ALSO BY HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.
African American National Biography, editor, with Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham
Black in Latin America
Tradition and the Black Atlantic: Critical Theory in the African Diaspora
Colored People
The Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Reader, edited by Abby Wolf
The Image of the Black in Western Art Series, editor, with David Bindman
Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African American History, 1513–2008
The Signifying Monkey
ALSO BY DONALD YACOVONE
Freedom’s Journey: African American Voices of the Civil War
Hope & Glory: Essays on the Legacy of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, editor, with Martin H. Blatt and Thomas J. Brown
Lincoln on Race and Slavery, editor, with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
“Nothing but Freedom, Justice, and Truth”: Essays on the Meaning of Wendell Phillips, editor, with A J Aiséirithe (forthcoming)
Samuel Joseph May and the Dilemmas of the Liberal Persuasion, 1797–1871
A Shared Experience: Men, Women, and the History of Gender, editor, with Laura McCall
A Voice of Thunder: The Civil War Letters of George E. Stephens
Witness for Freedom: A Documentary History of the Black Abolitionist Movement, editor, with C. Peter Ripley, Roy E. Finkenbine, and Michael Hembree
Copyright © 2013 by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Donald Yacovone
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Gates, Henry Louis.
The African Americans : many rivers to cross / Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Donald Yacovone.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4019-3514-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. African Americans--History. I. Yacovone, Donald. II. Title.
E185.G26 2013
305.896’073--dc23
2013010214
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4019-3514-6
Tradepaper ISBN: 978-1-4019-3515-3
16 15 14 13 4 3 2 1
1st edition, October 2013
PRINTED IN CHINA
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO WILLIAM S. MCFEELY
and
IN MEMORY OF HENRY HAMPTON
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
CHAPTER ONE
AFRICANS IN THE AMERICAS: 1500–1540
CHAPTER TWO
THE WORLDS SLAVERY MADE: 1526–1763
CHAPTER THREE
THE AGE OF REVOLUTIONS: 1700–1811
CHAPTER FOUR
HALF SLAVE, HALF FREE: 1797–1858
CHAPTER FIVE
THE WAR TO END SLAVERY: 1859–1865
CHAPTER SIX
RECONSTRUCTION AND REDEMPTION: 1865–1900
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE NADIR AND THE RENAISSANCE: 1890–1940
CHAPTER EIGHT
RISE! A PEOPLE EMERGENT: 1940–1968
CHAPTER NINE
FROM BLACK POWER TO THE WHITE HOUSE: 1968–2013
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Juan Garrido and Hernán Cortés
Landing of Slaves at Jamestown, 1619, by Howard Pyle
The Slave Trade, by Auguste François Biard
Young Negress, by Wenceslaus Hollar
Slave Market of Cairo, by David Roberts
Queen Nzinga
Job ben Solomon
Bunce Island, Sierra Leone
The Abolition of the Slave Trade, by Isaac Cruikshank
Henry Laurens slave sale advertisement
Fort Mose, by Jeff Gage
Slave Sale in New Amsterdam, by Howard Pyle
Life of George Washington, The Farmer, by Junius Brutus Stearns
Mum Bett, or Elizabeth Freeman
Phillis Wheatley
Toussaint L’Ouverture, by Nicholas Eustache Maurin
Richard Allen and A.M.E. bishops
Cotton gin patent
United States Slave Trade, 1830
Slave pen, Alexandria, Virginia
Nat Turner
Paul Cuffee
Map of Liberian coast
Frederick Douglass
The Resurrection of Henry Box Brown at Philadelphia, by A. Donnelly
William and Ellen Craft
Harriet Tubman
The Modern Medea (Margaret Garner)
John Brown
Harpers Ferry Firehouse
Stampede among the Negroes in Virginia
Robert Smalls and the Planter
Contraband crossing the Rappahannock
Benjamin F. Butler
Emancipation, by Thomas Nast
Fort Wagner and the 54th Massachusetts Regiment
Christian A. Fleetwood
Contraband working cotton field
Robert Smalls as congressman
Heroes of the Colored Race, by J. Hoover
Klan Sentinel, from A Fool’s Errand, by Albion W. Tourgée
Slave quarters at Jefferson Davis’s plantation
Isaiah Montgomery House, Mound Bayou
French Quarter, New Orleans
Ida B. Wells
Lynching of Jesse Washington
SAMBO IMAGES
Dixon’s Stove Polish
Liberty Frightenin de World
A Political Debate in the Darktown Club
Cavalry Tactics, by the Darktown Horse Guards
A Darktown Wedding
Initiation Ceremonies of the Darktown Lodge
A Darktown Tournament
Tonsorial Art in the Darktown Style
A Fair Start
The Darktown Bowling Club (2)
The Golf Crazy Coons
Coon Hollow
Hello! My Baby: George Thatcher’s Greatest Minstrels
George Thatcher’s Greatest Minstrels
Palmer’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Booker T. Washington
Madam C. J. Walker advertisements
W. E. B. Du Bois
Jack Johnson
Black officers of the 367th Infantry
Marcus Garvey
The Negro Exodus from North Carolina
Tulsa, Oklahoma, race riot
Zora Neale Hurston
Langston Hughes
Bessie Smith
Louis Armstrong
Mary McLeod Bethune
Detroit riot
Wartime Conference for Total Peace (Double V Campaign)
Howard P. Pe
rry, first black Marine
White-only cabs
Ella Baker
Bayard Rustin and Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum
Paul Robeson with W. E. B. Du Bois
Little Rock, Arkansas, riot
Rosa Parks
Malcolm X
Martin Luther King, Jr.
John Lewis at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Selma, Alabama
James Meredith
Stokely Carmichael and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Eldridge Cleaver
James Brown and the Famous Flames
General Colin Powell
Grandmaster Flash, DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and Chuck D
Inauguration of President Barack Obama, 2009
Shirley Chisholm
Oprah Winfrey
Condoleezza Rice and President George W. Bush
Toni Morrison
Spike Lee
INTRODUCTION
BY HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.
“THE MOST MAGNIFICENT DRAMA IN THE LAST THOUSAND YEARS OF HUMAN HISTORY is the transportation of ten million human beings out of the dark beauty of their mother continent into the new-found El Dorado of the West. They descended into Hell; and in the third century they arose from the dead, in the finest effort to achieve democracy for the working millions which this world had ever seen. It was a tragedy that beggared the Greek; it was an upheaval of humanity like the Reformation and the French Revolution.”
— W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880
The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross is a companion book to the six-part, six-hour PBS series of the same title, airing for the first time on national, prime-time broadcast in the fall of 2013. This book is the basis of the series and presents in much greater detail the 500-year history of the African American people since the black Spanish conquistador, Juan Garrido, accompanied Ponce de León on his expedition into what is now the state of Florida. It is entirely fitting that the publication of this book and the airing of the television series coincide with this very important 500th anniversary of the presence of persons of African descent in what is today the continental United States.
The African Americans is the first documentary series—since the nine-part History of the Negro People aired on National Educational Television in 1965, and the one-hour documentary, Black History: Lost, Stolen, or Strayed, narrated by Bill Cosby and broadcast in 1968—to chronicle the full sweep of African American history from the origins of the transatlantic slave trade on the west and central coasts of sub-Saharan Africa through five centuries of remarkable historical events right up to today, when our country has a black president yet remains a nation deeply divided by race and class. Indeed, the series and this book end with accounts of the reelection and second inauguration of President Barack Hussein Obama.
One of the central themes of The African Americans is the exploration of the diversity of ethnic origins of the people from Africa and their descendants whose enslavement led to the creation of the African American people, as well as the multiplicity of cultural institutions, political strategies and beliefs, and religious and social institutions that the African American people have created since Juan Garrido and other Africans first explored these shores. All of these elements have defined black society and culture in its extraordinarily rich and compelling diversity over this half millennium: from slavery to freedom, from the plantation to the presidency, from Black Power to the White House. By highlighting the complex internal debates and divisions within the Black Experience historically, The African Americans seeks to show, through fascinating stories about the lives of the people whose sacrifices and dreams made black history, the rich diversity and resilience of the African American community, which the black abolitionist Martin R. Delany perceptively described as early as the 1850s as “a nation within a nation.”
Black America, as we will see, has never been a truly uniform entity; in fact, its members have been expressing their differences of opinion from their very first days in this country. Even the road to freedom was not linear; rather, it flowed much like the course of a river, full of loops and eddies, slowing and occasionally reversing current, until ultimately finding its outlet. The African Americans also emphasizes the idea that African American history encompasses multiple continents and venues, and must be viewed through a transnational perspective to be fully understood, even—or especially—in the earliest years of the history of the slave trade and the institution of slavery, revealing the connections among the experiences of black people in the United States, Haiti, Cuba, Jamaica, and Mexico, for example.
This book is composed of stories about black people who were both pioneering and innovative, with the human endeavors of ordinary individuals, unsung heroes whose passions and beliefs changed their world or shaped the worlds that black people made and occupied. In other words, The African Americans is an account of emblematic people, individuals whose stories put a name and a face on a large and complex historical period.
But we also stress material history, especially technological developments and advances, the ways in which trade, industry, and inventions such as the sextant, the slave ship, the cotton gin, the printing press, chromolithography, radio, and the video camera shaped African American history. This is a story, in part, about how a commodity, cotton, was used to turn a group of human beings into commodities, and how those human beings continued to assert their agency, their subjectivity, until finally gaining their freedom. This is a book and a documentary series about how black people, interacting with other human beings in this country and abroad, built their world.
The African Americans foregrounds the marvelous internal worlds of culture and social institutions, both sacred and secular, that black people created in this country within their own spheres of existence, spheres at once self-contained yet reflecting, interacting, and deconstructing with the larger white world that surrounded them. Above all else, this book is concerned with showing that even in the midst of great political adversity and personal vulnerability, even under the harshest conditions, black people for 500 years have explored the fullest range of human emotions and actions, falling in and out of love, inventing novel ways to worship, stressing over the fate and fortunes of their children, and wondering about God’s purpose for their lives and their afterlives. In other words, the Black Experience is just one wondrous rendition of the larger experience of being a human being and collectively fashioning a civilization.
MY OWN FASCINATION WITH AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY BEGAN THE DAY IN JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL WHEN I SAW A PHOTOGRAPH OF W. E. B. DU BOIS. The caption under the picture told me he was the first black man to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard, but I wanted to know more. I wondered who this great man was, how he got there in the first place, and if I, too, might pursue a life of letters. But it would be Lerone Bennett’s columns in Ebony magazine in the mid-1960s that fired my imagination at the height of the civil rights movement and even more passionately as I grew up with the birth of the Black Power movement. I once wrote in longhand to Mr. Bennett and asked him if he would collect his columns into a book, not realizing that his book Before the Mayflower: A History of the Negro in America, 1619–1964 was in fact being published. No doubt that helps to explain why when I went to Yale as an undergraduate, I gravitated to the history major. I entered Yale in September 1969, as one of 96 black women and men in the class of 1973, the first fruits of the American academy’s adventure in affirmative action. As an undergraduate, I was most interested in American political and cultural history, under the direction of John Morton Blum. But the first course that I took in the history department was called Introduction to Afro-American History. Like just about everybody black at Yale in 1969, I enrolled in this large lecture course taught by William S. McFeely, who counted among his teaching fellows a graduate student named Thomas Holt.
It was already a legendary course; it had been taught previously by Eugene Genovese. And it unfolded week by week in the increasingly volatile atmosph
ere of escalating protests against the Vietnam War and the simultaneous escalation of the persecution of the Black Panther Party, as well as the trial of Panther leader Bobby Seale, taking place just down the street from Calhoun College, my Yale dormitory, in New Haven. The atmosphere in New Haven and on campus was extraordinarily explosive, and each of Professor McFeely’s classes was something of an adventure as we waited for “the Revolution” to come pounding on our classroom door. Nobody missed any of those classes, first because of the quality of Professor McFeely’s lectures, and second because the Panthers were likely to show up on any given day, demand “equal time” to espouse their “Ten Point Program” or attempt to intimidate us into giving donations for their meritorious “Free Breakfast Program.”
Professor McFeely’s lectures were vignettes about the black past that had an uncanny way of serving as allegories for what the black community was experiencing at that time. I well remember his “End of the Second Reconstruction” lecture, delivered just after President Richard M. Nixon, on January 19, 1970, nominated the conservative judge G. Harrold Carswell to replace Justice Abe Fortas on the Supreme Court. The auditorium was packed; you could have heard a pin drop. Threatening clouds of reaction were on the horizon, Professor McFeely warned, and unless we were vigilant, the very policies that had brought all of us black kids to Yale were going to be reversed by a conservative court. It was history teaching designed as an extended metaphor for those who would soon be history makers. Bill McFeely, who would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize in history for his biography of U. S. Grant, was our guide into the wonders of African American history.
But Professor McFeely also taught me something else, and that is, that you don’t have to look like the academic subject that you are studying or teaching to be an expert on that subject. No one has a monopoly on academic inquiry simply because of their ethnicity, gender, religion, or sexual preference. And despite the fact that the more militant among us had a most annoying habit of standing up during the question period to ask him what he, a white man, was doing teaching a black history course, he never lost his patience or his composure, never once admonished the student for his or her rudeness. And he did all that he could to ensure that a black historian, John W. Blassingame, would be hired the very next year to replace him as head of that class. I owe so much of my love of African American history to William S. McFeely, and it is for this reason that we have dedicated this book to him.