AFRICAN AMERICANS IN THE UNITED STATES
- Slavery in America was markedly different, as it became the basis of economic, social, legal and
political systems and placed enslaved people outside the realm of moral obligation, i.e. since they were
seen as not fully human, irrational (the Other), their enslavement was not seen as an issue, and they
were denied almost all opportunities to truly better themselves or to get out of slavery.
- From the very beginning, African Americans had to conform to a master culture that sought to rule
their lives and impose certain norms and values (such as linguistic and cultural) on them, as they were
seen as inferior, barbaric, and heathen.
- James Baldwin wrote: “It comes as a great shock to discover that the country which is your birthplace
and to which you owe your life and identity has not, in its whole system of reality, evolved any place
for you. . . . I was taught in American history books that Africa had no history and neither did I. I was
a savage about whom the least said the better. . . . You belonged where white people put you... the
truth about a black man, as a historical entity and as a human being, has been hidden from him,
deliberately and cruelly; the power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to
accept the white world’s definitions.”
- This does not mean, however, that the enslavement crushed their entire community, culture and
history. They always tried to maintain their own identities and sense of culture, for example, through:
- Retaining aspects of their mother tongues, combining them with the slaveholders` dominant
language and creating vernaculars. This is demonstrated by the African influence in the
formation/evolution of Black English with respect to the rules of grammar, structure, and sound; for
example, the use of the non-differentiation of pronoun genders, the use of the past tense marker “did,”
and the pronunciation of the sounds “r” and “th”. Moreover, the contribution of words to the English
language, such as yams, banana, cola, and chimpanzee, demonstrate the influence of African languages
and the reciprocity of communication between slaves and non-slaves. Nevertheless, the enslaved
people's version of English was always seen as broken and corrupted.
- Religion: African communities shared certain religious practices and ideas, which served as the basis
for black/slave religion in the US. They believed in a Supreme Being alongside other, lesser gods,
which was at odds with orthodox Judeo-Christianity. Thus, their form of religion was designated as
superstitious and primitive. Until the 1730/40s, there were no significant attempts to convert enslaved
people to Christianity – they were not welcome.
- They also held on to their cultural practices in the arts of expression, especially song and storytelling
or ancestral rituals. Music, for example, played a central role in slave religion and culture, as did call
and response and the ring shout in singing or dancing and drumming. Musical instruments like the
banjo and xylophone also come from Africa.
- Even though they were reprimanded for it, they found ways to do it. This focus on songs and
storytelling remained part of black culture, and many of those cultural retentions are still present in
American culture in the form of jazz, blues, hip hop, rap, or the freedom songs of the civil rights
movement. It can also be seen in the oratory of Martin Luther King, who built his speeches upon a
diverse background of biblical, folk and slave stories to weave a persuasive, rhythmic song-like pattern
which asserted the individual power of the voice but included the audience in the spectacle of the
occasion.
- In terms of rituals, enslaved people continued to practice conjuring (voodoo, rootwork) through
medicine-men/priests serving the community. The slaveholding society later adopted some of their
medical practices, while slave women often served as nurses and midwives on many plantations and
often even outside of them.
- The increasing presence of African Americans in the public sphere after the abolition of slavery, the
opportunities for citizenship and the growth of movements for civil rights and social justice helped to
recover and maintain that culture.
- They formed important institutions, like:
- Silver Bluff Baptist Church in South Carolina (1775) – the first separate Black church in
North America that also ushered in the era of Black evangelical leadership that continued to
expand the network of churches linking the community.
- Free African Society in Philadelphia in 1787 – supported widows and fatherless children,
the ill.
- Pittsburgh African Education Society in 1832
- Various anti-slavery societies and literary societies like the Philadelphia Library Company
of Colored Persons in 1833 to educate the youth.
- Slave narratives, which were specific to America, constituted one of the truly American genres. Books
like The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave Written by Himself helped
to relate the horrors of slavery to the outside world. According to him, liberation could only be
achieved through the ability to express and define oneself in society.
- Others also argue that the roots of black nationalist consciousness can be found in slave culture
because it was there that different tribes were forced together in slavery into shared experiences,
helping to mould a more or less homogenous black culture.
- In the 20th century, African Americans continued to face the idealisation of the slavery of the past
by white Americans – caricaturing them continued to be a major component of the popular culture of
the era. They also had to face the developing system of racial segregation.
- Segregation curtailed more and more rights, relegated blacks to second-class status, and created a
parallel universe for them (“white separatism, black parallelism,” as the historian Darlene Clark Hine
put it). The concept of “separate but equal” often meant the exclusion of formerly enslaved people
and their descendants from ordinary citizens’ rights and employment opportunities.
- It forced them, in fact, to inhabit a separate, inferior, and quite unequal world that became known under
the name of the nineteenth-century minstrelsy act Jim Crow. Racial separation was enacted not only
concerning schools, parks, hospitals, means of transportation, residences, and marital relations
but also governing graveyards, mental institutions, homes for the elderly, special driving hours
for blacks in automobiles, and separate black and white Bibles in some courts. Lynchings were
also common.
- One of the most famous quotations in American literature from W. E. B. Du Bois talks about double
consciousness, wanting to be American and Black at the same time, yet being denied the opportunity
to become the former and shamed for being the latter: „always looking at one’s self through the eyes
of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.
One ever feels his two-ness...“
- One form of resistance was art and literature in particular. The interwar period witnessed a cultural
flourishing in literature, art, and music that accompanied the Great Migration, the central theme of
which was “the migration narrative”. Many aimed to show that black people could also belong to the
cultural elite and produce high-quality cultural artefacts. Many influential authors came to the scene
around this time: Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, and Langston Hughes. The
Harlem Renaissance or New Negro Movement did achieve the cultural and literary flourishing it
envisioned, yet failed to strike a chord with the majority of Black Americans at that time.
- In the 1930s, the pressures on the federal government intensified to address the issue of black civil
rights on the highest level, to guarantee equal employment opportunities for blacks, and to support the
growing efforts to end segregation.
- Growing scholarship by African Americans supported the political struggle for equality. Carter G.
Woodson introduced Negro History Week in 1926 to commemorate the second week of February
with the birthdays of Frederick Douglass (1818) and Abraham Lincoln (1809), while others published
history/literary history textbooks that shed light on the African American past, putting blacks into
American history, rectifying omissions and neglect, and setting the record straight against the then
dominant scholarly opinion that undervalued the importance of blacks in America.
- The Civil Rights Movement steadily progressed from World War II to the mid-1960s. The response
to the pressure was a slow desegregation. At the peak of the Cold War, the landmark decision Brown
v. Board of Education in 1954 was followed by the most active and widely publicized period of
struggle for civil rights, with Rosa Parks’ refusal to sit in the back of a Montgomery bus in 1955, the
ensuing bus boycott in 1956 in which Martin Luther King gained prominence, and the Eisenhower
government’s sending the National Guard to Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957 to support educational
desegregation. The 1960 lunch-counter sit-ins introduced an even more active phase of nonviolent
protest that culminated on August 28, 1963, in the March on Washington, in which 200,000
participants rallied around the Lincoln Memorial in the symbolic centennial year of Lincoln’s
Emancipation Proclamation and urged the administration to take a more active role in passing a general
Civil Rights Act in 1964. The high point of the rally was Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream”
speech.
- In 1967 in Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court struck down the still widespread prohibition of
interracial marriage, and the system of legal segregation came to an end.
