The Making of African America

Table of Contents

 

 

 

OTHER BOOKS BY IRA BERLIN

 

 

 

 

EDITED

 

 

CO-EDITED

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

VIKING

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published in 2010 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

 

Copyright © Ira Berlin, 2010 All rights reserved

 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

 

Berlin, Ira, 1941-The making of African America : the four great migrations / Ira Berlin. p. cm.

 

Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN : 978-1-101-18989-4

1. African Americans—History. 2. African Americans—Migrations—History. 3. Slave trade—United States—History. 4. Slave trade—Atlantic Ocean—History. 5. Migration, Internal—United States—History. 6. United States—Emigration and immigration—History. 1. Title.

E185.B4732010 973'.0496073—dc22 2009028366

 

 

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JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN

 

[The preacher] says one thing and the congregation says it back, back forth, back forth, until we're rocking together in a rhythm that won't stop. His voice is low and rough and his guitar high and sweet; they seem to sing to each other, conversing in some heavenly language ...

—B. B. King and David Ritz,
Blues All Around Me

S
ome years ago, amid a dispute over “who freed the slaves?” in the Civil War South, I was interviewed on Washington's public radio station about the meaning of the Emancipation Proclamation. I addressed the familiar themes of the origins of the great document: the changing nature of the Civil War, the Union army's growing dependence on black labor, the intensifying opposition to slavery in the North, and the interplay of military necessity and abolitionist idealism. I rehearsed the long-standing debate over the role of Abraham Lincoln, the Radicals in Congress, abolitionists in the North, the Union army in the field, and slaves on the plantations of the South in the destruction of slavery and in the authorship of legal freedom. In the process, I restated my own position that slaves played a critical role in securing their own freedom. The controversy over what was sometimes mistakenly called “self-emancipation” had generated great heat among historians, and it still had life.
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As I left the broadcast booth, a small knot of black men and women—most of them technicians at the station—debated the authorship of emancipation and its meaning. What surprised me was that no one in the group was descended from families who had been freed by the Proclamation or any other Civil War measure. Almost all had been born outside of the United States—two in Haiti, one in Jamaica, one in Britain, and three others in Africa, two in Ghana, and one, I believe, in Somalia. Others may have been children of immigrants. While they were impressed—but not surprised—that slaves had played a part in breaking their own chains and were deeply interested in the events that had brought Lincoln to his decision during the summer of 1862, they insisted it had nothing to do with them. Simply put, it was not their history.

The conversation weighed upon me as I left the studio and it has preoccupied me not a little since. Much of the collective consciousness of black people in mainland North America and then the United States—the belief of individual men and women that their own fate was linked to that of the group—has long been articulated through a common history, indeed a particular history: centuries of enslavement, freedom in the course of Civil War, a great promise made amid the political turmoil of Reconstruction and a promise broken, followed by disfranchisement, segregation, and finally the long struggle for equality capped by a speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, a celebration in the Oval Office, a heart-stopping moment on the balcony of a Memphis motel, and the euphoria of the elevation of a black man to the American presidency.

History—that particular history—was so important that long before the latest triumphant event, Carter G. Woodson, an extraordinarily prescient black educator, established a week that would annually be devoted to its contemplation and celebration. Black politicos have since expanded and transformed Woodson's “Negro History Week” into “Black History Month,” and have helped elevate the commemoration of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday into a national holiday. These commemorations have become an occasion to bewail old oppressions, rehearse the struggle, honor achievements, and reassert the need to do more.
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In the process, celebrants have rightly laid claim to a unique identity.

Such commemorations, their memorialization of the past, are no different than those attached to the rituals of Eastern Orthodox Christmas, Tet, or Passover, or the celebration of the birthdays of Christopher Columbus, José Marti, or Casmir Pulaski, for social identity is ever rooted in history. But for African Americans, their history has always been especially important because they were long denied a past.
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For most of their stay in mainland North America, people of African descent have seen their homeland portrayed as a primitive society in an arrested state of development, and themselves as a congenitally backward people. In 1835, the governor of South Carolina asserted what would become conventional wisdom for most white Americans during the century that followed. “The African negro is destined by Providence to occupy a condition of servile dependency.... It is marked on the face, stamped on the skin, and evinced by the intellectual inferiority and natural improvidence of the race.... They are in all respects—physical, moral, and political—inferior to millions of the human race ... [and] are doomed to this hopeless condition by the very qualities which unfit them for a better life.”
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In inventing Negro History Week, Woodson—like Phyllis Wheatley, Benjamin Banneker, and George Washington Williams before him and John Hope Franklin, Benjamin Quarles, and numerous other African American scholars after him—challenged this skewed perspective. Each insisted African American history had as much integrity as any, and few would gainsay their conclusion.

The significance of history in African American life gave the disclaimer “not my history” by people of African descent particular poignancy, especially in light of the transformation of black life in the last third of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first.

In 1965, the United States Congress enacted two landmark pieces of legislation, the Voting Rights Act and the Immigration and Nationality Act. The passage of the Voting Rights Act proved to be a critical marker in the second emancipation. Given the opportunity, black Americans voted and stood for office in numbers not seen since the collapse of Reconstruction almost a hundred years earlier. They soon occupied positions that had been the exclusive preserve of white men for more than a half century. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, black men and women had taken seats in the United States Senate and House of Representatives, as well as various state houses and municipalities throughout the nation. In 2009, a black man assumed the presidency. African American life was transformed.

Within months of passing the Voting Rights Act, Congress enacted the Immigration and Nationality Act. The new law replaced the nativist policies put in place by the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which had favored the admission of northern Europeans by a peculiar accounting of origins of previous immigrants. The new law scrapped the rule of national origins and enshrined a first come, first served principle, giving preference to the recruitment of needed skills and the unification of divided families.

Although the Immigration and Nationality Act dramatically altered American immigration policy, few expected the reform to have much practical effect. Earlier, Senator Edward Kennedy, chair of the Senate's subcommittee on immigration and naturalization and one of the sponsors of the legislation, defended it by asserting, “Our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually,” and others nodded in unison.
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Later, even as he embraced the new law, President Lyndon Johnson downplayed its significance. It “is not a revolutionary bill,” Johnson intoned. “It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives....”
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