The Making of African America

by Ira Berlin

  2 The number of Africans sent across the Atlantic to slavery in the Americas has been subject to considerable debate. The latest and most authoritative estimate is 10.7 million, with some 3.6 percent arriving in the territories that eventually became part of the United States. David Eltis, “The U.S. Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1644—1867: An Assessment,” Civil War History 54 (2008), 353.

  3 Focusing on the four great migrations that frame the history of people of African descent in the United States does not reduce the significance of the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of lesser migrations. Historians have rightly marked some of these—the eighteenth-century movement from tidewater to piedmont, the early-nineteenth-century flight from Saint Domingue to the mainland of the United States (and the later one following the United States occupation of Haiti), the post-Civil War movement of black “carpetbaggers” from north to south, the late-nineteenth-century exodus from Mississippi to Kansas, and most especially the twentieth-century migrations from the Caribbean—as critical to any understanding of African American and American life. To the social transformation they wrought and the renaissances they initiated can be added similar transformations set in motion by smaller, generally ignored, migrations, as for example: the post-Revolutionary evacuation of the Northern countryside, the postemancipation westward drift, or the post-Civil Rights return to the South. Focusing on the four great migrations of African and African American peoples—the rivers, not the rills—does nothing to diminish the importance of the lesser migrations; indeed the great migrations cannot be understood apart from these smaller ones. But trying to address all of these movements reduces the African American past to one great itinerancy—a sort of endless peregrination—and expunges the sense of place that so informed black life.

  4 George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, 41 vols. (Westport CT, 1972—79), ser. 1, vol. 10, pt. 5, 226—227; American Slave, ser. 1, vol. 12, pt. 2, 119.

  5 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “New Negroes, Migration, and Cultural Exchange” in Elizabeth Hutton Turner, ed., Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series (Washington DC, 1993), 17—21; Jutta Lorensen, “Between Image and Word, Color and Time: Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration Series,” African American Review 40 (2006), 572. Another black artist deeply touched by the movement north was Walter Ellison, whose 1935 Train Station also gave a sense of the central role of movement in African American life. Jamie W. Johnson, “Instructional Resources: Journeys Through Art: Tracing the Great Migration in Three American Paintings,” Art Education 55 (2002), 25-31.

  6 On African American literature and migration see Farah Jasmine Griffin, “Who Set You Flowin’?”: The African-American Migration Narrative (New York, 1995) and Lawrence Rodgers, Canaan Bound: The African American Great Migration Novel (Chicago, 1997).

  7 Langston Hughes, The Big Sea: An Autobiography (New York, 1940), 23.

  8 Langston Hughes, One-Way cket (New York, 1949), 61—62; “Sweet Home Chicago,” http://www.lyricsfreak.com/b/blues+brothers/sweet+home+chicago_20020736.html.

  9 Among the more useful theoretical works on the significance of “place” is E. Relph, Place and Placelessness (London, 1976); David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge MA, 1996); Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis MN, 1994).

  10 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge MA, 1993).

  11 Quoted in Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York, 2007), 305. For the role of fictive kin, see Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth ofAfrican-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (Boston, [1976] 1992), 62—79.

  12 For insightful discussions of the “discourse and etiquette of place” within the context of the late-nineteenth-century South, see James R. Grossman, “ ‘Amiable Peasantry’ or ‘Social Burden’: Constructing a Place for Black Southerners” in Rick Halpern and Jonathan Morris, eds., American Exceptionalism?: US Working-Class Formation in an International Context (New York, 1997), 221—43, and Angel David Nieves and Leslie M. Alexander, “We Shall Independent Be”: African American Place Making and the Struggle to Claim Space in the United States (Boulder CO, 2008).

  13 Clifton Taulbert, The Last Train North quoted in Malaika Adero, ed., Up South: Stories, Studies, and Letters of this Century’s Black Migrations (New York, 1993), xii.

  14 Quoted in Walter Johnson, “Introduction” in Johnson, ed., The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas (New Haven CT, 2005), 2.

  15 Toni Morrison, “Rootedness: The Ancestor in African American Fiction” in Mari Evans, ed., Black Women Writers: A Critical Evaluation (Garden City NY, 1984), 339-45.

  16 The point is made forcefully by Marc S. Rodriguez, “Placing Human Migration in Comparative Perspective” in Rodriguez and Anthony T. Grafton, eds., Migration in History: Human Migration in Comparative Perspective (Rochester NY, 2007), ix-x.

  17 J. Lorand Matory, Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé (Princeton NJ, 2005), 3.

  18 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge MA, 1982).

  19 Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (New York, 1881), 97; New York Times, Nov. 28, 1863, quoted in Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York, 1979), 307.

  20 Quoted in Ira Berlin et al., eds., “The Terrain of Freedom: The Struggle over the Meaning of Free Labor in the U.S. South,” History Workshop 22 (1986), 127—28; Dylan C. Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill NC, 2003), 158; Julie Saville, The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina, 1860—1870 (Cambridge UK, 1994), chap. 1; Julia Peterkin, Roll, Jordan, Roll (New York, 1933), II.

  21 All quoted in James C. Cobb, Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity (New York, 2005), 268; also Helen Taylor, Circling Dixie: Contemporary Southern Culture through a Transatlantic Lens (New Brunswick NJ, 2001), 173. “Home,” reports Geneva Smitherman in her dictionary of African American colloquialisms (1994), is “a generic reference to any area south of the Mason-Dixon Line.... Thus, ‘My Momma nem went home last month,’ does not refer to the current home of the speaker, but to a place in the South where the speaker and her family are from.” Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner (Boston, 1994), 136. I would like to thank Elsa Barkley Brown for bringing this reference to my attention.

  22 Gates, “New Negroes, Migration, and Cultural Exchange,” 20.

  23 Cobb, Away Down South, especially chap. 10; Powledge quoted on p. 264.

  24 Adero, ed., Up South: Stories, 55.

  25 Robert N. Brown and John Cromartie, “Black Homeplace Migration to the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta: Ambiguous Journeys, Uncertain Outcomes,” Southeastern Geographer 46 (2006), 189—214. Quoted on 190—92.

  26 Quoted in Cobb, Away Down South, 269.

  27 Tony Burroughs, Black Roots: A Beginner’s Guide to Tracing the African American Family Tree (New York, 2001).

  28 Richard Wright, Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth (New York, 1966), 284. Similar sentiments were voiced by the Harvard-educated historian Elizabeth Arroyo, declaring that she felt “southern the same way an Irish American feels Irish. My roots are in the South, and southern worlds and ways are a part of me.” See Cobb, Away Down South, 287. See also Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York, 1978), 364.

  29 Piri Thomas, Down These Mean Streets (New York, 1967), 138. For a similar journey back to Africa, Saidiya V. Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York, 2007). The general phenomenon is brilliantly addressed in James T. Campbell, Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787—2005 (New York, 2006). I would like to thank Julie Greene for the reference to Piri Thomas’s autobiography.

  30 A point made with great concr
eteness by Anthony E. Kaye, Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South (Chapel Hill NC, 2007).

  31 Morrison, “Rootedness,” 343.

  32 The black belt refers to the three hundred mainly contiguous counties that stretched across the South from South Carolina to Texas in which, by the mid-nineteenth century, black people composed the majority.

  33 Shane White and Graham White, Stylin’: African American Expressive Culture from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit (Ithaca NY, 1998), 37—62, 168—91.

  34 Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York, 1987), 3—5; Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill NC, 1998), 209—13; Benjamin Quarles, “The Revolutionary War as a Black Declaration of Independence” in Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman, eds., Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution (Charlottesville VA, 1983), 283—301; Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Exodus!: Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America (Chicago, 2000); Molefi Kete Asante, An Afrocentric Manifesto: Toward an African Renaissance (Cambridge MA, 2007).

  35 Brilliantly demonstrated by Matory, Black Atlantic Religion, the phrase is drawn from p. 43.

  36 Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 6; Alan Lomax, “Folk Song Style,” American Anthropologist 61 (1959), 930; Ronald Radano, Lying up a Nation: Race and Black Music (Chicago, 2003), 96—102; LeRoi Jones, Blues People: The Negro Music in White America (New York, 1965), x. For Ralph Ellison, “the blues were a total way of life, and major expression of an attitude toward life,” see Shadow and Act (New York, 1964), 78. The same might be said for the spirituals in an earlier age and hip-hop in a later one. Also see James M. Trotter, Music and Some Highly Musical People (Chicago, [1880] 1969).

  37 Brown and Cromartie, “Black Homeplace Migration,” 191. There is a long history of essentializing the musical nature of black people. Ronald Radano follows that strand of romantic thought in “Denoting Difference: The Writing of the Slave Spirituals,” Critical Inquiry 22 (1996), 506—44.

  38 Toni Morrison makes the same point about the sermon in “Rootedness”; quoted in B. B. King with David Ruiz, Blues All Around Me: The Autobiography of B. B. King (New York, 1996), 17.

  39 J. H. Kwabena Nketia, The Music of Africa (New York, 1974); Dena J. Epstein and Rosita M. Sands, “Secular Folk Music” in Mellonee V. Burnim and Portia K. Maultsby, eds., African American Music: An Introduction (New York, 2006), 37—43; John M. Chernoff, African Rhythm and African Sensibility: Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms (Chicago, 1979), chap. 4; Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 6—7.

  40 Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 140; Shane White and Graham White, The Sounds of Slavery (Boston, 2005), xix; Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 186; Joe W. Trotter, “The African American Worker in Slavery and Freedom” in The African American Experience: An Historiographical and Bibliographical Guide (Westport CT, 2001), 364.

  41 What John and Alan Lomax said about the origins of the Blues—the unknown moment “when a lonely Negro man plowing in some hot, silent river bottom” raised his voice—can be extended to the spirituals, jazz, and hip-hop. American Ballads and Folks Songs (New York, 1924), 191.

  42 Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that Made the American People (Boston, 1952), 3.

  43 Carl Russell Fish, “The Pilgrim and the Melting Pot,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 7 (1920), 187—205; Lerone Bennett, Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America, 4th ed. (Chicago, 1969); quoted in Reed Ueda, “Immigration in Global Perspective” in Mary C. Waters and Reed Ueda with Helen B. Murrow, eds., The New Americans: A Guide to Immigration since 1965 (Cambridge MA, 2007), 27.

  44 Steven Shulman, ed., The Impact of Immigration on African Americans (New Brunswick NJ, 2004), x; Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890—1920 (Chicago, 1967), 228—29; Nell I. Painter, “Forward” in Trotter, ed., Great Migration, viii.

  45 Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, “Migrations, Migration History, History: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives” in Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, eds., Migration, Migration History, History (Bern, 1997), 11—14.

  46 Rediker, The Slave Ship, 106; Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge MA, 2007), 7—8.

  47 Frank Thistlewaite, “Migration from Europe Overseas in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries” in Rudolph J. Vecoli and Suzanne M. Sinke, eds., A Century of European Migrations, 1830—1930 (Urbana IL, 1991); Mark Wyman, Round Trip America: The Immigrants Return to Europe, 1880—1930 (Ithaca NY, 1993).

  48 John Cromartie and Carol B. Stack, “Reinterpretation of Black Return and Nonreturn Migration to the South, 1975—1980,” Geographical Review 79 (1989), 298.

  49 Charles Tilly, “Transplanted Networks” in Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, ed., Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology, and Politics (New York, 1990), 83. However, David Eltis sees chain migrations created by “shipping patterns and credit arrangements,” even where—in the case of the slave trade—the migrants lacked choice. David Eltis, “Free and Coerced Migration from the Old World to the New” in Eltis, ed., Coerced and Free Migration (Stanford CA, 2002), 27.

  50 David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, rev. ed. (London, 1999); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge MA, 1998); Thomas Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890—1945 (New York, 2003).

  51 Russell A. Kazal, “Revisiting Assimilation: The Rise, Fall, and Reappraisal of a Concept of American Ethnic History,” American Historical Review 100 (1995), 437—71, quoted on p. 444. Also see Philip Kasinitz, Caribbean New York: Black Immigrants and the Politics of Race (Ithaca NY, 1992), 4—6.

  52 Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City, 2nd ed. (Cambridge MA, 1970); Michael Novak, The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics: Politics and Culture in the Seventies (New York, 1973).

  53 Victoria Hattam connects race with heredity, body and blood, fixity, singularity, homogeneity, boundedness, and hierarchy, while ethnicity is identified with culture, language and religion, malleability, plurality, heterogeneity, openness, and equality. In the Shadow of Race: Jews, Latinos, and Immigrant Politics in the United States (Chicago, 2007), quoted on p. 2. Also see John Higham, “The Amplitude of Ethnic History: An American Story” in Nancy Foner and George M. Frederickson, eds., Not Just Black and White: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States (New York, 2004), 61—82. “[I]t sometimes seems as if the people who study immigration or race or ethnicity—or all these together—inhabit two different intellectual worlds.” Stephen Cornell and Douglas Hartmann, “Conceptual Confusions and Divides: Race, Ethnicity, and the Study of Immigration,” ibid., p. 23.

  54 Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness; also see note 47, above.

  55 For a heroic attempt to do just this, see Dirk Hoerder, Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium (Durham NC, 2002). The process remaking black society—“creolization”—is given a different name than the processes remaking of European American society—“transformation.” Rarely are these two concepts addressed collectively, although the processes they describe are precisely the same. Few scholars maintain that African American nationality, like white ethnicity, can be—and have been—reinvented in the course of the American past.

  56 “Historians probably view,” writes David Eltis in a broad-ranging discussion of free and forced migrations, “most migrations as forced at some level as social and ecological conditions at the point of origins might be such that individuals have no choice but to leave.” Eltis, “Introduction” and “Free and Coerced Migration from the Old World to the New” in Eltis, ed., Coerced and Free
Migration, 5—6, 49—60.

  57 Although the slave trade remains the largest forced migration in human history, the number of forced migrations seems to be increasing. See Reed Ueda, “Immigration in Global Historical Perspective” in Waters and Ueda, eds., The New Americans, 20.

  58 Alan Kraut, Huddled Masses: The Immigrant in American Society, 1880—1921 (Arlington Heights, IL, 1982), 57; Peter C. Marzio, ed., A Nation of Nations: The People Who Came to America as Seen Through Objects and Documents Exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution (New York, 1976), 431, 438.

  Chapter Two: The Transatlantic Passage

  1 In the era of the transatlantic slave trade, “national” identities had little meaning to most of the peoples of Africa. The African economies and societies promoted parochial identifications with village and family. Large states existed in some parts of the continent, but they had a weak hold on individual men and women. Joseph Miller, “Central Africa during the Era of the Slave Trade, 1490s to 1850s” in Linda M. Heywood, ed., Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora (Cambridge UK, 2002), 35—39, 41—43, 48—49; James H. Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African Portuguese World, 1441—1770 (Chapel Hill NC, 2003), 22—30; James Horn and Phillip D. Morgan, “Settlers and Slaves: European and African Migrations to Early Modern British America” in Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas, eds., The Creation of the British Atlantic World (Baltimore MD, 2005), 40—41.

  2 The confusion, sometimes purposeful, of the identity of captive Africans is manifest in the complaint made upon the arrival of a slave ship in Barbados: “Those ... by whom you stild good Gold Coast negroes we here found not to be so, but of several nations and languages as Alampo the worst Negroes, Papas & some of unknown parts & a few right Gold Coast negroes amongst them.” Quoted in Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge MA, 2007), 106. Also Herbert S. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge UK, 1999), 115. Klein emphasizes the ignorance of the European traders of the interior: “They only had the vaguest notions of the names of interior groups or their placement and relative importance.”