The Making of African America

The designation “Middle Passage,” strictly speaking, refers to the transatlantic journey from Africa to the Americas that forcibly propelled some eleven million Africans across the Atlantic between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.² But for people of African descent in North America—what became the United States—it was only the first of many massive relocations. The Making of African America is a history of the three great migrations that made and remade African and African American life in the United States, as well as a glimpse of a fourth, which is presently transforming African American—and American—society. Over time, the great migrations swelled like some giant tsunami increasing in mass and velocity, engulfing larger and larger numbers of men and women and sweeping them, their loved ones, and their possessions into a vortex for which none could fully prepare.

Finally, at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries, people of African descent entered the United States from all over the world—Africa, the greater Caribbean, South America, and Europe—again changing the composition, character, and cultures of the black population of the United States. The pace of these massive movements increased with their size, as ever-greater numbers arrived during a shorter period of time.³

Each of these massive migrations incorporated, in varying proportions, unspeakable brutality, dispossession, and death. They also provided the occasion for extraordinary acts of kindness and generosity, generated astounding creativity, and gave birth to new life. While it is impossible to calculate fully losses and gains, happily the latter increased and former decreased over time. But none of these passages was entirely free of either tragedy or triumph, either moral degradation or moral elevation. They changed the migrant’s world and everything that surrounded it. Status was transformed, cultures remade, and politics reshaped. The great migrations dehumanized, but they were all too human. Although the movement from the South to the North and the late twentieth-century diaspora never equaled the violent degradation that attended the transatlantic and transcontinental slave trades, they too pushed men and women to their limits.

The forced march from the seaboard to Arkansas during the middle years of the nineteenth century deeply affected Helen Odom’s grandmother, much as the seventeenth- or eighteenth-century Atlantic transit had earlier burdened Odom’s forebears. Years later, in the fourth decade of the twentieth century, grandmother Odom’s passage still gripped her granddaughter. “I heard this told over and over so many, many times before grandmother died,” Helen Odom told an interviewer for the Works Project Administration in the 1930s. “Seemed it was the greatest event of her life,” Odom reiterated. “She told other smaller things I can’t remember,” but grandmother Odom never forgot her long march to Arkansas. Neither did her granddaughter. ⁴

Others also remembered or learned through their memories, for the immigrant experience resonated across generational lines. Jacob Lawrence, whose great work visualized the epic journey of black people from the agricultural South to the industrial North, was raised in a household that knew nothing but movement. Lawrence was born in the North and did not travel south until he honeymooned with his Southern-born bride. But he, like many children of immigrants, nonetheless insisted that he “was part of the migration, as was my family: my mother, my sister, and my brother.” He explained, “I grew up hearing tales about people ‘coming up,’ another family arriving.” At age thirteen, living in Harlem with his Virginia-born mother and his South Carolina-born father, he himself had already experienced a move from Atlantic City, New Jersey, to Easton, Pennsylvania, and then to Philadelphia. Rapid-fire sequential migrations were so central to Lawrence’s life that when asked to explain the origins of his pictorial characterization of the northward migration, he reflectively replied: “This was such a part of my life.”⁵

From Frederick Douglass’s Narrative to Paul Dunbar’s Sport of the Gods, from Richard Wright’s Native Son to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Toni Morrison’s Jazz, migrants have been as much a part of African American literature as they have been part of African American life.⁶ Much the same can be said for African American music, from the spirituals of the Jubilee Singers to the blues of Bessie Smith and Riley “B. B.” King, not to mention other artistic accomplishments such as Langston Hughes’s poems, Gordon Parks’s photographs, August Wilson’s plays, and of course Lawrence’s Migration Series paintings. These extraordinary works and the symbols connected with the migratory theme—the slave ship, the auction block, the railroad pointed north—announce movement as a central theme of the African American experience. Langston Hughes was doubtless only one of many young black men and women in St. Louis who would periodically “walk down to the Santa Fe station and stare at the railroad tracks,” just as Otis Redding was only one of many, who—while “sittin’ on the dock of the bay”—calculated the benefit of a trip from Georgia to Frisco.⁷

The significance of movement elevated the importance of place in African American life. Between these massive movements of men and women stand periods of physical—although rarely social—stasis, during which black people developed deep attachments to place, be it the eerie beauty of the Sea Islands, the rich alluvial soils of the Delta, or the maze of streets and alleys of South Side Chicago—that “baddest part of town.” In such places, men and women worked together, married and raised their families, worshipped, and socialized in ways that created trust and built solidarity, so that their attachments were ultimately about people. Such places were also celebrated in literature, song, and art. While Langston Hughes spoke of the “One-Way Ticket” from the South, Robert Johnson celebrated “Sweet Home Chicago.”⁸ Such attachments to place riveted black people to familiar ground; many could not conceive of life apart from their home.⁹

Because this contrapuntal narrative—movement and place; fluidity and fixity; or, in Paul Gilroy’s phrase, “routes and roots”—ripped across some four centuries of black life in mainland North America, the alternating and often overlapping impact of massive movement and deep rootedness touched all aspects of the experience of black people, from language and theology to cuisine and music.¹⁰ Over the course of four hundred years, through slavery and freedom, the contrapuntal narrative—perhaps more than any other—informed the development of a distinctive African American way of thinking and acting, as black society unraveled and then was reknit. It produced, on the one hand, a malleable, flexible cultural style that became a touchstone of African American life, recognizable in such different spheres as art and politics and in such different times as the post-Civil War jubilee and the interwar cultural renaissance. It created, on the other hand, a passionate attachment to place, reflected in the earthy idioms of the rural South and the smashmouth street jive of the modern “hood.” Its drama was played out in the grand oratory of James Forten, Frederick Douglass, BookerT. Washington, and Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as the anonymous verbal duels of the hollers, toasts, dozens, and other forms of signifying. Taken together, movement and place informed the lives of peoples as different as enslaved tobacco hands and urban free people of color in the nineteenth century, the fastidious black bourgeoisie and the free-spirited zoot-suiters in the twentieth, and the hip-hop artists and buttoned-down buppies in the twenty-first.

Cultural malleability was and is reflected in all aspects of life. Commenting on people he had forced into the hold of his slave ship, one eighteenth-century slave captain noted the “facility with which they form new connexions,” often reinforced—in the words of yet another slaver—by having “partaken of the same food, and to have slept on the same plank during the voyage.”¹¹ The same process of transforming shipmates into kin would be repeated a century later in the coffles transporting slaves from Virginia to Mississippi, yet another century later in the boxcars carrying African Americans from Mississippi to Chicago, and most recently in airplanes carrying black people from Accra to New York. No aspect of black life in the United States has been untouched by the great migrations—by the contrapuntal interplay of movement and place.

Place—like movement—gained special meaning because of its unique relationship to the African American experience. For much of American history, place was not merely a geographic locale, but a social imperative—as in “stay in your place”—that black men and women violated at great risk. From the time black people were driven up the gangplank of that first slave ship, white authorities defined the “place” of black people as one of subordination, and they diligently patrolled the color line in the slave quarter, the back of the bus, the segregated schoolhouse, the urban housing project. Manifested at times in fugitive slave laws, racial covenants and redlines, or urban renewal policy that required “Negro removal,” the struggle for place was an ongoing part of the African American experience. Place, in short, was more than a locale. It was an attitude, a condition, a policy that white people required to be reenacted again and again with a tip of the hat, a downward glance, a silent acceptance of subordination.¹² Yet these same places of subordination became sites of subversion and, ultimately, sources of liberation. In a similar fashion, movement also secured a larger meaning because it suggested the possibility of escape from place, be it a visit to a “broad wife,” respite in a maroon colony, or the train or highway northward toward home.

Place gained particular significance because it had to be reconstituted again and again from the remembered fragments of a premigration past and the new circumstances of a postmigration world. The difficulties of preserving the sounds, tastes, and smells of the past bumped against the reality of new languages, food stocks, and landscapes. At times, men and women labored to preserve their cultural baggage, maintaining languages, cuisines, and rights of passage: the ways their parents brought children to the world, celebrated their coming of age, and buried their dead. At other times, these same men and women worked equally assiduously to lose their past—overbearing elders, rituals that confined, and attitudes that limited cherished aspirations. But whether remembered or forgotten, welcomed or denied, the old and the new came together in a form that gave place a special meaning.

As this process suggests, the very definition of movement and place were contested. Movement—forced and free—sometimes meant material loss, social dislocation, and spiritual fragmentation, yet sometimes signaled material gain, social improvement, and spiritual renewal. In slavery and in freedom, black people twisted the meaning of movement and place, transforming places of repression into places of liberation and places of confinement into routes of escape. What was generally true of these tropes was even truer for the great migrations or passages. The powerful combination of movement and place—the particular migrations and homelands they created—informed the making and remaking of African American life. The slave ship and Africa, the slave coffle and the black-belt plantation, and the northbound train and the ghetto were all critical to the formation of the African American experience. But it was the unique combination of fluidity and fixity that all these represented that came to shape African American life.

But the great migrations created vast chasms in the experience of black people. Addressing these violent ruptures—to the extent they could be addressed—required enormous energy and extraordinary creativity, for these massive migrations eroded established customs that professed ancient pedigrees and unseated long-standing conventions. They dissolved regionalisms and localisms while creating, at the same time, new cosmopolitanisms and then new provincialisms. These new cultures contained possibilities as well as constraints. Explosions of cultural creativity followed each of the great passages.

Again and again, the protocols and ideas of race were transformed. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, black people learned the meaning of enslavement on the periphery of the North American continent. In the nineteenth century, blackness was remade on the rich loam of black-belt Alabama, taking on meanings unknown on the red clays of Virginia and the swamps of South Carolina. In mid-twentieth-century America, blackness secured yet different meanings in the stockyards of Chicago than it had in the cotton fields of Mississippi. In the late twentieth century, as people of African descent from all over the world converged on the United States, race was interpreted yet anew. At each turn, migrants relearned the constraints and possibilities race allowed, as blackness took on new meaning.

The multiple passages entailed joining worlds that were lost to worlds whose full dimensions could barely be imagined, even by the most prescient. Of necessity, the unfamiliar required innovation. The novel circumstances in which black people again and again found themselves caused them to place a premium on adaptation. These strategies were spun out in endless variety, for the contingencies created by migration challenged old verities and required new truths. Few truths survived long in a landscape of rapid change, as the repeated reinvention of self and society created patterns of thought and action that prized the originality of a John Coltrane riff, a Toni Morrison novel, a Richard Pryor skit, or an LL Cool J rap.

New forms and new structures set the boundaries for new polarities that quickly emerged in the wake of these massive movements: Africans and creoles, slave and free, newcomers and old settlers, homeboys and street dudes. These new forms delineated the societies that emerged in the wake of immense transfers of peoples, but they hardly defined the contours of the new order, whose complicated cultural matrices depended on specific circumstances: who went where and why, the baggage migrants carried, and the nature of their new habitat. The cultures of black peoples in the transit from Africa, across the American continent, from south to north, and then from all parts of the globe to the United States were made and remade not by maintaining the old in some reified form but by creating something new as migrants became natives.

Although the great migrations marked extraordinary discontinuities in the African and African American experience, the frequency with which these massive, periodic transfers occurred caused them to be incorporated seamlessly into everyday life and, in time, to become the backbone of African American history. For some, such movements became routine, if hardly normal or welcome. “The traders was all around,” remembered the former slave Lewis Hayden, “the slave pens at hand, and we did not know what time any of us might be in it.”¹⁴ The endemic nature of migration—whether the feared arrival of a slave trader, eviction from a tenant shack, or sale to a convict lessee—required men and women to prepare themselves and their loved ones for what could only be seen as inevitable. For much of their history, black people lived not so much in flux—a circumstance endemic to the human condition—but in anticipation of catastrophic change. Husbands and wives, parents and children, kinfolk and neighbors understood that their ties would at some point be severed and that they would be required to reconstruct their lives anew often in radically different circumstances. Such expectations—and the accompanying anxieties—informed black life, for the migrations’ reverberations echoed throughout African American communities. They gave rise to rituals that both anticipated and cushioned change, as few were so foolish as to await the moment of departure to consider what the new realities might bring.

Between the great migrations stood periods of deep rootedness.¹⁵ Movement might be omnipresent in the African American experience between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries, but so too has been a sense of place. Indeed, one of the great ironies of migratory history is that diasporas rooted people in place—sometimes places where people came from and sometimes places where they went.¹⁶ The church, Masonic hall, beauty parlor, barbershop, storefront, and even the street corner and stoop were just as significant to the African American experience as the slave coffle and the Chicken Bone Special, for they were points of sociability where bonds of trust and collaboration were established and maintained. More than an attachment to landscape, the concept of place spoke to relationships, often deeply personal, and the institutions that emerged from those relationships.

The linkages created by movement had to be disentangled, decoupled, and fixed socially and culturally as well as geographically.¹⁷ The value of place in African American life seemed to increase with the constancy of movement and its often dire consequences. In time, Africa, the plantation South, and the inner city each became—by turns—a kind of Jerusalem. Although slaves and their mobile descendants were historically characterized as the ultimate outsiders—dismissed as socially dead denizens by some—they quickly made the land their own, mastered the terrain, and created dense networks of kinship and friendships that stretched across the land.¹⁸

In a word, they were rooted. Frederick Douglass, speaking from his own experience as both slave and free man, contrasted the difference between the expectations of enslaved and free peoples. Free people, declared Douglass, developed no “extravagant attachment to any one place,” while the slave “had no choice, no goal but was pegged down to one single spot, and must take root there or die.” From Douglass’s perspective, the firm connections necessitated by chattel bondage created a profound respect and even affection for place and the men and women connected to those places, even when another place—perhaps any other place—would have been preferred. “Perhaps the most marked trait in the negro character,” declared a New York Times reporter amid the chaos of the Civil War, “is his love of home and of the localities to which he is accustomed. They all pine for their homes.”¹⁹

Douglass’s image of the slave “pegged down” and this imputation of the love of locality as the “most marked trait in the negro character” evoke the figure of a people without motion, of being literally frozen in place. Rootedness—at least as employed here—does not refer to immobilization. Much as slaveholders, planter-merchants, and others who followed in their wake wanted to extend their sovereignty over the slave, sharecropper, tenant farmer, or ghetto dweller, they utterly failed to do so, if only because mobility was precisely what made these men and women so valuable. The image of the slave or cropper locked in place belies reality. The plantation regime as it developed in mainland North America and the industrial order that followed it required even the most constrained workers to move, as messengers, wagoners, and sailors, as well as husbands visiting wives, lovers courting sweethearts, and friends calling upon neighbors.

The notion of rootedness instead speaks to attachments—personal and material—within a defined geographic frame. Douglass was never “pegged down” on the Lloyds’ Great House Farm. When he—like others—spoke of his local connections, he was referring to the people—family and friends—as much as the landscape of a special piece of Maryland’s eastern shore. That was Douglass’s place, where generations of his family had resided, in which he seized his manhood in the epic battle with the slave breaker Covey, and to which he returned as a free man and international celebrity.

After the war, former slaves’ attachment to place manifested itself in a desire for land, the legendary forty acres. The quest for land had many meanings, but few former slaves coveted mere real estate. While they appreciated the independence that land ownership might bring, land ownership was as much a matter of social identity—and the multiple personal relations that entails—as of political economy, for the land they wanted also spoke to deep emotional investments. Often it was the land they had long resided and worked. Sometimes, as a group of former slaves declared, it was “land they had laid their father’s bones upon.” As one Union officer observed in 1862, “Never was there a people ... more attached to familiar places than they.”²⁰

The former slaves’ “love of locality” or what yet another federal agent called their “local attachments” resonated in the twentieth century. Reflecting on her youth in Knoxville, Tennessee, poet Nikki Giovanni insisted that it was “a place where no matter what, I belong.” Charlayne Hunter-Gault, who as a young woman integrated the University of Georgia, wrote fondly of her Southern home in a memoir she appropriately named In My Place. Amid her biographical account of the ugly confrontations with the segregationist educators and epithet-wielding fellow students, Hunter-Gault lovingly recalled the “evocative sights, sounds, and smells of my small-town childhood, the almost overpowering sweet smell of honeysuckle and banana shrub seducing buzzing bumblebees and yellow jackets; the screeching cries of crickets emanating from every shrub and bush; clouds of black starlings producing shadows wherever they flew over the dusty red-clay haze. This was the part of the South that I loved, that made me happy to be a Southerner, that left me unaffected by the seamier side....” “I do believe,” echoed Maya Angelou, putting a point on Hunter-Gault’s confession, “once a Southerner, always a Southerner.”²¹

The allegiances dueled, as yet other refugees from the former slave states held firm to the belief that the South was their place. It was a sensibility articulated by thousands of African Americans who fled north and then, in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, returned to the place of their nativity. “Black people are Southerners,” emphasized journalist Fred Powledge. “They are of and by and from and for the South ... and have repeatedly demonstrated ... their love for and faith in the region.”²³ Some suggested that the connection of black people to the South was even an essential element in their nature, going so far as to deny the possibility of transplantation. “The Negro has never been a wanderer,” asserted an officer of the Colored Organization of New Jersey on the eve of the exodus from the South. “Fixed ties have ever held for him attractions that have outshone opportunities that lie elsewhere.”²⁴

In the 1970s, when the third great migration that carried some six million black people from the South to the North had run its course and a counterflow to the South from the North began, economists and sociologists affirmed that migrants and their children and grandchildren remained “strongly tied to historic homeplaces.” Many of these ties were those of memories that represented “the intense value put on place and landownership, a value,” as noted in a close study of one particular returned migrant, “widely-shared among her generation.” Even migrants who had been born in the North felt the pull. They were not returning to their childhood roots, but to roots nurtured through the lives of others augmented by extended family visits, reunions, and family obligations. Still others tied “their homeplace” to their marital connections or simply to the force of belief.²⁵

Of course the South was not a single place any more than black Southerners were a single people. The South that Maya Angelou remembered differed from that of Fred Powledge, and Powledge from that of Nikki Giovanni. Their Souths were products of particular geographies and chronologies. What Angelou and others have called “the South”—as in “once a Southerner, always a Southerner”—was reified, frozen in time and in imagination as somehow “the” authentic South. The contending, opposing cultures that continually made and remade Southern society were reduced to a catchall.²⁶ Much the same would be done for Africa.

While some understood connections to place in essentialist terms, for others place had much more prosaic meanings, for it drew upon routines repeated so often that they proceeded without explanation, responsibilities taken without request, and favors exchanged without question. But as a wellspring of solidarity, place also defined the grounds of suspicion; while it embraced some, it excluded others. In drawing the boundaries of community, place defined kinship in the largest sense, creating—for example—a reverence for ancestors never known, whose remains stained ground that had never been seen and whose specters remained a presence long after breath had left their bodies. Over the centuries, African Americans have held reunions that drew thousands, and the constructed genealogies reached back across the Atlantic.²⁷ Upon exiting his native Mississippi, Richard Wright voiced the sentiment of many other migrants, declaring he could “never really leave the South, for my feelings had already been formed by the South, for there had been slowly instilled into my personality and consciousness, black though I was, the culture of the South.”²⁸

Place had such a powerful pull that its magnetic force drew in those who had never actually experienced it. Piri Thomas, man of dark-skin and Puerto Rican and Cuban descent growing up in Spanish Harlem felt compelled to visit the South as a way to explore and understand the meaning of his own blackness. A Southern-born friend encouraged him to do so, saying, “It’s damn hard leaving the South and harder still goin’ back to it. But now that it’s come down to it, I’d like to see what’s shakin’ home.” What drew Piri Thomas to the South likewise annually sends perhaps thousands of African Americans back to Africa, a journey that sometimes confirms a connection to Africa, but at other times leads to profound disillusionment. ²⁹

Of course no one really ever lived only in Africa or only in the South, just as they never lived only in the North or in Chicago. Rather black Southerners were more the product of neighborhoods, well-defined geographic spaces that were bound together by family ties, work patterns, and political alliances, as well as by the peculiarities of the natural and built environments. In such places, men and women knew one another and knew one another’s kin and near kin, their religious affiliations, their political ties, and even their dogs. Intimacy made for belonging.³⁰

Yet the migrants’ embrace of place was also uneasy, tentative, and often probationary, for there was that other place—sometimes half remembered, sometimes totally unknown, and sometimes constructed from the whole cloth—that also commanded allegiance. That distant place was the land of fathers and mothers, grandparents, and ancestry from time immemorial; it was a land of celebrated giants, of men and women of legendary strength and penetrating wit, whose wealth was uncounted, whose deeds were great and whose character was unimpeachable.³¹ There, life had been lived to its fullest, free of the weight of subordination and the sting of condescension. Immigrants and often their children thus looked backward as well as forward, formulating their identities and drawing strength from who they once were (or thought they were) as well as who they would become.

Self—individual and collective—was constantly being constructed between movement and place. Black people—as opposed to Angolans, Igbos, and Mandes—discovered their common Africanness had become a race on the western shore of the Atlantic. In much the same manner, African Americans hustled from the seaboard to the interior came to recognize their Virginian or South Carolinian origins in Mississippi, so black Georgians and Mississippians became Southerners in the cities of the North and ancestral places like Barbados and Jamaica, Ghana and Kenya came alive in twenty-first-century America. While the ligaments by which black people constructed their identity had been snapped in the process by which Africans became African Americans, the connections testify to the constant remaking of what had been and what would be. The old or the new might fail to be recognizable in these hybrids, as neither the rearview mirror of history nor the telescope of the future could capture the realities of the new mixtures.

The neck-snapping discontinuities between change and stasis have drawn black people to their past and invested that past with enormous weight, even as they wrestled again with an ever-changing present. At times, such connections with the past have created nostalgic longing for the old country, the old homestead, or the old neighborhood by men and women who—by force or choice—had been uprooted. These themes—the necessity to make life anew and the yearnings for a barely remembered or wholly imagined past—remain the great constants of African American life, echoed in literature, politics, and certainly music. Antebellum colonizationists, post-Reconstruction Exodusters, early twentieth-century Garveyites, and late-twentieth-century street vendors, generation upon generation, articulated a desire to recall, revisit, and sometimes return to the ancestral homelands and reclaim an African, then a seaboard, and even a Southern zion. Such projections suggest why African Americans constructed new histories from the ur-narrative of King Buzzard, the egalitarian guarantee of the Declaration of Independence, the biblical promise of exodus, or the Afrocentric roots of civilization.³⁴

Yet the force of change—the serial migrations and repeated cultural reconstructions—made it impossible to recoup the past fully, despite the powerful propensity to freeze identity at a single moment, sometimes defined by ancestry, ideology, or even body image. In truth, the old societies could never be fully reconstructed as they had been, as they were remembered, or even as they were imagined. Indeed, the great passages themselves transformed the old societies. They were felt as much by those left in the seaboard South after their children were sold away as those who remained in the black belt after their neighbors had gone north. The transatlantic slave trade remade black life on the west coast of Africa between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries; the internal slave trade again remade the settled seaboard South in the nineteenth century; and the movement to the urban North remade the rural South in the mid-twentieth century; and yet again the global diaspora has transformed blackness in the late twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. No matter how strong the identification with the “old country,” the world that migrants had left was no more. Immigrants—whether forced or free—might some day return to the old country, but they could not go home.

But if the Old World could not be transferred to the New, it was never entirely forgotten. In making and remaking themselves—first as Africans, then as African Americans—over the course of some four hundred years, black people never turned their backs on the past. Rather, in successive iterations, they incorporated the past into their new selves, not in heroically remembering, but in drawing upon their experience often with a great sense of purpose.

The cultures of movement and place penetrated one another, in part because change, no matter how revolutionary, was never complete. Old patterns always coexisted and overlapped with new ones. More importantly, the vectors of change did not always point in one direction. Movement did not give birth to place or vice versa any more than the past necessarily summoned the present or than the present automatically fulfills the past. Often languages, religions, cuisine, or music created amid the flux of movement was transported back to the migrants’ place of origins as well as forward to their place of arrival.³⁵

There have been many bridges between movement and place, linking the sense of what was lost to what was gained: rites of passage, aesthetics of form and color, styles of cooking and dressing, folktales and proverbs, even intonation of voice. None, however, was more manifest than music. Music, as Lawrence Levine has written, “appears to be one of the most conservative of cultural traits.” The portability of music and its seeming indestructibility maintained rhythmic patterns—and occasionally melodies and lyrics—even when migrants were stripped naked and denied their every material possession. In connecting shared experience with communal values, music, as Amiri Baraka has observed, has served as one barometer of the African American experience. The transformation of African American music mirrored that of black peoples, as the great passages set them in motion and the new arrivals rooted them in place. Nowhere is the contrapuntal narrative more evident.³⁶

But music was not simply a window into African American life; it was a means by which black people understood their circumstances and articulated their deepest beliefs and most powerful yearnings. It provided a way to speak the unspeakable, both to themselves and those who dared to listen. Explaining the return of black Northerners to the Mississippi Delta, one of the poorest parts of the South, contemporary social scientists emphasize the magnetic draw of the “powerful and stark form of blues ... some of the finest remnants of African American sacred music.”³⁷

Music also transmuted shared experience into communal solidarity. This was particularly true of the call-and-response that was a unifying element in eighteenth-century shouts, nineteenth-century spirituals, and twentieth-century jazz, as well as other musical genres. Echoing the theme sounded by the leaders, others then elaborated on it—assenting or dissenting to the message and then expanding and modifying it in various ways—thus taking ownership of the message. The voices of captive Africans were still echoed two centuries later in the churches of the Mississippi Delta. “The preacher,” remembered Bluesman B. B. King, “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.”³⁸

While the call-and-response pattern remains an omnipresent hall-mark of African American music, there are some others such as particular melodies, cadences, and strategic repetitions. Embellishments that emerged from field hollers, spirituals, the blues, jazz, and rap created grooves which then swung to join musician and audience as one. Each was driven forward by a never-ending process of improvisation that reflected—and marked—the remaking of African American life.

Music was present from the beginning, as slave-ship captains reported the collective voices emanating from below deck. The repetitive choruses, the interplay between leader and congregants, and the improvisational character provided the first evidence of one of the essential elements of what would be the African American repertoire. These features and others—polyrhythmic, tonal, and timbral flexibility, to name a few—became prominent in African American music and remain so in the present day. But if some central forms have remained the same, black musicians constantly reworked the melodic and harmonic ideas with different tempos and rhythmic impulses that reflected both movement and place.³⁹

Thomas Jefferson, like many observers since, recognized the special place of music in the lives of black people, even if he—again, like so many after—attributed it to some congenital trait. The continuities of African American music and the lack of accurate description has made it easy to essentialize the sounds that observers like Jefferson attributed to the music of black people. Put another way, those continuities have made it difficult, as Shane White and Graham White noted, “to restore the ‘pastness’ of past sounds.” The history of African American music is often frozen in place, celebrated as a marker of identity for a people whose identity was constantly disparaged. In the process, however, such celebrations often ignore cross-cultural construction first among Africans and then among African Americans, Native Americans, and Europeans in the creation of an ever-changing black musical tradition. Examining how movement and place transformed the evolution of shouts and hollers into spirituals, spirituals into gospel, and country blues into rhythm and blues both historicizes African American music and maintains its ubiquity in the black American experience without presuming these genres had distinctive lineages.⁴⁰

African American music, with its extraordinary variety and multiplicity of forms, rarely follows the “normal” course of any chronology of black life, a chronology whose specific markers remain mired in conjecture and endless debate.⁴¹ Black musicians, enslaved and free, functioning as “griots”—African storytellers—told many tales. The power of invention and reinvention of the black musical tradition overwhelms any attempt to link particular genres to particular moments. Subordination, moreover, discouraged black musicians from speaking directly, so their music was often coded, filled with ironic references, multiple meanings, and veiled imagery. Nonetheless, music speaks profoundly to the transformative dynamic that has constantly remade the experience of black peoples. No history of either movement or place in African and African American life can be fully understood without careful attention to the sounds that accompanied it. Nothing better revealed the larger transformations of African American life—be they cultural, economic, or political—than music.

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 their 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.

The experience of migration that made and remade black life also entwined the lives of black people with that of other Americans. Sometimes they were so intimately connected that a reduction of one enlarged another. When the movement of European indentured servants to the Chesapeake region faltered in the 1660s, the trade in African slaves—and the commitment to slavery—grew. When the constitutional mandate and congressional law closed the transatlantic slave trade to the United States in the early nineteenth century, European migration swelled, whitening the North American continent. When that migration ceased a century later as a result of World War I, black people left the South for the North. Meanwhile, Africans and their descendants mixed with Native Americans and European Americans as they met sometimes allies, sometimes enemies, and sometimes curious bystanders eager to avoid entanglements caught in circumstances not of their own making. The experience of these peoples was likewise tied to vast uprootings, sometimes of their own choosing but often made under duress. Threats of enclosures, horrors of famines, trails of tears, and nightmares of state-sponsored terror drove many of these people from their homelands. To doubt these movements were founded in extreme coercion belies the obvious, and to say that some found opportunity in these changes states nothing new. Following such traumatic uprootings, these migrants also became identified with particular places, be they ghettos, reservations, or suburbs. As they took root, they too constructed their histories from fading memories of the old country, biblical allusions to the promised land, images of the Golden Mountain, transcendent hopes of American life, and certainty that they too were God’s chosen people whose destiny was foretold in sacred texts.

Even the violent cultural cleansing whereby European slave masters stripped African slaves of the very signatures of their identity—their names—was not unknown to other immigrants. At Ellis Island, immigration officers regularly renamed the new arrivals, often in the most flippant manner and with the same sorts of ridicule that slave masters applied to their newcomers. Suggesting how the weight of a foreign cultural hegemony bore down upon them, many immigrants needed no prompting in disposing of their ancient appellation, so Sophie Abuza renamed herself Sophie Tucker, just as Asa Yoelson transformed himself into Al Jolson, Harry Lillis into Bing Crosby, and Israel Baline into Irving Berlin.⁵⁸ Many peoples, in short, shared the rhythm of movement and rootedness. If the names were different—Hester Street, Swede Town, and Little Italy rather than Drayton Hall, Monticello, and Mount Vernon—the experience was undeniably a common one, and a powerful reminder of what Americans share.

In the end, what distinguishes the African American experience is not merely the difficult distinction between free and forced migrations or the alleged absence of an immigrant past, but rather the collective weight of multiple migrations. Coerced or by choice, repeatedly and—then again—by coersion or choice—people of African descent rooted themselves in the land. In the process, they produced two massive contradictions.

First, the necessity of the periodic reconstruction of black society on new ground created a sense of “we-ness,” which joined together black peoples who had vastly different origins, beliefs, and interests across space and time. Bonds created by the terror of the Atlantic passage, the horror of the long march from the James to the Mississippi River, and the hopeful expectations of the train ride from Biloxi to Chicago provided a common experience, which became the basis of a new collective to which newcomers could identify and into which old hands could be incorporated. Men and women who had been utter strangers were joined together by the most elemental of shared experience: survival. African American culture was formed in the holds of slave ships and the necessity of dealing with harsh circumstances beyond their own creation. It was reformed in coffles tramping west, and reformed yet again in the segregated railroad cars that carried black people northward. In deplaning a jet at Kennedy, O’Hare, or Hartsfield airport, new arrivals in the twenty-first century echo the experience of their forebears who were likewise caught in the maelstrom of a changing world economy.

Yet the experience of migration that made and remade black life also entwined the lives of black people with that of other Americans: Native Americans who had been expelled from the very lands that African Americans would be forced to cultivate or European Americans who would claim ownership of those same grounds. The contrapuntal narrative of movement and place traced the transformation of people of African descent into African American and into Americans.

Here the story becomes even more telling, for culture never develops along a single path. Each iteration of African American culture was a hybrid, and could only be understood as the product of specific historical circumstances; it is always changing. Men and women often tried to freeze those changes as they searched for stability and permanence in a world in constant motion by positing culture—in this case “blackness”—as a timeless structure. But new circumstances eventually demand new understandings. Those understandings—a new narrative or history—tried to explain how and why the new people arrived where they were and became who they were. Sometimes this has been a narrative of reproach: what was done to us. Sometimes this has been a narrative of celebration: what we did for ourselves. These narratives can be further subdivided: narratives of abandonment (why God failed), narratives of salvation (why we were chosen), narratives of edification, and so on. Movement demands a rethinking of identity; hence new stories.

Movement

Place

The Contrapuntal Narrative

African and African American Migrants in a Nation of Immigrants