The Making of African America Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  CHAPTER ONE - Movement and Place in the African American Past

  CHAPTER TWO - The Transatlantic Passage

  CHAPTER THREE - The Passage to the Interior

  CHAPTER FOUR - The Passage to the North

  CHAPTER FIVE - Global Passages

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Index

  OTHER BOOKS BY IRA BERLIN

  Generations of Captivity: A History of African American Slaves

  Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in Mainland North America

  Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South

  EDITED

  Power and Culture: Essays on the American Working Class

  CO-EDITED

  Culture and Cultivation: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas

  Families and Freedom: A Documentary History of African-American Kinship in the Civil War Era

  Free at Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War

  Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation (4 volumes)

  Freedom’s Soldiers: The Black Military Experience and the Civil War

  A Guide to the History of Slavery in Maryland

  Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk About Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation

  Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution

  Slavery in New York

  The Slaves’ Economy: Independent Production by Slaves in the New World

  Slaves No More: Three Essays on Emancipation and the Civil War

  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

  Scholar, Teacher, Friend

  [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

  Prologue

  Some 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.1 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.2 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 ce
lebration 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.3 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.”4

  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.5 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....”6

  But the Immigration and Nationality Act had a profound impact on American life. At the time of its passage, the foreign-born proportion of the American population had fallen to historic lows, in large measure because of the old restrictions. Not since the 1830s, more than a century before, had the foreign-born composed such a tiny portion of the American people. Whatever the United States once was, in 1965 it no longer was a nation of immigrants. During the next four decades, the transformation set in motion by the Immigration and Nationality Act, its subsequent amendments, and the allied executive orders changed that. The number of immigrants legally entering the United States rose sharply, from some 3.3 million in the 1960S to 4.5 million in the 1970S. During the 1980S, a record 7.3 million people of foreign birth entered the United States. Those entering the United States in 1981 doubled that of 1965. In succeeding years, the admissions continued to swell, so that by the beginning of the twenty-first century, the United States accepted immigrants at rates higher than at any time since the 1850S. In the last third of the twentieth century, America’s legally recognized foreign-born population tripled in size. The number of men and women who entered the United States but were not officially recognized added yet more to the total, as the United States was transformed again into an immigrant society.7

  The Immigration and Nationality Act not only changed the number of new arrivals, but also their character. This too was something the authors of the new legislation had not expected, as they had promised, in Kennedy’s words, that “the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset.” But in the 1970S, the number of immigrants from Latin America and Asia began to increase. Before long, they were joined by Africans. Moreover, many new arrivals from the Americas also claimed African descent, as did black peoples from Europe and elsewhere. Although these immigrants represented a small portion of the total immigrant inflow, their arrival initiated a transformation of black America.8

  Perhaps no one paid less attention to the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act than the leaders of the Civil Rights movement, many of whom had witnessed President Johnson signing the new voting rights law. They had smiled broadly as the president distributed the ceremonial pens, and then celebrated a great victory for themselves and their people. Not one, however, joined Johnson several months later at the Statue of Liberty to witness the approval of the new immigration legislation. Preoccupied with the struggle for voting rights, which moved out of Congress and into the courthouses and then onto the streets, the black press hardly noted the occasion. Few African Americans imagined that the expansion of immigration might have as profound an impact on black society as the expansion of the suffrage.

  They would soon learn differently.

  Among the peoples entering the United States after 1965 were millions of men and women of African descent. Prior to that date, the number of black people of foreign birth residing in the United States was so tiny as to be nearly invisible. According to the 1960 census, the proportion was a fraction somewhere far to the right of the decimal point.9 Demographers, noting the small number of African arrivals between the closing of the slave trade in 1808 and the immigration reform of 1965, declared black America a closed population, the product of a century and a half of natural increase.10

  The same was not true at the beginning of the twenty-first century. While by then only 3 percent of the new arrivals derived from Africa itself, the changes set in motion by the Immigration and Nationality Act would transform black America as much as white America.11

  The arrival of foreign-born black people began slowly in the 1960s, and it increased steadily in succeeding decades. During the 1990s, some 900,000 black immigrants entered the United States from the Caribbean and another 400,000 came from Africa, while Europe and Australasia supplied still others, profoundly altering the African American population. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, more Africans had arrived than during the centuries of the slave trade. Other peoples of African descent—particularly from the Caribbean—joined the influx. The number of black immigrants was increasing faster than the number of American-born blacks, and, between 1990 and 2000, black newcomers accounted for fully one-quarter of the growth of the African American population. Black America, like white America, was also becoming an immigrant society.12

  In 2000, more than one in twenty black Americans was an immigrant; almost one in ten was an immigrant or the child of an immigrant. In many American cities, the proportion of black people of foreign birth was double that. In New York City, always an anomaly but often also a harbinger, immigrants comprised better than one-third of the black population and immigrants and th
eir children well over half the city’s black population.13 Writing at the beginning of the twenty-first century and speaking only of the Afro-Caribbean migration, one scholar predicted that if the current rate of immigration persisted, first- and second-generation immigrants would soon outnumber native black New Yorkers.14

  In many ways large and small, African American society has begun to reflect that transition. In New York, the Roman Catholic diocese has added masses in Ashanti and Fante, while black men and women from various Caribbean islands march in the West Indian Carnival and the Dominican Day Parade. In Chicago, Cameroonians celebrate their nation’s independence day, while the DuSable Museum of African American History hosts the Nigerian Festival.15 To many of these men and women, Juneteenth celebrations are at best an afterthought.

  The new arrivals frequently echo the words of the men and women I met outside the radio broadcast booth. Some have struggled with established residents over the very name “African American,” as many newcomers—declaring themselves, for instance, Jamaican Americans or Nigerian Americans—shun that title, while other immigrants have denied native black Americans’ claim to the title “African American” since they had never been in Africa.16 Black immigrants have joined groups such as the Organization for the Advancement of Nigerians, the Egbe Omo Yoruba (National Association of Yoruba Descendants in North America), the Association des Sénégalais aux USA, or the Federation des Associations Régionales Haïtiennes à l’Étranger rather than the NAACP or the Urban League. Old-time residents often refuse to recognize the new arrivals as true African Americans. “I am African and I am an American citizen; am I not African American?” asked the dark-skinned, Ethiopian-born Abdulaziz Kamus at a community meeting in suburban Maryland in 2004. To his surprise and dismay, the overwhelmingly black audience responded, “No, no, no, not you.”17