"Location, Location, Location": The Cultural Geography of African Americans — Introduction to a Journey

Abstract

So Jesus found Philip and said to him: Be my follower. Now Philip was from Bethsaida, from the city of Andrew and Peter. Philip found Nathanael and said to him: have found the one of whom Moses in the Law, and Prophets wrote, Jesus, the son of Joseph from Nazareth. But Nathanael said to him: Can anything good come out of Nazareth? Philip said to him, Come and see. John 1: 43-46. We have seen, to-day, the great truth, that when God does not destroy a people, but, on the contrary, trains and disciplines [them], it is an indication that He intends to make something of them, and to do something for them. It signifies that He is graciously interested in such a people. In a sense, not equal, indeed, to the case of the Jews, but parallel.... Such a are a chosen people of the Lord.... With all these providential indications in our favor, let us bless God and take courage. Casting aside everything trifling and frivolous, let us lay hold of every element of power, in the soil; in cooperative association; in mechanical ingenuity; and above all, in the religion of our God; and so march on in the pathway of progress to that superiority and eminence which is our rightful heritage, and which is evidently the promise of our God! Alexander Crummell (1877) (1) Who would have guessed in 1802 or even 1902, that the descendants of the Africans who were enslaved in the United States would become the most educated, wealthiest, and most influential African in the world by the dawn of the 21st century? The of European descent in the United States far outnumbered the Africans or African Americans. There were only a few locations within the United States where the numbers were in African Americans' favor. There was the Black Majority in Carolina in the colonial era, and with the expansion of the institution of into the southern and western territories in the early national and antebellum eras, a concentrated Black Belt was formed in the southern regions encompassing five to seven South states. (2) But these favorable demographics were in no way comparable to the seven to one ratio of Africans to Europeans on the islands of Jamaica, Hispaniola, Barbados, and others in the Caribbean. The sugar, tobacco, and cotton plantations that emerge d in the Americas in the 16th and 17th centuries consisted of large capitalistic economic enterprises that required the use of huge numbers of unfree to produce these staple crops for the international market. The plantation economy in the United States was confined to specific regions and locations, most notably in the Deep South, whereas in the Caribbean the plantation system dominated economic life, and the hundreds of thousands of enslaved African workers significantly outnumbered the Europeans. (3) The successful revolt among enslaved Africans in the French-controlled territory in Saint Domingue in the 1790s, led by Toussaint L'Ouverture, resulted in the formation of Haiti in 1804, the second independent nation in the New World. Africans throughout the Americas viewed the Haitian Revolution as a model for overthrowing the system of racial slavery that accompanied the formation of the plantation economy in the Caribbean, North, and America. (4) For this reason Haiti was treated as a pariah state in the region and was isolated and prevented from participating on an equal basis with other nations in economic and political relations, much as was the case with Fidel Castro's Cuba in the last four decades in the twentieth century. However, the Cubans, despite the U.S. sponsored economic boycott, gained some degree of financial support from fellow communists in the Eastern Bloc led by the Soviet Union between 1961 and 1989. (5) In the case of Haiti, the independent black nation was spurned by i ts neighbors and viewed as a threat even after the practice of enslaving Africans had ended. …