. In 1893,
Bruce was awarded an honorary LL. D. by
Howard University, and from 1894 until his death in 1898 served on that
institution’s Board of Trustees.
Aside
from these national level figures, African Americans of the Reconstruction era
held positions as sheriff, mayor, prosecuting attorney, justice of the peace,
and county superintendent of education;
most served as Republicans, the progressive party of Lincoln. Most African American politicians and voters
would stay loyal to that party until the Great Depression and the advent of the
Franklin Roosevelt administration.
Notable
in the post-Civil War social and political context of the United States was the
phenomenon of prominent, ambitious, and energetic African Americans to move to
the South. These
erstwhile
northerners worked with those who had long lived in the South to overturn laws
allowing use of the whip and branding iron to administer punishment for those
accused of crimes. They also ended
imprisonment for debt in many states and in others facilitated the adoption of
new constitutions featuring provisions that abolished property qualifications
and tests for voting and holding office.
Each of these constitutions established a system of free public
education for all children in the state.
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. A second Morril Act (Land Grant Act, 1890)
required governments that established institutions of higher learning for their white residents to pay for the
founding and maintenance of technical and agricultural schools for African
Americans. The land grant system that emerged
during the Reconstruction era laid a strong foundation for the system of
publicly funded state institutions now found in states throughout the country,
especially in those of the South and the West.
Among
those black colleges and universities founded during Reconstruction wre
Knoxville College (1863), Fisk University (1866), and LeMoyne-Owen College
(1870) in Tennessee; Emerson College
(1867) and Talladega College (1867) in Alabama;
Morehouse College (1867) in Georgia;
Morgan State College (1867) in Maryland;
Johnson C. Smith College in North Carolina; Hampton University in Virginia (1868); Dillard University (1869) in Louisiana; Tougaloo College (1869) in Mississippi; and Howard University (1867) in
Washington, D. C. The latter acquired a reputation as the
Harvard of the black institutions of higher learning, and there was a
connection between the two universities:
A number of African American graduates of Harvard went on to take
leadership and professorial roles at Howard.
Richard
Greener (1844-1922) led the way as the first African American graduate of
Harvard University in 1870; upon
graduation, Greener taught philosophy at the University of South Carolina until
1877 but lost that position as Reconstruction ended. He moved on to Howard University, where he
became dean of the law school in 1879 (the institution had added the law school
in 1872 after establishing a medical school in 1868). Greener later served as comptroller of the
United States Treasury and in 1898 accepted the post of U. S. consul in
Vladivostok, Russia from this Far East Asian post, Greener was in a position to
help with famine relief in China in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion, and
endeavor for which he was decorated by the Chinese government. Greener spent his years of retirement,
1906-1922, in Chicago.
Both
white and black educators came to the South in the aftermath of the Civil War
to open schools and train teachers.
Black schools occupied a prominent role in African American society and
culture in the late 19th century.
Not only did these institutions provide access to education; they also trained farmers, published
newspapers, provided instruction in land acquisition, and prepared people to
vote and run for public office.
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.
As that group within the
Republican
Party known as the Radical Reconstructionists grew older and as their energy
waned, the Reconstruction effort languished;
although, they were able to garner a good deal of support from African
Americans in national elections on the strength of habit and residual goodwill,
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: They burned churches, homes, and schools of African Americans, and they similarly
harassed and murdered those in the white community who had taken up the cause
of Reconstruction. A mob of
hatemongering whites that gathered in Colfax, Louisiana, in April 1873 murdered
105 African Americans in retaliation for election results that were not to
their liking. In Mississippi, a state
characterized by near-anarchy during 1870-1875, a group known as Higgie’s
Scouts boasted that it had murdered116 African Americans. In one of its many logically tortured and
strange decisions over a period stretching from the 1870s through the early 20th
century, the Supreme Court majority determined that the mob that had gathered
in Colfax constituted a private army over which the federal government had no
authority.
As
time went on, many in the southern white elite who had been shunted aside in
the immediate aftermath of Civil War found ways to reenter government; these people, and most poor whites, as well,
supported the Democratic Party. The
Republican Party, meanwhile, continued to live off its reputation, maintaining
among African Americans goodwill created by the efforts of President Lincoln
and those Republicans who launched and sustained the Reconstruction
effort. But as Republicans increasingly
got their key donations and electoral numbers from big business, the vital
initiatives of the Reconstruction era waned.
Then,
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 their 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. Ever
since 1865, federal troops had been instrumental in combating violent
expressions of white animosity, making sure that constitutional and statutory
laws were obeyed, ensuring that the educational and health initiatives of
Reconstruction went forward, providing protection for African Americans in
their election booths and public offices, and in many ways acting to prevent
the white power structure from reestablishing business as usual in the post-Civil
War 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.
But
the cynical deal resulting in the Compromise of 1877 was cut, 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 the most shameful era in the experience of African
America. Many will argue that nothing
could be worse than slavery, but I would even challenge that common view. Slavery was brutal and objectively
sinful. But the institution of slavery
had existed in many places throughout history, so that the large plantation
owners of the Americas during 1500-1865 were able to put to particularly
economically remunerative purposes, with weapons of great violence in their
hands, an institution with which both Africans and Europeans had long been
familiar. But by 1865, the great
opportunity of Reconstruction loomed;
instead of seizing fully the chance for racial justice and sectional
reconciliation, decision-makers and implementers charged with the
responsibility of bringing African Americans wholly into the civic life of the
nation did their duty with only variable effectiveness. And those making the most important decisions
in 1877 completely sold their souls to the gods of political expediency.
Thus
did the misery that never should have been ensue. Slavery was an abomination but an accepted
institution at the time of utilization in many parts of the world. The dark nights overseen by Jim Crow, though,
were the most shameful ever spent by an American people attesting to ideals of
freedom and justice for all; far from
realizing their own best ideals, American powerholders during the 1877-1954 era
consistently and flagrantly violated their own expressed values, very much
embodied in that United States Constitution touted as the supreme law of the
land.
Jim
Crow
Throughout
the southern states, in the aftermath of the withdrawal of federal troops,
legislatures moved quickly to establish the Black Codes, laws that directly
contravened federal legislation and relegated African Americans to second-class
citizenship. According to these codes,
blacks were restricted in their rights to testify in court, either not allowed
to do so at all, or only given the opportunity in cases involving fellow
African Americans. The codes of South
Carolina forbade African Americans from holding jobs other than those related
to farming or involving menial tasks.
These codes also typically forbade blacks from leaving their jobs
without forfeiting back pay, which many employers retained as security against
lost labor. The Black Codes in most
states specified the right of employees to whip their employees; often the language reverted to the days of
slavery, with the terms “master” and “slave” fixed in the codes. The codes fixed penalties for African
Americans who made gestures deemed to be insulting or speech judged to be
seditious in content.
These
codes clearly established different standards for whites and blacks. The dream of equality of opportunity
envisioned by those who had worked for Reconstruction faded. The Black Codes included provisions for a
rigidly segregated society, preventing multiracial access to drinking
fountains, hospitals, hotels, libraries, parks, playgrounds, sidewalks,
transportation systems, and institutions of learning at the elementary,
secondary, and postsecondary levels.
Even prisoners were kept separate under the codes of the Jim Crow
South: Correctional institutions and
chain gangs were usually segregated according to race.
Legislators
in South Carolina passed a law that criminalized the action of any African
American who dared to look out the same window as a fellow white worker in any
of the state’s cotton mills. Florida
legislators passed a law that called for different content in “Negro” textbooks
and “white” textbooks. Lawmakers in
Oklahoma passed legislation deeming that whites and blacks should use different
telephone booths.
The
term, “Jim Crow,” which came to refer to the laws and practices pertinent to
rigid segregation in the South during 1877-1954, is mysterious as to its
origins. The term may have been derived
from a slave trader named Jim Crow, or to a slave who escaped such a trader, or
to a lame dancer known in local folklore by such a name. One story specifies that the term’s origin is
traceable to an African American slave named Jim, whose very dark skin pigment
led boarders in his owner’s hotel in Charleston, South Carolina, to add the
additional appellation, “Crow.”
The
name is also connected to a silly minstrel show character created back in the
late 1820s by the white performer Thomas “Daddy” Rice (1808-1860); the character, presented in black-face, was a
stereotypical buffoonish slave who danced and sang as he went about the
plantation. The story goes that Rice had
heard an African American singing and dancing a number called “Jump Jim
Crow.” One version has it that Rice
witnessed a lame black man named Jim Crow (or Crowe) perform for fellow workers
at Thomas Crowe’s Livery Stable at 3rd
Street in Louisville, Kentucky. Another
version has Rice witnessing a similar performance by a youth in Cincinnati,
Ohio. The dance was in any case
incorporated into Rice’s routine and other minstrel shows, with numerous
variations. In time, the term came to be
applied to the legalized system of segregation that took shape in the years
after Reconstruction.
The
laws that established legal segregation in the South flowed from the
imaginations of whites who similarly held a stereotypical view of blacks; thus did the term, “Jim Crow,” seem
appropriate. The term can be used to
refer to the whole system of segregation and discrimination that contravened
federal law but which somehow the Supreme Court--- the highest judicial body in the United
States with the authority to rule on the constitutionality of laws--- found ways to uphold.
The
most portentous of the Supreme Court rulings came in Plessy
v. Ferguson (1896). The case was
brought by African American Homer Adolph Plessy against Louisiana Judge
Ferguson, who had found Plessy guilty of an 1890 state law requiring separate
accommodations in public facilities for blacks and whites. Plessy had been arrested for failing, during
a 60-mile ride from New Orleans to Covington, Lousiana, to move to a different
car as requested by a white passenger.
The Supreme court 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
the right to vote that is clear to anyone who reads the 15th
Amendment faded with the enactment of poll taxes and literacy tests. Poll taxes were fees placed on the right to
vote, thus discriminating against most African Americans in their general
condition of poverty, and also against
poor whites. Literacy tests were
designed to prevent those with limited or no ability to read from
voting. The prospective voter might be asked to read
a section of the state constitution. A
similar outcome was achieved in states that did allow the illiterate voter to
ask that the section be read aloud to her or him, whereupon she or he could
demonstrate understanding of the law with a proper interpretation. The accuracy of the interpretation was then
left to the judgment of a white official, who invariably ruled against the
responses of African Americans.
Sometimes questions ranged into the realm of the ridiculous: a “wrong” answer to the questions, “How many
bubbles are in a bar of soap?,” for example, might send a prospective African
American Voter home without having to cast a vote.
Other
means were used to deny African Americans the right to vote. These included violence or the threat
thereof. Alternatively, and in an attempt to re-enfranchise poor whites who
could not pay the poll tax or meet property qualifications, a number of states
enacted “grandfather laws.”
These
laws made possible the vote for someone who could not meet economic or property
qualifications to gain suffrage only if
his (only men could vote until 1920) ancestors had voted before 1867 of some
other date chosen prior to Reconstruction;
such a law clearly made impossible the exercise of voting rights by the
overwhelming number of African Americans in the South. A number of states used “god character
tests,” necessitating that an African American who sought to vote bring with
him a white individual willing to vouch for
his good character; there was little
chance that a white citizen in the Jim Crow South would do so.
Any
African American who opposed Jim Crow, or strove to organize others to do so,
would face a community of white employers and business leaders commonly
resolved to deny her or him ca job, credit, or mortgage. In many southern towns and cities,
organizations known as White Citizens’ Councils determined matters pertinent to
jobs and credit, ensuring in each case that African Americans were limited t
certain kinds of jobs and kept firmly under behavioral control.
Hate
groups did terrible damage to African Americans in communities across the
South, becoming such a force of disorder that the United States Congress felt
compelled to pass two Force Acts (1870 and 1871) and the Ku Klux Klan Act
(1871) that proscribed judgment and executions outside regular legal
proceedings. Even some southern states
passed laws with the expressed purpose of curtailing the most egregious forms
of violence perpetrated by hate groups.
The Ku Klux Klan Act authorized the President to use military force and
to impose martial law in those areas where terroristic groups were active. But as of the compromise of 1877, united
States troops had no regular presence in the South, and local police and
militia forces did not have the staff, money, or time to protect the lives of
African Americans; moreover, southern
law enforcement officials often either sympathized with the sentiments and
activities of hate groups, or they were too cowed by them to take any action.
In
time the organization of hate groups did wither due to internal stresses rather
than vigorous government action. But the
revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and the terrible legacy of lynchings
serve as testimony to the lack of ability and inclination n the part of federal
and state governments of the United States to protect African Americans from
criminal violence.
Lynchings
became part of the terrible reality of life during the Jim Crow era: Statistices compiled by the Tuskegee
Institute show that from the first recorded lynching in 1882 through 1968, at
least 4,743 people saw their lives end in this brutal way. During these years, nine states recorded over
200 lynchings; those states included
Mississippi (581 lynching during 1882-1968), Georgia (531), Texas (493),
Louisiana ( 391), Alabama (347), Arkansas (284), Florida (282), Tennessee
(251), and Kentucky (205). By far,
African Americans were the most frequent targets, but the statistics reveal
that in some geographical areas whites were also lynched with considerable
frequency. In Texas, 141 (28.6%0 of
those lynched were white; this was
similar to the overall national pattern, in which 1,297 (27.4%) of those
lynched were white.
But
in most southern states, the targets of lynchings were overwhelmingly African
Americans (over 90% in Georgia), Mississippi, and South Carolina [97.5%], but
in several northeastern and
western
states where African American populations were low, whites were the most
frequent targets. In Arizona, all 31 of
those lynched during 1882-1968 were white.
These data indicate a disturbing tendency toward generalized violence in
American life that, when paired with particularly virulent prejudices, fell
most heavily on African Americans.
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 purchase on
credit. Landowners frequently earned
high interest on loans, and they sold goods at prices above market value. Sharecroppers fell steadily into a level of
debt from which there was no hope of extracting themselves.
But
African Americans were not always passive actors in schemes of landowners. Some black farmers were so adroit in their
labor that they could use their productivity as leverage against an overweening
landowner. In rare cases, such leverage
could be used to ratchet down rents, interest rates, and prices enough that a
bit could be saved. An ingenious and
extraordinarily diligent African American farmer might save enough to purchase
land from a poor farmer or a landowner who had fallen on hard times. This same farmer or that agriculturalist’s
descendants might invest in a wagon to haul goods, expand into other
entrepreneurial endeavors, and maneuver into position for the purchase of more
land. In this way were a few small
fortunes made, so as to expand familial wealth in the South, sponsor family
members who might want to go to college, or to realize the dreams of those who
sought a better life in the North.
A
remarkable motif of African America during the Jim Crow era is in fact the creative
response to life under the most daunting conditions:
African
American Baptists in South Carolina, Georgia, and florida organized their own
association in 1866. Black Baptist
churches from across the south held a convention in Montgomery, Alabama, in
1880. Black Presbyterians also formed
churches of their own, and in 1870 African American
Methodists
organized the colored Methodist Church in America. Pastors in these churches manifested an
animated style that influenced white pastors and transferred to the purposes of
secular speechmaking. African American
choirs sang with great fervor; black
gospel joined a tradition that included the work songs of the slaves, each traveling
pathways of influence that eventually produced jazz and blues.
Southern
food is one of the main forms of purely American food. Its progenitors were African American slaves
in the kitchens of the Big House and sharecropping farmers who invented tasty
dishes with the produce from their own land, game from the hunt, and plants
gathered from the woods. With artful
applications of spices, herbs, and animal fats, African American cooks produced
excellent tasting and nutritious food that became part of the great American
tradition.
African
American rural folk could generate lives real substance and joy while living in
the most humble cabins, under the most stringent of economic conditions, and
enveloped by the hate of the white majority:
Stories
were told on Saturday evenings around the fire in an otherwise cold cabin in
January: Children huddled together while
daddy regaled them with another hair-raising tale of creatures lurking in the
woods of Louisiana, Mississippi, or Georgia.
There as poetry in those words, even as there was poetry in the everyday
cadences of a people who through some combination of ancestral inheritance and
immediate environment boomed out with metaphors brilliant enough to make the
best classically trained poets green with envy:
hot as a depot stove, skippin’ over the due, easy like Sunday morning.
African
Americans represented the best of the Old South. Through participation in the church, in the
creation of song and dance, in the acquisition of culinary brilliance, in their
ability to make crops grow whether the plot be the richest in the South or the
most hard-scrabble, in their artisanry with wood and iron and needle and
thread, they kept the Old South full of crops, they enabled the trains to run,
they saw children grow strong and confident and secure, and through their sheer
hard work they ensured that even a people who hated them beyond any logical
understanding would thrive.
But
having given so much of value while receiving so much animosity in return,
striving for lives of greater material circumstance and civic sustenance, many
African Americans of the South began to search other locations for work and
residence. This search led to migrations
both westward and northward, ultimately emphasizing the latter in the great
movement known as the Northern Migration.
The
Great Northern Migration
Before
the Great Northern Migration that began in earnest about 1915, there had
already been a trend toward movement of African Americans out of the
South. Much of this movement was
westward, onto the Great Plains, where Native Americans typically welcomed
fellow people of color with a knowledge of English; and to Texas and onward through the southwest
to California. In all of these places,
African Americans worked with horses, took jobs as agricultural laborers,
bought property, started small businesses, and gained the training necessary to
enter the professions. Hundreds of
African Americans responded to the flyers of Benjamin “Pap” Singleton, who
touted the abundance of jobs in “Sunny Kansas.” Known as “exodusters,” those responding to
the message of Singleton eventually landed not only in Kansas but also in
Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, and Oklahoma.
In the latter, black pioneers established the famous towns of Boley and
Langston, and also those of Arkansas Colored, Bailey, Bookertee, Canadian
Colored, Ferguson, Liberty, Lincoln City, Overton, Summit, Tullahassee, and
Wild Cat.
Out
on the plains, Nat Love (1854-1921) and Bill Pickett (1860s-1932) gained fame
as cowboys. Love was an expert with the
rifle, the rope, and the Spanish language.
He eventually published a memoir entitled, The Life and Adventures of Nat Love, Better Known in Cattle Country as
Deadwood
Dick.
Pickett was a master of many skills of the cowboy, gaining particular
fame for his superior technique in steer wrestling. Such was his fame that in 1914 he was invited
to perform for
King
George V and Queen Mary of England; and
in 1954 he was inducted into the National Cowboy
Hall
of Fame (Oklahoma City), the first African American to be so honored .
Also
gaining fame on the Great Plains were the Buffalo Soldiers, the name given to
the African American Ninth and Tenth United States Army Regiments by Native
Americans, who likened them to their sacred Buffalo. Amidst numerous ironies and a certain pathos,
the Buffalo Soldiers worked skillfully to protect mostly white settlers who
wanted to establish ranches and farms on the prairies and plains of the Midwest
and West. The Buffalo Soldiers also
erected forts, escorted trains, accompanied stage coaches, protected cowboys on
cattle drive, mapped new areas for settlement, and built new roads. They had a hand in capturing both Billy the
Kid and Geronimo, and they pursued the latter’s tough and determined Apache
people over many years.
In
addition to the particular enthusiasm for moving westward and southwestward
from the South, a yearning abided among African Americans to move northward, as
they had done as individuals and in small groups since the days of the
Underground Railroad. African Americans
in the rural South mostly eked out a living from the meager returns of
sharecropping. Many were not even settled
enough to root themselves in a sharecropper’s existence; a great number of blacks roamed the
countryside from farm to farm taking temporary jobs working in the fields for
as little as $60 and seldom more that $180 per year. In the cities, African Americans hired out as
carpenters, earning somewhere between $0.75 and $1.25 per hour, or as cooks
earning an average $5.00 per month in 1902.
African Americans also tended to work as janitors, chauffeurs,
stonemasons, and barbers. A small but
very influential black middle class did form in the urban areas of the South by
the turn of the 19th century into the 20th century. African Americans thrived best in fields
eschewed by whites, or businesses in which whites could not or would not serve
black customers. Hence, the fields of
insurance, undertaking, banking, cosmetics, and personal grooming attracted
African American entrepreneurs, some of whom built up sizable fortunes by
seizing the thread of opportunity available to them.
Remarkably,
some African Americans made considerable fortunes against heavy odds un the
economic context of the South. In 1903,
Maggie Lena Walker became the first African American woman to found a
bank; she was also initiated publishing
and other businesses. Arthur Gaston of
Birmingham, Alabama built an entrepreneurial empire that began in 1923 with
burial services and expanded into numerous enterprises, including training
people in office skills and providing a variety of financial services. Madame C. J. Walker became a millionaire via
her various beauty industry enterprises;
she committed a large portion of her wealth in various philanthropic
endeavors.
As
impressive as these African American successes in the Jim Crow South were,
black southerners seeking a better life were increasingly inclined to depart
the region of their birth:
Urban
life in the North beckoned to increasing numbers of Americans of all
ethnicities at the dawn of the 20th century. The iron and steel industries were booming,
and these attracted white and black Americans, and immigrants from the various
countries of Europe. African Americans
faced
heavy
discrimination when they filed for union membership, so they were left to
scramble for jobs as construction workers, doormen, and sleeping car porters,
for which the competition with whites was not so fierce. But when the black worker did manage to land
a job such as a meatpacker in one of the factories of the North, the wage
differential between southern rural and agricultural employment and northern
industrial labor could result in glowing letter sent back home, extolling
economic opportunities of the North and raising the expectations of friends and
family members who might themselves be persuaded to make the move northward.
In
the years after 1910, African Americans moved from the rural South to the
industrial North in unprecedented numbers.
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.
For
these immigrants and for African Americans of the Great Northern Migration, New
York, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Kansas City, and
St. Louis werer among the most popular destinations. In 1920 in Chicago jobs as laborers (5,300),
iron and steel workers (3,201), railway porters (2,540), waiters (2,315),
porters in domestic or personal service (2,139), male servants (1,942),
building or general laborers (1,835), janitors (1,822), non-store clerks
(1,659), semiskilled slaughter and packinghouse house workers (1,490), and
laborers, porters, and helpers in stores (1,210) proved to offer the best
chances for African Americans looking for jobs.
Others worked as tailors (371), house painters (286), carpenters (275),
musicians or music teachers (254), clergy officials or pastors (215), coopers
(148), plumbers (105), and lawyers (95).
Earning
higher wages than they had ever earned before, and dwelling in an atmosphere
that seemed freer and less overtly bigoted than that of the South, African
Americans at first found their northern environs a seductive alternative to the
formal restrictions of the Black Codes and the violent hatred of the
vigilantes. But over time, African
Americans dwelling in the urban North found whites guilty of subtle and
insidious forms of racism that in the course of the 20th century
caused African Americans as much misery as they had known in the frankly brutal
South. The frustration that African
Americans came to feel as second-class citizens in a region to which they had
come with so much hope
became
one of the most regrettable motifs in 20th century United States
history; in time, that motif and those
frustrations became manifest in the
lives of the African American underclass living at the urban core, especially
in the inner cities of the North.
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: They were not allowed to join
the marines and could not become officers in the navy. Even those African American officers and
soldiers in the United States Army who held college degrees were assigned
menial duties or served on labor battalions.
White officers frequently humiliated African American soldiers, bringing
forth numerous letters of complaint to Secretary of War Newton D. Baker. The United States Army cited a shortage of
housing in those segregated times as the key reason for failing to enlist the
hundreds of female African American nurses who could have helped tend fallen
soldiers. Only after 1918, upon the
conclusion of the war, did eighteen African American women officially get
approval for service, becoming the first women of their race to serve n the
United States armed forces.
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
1917, a racial altercation in East St. Louis, Missouri, cost at least 40
lives. That same year, the black 24th
Infantry of the United States Army stationed in Houston, Texas, revolted
against bigoted treatment of African American soldiers by both white army
officers and hatemongers in the Houston populace. Also in 1917, three African Americans and
three whites died in the wake of rioting in Chester, Pennsylvania. Three whites died in late July 1918 when
racially acrimonious rioting broke out in Philadelphia. And in 1919, twenty violent race riots shook
communities throughout the country, including Chicago, Illinois; Knoxville, Tennessee; Longview, Texas; Omaha, Nebraska; and Washington, D. C.
In
the context of these circumstances in the urban North, two organizations arose
to protest the conditions in which African Americans lived, to move
aggressively to ameliorate the existing situation, and to work toward a future
in which public practice in American society would be consistent with the words
and intent of the 13th, 14th, and 15th
Amendments.
One
of these organizations was the National Urban League, which in 1910 brought
together a panoply of smaller organizations, including the National League for
the Protection of Colored Women (NLPCW), the Committee for Improving the
Industrial Condition of Negroes (CIICN), and the Committee on Urban Conditions
Among Negroes (CUCAN). The National
Urban League conducted numerous programs pertinent to the economic condition of
African Americans, focusing at first especially on helping migrants from the
South make the transition to life in urban North. The Urban League trained people in the
trades, taught them how to respond and present themselves in interviews,
assisted people in finding decent affordable housing, recruited southerners
when large companies advertised for large quantities of workers, and conducted
groundbreaking research on the demographic characteristics and conditions of
northern African American workers. Today
the
National
Urban League is headquartered in New York City, with an Eastern regional office
in the same city and Mideastern (Akron, Ohio), Midwestern (St. Louis,
Missouri), Western (Los Angeles, California), and Southern (Atlanta, Georgia)
regional offices strategically established
across the country. Today, the
National Urban League has 101 affiliates in 34 states and the District of
Columbia. A bureau in the latter
affiliate conducts research into problems endemic to the urban and rural poor.
The
other organization established to meet the needs of African Americans at the
beginning of second decade of the 20th century was the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
The origins of the NAACP had its origins in the Niagara Movement, which
gained momentum in the aftermath of a meeting at Niagara Falls in 1905
organized by William Edward Burghardt (W. E. B.) DuBois. Key participants in this meeting went on to
found the National Negro Committee on 12 February 1909. The multiracial founders of this
organization, including Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W. E. B. Dubois, Henry Moscowitz,
Mary White Ovington, Oswald Garrison Villiard, and William English Walling soon changed the name to the enduring
appellation, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. While the National Urban League focused on
issues related to employment, the NAACP gave prime attention to legal rights,
especially those related to the pursuit of education. For this purpose the, the NAACP established
the Legal Defense Fund to litigate cases in local, state, and federal
courts. The NAACP published a journal, Crisis, which disseminated information
about legal issues, court cases, and topics of grave concern, such as the
continuing specter of vigilante violence and the brutal lynchings still
haunting the southern landscape.
W.
E. B. DuBois and fellow giants of leadership, Booker T. Washington and Marcus
Garvey, offer contrasts in the pursuit of full citizenship rights for African
America that endured as motifs of the 20th century:
W.
E. B. Dubois (1868-1963) came of age in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, went
southward to earn a B. A. degree (1888) at Fisk University, in Nashville, and
then came back to New England to study at Harvard. At Harvard, Dubois earned another B. A.
(1890), an M. A. (1891), and a Ph. D. (1895). Growing up in Great Barrington
and finding his academic grounding at Harvard, Dubois in both cases operated on
Massachusetts turf that was relatively hospitable to the formation of an
optimistic integrationist doctrine.
Those advocating an integrationist approach believed in the ideals of
the United States Constitution, dedicated themselves to the pursuit of justice
according to those ideals, and demanded the full exercise of citizenship in all
of its dimensions: political, economic,
and social. DuBois advocated this
position in his leadership of the NAACP and his editorship of Crisis.
Booker
T. Washington (1856-1915) was born a slave on a small plantation in
Virginia. At the end of the Civil War,
he secured the friendship of benevolent whites in his home state (especially in
the General Lewis Rutherford family, for whom he served as houseboy), learned
to read and write, and trained at the Hampton Institute in Hampton, Virginia. At Hampton, Washington was deeply influenced
by the institution’s director, General Samuel Armstrong, who stressed the
improvement of African American lives through cleanliness, thrift, morality,
character, and proficiency in the manual trades. In 1881, Booker T. Washington was, upon the
recommendation of General Armstrong, tapped to head the Tuskegee Institute in
Alabama, established with a curriculum very similar to that at Hampton. As an advocate of what may be called the
gradualist approach, Washington counseled
African
Americans to forego the pursuit of full political and social rights and to
accept segregation for the time being, taking training as bricklayers,
carpenters, machinists, plumbers, and stone masons so as to thrive economically
on the basis of terms laid down by Jim Crow.
He thus advised his fellows to build thriving communities of black
citizens capable of convincing even the heaviest doubters and most virulently
racist in white society of their diligence and trustworthiness. The gradualist approach articulated by
Washington urged African Americans to 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, and thus through self-help to be so
successful as to undermine the assumptions of Jim Crow and to eventually end
the system of that venal creature.
Marcus
Garvey (1887-1940) was born and grew up in Jamaica, the youngest of eleven
children of Sarah and Marcus Garvey. The
latter was a stonemason who seemingly was descended from the Maroons, the
African slaves who escaped and successfully defended themselves against
Spaniards and the British in the 17th century. Marcus the son took great pride in the Maroon
heritage of Marcus the father. Faced with financial difficulties, Garvey had
to leave school at the age of fourteen, thereafter educating himself through
hard work, wide reading, and travels to Central and South America. He trained and worked as a printer, took an interest
in journalism and for a time worked for newspapers in Panama, and along the way
became bitter over British treatment of Jamaicans who sought work in various
colonial outposts of the Caribbean.
During 1912-1914, Garvey lived in London, meeting people from the
African continent for the first time, and coming under the influence of the
Epyptian nationalist, Duse Mohammad Ali.
In London, Garvey wrote for the latter’s publication, African Times and Oriental Review, reinforcing his association with his mentor’s
views. He also gained great inspiration
from the philosophy of black self-help that he found in his initial encounter
with Booker T. Washington’s Up From
Slavery.
In
1914, at the age of 27, Garvey returned to Jamaica and formed an all-black
organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Garvey moved his residence and place of
operations to New York in 1917; just two
years later, thirty branches of the UNIA could be found in locations across the
United States and the islands of the Caribbean. Garvey publicized his motto, “Race First,”
urging all people of African heritage to recognize the bond that they
shared. There was no use, he said, in
trying to appeal to the sense of justice in white people, because almost all
white people harbored racist thoughts and were incorrigible. 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.
Garvey’s
ideas represented a synthesis of wide reading and thinking that he had
done; he drew from the self-help notions
of Booker T. Washington and the postulations
of those such as Paul Cuffe, Edward Wilmont Blyden, Henry Highland
Garnet, and Martin Delaney who had argued for a “Return to Africa” or black
nationalism . Garvey published his ideas
in the UNIA’s Negro World, and he
launched numerous programs and enterprises, including a Negro Factories
Corporation and the Black Star Line of ships for transporting people across the
Atlantic who sought return to Africa. In
1920, Garvey led the first UNIA International Convention of the Negro Peoples
of the World. A subcommittee from among
the 25,000 attendees issued the Declaration
of the Rights of the Negro People of the World demanding that governments across the world address the
grievances and
respond
to the quest of African American people for lives of economic, political, and
social justice. Garvey’s career ended in
controversy over the handling of investors’ money in the Black Star Line. The United States government deported him
back to Jamaica; from there Garvey
traveled to and settled in Great Britain, where he advocated his ideas from
London until the end of his days in 1940.
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. Washington’s ideas over time were absorbed
by both of the other strains, which adopted some version of the self-help
approach into their advocacy. The other
two approaches came to offer disparate routes to the achievement of African
American citizenship during the 1950s,1960s, and 1970s. The integrationist approach would be that
followed the NAACP and the Civil Rights movement as led by the Martin Luther
King at the helm of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; and also by such organizations, less
committed to nonviolence but still seeking integration into the civic life of
the United States, such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
and the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE).
The black nationalist approach would be adopted by various
organizations, including the Nation of Islam (Black Muslims), and Black Panthers.
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. Teeming with
racial pride, this collection of poetry, essays, short stories, and art
conveyed the genius of an African America determined not just to survive but to
inspirt people of all races with an astounding surge of cultural
creativity. Locke’s book appeared in the
midst of a especially significant time for the creative arts in African
America, a period during which black musicians, poets, and visual artists of
New York City’s Harlem area gave to the United States a rich outpouring of
creative expression that would forever influence both the African American and
the general cultural life of the United States.
During
the 1920s, artists of African descent poured into Harlem, the community of
Manhattan in New York City that had become a major destination not only for
southern and northern migrants within the United States but also for immigrants
from Africa and the Caribbean. As the
1920s opened, World War I had just come to a conclusion; significant portions of the population of the
United States were tired of war, weary of old patterns and attitudes perceived
as stultifying, and ready to invest their energies in activities that diverged
from accepted norms. This was the Jazz
Age, the Roaring Twenties, and the Harlem Renaissance imbibed and contributed
to the spirit of the times. The Great
Northern Migration had begun. In the
inner cities of the North, African American enterprises, journals, newspapers,
and associations flourished. A sense of
self-awareness pervaded the black communities of America, sending many African
Americans on a quest for deeper knowledge of their history, cultural origins,
and ethnic identity. There was an effort
on the one hand to master skills needed to access the mainstream institutions
of the United States , and on the other to assert and develop what was uniquely
African American in the history of the country that black labor and talent had
done so much to build.
There
was a declining interest among black people in the United States in copying the
ways of the white world, and a growing fascination in the mores of the
“Negro”; conversely, a white America
that often seemed exclusively interested in controlling, dominating, and
dictating the terms of cultural interaction in the United States demonstrated a
lively interest in the exciting works created and showcased in Harlem. Among whites, there was a keen interest in
blues, jazz, folk tales, vernacular, and fashion evident in African
America. Among blacks, there was a
surging pride in the accomplishments of their people against seemingly
insurmountable odds. New Audiences and
new contributors magnified the interest in African American culture and
encouraged its development in exciting new directions.
Works
of major Harlem Renaissance figures gained publication in the publications of
the National Urban League (Opportunity )
and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (Crisis ). But major mainstream publishing houses also
sent forth works of African American authors to the book stores of the United
States, tapping an interest among the general public in these innovations upon
various literary forms. In the course of
time multiple venues gave literary life to bevy of African American poets: Georgia Johnson Douglass, Jean Toomer, Jessie
Faucet, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and many others. Novels and works of other works of prose
poured forth from the teeming brains of artists such as 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 exploded with great force onto the American scene during the period
encompassing the Harlem Renaissance;
among the most seminal were 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.
The
Great Depression of the 1930s was not conducive to the torrid pace at which
works of the Harlem Renaissance emanated during the 1920s. But specifically African American literature,
music, dance, and the visual arts would never be the same again. And the creativity of those who rose to
prominence during the Harlem Renaissance opened a pathway through which other
African Americans traveled with their won creations, and inspirited all of
those of any race who worked in the artistic realms where African Americans
took center stage.
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.
During
the Great Depression, the capitalist system seemed to many to be failing, and
in that context interest in communism increased. Leaders of the Communist Party made a special
effort to recruit disaffected African Americans, and the party nominated
African American James Ford as vice-presidential candidate in 1932, 1936, and
1940. The African American laboring
people of the urban North, while making some progress in gaining acceptance
into unions, in general still found membership difficult to obtain, and in
terms of work availability and work conditions they fared poorly. 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
included, and his administration featured notable advances in the cause of
black citizenship. The United States,
though, was still a very segregated society.
As a rule, African Americans stayed in the camps of the Civilian
Conservation Corps (CCC) longer than whites, moved less readily into
administrative poistiions, and were confined to 10% of total enrollment. Approximately 50,000 African Americans wre
served by the CCC and another 64,000 young African Americans found work through
the National Youth Administration (NYA).
The education program of the Works Progress Administration (WPA)
employed over 5,000 African Americans in leadership and supervisory positions,
taught basic literacy to almost 25,000 black students, and provided training in
skills transferrable to jobs in business, industry, and the trades. The WPA was led by Harry Hopkins, an
enlightened individual who maneuvered to get policies established making
discrimination based on race, creed, or color illegal.
As
part of the New Deal, the Federal Writers Project (FWP) abetted the careers of
African American authors Horace R. Crayton, St. Clair Drake, Ralph Ellison,
Zora Neal Hurston, and Richard Wright.
The Federal Music Project, Federal Art Project, and Federal Theater
Project also supported the work of creative African Americans, producing
concerts, supporting hundreds of black sculptors and painters (including very
notably Horace Pippin and Jacob Lawrence), and employing 500 African Americans
for theater productions in New York City.
The works of Hall Johnson (Run
Little Chillun) Rudolf Fischer (Conjure
Man Dies: a Mystery Tale of Harlem [an
adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth])
gained production under the aegis of the Federal Theater Project. Many African American creative artists such
as dancer and choreographer Katherine Dunham and actor Rex Ingram went on to
exciting and seminal careers in the aftermath of the Great Depression and the
programs of the New Deal.
Eleanor
Roosevelt was instrumental in getting her husband to create a “Black Cabinet”
to provide advice to the president on New Deal policies. Roosevelt appointed African American educator
Mary McCleod Bethune to head the Division of Negro Affairs within the National
Youth Administration, and it was she who organized the Black Cabinet. The group included Robert L. Vann, editor of
the Pitsburgh Currier, who held a
post in the office of the attorney general;
William H. Hastie, a civil rights attorney who served in the Department
of Justice; Robert D. Weaver, an
economist serving in the Department of the Interior; Lawrence A. Oxley, a social worker in the
Department of Labor; and Edgar Brown,
president of the United Government Employees and an official in the Civilian
Conservation Corps. Other African
Americans tapped for positions in the Roosevelt administration included E. K.
Jones, on leave from the National Urban League, at the Department of
Commerce; Ira Reid on the Social
Security Board; and Ambrose Carver at the Office of Education.
Eleanor
Roosevelt served as a conduit to the president for congresspersons seeking his
support for legislation, notably Walter White in behalf of his anti-lynching
bill. The spouse of the president
arranged for Marian Anderson to sing at the Lincoln Memorial when the Daughters
of the American Revolution (DAR) denied the famous soprano the opportunity to
perform in Constitution Hall. Eleanor
Roosevelt was a hugely important figure at a time when so many Americans held
virulently racist views, absorbing the political heat, educating her husband on
issues of racial equity, and prodding his conscience as necessary.
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.
At
Pearl Harbor, mess attendant Dorie Miller positioned himself at a machine gun
and shot down at least four Japanese aircraft.
Miller was honored with the Navy Cross for heroism but was promoted only
to mess attendant first class and, sadly, died aboard a small carrier craft
torpedoed by the Japanese on 24 November 1943.
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. A sad demise, though, also was the reality
for the man who had saved so many lives as an expert in hematology. Drew died in the aftermath of an automobile
accident in North Carolina, driving himself to a meeting in order to avoid
segregated transportation. The
segregated hospital gto which he was admitted lacked the blood plasma that
might have saved his life.
African
Americans did, though, see gains in many facets of American life during the
last years of World War II and the years immediately following. Executive Order 8802 prohibited employment
discrimination in industries producing war goods. Before 1948, 78% of African Americans earned
under $3,800 per year. Between1948 and
1961, that percentage would decrease to 47%, and during the same period the
percentage of African Americans earning over $100,000 increased from less than
1% to about 17%. One could also see that
the efforts of the NAACP to improve the legal and social climate for African
American college attendance was producing favorable results: Whereas in 1947, the number of African
American college students was 124,000, by 1964 this figure had almost doubled,
to 233,000. In politics, Adam Clayton
Powell of New York City won a seat in the House of Representatives and, buoyed
by a strong and devoted following back home, strode in to barbershops, dining
rooms, and showers that had previously been segregated.
The
Immediate Aftermath of World War II
During
World War II and its aftermath, the NAACP pressed ahead with its initiatives to
open institutions of higher learning, with the ultimate objective of bringing
about total desegregation odf all public schools, whether K-12, college, or
university. Court action had
successively culminated in the desegregation for Missouri Law School and set a
precedent for the integration of other professional schools.
Under
the sway of enthusiasm for the New Deal and the efforts of Eleanor Roosevelt,
African American voters began to vote for most often for Democrats, distancing
themselves from a Republican Party that no longer seemed very much like the
party of Lincoln. In 1954, African
Americans provided the margin of victory for the candidacies of black
politicians running for seats in the United States House of Representatives; these included Augustus Hawkins of
California, William L. Dawson of Illinois, as well as Clayton Powell (who was
reelected).
And
in that very year of 1954, Thurgood Marshall led a team of NAACP lawyers to
landmark victory in the Brown v. Board of
Education of Topeka, Kansas,
ending desegregations and ushering in the Civil Rights Movement that at long
last ended the Period That Never Should Have Been, that stretch of time
extending from the Compromise of 1877 until the Brown v. Board decision of 1954.
Not
until the middle 1970s, though, did various efforts to implement desegregation
of the schools and federal programs advancing African American citizenship,
terms of employment, and freedom of residence manifest themselves in
significant changes in American society.
So we may think of the Period That Never Should Have Been for Extending
one hundred years:
This
should deepen our lament for the brutal experience of African Americans in the
history of the United States, raise our respect for African American
accomplishment in the midst of terrifying conditions of life, and impel us to
address the many concerns that still abide for African Americans living at the
urban core throughout the nation.
V. The Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1972
The
Cases and Incidents tht Galvanized a Movement
In
the town of Topeka, Kansas, in 1950, there were two elementary schools, one for
African American children, the other for white children. Seven year-old Linda Brown , African American
of ethnicity, lived just four blocks from the school for white for children but
across town from the school for black kids.
Linda Brown’s father lost a case filed in behalf of his daughter in the
lower courts, but his attorneys persisted with an appeal to the Supreme Court
of the United States, which accepted the case and assigned its appellation in
joint consideration of similar cases that had been referred on appeal to the
Supreme Court. In 1954, Chief Justice
Earl Warren wrote the case for the unanimous opinion in favor of Brown and by
extension those who had filed the other cases, asserting that “in the field of
public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are
inherently unequal
In
August 1955 a 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,
as gained wide notice when photos were fun in Jet magazine, the Chicago
Defender (a prominent and venerable black-owned newspaper), and in time the
mainstream white media.
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. When she
was arrested, her connections as a local civil rights worker sent forth a
concatenation of responses, including those from African American community
leader E. D. Nixon, attorney Cliffor Durr, and Alabama State College English
Professor Jo Ann Robinson. 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 that determined 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 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.
Hatemongering whites had mounted a massive intimidation effort that
called forth heroic feats of courage on the part of local NAACP president Daisy
Bates and others, but not until Eisenhower sent in the troops did the white
antagonists have to relent.
The
students who came to be known as the Little Rock Nine entered the halls of
Central High School, and senior Ernest
Green moved forward to graduation in spring 1958.
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 that produced such a dangerous showdown in
Birmingham, Alabama, and impelled Robert Kennedy, Attorney General in his
brother’s administration, to pressure southern bus companies and state
governments to comply with federal law so as to comply with follow desegregated
and nondiscriminatory policy 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. Meredith had National Guard
escorts to classes, and at their peak troops stationed on the university’s campus
totaled 20,000. Troops were still
necessary when Meredith (who arrived as a transfer student with numerous
previously earned credits) went through the graduation ceremony in August 1963.
Then
in that very month, 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. Of the many eloquent speakers,
Martin Luther King shown brightest of all with his ringing oratory in what has
come to be known as the “I Have a Dream” speech. This piece of oratory moved many people in
the United States who were watching on television or listening on the
radio. The speech was a mighty call for
the logical extension of morality and justice embedded in both the Bible and
the United States Constitution to the realms of law and human relationships,
envisioning among many other stirring images that day when “right down there in
Alabama, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of
interposition and nullification, little black boys and black girls will join
hands with little white boys and white girls and walk as sisters and brothers.”
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.
Johnson had won decisively against republican Barry Goldwater in 1964
but took stock of his political situation in the context of an increasingly
unpopular Vietnam War and declined to run for president in 1968. 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. The affirmative action
bills immediately resulted in the appearance of many more women and people of
color in the companies and colleges of the United States, and many more at the
head of their own business establishments.
In
the course of the 1960s and into the early 1970s, there came a voluble call for
the assertion of Black Power. Out of the
mouths and in the action of some African Americans this was a testimony of strength and solidarity that resonated
with the call of the Godfather of Soul, James Brown to ,”Say it aloud: I’m black and I’m proud.” For others such as 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. This attitude had been present in the
movement of the Nation of Islam (Black Muslims) whose demonstrations and
promulgations in the early and middle 1960s had added to the political and
social pressures that culminated in passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and
the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Malcolm X,
after a pilgrimage to Mecca that turned him away from extreme racial antipathy
for white people and toward a more conventional form of Islam, 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. But
by 1972, the energy of the movement had lost fervor. Conservative America seemed resurgent in the
victory of Richard Nixon over George McGovern in the 1972 presidential
contest. The shooting and death of
Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in his own apartment at the hands of
the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) came at a time when the Black Panther
organization was suffering from internal contentiousness and strain. Gains had been made and would be forthcoming
in the political halls of the establishment and in community organizations for
addressing the practical needs of people;
African Americans Shirley Chisolm, Jessie Jackson, Carl Stokes, Thomas
Bradley, Maynard Jackson, and Andrew Young would all rise to prominence in such
mainstream political and social contexts.
But
the advocacy for revolutionary change had waned by 1972, and year ahead,
despite the advances for the African American middle class and establishment
figures had left an angry and restive contingent of people still languishing in
poverty, violence, and desperation at the urban core, the inner cities of the
United States.
A
Time of Unfulfilled Expectations, 1973-1992
People
in the United States were in the doldrums for much of the 1970s. The oil crisis hit during 1973-1974, Richard
Nixon resigned in 1974 in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, the Vietnam
War came to an ignominious conclusion in 1975, stagflation hit the economy by
the middle years of the decade, and Iranians seized American hostages in
1979. The gains for women and people of
color in the halls of business, higher education, and political representation
were palpable. But the gains realized as
a result of legislation of the 1960s and early 1970s seemed to take the nation
only so far, stalling at the attempt to secure an Equal Rights Amendment; and leaving the underclass of the central
city mired in poverty, ill-educated, and susceptible to all manner of pressures
impinging on family and community.
In
the 1980s those pressures impinged with a vengeance. Crack cocaine hit the streets about 1980,
moving profitability of the drug from the noses of the mostly white wealthy to
the pipes of the mostly black poor. Into
this market swept gangs, oftentimes moving into previously unoccupied or lightly-trod
areas such as Denver, Omaha, Kansas City, Des Moines, and Minneapolis. As the white and black middleclass moved to
the suburbs, those left behind included the mostly African American poor, the
residentially mobile, the recent migrant who knew little about the heritage of
the community to which she and he sought more tolerable terms of
existence. 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. But this was mere
counterpoint to Reagan’s talk of “welfare queens” who drove Cadillacs and to
the policy stupor of the Bush term, 1988-1992.
These were not people to whom African Americans at the urban core could
relate, and there was a distinct feeling that both their own leaders and those
of white society were failing them, bringing little in the way of new ideas to
the table that could address the degrade, violent, and ever-worsening
conditions of their own lives.
Democrats
seemed more benign but no more effective.
Long after the Great Society programs screamed out for reevaluation,
Democrats stood by Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) that helped
families get by but did little to show a way for extraction from the conditions
of poverty; furthermore, because income
ceilings were pierced when an acknowledged male income was included in the
familial coffers, an unfortunate effect of AFDC was often to drive fathers away
from the family or to encourage nondurable and exploitative relationships with
males who took much but gave little to a household.
By
1992, then, there were two Americas.
Some people characterized these in terms of black and white, but the
much greater distinction was between the middle class and the underclass. Many African American people, as was the case
with women of all races, were becoming people of considerable economic means, rising
to assume the leadership of major corporations and taking positions in law
firms as attorneys and in hospitals and clinics as physicians. But the contrast with African Americans at
the urban core, joined there by other impoverished people of color and by poor
whites, was extreme. The problem ached
for a solution; that solution never
came, but the rise of a politician who
talked in cadences that resonated with African American people and delivered a
message that at least seemed to convey a caring disposition did make possible
of the vision of a more hopeful future for African American people and others
living in the inner city.
A Time of Greater Hope , 1992-2015
The
leader with the more amenable cadences and hopeful vision was William Jefferson
(Bill) Clinton, who defeated George H. W. Bush in 1992 and won reelection
(against Republican nominee Robert Dole) in 1996. Clinton caught the economy rising on a tide
of technological innovation and did much to abet a favorable trend. He negotiated a responsible budget deal with
Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich in 1994 and actually produced a balanced
budget 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 made strategic budgetary
cuts and streamlined the governmental bureaucracy.
And
Clinton made a significant change in the character of welfare. Clinton superintended, and cooperated with
Republicans in Congress on, the termination of AFDC in favor of 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. The goal was to move the key welfare delivery
system from long-term assistance that could be a dependent way of life, toward
a system that encouraged work and sought to end cycles of poverty.
In
the context of expansion of EIC, a booming economy in which people of all economic
classes were faring better, an unprecedented number of appointments of African
Americans to federal government positions of both greater and lesser status,
and the image of a president who spoke a language that radiated warmth and
concern--- welfare reform moved through
Congress and came law without very much opposition from the people of the inner city most affected by
the dramatic change.
George
W. Bush was hit with the bombing of the World Trade Center Twin Towers in 2001,
making the response to terrorism the chief focus of his presidency, which he
gained with victory in 2000 over Democratic candidate Al Gore and again in
2004, this time of over Democratic nominee John Kerry. The Bush response to terrorism led him to
make troop commitments in Iraq and
Afghanistan
that were costly and produced very slim results at a huge cost of lives. Bush did, though, superintend one promising
initiative, 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. This law most notably made denial of health
care insurance coverage for previously existing conditions illegal; established insurance exchanges (to be run by
states or, upon the inaction of a state, by the federal government) at which
consumers could select insurance plans and companies, with costs on a sliding
scale according to economic means;
expanding coverage for offspring to the age of 25; raising the income limitations and therefore
expanding coverage under Medicaid; and establishing
penalties for not having insurance. The
expansion of Medicaid and the elimination of coverage denial for preexisting
conditions especially helped African Americans of the impoverished inner city,
so that the terms and availability of health coverage for blacks and others
living at the urban core improved.
Obama’s
foreign policy has been conducted with the expressed goals of extracting troops
from Iraq and Afghanistan. This has been
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]). And
in Afghanistan, the central government seems inept in formulating a plan for
quelling the threat from the Taliban, so that some presence of United States
troops and advisers seems likely. But
Obama has maintained considerable focus on domestic policy even amidst grave
foreign policy concerns, thereby leaving a domestic policy legacy that George
Bush cannot claim.
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. None of these,
though, have yet had the projected favorable impact, and education in the K-12
systems of the inner city is still as wretched as it has been for at least 35
years.
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--- communicates a spirit of cultural inclusion
that has captured the affective support of most African American people. And for African Americans, the symbolism of
seeing someone at the pinnacle of power whose looks are recognizably those of
their own ethnicity is huge and a historical occurrence with permanently
favorable prospects.
