· NOTES ·
Introduction: What Is Africa to Me? xiv “One of the Kru men from Liberia”: Langston Hughes, The Big Sea: An Autobiography (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1986, orig. pub. 1940), p. 103.
xiv “comedy of misrecognition”: Kenneth Warren, “Appeals for (Mis)recognition: Theorizing the Diaspora,” in Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press), pp. 393-94.
Prologue: Ayuba’s Journey 1 “twenty Negars . . . Dutch manne o war”: John Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, Newe England, and the Summer Isles [ . . . ] (London, 1624), quoted in Engel Sluiter, “New Light on the ’20. and Odd Negroes’ Arriving in Virginia, August, 1619,” William and Mary Quarterly 54:2 (1997), p. 395.
3 “to make them appear like Slaves”: Thomas Bluett, Some Memoirs of the Life of Job, the Son of Solomon, the High Priest of Boonda in Africa [ . . . ] (London, 1734), in Philip Curtin, ed., Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), p. 40.
3 “leave to redeem . . . his man”: Bluett, Life of Job, p. 40.
4 “was no common slave”: Bluett, Life of Job, p. 42.
4 “affable carriage” and “easy composure”: Bluett, Life of Job, p. 42.
5 “acquainting him with his misfortunes”: Bluett, Life of Job, p. 43.
5 “strove who should oftenest invite him”: Douglas Grant, The Fortunate Slave: An Illustration of African Slavery in the Early Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. vi.
6 “he had proper clothes to go in”: Bluett, Life of Job, p. 46.
7 “with the greatest Respect”: Grant, The Fortunate Slave, p. 112.
7 “upon paying two other good Slaves for one”: Grant, The Fortunate Slave, p. 110.
8 “make so good an understanding between”: Francis Moore, Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa (London, 1738), in Curtin, ed., Africa Remembered, p. 59.
8 “a great deal of the horror of the Pholeys”: Moore, Travels into the Inland Parts, p. 57.
8 “imagined that all who were sold”: Moore, Travels into the Inland Parts, p. 57.
8 “a woman-slave and two horses”: Moore, Travels into the Inland Parts, p. 57.
12 “By the eve of the American Revolution”: David B. Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), p. 48.
Chapter One: Windward Coast 17 “leave the province . . . fellow-men to enslave them”: Herbert Aptheker, A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States, vol. 1 (Secaucus, N.J.: The Citadel Press, 1951), pp. 7-8.
18 “The inhabitants of Rhode Island”: Providence Gazette, October 13, 1787.
18 “spread the light of the gospel”: John Saillant, Black Puritan, Black Republican: The Life and Thought of Lemuel Haynes, 1753-1833 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 98.
18 “in the case of Joseph being sold a slave”: Saillant, Black Puritan, p. 98.
19 “’Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land”: John C. Shields, ed., The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 18.
19 “Did Fear and Danger so perplex”: Newport Mercury, December 21, 1767, in Shields, ed., Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley, p. 133.
19 “to promote this laudable design”: Phillis Wheatley to Samuel Hopkins, February 9, 1774, in Shields, ed., Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley, p. 176.
20 “earnest desire of returning to Affrica”: William H. Robinson, ed., The Proceedings of the Free African Union Society and the African Benevolent Society, Newport, Rhode Island, 1780-1824 (Providence: The Urban League of Rhode Island, 1976), p. 16.
21 “He is a discerning, judicious, steady”: George Champlin, ed., Mason’s Reminiscences of Newport (Newport: Charles E. Hammett, 1884), p. 157.
21 “natural abilities . . . acquaintance as to letters”: Lamin Sanneh, Abolitionists Abroad: American Blacks and the Making of Modern West Africa (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 46.
23 “stain and contamination . . . more dangerous”: Mavis C. Campbell, Back to Africa: George Ross and the Maroons: From Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1993), p. iii.
25 “terrestrial Elysium . . . comfortable situation”: Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), pp. 145, 148-49.
25 “I could not have conceived that men”: Hochschild, Bury the Chains, pp. 176-77.
26 “very peculiar emotions”: Ellen Gibson Wilson, The Loyal Blacks (New York: G.P. Putnam and Sons, 1976), p. 242.
27 “Your thoughts were evil”: Wilson, The Loyal Blacks, p. 242.
28 “to return to Africa, our native country”: Sidney Kaplan and Emma Nogrady Kaplan, The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989), pp. 207-9.
28 “mutual intercourse and profitable commerce”: Kaplan and Kaplan, Black Presence, p. 208.
28 “We are waiting and longing”: Robinson, ed., Proceedings of the Free African Union Society, p. 18.
29 “lands proper and sufficient to settle”: Robinson, ed., Proceedings of the Free African Union Society, p. 16.
29 “warm climate . . . more agreeable”: Kaplan and Kaplan, Black Presence, p. 208.
29 “inlightening and civilizing those nations”: Kaplan and Kaplan, Black Presence, p. 208.
29 “calamitous state . . . wicked as to sell one another”: Robinson, ed., Proceedings of the Free African Union Society, p. 19.
30 “simplicity, innocence, and contentment”: Peter Williams, “An Oration on the Abolition of the Slave Trade [. . .] January 1, 1808,” in Dorothy Porter, ed., Early Negro Writing (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), p. 346.
30 “imposters and bloodsuckers”: Daniel Coker, quoted in Floyd J. Miller, The Search for Black Nationality: Black Emigration and Coloniation, 1787-1863 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), p. 67.
30 “strangers and outcasts in a strange land”: Robinson, ed., Proceedings of the Free African Union Society, p. 19.
30 “good and proper title . . . Heirs or children”: Robinson, ed., Proceedings of the Free African Union Society, p. 16.
30 “civil society united by a political constitution”: Kaplan and Kaplan, Black Presence, p. 208.
32 “poor Dispised miserable” . . . “the white peopel do”: Aptheker, ed., Documentary History, vol. 1, pp. 14-16.
32 “[W]hen Mr. Clarkson’s History of the Abolition”: Sheldon H. Harris, ed., Paul Cuffe: Black America and the Africa Return (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972), p. 52.
32 “from which may issue the seeds of reformation”: Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-trade by the British Parliament, vol. 2 (London: Longman, 1808), pp. 344-45.
33 “rise to be a people”: Harris, ed., Paul Cuffe, p. 208.
33 “useful arts” . . . “Rice, Indigo, Cotton or Tobacco”: Harris, ed., Paul Cuffe, p. 177.
34 “as to Poor me i feel very feeble”: Rosalind Cobb Wiggins, ed., Captain Paul Cuffe’s Logs and Letters, 1808-1817 (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1996), p. 78.
34 “dust of Africa”: Wiggins, ed., Captain Paul Cuffe’s Logs, p. 104.
34 “mental endowments”: Lamont Thomas, Rise to Be a People: A Biography of Paul Cuffe (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), p. 61.
35 “a letter of advice . . . the nations of Africa”: Wiggins, ed., Captain Paul Cuffe’s Logs, p. 108.
35 “gave the king a Testament and several other books”: Paul Cuffe, A Brief Account of the Settlement and Present Situation of the Colony of Sierra Leone in Africa (Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprints, 1970, orig. pub. 1812), p. 7.
36 “acknowledge by words the existence”: Cuffe, A Brief Account, p. 7.
36 “them poor and they could not git things”: Wiggins, ed., Captain Paul Cuffe’s Logs, p. 342.
36 “So accustomed are they to wars and slavery”: Cuffe, A Brief Account, p. 7.
36 “It must have been a strange and animating spectacle”: Harris, ed., Paul Cuffe, p. 53.
36 “Clarkson and I are both of the mind”: William Allen, Life of William Allen, With Selections from His Correspondence, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Henry Longstreth, 1847), p. 103.
36 “few knew what to do with them”: Wiggins, ed., Captain Paul Cuffe’s Logs, p. 173.
37 “forefathers out of the Egyptian bondage”: Cuffe, A Brief Account, p. 10.
37-38 “such of the native productions . . . into a state of slavery”: Cuffe, “Memorial Petition, June 16, 1813,” in Wiggins, ed., Captain Paul Cuffe’s Logs, pp. 252-253.
38 “invite the emigration of free blacks”: Thomas, Rise to Be a People, p. 90.
38 “so much acquainted with treatment”: Harris, ed., Paul Cuffe, p. 187.
39 “[I]t is to be lamented to see & hear”: Harris, ed., Paul Cuffe, p. 194.
39 “far greater than the number taken in”: Harris, ed., Paul Cuffe, p. 194.
39 “the many obstructions thrown in the way”: Harris, ed., Paul Cuffe, p. 234.
39 “[S]hould it appear that there could be no more view”: Harris, ed., Paul Cuffe, p. 215.
39 “motions of insurrection . . . tranquility of the world”: Harris, ed., Paul Cuffe, pp. 202, 206, 215, ff.
40 “The whole commerce between master and slave”: Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Boston, Mass.: Bedford, 2002), p. 195.
40 “inferior in the faculties of reason and imagination”: Jefferson, Notes, p. 180.
41 “Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites”: Jefferson, Notes, pp. 175-76.
41 “[W]e have a wolf by the ear”: Jefferson to John Holmes, April 22, 1820, in Ford Paul Leicester, ed., The Works of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 12 (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1905), p. 159.
41-42 “breeders . . . swallowing a camel”: John Saillant, “The American Enlightenment in
42 Africa: Jefferson’s Colonizationism and Black Virginians’ Migration to Liberia, 1776-1840,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 31:3 (1998), p. 275.
42 “a powerful means . . . civilization and Christianity to Africa”: Harris, ed., Paul Cuffe, p. 232.
42 “rise to that condition . . . this scheme is from God”: Philip J. Staudenraus, The African Colonization Movement, 1816-1865 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), pp. 17-18.
43 “other situation in Africa”: Harris, ed., Paul Cuffe, p. 232.
44 “materially tend to secure” . . . “discontent”: Staudenraus, African Colonization Movement, p. 29.
44 “Can there be a nobler cause”: Staudenraus, African Colonization Movement, p. 28.
44 “unmerited stigma” . . . “blood and sweat”: Aptheker, Documentary History, vol. 1, p. 71.
44 “[W]e will never separate ourselves voluntarily”: Aptheker, Documentary History, vol. 1, p. 71.
44 “will never become a people”: Kaplan and Kaplan, Black Presence, p. 162.
45 “the more enlightened they were”: Staudenraus, African Colonization Movement, p. 33.
45 “[L]et no purpose be assisted which will stay”: Staudenraus, African Colonization Movement, p. 33.
45 “banana, orange, lime, and plantain trees”: Sanneh, Abolitionists Abroad, p. 196.
45 “a land stored with the choicest minerals”: Miller, Search for Black Nationality, p. 56.
45 “a second Paul Cuffe”: Amos J. Beyan, The American Colonization Society and the Creation of the Liberian State: A Historical Perspective, 1822-1900 (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1991), p. 57.
46 “[I]f the people [prove] troublesome”: Staudenraus, African Colonization Movement, pp. 46-47.
47 “interpositions of providence”: “Diary of Daniel Coker, April 21-September 21, 1821,” Peter Force Collection, Library of Congress, series 8D, reel 32, entry for April 29, 1821.
48 “[H]e being nearly white, the people said”: David Smith, Biography of Rev. David Smith of the A.M.E. Church (Xenia, Ohio: Xenia Gazette, 1881), p. 33.
48 “clearing and cultivating the land”: Ralph Randolph Gurley, Life of Jehudi Ashmun, Late Colonial Agent in Liberia (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969, orig. pub. 1835), p. 75.
49 “led his chosen armies through”: Daniel Coker, Journal of Daniel Coker, A Descendant of Africa [. . .] on a Voyage to Sherbro, in Africa (Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprints, 1970, orig. pub. 1820), p. 15.
49 “poring over our plan” . . . “Surely something great”: Coker, Journal, p. 14.
49 “Oh! My dears, what darkness has covered”: Coker, Journal, pp. 43-44.
50 “from intercourse with slave-traders”: Coker, Journal, p. 42.
50 “Such is their conduct that any one who loves”: Coker, Journal, p. 44.
50 “natives sit[ting] naked” . . . “children of nature . . . all nearly naked”: Coker, Journal, pp. 21-22.
50 “gross darkness”: Coker, Journal, p. 34.
50 “[T]he water at the place is not good or plenty”: Coker, Journal, p. 34.
51 “first impressions on heathens are to be made”: Coker, Journal, p. 24.
51 “[T]hey well know, if we get foot hold”: Coker, Journal, p. 36.
51 “I have no doubt that we shall succeed”: Coker, Journal, p. 37.
51 “[W]e must not get discouraged”: Coker, Journal, p. 38.
51 “the King & the head men . . . will not let a white”: Miller, Search for Black Nationality, p. 65.
52 “[W]hite blood is good, and black blood is good”: Miller, Search for Black Nationality, p. 66.
52 “O bigotry, thou art no friend”: Coker, “Diary,” May 27, 1821.
52-53 “late trials . . . well suited to my case”: Coker, “Diary,” July 21, 1821; August 4, 1821.
53 “Moses was I think permitted to see”: Coker, “Diary,” May 3, 1821.
53 “bleeding, groaning, dark, benighted Africa”: Coker, Journal, p. 44.
55 “I go to set an example to the youth”: Champlin, Mason’s Reminiscences of Newport, p. 159.
55 “composed by Dea[con] Newport Gardner”: Charles A. Battle, Negroes on the Island of Rhode Island (Newport, R.I.: Newport Black Museum, 1971, orig. pub. 1932), p. 28.
55 “and she said, Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs”: Matthew 15: 27-28.
56 “Hear the words of the Lord, O ye African race”: Battle, Negroes on the Island, p. 28.
Chapter Two: Representing the Race 57 “the said Commissioners, on behalf of the African race”: Martin Delany, Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party, in Howard H. Bell, ed., Search for a Place: Black Separatism and Africa, 1860 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969, orig. pub. 1861), pp. 77-78.
58 “black as jet”: Robert S. Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), p. 20.
60 “We see [slavery] now in its true light”: Fergus M. Bordewich, Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America (New York: Amistad, 2005), p. 305.
60 “I have for several years been striving to reconcile”: Freedom’s Journal 1:34 (November 2, 1827), p. 2.
60 “We wish to plead our own cause”: Freedom’s Journal 1:1 (March 16, 1827), p. 1.
60 “In the discussion of political subjects”: Freedom’s Journal 1:1 (March 16, 1827), p. 4.
60 “Born in this Republican country”: Freedom’s Journal 1:2 (March 23, 1827), p. 2.
61 “moral, religious, civil and literary improvement”: Freedom’s Journal 1:1 (March 16, 1827), p. 4.
61 “We are unvarying in our opinion”: Freedom’s Journal 1:13 (June 8, 1827), p. 2.
61 “[E]verything that relates to Africa shall find”: Freedom’s Journal 1:1 (March 16, 1827), p. 1.
61 “progress of geographic discovery”: Freedom’s Journal 1:3 (March 30, 1827), p. 3.
62 “We are all going on with some elegant improvements”: Julie Winch, A Gentleman of Color: The Life of James Forten (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 202.
63 “Let us and our friends unite, in baptizing the term”: The Colored American, March 4, 1837, p. 1.
64 “to remove the title of African”: “Minutes of the Fifth Annual Convention for the Improvement of the Free People of Color in the United States [. . .] 1835,” in Howard H. Bell, Minutes of the Proceedings of the National Negro Congress, 1830-1864 (New York: Arno, 1969), pp. 14-15.
64 “HEREDITARY BONDSMEN! KNOW YE NOT”: Robert S. Levine, ed., Martin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), p. 27.
65 “abolition of complexional distinctions”: Floyd J. Miller, The Search for Black Nationality: Black Emigration and Colonization, 1787-1863 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), p. 102.
65 “has gone about the same length in favor”: Levine, ed., Delany: Documentary Reader, p. 3.
65 “physiological condition . . . transmitted to the offspring”: Delany, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered (1852), in Levine, ed., Delany: Documentary Reader, pp. 215-16.
65 “a conclave of upstart colored hirelings”: Delany, “Introduction” to William Nesbit, Four Months in Liberia, or African Colonization Exposed (1855), in Wilson Jeremiah Moses, ed., Liberian Dreams: Back-to-Africa Narratives from the 1850s (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), p. 83.
66 “learned in all the ways of the Egyptians”: Delany, “Origins and Objects of Ancient Freemasonry” (1853), in Levine, ed., Delany: Documentary Reader, p. 53.
67 “say that his talents emanate”: Delany, North Star, July 7, 1848, in Levine, ed., Delany: Documentary Reader, p. 101.
67 “the most African of all the black men”: Delany, Christian Recorder, July 21, 1866, in Levine, ed., Delany: Documentary Reader, p. 463.
68 “the late Martin R. Delany, who was an unadulterated”: Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988, orig. pub. 1892), p. 30.
69 “We are slaves in the midst of freedom”: Delany, Condition, in Levine, ed., Delany: Documentary Reader, p. 201.
69 “the nominally free states”: Delany, North Star, July 28, 1848, in Levine, ed., Delany: Documentary Reader, p. 115.
69 “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit”: Dred Scott v. Sanford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) (1857), pp. 393, 408.
69-70“the harp-like strains that whisper freedom”: Miller, Search for Black Nationality, p. 188.
70 “My mind of late has greatly changed”: Miller, Search for Black Nationality, p. 190.
70 “I have found all my best friends among the white”: Daniel Peterson, The Looking Glass: Being a True Report and Narrative of the Life, Travels, and Labors of the Rev. Daniel H. Peterson (1854), in Moses, ed., Liberian Dreams, p. 10.
70 “I must say that I never saw a more attractive”: Peterson, The Looking Glass, p. 47.
70 “lands want ploughing up and sowing”: Peterson, The Looking Glass, p. 60.
70 “On stepping ashore, I found that we had been”: Nesbit, Four Months in Liberia, p. 88.
70-71“The whole country presents the most woe begone”: Nesbit, Four Months in Liberia, p. 88.
71 “violent and appalling storms” . . . “destroying insects”: Nesbit, Four Months in Liberia, pp. 94, 96, 101.
71 “cod-fish aristocracy”: Nesbit, Four Months in Liberia, p. 90.
71 “filthy and disgusting . . . lazy, rude, and ignorant”: Nesbit, Four Months in Liberia, p. 111.
71 “fast retrograding”: Nesbit, Four Months, p. 92.
71 “Let the colonist himself be barefoot”: Nesbit, Four Months, p. 103.
72 “aliens to the laws and political privileges”: Delany, Condition, in Levine, ed., Delany: Documentary Reader, p. 202.
72 “degrading, expatriating, insolent, slaveholding scheme”: Delany, North Star, March 2, 1849, in Levine, ed., Delany: Documentary Reader, p. 144.
72 “the admission of blacks to the medical Lectures”: Ronald Takaki, “Aesculapius Was a White Man: Antebellum Racism and Male Chauvinism at Harvard Medical School,” Phylon 39:2 (1978), pp. 128-30, 132.
73 “nation within a nation”: Delany, Condition, in Levine, ed., Delany: Documentary Reader, p. 202.
73 “the ruling element”: Delany, Political Destiny of the Colored Race on the American Continent (1854), in Levine, ed., Delany: Documentary Reader, pp. 247, 250.
73 “incontrovertibly shown” . . . “Where shall we go”: Delany, Condition, in Levine, ed., Delany: Documentary Reader, p. 203.
73 “Liberia is not an Independent Republic”: Delany, Condition, in Levine, ed., Delany: Documentary Reader, p. 204.
73 “the qualifications of physician, botanist, chemist”: Delany, “A Project for an Expedition of Adventure, to the Eastern Coast of Africa” (1852), in Levine, ed., Delany: Documentary Reader, p. 321.
74 “The land is ours; there it lies”: Delany, “A Project for an Expedition,” in Levine, ed., Delany: Documentary Reader, p. 323.
74 “We must not leave this continent”: Delany, Condition, in Levine, ed., Delany: Documentary Reader, p. 206.
74 “who would introduce the subject”: Aptheker, Documentary History, vol. 1, p. 363.
74 “[O]ur object and determination are to consider”: Aptheker, Documentary History, vol. 1, pp. 363-64.
75 “We must have a position, independently”: Delany, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, July 1852, in Levine, ed., Delany: Documentary Reader, pp. 222-23.
75 “seemed to know no other purpose for living”: Delany, Provincial Freeman, July, 12, 1856, in Levine, ed., Delany: Documentary Reader, p. 293.
75 “not having as yet read Uncle Tom’s cabin”: Delany, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, April 1853, in Levine, ed., Delany: Documentary Reader, p. 231.
76 “knows nothing about us”: Delany, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, April 1853, in Levine, ed., Delany: Documentary Reader, p. 225.
78 “an efficient corps of scientific men of color”: Miller, Search for Black Nationality, p. 176.
79 “Scientific Corps . . . Examination of the [Niger] Valley”: Delany, Official Report, pp. 39-40.
80 “an Enlightened and Christian Nationality”: Delany to Henry Ward Beecher, June 17, 1858, in Levine, ed., Delany: Documentary Reader, p. 183.
80 “that most pernicious and impudent of all schemes”: Delany, “Introduction” to Nesbit, Four Months in Liberia, p. 81.
80 “the grandest prospect for the regeneration”: Delany, Official Report, pp. 102, 122.
83 “the light of the gospel” . . . “in darkness”: J. F. Ade Ajayi, Christian Missions in Nigeria, 1841-1891: The Making of a New Elite (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965), pp. 27-28.
84 “a household word among the readers”: Ajayi, Christian Missions, p. 40.
85 “benefit your countrymen whilest you make”: Miller, Search for Black Nationality, pp. 176-77, n. 8.
86 “a fawning servilian of the negro-hating Colonizationists”: Delany, North Star, March 2, 1849, in Levine, ed., Delany: Documentary Reader, p. 146.
86 “propogated in consequence of writers”: Robert Campbell, A Pilgrimage to My Motherland: An Account of a Journey Among the Egbas and Yorubas of Central Africa in 1859-60, in Howard H. Bell, ed., Search for a Place, p. 151.
87 “history of the project”: Delany, Official Report, p. 32.
87 “on behalf of the African race in America”: Delany, Official Report, p. 77.
88 “sanitary means”: Delany, Official Report, p. 98.
88 “black rascals” . . . “stand deliberately and watch”: Delany, Official Report, p. 100.
88 “in which case . . . subdue the whites whenever they meet”: Delany, Official Report, p. 100.
89 “morbid affliction of the mind” . . . “most ardent and abiding”: Delany, Official Report, p. 64.
89 “a dense, heavy-wooded, primitive forest”: Delany, Official Report, p. 87.
89 “natural remedy for the permanent decrease”: Delany, Official Report, p. 66.
90 “the well-regulated pursuits of civilized life”: Delany, Official Report, p. 110.
90 “habits, manners, and customs”: Delany, Official Report, p. 109.
90 “descendants of Africa” . . . “claims, sentiments, and sympathies”: Delany, Official Report, p. 110.
90 “Africa for the African race, and black men”: Delany, Official Report, p. 121.
91 “the Commissioners, on behalf of the African”: Delany, Official Report, pp. 77-78. (See also Campbell, Pilgrimage, pp. 248-50, which offers a slightly different version of the treaty.)
91 “the learned Oriental traveler”: Delany, Official Report, p. 135.
92 “open new cotton fields for the supply”: Delany, Official Report, p. 131.
92 “countries that may offer a suitable field”: Delany, Official Report, p. 135.
93 “the Americans Mr Campbell and Dr Delany”: Ajayi, Christian Missions, p. 191.
93 “common property; every individual enjoys”: Campbell, Pilgrimage, pp. 174-75.
94 “[M]y destiny is fixed in Africa”: Delany, Weekly Anglo-African, October 5, 1861, in Levine, ed., Delany: Documentary Reader, p. 369.
95 “explorations in certain portions of Africa”: Frank A. Rollin, Life and Public Services of Martin R. Delany (New York: Arno, 1969, orig. pub. 1868), p. 84.
96 “triple alliance”: Rollin, Life and Public Services, pp. 242-43.
96 “neither disheartened” . . . “see his salvation”: Rollin, Life and Public Services, pp. 282-83.
96 “under the rallying-cry of acting for”: Delany to Frederick Douglass, August 14, 1871, in Levine, ed., Delany: Documentary Reader, p. 439.
97 “carpet-baggers” . . . “Southern men”: New York Daily Tribune, March 6, 1875, in Levine, ed., Delany: Documentary Reader, p. 451.
97 “de dam nigger dimocrat”: News and Courier, October 16, 1876, in Levine, ed., Delany: Documentary Reader, p. 456.
98 “government favors”: Levine, ed., Delany: Documentary Reader, p. 484.
Chapter Three: Emigration or Extermination 100-1 “Adventurers swarmed” . . . “to protect the Southern country”: The quotation is culled from Woodrow Wilson, A History of the American People, vol. 5: (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1903), pp. 38, 46, 49, 58, 60.
104 “owing to some British statute”: Stephen Ward Angell, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and African American Religion in the South (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), p. 7.
105 “We have, as far as possible, closed”: Fergus M. Bordewich, Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America (New York: Amistad, 2005), p. 106.
106 “fought, bled and died here”: Edwin S. Redkey, ed., Respect Black: The Writings and Speeches of Henry McNeal Turner (New York: Arno Press, 1971), pp. 34-35.
107 “chin deep” . . . “if they were a set of varmints”: David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 147.
107 “thronged the windows” . . . “‘we are your masters’”: Blight, Race and Reunion, p. 147.
108 “old things will be forgotten”: Redkey, ed., Respect Black, p. 9.
108 “I became a convert to emigration”: Redkey, ed., Respect Black, pp. 13-14.
108 “cowardice” . . . “pusillanimity”: Redkey, ed., Respect Black, p. 15.
109 “resting place for the Negro’s feet”: Angell, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, p. 119.
109 “There is no more doubt in my mind”: Redkey, ed., Respect Black, p. 42.
110 “a load of humanity” . . . “broad African continent”: Walter L. Williams, Black Americans and the Evangelization of Africa, 1877-1930 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), p. 39.
111 “We hold these truths to be self-evident”: “First Convention of the Liberia Exodus Arkansas Colony[. . .]1886,” in Annual Report of the New York State Colonization Society for the Year Ending May 1, 1886 (New York: 1886).
112 “wealth and refinement” . . . “millions to Christ”: Kenneth C. Barnes, Journey of Hope: The Back-to-Africa Movement in Arkansas in the Late 1800s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), p. 18.
112 “pianos and organs, carpets, pictures”: Barnes, Journey of Hope, p. 18.
113 “remarkable achievements” . . . “unprecedented advance”: For the progressive school of postbellum black politics, see William J. Simmons, Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive and Rising (New York: Arno Press, 1968, orig. pub. 1887) and H. F. Kletzing and W. H. Crogman, Progress of a Race or, the Remarkable Advancement of the Afro-American (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969, orig. pub. 1897).
113 “All this native land talk”: Frederick Douglass, “The Lessons of the Hour: Address by the Honorable Frederick Douglass in the Metropolitan A.M.E. Church, Washington, D.C., January 9, 1894.”
114 “What one thoughtful man among us”: Edwin S. Redkey, Black Exodus: Black Nationalist and Back-to-Africa Movements, 1890-1910 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1969), p. 33.
114 “aimless, objectless, selfless, little-souled”: Redkey, ed., Respect Black, p. 57.
114 “I would like to take yearly those who are sent”: Redkey, ed., Respect Black, p. 56.
114 “barbarous decision” . . . “absolves the negro’s allegiance”: Redkey, ed., Respect Black, p. 60.
115 “If the decision is correct, the United States Constitution”: Redkey, ed., Respect Black, p. 63.
115 “But just so long as we are a people within a people”: Redkey, ed., Respect Black, p. 43.
115 “Washington’s policy is not worth a cent”: Gayraud Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972), p. 187.
115 “standard of beauty” . . . “hair-straighteners and skin-bleachers”: Redkey, ed., Respect Black, p. 179.
116 “The whole tendency of our ignoble status”: Redkey, ed., Respect Black, p. 57.
116 “the large size of the negro’s penis”: George Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 279.
118 “high offices, dignitaries, artisans, mechanics”: Redkey, ed., Respect Black, p. 59.
118 “United States of Africa”: Redkey, ed., Respect Black, p. 44.
119 “the world’s future paradise”: “The Letters of Henry M. Turner,” The A.M.E. Church Review 8:4 (1892), p. 446.
119 “the Crew tribe seems to be a superior class”: Turner, “Letters,” p. 453.
119-20 “a regular African” . . . “Talk about the African being ignorant”: Turner, “Letters,” p. 455.
120 “Things are gloomy here” . . . “I am crazy with delight”: Turner, “Letters,” p. 467.
120 “Great heavens, how white people”: Turner, “Letters,” p. 475.
120 “paradisical spot” . . . “easiest place to make a living”: Turner, “Letters,” p. 481.
120 “could hibernate six months annually”: Turner, “Letters,” p. 481.
120 “in mountain heaps” . . . “the finest wood on earth”: Turner, “Letters,” p. 472.
120 “would be worth millions in a few years”: Turner, “Letters,” p. 483.
120 “True, there is an acclimating change”: Turner, “Letters,” p. 481.
120 “I thought it was a second-class portion”: Turner, “Letters,” p. 483.
120 “inestimable—enough to run the machinery of the world”: Turner, “Letters,” p. 482.
121 “all the mere common labor”: Turner, “Letters,” p. 496.
121 “twenty-five cents per day or five dollars per month”: Turner, “Letters,” p. 482.
121 “I never wanted to be a young man so badly”: Turner, “Letters,” p. 496.
121 “beautiful ginger-cake-colored”: Turner, “Letters,” p. 473.
121 “the equal of any man on earth”: Turner, “Letters,” p. 476.
122 “said to be 108 years old” . . . “sold to America”: Turner, “Letters,” p. 488.
122 “those who think the receding forehead, the flat nose”: Turner, “Letters,” p. 488.
122 “take intelligent possession”: Turner, “Letters,” p. 494.
123 “the most susceptible heathen” . . . “an easy matter”: Turner, “Letters,” p. 484.
123 “There is no reason under heaven”: Turner, “Letters,” p. 483.
124 “to leave Georgia and go to their own country”: Clarence A. Bacote, “Negro Proscriptions: Protests and Proposed Solutions in Georgia, 1880-1908,” in Charles E. Wynes, ed., The Negro in the South Since 1865: Selected Essays in American Negro History (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1965), p. 107.
125 “the oiled advocate of a white man’s corporation”: Redkey, Black Exodus, p. 124.
126 “man in the moon”: Redkey, ed., Respect Black, p. 137.
126 “possession of the gold, silver, tin, lead, iron”: Redkey, ed., Respect Black, p. 139.
128 “when Providence opens to us a door” . . . “freedom in Canaan”: Alfred Lee Ridgel, Africa and African Methodism (Atlanta, Ga.: Franklin Publishing, 1896), pp. 90-91.
128 “to leave the haunts of American slavery”: Ridgel, Africa and African Methodism, p. 39.
128 “powerful tendencies toward white men absorbtion”: Ridgel, Africa and African Methodism, p. 45.
128 “despise Africa” . . . “extol negro-hating America”: Ridgel, Africa and African Methodism, pp. 43-44.
128 “to my mind the negro in foreign lands”: Ridgel, Africa and African Methodism, p. 45.
128 “Awful! Awful! Awful!” “the gospel is needed here”: Williams, Black Americans and the Evangelization of Africa, p. 111.
128 “We regard the British government as a godsend”: Ridgel, Africa and African Methodism, pp. 40-41.
129 “the morning-star to the pure sun of Christianity”: Turner, “Letters,” p. 495.
129 “laid down the Bible for the Koran”: Ridgel, Voice of Missions, February, 1896.
129 “colorphobia” . . . “blood, death and ruin” . . . “higher senses”: Ridgel, Africa and African Methodism, pp. 67, 69, 72-72.
130 “Africa doesn’t need me one-thousandth part as much”: Smith, quoted in Ridgel, Africa and African Methodism, p. 52.
130 “tropical outfit” . . . “red silk cummer-band”: Charles Spencer Smith, Glimpses of Africa: West and Southwest Coast (Containing the Author’s Impressions and Observations during a Voyage of Six Thousand Miles from Sierra Leone to St. Paul de Loanda and Return) (Nashville, Tenn.: A.M.E. Sunday School Union, 1895), pp. 156-57.
131 “very unattractive “: Smith, Glimpses of Africa, p. 185.
131 “ their persons disgustingly filthy by besmearing”: Smith, Glimpses of Africa, p. 164.
131 “They were never enslaved and are evidently”: Smith, Glimpses of Africa, p. 164.
131 “surpasses all other low-grade varieties of man”: Smith, Glimpses of Africa, pp. 82-83.
132 “would be a wilderness were it not for European”: Smith, Glimpses of Africa, p. 77.
132 “a degenerate and retrogressive”: Smith, Glimpses of Africa, p. 60.
132 “to redeem West Africa from the grasp of barbarism”: Smith, Glimpses of Africa, p. 54.
132 “the bright flames of the heated furnace”: Smith, Glimpses of Africa, p. 213.
133 “the advent of Europeans” . . . “fierce growl of untamed beasts”: James T. Campbell, Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 240.
133 “back to the Thames”: Carol Page, “Colonial Reactions to A.M.E. Missionaries in South Africa, 1898-1910,” in Sylvia Jacobs, ed., Black Americans and the Missionary Movement in Africa (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982), pp. 187-88.
133 “We have as much right biblically and otherwise”: Redkey, Respect Black, pp. 176-77.
135 “the last of his clan” . . . “spiritual progeny of African chieftains”: W. E. B. Du Bois, The Crisis, July 1915.
Chapter Four: Mundele Ndom 136 “one of those African trees famous for their short”: Charles Spencer Smith, Glimpses of Africa: West and Southwest Coast (Containing the Author’s Impressions and Observations during a Voyage of Six Thousand Miles from Sierra Leone to St. Paul de Loanda and Return) (Nashville, Tenn.: A.M.E. Sunday School Union, 1895), p. 218.
138 “slice of this magnificent African cake”: Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), p. 58.
139 “We have attacked and destroyed 28 large towns”: Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, p. 49.
139 “of valuable service in helping civilisation”: Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, p. 97.
140 “African savages brought to act the monkey”: Donald L. Miller, “The White City,” American Heritage Magazine 44:4 (July/August, 1993), p. 70.
142 “adaptation” . . . “tropical fitness”: J. W. E. Bowen, ed., Africa and the American Negro: Addresses and Proceedings of the Congress on Africa[. . .]1895 (Atlanta: Gammon Theological Seminary, 1896), pp. 137-148, ff.
142 “hearken to your message where the white messengers”: H. B. Parks, “The Redemption of Africa the American Negro’s Burden,” Voice of Missions, March 1899.
143 “the obligation of the American Negro to missionary work”: Bowen, ed., Africa and the American Negro, p. 10.
144 “How can we remain contented / in illuminated”: Walter L. Williams, Black Americans and the Evangelization of Africa, 1877-1930 (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1982), p. 42.
144 “kindred o’er the sea”: Levi J. Coppin, “The Negro’s Part in the Redemption of Africa,” A.M.E. Church Review 19:2 (1902), p. 511.
144-45 “The white people were always very kind”: William H. Sheppard, Presbyterian Poneers in Congo (Richmond, Va.: Presbyterian Committee of Publication, 1917), p. 15.
145 “Before and directly after the war, when all the best”: W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Boston: Bedford, 1997, orig. pub. 1903), p. 144.
145 “hard core remnant of old family retainers”: Stanley Shaloff, Reform in Leopold’s Congo (Richmond, Va.: John Knox Press, 1970), p. 14.
145 “I loved my new home, for Dr. Henkel and his wife”: Sheppard, Presbyterian Pioneers, p. 16.
146 “it was on the whole better for them”: Donald Spivey, Schooling for the New Slavery: Black Industrial Education, 1868-1917 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978), p. 7.
147 “every advantage” . . . “a great, tender-hearted father”: Sheppard, Presbyterian Pioneers, p. 17.
149 “kind” . . . “bright and gentle” . . . “good king”: William E. Phipps, William Sheppard: Congo’s African Livingstone (Louisville, Ky.: Geneva Press, 2002), pp. 17-18.
149 “thronged with half clad natives”: Sheppard, Presbyterian Pioneers, p. 21.
150 “[J]ust like our own darkies”: Pagan Kennedy, Black Livingstone: A True Tale of Adventure in the Nineteenth-Century Congo (New York: Viking, 2002), p. 30.
151 “foreigners” . . . “trials and triumphs”: Sheppard, Presbyterian Pioneers, p. 29.
151 “no good here for Sierra Leone man”: Kennedy, Black Livingstone, p. 37.
151 “These imported workmen raise a question”: Kennedy, Black Livingstone, p. 37.
151 “sun-bleached skeletons of native carriers”: Sheppard, Presbyterian Pioneers, p. 28.
151 “If a party of white men approaches”: Phipps, William Sheppard, p. 29.
152 “Your Majesty’s Government is engaged in the slave-trade”: Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, p. 111.
152 “Russian” . . . “a handle I hope to use on him”: Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, p. 154.
152 “I found many of them afraid I was a State man”: Phipps, William Sheppard, p. 45.
153 “human head they brought him during the course”: Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, p. 196.
153 “Going up that river was like traveling back”: Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, Paul B. Armstrong, ed., Norton Critical Edition, fourth edition (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), pp. 33-34.
153 “It makes a terrible mark where it strikes”: Kennedy, Black Livingstone, p. 56.
154 “sensible” . . . “in accord with their traditions and sentiments”: Phipps, William Sheppard, p. 147.
154 “Sheppard is a most handy fellow”: Phipps, William Sheppard, p. 39.
155 “Brother Sheppard has the constitution needed”: Phipps, William Sheppard, p. 40.
155 “carefully and tenderly”: Sheppard, Presbyterian Pioneers, p. 81.
155 “broadest and best smiles”: Sheppard, Presbyterian Pioneers, p. 62.
156 “You can trust them as far as you can see them”: Sheppard, “Into the Heart of Africa,” Southern Workman, December 1893, p. 182.
156 “superiority in physique, manners, dress and dialect”: Sheppard, Presbyterian Pioneers, p. 81.
157 “with low verandah” . . . “in old Virginia again”: Kennedy, Black Livingstone, p. 121.
158 “aboriginal vigor” . . . “for the seed of the Word”: H. A. C. Cairns, Prelude to Imperialism: British Reactions to Central African Society, 1840-1890 (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1965), p. 241.
158 “mounds of triumphant martyrs”: Sheppard, Presbyterian Pioneers, p. 25.
158 “weeping and wailing” . . . “grief to Almighty God”: Sheppard, Presbyterian Pioneers, p. 84.
158 “desired so much to journey into that land”: Sheppard, Presbyterian Pioneers, p. 87.
159 “If the king hears you are here all our heads”: Sheppard, “Into the Heart of Africa,” p. 184.
159 “We may possibly escape the King’s wrath”: Sheppard, “Into the Heart of Africa,” p. 184.
159 “These people are not to blame”: Sheppard, “Into the Heart of Africa,” p. 185.
159 “Well, that is very strange”: Sheppard, “Into the Heart of Africa,” p. 185.
159 “They knew me better than I knew myself ”: Sheppard, Presbyterian Pioneers, p. 101.
160 “made the forest look like a beautifully painted”: Sheppard, Presbyterian Pioneers, p. 102.
160 “perfect blocks” . . . “a checker board”: Sheppard, “Into the Heart of Africa,” p. 185.
160 “what had once been white linen”: Sheppard, Presbyterian Pioneers, p. 106.
160 “I want to acknowledge to you that I am not”: Sheppard, Presbyterian Pioneers, p. 107.
161 “had their judges, jurors, lawyers and officers”: Sheppard, Presbyterian Pioneers, p. 72.
161 “Many times in Central Africa foreigners”: Sheppard, Presbyterian Pioneers, pp. 39-40.
161 “prying into the king’s customs”: Sheppard, Presbyterian Pioneers, p. 131.
161 “knowledge of weaving, embroidery, wood carving”: Sheppard, Presbyterian Pioneers, p. 137.
161 “trying to find out what they were thinking about”: Sheppard, Presbyterian Pioneers, p. 127.
161 “highly civilized”: Sheppard, Presbyterian Pioneers, p. 137.
161 “enlightened but in darkness”: Sheppard, Presbyterian Pioneers, p. 132.
162 “In the native mind no one dies a natural death”: Sheppard, Presbyterian Pioneers, p. 121.
162 “wicked custom”: Sheppard, Presbyterian Pioneers, p. 130.
162 “I tried to prove to him that the poisonous cup”: Sheppard, Presbyterian Pioneers, p. 131.
162 “If a person is innocent he can never die”: Sheppard, Presbyterian Pioneers, p. 131.
162 “They serve us here and then go with us”: Sheppard, Presbyterian Pioneers, p. 131.
162 “conspicuous consumption”: Jan Vansina, The Children of Woot: A History of the Kuba People (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1978), p. 181.
163 “in the strongest language I could command”: Sheppard, Presbyterian Pioneers, p. 131.
163 “burying the living with the dead”: Sheppard, Presbyterian Pioneers, p. 131.
163 “Seeing these awful customs practiced by these people”: Sheppard, Presbyterian Pioneers, pp. 131-32.
163 “indifferent, stony-hearted, and superstitious”: Sheppard, “The Bakuba Mission,” Southern Workman, July 1904, p. 408.
163 “well organized, independent, and exceedingly industrious”: Sheppard, “The Bakuba Mission,” p. 408.
163 “culture, mode of living, and intelligence”: Sheppard, “The Bakuba Mission,” p. 408.
164 “a Virginia Negro, through the power”: Phipps, William Sheppard, p. 125.
164 “has been speaking to crowded houses”: Phipps, William Sheppard, p. 98.
164 “Will you lend a helping hand”: Sheppard, “Into the Heart of Africa,” p. 186.
165 “has thrown open its doors, given up the keys”: Kennedy, Black Livingstone, pp. 119-20.
166 “a howling mob of jabbering idiots”: Robert Benedetto, ed., Presbyterian Reformers in Central Africa: A Documentary Account of the American Presbyterian Congo Mission and the Human Rights Struggle in the Congo, 1890-1918 (London: E. J. Brill, 1996), p. 104.
166 “never were enslaved”: Sheppard, “Into the Heart of Africa,” p. 187.
166 “the Baluba are by far the most numerous”: Phipps, William Sheppard, p. 63.
168 “There is no man in all this country”: Benedetto, ed., Presbyterian Reformers, p. 116.
169 “both the lever and the fulcrum for uplifting”: Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988, orig. pub. 1892), p. 45.
169 “When I saw the first native woman in her strip”: Sylvia Jacobs, “Their Special Mission: Afro-American Women as Missionaries to the Congo, 1894-1937,” in Jacobs, ed., Black Americans and the Missionary Movement in Africa (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982), p. 164.
170 “Christian ideals of womanhood”: Jacobs, “Their Special Mission,” p. 167.
170 “Christian mothers of Christian families”: Jacobs, “Their Special Mission,” p. 170.
170 “little home missionaries”: Jacobs, “Their Special Mission,” p. 158.
170 “totally depraved and degraded state”: Jacobs, “Their Special Mission,” p. 167.
170 “demonstration and practice center”: Jacobs, “Their Special Mission,” p. 163.
170-71 “making of a Christian home was part”: Jacobs, “Their Special Mission,” p. 163.
171 “I called it my Ladies’ Home Journal home”: Kennedy, Black Livingstone, p. 116.
173 “a small forest is as profitable as a gold mine”: Phipps, William Sheppard, p. 134.
173 “refuse obstinately to work” . . . “take hostages”: Phipps, William Sheppard, p. 133.
173 “I have the honour to inform you that from”: Phipps, William Sheppard, p. 140.
174 “It is just as if I were to take a rope and go out”: Sheppard, “Light in Darkest Africa,” Southern Workman, April 1905, p. 220.
174 “We hear of atrocities being committed”: Sheppard, “Light in Darkest Africa,” p. 220.
174 “These were orders. I had to go”: Sheppard, “Light in Darkest Africa,” p. 221.
174 “Sheppard! Sheppard”: Sheppard, “Light in Darkest Africa,” p. 223.
175 “I don’t like to fight, but the state”: Benedetto, ed., Presbyterian Reformers, p. 122.
175 “We are going to kill them all”: Benedetto, ed., Presbyterian Reformers, p. 122.
175 “conducted us to a framework of sticks”: Benedetto, ed., Presbyterian Reformers, p. 124.
176 “The whole country is pillaged”: Phipps, William Sheppard, pp. 143-44.
176 “You have sent me to do this”: Sheppard, “Light in Darkest Africa,” p. 225.
176 “Shepete! Shepete!”: Benedetto ed., Presbyterian Reformers, p. 154.
177 “turned out to be a gigantic slave”: Phipps, William Sheppard, p. 144.
177 “We have heard reports for years past of the terrible”: Phipps, William Sheppard, p. 144.
177 “We can hardly think it necessary” . . . “non-political character”: Benedetto, ed., Presbyterian Reformers, p. 127.
178 “to expose and destroy what I knew”: Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, p. 186.
178 “the incorruptible Kodak”: Mark Twain, King Leopold’s Lament: A Defense of His Congo Rule, second edition (London: Unwin, 1907), p. 40.
178 “highly improbable” . . . “grossly overstated”: Benedetto, ed., Presbyterian Reformers, p. 127.
179 “the greatest Negro of his generation”: Phipps, William Sheppard, p. 125.
179 “tool in the hands of Morrison”: Kennedy, Black Livingstone, p. 157.
179 “when Sheppard arrived, things were at top notch”: Kennedy, Black Livingstone, p. 161.
179 “Being a colored man, I would not be understood”: Kennedy, Black Livingstone, p. 161.
181 “We are not now suffering from the old forms”: Kennedy, Black Livingstone, p. 168.
182 “one of the most prosperous and intelligent”: Benedetto, ed., Presbyterian Reformers, pp. 281-82.
182 “any calumny against a Congo state official”: Phipps, William Sheppard, pp. 164-65.
182 “the entire abolition of the Company”: Wilfred G. Thesinger, “Report of a Journey into Kasai District,” in Benedetto, ed., Presbyterian Reformers, pp. 310-16.
183 “invincible logic” . . . “burning sarcasm”: Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, p. 264.
183 “Throw up your hat! Sheppard & I”: Benedetto, ed., Presbyterian Reformers, p. 417.
183 “AMERICAN NEGRO HERO OF CONGO”: Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, p. 264.
183 “some family matters which I believe”: Phipps, William Sheppard, p. 176.
184 “was guilty of the sin of adultery”: Kennedy, Black Livingstone, p. 190.
185 “I am sorry you feel that I have talked too freely”: Benedetto, ed., Presbyterian Reformers, p. 38.
185 “In view of all the experiences of the past few years”: Benedetto, ed., Presbyterian Reformers, p. 33.
185 “being waited on”: Kennedy, Black Livingstone, p. 199.
186 “He was such a good darky”: Kennedy, Black Livingstone, p. 152.
186 “extravaganza of African artifacts, curios”: Phipps, William Sheppard, p. 187.
Chapter Five: So Long, So Far Away 188 “the States, where you have to live like a nigger”: Langston Hughes, The Big Sea: An Autobiography (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1986, orig. pub. 1940), p. 62.
188 “My father hated Negroes”: Hughes, Big Sea, p. 40.
188 “Look at the niggers”: Hughes, Big Sea, p. 41.
189 “I’ve known rivers”: Hughes, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” in Arnold Rampersad, ed., The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (New York: Knopf, 1994), p. 23.
191 “I just begun to feel like a man”: Emmett J. Scott, ed., “Additional Letters of Negro Migrants of 1916-1918,” Journal of Negro History 4:4 (1919), p. 459.
191 “the Negro race was found almost entirely”: E. T. H. Shaffer, “A New South—the Negro Migration,” Atlantic Monthly, September 1923, p. 403.
192 “the period when the Negro was in vogue”: Hughes, Big Sea, p. 228.
195 “What American literature decidedly needs”: Carl Van Doren, “The Younger Generation of Negro Writers,” Opportunity, May 1924, p. 145.
195 “the great desideratum of modern art”: Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: The Noonday Press, 1995), p. 93.
195-96 “The white man in the mass cannot compete” . . . “working alliance”: Albert C. Barnes, “Negro Art and America,” in Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1925), pp. 20, 25.
197 “Mecca of the New Negro”: “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro,” Special issue of Survey Graphic 6:6 (March 1925).
199 “believed in books more than in people”: Hughes, Big Sea, p. 26.
199 “earliest memories of written words”: Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes (volume 1: 1902-1941): I, TOO, SING AMERICA (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 19.
200 “You are in the final analysis the most consarned”: Rampersad, Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 1, p. 133.
200 “He fended off every attempt to probe”: Wallace Thurman, Infants of the Spring (New York: Macauley, 1932), p. 232.
200 “the thunderclaps of their laughter”: Hughes, Big Sea, p. 54.
201 “to catch a glimmer of their own beauty”: Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” The Nation, June 23, 1926, p. 694.
201 “Night-dark girl of the swaying hips”: Hughes, “Nude Young Dancer,” in Rampersad, ed., Collected Poems, p. 61.
201 “poet low-rate”: Chicago Whip, February 26, 1927.
201 “I am a negro”: Hughes, “Negro,” in Rampersad, ed., Collected Poems, p. 24.
202 “brown faced child to her bosom”: Hughes, “Aunt Sue’s Stories,” in Rampersad, ed., Collected Poems, pp. 23-24.
203 “swan-song” . . . “song-lit race of slaves”: Jean Toomer, Cane (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988, orig. pub. 1923), pp. 14, 156.
203 “I had a swell time while it lasted”: Hughes, Big Sea, p. 228.
204 “What is Africa to me?”: Countee Cullen, “Heritage,” Color (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1925), pp. 36-41.
204 “Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation”: Anne Shaw Faulkner, “Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation?” Ladies’ Home Journal, August 1921, p. 16.
204 “the Dixie Pike has grown from a goat path in Africa”: Toomer, Cane, p. 12.
205 “[T]hree hundred years of America passed”: Robert E. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), pp. 74-75.
205 “had more to gain from the rich background”: Countee Cullen, “Foreword” to Cullen, ed., Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1927), p. xi.
205 “so complex” . . . “one had almost as well be civilized”: Rampersad, Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 1, p. 160.
205 “even when he appears to be civilized”: George Schuyler, “Black Genesis,” The Modern Quarterly 5:4 (Spring 1929), pp. 571-72.
205-6 “The low beating of the tom-toms”: Hughes, “Danse Africaine,” in Rampersad, ed., Collected Poems, p. 28.
206 “All the tom-toms of the jungles”: Hughes, “Poem [1] for the Portrait of an African Boy after the Manner of Gauguin,” in Rampersad, ed., Collected Poems, p. 32.
208 “It was like throwing a million bricks into the sea”: Hughes, Big Sea, p. 3.
208 “real thing, to be touched and seen”: Hughes, Big Sea, p. 10.
208 “the bare, pointed breasts” . . . “the rippling muscles”: Hughes, Big Sea, p. 102.
208 “You should see the clothes they wear”: Rampersad, Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 1, pp. 73-74.
208 “It was a gorgeous trip”: Hughes, “L’Histoire De Ma Vie,” Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University, box 303, folder 4982, p. 3.
208 “missionaries carried Bibles” . . . “bolts of cloth”: Hughes, Big Sea, p. 8.
209 “The Africans were very polite, however”: Hughes, Big Sea, p. 111.
209 “billowing robes . . . glistening in the sunshine”: Hughes, “Ships, Sea and Africa,” The Crisis, December 1923, pp. 69-71.
210 “the vile houses of rottening women”: Hughes, “L’Histoire De Ma Vie,” p. 3.
210 “a delightful trip”: Hughes to Carrie Hughes, July 21, 1923, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University, box 260, folder 4156.
210 “Old sailors” . . . “the worst trip in the world”: Hughes, “L’Histoire De Ma Vie,” p. 2.
210 “Could we take him away with us?”: Hughes, Big Sea, p. 105.
210 “I have a way of not answering letters”: Hughes, Big Sea, p. 105.
210 “Africa!” . . . “And me a Negro”: Hughes, Big Sea, p. 10.
211 “mostly as missionaries, to teach us”: Hughes, Big Sea, p. 103.
211 “hurt me a lot”: Hughes, Big Sea, p. 11.
211 “the drums of Omali” . . . “too sweet for the taste of man”: Hughes, “Burutu Moon,” The Crisis, June 1925, pp. 64-65.
212 “plowed warmer, more sensual waters”: Rampersad, Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 1, p. 139.
212 “I write poems about her and destroy them”: Hughes, “Luani of the Jungle,” in R. Baxter Miller, ed., The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Volume 15, The Short Stories (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), p. 425.
213 “mystical vision” . . . “African life on the earth”: Rampersad, Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 1, pp. 147-48.
213 “throne-like chair” . . . “utterly sincere in living”: Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, pp. 106-7.
213 “winged poet Child” . . . “shining messenger of hope”: Rampersad, Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 1, p. 149.
213 “golden star in the Firmament of Primitive Peoples”: Rampersad, Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 1, p. 159.
214 “She wanted me to be primitive and know and feel”: Hughes, Big Sea, p. 325.
214 “I love you” . . . “I need you very much”: Rampersad, Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 1, pp. 168-69.
215 “So long / So far away”: Hughes, “Afro-American Fragment,” in Rampersad, ed., Collected Poems, p. 129.
215 “We were no longer in vogue, anyway”: Hughes, Big Sea, p. 334.
216 “[N]o cultural advance is safe without some sound economic”: Alain Locke, “Harlem: Dark Weather-Vane,” Survey Graphic, August 1936, p. 457.
216 “In the Johannesburg mines”: Hughes, “Johannesburg Mines,” in Rampersad, ed., Collected Poems, p. 43.
217 “Hail Mary, Mother of God! / the new Christ child”: Hughes, “Advertisement for the Waldorf Astoria,” in Rampersad, ed., Collected Poems, pp. 143-46.
217 “Quite truthfully, there was no toilet paper”: Rampersad, Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 1, p. 246.
218 “looks guilty to me”: Rampersad, Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 1, p. 259.
218 “The revolutionary poems seem very weak to me”: Rampersad, Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 1, p. 266.
218 “to laugh and sing and dance and make music”: Hughes, “To Negro Writers,” in Henry Hart, ed., American Writers’ Congress (New York: International Publishers, 1935), pp. 139-40.
219 “I am laying off political poetry for a while”: Rampersad, Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 1, p. 375.
219-20 “singing boatmen on dark rivers” . . . “Jesus in the front rows”: Hughes, Big Sea, p. 106.
220 “palm oil and cocoa beans” . . . “Hollywood films”: Hughes, Big Sea, p. 102.
220 “bought up the town”: Hughes, Big Sea, p. 109.
220 “hoping to make some money” . . . “nobody had a cent”: Hughes, Big Sea, p. 108.
221 “made of wood and life, energy and death out of Africa”: Hughes, Big Sea, p. 112.
223 “haunted his hotel the way American youngsters”: Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes (Volume II: 1941-1967): I Dream a World, second edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 400.
223 “a combination of the most enticing travel folders”: Rampersad, Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 2, p. 349.
223 “In the new African countries, honest, I thought”: Rampersad, Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 2, p. 348.
224 “to teach us something”: Hughes, Big Sea, p. 103.
224 “to offer an exchange of knowledge”: Rampersad, Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 2, p. 355.
224 “The most talented of the young Negro writers”: Hughes, “Black Writers in a Troubled World,” in Christopher C. De Santis, ed., The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Volume 9, Essays on Art, Race, Politics and World Affairs (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), p. 475.
225 “If one may ascribe a prime function to any creative writing”: Hughes, “Black Writers in a Troubled World,” p. 478.
Chapter Six: The Spell of Africa 227 “imbecilities, knavery and pathological virtues”: George Schuyler and Theophilus Lewis, “American Foibles,” The Messenger, April 1924, p. 108.
227 “were not African so much as Dutch and New England”: W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1940), p. 115.
228 “one direct cultural connection”: Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, p. 114. (See also W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Boston: Bedford, 1997, orig. pub. 1903), p. 187.
228 “later learning and reaction”: Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, p. 115.
229 “racial fount”: “Letters from Dr. Du Bois,” The Crisis, February 1919, p. 166.
229 “rich tropical imagination” . . . “innate love of harmony”: Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, pp. 39, 153.
230 “a final crusade for humanity”: Du Bois, “The Future of Africa,” Advocate of Peace, January 1919, p. 13.
230 “the thinking classes of the future Negro world”: Du Bois, “The Future of Africa,” p. 12.
231 “the natives of Africa must have the right to participate”: Du Bois, “The Pan-African Congress,” The Crisis, April 1919, pp. 273-74.
231 “if the Negroes of the world could have maintained”: Du Bois, “My Mission,” The Crisis, May 1919, pp. 8-9.
231 “ancient common ownership of land”: Du Bois, “To the World: Manifesto of the Second Pan-African Congress,” The Crisis, November 1921, pp. 9-10.
231 “Bolshevism” . . . “rank communism”: Du Bois, “A Second Journey to Pan-Africa,” The New Republic, December 7, 1921, pp. 40-41.
233 “where the American Negroes die like sheep”: Du Bois to William Pickett, January 16, 1907, Papers of W. E. B. Du Bois, reel 2/1190-1191.
233 “unless Liberia makes a strong stand”: Du Bois to Ernest Lyons, April 15, 1919, papers of W. E. B. Du Bois, Reel 7/1066.
234 “Would it not be a graceful thing if the United States”: Du Bois to William H. Lewis, September 20, 1923, Papers of W. E. B. Du Bois, reel 1½14. (See also 11/1217.)
234 “a good chance to play a little politics”: Frank Chalk, “Du Bois and Garvey Confront Liberia: Two Incidents of the Coolidge Years,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 1:2 (November 1963), p. 137.
234 “the highest rank ever given by any country”: Du Bois, “Africa,” The Crisis, April 1924, p. 250.
234 “3:22 p.m.” . . . “two low, pale semi-circles”: Du Bois, “Africa,” p. 248.
235 “ambassador of Pan-Africa”: Du Bois, “Pan-Africa in Portugal,” The Crisis, February 1924, p. 170.
235 “sixth generation in descent from my stolen forefathers”: Du Bois, “Africa,” p. 248.
235 “designating me as his personal representative”: Du Bois, “Africa,” p. 251. (See also Papers of W.E.B. Du Bois, Reel 13/927-928.)
236 “technic of civilization”: Du Bois, “Back to Africa,” Century Magazine, February 1923, p. 541.
236 “no business sense, no flair for real organization”: Du Bois, “Marcus Garvey,” The Crisis, December 1920, p. 60.
236 “anything to do with the so-called Garvey movement”: David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963 (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2000), p. 69.
236 “constructive plan and program for uplifting”: Du Bois, “Marcus Garvey,” p. 59.
237 “very serious defects of temperament and training”: Du Bois, “Marcus Garvey,” pp. 59-60.
237 “unfortunate mulatto who bewails every day”: Lewis, Du Bois: The Fight for Equality, p. 82.
237 “That is why he likes to dance with white people”: Lewis, Du Bois: The Fight for Equality, p. 82.
237 “little, fat black man, ugly”: Du Bois, “Back to Africa,” p. 539.
238 “best natural advantages . . . practically inexhaustible”: Ibrahim K. Sundiata, Black Scandal: America and the Liberian Labor Crisis, 1929-1936 (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1980), p. 19.
239 “far-reaching reform”: Du Bois to Harvey Firestone, October 25, 1925, Papers of W. E. B. Du Bois, reel 15/311-312.
239 “[I]f the Firestone Plantations Company wishes it can repeat”: Du Bois, “Liberia and Rubber,” The New Republic, November 18, 1925, p. 329.
239 “I had not then lost faith in the capitalist system”: Du Bois, “Liberia, the League and the United States,” Foreign Affairs, July 1933, p. 684.
240 “full, very full with things that must be said”: Du Bois, “Africa,” p. 247.
240 “Africa is vegetation. It is the riotous”: Du Bois, “Little Portraits of Africa,” The Crisis, April 1924, p. 273.
240 “star-faced palms and thatched huts”: Du Bois, “The Primitive Black Man,” The Nation, December 17, 1924, p. 675.
240 “palm leaves and mangoes” . . . “coy African modesty”: Du Bois, “Little Portraits of Africa,” pp. 273-74.
240 “The spell of Africa is upon me. The ancient witchery”: Du Bois, “Little Portraits of Africa,” p. 274.
241 “black shiny bodies, perfect bodies”: Du Bois, “Little Portraits of Africa,” p. 273.
241 “I believe that the African form in color and curve”: Du Bois, “Little Portraits of Africa,” p. 273.
241 “I am riding on the singing heads of black boys”: Du Bois, “Little Portraits of Africa,” p. 273.
241 “How can I describe it? Neither London nor Paris”: Du Bois, “Primitive Black Man,” p. 675.
241-42 “Their manners were better than those of Park Lane”: Du Bois, “Primitive Black-Man,” p. 675.
242 “little village was a mighty thing”: Du Bois, “The Answer of Africa,” in Maurice Maeterlinck et al., What Is Civilization? (New York: Duffield, 1926), pp. 45-46.
242 “intertwined collective soul”: Du Bois, “Primitive Black Man,” p. 676.
242 “no monopoly, no poverty, no prostitution”: Du Bois, “Answer of Africa,” p. 50.
242 “well-bred and courteous” . . . “sniffling and whining”: Du Bois, “Primitive Black Man,” p. 675.
242 “naked to the waist” . . . “sex dalliance”: Du Bois, “Primitive Black Man,” pp. 675-76.
242 “the Eternal World of Black Folk”: Du Bois, “Sketches from Abroad: Le Grand Voyage,” The Crisis, March 1924, p. 203.
245 “Bad sore requires hard medicine”: Sundiata, Black Scandal, p. 19.
245 “never had a revolution or internal disturbance”: Du Bois to Secretary of State Charles E. Hughes, March 24, 1924, Papers of the U.S. State Department, National Archives, record group 59, 882.000/739. (See also Papers of W.E.B. Du Bois, reel 14/258-260.)
245 “This question a little confused him”: William R. Castle, Memorandum of Conversation with W. E. B. Du Bois, March 26, 1924, National Archives, RG 59, 882.000/742.
246 “a good deal of what appeared exploitation”: Castle, Memorandum of Conversation, National Archives, RG 59, 882.000/742.
246 “endless native servants” . . . “happiness and cheer”: Du Bois, “Africa,” p. 250.
248 “analogous to those of forced labor”: Sundiata, Black Scandal, p. 44.
249 “excellent plan of reform”: Du Bois, The Crisis, November 1932, p. 362.
249 “stand fast”: Du Bois, The Crisis, November 1933, pp. 260-61.
249 “a piece of smug hypocrisy”: Sundiata, Black Scandal, p. 22.
249 “a native African”: Du Bois, The Crisis, March 1931, p. 102.
250 “peace, efficiency, and ability” . . . “human history”: Du Bois, “Liberia, the League and the United States,” pp. 682-83.
250 “the brutalities of police everywhere”: Du Bois, The Crisis, December 1932, pp. 387-388.
250 “among the more primitive Liberian tribes” . . . “approximate slavery”: Du Bois, “Liberia, the League and the United States,” pp. 686-88.
250 “well-bred and courteous children”: Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, p. 127.
250 “faces were a mass of sores”: Charles Johnson, Bitter Canaan: The Story of the Negro Republic (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1987), p. 216.
252 “to slur, lampoon, damn and occasionally praise”: Schuyler and Lewis, “American Foibles,” The Messenger, April 1924, p. 108.
252 “Ku Klux Klan Uber Alles” . . . “pennant in the Lynching League”: Andrew Buni, Robert Vann of the Pittsburgh Courier: Politics and Black Journalism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974), pp. 137-38.
253 “no desire to assist in the rescuing of humanity”: Schuyler, Pittsburgh Courier, December 16, 1924, p. 8.
253 “give a whoop”: Harry McKinley Williams, “When Black Is Right: The Life and Writings of George S. Schuyler,” Ph.D. dissertation, Brown University, 1988, p. 92.
253 “because it has never shown any evidence”: Schuyler, Pittsburgh Courier, November 22, 1924, p. 16.
253 “to see who would get shafted”: Jeffrey B. Ferguson, “The Newest Negro: George Schuyler’s Intellectual Quest in the 1920s and Beyond,” Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1998, p. 37.
254 “urge to whiteness”: Robert A. Bone, The Negro Novel in America, revised edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), p. 89.
254 “the blackamoor’s gifts to the Great Republic”: Schuyler, “Our Greatest Gift to America,” in V. F. Calverton, ed., Anthology of American Negro Literature (New York: The Modern Library, 1929), p. 121.
255 “We cannot decry the Caucasions for their prejudices”: Schuyler, The Messenger, February 1925, p. 91.
255 “a beautifully lacquered dill pickle”: Schuyler, The Messenger, January 1924, p. 8.
255 “cut glass thunder-mug”: Schuyler, The Messenger, March 1925, p. 129.
255-56 “the jungle, plantation or the slum”: Schuyler, The Messenger, January 1925, p. 9.
256 “salve the conscience of white America for looting”: Schuyler, Pittsburgh Courier, August 30, 1930, p. 10.
256 “merely a lampblacked Anglo-Saxon”: Schuyler, “The Negro Art Hokum,” The Nation, June 16, 1926, p. 662.
256 “last stand of the old myth palmed off by Negrophobists”: Schuyler, “The Negro Art Hokum,” p. 663.
257 “open sesame of a pork-colored skin”: George S. Schuyler, Black No More (New York: The Modern Library, 1999, orig. pub. 1931), p. 19.
258 “scholarly and biting editorials in The Dilemma”: Schuyler, Black No More, p. 65.
258 “uncomfortably savage”: Williams, “When Black Is Right,” pp. 209-10.
258 “There is something tremendously refreshing and hopeful”: Du Bois, The Crisis, January 1931, p. 16.
258 “a rollicking, keen, good natured criticism”: Du Bois, The Crisis, March 1931, p. 100.
259 “the most shiftless, untrustworthy, incompetent”: Schuyler, “Slavery in Liberia (Part 5): Missionaries Silent on Liberian Outrages,” Washington Post, July 3, 1931.
259 “step in and straighten things up”: Schuyler, “Slavery in Liberia (Part 6): Reforms are Blocked by Political Influence,” Washington Post, July 4, 1931.
259 “draw aside the draperies of official camouflage”: Schuyler, “Slavery in Liberia (Part 1): Reports on Liberian Slavery Discovered to be Well Founded,” Washington Post, June 29, 1931.
260 “to enter a totally different world”: Schuyler, “Slavery in Liberia (Part 4): Firestone Plantations Found Like America,” Washington Post, July 2, 1931.
260 “There are times when the masses are actually”: Williams, “When Black Is Right,” p. 239.
262 “there was only one thing that Liberia had left”: Du Bois, The Crisis, February 1932, pp. 68-69.
262 “Right is right and wrong is wrong, Dr. Du Bois”: Schuyler to Du Bois, January 27, 1932, Papers of W. E. B. Du Bois, reel 39/138. (See also The Crisis, March 1932, p. 92.)
263 “with the reactionary, war-mongering”: Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 117.
264 “machine gun”: Williams, “When Black Is Right,” p. 317.
264 “hokum and hack work of the purest vein”: Ferguson, “The Newest Negro,” p. 72.
265 “insane tactics give the murderous Southern”: George S. Schuyler, Black and Conservative: The Autobiography of George S. Schuyler (New Rochelle: Arlington House Publishers, 1966), p. 192. (The column originally appeared in the Pittsburgh Courier, August 15, 1931.)
265 “actual civil war which would certainly lead to genocide”: Schuyler, Black and Conservative, p. 344.
265 “three-century struggle to avoid extermination”: Schuyler, “Negroes Reject Communism,” American Mercury, June 1939, pp. 176-77, 181.
265 “well-intentioned politician who was appalled”: Schuyler, Black and Conservative, p. 330.
266 “hapless aggregations of people”: Schuyler, Black and Conservative, p. 337.
266 “demagogue with a Napolean complex”: Schuyler, “Kruschchev’s African Foothold,” American Mercury, March 1959, p. 59.
266 “international retardates” . . . “investment and direction”: Schuyler, Black and Conservative, p. 338.
266 “welfare colonialism”: Ferguson, “The Newest Negro,” p. 10.
266 “sable Typhoid Mary, infecting the mentally disturbed”: Schuyler, Manchester Union Leader, November 10, 1964, p. 1.
267 “three great untwisted negro intellects”: Williams, “When Black Is Right,” p. 351.
Chapter Seven: Native Son, American Daughter 270 “What was it that made me conscious”: Richard Wright, Black Boy (American Hunger): A Record of Childhood and Youth, restored text (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993, orig. pub. 1945), p. 494.
270 “Dear Madam: Will you please let this nigger”: Wright, Black Boy, p. 291.
270 “great forces that circumscribe and condition personality”: H. L. Mencken, quoted in Hazel Rowley, Richard Wright: The Life and Times (New York: Henry Holt, 2001), p 46.
270 “All my life had shaped me for the realism”: Wright, Black Boy, p. 295.
271 “Negroes had never been allowed to catch the full spirit”: Wright, Black Boy, p. 43.
271 “My first glimpses of the flat black stretches”: Wright, Black Boy (American Hunger), p. 307.
273 “I had fled [the South] with the dumb yearning to write”: Richard Wright, “Introduction” to St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York: Harper and Row, 1962, orig. pub. 1945), volume 1, p. xvii.
274 “the day Native Son appeared”: Irving Howe, “Black Boys and Native Sons,” Dissent 10:4 (Autumn 1963), p. 355.
274 “quite as human as it is Negro”: Quoted in Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 153.
275 “naked black men and women”: Richard Wright, Native Son (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993, orig. pub. 1940), pp. 36-37.
276 “Oppression oppresses”: Richard Wright, Foreword to George Padmore, Pan-Africanism or Communism: The Coming Struggle for Africa (New York: Roy Publishers, 1956), p. 12.
276 “become a tradition, in fact a kind of culture”: Wright, Foreword to Pan-Africanism or Communism, p. 13.
278 “how the brown, red, and yellow people are faring”: Rowley, Richard Wright, pp. 235-36.
278 “I must see Africa”: Rowley, Richard Wright, p. 417.
280 “by the strength of their arms”: Era Bell Thompson, American Daughter (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1986, orig. pub. 1946), p. 173.
280 “Perhaps I had waited too long”: Wright, Black Boy, p. 176.
280 “more comfortable” . . . “more accepted”: Interview with Era Bell Thompson in Ruth Edmonds Hill, ed., The Black Women Oral History Project (Westport: Meckler Publishing, 1978), vol. 9, p. 453.
281 “became a symbol of the South”: Thompson, American Daughter, p. 113.
281 “Where is North Dakota?”: Era Bell Thompson, “What ’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like That?” North Dakota Horizons 3:1 (Spring 1973), p. 26.
282 “There is nothing of Richard Wright”: Louise H. Elder, “Minority Saga,” Phylon 7:3 (Fall 1946), p. 307.
282 “Here is an autobiography by a Negro”: Arthur P. Davis, “Current Literature on Negro Education,” Journal of Negro Education 15:4 (Autumn 1946), p. 647.
282 “I know . . . that way down underneath”: Thompson, American Daughter, p. 296.
283 “negativism and advocacy”: Ben Burns, Nitty Gritty: A White Editor in Black Journalism (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996), p. 88.
283 “to chronicle in a positive, informative and entertaining”: Burns, Nitty Gritty, p. 126.
283 “We ’re rather jolly folks”: Burns, Nitty Gritty, pp. 88-89.
284 “subconsciously disliked” . . . “root cause”: Burns, Nitty Gritty, p. 118.
285 “standard of living” . . . “civil rights”: Burns, Nitty Gritty, pp. 106, 137.
285 “the essential bleakness of black life”: Wright, Black Boy, p. 43.
285 “striking out in blind fury”: Burns, Nitty Gritty, pp. 169-70.
286 “I tell you frankly that there is more freedom”: Burns, Nitty Gritty, p. 171.
286 “the United States the glorious democracy it is”: Burns, Nitty Gritty, p. 126.
286 “big time newspapers and magazine correspondents”: Era Bell Thompson, Africa, Land of My Fathers (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1954), p. 18.
287 “[M]y knowledge of the continent”: Thompson, Land of My Fathers, p. 16.
287 “savages with rings in their noses”: Thompson, American Daughter, p. 245.
287 “had anyone called me an African”: Thompson, Land of My Fathers, p. 16.
287 “receive a prodigal daughter”: Thompson, Land of My Fathers, pp. 10-11.
287 “the world’s biggest Negro processor and grower”: Ebony, December, 1953, p. 73.
288 “Once the greatest brasswork craftsmen”: Ebony, September 1953, p. 75.
288 “Africa’s most momentous meeting since”: Ebony, June 1953, p. 15.
288 “It had its social highlights too”: Ebony, June 1953, p. 15.
289 “A carrier pigeon service, with houseboys”: Thompson, Land of My Fathers, p. 24.
289 “My first reaction to my aborigine brothers”: Thompson, Land of My Fathers, p. 20.
289 “the positive side of the ledger”: Thompson, Land of My Fathers, p. 23.
289 “like a scene from a Katherine Dunham dance”: Thompson, Land of My Fathers, p. 52.
289 “Here, indeed, was proof ”: Thompson, Land of My Fathers, pp. 53-54.
289 “lacked the robust progressiveness of Lagos”: Thompson, Land of My Fathers, p. 69.
289 “handsome, dreamy-eyed, and wistful”: Thompson, Land of My Fathers, pp. 44-45.
289 “cold, calculating calmness”: Thompson, Land of My Fathers, p. 76.
290 “to make bush people feel at home”: Thompson, Land of My Fathers, p. 146.
290 “conduct[ing] a seminar”: Thompson, Land of My Fathers, p. 113.
290 “a true picture of American life”: Thompson, Land of My Fathers, p. 162.
291 “highly developed mentally”: Thompson, Land of My Fathers, p. 142.
291 “most beautiful black woman I had ever seen”: Thompson, Land of My Fathers, p. 134.
291 “for all the world like a Harlem businessman”: Thompson, Land of My Fathers, p. 137.
292 “return of this native was quickening”: Thompson, Land of My Fathers, p. 204.
293 “the influx of the American negro”: James T. Campbell, Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 139-40.
294 “That was my first trip to Africa”: Hill, ed., Black Women Oral History Project, vol. 9, p. 460.
294 “Two months in Africa had made me feel”: Thompson, Land of My Fathers, p. 188.
295 “From high in the sky, Addis Ababa”: Thompson, Land of My Fathers, p. 252.
295 “a great big beautiful American”: Thompson, Land of My Fathers, p. 243.
295 “Free again. Once more my country”: Thompson, Land of My Fathers, p. 243.
295 “No more interviews and notes”: Thompson, Land of My Fathers, p. 271.
295 “Cleansed of the red dust of Africa”: Thompson, Land of My Fathers, p. 272.
295 “one good American firecracker”: Thompson, Land of My Fathers, p. 276.
295 “returned to the moonlit balcony”: Thompson, Land of My Fathers, p. 272.
296 “Now that your desk is clear”: Richard Wright, Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1954), p. 3.
296 “vague sense of disquiet”: Wright, Black Power, p. 6.
296 “What would my feelings be when I looked”: Wright, Black Power, p. 4.
296 “I’m going”: Wright, Black Power, p. 7.
296 “concepts that one would use in observing”: Wright, Black Power, pp. xiv-xv.
297 “The ocean seemed to possess a quiet”: Wright, Black Power, pp. 20-21.
297 “were built of human flesh and blood”: Wright, Black Power, p. 11.
297 “the African newspaper men”: Richard Wright, unpublished Gold Coast journal, Papers of Richard Wright, Beinecke Library, Yale University, box 22, folders 337-347 (hereafter Wright journal), June 5, 1953.
297 “rendezvous with the twentieth century”: Wright journal, June 5.
298 “stammer and grope”: Wright journal, June 7.
298 “black as the ace of spades”: Wright journal, June 3.
298-99 “tribal rabble . . . running naked in the bush”: Wright, Black Power, p. 15-16.
299 “I struggled against an oblique sympathy”: Wright, Black Power, p. 27.
299 “mudhole . . . free from anything smacking of humanity”: Wright journal, June 13.
299 “streets clogged with black life”: Wright, Black Power, pp. 36-40, 46, ff.
299 “tremendous prestige”: George Padmore to Kwame Nkrumah, April 14, 1953, Michel Fabre Papers, Emory University.
299-300 “frenzied assent” . . . “filled the vacuum” . . . “teeming millions”: Wright, Black Power, pp. 53-54, 60, 65, 77, ff.
300 “I cannot escape the feeling”: Wright, Black Power, pp. 136-37.
300 “All my life I’ve asked for this”: Wright journal, June 19.
301 “enervated, listless” . . . “chucking up the whole thing”: Wright journal, June 23-24.
301 “I lost all interest in the Gold Coast”: Wright journal, July 2.
301 “There’s nothing here for me now”: Wright journal, July 2.
301 “Thinking back on the spectacle”: Wright journal, July 3.
301 “Funny creature that I am”: Wright journal, July 3.
302 “I suspect that my attitude caused”: Wright, Black Power, p. 137.
302 “the fateful subjective emotional relationship”: Richard Wright, “The Neuroses of Conquest,” The Nation, October 20, 1956, pp. 330-31.
303 “[D]istrust had become enthroned”: Wright, Black Power, p. 101.
303 “childlike . . . mania for hiding the facts”: Wright, Black Power, p. 106.
303 “All that the African personality seemed”: Wright, Black Power, p. 104.
303 “Eroded personalities loom here”: Wright, Black Power, p. 153.
303 “given up hope of getting close to the political boys”: Wright journal, July 14.
303 “the kind of hotel one read about”: Wright, Black Power, pp. 80-81.
304 “miss a lot” . . . “no time to dress up”: Wright, Black Power, pp. 140-41.
304 “psychologically detribalized Africans living”: Wright, Black Power, p. 69.
304 “in secrecy and shame”: Wright, Black Power, p. 65.
304 “fetish-ridden past”: Wright, Black Power, p. 170.
304 “The over-all impression was that black”: Wright, Black Power, p. 67.
304 “What innocence of instincts”: Wright, Black Power, p. 39.
305 “sex was so blatantly prevalent”: Wright, Black Power, p. 39.
305 “no sighing, longing or other romantic notions”: Wright, Black Power, p. 116.
305 “huge wobbly white bags, like the full udders”: Wright, Black Boy, pp. 7-8.
305 “flopping loosely and grotesquely in the sun”: Wright, Black Power, p. 129.
305 “flat and remarkably” . . . “pressure of babies”: Wright, Black Power, p. 38.
305 “inevitable baby” . . . “tossed it over their shoulder”: Wright, Black Power, pp. 39, 48.
305 “vast black mirror” . . . “what is Africa to me”: Wright journal, June 30.
306 “Either what I’m looking at”: Wright journal, June 30.
306 “The gold can be replaced”: Wright, Black Power, p. 153.
306 “The chiefs are and were, one and all”: Wright, Black Power, pp. 307-8.
306 “involuntary emotional slavery” . . . “fabulous power structure”: Wright, Black Power, p. 284.
307 “a waste of good gin”: Wright journal, June 3.
307 “a frightful kind of baby talk”: Wright, Black Power, pp. 191-92.
307 “a vast purgatorial kingdom”: Wright, Black Power, p. 283.
307 “all mixed up, blended”: Wright, Black Power, pp. 151-52.
307 “The specialty of this establishment”: Wright, Black Power, pp. 107-8.
308 “I looked at the guide”: Thompson, Land of My Fathers, p. 98.
308 “Dear Kwame” . . . “My journey’s done”: Wright, Black Power, p. 342.
308-9 “the necessary hardness for the task”: Wright, Black Power, p. 343.
309 “AFRICAN LIFE MUST BE MILITARIZED”: Wright, Black Power, p. 347.
309 “not speaking of a military dictatorship”: Wright, Black Power, p. 347.
309 “atomize the fetish-ridden past”: Wright, Black Power, p. 348.
309 “By going from spot to spot”: Michel Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, second edition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), p. 403.
310 “omniscient hand of Moscow”: Wright, Black Power, p. xiv.
310 “In fact, it can be definitely stated”: Wright, Black Power, p. xii.
310 “conscientiously modeled” . . . “upon the Russian”: Rowley, Richard Wright, pp. 436-37.
310 “picturesque travelog” . . . “weighty social”: John Reilly, ed., Richard Wright: The Critical Reception (New York: Burt Franklin & Co., 1978), p. 262.
310 “Mr. Wright’s own emotional processes”: Reilly, ed., Richard Wright: The Critical Reception, p. 242.
310 “Black Power is almost as tortured and tortuous”: Reilly, ed., Richard Wright: The Critical Reception, p. 259.
311 “in the willingness of nations to take up modern ideas”: Richard Wright, The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (New York: World Publishing, 1956), p. 199.
311 “I do say ‘Bravo’ to the consequences”: Amrit Singh, “Introduction to the HarperPerennial Edition,” Black Power (New York: HarperPerennial, 1995), p. xxvi.
312 “I’m about the only ‘uncontrolled’ Negro alive”: Fabre, Unfinished Quest, p. 500.
312 “wishes to know in what way Ghana would like”: Fabre, Unfinished Quest, pp. 496, 617-18.
314 “comparing the Africa that was colonized”: Hill, ed., Black Women Oral History Project, vol. 9, p. 461.
Chapter Eight: Black Star 315 “He didn’t know what kind of doctor I was”: Robert Lee, interview with author, August 1993.
317 “the book that did more than any other”: Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (New York: International Publishers, 1971, orig. pub. 1957), p. 45.
317 “not very bright”: C. L. R. James, “”Kwame Nkrumah: Founder of African Emancipation,” in James, At the Rendezvous of Victory: Selected Writings (London: Allison and Busby, 1984), p. 258.
318 “appreciation of your efforts”: Kevin Gaines, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2006), p. 67.
318 “Ghana’s contributions, as a free nation”: James H. Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935-1961 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), p. 162.
318 “Proudly We Can Be Africans”: Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans, p. 163.
319 “How does it feel to be free?”: Gaines, American Africans in Ghana, p. 5.
320 “shared none of her father’s aversions”: David Levering Lewis, “Ghana, 1963: A Memoir,” The American Scholar 68:1 (Winter 1999), p. 47.
324 “It’s my name”: Lee, interview with author, August 1993.
325 “I thought it was his barbershop”: Lee, interview with author, August 1993.
326 “I realized that they knew things”: Lee, interview with author, August 1993.
327 “I don’t understand niggers”: Lee, interview with author, December 1994.
327 “Finally, I had enough of Georgia”: Lee, interview with author, December 1994.
327 “hemmed in, growing up thinking”: Lee, interview with author, December 1994.
327 “She didn’t like racial discrimination either”: Lee, interview with author, August 1993.
328 “You could feel, when you came here”: Lee, quoted in Ernest Dunbar, ed., The Black Expatriates: A Study of American Negroes in Exile (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1968), p. 75.
328 “I didn’t come here because”: Lee, interview with author, August 1993.
331 “I got to the point where I rejected”: Bill Sutherland, quoted in Dunbar, ed., The Black Expatriates, p. 91.
331 “seeking his own salvation”: Sutherland, quoted in Dunbar, ed., The Black Expatriates, p. 109.
332 “I really misjudged the situation”: Sutherland, interview with author, May 2003.
333 “[I]t wasn’t my job to take care of ”: Bill Sutherland and Matt Meyer, Guns and Gandhi in Africa: Pan-African Insights on Nonviolence, Armed Struggle, and Liberation (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2000), p. 43.
333 “a sledgehammer to kill a gnat”: Sutherland, interview with author, May 2003.
334 “the lights of liberty”: Sutherland and Meyer, Guns and Gandhi, p. 46.
335 “Capitalism cannot reform itself ”: David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963 (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2000), p. 567.
337 “their own interests lay in the overthrow”: Dorothy Hunton, Alphaeus Hunton: The Unsung Valiant (New York: D. K. Hunton, 1986), p. 56.
339 “to the level of taking anything”: Hunton, Alphaeus Hunton, p. 94.
340 “There ’s something else that makes me hesitate”: Hunton, Alphaeus Hunton, p. 101.
343 “I have been in Sorrow’s kitchen”: Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984, orig. pub. 1942), p. 280.
344 “with the intention of finding a strong”: Maya Angelou, The Heart of a Woman (New York: Random House, 1981), p. 138.
344 “might be betraying the entire struggle”: Angelou, The Heart of a Woman, p. 140.
345 “imperialists and neo-colonialists”: Shirley Graham Du Bois, What Happened in Ghana: The Inside Story (New York: Freedomways, 1966), p. 203.
345 “there were stresses and strains”: Shirley Du Bois, What Happened in Ghana, pp. 218-19.
346 “fraught with ambiguities”: Gaines, American Africans in Ghana, p. 143.
347 “you are there because you hated America”: Leslie Alexander Lacy, The Rise and Fall of a Proper Negro (New York: Macmillan, 1970), p. 161.
348 “Every instance of racial prejudice”: Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans, p. 167.
349 “The only thing I can’t understand”: Gaines, American Africans in Ghana, p. 150.
350 “Is This America the Beautiful”: Gaines, American Africans in Ghana, p. 166.
351 “The Europeans and the Americans love me”: The African Review 1:1 (May 1965), p. 7.
351 “hypocritical savagery of Africa’s enemies”: The African Review 1:1 (May 1965), p. 6.
351 “If you have no history, invent one”: Newsweek, October 31, 1960, cited in Gaines, American Africans in Ghana, p. 126.
353 “The President’s office was like”: LeRoy S. Hodges, Jr., Portrait of an Expatriate: William Gardner Smith, Writer (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985), p. 79.
354 “stooge” . . . “C.I.A.”: Windom, “Malcolm X: Radical Tradition.”
354 “she was absolutely captivated”: Windom, “Malcolm X: Radical Tradition.”
355 “How do you unify with Uncle Toms”: Windom: “Malcolm X: Radical Tradition.”
355 “the beginning of a new phase”: Windom, “Malcolm X: Radical Tradition.”
355 “let that jazz [in America] cool off ”: Hodges, Portrait of an Expatriate, p. 78.
356 “Long live Ghana”: Du Bois, What Happened in Ghana, p. 213.
357 “a scene from Dante’s Inferno”: Shirley Du Bois, What Happened in Ghana, p. 219.
359 “The passion my people would exhibit”: Maya Angelou, A Song Flung Up To Heaven (New York: Random House, 2002), pp. 7-8.
361 “gradual withdrawal into injured despondency”: Hunton, Alphaeus Hunton, pp. 169-70.
362 “decide if you wanted to play for keeps”: “Conversations with St. Clair Drake” (video recording), October 1980, Northwestern University Library, reel 4.
363 “[N]ot by a long shot”: Lee, quoted in Dunbar, ed., The Black Expatriates, pp. 84-85.
363 “I think that my children”: Lee, quoted in Dunbar, ed., The Black Expatriates, p. 81.
364 “his current problems would soon be over”: Mike Adjei, Death and Pain: Rawling’s Ghana, the Inside Story (London: Black Line, 1994), p. 82.
364 “everybody thinks I should be angry”: Lee, interview with author, August, 1993.
Chapter Nine: Counting the Bodies 365 “Because this is Africa, and they don’t count”: Keith B. Richburg, Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa (New York: Basic Books, 1997), p. 100.
373 “look like me”: Richburg, Out of America, p. xi.
373 “devoid of hope . . . drained of compassion”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 27.
373 “a particularly ‘black’ childhood”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 10.
373 “I want you to see this”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 12.
375 “voluntary resegregation” . . . “the dining hall test”: Richburg, Out of America, pp. 17-18.
375 “face in the crowd”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 21.
375 “to choose which side of the dining hall”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 20.
375 “well-meaning academics and Africa specialists”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 238.
376 “teetering between strongman rule and violent”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 53.
376 “where the United Nations, freed from Cold War”: “After the War: Transcript of President Bush’s Address on the End of the Gulf War,” New York Times, March 7, 1991.
376 “backward-looking attitude”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 180.
377 “a nation in meltdown”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 51.
378 “If ever there was a reason for being in Africa”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 52.
378 “The world, and Washington policy makers specifically”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 52. 378 “to raise the flag for a new kind of American”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 59.
378 “desire to relieve human suffering”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 59.
378 “marveled at the pinpoint accuracy” . . . “scatter in terror”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 59.
379 “the perfect ringside seat on Africa’s chaos”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 9.
379 “any of the handful of sleazy bars”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 9.
380 “rampant cynicism”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 39.
380 “Africa’s dumbest country”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 38.
380 “Baboons with Rifles”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 31.
380 “It wears you down” . . . “on a treadmill”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 39.
380 “I was always on the outside looking in”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 55.
381 “We all found it hilarious and played it”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 71.
381 “humanitarian mission” . . . “egotistical baldheaded warlord”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 74.
382 “protected little journalistic universe”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 83.
382 “letting the anger roil up again”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 83.
382 “reason for being a reporter in Africa”: Richburg, Out of America, pp. 88-89.
382 “and I’m hating them, the Somalis”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 89.
382 “the start of a bitter wake-up call”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 64.
382-83 “prism” . . . “the rest of Africa”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 53.
383 “buffoons and misfits”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 220.
383 “civilized behavior between human beings”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 41.
383 “moral clarity” . . . “vexing emotional and moral”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 21.
383 “that looked and smelled” . . . “supermodern freeways . . . shopping malls”: Richburg, Out of America, pp. 195-96.
383 “It’s an illusion, because no matter how”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 210.
383 “I’ve been there” . . . “I’ve seen it”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 169.
383 “Is this depressing you?” . . . “rotting corpses”: Richburg, Out of America, pp. x-xi.
383-84 “I’m tired of lying . . . around amid the corpses”: Richburg, Out of America, p. xii.
384 “the potential for a violent implosion”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 104.
384 “fully evolved human beings”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 90.
384 “breeding ground for myriad viruses”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 127.
384 “rampant prostitution and the Africans’ free”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 123.
384 “the norms and rules and codes of conduct”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 49.
384 “heroism, honor and dignity”: Richburg, Out of America, p. xiv.
384 “endless little acts of kindness”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 32.
385 “something in the nature of Africans”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 175.
385 “maddening propensity to accept all kinds of suffering”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 181.
385 “aid dollar dole”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 178.
385 “the same way many American blacks see”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 180.
385 “most Africans were born in independent”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 180.
385 “hanker after Mother Africa, as if ”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 158.
385 “self-anointed spokesmen”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 180.
385 “one of the great leader-servants”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 138.
386 “Maybe I would have been better off ”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 153.
386 “hoping to feel that same kind of spiritual”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 161.
386 “revulsion at the horrendous crime of slavery”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 161.
386 “little personal connection” . . . “so unspeakable, so unthinkable”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 162.
386 “not making a defense of slavery” . . . “should not inhibit us”: Richburg, Out of America, p. xiii.
387 “And why should I feel anything more”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 247.
387 “Maybe I would care more if I had never come”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 247.
388 “The way I grew up, issues of civil rights”: Lynne Duke, interview with author, July 2005.
388 “grass skirts, Tarzan, bare breasts, [and] starving people”: Lynne Duke, interview with author, July 2005.
388 “normality and humanity”: Lynne Duke, Mandela, Mobutu, and Me: A Newswoman’s African Journey (New York: Doubleday 2003), p. 176.
388 “the poetry of ordinary Africa”: Duke, Mandela, Mobutu, and Me, p. 176.
388 “in a strong African American family”: Howard French, A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa (New York: Knopf, 2004), p. 5.
389 “beauty and unfussy grace of the people”: French, Continent for the Taking, p. 239.
389 “to distrust this concept of authenticity”: French, Continent for the Taking, p. 6.
389 “many foreign correspondents tearing their hair out”: French, Continent for the Taking, p. 82.
389 “theater of misery and suffering”: French, Continent for the Taking, p. 202.
389 “the kinds of stories of African people and culture”: French, Continent for the Taking, p. 239.
389 “of understanding, or at least of feeling”: French, Continent for the Taking, p. 82.
390 “Disney-fied cradle of civilization”: French, “An Ignorance of Africa as Vast as the Continent,” New York Times, November 20, 1994.
390 “in the emotional throes of the ‘motherland’”: Duke, Mandela, Mobutu, and Me, p. 255.
390 “the space between the archetypes”: Duke, Mandela, Mobutu, and Me, p. 9.
390 “a new Africa in the making”: Duke, Mandela, Mobutu, and Me, p. 35.
390 “symbiotic relationship” . . . “South Africa’s progress to the world”: Duke, Mandela, Mobutu, and Me, p. 30.
391 “Of course, I know the history of the C.I.A.’s complicity”: Richburg, Out of America, p. 102.
392 “peace, prosperity, and greatness” . . . “Rights of Man”: Patrice Lumumba, speech on Independence Day, June 30, 1960.
393 “cultural originality”: French, “An Ignorance of Africa.”
395 “getting their first taste of Africa”: French, Continent for the Taking, p. 50.
395 “yet here I was, just like everyone else”: French, Continent for the Taking, p. 59.
396 “a flicker on the screen of the world’s conscience”: French, “Sure, Ebola Is Bad. Africa Has Worse,” New York Times, June 11, 1995.
396 “savage African diseases ready to break out”: British Sunday Telegraph, quoted in French, “Sure, Ebola Is Bad.”
396 “cinematically compelling” . . . “projectile vomiting”: French, Continent for the Taking, p. 58.
396 “human catastrophe or primordial exoticism”: French, “Sure, Ebola is Bad.”
397 “If we use the word ‘genocide’ and are seen as doing nothing”: Susan Rice, quoted in French, Continent for the Taking, p. 127.
399 “the scramble to do some rudimentary ethnic”: French, Continent for the Taking, p. 128.
399 “[F]or many of us on assignment here”: French, Continent for the Taking, p. 128.
400 “They are the bad guys”: French, Continent for the Taking, p. 142.
401 “swashbuckling self-image”: Duke, Mandela, Mobutu, and Me, p. 125.
401 “There are many bodies in the mountains”: Duke, Mandela, Mobutu, and Me, pp. 139-40. (See also Duke, “Size, Scope of Hutu Crisis Hotly Debated; Refugees Caught in Eastern Zaire Crisis,” Washington Post, November 24, 1996.)
401 “private release” . . . “around a male colleague”: Duke, Mandela, Mobutu, and Me, p. 60.
402 “personal talisman” . . . “most remarkable sons”: Duke, Mandela, Mobutu, and Me, p. 274.
402 “had now settled into a spiral of bloody traumas”: French, Continent for the Taking, p. 50.
402 “patterns of treachery and betrayal”: French, Continent for the Taking, p. xv.
403 “open markets, honest government, and the rule of law”: French, “On Visit to Congo, Albright Praises the New Leader,” New York Times, December 13, 1997; see also French, “Albright in Africa: The Embraceable Regimes?” New York Times, December 16, 1997.
403 “Long live democracy. Ha-ha-ha”: French, Continent for the Taking, p. 248.
404 “Serving up atrocities is a business”: French, Continent for the Taking, p. 254.
Epilogue: The Language We Cry In 406 “quick Dispatch” . . . “your Voyage depends on their health”: Samuel and William Vernon to Caleb Gardner, November 8, 1755, Vernon Papers, New York Historical Society, box 1.
406 “Good order”: Caleb Gardner to Samuel and William Vernon, April 8, 1756, Vernon Papers, New York Historical Society, box 1.
406 “But porr order” . . . “Shall miss of my Expectation”: Caleb Godfrey to Samuel and William Vernon, June 25, 1756, Vernon Papers, New York Historical Society, box 1.
407 “[R]eally they are a wretched cargo”: Henry Laurens to Samuel and William Vernon, July 5, 1756, The Papers of Henry Laurens, volume 2 (Columbia: South Carolina Historical Society, 1968), pp. 238-39.
407 “a Cargo of Likely and Healthy Slaves”: South Carolina Gazette, June 17, 1756.
408 “There are five things we don’t talk about”: Edward Ball, Slaves in the Family (New York: Ballantine, 1998), p. 7.
416 “He killed my ma, he killed ma pa”: Helene Cooper, “The Other Election: This Month, All Eyes Turn to Liberia,” New York Times, October 17, 2005.
417 “because he’s intelligent, he knows what sells here”: Jon Lee Anderson, “The Devil They Know,” The New Yorker, July 27, 1998.
432 “them poor and they could not git things”: Rosalind Cobb Wiggins, ed., Captain Paul Cuffe’s Logs and Letters, 1808-1817 (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1996), p. 342.