by Ira Berlin
African and African American Migrants in a Nation of Immigrants
The interplay of movement and place is not unique to black Americans. Americans of all sorts also experienced its whiplash effects, for the history of the United States rests upon movement—first across the oceans and then across the continent—and then the embrace of place. In the hands of historians like Frederick Jackson Turner, the migratory experience became the definning characteristic of American life. His argument was so powerful that even his most determined critics could only emphasize movement, though generally of a different sort. Oscar Handlin, reflecting upon his own work as a historian of American immigration, famously declared, “Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history.”42
Handlin’s appreciation of migration as the master narrative of American history strangely was never extended to African Americans. For some, to concede as much was to incorporate them into American history as equal to others. Differences in the nature and timing of the arrival of Africans and Europeans (forced and free) served as a means of excluding people of African descent from the ideology that celebrated the United States as a global sanctuary from oppression and as fostering material improvement for all. Writing in 1920, historian Carl Russell Fish, a pioneer student of American immigration, denied black people a place in the history of the United States for just this reason. Their “enforced migration” precluded the possibilities of self-improvement that were at the heart of the American ethos. Lerone Bennett, writing some forty years later, agreed—although for different reasons. If the new American republic’s foundational ideology saw the nation, in the words of its first president, as a refuge for “the oppressed and persecuted of all nations,” what place could there be for enslaved peoples of African descent?43
For others, the incorporation of African Americans into the master narrative denied the exceptional nature of the black experience: the long, violent nightmare of enslavement, segregation, disfranchisement, and poverty. “African Americans,” flatly declared one economist, “are the descendants of slaves, not immigrants.” “Unlike the Irish, Poles, Jews or Italians,” insisted a careful student of Chicago’s ghetto, “Negroes banded together not to enjoy a common linguistic, cultural and religious tradition, but because a systematic pattern of discrimination left them no alternative.” Others have dismissed the possibility on principled ground, observing that the employment of the very word “immigrant” for enslaved Africans “strips the language of its symbolic meaning.”44
The debate concerning the special character of the African American versus the European American experiences has turned nasty at times. The comparison of migrations often became the occasion for invidious matches as to who suffered the greatest hardships, the most wrenching losses, or the most devastating separations. The differences among the “uprooted” counted for more than their shared experience. Perverse competitions as to relative damage meted out by restrictive covenants, redlining, or the barrage of vile epithets—dago, gook, greaser, hunky, kike, and nigger—demonstrate that shared experience breeds contempt as well as camaraderie.
Without question, the organized, systematic removals wrought by the slave trade were categorically different from migrations based on the belly or on fear—no matter whether the fear was generated by political persecution or by environmental disaster. Forced migrants did not make the choice between improving their circumstances in their homeland or someplace else, although they too were subject to the vagaries of the business cycle. The crimp and the labor contractor—like the slave trader—were in the business of labor recruitment. But no matter how rapacious and exploitive they viewed themselves and were viewed by others as different than slave traders, no matter how similar their objectives, methods, or even motives. Similarly, unlike indentured servants, debtors, or redemptioners, who might have conceived a term of servitude as a bargain that exchanged labor for the promise of a better life in the future, those who arrived in slave ships could hardly conjure any advantage derived from their passage.
What can be said for the differences between European free migrants and those black men and women caught in the slave trade also applies to the various movements of black men and women, for here too the distinction between choice and coercion is manifest. The men and women forcibly transported across the Atlantic or across the North American continent differed from those who chose to leave the South for the North in the twentieth century or come to the United States in the twenty-first, no matter how desperate their situation. Africans ensnared in the slave trade were not trying to improve their material circumstance, enrich their social lives, or escape from political oppression. As free men or women, even the most impoverished black sharecroppers fleeing the hellhounds of landlord debt and Klan violence had some choice of destinations and traveling companions. They could imagine a better life in a better place.45
Black men and women who evacuated the plantation South for the urban North in the first half of the twentieth century hardly left by choice, although there were many reasons for them to do so. The decision of planters and furnishing merchants, often with the direct assistance of the state, to protect their own profit at the expense of the well-being of black laborers made it impossible for many to remain in the rural South. The men and women who were expelled from the plantations that they, their parents, and perhaps their grandparents had worked on often migrated north with great reluctance. Some left only under threat of bodily harm. They fretted about leaving home, severing the network of kin in which they were enmeshed, and losing the familiar landscape that they knew and loved. They feared the unknown and were skeptical about the promise of freedom and opportunity among white Northerners. But they were also excited about the new possibilities. The joy that radiated from the railroad cars cannot be compared to the misery emanating from slave ships. While observers regularly compared the slave coffle to a funerary train, literally a march toward death, no one—not ever—described the trains and buses that carried black people northward in such a manner. The decisions that shaped the migrations of black men and women who left the South were largely their own, beginning with how and who and where and sometimes when. Traveling on their own or with family, they carried numerous possessions. Whatever pain accompanied the loss of the familiar and whatever anxieties attended the fear of the new, escape from the oppression which had dogged them generated an optimism unimagined by those caught in the slave trade. If the forced migration of both the international and internal trades represented social death, the movement north bespoke life and the possibilities that accompanied smashing the shackles of confinement.
The possibility of return, however distant, also distinguished the free from the forced immigrant. The former lived in a dense network of connections, real or fictive. The latter was isolated and alone in a world permanently truncated.46 Perhaps more important, free migrations—far more than forced migrations—generated reverse flows. A large portion of those who ventured across the Atlantic and the Pacific sampled life in the New World and turned on their heels and went home.47 While a handful of enslaved peoples crossed the Atlantic or later the North American continent several times, most did not. Black Southerners who migrated northward, however, commonly returned home, sometimes for short visits, sometimes for an extended stay, and sometimes permanently.
In the late twentieth century, shuttling between Africa, the Caribbean, or other distant places and the United States became even more common, as changes in transportation and communication created new kinds of global connectedness. If the isolation of slaves—their one-way ticket—shaped African American culture during the first three centuries of the history of black America, the mobility of their successors did the same during the last one hundred years. Assessing the circumstances of the men and women who “returned” to the South in the 1970s, anthropologists discovered that returnees had been “born in northern cities, but almost all had been well acquainted with t
heir destination since childhood through school-year and summer residence as well as through repeated visits.”48 Returnees brought the new world back to the old and, in the process, remade the old society. Increasingly, the transmission of culture moved both ways, as movement and place became conjoined in an unbounded process, subverting the notion that culture is formed by a linear process. The new culture, in short, was as much a product as a precipitate of movement.
Those differences reflected the ways in which migrants should be understood. While the motives of forced migrants can be reduced to a function of economic calculus—the market for labor, for example—free migrants have a multitude of reasons for moving beyond that of finding work. The needs of families and kin, the desire to create new societies, and the aspiration for greater political freedom or material prosperity are just some of these. A similar event—war, for example—could have a different effect on both forced and free migrations. While forced migrations created protocols of their own, modern free migrations are governed by all sorts of legal regulations, and affected by many more factors. Migrations of choice-even made under difficult conditions—tended to be much more selective. Forced migrations tend to spew men and women helter-skelter across the countryside.49 The comparative homogeneity of free migrations suggests the ability of migrants to plan their exodus by seeking out information and joining together with family and friends.
The unique experience of black people as slaves and as free people cannot be reduced to another version of the classic struggle of immigrants for recognition, acceptance, and success. Frederick Douglass was neither John Altgeld nor Carl Schurz, and Bigger Thomas was neither David Levinsky nor Mike Dobrejcak. The centrality of white supremacy has distinguished the history of black people from that of the Germans, Irish, Italians, Japanese, Jews, Mexicans, and others. 50 The former lost their freedom in crossing Atlantic, while the latter often celebrated their arrival in America as an expansion of their liberty; the former’s arrival was understood in terms of their unnatural injection into American society and their contested incorporation, while the latter have been seen as a continuous, even natural process of absorption or what some have called assimilation.
The assimilative power of American pluralism apparently had little effect on people of African ancestry. “Ethnics”—a term rarely applied to people of African descent—might be incorporated into the melting pot and given a ticket to full inclusion into American society, but black arrivals were not. The concept of the melting pot (and its close relatives: assimilation, amalgamation, and cultural pluralism), whatever its utility for the study of European and Asian immigration, has been given little weight with respect to the forced arrival of Africans.
Such notions of assimilation fail to accommodate the effervescent diversity of American society or its lack of a single hegemonic core in favor of more complex cultural reciprocities by which American society (or perhaps any society) was continually refashioned. Still, few have applied the idioms of pluralism (Horace Kallen’s “democracy of nationality” or Israel Zangwill’s “melting pot”) to African Americans. The “process of interpenetration and fusion in which persons and groups acquire the memories, sentiments, and attitudes of other persons or groups, and, by sharing their experience and history, are incorporated with them in a common cultural life” is generally not part of the study of African American life, although people of African descent have been “interpenetrated” in American life and “fused” with peoples of Native American, European, and Asian descent. While scholars repeatedly revisit the debate over the assimilation of Europeans and others deemed “white” in terms of ethnicity (a concept invented for just that purpose), religion, or work experience, people of African descent remain of one piece, primordially rooted with a presumed collective identity.51
The putative staying power of ethnicity—suggested by the mid-twentieth-century popularity of such books as Beyond the Melting Pot or The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics—has seemingly drawn the experiences of white and black immigrants together.52 Yet profound differences in the experiences of blacks and whites even in the post—Brown v. Board era validate the categories of race and ethnicity, which are often used in opposition to one another.53 Studies of whiteness affirm that race remains a driving force in understanding American life.54
But all human beings share a migratory history. That ubiquity integrates African American experience into world history, modern history, and American history (and vice versa).55 From the largest historical perspective, the great migrations of African American peoples straddled the great historical divides created by the expansion of Western capitalism and informed—perhaps determined—the lives of peoples in Europe and Asia as well as Africa and the Americas. Between the middle of the fifteenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries, most of the men and women crossing the Atlantic were forcibly repeopling the Americas in the wake of the catastrophic destruction of Native American peoples and the reluctance of Europe’s underclass to leave their homelands. In a like fashion, the massive expansion of industrial production—and the subsequent demand for foodstuff and other commodities—during the nineteenth century initiated both the surge of Europeans to the Americas and an internal migration (free and forced) within the Americas. The emancipationist century—the years between the 1780s and the 1880s when one Atlantic nation after another proscribed the trade in persons—set loose another massive movement of peoples, as Asians, many of them contracted, indentured, and shanghaied, also found their way to the Americas. In the United States, the dual migration—Europeans settling on the East Coast, Asians on the West—tethered African Americans to the Southern states. Not until the spigot of European and Asian migration shut during the second decade of the twentieth century would black people begin to move north. Finally, most late-twentieth-century migrations reflected both the movement of highly trained technicians and managers from the third world to the first—the so-called brain drain—and the desperate flight of poor people from low-wage to high-wage nations.
From such a global perspective, the seventeenth-century slave trader in El Mina, the eighteenth-century crimp in Bristol, and the nineteenth-century labor contractor in Pozen performed the same function, and the enslaved African, dragooned English sailor, shanghaied Chinese peasant, and desperate Polish peasant likewise stood in a similar relationship to the making and unmaking of a transnational labor force that was driven by the expansion of commodity production. The enslaved African, impressed Chinese coolie, and the Polish peasant found themselves swept up in a process of rural dispossession and urban proletarianization. Moreover, these massive changes in the world economy were often preceded by environmental disasters—droughts and floods, famines and plagues—on one hand, and political violence—civil wars, state-sponsored terrorism, genocide, and ethnic cleansings—on the other, which made life unbearably difficult. These upheavals would eventually reach into every corner of the globe.
The global perspective and the long view of human history call into question distinctions between coerced migrations and voluntary migrations.56 For while many migrants moved on their own free will, the labor drafts and political discord that accompanied these migrations strained the very meaning of human volition. English peasants driven from the land by enclosures, Irish tenants avoiding starvation, Poles running before Cossacks, Jews escaping pogroms, Armenians dodging Turks, and Native Americans fleeing the U.S. cavalry, or Ugandans, Croats, and Laos escaping the murderous ethnic cleansers could hardly be called free immigrants.57 Moreover, the process of settlement, integration, and assimilation of free and forced migrations had much in common as men and women whose primary identity had nothing to do with nation-states were transformed into nationals of one sort or another. The processes whereby enslaved Angolans and Wolofs became Africans followed much the same path as Genoese and Tuscans who became Italians or Hausas and Igbos who became Nigerians. Although some moved in chains and others by choice, transplantation transformed networks of kin groups into new
peoples.
While the distinction between forced and free migrations cloaks the fact that all migrations involve cultural transformations, these various migrations also mask the essential reality that even the most traumatic uprootings do not necessarily dissolve the migrants’ humanity, their sense of self, and their determination to shape their own lives. Forced migrants, like free ones, carried with them ideas about family, work, religion, and much else that they put into practice at the first opportunity, albeit in different circumstances. Emphasizing the distinction between the voluntary and the coerced, moreover, revivifies the myth of stability—the timelessness of premodern society and fixity of peasant life. Such notions may be useful foils for understanding the hyperactivity identified with modernity, but they have long since been exposed as hollow stereotypes. Geographic movement, as students of migration have demonstrated, has been and remains the normal condition of mankind.
