Ira Berlin one of America's leading historian offers a sweeping new account of the African American experience over four centuries title: The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations
Commentary, dopper0189 Black Kos, Managing Editor
Four great migrations defined the history of black people in America: the violent removal of Africans to the east coast of North America known as the Middle Passage; the relocation of one million slaves to the interior of the antebellum South; the movement of more than six million blacks to the industrial cities of the north and west a century later; and since the late 1960s, the arrival of black immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean, South America, and Europe. These epic migrations have made and remade African American life.
Ira Berlin's publisher writes:
Ira Berlin's magisterial new account of these passages evokes both the terrible price and the moving triumphs of a people forcibly and then willingly migrating to America. In effect, Berlin rewrites the master narrative of African America, challenging the traditional presentation of a linear path of progress. He finds instead a dynamic of change in which eras of deep rootedness alternate with eras of massive movement, tradition giving way to innovation. The culture of black America is constantly evolving, affected by (and affecting) places as far away from one another as Biloxi, Chicago, Kingston, and Lagos. Certain to garner widespread media attention, The Making of African America is a bold new account of a long and crucial chapter of American history.
Berlin's account starts in the 1950's where American culture reached the peak of trying to be "uniformed". Not since the 1830s, had America's foreign-born composed such a small percentage of the nation. Through the 1950's the proportion continued to fall, from nearly 7 percent in 1950 to just over 5 percent in 1960, even as the nation's population grew, from about 150 million to 180 million.
While traditionally American history has dealt with arrival of the Irish, and later Eastern Europeans as new immigrants who added to the American fabric. Only recently have African-Americans received the same treatment. While the majority of African-Americans came here through forced immigration, later waves much like the Irish, Jews, and Poles came to Northern Cities to escape oppression at home (the Jim Crow South).
Book reviewer David Wallace-Wells writes:
Of course, midcentury America was home to one sizable minority—transient, ostracized, semi-assimilated and semi-forsaken—and, at the time, as Ira Berlin reminds us in his new book, American blacks were just completing a great migration of their own. Six million blacks fled the oppressive rural south for the industrial cities of the north between 1900 and 1970, in a great rush that reached its peak velocity in the years immediately after the World War II. The black flight of the Great Migration is often described as an interwar phenomenon, but in 1940 only one-quarter of black Americans lived outside the South. By 1970, more than half did. Three million left between 1940 and 1960, including 1.5 million in the 1940s alone.
The great beneficiaries were the cities of the North. Only six thousand blacks lived in Detroit in 1910; by 1930, there were 120,000, and by 1950 over 300,000. The black population of Chicago was 40,000 in 1910, 250,000 in 1930, and 500,000 by 1960. By that year, three-quarters of black Americans lived in cities, and fully two-thirds of them lived in just seven urban areas. "No group of Americans was more identified with urban life," Berlin notes.
This pioneer generation, in which families and communities transplanted themselves wholesale from the farmland of their forebears to the cityscapes of their children, was hardly unique, despite its exceptional stature in our memory. Black Americans have always been on the move, Berlin observes, their history largely a tale of turbulence and upheaval. To prove it, Berlin sets out to survey and celebrate the four largest migrations—the "Middle Passage," which introduced blacks to the New World and its peculiar variety of perpetual slavery; the forced antebellum exodus from the tobacco- and rice-producing coast to the cotton and sugar plantations of the Southern interior; the "Great Migration" north in the beginning and middle of the twentieth century; and the recent influx from Africa and the Caribbean following the loosening of immigration law in 1965.
The Making of African America is macrobiotic history—high-minded, unsynthetic, and unrefined—and a noble effort to place this migratory experience alongside the stories of white immigrants in our broad narrative of national assimilation. With it, Berlin would like to re-fashion for a new generation the leftover, linear history captured by the title of John Hope Franklin’s supervisory survey From Slavery to Freedom, which presented four complex centuries of black American life as though it were a single odyssey in pursuit of dignity and liberty. That master narrative, which Berlin carefully praises, "integrates [black] history into an American story of seemingly inevitable progress," and implies a "teleological trajectory," and inspired Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of history as an "arc of justice." But it is also, he says, inadequate. In its place, Berlin offers a more haphazard history, fashioned from stories of upheaval and turmoil rather than captivity and constraint, that reflects the centrality of movement in black American life.
From the mid-century movements Ira Berlin flow easily into the horrors of the middle passage. The term "Middle Passage" refers to that middle leg of the transatlantic trade triangle in which millions of Africans were imprisoned, enslaved, and removed from their homelands. Traders from the Americas and Caribbean received the enslaved Africans. European powers such as Portugal, England, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and Brandenburg, as well as traders from Brazil and North America, all took part in this trade. The enslaved Africans came mostly from eight regions: Senegambia, Upper Guinea, Windward Coast, Gold Coast, Bight of Benin, Bight of Biafra, West Central Africa and Southeastern Africa.
Bight Of Benin People Senegambians
An estimated 15% of the Africans died at sea, with mortality rates considerably higher in Africa itself in the process of capturing and transporting indigenous peoples to the ships. The total number of African deaths directly attributable to the Middle Passage voyage is estimated at up to two million; a broader look at African deaths directly attributable to the institution of slavery from 1500 to 1900 suggests up to four million African deaths.
The duration of the transatlantic voyage varied widely, from one to six months depending on weather conditions. The journey became more efficient over the centuries; while an average transatlantic journey of the early 16th century lasted several months, by the 19th century the crossing often required fewer than six weeks.
African kings, warlords and private kidnappers sold captives to Europeans who held several coastal forts. The captives were usually force-marched to these ports along the western coast of Africa, where they were held for sale to the European or American slave traders in the barracoons. Typical slave ships contained several hundred slaves with about thirty crew members. The male captives were normally chained together in pairs to save space; right leg to the next man's left leg — while the women and children may have had somewhat more room. The captives were fed beans, corn, yams, rice, and palm oil. Slaves were fed one meal a day with water, but if food was scarce, slaveholders would get priority over the slaves. Sometimes captives were allowed to move around during the day, but many ships kept the shackles on throughout the arduous journey.
Most contemporary historians estimate that between 9.4 and 12 million Africans arrived in the New World from the slave trade. Disease and starvation due to the length of the passage were the main contributors to the death toll. Dysentery and scurvy caused the majority of deaths at sea. Additionally, outbreaks of smallpox, syphilis, measles, and other diseases spread rapidly in the close-quarter compartments. The number of dead increased with the length of the voyage, since the incidence of dysentery and of scurvy increased with longer stints at sea as the quality and amount of food and water diminished with every passing day. In addition to physical sickness, many slaves became too depressed to eat or function efficiently because of the loss of freedom, family, security, and their own humanity.
David Wallace-Wells notes that:
Once aboard ship, of course, conditions did not much improve; one in seven died along the way, including many who, as a strategy of suicide, dove into the ocean to surrender to the sharks. "When the crew—determined to protect its valued cargo—blocked the way with nets and other barriers, slaves starved themselves," Berlin notes, drawing liberally from existing literature. "The crew force-fed some, employing the speculum oris, a diabolical device design to hold the slave’s mouth open while some gruel was poured down his or her throat." About one in ten slave ships encountered some kind of unrest, but captives invariably attempted mutinies only in the first days of the voyage. As those above deck soon learned, when the coast of Africa disappeared from view, those below lost hope.
To me what was an innovative way at looking at Black culture was the term Ira Berlin coined for the Slave trade inside America itself. Berlin calls it the "second middle passage". The second middle passage has become en vogue as the post appropriate way to describe the American slave trade.
Most importantly, the economy moved, and the slaves followed; tobacco was no longer king on the coast, and the new cereal crops could not compete with profits of cotton and sugar in the "black belt" of the Deep South. (The term referred originally to the dark, fertile soil of the region, but became quickly a reference to its racial composition.) In his earlier studies of slave culture, for which he is justly acclaimed, Berlin has described the great migration of this era, as a "Second Middle Passage," nearly as brutal as the first, and the traumatic origin of the haunting memory so many slaves carried with them through emancipation, of being callously separated from children, siblings, parents, and spouses, and dispatched, alone, into unknown territory.
"This internal slave trade became the largest enterprise in the South outside of the plantation itself," Berlin writes, and "[i]ts seasonality—when best to move slaves and when to retain them—became part of the rhythm of Southern life, much like planting and harvest." Without the young and able-bodied, the plantations of the coastal South became overwhelmingly female and remarkably domestic. "For some seaboard slaveowners, slave children were their most profitable ‘crop.’ " Between the elections of Thomas Jefferson in 1800 and Abraham Lincoln in 1860, Berlin writes, more than one million blacks were forced from their homes and driven southwest—first to inland Georgia, then later to Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas.
The trade was indeed swift. In the second decade of the nineteenth century, slave traders and owners shipped 120,000 men and women into the black belt. In the 1830s, the figure was 300,000. Between 1860 and the outbreak of Civil War—hardly fifteen months—a quarter of a million slaves were moved off the seaboard and into the Deep South, by then the home of a majority of American blacks. Jefferson’s Virginia had held nearly half of the country’s slaves; Robert E. Lee’s Virginia contained only 12 percent.
That "passage to the interior" helped to forge a lasting if ambivalent attachment to the Deep South—as both a black homeland and the site of a full century of oppression—in a way that the Great Migration was unable to completely undo—but which, Berlin suggests, a new migration might just yet.
Lastly Ira Berlin has been one of the foremost historians to look at the effect of Black immigration on the larger Black population from a historical perspective. Ira Berlin discuss the effects on both culture, as well as economic, as a Black population many of whom has connections to a diaspora of their own, begin to weave themselves into the Africa American culture.
In 1960, the proportion of foreign-born black Americans was "somewhere far to the right of the decimal point," Berlin writes. By 2000, it was one in twenty, and one in ten were either immigrants or the children of immigrants. In some cities, the proportion was twice that. In New York, it was three times as high, and more than half of the city’s black residents were either immigrants or their children. Forty thousand men and women arrived from Africa annually in the 1990s, during which time the number of Africans living here grew from 400,000 to 700,000. Over the same period, we welcomed 900,000 black immigrants from the Caribbean.
Ira Berlin's book give a truly sweeping over view, from a deep historical perspective on what it means to be African American today, in our collective pasts, as well as hints of what we may become in the future.
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Todays News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Long suspected now confirmed! The Grio: Declassified US document reveals decades of disrespect to Haiti
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Today, the international community gathered at the United Nations to decide how much each country will donate to the Haiti tin cup. Over the years, what to do about Haiti has seemed to be the preoccupation of many world leaders. The United States, as the most influential power in Haiti, has had its share of ups and downs when it comes to the island nation. Recently, a U.S. document entitled "National Security Study Memorandum 70 - Haiti" began circulating among some in Haiti.
The classified document was written on January 8, 1970 and declassified on April 16, 2002. It is a chillingly candid - some would say arrogant - document from U.S officials who see little use for Haiti. So today, as the "Haiti problem" is once again at the forefront of world discussions, it is worth looking at this document which is akin to the Haitian version of the Pentagon Papers.
HAITI CONDITIONS
The report states:
"The trouble with Haiti is that it cannot reasonably be considered a member of the hemispheric community, and yet there it is, right in the middle of the Caribbean. The trouble with Haiti is that its leadership has been a succession of scoundrels, each of whom has driven the country further into darkness and desolation. The trouble with Haiti is that it is barely a country, yet its resident and expatriate would-be elites demand that it be treated like one. The trouble with Haiti is that it won't respond to anybody's therapy. Even if Haiti's trouble should be compounded by violence and an uncertain succession after Duvalier passes from the scene, its hemispheric neighbors would be little tempted to press for intervention. And no matter who succeeds Duvalier, Haiti's troubles are not likely to be relieved."
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South Africa's president says the laws have failed. Economist: South Africa: Are Blacks getting richer?
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IT IS now widely agreed that "black economic empowerment" (BEE) and affirmative-action laws brought in after apartheid as the star policies of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) have failed. Even President Jacob Zuma seems to agree. Instead of redistributing wealth and positions to the black majority, they have resulted mainly in "a few individuals benefiting a lot," he says, while leaving the leadership of most big companies in white hands. The black masses, the intended beneficiaries, have hardly gained.
Largely as a result of the emergence of this new BEE elite, post-apartheid South Africa is still one of the most unequal countries in the world. Although poverty has been alleviated by providing welfare benefits to more than one in four of South Africa’s 49m inhabitants, the gulf between rich and poor has widened. The richest 4% of South Africans—a quarter of whom are black—now earn more than $80,000 a year, 100 times what most of their compatriots live on.
Under apartheid, blacks were given an inferior education and on the whole restricted to much worse jobs. The Employment Equity Act in 1998 tried to make the workforce "more broadly representative of our people" across the board. But more than a decade later, whites still hold three-quarters of senior jobs in private business whereas blacks have 12%, the exact reverse of their share in the working population.
Among the 295 companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE), blacks account for just 4% of chief executive officers, 2% of chief financial officers and 15% of other senior posts. In non-executive ones, they do a bit better, accounting for just over a quarter of board chairmen and 36% of directors, but still nowhere near their share of the workforce. Even so, many whites grumble sotto voce that incompetent blacks are being promoted beyond their abilities.
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Let's hope peace reigns! New York Times: Zuma Seeks to Calm South Africa After Killing
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South Africa’s president, Jacob Zuma, called for calm on Sunday, warning that "agent provocateurs" might try to incite racial hatred after the brutal killing of the white supremacist Eugene TerreBlanche.
The killing comes at a time when the nation’s racial divisions seem particularly acute, the cleft deepened by the singing of a song.
Julius Malema, the leader of the governing party’s youth league, has recently included a singalong at his public appearances. The song, "Ayesab’ Amagwala," dates back to the struggle against apartheid. Its lyrics include the lines "Shoot the Boer" — the Dutch word for farmer — "shoot, shoot, shoot them with a gun."
These renditions have led to hot crosscurrents of opinion here, with some saying that the song has historical importance and that the "shooting" part is metaphorical, while others claim the words are a renewed solicitation to kill.
Last week two judges, in separate hearings, declared the song unlawful and banned its performance, a decision that had many legal experts debating the boundaries between free speech and hate speech.
According to the police, Saturday’s killing of Mr. TerreBlanche, the 69-year-old leader of a right-wing party that has largely slipped from significance, was carried out by two farm workers angry with him in a dispute over their pay.
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Senegal's President Abdoulaye Wade says his country is taking back control of all military bases held by the former colonial power France. BBC: Senegal 'takes back French bases'
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He made the announcement in a televised address as Senegal marked 50 years of independence.France and Senegal had reached agreement in February on the future of the bases.
Earlier, Senegal had inaugurated its controversial Monument of African Renaissance.
In his address, Mr Wade solemnly declared that Senegal was formally assuming sovereignty over military bases that since decolonisation in 1960 have continued to house French army and air force personnel.
The announcement appeared designed to boost national pride in a country that sees itself as shaking off the last vestiges of colonialism.
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Black America Web: Analysis: Is $1 Billion for HBCUs Enough?
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President Barack Obama says he’s committed to the survival of America’s historically black colleges, and his decision this week to allocate $1 billion for beleaguered black institutions should quiet some critics who argue that Obama isn’t doing enough for black Americans.
On Tuesday, Obama signed the historic Health Care and Education Affordability Reconciliation Act of 2010, a $68 billion education initiative that also includes $1 billion over 10 years for historically black colleges and universities.
"While many of today’s colleges and universities are facing a host of challenges — shrinking endowments, decreasing state appropriations, deteriorating facilities and increasing costs - many of America’s historically black colleges and universities and predominantly black institutions are feeling the pain more acutely," Obama said last month when he extended the White House Initiative for Historically Black Colleges. "They do more with less and enroll higher proportions of low- and middle-income students."
The $1 billion couldn’t have come at a better time.
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EbonyJet: Being Blacktino: The Culture Clash
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Being an Afro-Latino in the United States is tricky. Oftentimes it means unacceptance on the part of the African-American community, and condescension among other Hispanics. Afro-Latinos share few black cultural norms here, yet they don’t look like what most think Hispanics should.
Ricardo Millet says he is as Latino as any Latino, but with three grandparents from Jamaica and another from Antigua, many Latinos, he says, have trouble with that.
His forefathers moved to Panama for work in the early 1900s, when the French first attempted to build a canal. But growing up in the late 1940s and 1950s, the boy with black skin felt the insidious effects of racism in Central America that most associate with the Jim Crow South.
From separate bathrooms to separate post office windows, his small town of Gaboa’s segregation patterns were enforced by the military. "In general, the color gradation concept in Latin America is strong," Millet explains. "The darker the skin color your have, the less you are appreciated, and there are assumptions made about your intelligence."
Those assumptions would have been wrong in Millet’s case, because he earned a scholarship to attend Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. There, black classmates viewed him as just another international student.
Of this, Millet laughs. "My history was in many ways more afrocentric than theirs," he says, but recalls his experience at Brandeis as liberating. "I was finally in a society that provided a legal basis for pursuing equality of rights," Millet says, and describes the campus as encouraging when it came to questioning equality.
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The fact that many rural conservative counties have low census return rates shouldn't diminish that many urban areas still have low return rates. The Nation: Urban Count in Census Lagging Again, So Far.
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If you live in a big city, particularly in a neighborhood full of people of color, you've likely been bombarded with Census advertising in recent weeks. Here’s why: Washington has spent a record $14 billion over the past decade in an effort to finally accurately count urban areas. So far, the results are mixed.
As of today, a familiar pattern had emerged. Small, white-dominated counties in the Plains and the Midwest were leading the way in share of households that had mailed in their Census questionnaires. Green township, Ohio, leads the nation with a 72 percent response rate. Sioux Falls city, S.D., is at 66 percent. Meanwhile, just a third of Brooklynites have replied; 26 percent in my neighborhood (really, y’all?). Cook County, which overlaps with Chicago, and Los Angeles County are both doing better at roughly 50 percent. The Census Bureau has a fun interactive map here, where you can check out response rates and drill all the way down to the neighborhood-level.
Next month Census workers will start going door-to-door to follow up. That’s when we’ll really find out how much progress the bureau has made in fixing the chronic urban undercount. A Pew Hispanic Center survey suggests that the massive public awareness push from groups like the National Association of Latino Elected Officials and Leadership Conference on Civil Rights has at least shaped public opinion on participation. A remarkable 91 percent of foreign-born Latinos Pew surveyed last month said they planned to participate in the Census.
The challenge is multi-layered. There’s the obvious fact that many people in Black and immigrant neighborhoods have rightfully distrustful relationships with officialdom. Certainly, with deportations at record highs, any household with undocumented family members isn’t going to be eager to fill out a questionnaire for the federal government. But there’s also hard logistics: Dense urban areas are dynamic places, in which both the housing stock and residents are constantly in motion. A housing-based population count is challenging. The recession doesn’t help, as more and more people struggle to hold onto stable housing.
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Chicago Tribune: Are property tax appeals a fast sale in slow market?
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New research by two University of Illinois professors suggests that if there's ever a good time to do it, it's during a sluggish market.
Using data on Chicago property assessment appeals from 2000 and 2003, Rachel Weber, an associate professor at University of Illinois at Chicago, and David McMillen, a professor at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, sought to identify who was most often filing appeals and who was getting the "right" answers back. The study followed the path of property tax appeals made within the city on single-family homes and buildings of up to six units.
Their findings yielded more than a few surprises but really boil down to this: The homeowners most likely to file appeals weren't the ones who won them.
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam Black Kos, Tuesday's Chile Poetry Contributor
The witness of poetry is a powerful force; it not only can describe
events, it also can give voice back to those people and things that
have been rendered voiceless. Martin Luther King not only fought for
civil rights in the U.S., he also fought against war and oppression
around the world. He advocated for human rights to the lowest peasant
in the most oppressed regions. He encouraged his followers to extend
the fight to those so oppressed.
A little more than ten years after Martin Luther King's assassination,
Carolyn Forché travelled to Salvador. The witness of her poetry is
never more powerful as when she recounts her conversation with...
The Colonel
What you have heard is true. I was in his house.
His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar.
His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night.
There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him.
The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house.
On the television was a cop show.
It was in English.
Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace.
On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores.
We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for
calling the maid.
The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread.
I was asked how I enjoyed the country.
There was a brief commercial in Spanish.
His wife took everything away.
There was some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern.
The parrot said hello on the terrace.
The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table.
My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing.
The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home.
He spilled many human ears on the table.
They were like dried peach halves.
There is no other way to say this.
He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass.
It came alive there.
I am tired of fooling around he said.
As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck them-
selves.
He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air.
Something for your poetry, no? he said.
Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice.
Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.
--- May 1978 --- Carolyn Forché
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--- Tuesday's Wake Up Poetry: "Homeward" by Bassey Ikpi --