Africa and the new identity; The Negro in America

I would like to begin my contribution to your series here. By moving into the problem of Negro identity first by trying to see how one might broaden the screen on which we see what's happening. The kind of thing I was just listening to in a conversation outside. About the problem of preparing new texts for use in the schools to begin introducing more information knowledge and awareness about the place of negroes in American society and indeed a program of this kind. I wouldn't be surprised to discover that this is the first time anything like this has been done. It. Is very reminiscent of what was beginning to happen just a decade or so ago with respect

to many of the peoples around the world. Asians Africans and who similarly had largely been invisible men in the American society and certainly in terms of American schools and what was taught in the texts. And this really suggests the DI mentions that I would like to begin to draw as the area in which these changes are taking place and the fact that they're not only taking place for Negroes but the the enormous pressure on all people. To begin changing the ways in which they perceive themselves and others is the characteristic experience of our time the tremendous transformations that have been taking place in the world power systems

over the last decades. You. Have to be viewed as the coming to an end of a of a historic period that it lasted some three centuries which is characterized mainly by the establishment and maintenance of western white dominance in the world. And the whole system of empires and colonies through which the world was organized in this time erected over itself a whole set of assumptions rationales Mystiques in order to. Bolster and maintain and justified the social and economic systems it created and most of all to provide psychological reinforcement. To keep the dominated dominated in the dominant dominant. And this required

the creation of a vast array. Of mythologies relating to the superiority and inferiority patterns of different peoples cultures and races. And it is this whole system that has come crumbling down in the last quarter century. And as the power system collapsed in the great convulsive events of voice revolutions this whole superstructure of assumptions and mythologies the kinds of awareness kinds of attitudes. Obviously had to come falling to the earth in its wake. Things being as they are and the lag and power of a measure being what it is for quite a while the superstructure has a way of almost continuing to hover in the air and looking a

little bit like a slow motion picture of a building that's been dime dynamited and you can still see the facade up there full in it still retaining most of its shape just as it slowly moves to crumple and dust on the ground. And I think this is possibly one way of seeing the period through which we've been passing in recent years. A great deal of the structure of mythology and assumption and superiority inferiority patterns persists persists in the minds of people and in much of their behavior. But the reality that boasted this the structure on which it rested has gone. And this is why the systems of white supremacy. The ideas notions and behavior patterns resulting from this have had to

go and it is why they are going in the United States. Now there are many points of parallel in the story of the place of the Negro in American society and his struggle to change that place. And out of the colonial struggles. National struggles political independence. Among many meaningful differences between these two sets of things however is the cardinal one. That the outcome of the struggle to reassert selfhood in the former colonies was the establishment of a separate political power run up a new flag.

Make your own nation and we've had 50 or 60 such new nations come into being in the last 15 20 years. The problem of the negro in the American society is not to achieve this kind of separation or anything resembling it but integration. To begin to occupy a place in the American plurality of peoples in which the theory is all occupy a common ground. Enjoying common privileges and rights and status. Even as in various ways they separate into their groups which they maintain for whatever reasons they want to maintain them whether religious or nationality groups or sons of St. Andrews

or people with yellow fingernails or whatever they wish. And it's this process of finally bringing the Negro into this picture from which he has been rigidly and sensuously excluded over all this time. That is going on now. Of course it would have been a lot better had the American system itself generated the capacity by its own logic. To a brought about this process. The fact is that this process has been brought about by changes on the will cede to a definitely greater degree I think in the sense of triggering enforcing and pressuring than anything inherent him. What was functioning in the system itself

and even here this is had to be fought. Italy and pushed strained at even to this hour. Now in the American setting the identity of a quite total inferiority. Was imposed on me grows to a shattering extent. Right through from the time of slavery and after the end of slavery if the system was not able to.

Maintain and the creation of the new forms of control and debasement which followed. As you all know. The essential image of the negro as an inferior human being indeed as something subhuman was firmly established in all the literature and folklore of the society. The forms of this have been retailed in detail in much of the rich literature that exists on the negro in American life and in the literature about him.

Rayford Logan has written a book about the Negro in American life and thought which he locates the what he calls the need here. The low point of the position of the Negro in American society is just about the turn of the century. Or in the last quarter of the last century. Which interestingly enough that same kind of consonants which links these things to what was happening in the rest of the world happened also to be the period of time in which one could say the Paramount sea of western white man was really at its peak at its most on challenge not only in terms of political power and empire but in terms of ideology mystique and mythology. It was the period when the all the Darwinian concepts were transferred over into notions about cultures and peoples and the

idea of not merely the white man but the Anglo-Saxon the white man and not merely the Anglo-Saxon white man but the English Anglo-Saxon white man as the apex of human development. Had been pretty largely established to the satisfaction of the English Anglo-Saxon white man and. Handle to a very considerable extent accepted. A few years ago in England I had the impulse to go and stand on zero longitude Greenwich Mean and to which was established in 1884 at an international conference which laid out the details of how time and distance were going to be reckoned with and I wondered whether in the minds of those who sat at that conference the

question even the rubes that there might be some query as to what everything was far from. It. And why the beginning and apex of it all was written and why in all the drawing of the maps the zero longitude was in the center. The rest of the world was built around the old Mercator projection. This is the way the world was see. The degree of acceptance of this concept really characterized the the power of this kind of system now in much the same way the peoples brought under this system of governance in all its full riot shape. Were a largely brought

to accept the notion. Created by this system of power. And in that part of it the war on the conceptions of the races of man over vast power of learning everything that was taught in school all the texts all the literature all of the things children breathed didn't practically with their mother's milk. All served to reinforce and create. This sense of what one's relationship was to others. There's a great deal one could specify on this and I know the risk of making a commercial plug plug do

urge you to take a look at this at the attempt I made to review some of these matters in this book a new world of Negro Americans because that's another whole thing in itself. The content creation of these images but the idea that you have a hierarchy of values in relation to the races of people. Certainly in this country. And certainly in all the time from the last quarter of the last century on up until awfully recently people only now are scrounging around to try to create new textbooks for the children to learn from. Became one of the most firmly embedded Of all the experiences that all people had in discovering about their culture. And I suppose that most of you even in this room. Have been exposed to this kind of condition

classically in the American school textbooks. The races of man were depicted as those famous five races usually were given in the form of pitches. You'll find these five pictures in all the old geography texts all the Cyclopedia and generally speaking. The other four races would be shown. Along a hierarchy of present ability but invariably the white man. Is presented either in the middle in a great big simple picture. Or on a separate page or by himself. And generally in fact in the textbooks of the turn of the century as and right through to the nineteen ten to twenty period there was a certain convention about these pictures.

And one of the most common conventions of the presentation of the white man was of a sort of an Emersonian figure was kind of a Harvard professor looking guy. Who usually was sitting at a desk in a book filled room with a globe on his desk in a great big tome open before him and usually a child at his knee to whom he was obviously imparting basic wisdom of the human story. Whereas at the other end of the scale a black man would usually be presented as some kind of primeval Savage just about emerging from the woods or as a bacon faced naked man looking with empty eyes at the camera. And you know when I was engaged in tracking some of these things down

my son who is by that time a college student said well you remember how it was in the world encyclopedia and other world encyclopedia was a the newest thing I could find when my children were small that I bought for their early education in the middle in late 1940s I said No I don't remember how it was that it was like it went right up stairs came down to the bottom. Mind you he was remembering something that he first saw 13 or 14 years before. And sure enough in the world encyclopedia 1947 edition which still must be a standard either. Many a family shelter. I'm sorry. Compton the wife of my compass I buy him a lever. Here are the five races of man. Here is your vacant faced black

man. One point here is usually the brown man is presented a little more respectfully. Usually the late Chief did with Chris. The yellow man is presented usually in the robes of either a Chinese Mandarin or a merchant. And in this particular collection the Compton Encyclopedia of the white race was represented by a portrait of Benjamin Franklin. And identified in the group. I mean here were these other faces and therefore the white race. Benjamin Franklin. Well. It's easy enough you can fill in all the spaces in terms of what kind

of insensible intake there is. Children year after. Or the story the Doctor Doolittle stories of the Black Prince who wanted to be white one could begin to multiply this literature many times. Now the important thing however is not to dwell on the for OP purposes not to dwell on the fairly obvious and easy effect of all this on the white chip in reinforcing this sense of the very pleasant superiority of the White House. How about Negro children. How about the experience of negroes exposed to the same textbooks and where the pictures did not convey a sufficient message. The text usually did very

explicitly stating in varying degrees the rules of patterns of superiority of the very origin. And from this entire world of authority and running the negro child exposed to it took in the sense of this says. And when a few years ago I went around beginning to try to find out from individuals. What the process was of their discovery of themselves. This picture of these geography textbook illustration began to come off the tops of the minds of men 40

50 60 70 years old and remembering vividly that picture down there on the lower right hand corner of my geography textbook said a man of seventy two as the beginning of his association of himself with the rest of society. And this figure was almost invariably an African. Black man who's usually presented in some more or less obvious way whether as an actual African villages or a naked black man in some kind of a jungle setting which identified him as half. How this mesh of the black man. And after. With everything that with which

they would burden you in the overpowering leave voluminous in a jar of tainted literature of the white world that dominated all. Of the main core content one Negro began to acquire as the sense of what he came out of what he was. And when all this was superimposed all the facts of life in the society which for again practically from his first breath placed him in some kind of separated imposed and force inferiority in relation to all the rest of the society. Created a profound sense within

that individual. That he was indeed some kind of an inferior being. And the fact that over the generations so many Negro coming up out of all corners of this mess successfully resisted the power of that he have posed it is one part of the great epic of this story that I think goes profoundly on realized and unappreciated. It's as though in your whole education you in the audience who are white. Had somehow found the inner means and the strength. To resist and reject what everything in your environment told you about yourself.

And the fact that the history of heroes self-assertion struggle for a self-respecting position life goes back goes back decades and decades father than any nationalist movement in any colony of any of the empires and has a tradition greater and longer and filled with. With more epic heroism. Both of this subtle kind are no less subtle than any nationalist tradition anywhere in the world can vote is something that's also largely unappreciated. And it certainly is a surprise that great masses of others meanwhile did accept this path. So that you begin to get this elaborate structure based upon a

characteristic self rejection self hatred which is common in some measure or degree in the experience of all despised groups or dominated groups. Psychological phenomenon called identification with the aggressor. The attempt to ape and be like those who dominate you has been part of almost everybody's story in one form or another. Even the Chinese probably the proudest people on earth that many were in very considerable measure went through this experience of self debasement in the face of Western superior power during much of the 19th and first quarter of the 20th century

Jews who've been despised for longer than any group of people on earth have a very irrigated history of this kind of acceptance of the world's estimate up and the building of tangled lives trying somehow to compete with that picture to overcome it or to accommodate to it. The case of the negro in the American society he built up. A whole series of defenses which took the form in large measure of different kinds of measures and degrees of acceptance of the situation postponed both as a practical matter and day to day behavior and terms of internal conception. And from this came the institution of color caste among the

gross. Evaluation of white or light above dark blue in the language of our Bible of Milton and Shakespeare and translated as Jewishly by people from merely literary or physical qualities to the nature of human beings. There are many other phenomena of this kind and I can only suggest you again a look at the literature. Look at the effort that I made to spell some of this out. I think you'll find of some profit in the case. He flew the American society.

All of this attached to Dr Sun block. Attached indeed to his very neat greatness the very fact of his physical be. As you know in the American Society great masses of Negroes like everybody else has ever come to this country became a blend of many kinds and a great majority of Negroes in this century have probably more ancestors that come from different parts of Europe. All the parts of Europe the white men came to this country from then they have ancestors strains of happy. And in pursuit of this same source of greatest satisfaction. Naturally what's great a stall is placed on a white ancestor so the American Indian ancestry was never placed on black. And the man who was pure a black African looking man

who couldn't make this solacing claim to some other kind of superior dances. He came by the same token the lowest of the orders among Negroes themselves in terms of this system of color caste which in turn was a reflection of what was imposed upon by the outside society. Hence all we elaborate folk but I'm sure it's been impossible for you to not become aware of it via any contact at any point. The language in the lore and the experiences relating to likeness likeness. And as far as Africa was concerned over a long period of time the affective blocking out of the African.

The African connection was the connection that most fully reinforce all of these hateful images of self the African connection was the source of the primitiveness the savagery the backwardness all the things associated in these conceptions with the black man. So again I'm surprised that a thing as hateful as I was this should simply be rejected rejected in the most literal sense. And in the most subtle senses of the unconscious. So that up today before yesterday characteristically. Vast number by far one has every right to assume

a majority of vast majority of people would have had some kind of a negative or rejecting attitude toward anything relating to Africa. Now also through this history by the universal tokens of duality there is another strand. That has intimately involved AFP with American Negroes. This has been one of at least two main come one a strand largely fashioned by white interests going right back to the beginnings of this republic where people partly out of conscience and partly

out of calculated interest began to toy with the idea of getting the Negroes out of the American continent and shipping them back to Africa. The American Colonization Society was formed for this purpose in 1870. Indeed Thomas Jefferson as early as 777 proposed repatriation as a way of making up for the slavery. And that followed a long and complicated little history in which American Colonization Society tried to recruit among free negroes who were a growing number of sun negroes who had won their freedom from slavery in various ways by Manumission but by themselves to go back to Africa and they actually sent those boatloads in 1821 of people who founded

the state of Liberia. But generally speaking among Negroes and among the free educated negroes of the north and of the South this effort to solve the problem by shipping them off to the dark continent of Africa which resisted might and main. First Howard Bell Texas Southern University is where the convention movement of the early decades of the 900 century in which the issue was constantly this struggle against the attempts on the part of the self-interest of whites either to solve a conscience or to serve their interest by getting these dangerous free Negroes out of the way ship them all off to Africa. The other strand was a strand that was generated among Negroes themselves.

And this came out periodically. Of the impulses of men driven to despair the total loss of hope that life for American society would ever give them an opportunity to live in some kind of decent manhood or human and that therefore their only our only option was to get out. Go back at it and you can find back to Africa movement dotting the history of the negro dark side from very nearly the beginning. Paul Coffey a free negro achieve some status and position in Boston as a merchant trader Mariner outfitted a ship and took the

first boatload back in 1850 what is now Sierra Leone and all through the century. You have a scattered little move of this kind of people who out of despair. Just wanted out. And some very remarkable figures appear in the history of the school. Indeed some of the most remarkable figures in a long gallery of remarkable magnitude emerged among Negroes of the Americas and it was a very characteristic pattern. These were very often men who fought the dawn iest kind of battles in the pre civil war period. A man named Martin Delaney in New York and Harvard graduate physician author who

engage in some of the most eloquent of the opposition to the colonization schemes of the whites finally reached his moment of despair in the 1850s became a migration has looked for all kinds of schemes if not to Africa to the Caribbean and any place to get out and find their own ground to stand on where they could feel like decent men and finally came the war. Martin Delaney went in as an officer in the Union Army. Later in the century a man like Bishop Henry Turner would build a chapel in the Union army civil war also became a migrations. And of course all of this reached its most culminating I should add the turner's migration is period followed that a very needy year would be with the revoke ation of the civil rights laws in

1883 and the loss of hope that anything whatever emerged to give the Negro a fair shake is what turn men like this to the idea of getting out. Then along came Marcus Garvey in the wake of the First World War when all the propaganda of making the world safe for democracy self-determination of man led up to the discovery by millions that President Wilson and his con friends need to come along to preside over the liquidation of the system of white supremacy in the world at that time and in the despair and anguish of those years. The red summer of 1999 has James Weldon Johnson Claude McKay called 70 lynchings most of the men in uniform out of this came Garvey with his call to come back to Africa and to come

back to black Garvey's called the Africa Corps back to black and call of ultimate despair. And at that time hundreds of thousands if not millions followed. Not as you know those. Somebody must haves John Hope was speaking about this yesterday came crashing down. Follow the history of suing decades. When as part of this final beginning of the turning of the big wheel of his dream this whole system of Empire crashing down bringing these assumptions and mythologies and ideas and patterns of behavior down and bringing up onto the stage of history in a new form a

new shape but with a new state among other continents after presenting for the first time literally for the first time. The possibility of a prideful association that a negro might have with the continent of his aunt to see. I might add parent that ik we in here that there was sort of another sub strand through all these years a missionary strand and over the years a thin trickle of support given by Negro churches to Negro missionaries in Africa based on the notion that somehow the whole history of slavery would find its justification of the man who emerged from slavery could come back and bring the civilizing and grace giving

God to the heathen. This too was essentially a source of the negative feelings about Africa rather than a positive one. But here comes Africa in a new guise taking its place seats of the nations and men walking in the great public view walking up the red carpets occupying the seats of the mighty. The incrimination the second to erase their errors Jomo Kenyatta tomboy not only creating the beginning of a basis for some new more tolerable relationship to the continent of origin but at the same time beginning to create something

new about this concept of the black man. And one of the things that's been happening under the impact of these events has been again in a culminating way because things have been working in this direction for a long time. The beginning of a shaving down this system of color attitudes of color caste among Negroes the beginning of the acquisition of a new sense of self-respect that gets away from these basing notions of differences based on shade of skin. And this is occurring now for the first time not a modern extremist despairing groups of people who still clustered around carry overs of the Garvey movement black nationalism and so on and still waving the banner of. Go back to Africa.

But among much wider circles of negroes caught up in the new currents of change and those coincide by no means coincidental with the gradual push of the levels of struggle of the negro for his position and status in the society. To the styles and modes of self-assertion nonviolent demonstration taking it out of the earliest spheres in which it moved and carrying it into the whole wide sphere of customary behavior and attitude in the American society. And I'm sure that you've all read repeatedly in whatever you've seen of these events of these years some kind of an allusion to the encouraging and reinforcing sense that Negroes have gained from this change in the status of people elsewhere and

especially in Africa. The nine kids of Little Rock in 57 received bags full of mail. People in countries that never even heard of before as a kind of a vivid demonstration of what new things are happening and some part of the remarkable sustenance unnerve that those youngsters showed came from this kind of sense this new sense of identification. Now out of all of this Negroes have the formidable task formidable task. Of somehow rearranging all these elements in their minds and in this cycle. The

whites of the world and of the American side. Have the quite formidable task of overcoming all the mass the habits. And embedded notions of mastery that come out of this past automatic past. He grow has the problem of overcoming the habits of subjection and this can be even rougher psychologically rougher. And whereas people in other societies can at least carry on their process of change within the boundaries of the new political power systems and heaven knows these new political power systems are not that cannot probably be for a long time to come. And anything resembling power systems that are going to establish self respecting freedom are individual human

beings at any rate they move their problems onto a new plane. And when the queen and the dupe now come to the black the exploit colony Queen dances with the black prime minister and do dances with the prime minister's wife and all the surfaces of life have now been by force measure moved over into something of a pattern of behavior that is more tolerable and enables these changes to take place more or less in their own way in the American society where the need is to in the very process of this to arrive in a whole new set of relationships a whole new set of mutual visibilities a whole new set of ideas about what I am to you and what you are to be situated. And where this takes place not a

long sort of smooth open roads but all along talk to cluttered battlefield where the resistance to this kind of change is still tough. And not only the open naked physical resistance of the white race is segregationist in the south but the deeply embedded infinitely more subtle and less tangible resistances within the society to the admission and accept us not of everybody marrying everybody else's daughters but simply of that arriving at the point of that reasonable degree of live and let live on a common basis of some decent minimum self-respect in which everybody has to live in order to live together in a crowded society. That kind of minimum need

not Christian love of brotherhood all of that would be very nice but some kind of situation in which not only physically but psychologically we don't tear each other and land. All of this still having to be achieved against blank walls against against intractable economic and social factors against Well the conditions created now in the great urban sprawl of American life which is in the heaviest problems of the society against the whole problem of mass poverty in the new urban core cities which is such an overwhelming degree a problem of Negroes because they were at the bottom of the society. The fact the changes come and that at the upper levels all kinds of barriers are down and gates opening on all kinds of people

being able to move through not merely into those magazine ads but into all kinds of new channels and places in life. And yet at the same time a tremendous mass behind which is still unable out of a whole combination of the circumstances to march anything like the same rate across those four barriers into some new kind of more self-respecting basis for their lives and the longer and more difficult this process becomes and it's going to stretch out for quite some time. The more and more difficult it is for people to carry this on in some kind of a. Sort of an orderly attractive manner. You know the spectacle. I said I wasn't here but from a long distance away

the spectacle of the negro demonstration movement of 1963. Was again one of those sort of staggering bits of testimony special resource people are able to draw no nationalist movement no movement of people for a new status and self-respect and I know of and I've been mixed up in a lot of them for 30 years. Ever had quite the quality of this. And by what kind of miracle does anybody think that this can be kept up in minutely by people in the face of continuing not merely the pressures of the truly intractable elements in the society like the hard facts of what's happening to our cities but in the face of our 23 senators and what they represent in the politics and society of the country. How can one not expect the breaking points to begin appearing in

almost every and the passage of the cued to various forms of extremism. And just in Kuwait violence. Is sort of almost inescapable in this circumstance. And what is remarkable is not that any of it is occurring but that still so little of it has occurred. And that what other forms the option of despair can take what the relationship of this kind of pattern of new breaking points and pressures and needs and desires and actions. What relationship that will have to the whole African question is still a wide open.

In the first years of the African emergence the middle 50s the early 60s this could take place behind a sort of filmy gauze like screen which everything looked pretty damn good. Black men getting up off and knees on to their feet and walking like the two legged animals they were all up to. As we move into the period where their complexities begin to overtake them the ways in which neither of us can perceive their relationship to this thing gets more complex because then they bring they come into all the almost inextricably complicated matters of the negro as America the negro as a man committed to a free society open society. And the nature of these conflicts is something that remains to unfold

and where the spectrum now goes from the GRO member of the staff of the Gonna embassy you went out pushed flag up like Pollie get pulled down by demonstrating mass all the way over to the more obscure feelings in the breasts of young people in this society who express their despair their patients by attempting to embrace something outside or run to something outside whether it's to Castro or all the way to West Africa is part of the story that has yet to unfold. This is a story filled with loose ends. Every loose and is a bloody quivering nerve. This is not an easy simple thing is not easy even to try to draw an accurate picture of it. It's a mass of open nervous of

people coming up out of 20 30 generations of systematic debasement by others and worse self debased and having to find their way. To some kind of a new more self accepting view of themselves even as they achieve a better position of acceptance of status in the society you live. You know we are all engaged in extremely difficult subtle painful process of discovering who and what we are and it's bad enough for any single human being to arrive at the strands of his identity and to find him self. It's hard enough in the bosom of your little family. It's hard enough in your particular group or community. This is taking place on a massive scale of a whole people

forced through convulsive events to go through the experience of this change and whatever it is you come into contact with or will observe whatever degree of awareness or consciousness or particular formulation of this problem that you will encounter. I hope it will be of some use to you to see it as part of this lodge lives. Sore and difficult painless brought painful process which is probably almost without real parallel anyway because no body no group of people in our history. And I don't mean only our American history has generally been all we have. In the struggle to come up I've had to come up quite so far from

quite so far down. For a whole series of obvious and obscure reasons. The black man has been and remains at the bottom of everybody's totem pole. And the black man's task of being to make his way up into some kind of existence where he can breathe more freely and live more decently lives man is a tougher fight than any money. And if a takes on difficult and dangerous complications. They will have to deal with him. We will have to deal with them as they come on whether in the life of the individual or in the life of the group. This is the process through which we are and don't ever forget the fact that the revision of the negro's view of himself and the reshaping of his sense of his

identity whether as an individual or as a member of some particular group is inseparable from the process going on by which everybody else equally must be revising. Not only his view of that Niko over here in that structure also his view of himself.