The Making of African America

by Ira Berlin

  Together the new sounds of gospel and the urban blues inspired the emergence of rhythm and blues and later rock and roll. Ray Charles and especially Sam Cooke, among the leading architects of the new sounds, were two extraordinary musical talents and shrewd businessmen who not only deftly mixed the older forms but also promoted their own music. Cooke made his own bookings and eventually established his own record label. But no one could control the pedigree of the rapidly changing musical forms, especially under the intense pressure of commercialization. R&B, with its insistent beat and infectious lyrics, was repackaged in countless ways, often to make it attractive to a white audience even when performed by black musicians, and adopted by white musicians to play to black audiences. Still, there was no denying its origins. The Civil Rights movement marched to its beat and Motown became an emblem of Black Pride.74

  The commercial success of rock and roll blurred the themes of movement and place, although they remained especially clear in the plaintive wail of the blues. Blind Blake’s “Detroit Bound Blues,” Bessie Smith’s “Chicago Bound Blues,” and Henry Townsend’s “A Ram-blin’ Mind” were among the songs that expressed wrenching pain and an eager desire to leave the South, just as Lizzie Miles’s “Cotton Belt Blues,” Tommy McClennan’s “Cotton Patch Blues,” and Roosevelt Sykes’s “Southern Blues” echoed the sense of loss that accompanied the third passage. Others—like Ben Lorre’s “Roamin’ Blues”—captured the continuous motion of northward movement:Left Chicago in the summer, New York in the fall,

  Detroit in the winter didn’t prove a thing at all

  But still others captured the emotional attachments to place, as in Robert Johnson’s “Sweet Home Chicago”:Oh, baby, don’t you want to go?

  Back to the land of California, to my sweet home, Chicago.

  Indeed, no part of the migratory experience escaped the blues men and women: the aspiration for change, the frustrations of life in the North, and the desire to return home—as in Memphis Minnie’s and Joe McCoy’s “I’m Going Back Home.”75

  Ironically, jazz—the musical signature of the third passage—only occasionally spoke the words of movement and place, but it captured their contrapuntal relationship not in its lyrics but in its instrumentality. Jazz too emerged from the plantation South and its capital city, New Orleans, where a variety of native musical traditions mixed with those of the Caribbean and then traveled north, much like the people themselves, moving in small jumps from city to city: New Orleans to St. Louis to Chicago, and then points east—Philadelphia and New York—or west—San Francisco and Los Angeles.76

  Like gospel and the blues, jazz (in some ways instrumental blues) also drew on the long tradition of improvisation and syncopation and utilized the call-and-response form. But jazz expanded the range of harmonic complexity and placed the emphasis on the instrumental rather than the vocal, and the vocal form most associated with jazz—scat—seemed oblivious to either movement or place. Still, the familiar references could be found in pieces from Jelly Roll Morton’s “Black Bottom” in 1926 to Wynton Marsalis’s “Congo Square” in 2006. Duke Ellington’s theme, “Take the ‘A’ Train,” which was written by his friend and musical collaborator Billy Strayhorn, guided newcomers directly to the center of the new African American world, Harlem’s Sugar Hill.

  You must take the “A” Train to Sugar Hill

  Way up in Harlem

  By the 1960s, as the third great migration drew to a close, African American music seemed to be shaking free from its historical moorings. Black people were both in place and everyplace. Yet, as in times past, the stasis in black life would not last long. During the last third of the twentieth century, black life would again be remade, as a new diaspora brought millions of people of African descent to the United States and, with it, a new music.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Global Passages

  By the third quarter of the twentieth century, African American people were firmly entrenched in urban America. The epic transcontinental journey had been completed, and nearly as many black people resided in the Northern and Western states as in the Southern ones. Their Northern base provided the political leverage to overthrow the system of de jure segregation, remaking black life and the nation along with it. The transformation of American society allowed some of the children and grandchildren of those who had fled the South to reverse field and return to the land of their ancestors. It too had been transformed, so that, as in the North, black Southerners identified as fully with the city as they once had with the countryside. The agricultural past that had been central to African American life for more than three centuries was a distant memory for black people. Like most Americans, they worked in offices and shops rather than in fields and factories. Rather than follow mule-turned furrows, black people navigated the streets and alleys of the inner city. The most visible black men and women were no longer sharecroppers and washerwomen, but athletes, entertainers, public intellectuals, and not a few aspiring politicians. Hip-hop and MTV had replaced spirituals and juke joints.

  Shaped by the forces unleashed by the fall of Jim Crow and the collapse of industrial America, the structure of black society was radically altered. The Old Settlers, with their dependence on white patrons, were long gone, as was the new elite with its captive black clientele. In their place stood a professional and managerial class whose education and occupations differed little from that of other upward-striving Americans. Their ambitions, patterns of consumption, and lifestyle so followed that of bourgeoisies the world over that some commentators spoke of the declining significance of race.

  But if much had changed in African American life, much remained the same. Race had taken a new form, but had not disappeared or even been attenuated. Black people remained disproportionately at the bottom of American society, denied access to good jobs, condemned to the worst housing, and locked in poverty. The majority of black Americans had yet to enter the much-heralded new black middle class. Those who did—like their predecessors—had just a fraction of the material resources of their white counterparts. Members of the black middle class lived on the edge, ever fearful of losing their privileged place and sliding into a swollen proletariat. As in centuries past, commentators and politicos defined black life by its most vulnerable members. Whereas once they dwelled upon the benighted slave and the eternal peasant, now they emphasized the urban underclass’s seemingly immutable culture of poverty.

  Lost among the attributes that allegedly defined black Americans was another seemingly immutable characteristic: their overwhelmingly American nativity. While white America had been continually reconstructed by waves of European immigrants, the vast majority of black people—perhaps more than any other group of Americans, save for Native Americans—could trace their ancestry to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For more than 150 years between the official close of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808 and the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965, few black Africans or foreign-born people of African descent had augmented the African American population. During the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, when Europeans totaling in the millions annually flooded into the United States, African immigrants could be counted in the hundreds. Most of these were fair-skinned peoples who derived from Egypt, Morocco, and South Africa, along with a small contingent of Afro-Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands. In yoo, only 20,000 black people of foreign birth resided in the United States. A short-lived influx from the circum-Caribbean during the first decades of the twentieth century remained the striking exception. Set in motion by the construction of the Panama Canal, some 150,000 Barbadians, Jamaicans, Trinidadians, and other black Antilleans entered the United States under rules that allowed unlimited entry from the Western Hemisphere. In 1924, new national-origins restrictions limited immigration from the Caribbean, although some West Indians continued to gain entry under the British quota. That codicil was eliminated and then briefly reinstated during World War II, when the United States government issue
d short-term visas to Jamaican agricultural workers. Still, at midcentury, the foreign-born black population totaled 114,000. Even these exceptions proved the rule. “[T]here was relatively little in the way of new black in-migration to the United States since well before the end of slavery,” explained a distinguished demographer in a 1978 survey, “and because black emigration from the nation has not been significant in number, the assumption of a closed population is not too unrealistic.”1

  Then, with the suddenness of the earlier transfers of black peoples from Africa to America, from the seaboard South to the interior, and from the rural South to the urban North, all began to change. During the last third of the twentieth century, dark-skinned peoples of African descent from all over the world descended upon the United States. The influx of people of African descent initiated yet another transformation of black society. Still under way at the beginning of the twenty-first century, this fourth great migration—like the earlier three—promises to remake African American life, much as rappers had begun to remake African American music.

  While earlier passages began with the crack of a whip, the slam of an auctioneer’s gavel, or the whispered promise of a better job, the new migration had its origins in a fit of absentmindedness. The congressmen who authored the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 evinced no particular desire to enlarge the black population, let alone repeople the United States with foreign-born men and women of African descent. Yet making skilled-based merit and family ties, rather than national origins, the criteria for entry into the United States jarred the door open for peoples of African descent. Allowing independent states a quota of 20,000 immigrants, not including the immediate family members of American citizens, threw it open. Subsequent modifications to the 1965 law—particularly the 1986 Immigration and Control Act, which granted the possibility of amnesty to numerous illegal immigrants and introduced the so-called lottery system—only enlarged the portal. Still others gained entry as political refugees and asylees.2

  During the next forty years, black men and women poured into the United States at an ever-increasing rate. Nations whose citizens had been denied entry or limited to quotas in the hundreds sent thousands. As Caribbean and African colonies gained independence, the number of such places multiplied; newly independent nations, which previously had not been recognized as places of embarkation, became sources of large-scale immigration.

  The new American laws and regulations made entry into the United States possible, but, as with earlier passages, the matter of labor—both the need for labor and the needs of laborers—was never far from the surface. For American employers, the dynamics of a global marketplace—both for cheap, unskilled labor and for highly skilled workers—were becoming increasingly evident. For workers, particularly those residing in the low-wage, low-standard-of-living portions of the greater Caribbean and continental Africa, the United States was an increasingly attractive destination. Post-World War II decolonization had been accompanied by promises of prosperity and democracy. During the 1960s, the initial success of many newly established Caribbean and African states waned amid hurricanes and droughts, falling commodity prices, poor planning, and rampant corruption. Economic collapse ignited political turmoil in the form of military coups that empowered repressive regimes, eroded civil society, and initiated civil wars, expulsions, and genocide. Hundreds of thousands, eventually millions, of desperate men and women scrambled to find safe harbors from natural disasters, impoverishment, predatory regimes, and ethnic cleansers. Reclaiming the nation’s heritage as a global sanctuary, American presidents—with varying degrees of enthusiasm—offered asylum to these desperate men and women. An increasingly assertive Congressional Black Caucus lobbied to assure that Caribbean and African asylees received the protection of these executive orders. As refugees were not subject to the numerical quotas governing immigration, they added to the total number entering the United States.3

  The presidential edicts and new legislation hardly met needs of the men and women set adrift. But the possibility of entry into the United States encouraged many to try, legally if possible and illegally if not. Some, having entered on short-term visas, stayed without official certification. As their numbers and desperation grew, amnesty programs legitimated their standing. Those not granted amnesty often had their stay extended by congressionally mandated Temporary Protected Status, allowing illegal entries time to secure asylum. Still others took advantage of the 1990 Diversity Immigrant Visa Program designed to incorporate émigrés from nations with previously low rates of immigration to the United States. But many of those who failed to secure the protection of these programs simply remained illegally.4

  During the 1970s, the number of black people of foreign birth entering the United States increased at an ever-faster rate, as the United States became a destination for the African diaspora. In the decades that followed, the rate continued to accelerate; more arrived in the 1980s than in the 1970s and even more in 1990s than in the 1980s. Their numbers continue to swell into the twenty-first century, so that the black population closed for centuries, opened to increase from the outside. During the last decade of the twentieth century immigrants accounted for fully one-quarter of the growth of the African American population.5

  While the diverse definitions of race and the vagaries of counting by national origin make it impossible to calculate the precise number of black arrivals, several million men and women of African descent entered the United States in the last third of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first. Although they were but a small part of the massive migration that followed the 1965 reform of immigration, the newcomers transformed black society. Whereas less than one black person in one hundred was foreign born prior to 1965, by 2000 the proportion was one in twenty. By the early twenty-first century, one-tenth of all black Americans were immigrants or the children of immigrants.6

  People of African descent arrived from all parts of the globe. Among the new arrivals were black Britons, some of whom descended from the Loyal Blacks who had taken refuge in England in the years that followed the American Revolution. Others were the children of black American soldiers who had served in places as disparate as Germany, Korea, and Vietnam. Yet others came from Australasia and the Middle East, but the vast majority of the newcomers derived from the Caribbean and Africa.

  Unlike most of the new black arrivals, Caribbean peoples had established a presence in the United States early in the twentieth century. In the intervening years, many had obtained American citizenship, making it possible for them to sponsor members of their immediate families. Some of the new arrivals drew on these kin connections, but most entered on their own. Among the first were English-speaking immigrants from former British colonies, whose ties with their old colonial overlord had withered after Britain closed its borders to its former subjects. Jamaicans were the most numerous, but many black newcomers originated in smaller West Indian islands like Antigua, Barbados, Montserrat, and St. Lucia. These black men and women were soon joined by an influx of refugees from the larger Caribbean—Cuba, El Salvador, Guyana, and Nicaragua—many of whom were black at least by the conventions established in the United States.7 The largest group of black refugees whose native language was not English arrived from Haiti. Desperately trying to escape endemic poverty and the heavy, dictatorial hand of the Duvalier family and its equally despotic successors, they were intercepted by the American Coast Guard, interned, demonized as diseased and politically subversive, and then returned to their homeland. Still, they continued their massive exodus until their desperate plight could not be ignored. All totaled, over two million black migrants arrived from the greater Caribbean after 1965, with more than 900,000 entering American borders in the 1990s. The influx hardly slackened during the first years of the twenty-first century, as many of the earlier immigrants, now American citizens, began to sponsor family members.8

  The African entries followed a similar pattern, with the mixture of immigrants and refugees gro
wing steadily during the last two decades of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first. Their numbers had exploded with the turmoil in Africa, beginning in the early 1960s with the Biafran civil war and continuing through conflicts in Ethiopia, Rwanda, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Sudan. Between 1980 and 2000, the number of immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa doubled and doubled again. In the last decade of the twentieth century, an average of around 40,000 Africans annually entered the United States, and foreign-born Africans increased from 400,000 in 1990 to some 700,000 in 2000. By then, the first arrivals had gained American citizenship and they too could sponsor family members. In 2001, more than half of the 54,000 African immigrants fell under programs that granted preference to the families of American citizens. Most African immigrants originated in Nigeria, whose nationals in the United States totaled some 140,000 at the beginning of the twenty-first century. But the number of Ethiopians, Ghanaians, Kenyans, Liberians, and Somalis were not far behind.

  At the beginning of the twenty-first century, persons of African birth in the United States totaled around one million, according to official federal census totals.9 The actual number may have been much larger. Some arrived illegally, and others entered legally and stayed illegally. But even legal immigrants often avoided census takers and other governmental officials. The 1990 census counted 2,287 Senegalese residing in the United States, although at least 10,000 were living in New York City.10