Black Migrants Research Articles

Nikki Giovanni’s Appalachian Ties

Nikki Giovanni’s Appalachian Ties Virginia C. Fowler (bio) Certain aspects of Nikki Giovanni’s biography are not unique to her but common to several generations of African-Americans. Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, she moved with her family to Cincinnati, Ohio (“Gateway to the South”). In 1943, when she was only two months old, she and her family were a part of what we now call the Great Migration of blacks from the rural South to the urban North. Like many others, Giovanni’s parents migrated north to pursue better job opportunities and to escape the racial conditions of the South. In Knoxville, Giovanni’s father could find only low-paying, menial jobs, despite the fact that he had a college education. In Knoxville, his children’s lives would be constricted by segregation’s many rules and regulations. In Cincinnati, where he had moved with his mother when he was himself only a child (a part of an earlier wave of black migration from the South), Gus Giovanni was offered a job at a home for black boys, as well as opportunities for future, better-paying professional employment. Like many other children whose parents migrated to the North but left family in the South, Giovanni and her sister and cousins all returned to Knoxville for summer vacations; moreover, Giovanni lived with her grandparents in Knoxville from the time she was fourteen until she was seventeen, when she left Austin High School and went to Fisk University as an early entrant. Her grandparents’ home at 400 Mulvaney Street becomes in Giovanni’s work the enduring symbol of safety, happiness, warmth, and security. Even after its literal destruction, it remains, at least imaginatively, her refuge from a hostile world. Importantly, most of the values inscribed throughout Giovanni’s poetry are associated with her maternal grandparents. More powerfully than their home at 400 Mulvaney, which was ultimately destroyed in the wake of “urban renewal,” her grandparents live on in her poetry as ancestral figures offering wisdom, comfort, and love. As this brief summary of some of the biographical details of [End Page 42] Giovanni’s life suggests, both because of her parents’ roots in the South and because of her ties to her grandparents, Giovanni may have grown up in the North (although Cincinnati is in reality and not just in name the “Gateway to the South”), but many of the values instilled in her as a child were southern and Appalachian. Like many other African-American writers of her generation, however (for example, Toni Morrison), Giovanni tends to identify these values sometimes as “Southern,” but more often simply as “Black.” When she wants to celebrate black women, for example, her images are most often of southern black women. Although white Americans rarely acknowledge it, many elements of southern culture have some of their deepest roots in Africa. The abiding presence and importance of the past, the significance, even sacredness, of place, the centrality of food and food rituals, the importance of oral tradition—these were central to West African cultures. Similarly, quilts and quilting, which I have suggested are central tropes in Giovanni’s poetry, also have African roots. While African-American and feminist historians have made significant corrections to the traditional white, male version of southern history, few would venture to assert—as Nikki Giovanni repeatedly does in her lectures—that southern culture, at least in terms of these values, is black. In an early essay, Nikki Giovanni writes about the process by which black American culture becomes white in regard to music: “The blues didn’t start with Dixieland or work songs or Gospel or anything but us. . . . Dvorak’s ‘Fifth,’ commonly called ‘The New World Symphony,’ is nothing but our music” (Gemini, 117). Similarly, in her recent poem “When Gamble and Huff Ruled,” she states, “I dislike other people for taking our music our muse and our rap to sell their cars and bread and toothpaste and deodorant and sneakers but never seeming to have enough to give back to the people who created it” (Love, 51). Not only is it the case that “Black people don’t get paid for anything that we do,” Giovanni argues in a...

The Black worker: race, labor, and civil rights since emancipation

Long before the modern civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s made a frontal assault on the reigning segregationist order, African American workers had to struggle against both their employers and fellow white workers. Because their efforts to secure their workplace rights pitted them against the broader structures of racial oppression, their activism constituted nothing less than a form of civil rights struggle. Uniting the latest scholarship on race, labour, and civil rights, Black Worker aims to establish the richness of the African American working-class experience, and the indisputable role of black workers in shaping the politics and history of labour and in the United States. To capture the complexity of African Americans' experiences in the workplace, this reader examines workers engaged in a wide array of jobs, including sharecropping, coal mining, domestic service, longshoring, automobile manufacturing, tobacco processing, railroading, prostitution, lumbering, and municipal employment. The essays' subjects include black migration, strikebreaking, black conservatism, gender, and the multiple forms of employment discrimination in the South and North. Other contributions deal explicitly with state policy and black workers during the transition from slavery to freedom, World Wars I and II, and the 1960s. The variety of challenges made by these workers, both quiet and overt, served as clear reminders to the supporters of white supremacy that, despite their best efforts through violence, fraud, and the law, as long as they insisted upon racial inequality, the race question would never be fully resolved.

Masks of Authenticity: Failed Quests for the People in Quicksand by Nella Larsen and The Silver Dove by Andrei Belyi

Masks of AuthenticityFailed Quests for the People in Quicksand by Nella Larsen and The Silver Dove by Andrei Belyi Irina Anisimova Quicksand (1927) by Nella Larsen and The Silver Dove (1910) by Andrei Belyi focus on the failures of Helga Crane and Petr Dar’ial’skii, members respectively of African American and Russian elites, to make contact with the common people. As both of these intellectuals immerse themselves in the lower classes, they make a deliberate effort to refashion their identities in accordance with their notions of folk authenticity. After an initial period of self-delusion, however, their desire to join the people results in bitter disappointment. They try to escape their new, “authentic” lifestyles, but their failure to return to their original social milieu leads to feelings of entrapment and, ultimately, to their moral and physical destruction. In the end, the protagonists’ failed quests serve to reveal the constructedness of racial and national identities and to challenge the associated discourses of racial and national authenticity. By the beginning of the twentieth century, African American and Russian intellectuals had developed discourses of ethnic authenticity that relied on romantic notions of the rural folk. However, these discourses were challenged by social change, the relocation of rural populations, and the increased visibility of the changing folk culture. Both the migration of the rural Southern blacks after World War I to the Northern urban centers and the labor migration of Russian peasants to the industrializing cities during the last decades of the nineteenth century influenced the intelligentsia’s perception of the lower classes. In Russia as well as in the U.S., the intellectuals’ reaction to the new visibility of the poor can be characterized as a “moral panic,” defined by Stanley Cohen as an episode in which part of the population responds briefly, suddenly, and intensely to some new feature of lower-class behavior (9). New forms of the popular culture and non-conformity of the lower classes undermined traditional notions of authenticity and ethnic identity. Written at the beginning of the twentieth century, these novels can both be situated in this context. In Quicksand and The Silver Dove, authenticity turns into a form of self-delusion or masquerade, while the lower-class body is represented through the imagery of minstrels or of an inscrutable mask.1 [End Page 175] Larsen The Rural Folk as the Primitive Quicksand focuses on the instability of racial identity and presents the tension between racial essentialism and the conception of race as a social construction. Quicksand dramatizes an unresolved tension between the seductions of consumerism, associated with whiteness, and the attraction of racial authenticity, represented by the black folk. Although Helga never passes for white, her geographic and social wandering is informed by the desire for material comfort and personal acceptance. Helga’s desire for “authentic” racial identity at the end of the novel presents race as “the irresistible tie” (92) that ends her search for identity and results in her eventual death. In Quicksand, folk authenticity becomes related to essentialism, and even to primitivism. Paradoxically, Larsen both exposes the work of primitivism, especially in the Denmark section of the novel and, at the same time, subscribes to certain primitivist presentations of the folk. Chip Rhodes claims that primitivism can be seen as “the purest expression” of “ideological tension between performativity and essentialism” (17). This tension is vividly illustrated by discrepancies between the protagonist’s performances in the Danish upper-class circles and the narrator’s presentation of Helga’s life among rural Alabama folk. The text of Quicksand creates an uncanny connection between folk identity and forms of sexual expression that are often degraded. Deborah McDowell writes that Larsen’s treatment of sexuality is linked to an imagery of descent and animalism, suggesting “inner degradation” (xxii). However, the same images that, according to McDowell, are connected to sexuality—the Harlem cabaret, the storefront church, and the deep South—are also associated with the black folk.2 In addition, there are parallels between Helga’s primitivist image, constructed by her white relatives and the famous Danish painter Olsen, and Larsen’s presentation of the rural women. For example, the description of Clementine Richards as “a...

African Americans and Homelessness

The story of African Americans is usually absent from the mainstream textbook study of homeless people. This research begins to address this absence. It provides an overview by using eight distinct historic experiences—the colonial period, Civil War period, cowboys of the west, the tramping years, the Black migration north, the depression years and New Deal, urban renewal, and deindustrialization of the American economy—to begin the process of more fully describing the experience of Black homelessness in America.

The Great Migration and the Economic Status of African-Americans Since the Great Depression: Puzzles and Paradoxes

In my comments for this session, I wish to focus on what economists and economic historians have learned in recent years about the impact of the great northward migration on the economic status of African-Americans since the period of the Great Depression. At first glance, the answer seems obvious. For much of this century, the earnings and economic opportunities of black workers residing in the South were dismal. Although opportunities were also constrained in the northern cities that received the black migrants, there can be little doubt that the migration had a direct and positive effect on the economic status of most. The regional income differential for black workers both served as an economic incentive that helped spur the migration and, once the migration was underway, played a significant role in the overall narrowing of the earnings gap between blacks and whites that occurred between 1940 and the mid-1970s.

Avoiding “Jim Crow”

The fight against discrimination on public transportation in Florida at the turn of the twentieth century helped to transform black leaders from nineteenth century activists into modern civil rights protesters. Although the movements at the turn of the century and the ones that dominated the South after World War II were not directly connected through a continuum of leadership and institutions, activists in the early twentieth century laid the intellectual and philosophical foundations of the modern civil rights movements. These important protests coincided with increased migration and urbanization of blacks and poor whites in Florida, but also provided that space where the merging of disparate groups of black leaders could communicate and subordinate gender and class demands to race.

Challenging cheap-labour theory: Natal and Transvaal coal miners, ca 1890–1950

In the first half of the twentieth century, South Africa's two main coal-producing provinces, Natal and the Transvaal, were regarded as having separate industries. Comparing the two, the article shows that their geology, markets, ownership and organization were distinctive. In contrast, the patterns of labour struggles were alike, reflecting labour processes, racial divisions, and legal and ideological frameworks that were similar. The historiography of South African mining labour has emphasized the role of black migrants, who ‘oscillated’ between the mines and the rural areas from where they originated and to which they retired. While structuralist analyses argued that migrancy was the bedrock of a cheap-labour system that underpinned white power, leading social historians stressed that migrants were primarily rural men. The account presented here rejects the thrust of both positions, showing that a high proportion of coal miners settled around the mines. More of them would have done so had this been permitted, and the same applies to Africans working on the gold mines. Given that cheap-labour theory strengthens the exceptionalism that runs through much South African history, rejecting it can open up new possibilities for comparative study. In passing, the article reveals that black workers participated in the militant 1913 strike by the Witwatersrand's white mine workers.

Bayonets in the Wilderness: Anthony Wayne's Legion in the Old Northwest by Alan D. Gaff

156 Michigan Historical Review also an invaluable work for researchers interested the expansion of American suburbs in the twentieth century. Walter D. Greason Department of History Ursinus College Alan D. Gaff. Bayonets in theWilderness: Anthony Wayne's Legion in the Old Northwest. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004. Pp. 419. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Notes. Cloth, $39.95. Given the awesome might of the armed forces that won the Civil War and both World Wars, it is easy to forget that the United States Army was once a humble, ragtag force hindered by a great many obstacles: a lack of resources, recruiting difficulties, American hostility to standing armies, and nearly constant pressure from both unfriendly Natives and European interlopers. In an elegantly written and eminendy readable book, Alan D. Gaff successfully documents this chapter inAmerican military history. On November 4, 1791, American military power ebbed to its lowest point when a confederacy of northwestern Indians defeated General Arthur St. Clair in the Battle of Wabash River. President George Washington had to pick up the pieces from this disastrous defeat and rebuild. Gaff traces this process, from the painstaking choice of a new commander, through the recruitment and training of new troops, and finally to the ultimate victory of the U.S. Army over the northwestern confederacy. It is a compelling drama full of intrigue, political maneuvering, desperation, and chicanery. Besides serving as a tighdy constructed history of the early years of the American army, Gaffs book doubles as a biography of Anthony Wayne, best known by the moniker "Mad Anthony." The nickname was used byWayne's men as a term of affection, but over the centuries it has encouraged the easy?and lazy?assumption that he was imbalanced, or at the very least incompetent. Gaff is careful to correct this false impression, building a persuasive case thatWayne was a skillful soldier who played an instrumental role in the growth and professionalization of the American military. There is also another poorly understood part of American history woven in among the events Gaff documents. Less is known about the tribes of the Old Northwest than those of any other region. Here, regrettably, Bayonets in theWilderness has little new to offer. Gaff himself Book Reviews 157 acknowledges asmuch, observing that "the lack of awritten language has hamstrung any attempt to relate to the Indian version of events. It is an immeasurable loss to history" (p. xiv). Alan Gaff is an independent scholar and is careful to define his audience broadly. His clear prose, skillful use of anecdotes, and unobtrusive footnotes will certainly appeal to readers outside of academia. The book is not lacking in scholarly rigor, however. Indeed, thanks to the time Gaff spent examining previously unused newspaper accounts, the book surely sits on a firmer evidentiary basis than any previous work on this topic. Consequendy, Bayonets in theWilderness will find a place both in survey courses on early American history and in the libraries of military enthusiasts. Christopher Bates University of California, Los Angeles Sharon A. Roger Hepburn. Crossing theBorder:A Free Black Community in Canada. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Pp. 272. Bibliography. Index. Notes. Photographs. Cloth, $40.00. The past few years have seen an outpouring of writing on black Canadian history and black migration studies. Among these texts is Sharon A. Roger Hepburn's Crossing theBorder:A Free Black Community in Canada. A substantive book with a brief introduction and ten complex chapters, Crossing the Border has four notable features. First, Hepburn squarely takes on the espousal by abolitionists that Canada was a promised land of black freedom and equality as well as the fable touted by Southern slave owners that it was barren, frozen tundra. Second, Hepburn offers a comprehensive profile of the Reverend William King, the founder and primary financier of Buxton, the main community she examines. Third, Crossing the Border explains the inner workings of the Elgin Association and the Buxton Mission, the two rather distinct administrative entities that comprised the Buxton setdement. Finally, Hepburn sustains a narrative throughout her text that emphasizes the experiences of the ordinary people who transformed Buxton from a setdement into a community. Crossing the Border illustrates that Buxton was a...

Crossing the Border: A Free Black Community in Canada by Sharon A. Roger Hepburn

Book Reviews 157 acknowledges asmuch, observing that "the lack of awritten language has hamstrung any attempt to relate to the Indian version of events. It is an immeasurable loss to history" (p. xiv). Alan Gaff is an independent scholar and is careful to define his audience broadly. His clear prose, skillful use of anecdotes, and unobtrusive footnotes will certainly appeal to readers outside of academia. The book is not lacking in scholarly rigor, however. Indeed, thanks to the time Gaff spent examining previously unused newspaper accounts, the book surely sits on a firmer evidentiary basis than any previous work on this topic. Consequendy, Bayonets in theWilderness will find a place both in survey courses on early American history and in the libraries of military enthusiasts. Christopher Bates University of California, Los Angeles Sharon A. Roger Hepburn. Crossing theBorder:A Free Black Community in Canada. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Pp. 272. Bibliography. Index. Notes. Photographs. Cloth, $40.00. The past few years have seen an outpouring of writing on black Canadian history and black migration studies. Among these texts is Sharon A. Roger Hepburn's Crossing theBorder:A Free Black Community in Canada. A substantive book with a brief introduction and ten complex chapters, Crossing the Border has four notable features. First, Hepburn squarely takes on the espousal by abolitionists that Canada was a promised land of black freedom and equality as well as the fable touted by Southern slave owners that it was barren, frozen tundra. Second, Hepburn offers a comprehensive profile of the Reverend William King, the founder and primary financier of Buxton, the main community she examines. Third, Crossing the Border explains the inner workings of the Elgin Association and the Buxton Mission, the two rather distinct administrative entities that comprised the Buxton setdement. Finally, Hepburn sustains a narrative throughout her text that emphasizes the experiences of the ordinary people who transformed Buxton from a setdement into a community. Crossing the Border illustrates that Buxton was a complicated, highly ambitious undertaking. The settlement was founded in 1849, it comprised more than seven thousand acres by the end of its first five years, and it lasted formally for more than twenty years. However, even though the 158 Michigan Historical Review Buxton story is about its successful transformation into a true community where residents lived, worked, worshiped, and studied, there is a discernable tension in its history. Hepburn is not able to resolve fully the contradictions created by William King's management of the community. In a variety of ways, King's purpose was to make Buxton residents as independent as possible. At the same time, King not only helped manage the settlement's finances, but also directed the people's spiritual and educational development. What Hepburn does make clear, however, is that Buxton was not a homogeneous society. Its residents were male and female, fugitive and free-born, literate and illiterate, destitute and propertied. Its small number of interracial families meant that from the very beginning Buxton was not even a truly all-black settlement. To its credit, Crossing the Border is a thorough study that features a highly readable narrative drawn from primary sources including Canadian census returns, Elgin Association records, church histories, family papers, newspaper articles, and personal correspondence. The Buxton setdement's significance to Michigan history is twofold. Buxton's proximity to the Michigan/Canadian border?a border that was much more fluid than it is today?makes the study pertinent to Michigan history. Also, although itmay not have seen the human traffic of Buffalo, New York, Detroit was a gateway to freedom in Ontario towns and cities likeWindsor, Amherstburg, and Sandwich. Hepburn's analysis of the ways in which race and class shaped Buxton's history is strong, but gender analysis falls short in comparison. Maureen Elgersman Lee Old Dominion University Mark Hoffman. 'My Brave Mechanics": The First Michigan Engineers and Their Civil War. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007. Pp. 470. Appendices. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Maps. Notes. Tables. Cloth, $44.95. Mark Hoffman's (My Brave Mechanics" details the service of the First Michigan Engineers throughout America's most pivotal war. What separates this regimental history from other examples of the genre...

The Religious and Racial Meanings ofThe Green Pastures

AbstractMarc Connelly'sThe Green Pasturesplay was one of the longest running dramas in Broadway history. Responses to the play by blacks and whites demonstrate its contested nature. Whites generally lauded the drama for its simplicity and its childlike depiction of black religion in the rural South. African Americans, though hopeful that its allblack cast would lead to more opportunities for blacks on stage, were divided between a general appreciation of the extraordinary display of talent by its actors and worries about the implications of a play that seemed to idealize the rural South as the natural environment of carefree overly religious blacks. Connelly's widely popular drama became a site of cultural debates about the significance of black migration to the urban North, the nature and importance of religion in black communities, and the place of blacks in the nation. Precisely when black social scientists were urging rural black Christians to abandon an otherworldly and emotional religion, white dramatists and literary artists were making more widely available what they saw as a picturesque and deeply rooted aspect of black folk culture.

Black Loyalists and Black Slaves in Maritime Canada

AbstractWe know a great deal about the Black Loyalists who achieved freedom during the Revolutionary War, settled in Maritime Canada, and those who eventually migrated to the coast of West Africa. However, what about black people who were slaves in the American colonies and remained slaves after migrating to Maritime Canada with their masters? This article examines the historiography of the Black Loyalists in Maritime Canada and attempts to address the experience of those who remained slaves. Indeed, to have a broader understanding of transnational black migration to Canada historians must look beyond the paradigm of from slavery in America to freedom in Canada and consider the experience of those who remained slaves.

Was Postwar Suburbanization “White Flight”? Evidence from the Black Migration*

Residential segregation across jurisdiction lines generates disparities in public services and education by race. The distinctive American pattern - in which blacks live in the center city and whites in the suburban ring - was enhanced by black migration from the rural South from 1940-1970. I show that urban whites responded to this black influx by relocating to the suburbs and rule out the indirect effect on urban housing prices as a cause. Black migrants may have been attracted to areas already undergoing suburbanization. I create an instrument for changes in urban diversity that predicts black migrant flows from southern states and assigns these flows to northern cities according to established settlement patterns. The best causal estimates imply that white flight explains around 20 percent of suburban growth in the postwar period.

Black Response to the Construction of Colored Huntington, West Virginia, during the Jim Crow Era

Black Response to the Construction of Colored Huntington, West Virginia, during the Jim Crow Era Cicero M. Fain III Huntington, West Virginia, located in Cabell County, experienced a phenomenal population explosion during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. By 1930, its increasing importance as a transshipment point for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, vital river port, and growing manufacturing center made it West Virginia's most populous city with 75,752 residents. Huntington's African American population growth paralleled this increase, comprising by 1930 the second largest conglomeration in the state at 4,630 residents (see Table 1).1 Click for larger view View full resolution Table 1. Population of Huntington, West Virginia Given such rapid growth, city leaders faced a host of difficult issues, including those affiliated with the surging influx of black migrants. Over time, with the tacit agreement of city officials and the general population, white realtors designated both white-only neighborhoods augmented by racially "restrictive covenants," and constructed a black-only residential subdivision as a way of containing the aspirations of black Huntingtonians. In this manner, they mirrored and implemented segregationist practices throughout the nation during the nadir of Jim Crow. Nevertheless, ambitious [End Page 1] and savvy black residents who wished to improve their financial situation found ways to take advantage of these developments. However, before an examination of the construction of colored Huntington can begin, it is important to place its development within the larger historical context of the Jim Crow era. Any discussion related to the black experience during this era begins with the well-documented "Great Migration" of hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the South to the urban-industrial North during the first third of the twentieth century. What is less known, but more important in the development of Huntington, is the intraregional movement of tens of thousands of blacks into central Appalachia and the southern West Virginia coalfields during the first decades of the twentieth century. This transplantation of black southerners, part of a larger movement south and west that began prior to the Civil War, shifted the center of the Negro population from its historical roots in the Chesapeake Bay region to northern Alabama.2 The massive influx of black laborers into the southern West Virginia coalfields coincided with the movement of hundreds of thousands of black migrants south and west, and each of these must be viewed against the backdrop of the other to fully understand the historical reality and motivation behind this mass black migration. So extensive was black migration into the coalfields that, between 1890 and 1910, West Virginia was the only southern state to increase in total population. An infusion of northern black migrants also contributed to the population increase in the region. In his study of African Americans in West Virginia, historian Joe W. Trotter found that only about 21 percent of the state's blacks lived in the southern counties in 1880. By 1910 that figure had climbed to 63 percent.3 In conjunction with black migration into southern West Virginia, thousands of European immigrants also settled in this region. Southern West Virginia's population increased dramatically throughout the region from approximately 80,000 in 1880 to nearly 300,000 in 1910. The immigrant population from southern, central, and eastern Europe grew from 1,400 in 1880 to 18,000 (6 percent of the total increase) in 1910. African American growth outpaced foreign growth, expanding from 4,800 in 1880 (6 percent of the total) to over forty thousand (14 percent of the total) in 1910.4 These numbers represented over twice the proportion of European immigrants in the southern part of the state and transformed the region into a contested zone of social tension and labor strife as native-born whites, European immigrants, and African Americans competed for jobs, housing, and hegemony.5 [End Page 2] Notwithstanding the increasing number of blacks and immigrants into the region during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, West Virginia remained overwhelmingly white in its racial composition. Thus, white political power and notions of racial superiority remained a source of pride and unity for many whites. Growing white resentment did not remain a...

Blacks on the Border: The Black Refugees in British North America, 1815–1860 (review)

Blacks on the Border: The Black Refugees in British North America, 1815-1860. By Harvey Amani Whitfield. (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2006. Pp. 200. Maps. Cloth, $65.00; Paper, $24.95.)Reviewed by W. Bryan Rommel-RuizIn his timely and important study of the Black Refugees from the War of 1812, Harvey Amani Whitfield has reminded us that the black communities established in Nova Scotia in the nineteenth century were among the connected nodes of black freedom in the Atlantic world. Whitfield traces the regional, cultural, and social histories of the Black Refugees, a constellation of former American slaves who fled to the British Army during the war, from the Chesapeake and Lowcountry (primarily Virginia and Georgia's Sea Islands). Ultimately, he confronts a profound issue: How did the cultural and social worldviews of the Black Refugees with such deep roots in American slavery endure migration and resettlement to Nova Scotia? Much as American historians have discovered in their studies of nineteenth-century urban black communities in the American North, Whitfield sees the ways in which economic, social, and political marginalization in Nova Scotia promoted a black racial consciousness, becoming the impetus for community development, political action, and identity formation. As Whitfield demonstrates, the Black Refugees embraced their identity as subjects of the British monarchy, and moved from that position to advocate for their rights as citizens in Nova Scotia.Blach on the Border opens with two narratives: The history of blacks in Nova Scotia and the history of American slavery in the Chesapeake and Lowcountry. Weaving together Canadian and American historiography, Whitfield illuminates the ways in which the longer history of blacks in Nova Scotia, particularly the legacies of the Black Loyalists and Jamaican Maroons, influenced the Black Refugee experience. Furthermore, he demonstrates how slave culture and society in the American South shaped their lives in nineteenth-century Nova Scotia. These histories and traditions would collide and define the contours of black life in this maritime Canadian province. Like the Black Loyalists during the Revolutionary War, the Black Refugees were promised land and freedom for their support of the British military. And similar to the Black Loyalist experience, this next wave of black American migrants encountered a government and communities in Nova Scotia hostile to their arrival. Indeed, the Black Refugees discovered a harsher racial climate because of the history of tense race relations in the province. Ultimately nearly half of the Black Loyalists left to help found the Afro-British colony of Sierra Leone, and most of the Jamaican Maroons left Nova Scotia as well. Many white Nova Scotians hoped the Black Refugees would follow these earlier examples and leave the colony. While a few of the Refugees would accept the offer of removal to the Caribbean, most decided to stay and make a life in Nova Scotia.It is in the stories of the struggles and hardships of the Black Refugees in the early years of their settlement that we see the richness of Whitfield's research. Significantly, Chesapeake blacks settled in Preston, a rural area outside of Dartmouth (a suburb of Halifax) while Lowcountry migrants settled in Hammonds Plains, another area bordering the seaport, although distant from the black community in Preston. Looking at the petitions submitted by Black Refugees for land and supplies, Whitfield discovered work patterns that paralleled the black experience in the American South, particularly in the insistence of the Refugees to pursue farming and practice traditional artisan trades, occasionally engaging the urban labor market in Halifax. In their work and labor, the Black Refugees were practicing cultural and social traditions tied to their experience in American slavery, and identified their commitment to farming with ideas of independence and freedom. …

Ghetto Formation and Armed Resistance in East St. Louis, Illinois

This article explores African American armed resistance during the 1917 East St. Louis race riot in the context of black migration and ghetto formation. In particular it considers the significance of the development of the black urban community, composed of an emerging working class and a dynamic, militant and increasingly influential middle class. It was that community which came under attack by white mobs in 1917, and this work illuminates the infrastructure of resistance in the city, showing how African Americans drew upon the resources of the nascent ghetto and older traditions of self-defence to protect their homes and families.

Vanguards of the New Negro: African American Veterans and Post-World War I Racial Militancy

On 28 July 1919 African American war veteran Harry Haywood, only three months removed from service in United States Army, found himself in midst of a maelstrom of violence and destruction on par with what he had experienced on battlefields of France. The previous day, simmering tensions between black and white residents of Chicago reached a boiling point following stoning and subsequent drowning of young Eugene Williams who had dared to challenge color-line at Lake Michigan's 29th Street beach. As he returned to city following his latest run as a waiter on Michigan Central Railroad, Haywood, formerly a soldier in highly decorated 8th Illinois National Guard (370th Infantry Regiment), learned of riot and feared worst. A white coworker validated his anxiety, cautioning him against entering southside of city because, There's a big race riot going on out there, and already this morning, a couple of colored soldiers were killed coming in unsuspectingly. While most likely rumor, warning punctuated Haywood's disillusionment with facade of American democracy stemming from his battles with systemic racism of U.S. Army and deepened his resolve to actively resist brewing assault on Chicago's black community. After briefly reuniting with his family, Haywood immediately went to 8th Illinois Armory and met with fellow veterans of regiment to prepare a military style defense of their neighborhood from Irish rioters. Stocked with a cache of 1903 Springfield rifles and a browning sub-machine gun procured from armory, Haywood and his comrades established positions in an apartment overlooking 51st Street, and stood ready to utilize their military training in anticipation of an impending evening attack. Haywood recalled similar actions taken throughout South's Black Belt by other groups of African American veterans. (1) Although no ambush occurred, Chicago race riot indelibly transformed Haywood's racial and political consciousness. As he wrote in his autobiography, the war and riots of 'Red Summer' of 1919 left me bitter and frustrated. I felt that I could never again adjust to situation of Black inequality. The warlike nature of American race relations in aftermath of World War I prompted many black veterans to question meaning of their service and seek new strategies for achieving racial justice. After a period of intellectual self-discovery, Haywood joined radical African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), a secret paramilitary organization founded by Cyril Briggs, editor of The Crusader, and committed to defense of black people, liberation of Africa, and destruction of global capitalism. Upon its dissolution, he became a member of Communist Party and emerged as one of its most influential black leaders. Racially enlightened and deeply politicized as a result of their experiences, African American veterans like Haywood represented and embodied New Negro of post-World War I era. (2) This essay examines how activism and racial militancy of black veterans fundamentally shaped historical development and ideological diversity of New Negro movement. The New Negro movement, rooted in political consciousness and collective racial identity of black people in communities throughout United States and African Diaspora more broadly, was a product of domestic and global upheavals of World War I and its aftermath. While etymology of term dates to post-Reconstruction era, when a new generation of African Americans sought to distance themselves from slavery and its legacy, vast social, political, and demographic transformations brought about by global conflict made New Negro of war and postwar periods substantively distinct from previous historical epochs. Scholars have examined various factors that gave rise to New Negro, which included black migration, international revolutionary movements, most notably in Russia and Ireland, growth of a radical black press, emergence of a host of new racially militant political organizations, and most significantly a spirit of defiance stemming from disillusioning experience of black support for and military participation in war. …

Black Migration, White Flight: The Effect of Black Migration on Northern Cities and Labor Markets

Black Migration, White Flight: The Effect of Black Migration on Northern Cities and Labor Markets

The Great Black Way: L.A. in the 1940s and the lost African-American Renaissance

This revelatory social history resurrects a largely forgotten era in African American history, and discovers a hugely influential scene, which spawned, among other things, civil rights movement, rhythm and blues and hip-hop. The Great Black Way is a book about an unheralded era in American history, a time when forbidden seemed possible. It is about 1940's African American Los Angeles, a period unknown by those who weren't there, but whose impact is ubiquitous today. It is about a decade of race riots and revelry in streets; of protest and a new way of walking. Those who lived it experienced a cultural flowering and a sense that a race was making unprecedented progress. And when moment was over, many hopes and lives were swept away by it. Central Avenue was Great Black Way, Main Stem. It was heart of Southern Californian black enclave, a settlement as old as city itself. Blacks had been among original settlers in LA, but by 20th century a de facto Jim Crow system confined them to life within a few small areas of city. By 1920s, Central Avenue was black business and entertainment corridor, and in 40s threat of world war, and opening up of California's burgeoning defence industry to black workers, led to a massive wave of black migration and a corresponding cultural ferment in arts, culture and politics. It was here that rhythm and blues was spawned - in ferment of Little Tokyo, emptied of its Japanese residents and packed by mid-decade with black musicians, independent labels and after-hours spots. Chester Himes fathered black detective novel and a noir sensibility. Black comics took off minstrel blackface for first time and addressed audiences directly with socially-tinged humour. And, Smith argues, civil rights movement actually got its start on Central Avenue, where strategy of building mass movements and giving power to ghetto dwellers gained favour in opposition to top-down strategies of groups like NAACP and Urban League. Harlem's Renaissance had been driven by intellectual elite; a group WEB DuBois called The Talented Tenth. But in LA, a new sense of black identity was arising from street level; and DuBois called LA's cultural leaders the Debauched Tenth. Much that we take for granted today, from hip-hop and slang to modern-day street fashion, all flowed from 1940s scene along Great Black Way.

Rescued from their Invisibility: The Afro-Puerto Ricans of Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century San Mateo de Cangrejos, Puerto Rico

The black “root” has been systematically “uprooted” from the main “trunk” of the Puerto Rican nation.Jorge DuanyScholars who study Puerto Rico's past have struggled with the question of how to define the island’s national identity. Is the essence of Puerto Rican identity rooted in Spain, does it have its origins in Africa, in the legacy of the native Tainos, or is it a product of two or all three of these? This polemical question has yet to be resolved and remains a subject of much debate. The island's black past is often overlooked, and what has been written tends to focus on the enslaved labor force and its ties to the nineteenth-century plantation economy. Few works are specifically devoted to the study of the island's seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Afro-Puerto Rican population. Recent scholarship has begun to address this oversight. For example, the efforts of fugitive slaves and free black West Indian migrants making their way to Puerto Rico have been well documented. Yet, little is known about the number or identity of these runaways. How many slaves made their way to freedom in Puerto Rico, who were they, and where did they come from? Perhaps more importantly, what about their new lives on the island? How were they able to create a sense of belonging, both as individuals and as part of a community within the island's existing population and society? What follows strives to answer these questions by taking a closer look first at the number and identity of these fugitives, and second at how new arrivals were assimilated into their new surroundings through marriage and family formation while their integration was facilitated by participation in the local economy. Through their religious and civic activity Afro-Puerto Ricans were able to create a niche for themselves in San Juan and eventually a community of their own in Cangrejos. In doing so, they helped shape the island's national identity.

“WE DIDN'T CROSS THE COLOR LINE, THE COLOR LINE CROSSED US”

We examine the interlinked migrations between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, between the Dominican Republic and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and, finally, migrations from these three countries to the United States. The literature tends to draw stark differences between race and racism in the United States and the nonracial societies of Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. However, althoughBlacknessis a contextual category, through analyzing how “Black” migrants are racialized using these three contexts, we find that there is a simultaneously global and local derogation of “Blackness” that places Black migrants at the bottom of socioeconomic hierarchies. Further, these migrants remain largely outside of conceptions of the nation, and thus Blackness is constructed as a blend of racial phenotype and national origin, whereby native “Blacks” attempt to opt out of Blackness on account of their national identity. This dynamic is particularly true in the Caribbean whereBlanqueamiento, or Whitening, is made possible through a dialectical process in which a person's Whiteness, or at least his or her non-Blackness, is made possible by contrast to an “Other.” Consequently, we argue that immigration becomes a key site for national processes of racialization, the construction of racial identities, and the maintenance of and contestation over racial boundaries.