Notes

Introduction

  1. Amelia Blyden, “Hearing the Stone,” unpublished memoir (2004), 13–14.

  2. Isabel Wilkerson, “‘African-American’ Favored by Many of America’s Blacks,” Special to the New York Times, January 31, 1989, http://www.nytimes.com/1989/01/31/us/african-american-favored-by-many-of-america-s-blacks.html.

  3. Quoted in Tunde Adeleke, The Case against Afrocentrism (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009), 120.

  4. Frederick Douglass, “The Folly of Colonization,” quoted in Negro Social and Political Thought: 1850–1920, ed. Howard Brotz (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 328, also at http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/the-folly-of colonization. See also B. L. Martin, “From Negro to Black to African American: The Power of Names and Naming,” Political Science Quarterly 106, no. 1 (1991): 83–107.

  5. See Christopher Miller, Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Gomez, “African Identity and Slavery in the Americas.”

  6. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45465/on-being-brought-from-africa-to-america.

  7. Smith, A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture.

  8. Alexander, African or American? 51.

  9. Alexander, African or American? 83. See also Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 127.

10. “Anglo-African Newspaper,” in Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619–1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass, ed. Paul Finkelman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 71.

11. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Name ‘Negro,’” The Crisis, March 1928, 96–97.

12. Lerone Bennett Jr., “What’s in a Name? Negro vs. Afro-American vs. Black,” Ebony, November 1967, 48, 46, 47, http://www.virginia.edu/woodson/courses/aas102%20(spring%2001)/articles/names/bennett.htm.

13. Bennett, “What’s in a Name?” 46.

14. Quoted in Wilkerson, “‘African-American’ Favored by Many of America’s Blacks.”

15. NBC, Today Show, “Morgan Freeman Says ‘I’m Not African!’” YouTube, December 24, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBSgaIUzfwU; see also John Peterson, “Morgan Freeman: Obama, Mandela, Batman and Me,” Guardian, July 12, 2012, http://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/jul/12/morgan-freeman-obama-mandela-batman.

16. Ira Reid, The Negro Immigrant: His Background, Characteristics and Social Adjustment, 1899–1937 (New York: AMS, 1939), 25.

17. Black Lives Matter website, https://blacklivesmatter.com/about/what-we-believe/. In an interview with the Guardian Garza observes: “We have said from the very beginning that our movement is about . . . the fact that there isn’t much quality of life for black people in this country. Our conditions are pretty similar to conditions for black people around the world, which is how we know that it’s not isolated—that it’s intentional and that it’s systematic.” Elle Hunt, “Alicia Garza on the Beauty and the Burden of Black Lives Matter,” Guardian, September 2, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/02/alicia-garza-on-the-beauty-and-the-burden-of-black-lives-matter.

18. For a discussion of this, see C. J. La Roche and M. L. Blakey, “Seizing Intellectual Power: The Dialogue at the New York African Burial Ground,” Historical Archaeology 31, no. 3 (1997): 84–106; and M. E. Mack and M. L. Blakey, “The New York African Burial Ground Project: Past Biases, Current Dilemmas, and Future Research Opportunities,” Historical Archaeology 38, no. 1 (2004): 10–17.

Chapter One.  “What is Africa to me?”

  1. Countee Cullen, “Heritage,” http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/heritage/.

  2. Eddy L. Harris, Native Stranger: A Black American’s Journey into the Heart of Africa (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 312. Other perspectives on the relationship between African Americans and Africans in the same vein include Keith Richburg’s indictment of Africa and its problems. Having covered the continent for many years, Richburg, though he acknowledges his African ancestry, concludes: “Thank God my ancestor got out, because, now I am not one of them. In short, Thank God that I am an American.” Keith B. Richburg, Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa (New York: Basic Books, 1997), xviii.

  3. Claude Clegg, Africa and the American Imagination (N.p.: Proquest Information and Learning, 2006, e-book).

  4. Creolization here refers to the process by which people from the Old World (for our purposes, Africa) transformed in the New World. It is a process by which enslaved Africans created new lives and institutions in the Americas, whether language, religion, or cultural practices. It involved transformation and loss, but also resulted in creativity. There is a tremendous literature on creolization and some significant debates about its utility. See, for example, Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (Boston: Beacon, 1992); Richard Price, “Créolisation, Creolization, and Créolité,” Small Axe, March 1, 2017, 211–19, doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537–3843962; James Sidbury and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, “Mapping Ethnogenesis in the Early Modern Atlantic,” William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 2 (2011): 181–208, doi:10.5309/willmaryquar.68.2.0181; David Buisseret and Steven G. Reinhardt, eds., Creolization in the Americas (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2009); Robin Cohen and Paolo Toninato, eds., The Creolization Reader: Studies in Mixed Identities and Cultures (New York: Routledge, 2009).

  5. Gomez, “African Identity and Slavery in the Americas,” 111, 118.

  6. See Isani, “‘Gambia on My Soul,’” 65.

  7. “Map: The Growing New Nation,” Africans in America, part 3, 1998–99, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part3/map3.html.

  8. Psalm 68:31, King James Bible, https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Psalms-68–31/.

  9. There is a tremendous amount of literature on European and American representations of Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. See, for example, Hickey and Wylie, An Enchanting Darkness; Keim, Mistaking Africa; Hammond and Jablow, The Africa That Never Was; Pieterse, White on Black. The classic work on European images of Africa is, of course, Curtin, The Image of Africa.

10. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (Kitchener, Ontario: Batoche Books, 2001), 109, http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/hegel/history.pdf.

11. “Dangers in Africa: M. Jules Boreill Tells of the Perils He Experienced during His Travels,” Rocky Mountain News, January 5, 1890, 5; “Four Young Savages: Members of the Karco Tribe, of Africa, Sent to America to Be Educated,” Milwaukee Sentinel, January 18, 1890, 2; “Cannibal Race Found in Africa: Arthur Sharp Returns from the Dark Continent,” News and Observer, December 30, 1899, 6.

12. George Washington Williams, “History of the Twelfth Baptist Church,” quoted in John H. Franklin, George Washington Williams: A Biography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 10.

13. Franklin, George Washington Williams, 10–11.

14. George Washington Williams, History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880: As Negroes, as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1883), vi, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15735/15735-h/15735-h.htm.

15. B. D. Dickinson. “Ancient Africa and the Early Black American Historians, 1883–1915,” American Quarterly 36, no. 5 (1984): 687, doi:10.2307/2712867.

16. George Washington Williams, An Open Letter to His Serene Majesty Léopold II, King of the Belgians and Sovereign of the Independent State of Congo, July 18, 1890, in Barbara Harlow and Mia Carter, Archives of Empire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 772.

17. Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999).

18. Franklin, George Washington Williams, xvii.

19. A useful perspective on African American historians and Africa is Bruce, “Ancient Africa and the Early Black American Historians.” Dickson argues that these early historians focused on ancient Africa “because it resolved the problem of a dual identity in ways that an appreciation of modern Africa could not. Modern Africa was generally taken by black and white people alike as a primitive, backward continent” (695).

20. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Folk Then and Now: An Essay in the History and Sociology of the Negro Race, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), xxxi.

21. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Negro (Project Gutenberg, 2005), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15359/15359-h/15359-h.htm.

22. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Concept of Race,” in The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 87.

23. Jerry Gershenhorn, Melville J. Herskovits and the Racial Politics of Knowledge (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 105.

24. Carter G. Woodson, The Miseducation of the Negro (Drewryville, VA: Khalifah’s Bookseller and Associates, 2006), https://devontekwatson.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/miseducation-text.pdf.

25. Darlene Clark Hine, The State of Afro-American History: Past, Present, and Future (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986); John H. Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010).

26. J. Gershenhorn, “Not an Academic Affair: African American Scholars and the Development of African Studies Programs in the United States, 1942–1960,” Journal of African American History 94 (2009): 49.

27. “Native African Student Likes American Food,” Chicago Defender, November 23, 1940; “Says Minister Took His Wife; Given Divorce,” Chicago Defender, January 13, 1923.

28. “African Student Visitor to City,” Chicago Defender, January 3, 1931.

29. See J. H. Clarke, “Say Brother,” Essence, June 1985, 9.

30. See J. H. Clarke, “African-American Historians and the Reclaiming of African History,” Présence africaine, n.s., no. 110 (1979): 29–48, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24349918. In 1996 the filmmaker St. Clair Bourne made an interesting documentary of Clarke’s life, showcasing his path to the study of African history, his high influence, and his intellectual legacy. See John Henrik Clarke—A Great and Mighty Walk, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njdQzyQnHeg.

31. For a discussion of J. A. Rogers’s influence, see Asukile, “Joel Augustus Rogers.” For a short biography and list of publications, see https://www.africanglobe.net/featured/rogers-historian-journalist-author/. Rogers published works with titles that served to illustrate the greatness of Africa. See From Superman to Man (New York: J. A. Rogers, 1917); Africa’s Gift to America: The Afro-American in the Making and Saving of the United States (New York: J. A. Rogers, 1961); J. A. Rogers, One Hundred Amazing Facts about the Negro (New York: J. A. Rogers, 1934); World’s Great Men and Women of African Descent (New York: J. A. Rogers, 1935); Real Facts about Ethiopia (New York: J. A. Rogers, 1936); Your History: From the Beginning of Time to the Present (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh Courier, 1940); Africa’s Gift to America, rev. ed. (New York: J. A. Rogers, 1961); Five Negro Presidents (New York: J. A. Rogers, 1965) His work, much of which was self-published, served to generate pride in their African ancestry among black Americans.

32. “Joel Augustus Rogers (1883–1966),” The Crisis 73, no. 4 (1966): 201. See also the entry on Joel Rogers in Leslie Alexander, ed., Encyclopedia of African American History (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2010), 2:249.

Chapter Two.  “I tried to keep their voices in my head”

  1. Lawrence Hill, Someone Knows My Name: A Novel (New York: Norton, 2008).

  2. Sweet, “Defying Social Death,” 255; Toyin Falola, “Social Institutions: Kinship Systems,” in Africa, vol. 2, African Cultures and Societies Before 1885, ed. Toyin Falola (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2000).

  3. “Family,” Motherlandnigeria.com, http://www.motherlandnigeria.com/proverbs.html#Family.

  4. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (New York: Anchor Books, 2008), 3, 8.

  5. See Becker, “We are Real Slaves, Real Ismkhan.”

  6. Maghreb, meaning “west” in Arabic, refers to the region in North Africa west of Egypt. See also “The Word Maghreb,” Maghreb Studies, http://www.maghreb-studies-association.co.uk/en/allhome.html.

  7. D. T. Niane, Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali (New York: Pearson, 2006), 38.

  8. Paul Halsall, “Ibn Battuta: Travels in Asia and Africa, 1325–1354,” Medieval Sourcebook, last modified February 21, 2001, http://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/1354-ibnbattuta.asp.

  9. See Thornton, “Elite Women in the Kingdom of Kongo,” 460.

10. Wright, “‘What Do You Mean There Were No Tribes in Africa?’” 418. Wright also discusses the difficulty of reconstructing the history of the slave trade in Niumi and the Gambia because of the country’s citizens’ knowledge of Alex Haley’s Roots. He writes: “Today, the story of the Gambia-River slave trade in the minds of most Gambians is the story Haley told in Roots.” Wright, “The Effect of Alex Haley’s Roots.”

11. Tishken, “Indigenous Religions.” See also Boubacar Barry, Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade, trans. Ayi Kwei Armah. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

12. “Kongo Religion,” Overview of World Religions, http://www.philtar.ac.uk/encyclopedia/sub/kongo.html. See also Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds., Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Igor Kopytoff, “Ancestors as Elders in Africa,” in Perspectives on Africa: A Reader in Culture, History and Representation, ed. Roy Richard Grinker, Stephen C. Lubkemann, and Christopher B. Steiner (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 313–22.

13. See Ras Michael Brown, African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 90–126.

14. David Northrup, Africa’s Discovery of Europe, 1450–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Davidson, West Africa Before the Colonial Era.

15. There is significant amount of material on the early relationship between the Portuguese and the Kingdom of Kongo. See Basil Davidson, The African Slave Trade, rev. ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980); John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

16. See George E. Brooks, Eurafricans in Western Africa: Commerce, Social Status, Gender, and Religious Observance from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003).

17. Berlin, Many Thousands Gone.

18. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery; Lovejoy, Ideology of Slavery in Africa. See also Klein and Robertson, Women and Slavery in Africa.

19. See Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery: Early American Studies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 50–68.

20. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery. How Africans resisted is convincingly shown in Sylviane Diouf, Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003).

21. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery, 35.

22. Hill, Someone Knows, 25.

23. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks; Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas; Heywood and Thornton, Central Africans. While the 12–15 million estimate is generally accepted by scholars, lower and higher figures have been cited. One of the first scholars to cite numbers for Africans exported to the Americas was Phillip Curtin, who provided the number of 10 million. W. E. B Du Bois’s doctoral thesis cited 100 million, but Curtin argued the number had not been scientifically calculated. Joseph Inikori has challenged Curtin’s numbers, giving the higher number of 15 million exported. See Joseph Inikori, Forced Migration: The Impact of the Export Slave Trade on African Societies (London: Hutchinson, 1982), 20. A 1991 publication by the Nation of Islam, The Secret Relation between Blacks and Jews, cites a number of 600 million, which many scholars have challenged as ridiculously high. See, for example, Winthrop D. Jordan, “Slavery and the Jews,” Atlantic Monthly, September 1995, 109–14. This is clearly a highly charged and political issue. We will, after all, never have an accurate number. However, from the perspective of those who were enslaved, whether the number was 10 million or 600 million, the effect was devastating and the consequences dire.

24. See Lovejoy, The “Middle Passage.” See also Heywood and Thornton, Central Africans; Brown, African-Atlantic Cultures.

25. Cameron Monroe and Akinwumi Ogundiran, Power and Landscape in Atlantic West Africa: Archaeological Perspectives (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). See also Christopher R. Decorse, An Archaeology of Elmina: Africans and Europeans on the Gold Coast, 1400–1900 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 286; Christopher R. Decorse, ed., West Africa during the Atlantic Slave Trade: Archaeological Perspectives (London: Leicester University Press, 2001); C. R. DeCorse, “West African Archaeology and the Atlantic Slave Trade,” Slavery and Abolition 12, no. 2 (1991): 92–96.

26. The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua: His Passage from Slavery to Freedom in Africa and America, Written and Revised from His Own Words by Samuel Moore, Esq. (Detroit: George E. Pomeroy and Co. Tribune Office, 1854), 35.

27. Roy E. Finkenbine, “Belinda’s Petition: Reparations for Slavery in Revolutionary Massachusetts,” William and Mary Quarterly 64, no. 1 (January 2007): 95–104.

28. Equiano, Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano. Literary scholar Vincent Carretta has questioned Equiano’s African birth, suggesting that he might have been born in South Carolina. He does not assert this conclusively. Historians of Africa such as Paul Lovejoy have challenged Carretta’s conclusion. In some respects Equiano’s birthplace is not important, and we can read his description of the Middle Passage as representative of the experience of millions of Africans. See Vincent Carretta, Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005); and Paul E. Lovejoy, “Issues of Motivation—Vassa/Equiano and Carretta’s Critique of the Evidence,” Slavery and Abolition 28, no. 1 (2007): 121–25.

29. Hill, Someone Knows, 28.

30. The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua: His Passage from Slavery to Freedom in Africa and America, ed. Robin Law and Paul E. Lovejoy (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2003). Paul Lovejoy notes that in the 1650s it took the average ship 133 days to cross the Atlantic from Africa. In the early eighteenth century, it took 75–80 days. By the end of that century the trip was reduced to 50–65 days. Between 1820 and 1850 the time was further reduced, to 40–50 days. Better ship designs and technology account for the reduction in time. Paul E. Lovejoy, The “Middle Passage”: The Enforced Migration of Africans across the Atlantic (Cambridge: ProQuest, 2006), http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:bsc:&rft_dat=xri:bsc:ft:essay:22LOVE.

31. Rediker, The Amistad Rebellion. See also Arthur Abraham, Amistad Revolt: An Historical Legacy of Sierra Leone and the United States (Freetown, Sierra Leone: United States Information Service, 1987). Documents relating to the case can be found at the National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/amistad.

32. Hawthorne, “‘Being Now, as It Were, One Family,’” 55.

33. Alex Haley, Roots: The Saga of an American Family (New York: Doubleday, 1976), 226.

34. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery, 101.

35. Smith, A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture. See also Paul Lovejoy, “The African Background of Venture Smith,” in Venture Smith and the Business of Slavery and Freedom (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), 35–55.

Chapter Three.  “We, the African Members, form ourselves into a Society”

  1. Smith, A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture.

  2. Peter H. Wood, “Strange New Land: 1502–1619,” in To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans, ed. Robin D. G. Kelley and Earl Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

  3. These first African “settlers” were likely casualties of a civil war in West Central Africa.

  4. James H. Sweet, “African Identity and Slave Resistance in the Portuguese Atlantic in the Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550–1624,” in The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550–1624, ed. Peter C. Mancall (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 246.

  5. Sweet, “African Identity and Slave Resistance,” 246–47.

  6. Wood, “Strange New Land,” 63–70. See text of the 1705 law, “An Act concerning Servants and Slaves,” Encyclopedia Virginia, https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/_An_act_concerning_Servants_and_Slaves_1705.

  7. Peter Wood, Part 1, The Terrible Transformation, 1450–1750, The Africans in America, PBS Online, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/title.html.

  8. Berlin, “From Creole to African,” 252.

  9. Bennett, Before the Mayflower.

10. See, for example, “African Americans and the End of Slavery in Massachusetts,” http://www.masshist.org/endofslavery/index.php?id=58.

11. Smith, A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture.

12. Richard Allen, The Life, Experience, and Gospel Labours of the Rt. Rev. Richard Allen: To Which Is Annexed the Rise and Progress of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States of America; Containing a Narrative of the Yellow Fever in the Year of Our Lord 1793, with an Address to the People of Colour in the United States, 1833, Documenting the American South, University Library, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2000, https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/allen/allen.html.

13. Higginbotham, In the Matter of Color, 163.

14. See Carney, Black Rice.

15. Gomez, “African Identity and Slavery in the Americas,” 112.

16. Sweet, “Reimagining the African-Atlantic Archive,” 153. See also Gomez, “African Identity and Slavery in the Americas,” 113; Erskine Clarke, “‘They Shun the Scrutiny of White Men’: Reports on Religion from the Georgia Lowcountry and West Africa, 1834–1850,” in African American Life in the Georgia Lowcountry: The Atlantic World and the Gullah Geechee, ed. Philip Morgan (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010); Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Douglas Chambers, “Igboes,” in The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, vol. 6, Ethnicity, ed. Ray Celeste (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

17. Berlin, “Atlantic Creoles,” 266. Berlin designates “Atlantic creoles” as “those who by experience or choice, as well as by birth, became part of a new culture that emerged along the Atlantic littoral—in Africa, Europe, or the Americas—beginning in the 16th century. . . . The term ‘Atlantic creole’ is designed to capture the cultural transformation that sometimes preceded generational change and sometimes was unaffected by it” (254). James Sweet takes issue with the “Atlantic Creoles” narrative, arguing that it tends to “exaggerate European impacts in Africa” (“Reimagining the African-Atlantic Archive,” 149). John Thornton has persuasively argued that many Central Africans brought to the United States, because of their long contact with Europeans, were acculturated to European ways. See Thornton, “The African Experience of the ‘20 and Odd Negroes.’”

18. Equiano, Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano.

19. For a good discussion of what Africans brought to the Americas, see Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks; see also Gomez, “African Identity and Slavery in the Americas”; Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas; and Margaret Washington Creel, A Peculiar People: Slave Religion and Community-Culture among the Gullahs (New York: New York University Press, 1988).

20. Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 160. See also Sweet, “Defying Social Death”; Roberts, “African-Virginian Extended Kin,” 36; John Blassingame, The Slave Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972).

21. See Joseph Holloway, ed., Africanisms in American Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005); David Dalby, ed., African Language Review, vol. 9 (London: Frank Cass, 1972).

22. Stuckey, Slave Culture, 7–9.

23. Wright, African Americans in the Colonial Era.

24. “Map: The Growing New Nation,” Africans in America, part 3, 1998–99, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part3/map3.html.

25. Wright, African Americans in the Colonial Era, 123.

26. Herbert Aptheker, ed., A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States (New York: Citadel, 1965), 1:27.

27. Shane White, “Slavery in the North,” OAH Magazine of History 17, no. 3 (2003): 17–21. See also Donald R. Wright, “Recent Literature on Slavery in Colonial North America.” OAH Magazine of History 17, no. 3 (2003): 5–9; Erik R. Seeman, “Reassessing the ‘Sankofa Symbol’ in New York’s African Burial Ground,” William and Mary Quarterly 67, no. 1 (2010): 101–22. See also Erik R. Seeman, Death in the New World: Cross-Cultural Encounters, 1492–1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).

28. Hodges, Root and Branch. See also Marshall, “Powerful and Righteous”; Timothy J. McMillan, “Black Magic: Witchcraft, Race, and Resistance in Colonial New England,” Journal of Black Studies 25, no. 1 (1994): 103.

29. White, “Slavery in the North,” 20.

30. Alexander, African or American? On Prince Hall, see Miller, The Search for a Black Nationality, 4.

31. Aptheker, A Documentary History, 1:17–18, 38.

32. “Museum of African American History, Boston and Nantucket,” http://www.afroammuseum.org/site14.html.

33. David Walker, Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America, Written in Boston, State of Massachusetts, September 28, 1829 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2014), 81, http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/walker/menu.html.

34. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Philadelphia: Prichard & Hall, 1788), cited in Documenting the American South, University Library, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, http://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/jefferson/jefferson.html.

35. Maria Stewart, “An Address Delivered at the African Masonic Hall, Boston, February 27, 1833,” cited in Richard Newman, Patrick Rael, and Philip Lapsansky, eds., Pamphlets of Protest: An Anthology of Early African-American Protest Literature, 1790–1860 (New York: Routledge, 2001), 123. See also Stewart, Meditations from the Pen of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart.

36. Alexander, African or American? 51.

37. Walker, Walker’s Appeal, 65.

38. Aptheker, A Documentary History, 1:40, 44.

39. Alexander, African or American? 21, 51.

Chapter Four.  “It is the will of GOD for you to come into the possessions of your ancestors”

  1. Some accounts of the Erskine family story refer to Martha Gains as his mother, but I believe she was his wife’s mother.

  2. “Captain Sherman to Thomas James, President of the Pennsylvania Colonization Society, June 4, 1830,” African Repository 6, no. 6 (1830).

  3. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery, 33–64.

  4. Alexander, African or American?

  5. See Miller, The Search for a Black Nationality, ch. 1.

  6. Herbert Aptheker, ed., A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States, vol. 1, Colonial Times through the Civil War (New York: Citadel, 1969), 7–8, also quoted in Horton and Horton, Hard Road to Freedom, 62.

  7. “The Boston Plan,” Africans in America, part 2, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part2/2h59t.html.

  8. “Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation, November 7, 1775,” NCpedia, https://www.ncpedia.org/media/image/lord-dunmore-proclamation-1775.

  9. Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom, 205.

10. David George, An Account of the Life of Mr. David George from Sierra Leone in Africa Given by Himself in a Conversation with Brother Rippon of London, and Brother Pearce of Birmingham (Louisville, KY: Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Library, 1980), 473–84. Also cited in Black Loyalists: Our History, Our People, http://blackloyalist.com/cdc/documents/diaries/george_a_life.htm. See also the entry on David George in Carretta, Unchained Voices. It is worth noting how George’s description of his first glimpse of Africa reverses the usual “trope” of seeing the Statue of Liberty in other American immigration stories. Brooks, The Silver Bluff Church. On George’s life in Sierra Leone, see Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, 69–101. See also “David George,” in Black Loyalists: Our History, Our People, http://www.blackpast.org/gah/george-david-1742–1810#sthash.IuAbPlww.dpuf.

11. Quoted in C. Pybus, “‘One Militant Saint’: The Much Traveled Life of Mary Perth,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 9, no. 3 (2008): 1, http://proxygw.wrlc.org/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/210670741?accountid=11243. See also Mary Louise Clifford, From Slavery to Freetown: Black Loyalists After the American Revolution (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999); Adrienne Shadd, “The Lord Seemed to say ‘Go’: Women and the Underground Railroad Movement,” in We’re Rooted Here and They Can’t Pull Us Up: Essays in African Canadian Women’s History, ed. Peggy Bristow (Buffalo, NY: University of Toronto Press, 1994); Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, 85.

12. “Memoirs of the Life of Boston King,” Methodist Magazine, May 1798, http://antislavery.eserver.org/narratives/boston_king/bostonkingproof.pdf/.

13. Miller, The Search for a Black Nationality.

14. T. Perronet Thompson to Castlereagh, November 2, 1808, Despatch 4, re: State of the Colony and Its Inhabitants, CO 267/24, Public Records Office, Kew Gardens, London.

15. Quoted in Pybus, “One Militant Saint,” 1.

16. “Cuffe to John James and Alexander Wilson, 1809,” in Captain Paul Cuffe’s Logs and Letters, 1808–1817: A Black Quaker’s “Voice from within the Veil,” ed. Rosalind Cobb Wiggins (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1996), 80.

17. Quoted in Miller, The Search for a Black Nationality, 56. On Cuffe, see Lamont D. Thomas, Paul Cuffe: Black Entrepreneur and Pan-Africanist (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), ch. 13.

18. Quoted in Jackson, Let This Voice Be Heard, 307.

19. Freedom’s Journal, June 13, 1828, extracted from African American Newspapers collection. See also James and Russwurm, Struggles of John Brown Russwurm. See also George Apperson, “George M. Erskine, Slave, Presbyterian, Missionary,” Presbyterian Voice, December 2001, http://www.synodoflivingwaters.com/the_voice/2001/10erskine.html.

20. “The Rev. George M. Erskine,” African Repository 5, no. 1 (1829): 30. See Nemata Blyden, “Early Black Atlantic Identities,” in Back to Africa, vol. 2, The Ideology and Practice of the African Returnee Phenomenon from the Caribbean and North America, ed. Kwesi Kwaa Prah, CASAS book series 92 (Cape Town: Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society, 2012).

21. See “Africa and America,” African Repository 46, no. 7 (1868), with extract from Calvinistic Magazine, printed in 1829, that claimed the family’s return allowed her to “return in company with an enlightened and Christian offspring.” David Nelson, James Gallaher, and Frederick Ross, “An Interesting Sight,” Calvinistic Magazine 3, no. 2 (1829).

22. “Letter of the Rev. George M. Erskine,” African Repository 6, no. 4 (1830): 121.

23. Finkenbine, Sources of the African-American Past, 37.

24. Abraham Camp, “Free Illinois Black, July 1818 Letter,” in Aptheker, A Documentary History, 1:72.

25. “Letter of the Rev. George M. Erskine,” 121.

26. “A Large Expedition for Liberia,” African Repository 42, no. 12 (1866): 374.

27. Queen Victoria’s journals, July 16, 1892, Windsor Castle, RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ (W) (Princess Beatrice’s copies). Martha married twice. Her first husband was Zion (Sion) Harris, who traveled on the same ship from America to Liberia. After Harris died, she married Mr. Ricks.

28. “Mr. Ellsworth’s Appeal,” African Repository 18, no. 9 (1842): 218.

29. Diana Skipwith, “James to Sally Cocke, March 6, 1843,” in Wiley, Slaves No More, 43.

30. See Daniel Coker, Journal of Daniel Coker, a Descendant of Africa, from the Time of Leaving New York, in the Ship Elizabeth, Capt. Sebor, on a Voyage for Sherbro, in Africa, in Company with Three Agents, and about Ninety Persons of Colour: The Rev. Samuel Bacon, John B. Bankson, Samuel S. Crozer, Agents; With an Appendix (Baltimore, MD: Edward J. Coale, in aid of the funds of the Maryland Auxiliary Colonization Society; John D. Toy, printer, 1820), 17, 22. See also Daniel Coker, A Dialogue between a Virginian and an African Minister (Baltimore, MD: Benjamin Edes for Joseph James, 1810). The full pamphlet is also included in Richard Newman, Patrick Rael, and Philip Lapsansky, eds., Pamphlets of Protest: An Anthology of Early African-American Protest Literature, 1790–1860 (New York: Routledge, 2001). For Coker to Lockes, see See Blyden, “Edward Jones”; Debra Newman Ham entry in Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619–1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass, ed. Paul Finkelman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 308–10.

31. See Davidson Nicol, “The Life and Times of Edward Jones,” unpublished manuscript, 1994, used by permission of the Nicol Family; Powers, Black Charlestonians, 57. See also Edward Jones, “Amherst College Class of 1826,” from the Amherst College Biographical Record, Centennial Edition (1821–1921), Amherst College, 1927, also at http://www3.amherst.edu/~rjyanco94/genealogy/acbiorecord/1826.html#jones-e. “Amherst College Class of 1826”; Blyden, “Edward Jones”; Hugh Hawkins, “Edward Jones: First American Negro College Graduate?” School and Society 89, no. 2198 (1961); Hawkins, “Edward Jones, Marginal Man”; C. G. Contee, “The Reverend Edward Jones, Missionary-Educator to Sierra Leone and ‘First’ Afro-American College Graduate, 1808?–1865,” Negro History Bulletin 38, no. 1 (1975); Harold Wade Jr., Black Men of Amherst (Amherst, MA: Amherst College Press, 1976); Davidson Nicol, “The Jones Family of Charleston, London and Africa,” in Sierra Leone Studies at Birmingham, Proceedings of the Fifth Birmingham Sierra Leone Studies Symposium, ed. Adam Jones, Peter K. Mitchell, and Margaret Peil (Birmingham, UK: University of Birmingham, 1990); Michael Crowder, “From Amherst to Fourah Bay: Principal Edward Jones,” in Two Hundred Years of Inter-cultural Evolution and Perspectives for the Future: Bicentenary of Sierra Leone Symposium (Fourah Bay: University of Sierra Leone, 1987); Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, 387. See also Nicol, “The Life and Times of Edward Jones”; Hawkins, “Edward Jones, Marginal Man,” 244. Why Jones chose to look to Africa at this time is unclear, but it is likely that because of laws in South Carolina that prevented blacks who left the state from returning, Jones could not go back home and therefore may have chosen Africa as an alternative. It seems Jones went to Liberia first and then on to Sierra Leone. This is logical given the interest of the Mission School in Liberia. Hugh Hawkins suggests that the Church Missionary Society, already established in Sierra Leone, may have enticed Jones from the American missionary establishment.

32. Quoted in Wheatley, Complete Writings, 159.

33. For an interesting discussion of the differences, see Ousmane K. Power-Greene, Against Wind and Tide: The African American Struggle against the Colonization Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2014). For more recent perspectives and debates on the American Colonization Society, the emigration movement, and opposition to it, see Tomek, Colonization and Its Discontents; Beverly C. Tomek and Matthew J. Hetrick, eds., New Directions in the Study of African American Recolonization (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017).

34. In his Appeal David Walker made reference to the Ohio case in his criticism of colonization: “Do the colonizationists think to send us off without first being reconciled to us? Do they think to bundle us up like brutes and send us off, as they did our brethren of the State of Ohio?” David Walker, Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America, Written in Boston, State of Massachusetts, September 28, 1829 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2014), 77, http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/walker/menu.html.

35. Quoted in Alexander, African or American? 76. The quote is from the Reverend Peter Williams Jr. from a speech made on Independence Day 1830.

36. Alexander, African or American? 79.

37. Thomas Jennings, “Free New York Black, 1828,” in Alexander, African or American? 83.

38. Walker, Walker’s Appeal.

39. Walker, Walker’s Appeal, 62, 77.

40. Frederick Douglas, “Colonization,” North Star, January 26, 1849, http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/abolitn/abar03at.html.

41. Henry Highland Garnet, “Address Delivered before the National Convention of Colored Citizens, Buffalo, New York, August 16, 1843,” in Walker’s Appeal, with a Brief Sketch of His Life. And Also Garnet’s Address to the Slaves of the United States of America (New York: J. H. Tobitt, 1848), 89–97.

42. “Words from the People; African Civilization Society,” letter to the editor from A. A. Constantine, corresponding secretary, New York Times, April 17, 1860. J. T. Holly was Bishop James Theodore Holly, another proponent of emigration.

43. Kenneth Barnes, Journey of Hope: The Back-to-Africa Movement in Arkansas in the Late 1800s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 102–3. A series of unflattering editorials in the New York Age and New York Freeman attacked “Dr. Blyden” in the belief that he was the impostor. In May 1891 Blyden’s son responded to one such editorial, contradicting “this malicious assertion,” and assuring readers his father was in Africa, not in an Arkansas jail. “He Is Not the Fire Brand,” New York Age, August 15, 1891.

44. Bernard K. Duffy and Richard W. Leeman, The Will of a People: A Critical Anthology of Great African American Speeches (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012), 94. A good treatment of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century emigration movement is Redkey, Black Exodus.

45. Grant, The Way It Was in the South, 386.

46. “Colonization and Emigration,” in In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience (New York: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, 2005), http://www.inmotionaame.org/home.cfm.

47. The Crisis, July 1915, 132. See also PBS, “Henry McNeal Turner”; Redkey, “Bishop Turner’s African Dream.”

Chapter Five.  “Africa is their country. They should claim it.”

  1. Alexander Crummell, “The Progress and Prospects of the Republic of Liberia: Delivered at the Annual Meeting of the New York State Colonization Society, May 9, 1861,” in The Future of Africa: Sermons, Addresses Delivered in Liberia (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 134, https://archive.org/details/futureafricabei01crumgoog.

  2. Simon Greenleaf, The Independent Republic of Liberia: Its Constitution and Declaration of Independence: Address of the Colonists to the Free People of Color in the United States, with Other Documents: Issued Chiefly for the Use of the Free People of Color (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Colonization Society, 1848). See also “Liberian Declaration of Independence,” The Liberian Constitutions, http://onliberia.org/con_declaration.htm.

  3. John H. Bracey Jr., August Meier, and Elliott Rudwick, eds., Black Nationalism in America (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), xxvii.

  4. Martin R. Delany, “Political Destiny of the Colored Race, on the American Continent,” in Proceedings of the National Emigration Convention of Colored People, Held at Cleveland, Ohio, August 24, 1854 (Pittsburgh: A. A. Anderson, 1854), http://uncpress.unc.edu/browse/page/471.

  5. Anna Julia Cooper, “A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South,” in Documenting the American South, University Library, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1998, 30, http://docsouth.unc.edu/church/cooper/cooper.html.

  6. Although Delany lobbied to serve as United States representative to Liberia, he was never appointed. In 1871 J. K. Milton Turner was appointed consul general to Liberia, where he presented his credentials to President Edward James Roye, an emigrant from Ohio. See Skinner, African Americans and U.S. Policy toward Africa, 69.

  7. Miller, The Search for a Black Nationality, 4. The belief that New World blacks could serve as examples of the benefits of Christianity and Western culture was perpetuated in the nineteenth century. It was a common argument among humanitarians in Europe and America, and New World blacks themselves internalized it. This was a notion that fell in with nineteenth-century European missionary and imperial ideas that exposure to Western values and education was best for Africans. Throughout the nineteenth century, American blacks articulated these ideas, with variations. Once black Americans were in Africa, many of their preconceptions and opinions changed, and their responses to the Africans they encountered varied. See also Magubane, The Ties That Bind, 23.

  8. Greenleaf, The Independent Republic of Liberia. See also “Liberian Declaration of Independence.”

  9. Quoted in Horton and Horton, Hard Road to Freedom, 102.

10. Quoted in Killingray, “The Black Atlantic Missionary Movement,” 6. Half of that number were women, mostly unmarried (22).

11. Williams, Black Americans and the Evangelization of Africa, 110. Sylvia Jacobs argues that American missions at this time had two goals—to evangelize among peoples they considered heathen and to develop social institutions, such as schools, hospitals, and agriculture, in order to achieve Westernization in Africa. See “The Historical Role of Afro-Americans in American Missionary Efforts in Africa,” in Jacobs, Black Americans and the Missionary Movement in Africa.

12. See Alexander, African or American? ch. 2, for discussion of black activism in New York. Crummell’s father, Boston, was a member of the African Society in New York, and also of the Haytian Emigration Society.

13. Otey Scruggs, “Alexander Crummell,” in Dictionary of American Negro Biography, ed. Rayford W. Logan and Michael R. Winston (New York: Norton, 1982), 15.

14. Alexander Crummell, The Relations and Duties of Free Colored Men in America to Africa (Champaign, IL: Hartford, 1861), https://archive.org/details/relationsdutieso00crum.

15. John Wesley and Edward Bowen, eds., Africa and the American Negro: Addresses and Proceedings of the Congress on Africa: Held under the Auspices of the Stewart Missionary Foundation for Africa of Gammon Theological Seminary in Connection with the Cotton States and International Exposition, December 13–15, 1895 (1895), in Documenting the American South, University Library, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2001, http://docsouth.unc.edu/church/bowen/bowen.html.

16. Amanda Smith, An Autobiography: The Story of the Lord’s Dealings with Mrs. Amanda Smith the Colored Evangelist; Containing an Account of Her Life Work of Faith, and Her Travels in America, England, Ireland, Scotland, India, and Africa, as an Independent Missionary (1893), in Documenting the American South, Academic Affairs Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1990, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/smitham/smith.html. See also Sandy Martin, “Spelman’s Emma B. Delaney and the African Mission,” in This Far by Faith: Readings in African-American Women’s Religious Biography, ed. Judith Weisenfeld and Richard Newman (New York: Routledge, 1996), 225; S. D. Martin, “Spelman’s Emma B. Delaney and the African Mission,” Journal of Religious Thought 41, no. 1 (1984): 22; Spelman College, Spelman Messenger, May 1896, 89, http://digitalcommons.auctr.edu/scmessenger/89; Spelman College, Spelman Messenger, December 1900, 124, http://digitalcommons.auctr.edu/scmessenger/124. See also Brandi Hughes, “Reconstruction’s Revival: The Foreign Mission Board of the National Baptist Convention and the Roots of Black Populist Diplomacy,” in African Americans in U.S. Foreign Policy: From the Era of Frederick Douglass to the Age of Obama, ed. Linda Heywood, Allison Blakely, Charles Stith, and Joshua C. Yesnowitz (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 83–108, http://www.jstor.org.proxygw.wrlc.org/stable/10.5406/j.ctt6wr5pv.9. For more recent work, see Y. Pierce, “Leaving Husband, Home, and Baby and All: African American Women and Nineteenth-Century Global Missions,” Journal of World Christianity 6, no. 2 (2016): 277–90. For an interesting discussion of the relationship between African American and indigenous African women, see Joanna Tenneh Diggs, “The Role of Women in National Development in Liberia, 1800–1900” (PhD diss., University of Illinois, 1989). According to Diggs, African American and indigenous women interacted in religion and education as well as through trade, employment, and intermarriage. Nevertheless, she argues, integration was never complete. African American women eschewed agriculture and heavy labor and often utilized indigenous women for labor purposes (ch. 4). For the difficulties encountered by African American missionaries, see Betty Collier-Thomas, Jesus, Jobs, and Justice: African American Women and Religion (New York: Knopf, 2010), ch. 4; Jacobs, “African-American Women Missionaries,” 384. See also Jacobs, “Give a Thought to Africa”; Jacobs, “Three African American Women Missionaries,” 320.

17. Hughes, “Reconstruction’s Revival,” 87.

18. See Pagan Kennedy, Black Livingstone: A True Tale of Adventure in the Nineteenth-Century Congo (Santa Fe, NM: Santa Fe Writers Project, 2013). On Sheppard’s activism against Belgian colonialism, see Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999). Scholars such as Alain Locke were influenced by the exposure to African art afforded by Sheppard’s collection of African art. See H. G. Cureau, “William H. Sheppard: Missionary to the Congo, and Collector of African Art,” Journal of Negro History 67, no. 4 (1982): 340–52.

19. Williams, “Ethnic Relations of African Students,” 229–31; Collier-Thomas, Jesus, Jobs, and Justice, 228. See also Martin, “Spelman’s Emma B. Delaney and the African Mission.”

20. Sylvia Jacobs, The African Nexus: Black American Perspectives on the European Partitioning of Africa, 1880–1920 (Westport, CO: Greenwood, 1981), 67–79.

21. Quoted in Jeanette Eileen Jones, In Search of Brightest Africa: Reimagining the Dark Continent in American Culture, 1884–1936 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 85.

22. T. Thomas Fortune, quoted in Jones, In Search of Brightest Africa, 38. See also Aldridge, “Becoming American,” 38; Donald F. Roth, “The ‘Black Man’s Burden’: The Racial Background of Afro-American Missionaries and Africa,” in Jacobs, Black Americans and the Missionary Movement in Africa, 24; Wesley and Bowen, Africa and the American Negro; W. L. Williams, “Black Journalism’s Opinions about Africa during the Late Nineteenth Century,” Phylon 34, no. 3 (1973): 224–35.

23. Wesley and Bowen, Africa and the American Negro; Henry McNeal Turner, “Our Sentiments,” Voice of Mission 5, no. 6 (1897).

24. Darlene Clark Hine, William C. Hine, and Stanley Harrold, “Lynchings in the United States,” in African Americans: A Concise History, vol. 2, 1889–1932 (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2004), 243.

25. Harvard Sitkoff, Struggle for Black Equality, 1954–1992 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1993), 4.

26. John Hope Franklin and Isidore Starr, eds., The Negro in Twentieth Century America: A Reader on the Struggle for Civil Rights (New York: Vintage Books, 1967); Ray Stannard Baker, Following the Color Line: An Account of Negro Citizenship in the American Democracy (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1908).

27. W. E. B Du Bois, “Segregation in the North,” The Crisis, April 1934, 115–17.

28. Langley, “Chief Sam’s African Movement,” 165. See also Robert Hill, ed., Pan African Biography (Los Angeles: Crossroads/African Studies Center, 1987); David Chang, The Color of the Land (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); William E. Bittle and Gilbert Geis, The Longest Way Home: Chief Alfred C. Sam’s Back-to-Africa Movement (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1964).

29. Quoted in Langley, “Chief Sam’s African Movement,” 173. See also “African ‘Paradise’ Lure for Negroes,” New York Times, February 11, 1914, http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=990DE1D61F3BE633A25752C1A9649C946596D6CF.

30. Franklin and Starr, The Negro in Twentieth Century America.

31. Quoted in Leon Litwack, Trouble in Mind (New York: Knopf, 1998), 486.

32. James Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935–1961 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 19.

33. Emory Warren Ross Papers, Burke Library at Union Theological Seminary, Columbia University, New York.

34. Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans, 19.

35. W. E. B. Du Bois, “On Being Ashamed of Oneself,” in Eric J. Sundquist, ed., The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 76.

36. “Negro Protectorate in Africa Proposed,” Baltimore Sun, January 22, 1919.

37. Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans, 21–22.

38. Quoted in Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: Harper Collins, 2006), 195.

39. See Robert Hill, ed., The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, vol. 9, Africa for the Africans, June 1921–1922 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995); Robert Hill, ed., The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, vol. 10, Africa for Africans, 1923–1945 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006).

40. See Colin Grant, Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 244; Ula Taylor, The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 110. Records show Marke entering the country in 1920 and 1922. For an interesting analysis of Garvey’s influence and impact in South Africa, see Robert Trent Vinson, The Americans Are Coming! Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregationist South Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011).

41. Quoted in Howard Brotz, ed., Negro Social and Political Thought, 1850–1920: Representative Texts (New York: Basic Books, 1923), 568.

42. “Protests Alien Bill: Booker T. Washington Says It’s Unfair to His Race,” Washington Post, January 15, 1915.

43. Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

44. On Washington’s influence on Africans, see Louis Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856–1901 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972).

45. Williams, “Ethnic Relations of African Students.” See also Nemata Blyden, “Relationships among Blacks in Diaspora: African and Caribbean Immigrants and American-Born Blacks,” in Africans in Global Migration: Searching for Promised Lands, ed. John A. Arthur, Joseph Takougang, and Thomas Owusu (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012), 161–74.

46. See Ralston, “American Episodes in the Making of an African Leader,” 75. See also Steven Gish, Alfred B. Xuma: African, American, South African (New York: New York University Press, 2000). Dube received high school training at Oberlin and did a theology degree at Brooklyn Theological Seminary in New York City in the late 1890s. He was certainly influenced by Washington. See Heather Hughes, The First President: A Life of John L. Dube, Founding President of the ANC (Auckland Park, South Africa: Jacana Media, 2011). William Manning Marable, “African Nationalist: The Life of John Langalibalele Dube” (PhD diss., University of Maryland, 1976); Hunt Davis, “John L. Dube: A South African Exponent of Booker T. Washington,” Journal of African Studies 2, no. 4 (1975). Manning Marable rather strongly argues that Dube’s American experience “established the intellectual rationale for his educational and political thought for the rest of his adult life.” See also R. T. Vinson and R. Edgar, “Zulus Abroad: Cultural Representations and Educational Experiences of Zulus in America, 1880–1945,” Journal of African Studies 33, no. 1 (2007): 43–62.

47. See Edwin W. Smith, Aggrey of Africa: A Study in Black and White (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1929). See also S. M. Jacobs, “James Emman Kwegyir Aggrey: An African Intellectual in the United States,” Journal of Negro History 81, no. 1 (1996): 47–61; Williams, “Ethnic Relations of African Students.” Aggrey was the sole black member of the Phelps Stokes Fund’s commission sent to assess education in Africa.

48. James Aggrey Papers, box 147–3, folder 21, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, DC.

49. “Rev. Orishatukeh Faduma” American Missionary 57, no. 1 (1904): 16.

50. Orishatukeh Faduma, “The African Movement: The Perils of Pioneering—A Parallel,” Sierra Leone Weekly News, September 11, 1915, quoted in Langley, “Chief Sam’s African Movement,” 176. See also Moses Nathaniel Moore Jr., “Orishatukeh Faduma: An Intellectual Biography of a Liberal Evangelical Pan-Africanist, 1857–1946” (PhD diss., Union Theological Seminary, 1987), 260. Faduma spent a period of eight years in Sierra Leone on and off after he left, opening a school in the colony.

51. See Simbini Mamba Nkomo, “The African Student Union,” in Pamphlet, The Student World. Negro Students in Africa, America, and Europe: April 1923, James Aggrey Papers, folder 13: Writings by “The Native Students of Africa” Staff.

52. Rina Okonkwo, “Orishatukeh Faduma: A Man of Two Worlds,” Journal of Negro History 68, no. 1 (1983): 26.

53. Quoted in Alfred Xuma, Charlotte Manye (Mrs. Maxeke): “What an Educated African Girl Can Do,” ed. Dovie King Clarke (Alice, Lovedale, South Africa: Women’s Parent Mite Missionary Society of the A.M.E. Church, 1930), 1, http://www.historicalpapers.wits.ac.za/inventories/inv_pdfo/AD2186/AD2186-Ha2–01-jpeg.pdf. See also N. Masilela, “The ‘Black Atlantic’ and African Modernity to South Africa,” Research in African Literatures 27, no. 4 (1996): 88–96; and April, “Theorising Women.” For other laudatory perspectives on Manye, see Daluxolo Molantoa, “What They Said about Missionary School Pioneer Dr. Charlotte Maxeke,” Gateways to a New World—Profiles of Eminent Missionary Education Schools in South Africa, January 29, 2016, https://gatewaystoanewworld.wordpress.com/2016/01/29/what-they-said-about-dr-charlotte-maxeke/. Also on Charlotte Manye, see Zubeida Jaffer, Beauty of the Heart: The Life and Times of Charlotte Maxeke (Bloemfontein, South Africa; Sun, 2016). See also Veit Erlmann, African Stars: Studies in Black South African Performance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 21–53.

54. Williams, “Ethnic Relations of African Students,” 232; The Baptist Home Mission Monthly, an organ of the American Baptist Home Mission Society, published several articles on African American female missionaries and young African women brought to the United States to be educated. An article on some of these young women, including Yongebloed, Clark, and Rattray, offered their Congolese names. Interestingly, the missionary who sponsored one of them, Nora Gordon, was also given the Congolese name Sita. Baptist Home Mission Monthly, Volume 17–18 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan and American Baptist Home Mission Society, 1895), 389–400. Included with the article was a picture of four young women captioned “Vunga, Zinga, Nkebani and Sita.” Collier-Thomas, Jesus, Jobs, and Justice, 228. Suluka’s husband was Dr. Andrew Holmes from Fort Valley, Georgia.

55. Gareth Griffiths, “Coming to America: ‘African Princes’ in America, 1886 to the Present Day,” in Literature, the Visual Arts and Globalization in Africa and Its Diaspora, ed. Lokangaka Losambe and Maureen Eke (Trenton, NJ: African World Press, 2011), 149. See also Felix Ekechi, “Christianity,” in Africa, vol. 2, African Cultures and Societies Before 1885, ed. Felix Ekechi (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2000); Adebayo Oyebade, “Euro-African Relations to 1885,” in Africa, vol. 1, African History Before 1885, ed. Toyin Falola (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2000), 82.

56. “Hampton Graduating Class,” America Archives, http://www.accessgenealogy.com/native/schools/hampton2/graduating_class_1884.htm. See also Griffiths, “Coming to America,” 149.

57. Jabez Ayodele Langley, quoting Kobina Sekyi in The Parting of the Ways (1922?), located in J. A. Langley, “Garveyism and African Nationalism,” Race & Class 11, no. 2 (1969): 157, 166.

58. Quoted in Ibrahim Sundiata, Brothers and Strangers: Black Zion, Black Slavery, 1914–1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 37.

59. Berman, “American Influence on African Education,” 13.

60. “Aggrey to Rose, October 24, 1920,” James Aggrey Papers.

61. T. S. Gale, “Segregation in British West Africa,” Cahiers d’études africaines 20, no. 80 (1980): 495–507.

62. Shepperson, “Notes on Negro American Influences on the Emergence of African Nationalism,” 304. Sol Plaatje came on a speaking tour and had exchanges with Robert Russa Moton, Washington’s successor at Tuskegee. See Brian Willan, Sol Plaatje: A Biography (Braamfontein, South Africa: Ravan, 1984). See also Robert Hill and Gregory Pirio, “‘Africa for Africans’: The Garvey Movement in South Africa, 1920–1940,” in The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism in 20th Century South Africa, ed. Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido (Los Angeles: The Regents of the University of California, 1987); Vinson, The Americans are Coming!; Adam Ewing, The Age of Garvey: How Jamaican Activist Created a Mass Movement and Changed Global Black Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). While this book is mainly concerned with African Americans and their views/relationship and representation of Africa, it is worth noting that Africans too understood, and understand, the experiences of African Americans in particular ways.

Chapter Six.  “My Africa, Motherland of the Negro peoples!”

  1. “2000 Parade in Harlem’s Protest to Ethiopian Invasion,” Baltimore Afro American, May 11, 1935.

  2. C. Fyfe, “Race, Empire and the Historians,” Race & Class 33, no. 4 (1992): 26. See also C. Fyfe, “Using Race as an Instrument of Policy: A Historical View,” Race & Class 36, no. 2 (1994): 69–77.

  3. See Nemata Blyden, West Indians in West Africa: A Diaspora in Reverse (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2000).

  4. See Kevin Shillington, A History of Africa (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 362; Robert William July, The Origins of Modern African Thought: Its Development in West Africa during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: F. A. Praeger, 1968); Philip Serge Zachernuk, Colonial Subjects: An African Intelligentsia and Atlantic Ideas (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 2000).

  5. Marc Matera, “Black Internationalism and African and Caribbean Intellectuals in London, 1919–1950” (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 2008), 105.

  6. Ibrahim Sundiata, Brothers and Strangers: Black Zion, Black Slavery, 1914–1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).

  7. Selassie’s name before he became king was Ras Tafari. He would later inspire Jamaicans to found Rastafarianism in the early 1930s. Another interesting connection to Ethiopia is the settlement at Shashemane in Ethiopia by Rastafarians from the U.S. and the Caribbean.

  8. William R. Scott, The Sons of Sheba’s Race: African-Americans and the Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935–1941 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). See also E. O. Erhagbe and E. A. Ifidon, “African-Americans and the Italo-Ethiopian Crisis, 1935–1936: The Practical Dimension of Pan-Africanism,” Aethiopica: International Journal of Ethiopian and Eritrean Studies 11 (2008); Robinson, “The African Diaspora and the Italo-Ethiopian Crisis,” 61; Joseph E. Harris, African-American Reactions to War in Ethiopia, 1936–1941 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994).

  9. “From the Press of a Nation,” The Crisis 42, no. 8 (1935): 214. Extract from the Daily Worker in “Rally to Support of Abyssinian Masses,” Chicago Defender, January 5, 1935. The Daily Worker was a Communist paper and a white commentator could have just as well written this statement, although it was likely an African American. The newspaper was not particularly black in its staff or outlook. Regardless of its author, it expressed the sentiments of many African Americans, whether they were Communist or not. It is interesting to note that while the Communist Party had black members, it was silent on the Soviet Union’s continued sale of oil to Italy, an act that contributed to Italy’s ability to subdue and occupy Ethiopia.

10. Quoted in Robinson, “The African Diaspora,” 27, 63. Chicago Defender, July 22, 1935. For Mrs. Thompson’s observations, see “Why Go to Ethiopia,” Chicago Defender, August 17, 1935.

11. See Keisha N. Blain, “Teaching Black Internationalism and Americanah,” Blog of the American Studies Journal, January 27, 2015, https://amsjournal.wordpress.com/2015/01/27/teaching-black-internationalism-and-americanah/. There is a rich literature on black internationalism. See especially Michael O. West, William G. Martin, and Fanon Che Wilkins, eds., From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International since the Age of Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Roderick Bush, The End of White World Supremacy: Black Internationalism and the Problem of the Color Line (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009). More recently, scholars are paying more attention to black women’s internationalism. See Mary G. Rolinson, “Mabel Murphy Smythe: Black Women and Internationalism,” in Georgia Women: Their Lives and Times, ed. Ann Short Chirhart and Kathleen Clark (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014); Dayo F. Gore, “From Communist Politics to Black Power: The Visionary Politics and Transnational Solidarities of Victoria ‘Vicki’ Ama Garvin,” in Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle (New York: New York University, 2009); Gerald Horne, Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois (New York: New York University Press, 2000); Barbara Ransby, Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013); Yevette Richards, Maida Springer: Pan-Africanist and International Labor Leader (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000); Y. Richards, “African and African-American Labor Leaders in the Struggle over International Affiliation,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 31, no. 2 (1998): 301–34. See also K. N. Blain, “‘We Want to Set the World on Fire’: Black Nationalist Women and Diasporic Politics in the New Negro World, 1940–1944,” Journal of Social History 49, no. 1 (2015): 194–212.

12. Harvard Sitkoff, Struggle for Black Equality, 1954–1980 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981), 4.

13. See W. E. B. Du Bois, “Segregation in the North,” The Crisis, April 1934, 115–16.

14. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Pan-Africa and New Racial Philosophy” (1933), in A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States, vol. 3, From the Beginning of the New Deal t0 the End of the Second World War, 1933–1945 (New York: Citadel, 1975), 47.

15. Jones, In Search of Brightest Africa, 22.

16. S. Delgado-Tall, “The New Negro Movement and the African Heritage in a Pan-Africanist Perspective,” Journal of Black Studies 31, no. 3, (2001): 288–310. See also Trudier, “The Image of Africa in the Literature of the Harlem Renaissance.”

17. See Shane Graham and John Walters, eds., Langston Hughes and the South African Drum Generation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

18. J. C. Parker, “‘Made-in-America Revolutions’? The ‘Black University’ and the American Role in the Decolonization of the Black Atlantic,” Journal of American History 96, no. 3 (2009): 732. Alain Locke, “Apropos of Africa,” in The Works of Alain Locke, ed. Charles Molesworth (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

19. Quoted in Dorothy Hunton, Alphaeus Hunton: The Unsung Valiant (Richmond Hill, NY: D. K. Hunton, 1986), 60–62. See also Rayford W. Logan, The African Mandates in World Politics (Washington, DC: Public Affairs, 1949); Alioune Diop and John A. Davis, Africa Seen by American Negroes (Paris: Presence Africaine, 1958).

20. Langston Hughes, The Big Sea: An Autobiography, (Hill & Wang, 1964), 10–11. See also Arnold Rampersand, The Life of Langston Hughes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). On Bunche, see Robert R. Edgar, ed., An African American in South Africa: The Travel Notes of Ralph J. Bunche, 28 September 1937–1 January 1938 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992). More broadly, see Cheryl Fish and Farah J. Griffin, eds., Stranger in the Village: Two Centuries of African American Travel Writing (Boston: Beacon, 1998).

21. Hughes (1940), quoted in Delgado-Tall, “The New Negro Movement,” 290–91.

22. “Africa Not Fatherland of Negroes, NAACP Tells Bilbo,” July 12, 1945, NAACP Papers, 1940–55, General Office File, Africa (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1992).

23. Darlene Clark Hine, William C. Hine, and Stanley Harrold, eds., African Americans: A Concise History, vol. 2, 1889–1932 (Hoboken, NJ: Pearson, 2013), 359.

24. See K. Dunn, “Lights . . . Camera . . . Africa: Images of Africa and Africans in Western Popular Films in the 1930s,” African Studies Review 39, no. 1 (1996): 149.

25. Quoted in Paul Robeson and Philip Foner, Paul Robeson Speaks: Writings, Speeches, Interviews, 1918–1974 (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel, 1978), 351. Original citation from Robeson, “Here’s My Story,” Freedom, June 1953. With respect to learning languages and studying culture, Robeson wrote in 1935: “Meanwhile in my music, my plays, my films, I want to carry always this central idea—to be African.” Quoted in J. H. Clarke, “Paul Robeson: The Artist as Activist and Social Thinker,” Présence Africaine, no. 107 (1978): 230.

26. Quoted in Paul Robeson Jr., The Undiscovered Paul Robeson: Quest for Freedom, 1939–1976 (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2010), 209. This statement was made in 1934 at the League of Colored Peoples Conference.

27. See David Henry Anthony III, Max Yergan: Race Man, Internationalist, Cold Warrior (New York: New York University Press, 2006).

28. Paul Robeson to Walter White, May 22, 1945, NAACP Papers, 1940–55, General Office File, Africa.

29. Eslanda Robeson, African Journey (New York: John Day, 1945), 9.

30. Robeson, African Journey, 90, 187. See Barbara Ransby, “Eslanda Robeson and Cold War Politics,” Race & Class 54, no. 4 (2013): 104–9; and for a more comprehensive biography of Eslanda Robeson’s life and politics, see Ransby, Eslanda. See also M. Mahon, “Eslanda Goode Robeson’s African Journey: The Politics of Identification and Representation in the African Diaspora,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 8, no. 3 (2006).

31. E. F. Frazier, “Ethnic Family Patterns: The Negro Family in the United States,” American Journal of Sociology 53, no. 6 (1948): 435.

32. Richards, Maida Springer, 5.

33. James Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935–1961 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 204.

34. However, some, like Randolph, Maida Springer, and Pauli Murray, were vocal and loud on the subject in the 1950s, carrying on long after CAA voices fell silent. Anti-Communism and anticolonialism could exist side by side, often reinforcing each other. While Communist anticolonialism got crushed, other variants survived. See E. Arnesen, “Civil Rights and the Cold War at Home: Postwar Activism, Anticommunism, and the Decline of the Left,” American Communist History 11, no. 1 (2012). In subsequent years the Justice Department and the FBI harassed the CAA. Whether Yergan aided them or not is unclear.

35. See Nnamdi Azikiwe, Zik: A Selection of Speeches from Nnamdi Azikiwe, Governor-General of the Federation of Nigeria, Formerly President of the Nigerian Senate, Formerly Premier of the Eastern Region of Nigeria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), http://www.blackpast.org/1959-nnamdi-azikiwe-addresses-national-association-advancement-colored-people-organizations-50th-ann#sthash.nr9VVfxC.dpuf.

36. Penny M. Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 102, 118, 125, 146.

37. Paul Robeson and Max Yergan were signatories to an appeal calling for an end to the oppression of Africans in South Africa. Council on African Affairs, An Urgent Call for Immediate Protest against Racial Injustice and the Brutal Smashing of the African Mine Workers’ Strike in the Union of South Africa, 1946, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312), Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b109-i424. For the conference, see Meriwether, Proudy We Can Be Africans, 138. The conference is also mentioned in a report put out by the CAA. See Council on African Affairs, Spotlight on Africa, May 18, 1954, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312), Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.

38. Channing Tobias, “To Our Friends in Africa,” March 21, 1947, MRL 1: Emory Warren Ross Papers, series 2, box 9, folder 8, Burke Library at Union Theological Seminary, Columbia University, New York.

39. Claude Barnett and Etta Moten, “A West African Journey,” September 1, 1947, 19, 25, MRL 1: Emory Warren Ross Papers, series 2, box 9, folder 8, Burke Library at Union Theological Seminary, Columbia University, New York.

40. Barnett and Moten, “A West African Journey,” 31.

41. International Committee on Christian Literature for Africa, 1934–1954, MRL 1, Emory Warren Ross Papers, series 2, box 8, folder 3, Burke Library at Union Theological Seminary, Columbia University, New York. The Barnett manuscript can be found in the Emory Warren Ross Papers, 1877–1972. Missionary Research Library Archives, section 1, Emory Warren Ross Papers; Phelps Stokes Fund, 1944–1961, Emory Warren Ross Papers, series 2, box 9, folder 8; International Committee on Christian Literature for Africa, 1934–1954, MRL 1, Emory Warren Ross Papers, series 2, box 8, folder 3, 25, 28.

42. Barnett to W. E. F. Ward, September 6, 1947, in Phelps Stokes Fund, 1944–1961, MRL 1, Emory Warren Ross Papers, 1877–1972, series 2, box 9, folder 8.

43. Enclosure in Emory Warren Ross Papers. Pamphlet put out by Charles Pearson Publishers.

44. “Princess Wins Suit against Fisk U.: Autobiography Judged Hers; Charged President Made Copy of Book,” Baltimore Afro-American, February 10, 1945.

45. Africans formed their first organizations in the early twentieth century. In June 1919 the Chicago Defender “big weekend edition” reported on a “convention composed of native Africans.” The students, “in attendance at various colleges throughout the city,” met to discuss a variety of topics, including missionary work and their role in it. The article noted that many of the students “expect to return to their native land soon and engage in work beneficial to their people there.” “Native African Students Hold Council,” Chicago Defender, June 14, 1919.

46. “We Make Our Bow,” in African Interpreter, February 1943, 4, NAACP Papers, 1940–55, General Office File, Africa (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1992).

47. “We Make Our Bow,” 4.

48. Generic letter of invitation addressed to “Dear Friend” from Warren Marr II, provisional chairman of the organization, May 13, 1958, NAACP Papers, Africa, Sierra Leone, 1958–1961.

49. “African Chieftainess and Aide Here,” New York Times, May 21, 1958, 8.

50. Asadata Dafora Papers, folder 1/6: Programs, 1931–1959, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. African Americans were integral members of Dafora’s troupe. Often billed in his programs with African names, some argued that they sought authenticity. For example, Frances Atkins took the name Musu Esami. In the 1960s it became common practice for African Americans to take African names. See Julia L. Foulkes, Modern Bodies: Dance and American Modernism from Martha Graham to Alvin Ailey (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

51. “Kingsley Mbadiwe to Mary McLeod Bethune, November 17, 1944,” African Academy of Arts and Research folder, Mary McLeod Bethune Papers: The Bethune Foundation Collection, part 3: subject files, 1939–1955, ProQuest History Vault: The Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century: Organizational Records and Personal Papers.

52. Paula Giddings, Where and When I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: Harper Collins, 1984), ch. 12.

53. Letter of invitation from Joseph Acquah to Bethune, July 17, 1950, “A Proposed College to Be Erected in West Africa to Be Supported by Americans of African Descent,”4, in Mary McLeod Bethune Papers: The Bethune Foundation Collection, part 3: subject files, 1939–1955, ProQuest History Vault: The Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century: Organizational Records and Personal Papers.

54. Bethune to Mr. J. Chukwuka Ezenekwe, November 29, 1954, Mary McLeod Bethune Papers: The Bethune Foundation Collection, part 3: subject files, 1939–1955, ProQuest History Vault: The Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century: Organizational Records and Personal Papers.

55. Henrietta Peters to Sallie Stewart, July 9, 1930, Sallie W. Stewart Correspondence, 1930–1931, Records of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, 1895–1992, part 1: Minutes of National Conventions, Publications, and President’s Office Correspondence, ProQuest History Vault: The Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century: Organizational Records and Personal Papers.

56. Elliott Skinner, “Afro-Americans in Search of Africa: The Scholars’ Dilemma,” in Transformation and Resiliency in Africa, ed. Pearl Robinson and Elliott Skinner (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1983). See also Skinner, African Americans and US Policy toward Africa; Martin Staniland, “African-Americans and Africa,” in American Intellectuals and African Nationalists (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991); Jones, In Search of Brightest Africa.

57. See Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans; McCray to Barnett, November 18, 1946, Claude A. Barnett Papers: The Associated Negro Press, 1918–1967, part 3: Subject Files on Black Americans, series G: Philanthropic and Social Organizations, 1925–1966, ProQuest History Vault: The Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century: Organizational Records and Personal Papers. McCray, a labor activist and co-founder with Edith Sampson of the Chicago-based Afro World Fellowship, would later become involved in the labor movement in Africa. Long a Pan-Africanist, he took pride in his African ancestry, and would follow through with his call for diasporan blacks to help develop Africa by moving to newly independent Ghana. See Yevette Richards, “The Activism of George McCray,” in Black Power beyond Borders: The Global Dimensions of the Black Power Movement, ed. Nico Slate (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2012).

58. See Brenda Gayle Plummer, In Search of Power: African Americans in the Era of Decolonization, 1956–1974 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 38.

Chapter Seven.  “I wanted to see this Africa”

  1. Richard Wright, Black Power (New York: Harper Collins, 1954), 9.

  2. Since Richard Wright made his journey, other African Americans and diasporan blacks have also gone in search of their African heritage, or to discover why they were not, in fact, connected to Africa. See Sadiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007); and Caryl Phillips, The Atlantic Sound (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), among others.

  3. Wright, Black Power, 12.

  4. Richard Wright, Native Son (New York: Harper & Row, 1940), 35. For an interesting perspective on Wright’s views on Africa, see C. O. Ogunyemi, “Richard Wright and Africa,” International Fiction Review 7, no. 1 (1980); “Trader Horn Trailer,” YouTube, March 16, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxXM8M0vro8.

  5. African Americans and Africans had also cooperated at the founding of the United Nations in 1945. See Carol Anderson, Eyes off the Prize: The UN and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); M. Sherwood, “There Is No Deal for the Blackman in San Francisco,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 29, no. 1 (1996): 71–94.

  6. James Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935–1961 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). See also Ebere Nwaubani, The United States and Decolonization in West Africa, 1950–1960 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2001).

  7. S. C. Drake, “The American Negro’s Relation to Africa,” Africa Today 14, no. 6 (1967): 12–15.

  8. Wright, Black Power, 66.

  9. Kevin Gaines, American Africans in Ghana (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 110; Rosalind Rosenberg, Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 235–36.

10. Pauli Murray, interview by Genna Rae McNeil, February 13, 1976, Series G: Southern Women, Southern Oral History Program Collection, http://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/html_use/G-0044.html.

11. A. Wyse, “The Sierra Leone Branch of the National Congress of British West Africa, 1918–1946,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 18, no. 4 (1985): 675–98.

12. The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1957), 42; see also ch. 3.

13. Meriwether, Proudy We Can Be Africans, 173.

14. “Salute from Harlem,” Ghana Today, August 20,1958, https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=GsEqAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&hl=en&pg=GBS.PA346 and https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=GsEqAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&hl=en&pg=GBS.PA339. See also Gaines, American Africans in Ghana.

15. “On the Tour with Thomasina Norfold,” Amsterdam News, November 14, 1959, quoted in Brenda Gayle Plummer, In Search of Power: African Americans in the Era of Decolonization, 1956–1974 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 34; Evelyn Cunningham, “Guinea’s President Toura’s Visit Evokes: New U.S. Look at Africa,” Pittsburgh Courier, November 14, 1959, 3.

16. News release entitled “Mrs. Robeson Denounces McCarthy Quiz,” Associated Negro Press (ANP) files with ANP byline. Barbara Ransby writes about Eslanda’s testimony before McCarthy in “Eslanda Robeson and Cold War Politics,” Race & Class 54, no. 4 (2013): 104–9.

17. Seon is the mother of comedian Dave Chappelle. George Kibala Bauer, “How many of you know Dave Chappelle’s mother worked for Patrice Lumumba?” May 19, 2015, http://africasacountry.com/2015/05/how-many-of-you-know-dave-chappelles-mother-worked-for-patrice-lumumba/. Seon would later work for Africare: see http://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/yvonne-seon-39.

18. “UN Riot Symbol of Black Unrest,” Chicago Defender, March 4, 1961. See also P. E. Joseph, “Dashikis and Democracy: Black Studies, Student Activism, and the Black Power Movement,” Journal of African American History 88, no. 2 (2003): 182–203. James Hicks was a longtime journalist for the Amsterdam News, an African American newspaper. He was the first black journalist to report on United Nations news. See Wolfgang Saxon, “James Hicks, 70, Journalist; Ex–Amsterdam News Editor,” New York Times, January 22, 1986, http://www.nytimes.com/1986/01/22/obituaries/james-hicks-70-journalist-ex-amsterdam-news-editor.html.

19. Nnamdi Azikiwe, “Nnamdi Azikiwe Addresses the NAACP Convention on the Organization’s 50th Anniversary,” 1959, http://www.blackpast.org/1959-nnamdi-azikiwe-addresses-national-association-advancement-colored-people-organizations-50th-ann#sthash.nr9VVfxC.dpuf. See also Nnamdi Azikiwe, Zik: A Selection from the Speeches of Nnamdi Azikiwe, Governor-General of the Federation of Nigeria, Formerly President of the Nigerian Senate, Formerly Premier of the Eastern Region of Nigeria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961).

20. Brenda Gayle Plummer, In Search of Power: African Americans in the Era of Decolonization, 1956–1974 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 4.

21. Cunningham, “Guinea’s President Toura’s Visit,” 3.

22. L. F. Palmer Jr., “Violence Fails to Halt ‘Sit-In,’” Daily Defender, March 23, 1960, 9, http://proxygw.wrlc.org/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/493789234?accountid=11243.

23. Gaines, American Africans in Ghana, 5.

24. Kevin Gaines, “African-American Expatriates in Ghana,” Souls (1999): 66.

25. Martin Luther King Jr., “Birth of a New Nation” (sermon delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, AL, April 7, 1957).

26. Gaines, American Africans in Ghana, 170.

27. F. C. Wilkins, “The Making of Black Internationalists: SNCC and Africa Before the Launching of Black Power, 1960–1965,” Journal of African American History 92, no. 4 (2007): 471.

28. Wilkins, “The Making of Black Internationalists,” 490n61.

29. Quoted in Wilkins, “The Making of Black Internationalists,” 480. See also R. J. Hayes, “A Free Black Mind Is a Concealed Weapon: Institutions and Social Movements in the African Diaspora,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 9, no. 3 (2007): 223–34.

30. “Nigerian and U.S. Negro Artists Blend Tales at AMSAC Festival in Lagos,” Ebony, March 1962, 84.

31. Quoted in Wilkins, “The Making of Black Internationalists,” 484.

32. Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans, 151.

33. “Nigerian and U.S. Negro Artists Blend Tales,” 89.

34. Gaines, American Africans in Ghana, 190–94. See also Maya Angelou, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (New York: Random House, 1986); James T. Campbell, Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787–2005 (New York: Penguin Books, 2007).

35. Angelou, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, 195–96.

36. Angelou, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, 206–7.

37. Campbell, Middle Passages, 348.

38. Maya Angelou, “Africa,” AfroPoets Famous Black Writers, http://www.afropoets.net/mayaangelou21.html, and “America,” https://genius.com/Maya-angelou-america-annotated. Both poems are also included in Maya Angelou, The Complete Poetry (New York: Random House, 2015).

39. Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans, 205. See also Gaines, American Africans in Ghana, 206.

40. “African Liberation Support Committee,” African Activist Archive, http://africanactivist.msu.edu/organization.php?name=African+Liberation+Support+Committee.

41. Randall Robinson, Defending the Spirit: A Black Life in America (New York: Penguin, 1998), 96.

42. Robinson writes: “In the 1970s, African Americans who wanted to do policy work on Africa hitched their wagons to Congressman Diggs’ star.” Robinson, Defending the Spirit, 95. Robinson later became disenchanted, and left the United States to settle in Saint Kitts. See Randall Robinson, Quitting America: The Departure of a Black Man from His Native Land (New York: Dutton Adult, 2004).

43. See James B. Stewart, “Amandla! The Sullivan Principles and the Battle to End Apartheid in South Africa, 1975–1987,” Journal of African American History 96, no. 1 (2011): 62–89, doi:10.5323/jafriamerhist.96.1.0062. See also Leon Sullivan, The (Sullivan) Statement of Principles (Fourth Amplification) (Philadelphia: International Council for Equality of Opportunity Principles, 1984).

44. See David Clark Scott, “The Sullivan Principles: A Code of Conduct for US Companies in South Africa,” Christian Science Monitor, April 1, 1986, https://www.csmonitor.com/1986/0401/africa1.html.

45. Quoted in Joe Logan, “Harry Belafonte’s 30-Year Labor of Love for Africa,” Chicago Tribune, August 15, 1985, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1985–08–15/features/8502230384_1_harry-belafonte-usa-for-africa-delegation-golden-nugget-casino-hotel.

46. Nelson Bangston, Elizabeth Lanis, Phyllis Suskid, and Peter Weiss, “Special Session of the Executive Board of the American Committee on Africa,” African American Archivist, August 27, 1957, http://kora.matrix.msu.edu/files/50/304/32–130–246B-84-PW%20ACOA%20EB%209–27–57%20opt.pdf.

47. “Flier for the Free South Africa Movement Rally, December 20, 1884,” African Activist Archive, http://kora.matrix.msu.edu/files/50/304/32–130–1A24–84-Free_SA_dec20_1984.pdf. Sylvia Hill is an academic at the University of the District of Columbia. A formative experience for her was attending the Sixth Pan-Africanist Congress in Dar es Salaam in 1974. See “Free South Africa Movement,” African American Archivist, http://africanactivist.msu.edu/organization.php?name=Free%20South%20Africa%20Movement.

48. “Oprah’s Mission to Empower Women and Girls in South Africa,” http://www.impactingourfuture.com/news/oprahs-mission-to-empower-women-and-girls-in-south-africa. See also Andrew Meldrum Henley-on-Klip, “‘Their Story Is My Story’: Oprah Opens $40m School for South African Girls,” Guardian, January 3, 2007. On African Americans and the anti-apartheid movement, the author consulted Nesbitt, Race for Sanctions. See also “U.S. Activists and Politicians Campaign at South African Embassy for End to Apartheid, 1984–1985,” Global Nonviolent Action Database, http://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/us-activists-and-politicians-campaign-south-african-embassy-end-apartheid-1984–1985. Gerald Horne has argued, however, that the NAACP distanced itself from the African National Congress of South Africa during the anti-apartheid movement in the United States, perceiving the ANC as Communist. See G. Horne, “Looking Forward/Looking Backward: The Black Constituency for Africa Past & Present,” Black Scholar 29, no. 1 (2015): 31.

49. “Maya Angelou Writes Poem in Honour of Nelson Mandela,” Guardian, December 7, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/07/maya-angelou-poem-nelson-mandela. See also Harriet Staff, “Maya Angelou Presents a Tribute Poem on Behalf of the American People to Nelson Mandela,” Poetry Foundation, December 12, 2013, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2013/12/maya-angelou-presents-a-tribute-poem-on-behalf-of-the-american-people-to-nelson-mandela.

50. For an analysis of hip-hop as black nationalism, see J. L. Decker, “The State of Rap: Time and Place in Hip Hop Nationalism,” Social Text 34 (1993): 53–84.

51. August Wilson, quoted in Alex Poinsett, “August Wilson: Hottest New Playwright,” Ebony, November 1987, 74.

52. Quoted in Shannon, “Framing African American Cultural Identity,” 29. See also Bissiri, “Aspects of Africanness in August Wilson’s Drama.”

53. Horne, “Looking Forward/Looking Backward,” 33.

54. Joseph Takougang, “Contemporary African Immigrants to the United States,” Ìrìnkèrindò 2 (December 2003), http://search.proquest.com/docview/37876203/.

55. David Crary, “Africans in U.S. Caught between Worlds,” USA Today, June 16, 2007.

56. Monica Anderson, “African Immigrant Population in U.S. Steadily Climbs,” Pew Research Center, February 14, 2017, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/14/african-immigrant-population-in-u-s-steadily-climbs/.

57. Y. K. Djamba, “African Immigrants in the United States: A Socio-demographic Profile in Comparison to Native Blacks,” African and Asian Studies 34, no. 2 (1999): 210–15; Elizabeth M. Grieco, “The Foreign Born from Mexico in the United States: 1960–2000,” in The Hispanic Challenge? What We Know about Latino Migration, ed. P. Strum and A. Selee (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2004), 7–15.

58. J. E. Benson, “Exploring the Racial Identities of Black Immigrants in the United States,” Sociological Forum 21, no. 2 (2006): 221. See also Festus E. Obiakor and Patrick A. Grant, eds., Foreign-Born African Americans: Silenced Voices in the Discourse on Race (New York: Nova Saence, 2002); L. Freeman, “Does Spatial Assimilation Work for Black Immigrants in the United States?” Urban Studies 39, no. 11 (2002).

59. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah (New York: Anchor Books, 2013), 17, 70, 331–32, 410.

60. Jemima Pierre, “Interrogating Blackness: Race and Identity Formation in the African Diaspora,” Transforming Anthropology 11, no. 1 (2002): 51–53.

61. K. K. Apraku, African Émigrés in the US (New York: Praeger, 1991); Brandon A. Perry, “Historic Celebration to Build Bridges among Local Residents and African Immigrants,” Indianapolis Recorder, June 3, 2005.

62. S. Iwarere, “D.C. Based Center Reaches out to African Immigrants,” Washington Informer 40, no. 41 (2004).

63. “President’s Bio,” Constituency for Africa, http://www.cfa-network.org/business-services-presidents-bio.

64. “Washington DC, Mayor’s Office on African Affairs,” Office on African Affairs, www.oaa.dc.gov.

65. Yolanda Woodlee, “Activists Call for African Affairs Office,” Washington Post, December 29, 2005.

66. Felicia Lee, “Black Migration, Both Slave and Free,” New York Times, February 2 2005.

67. Lee, “Black Migration.”

Epilogue

  1. “Michelle Obama: ‘The Blood of Africa Runs through My Veins,” Washington Post, July 30, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/posttv/national/michelle-obama-the-blood-of-africa-runs-through-my-veins/2014/07/30/949a485c-182e-11e4–88f7–96ed767bb747_video.html; Hannah E. Adewumi, “Zambian Musicians Sing Obama Lyrics in ‘Change We Can Believe In’: Obama Inauguration Speech Inspires Song,” June 25, 2009, http://iipdigital.usembassy.gov/st/english/article/2009/06/20090625120207sztiwomod0.3060266.html#ixzz4bc84uEgL; Blakk Rasta, Barack Obama, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L85YF0pyPH0. When President Obama, visited Ghana in 2009 the composition served as sort of a theme song of his visit. Tata Kinge, “Musician Tata Kinge’s Tribute to U.S. President Barack Obama,” December 18, 2012, BBC World Service video, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p012s8jx; Sebastien Berger, “Kenya Declares National Holiday in Celebration of Barack Obama’s Presidential Victory,” Telegraph, November 5, 2008, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/3385610/Kenya-declares-national-holiday-in-celebration-of-Barack-Obamas-presidential-victory.html; Ofeibea Quist-Arcton, “Africa Celebrates Barack Obama’s Victory,” NPR, November 5, 2008, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=96643771.

  2. Violet S. Johnson, “When Blackness Stings: African and Afro-Caribbean Immigrants, Race, and Racism in Late Twentieth Century America,” Journal of American Ethnic History 36, no. 1 (2016): 31–62.

  3. Sara Rimer and Karen W. Arenson, “Top Colleges Take More Blacks, but Which Ones?” New York Times, June 24, 2004; Lani Guinier, “Our Preference for the Privileged,” Boston Globe, July 9, 2004, http://archive.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/07/09/our_preference_for_the_privileged?pg=full.

  4. G. J. Sanchez, “Race, Nation and Culture in Recent Immigration Studies,” Journal of American Ethnic History 18, no. 4 (1999): 72

  5. It is important to note that there has been a significant population of African refugees in the United States. Liberians, Eritreans, Ethiopians, and Somalians have often arrived fleeing wars, famine, repression, drought, and so on. These men and women have often not come voluntarily.

  6. Phillipe Wamba, Kinship: A Family’s Journey in Africa and America (New York: Penguin Putnam, 2000), 328.

  7. Afropolitan was a term coined by the writer Taiye Selasi to describe what she calls the “newest generation of African emigrants,” the children of postcolonial African immigrants seeking better opportunities in metropolitan cities in the United States and Europe. Taiye Selasi, “Bye-Bye Babar,” LIP Magazine, March 3, 2005, http://thelip.robertsharp.co.uk/?p=76. For a discussion of the Afropolitan phenomenon, see C. Eze, “‘We, Afropolitans,’” Journal of African Cultural Studies 28, no. 1 (2015): 114–19; E. Dabiri, “‘Why I Am (Still) Not an Afropolitan,’” Journal of African Cultural Studies 28, no. 1 (2016): 104–8; S. Balakrishnan, “The Afropolitan Idea: New Perspectives on Cosmopolitanism in African Studies,” History Compass 15, no. 2 (2017). Horne argues, “Solidarity across the Atlantic must be based on more than common melanin content, for although this is not an irrelevant concern, solidarity must also be based on a common struggle.” G. Horne, “Looking Forward/Looking Backward: The Black Constituency for Africa Past & Present,” Black Scholar 29, no. 1 (2015): 32.

  8. Wamba, Kinship, 328.

  9. Rich Schapiro, “Amadou Diallo’s Mother Finally Finds Peace 17 Years After Son’s Slaying by NYPD,” New York Daily News, February 4, 2006, http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/amadou-diallo-mother-finally-peace-nypd-shooting-article-1.2519647.

10. Chris Stein, “Back to Africa? For Some African-Americans, the Answer Is Yes,” Christian Science Monitor, April 4, 2014, https://www.csmonitor.com/World/2014/0404/Back-to-Africa-For-some-African-Americans-the-answer-is-yes. Stein cites an estimated three thousand black Americans living in Ghana.