6
Washington Post,
Oct. 4, 1965.
7
New York Times, Aug. 15, 2007, Nov. 29, 2007; David M. Reimers,
Other Immigrants: The Global Origins of the American People
(New York, 2005), chap. 9; April Gordon, “The New DiasporaâAfrican Immigration to the United States,”
Journal of Third World Studies
15 (1998), 79â103.
8
Quoted in Waters and Ueda, eds.,
The New Americans,
8; Reimers,
Other Immigrants,
chap. 9.
9
With the close of the slave trade at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the proportion of black people of foreign birth in the United States began to decline. In 1910, it was less than four-tenths of 1 percent for the United States and some one-tenth of 1 percent for the South. U.S. Census Bureau,
Negro Population: 1790â1915
(Washington DC, 1918), 61.
10
Stanley Lieberson, “Selective Black Migration from the South: A Historical View” in Frank D. Bean and W. Parker Frisbie, eds.,
The Demography of Racial and Ethnic Groups
(New York, 1978), 122; Karl E. Taeuber, “The Negro Population in the United States” in John P. Davis, ed.,
The American Negro Reference Book
(Englewood Cliffs NJ, 1966), 109.
11
U.S. Census Bureau,
Profileof the Foreign-Born Population in the United States:
2000 (Washington DC, 2001), 3. Many more people of African descent derived from the West Indies and other parts of the world, although they too made up only a small percentage of the post-1965 immigration.
12
U.S. Census Bureau,
Profile of the Foreign-Born Population in the United States:
2000 (Washington DC, 2001), 10; David Dixon, “Characteristics of the African Born in the United States” (January 2006) in Migration Information Source (
www.migrationinformation.org
); Reimers, Other
Immigrants,
chap. 9; Gordon, “The New Diaspora,” 79â103; Yoku Shaw-Taylor and Steven Tuch, eds.,
The Other African Americans: Contemporary African and Caribbean Immigrants in the United States
(Lanham MD, 2007). During the 1990s legal immigration from Ghana increased 380 percent and immigration from Nigeria increased 220 percent in New York City. Nancy Foner, ed.,
New Immigrants in New York
(New York, 2001), 23.
13
U.S. Census Bureau,
Profile of the Foreign-Born Population in the United States:
2000 (Washington DC, 2001).
14
Waters and Ueda, eds.,
The New Americans,
4; Reuel Rogers, “âBlack Like Who?': Afro-Caribbean Immigrants, African Americans, and the Politics of Group Identity” in Nancy Foner, ed.,
Islands in the City: West Indian Migration to New York
(Berkeley CA, 2001), 164.
15
Rogers, “âBlack Like Who?,”' 164; James R. Grossman, Ann Durkin Keating, Janice L. Reiff, eds.,
The Encyclopedia of Chicago
(Chicago, 2004), 21, 281, 446, 476â77, 571â72; New York Times, Aug. 29, 2004.
16
Flore Zéphir,
Haitian Immigrants in Black America: A Sociological and Sociolinguistic Portrait
(Westport CT, 1996), 85â86.
17
New York Times,
Aug. 29, 2004; Also see
Washington Post,
Feb. 24, 2002;
New York Amsterdam News,
Mar. 9, 2005.
18
New York Times,
Aug. 29, 2004.
19
Washington
City Paper,
Nov. 5, 2004.
20
Washington
City Paper,
Nov. 5, 2004. For a more general discussion of the relationship between African Americans and Africans, see Violet M. Showers Johnson, “âWhat, Then, Is the African American?': African and Afro-Caribbean Identities in Black America,”
Journal of American Ethnic History
28 (2008), 77â103.
21
Franklin's
Slavery to Freedom
was first published in 1947. In 2007, a seventh edition, coauthored by Alfred A. Moss, Jr., appeared, and another edition, authored by Evelyn Higginbotham, is scheduled for publication in 2010.
22
No one has written more thoughtfully about the matter of “master narratives” than Nathan Huggins. See especially his “The Deforming Mirror of Truth: Slavery and the Master Narrative of American History,”
Radical History Review
49 (1991), 25â48, and “The Afro-American, National Character, and Community: Toward a New Synthesis” in Brenda Smith Huggins, ed., Revelations: American
History, American Myths
(New York, 1995), 36â60, and “Integrating Afro-American History into American History” in Darlene Clark Hine, ed.,
The State of Afro-American History: Past, Present, and Future
(Baton Rouge LA, 1986), 157â68.
23
Benedict Anderson,
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism,
rev. ed. (London, 1991).
24
King's precise words were: “The moral arc of the universe bends at the elbow of justice.”
25
Rogers, “âBlack Like Who?,”' 178; quoted in
Newsweek,
July 16, 2007. For a powerful invocation of the differences between the African American and African perspective, see Saidiya V. Hartman,
Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic
Slave Route (New York, 2007).
26
Charlotte Sussman, “The Colonial Afterlife of Political Arithmetic: Swift, Demography, and Mobile Populations,”
Cultural Critique
56 (2004), 117.
27
A point made with respect to European migrations in John Bodnar, The
Transplanted: A History of Urban Immigration
(Bloomington IN, 1985).
Chapter One: Movement and Place in the African American Past
1
Colin A. Palmer, “The Middle Passage” in Beverly C. McMillan, ed.,
Captive
Passage:
The Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Making of the Americas
(Newport News VA, 2002), 53; Maria Diedrich, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Carl Pedersen, eds.,
Black Imagination and the Middle Passage
(New York, 1999); Palmer added that the Middle Passage “remains alive in the memories of the people of African descent, linking them across the geographic expanse of the diaspora.”
2
The number of Africans sent across the Atlantic to slavery in the Americas has been subject to considerable debate. The latest and most authoritative estimate is 10.7 million, with some 3.6 percent arriving in the territories that eventually became part of the United States. David Eltis, “The U.S. Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1644â1867: An Assessment,”
Civil War History
54 (2008), 353.
3
Focusing on the four great migrations that frame the history of people of African descent in the United States does not reduce the significance of the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of lesser migrations. Historians have rightly marked some of theseâthe eighteenth-century movement from tidewater to piedmont, the early-nineteenth-century flight from Saint Domingue to the mainland of the United States (and the later one following the United States occupation of Haiti), the post-Civil War movement of black “carpetbaggers” from north to south, the late-nineteenth-century exodus from Mississippi to Kansas, and most especially the twentieth-century migrations from the Caribbeanâas critical to any understanding of African American and American life. To the social transformation they wrought and the renaissances they initiated can be added similar transformations set in motion by smaller, generally ignored, migrations, as for example: the post-Revolutionary evacuation of the Northern countryside, the postemancipation westward drift, or the post-Civil Rights return to the South. Focusing on the four great migrations of African and African American peoplesâthe rivers, not the rillsâdoes nothing to diminish the importance of the lesser migrations; indeed the great migrations cannot be understood apart from these smaller ones. But trying to address all of these movements reduces the African American past to one great itinerancyâa sort of endless peregrinationâand expunges the sense of place that so informed black life.
4
George P. Rawick, ed.,
The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography,
41 vols. (Westport CT, 1972â79), ser. 1, vol. 10, pt. 5, 226â227;
American Slave,
ser. 1, vol. 12, pt. 2, 119.
5
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “New Negroes, Migration, and Cultural Exchange” in Elizabeth Hutton Turner, ed.,
Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series
(Washington DC, 1993), 17â21; Jutta Lorensen, “Between Image and Word, Color and Time: Jacob Lawrence's
The Migration Series,” African American Review
40 (2006), 572. Another black artist deeply touched by the movement north was Walter Ellison, whose 1935
Train
Station also gave a sense of the central role of movement in African American life. Jamie W. Johnson, “Instructional Resources: Journeys Through Art: Tracing the Great Migration in Three American Paintings,”
Art Education
55 (2002), 25-31.
6
On African American literature and migration see Farah Jasmine Griffin, “Who
Set You Flowin'?”: The African-American Migration Narrative
(New York, 1995) and Lawrence Rodgers,
Canaan Bound: The African American Great Migration
Novel (Chicago, 1997).
7
Langston Hughes,
The Big Sea: An Autobiography
(New York, 1940), 23.
9
Among the more useful theoretical works on the significance of “place” is E. Relph,
Place and Placelessness
(London, 1976); David Harvey,
Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference
(Cambridge MA, 1996); Doreen Massey,
Space, Place, and Gender
(Minneapolis MN, 1994).
10
Paul Gilroy,
The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness
(Cambridge MA, 1993).
11
Quoted in Marcus Rediker,
The Slave Ship: A Human History
(New York, 2007), 305. For the role of fictive kin, see Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price,
The Birth ofAfrican-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective
(Boston, [1976] 1992), 62â79.
12
For insightful discussions of the “discourse and etiquette of place” within the context of the late-nineteenth-century South, see James R. Grossman, “ âAmiable Peasantry' or âSocial Burden': Constructing a Place for Black Southerners” in Rick Halpern and Jonathan Morris, eds.,
American Exceptionalism?:
US
Working-Class Formation in an International Context
(New York, 1997), 221â43, and Angel David Nieves and Leslie M. Alexander,
“We Shall Independent Be”: African American Place Making and the Struggle to Claim Space in the United States
(Boulder CO, 2008).
13
Clifton Taulbert,
The Last Train North
quoted in Malaika Adero, ed., Up South:
Stories,
Studies, and Letters of this Century's Black Migrations (New York, 1993), xii.
14
Quoted in Walter Johnson, “Introduction” in Johnson, ed., The Chattel Principle:
Internal Slave Trades in the Americas
(New Haven CT, 2005), 2.
15
Toni Morrison, “Rootedness: The Ancestor in African American Fiction” in Mari Evans, ed., Black Women Writers: A Critical Evaluation (Garden City NY, 1984), 339-45.
16
The point is made forcefully by Marc S. Rodriguez, “Placing Human Migration in Comparative Perspective” in Rodriguez and Anthony T. Grafton, eds.,
Migration in History: Human Migration in Comparative Perspective
(Rochester NY, 2007), ix-x.
17
J. Lorand Matory,
Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé
(Princeton NJ, 2005), 3.
18
Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge MA, 1982).
19
Frederick Douglass,
Life and Times of Frederick Douglass
(New York, 1881), 97;
New York Times,
Nov. 28, 1863, quoted in Leon F. Litwack,
Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery
(New York, 1979), 307.
20
Quoted in Ira Berlin et al., eds., “The Terrain of Freedom: The Struggle over the Meaning of Free Labor in the U.S. South,”
History Workshop
22 (1986), 127â28; Dylan C. Penningroth,
The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century
South (Chapel Hill NC, 2003), 158; Julie Saville,
The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina, 1860â1870
(Cambridge UK, 1994), chap. 1; Julia Peterkin,
Roll, Jordan, Roll
(New York, 1933), II.
21
All quoted in James C. Cobb,
Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity
(New York, 2005), 268; also Helen Taylor,
Circling Dixie: Contemporary Southern Culture through a Transatlantic Lens
(New Brunswick NJ, 2001), 173. “Home,” reports Geneva Smitherman in her dictionary of African American colloquialisms (1994), is “a generic reference to any area south of the Mason-Dixon Line.... Thus, âMy Momma nem went home last month,' does not refer to the current home of the speaker, but to a place in the South where the speaker and her family are from.”
Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner
(Boston, 1994), 136. I would like to thank Elsa Barkley Brown for bringing this reference to my attention.
22
Gates, “New Negroes, Migration, and Cultural Exchange,” 20.
23
Cobb,
Away Down South,
especially chap. 10; Powledge quoted on p. 264.
24
Adero, ed.,
Up South: Stories,
55.