Black Globalism

The International Politics of a Non-State Nation

Sterling Johnson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429804984
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

First published in 1998, Black Globalism: The International Politics of a Non-state Nation examines the international political behaviour of African-Americans. From the slave revolts of Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, to the influence of the Congressional Black Caucus on US foreign policy, the author examines the impact of the domestic racial environment on the international interests and activities of African-Americans. Black Globalism uses three levels of analysis to describe the dimensions of this international activity. At the individual level, the emigration debate which included Frederick Douglass, David Walker, Benjamin Russworm, Paul Cuffee, Martin Delany is considered. Here, the emigration efforts of Chief Alfred Sam, Bishop Henry Turner and Marcus Garvey are examined. The influence of scholar and activist W.E.B. DuBois and the leadership of Malcolm X is examined with respect to their ideological impact on the transnational political activity on organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panther Party. From the 1869 appointment of Andrew Young to the US Ambassador to the United Nations, the impact of African-Americans on US foreign policy decision making is examined. This includes the Congressional Black Caucus' influence on president Clinton's humanitarian intervention in Haiti. This governmental level analysis includes an examination of the history and politics of desegregating the US Department of State. Finally, the relative economic status of African-Americans in the domestic and global economic system is considered with respect to the shrinking of the welfare state and the challenges of the post-cold war global economy.

PART I
THE ROOTS OF PAN-AFRICANISM

1 The Spiritual Roots of PanAfricanism

The first Dutch slave ship, Jesus, reached Jamestown in 1619. During the middle passage - the term used for the voyage of the slave ship - many members of its African cargo jumped overboard and died in a vain attempt to swim back home. Those Africans who arrived in the New World brought with them their culture.

The majority of Africans enslaved in North America were from the central and western areas of Africa - from Congo-Angola, Nigeria, Dahomey, Togo, the Gold Coast and Sierra Leone (Thompson, 1981:148 and Rawley, 1981:33s).¹ Slave ships became the incubators of slave unity across the cultural lines which divided them in Africa. The shared experience erased barriers between one group and another and fostered resistance thousands of miles before the land of enslavement appeared on the horizon. The folktales that accompanied the early African slaves told of the traumatizing experience of the middle passage and became part of a collective conscious history and folk memory. Among the oldest and most important of these is The King Buzzard, an Ibo symbolic tale. The essence of the story revolves around a chief who betrayed thousands of his people, enticed them aboard a ship and tricked them into slavery. Although the dialect is English, the interplay of voices and African traditions and sentiment make the story impossible to capture on paper (Stuckey, 1987:4-8). The Buzzard symbolized the traitor who, must enter upon an endless journey of spiritual unrest, a punishment which is a form of hell. But the categories of heaven and hell do not distance the storyteller from the original African chroniclers of the event, and they reflect not New World religious concepts but, rather, African ones.

According to the Ibos, the spirit of the deceased returns to this world in the form of an animal if, he has ‘murdered’ one or more human beings. Although the return of the spirit in the form of an animal may be widespread in West African religions, the return as a buzzard as a repercussion of crimes committed is not. The African concern for the fate of the spirit is so universal that the tale stands as a metaphor for treachery performed anywhere at any time in history. The story would have been understood by Africans on the plantations of the South, in the North, and elsewhere in the Americas.

The King Buzzard tale originated prior to the nineteenth century, for in one account the storyteller says that his father made a reference to ‘dat ole thing’ occurring ‘way back in slavery time - way back in Africa’. The Ibo elements in the tale were used to interpret the concrete experiences of those who created it. Although they were important at the time of their creation, African ethnic tales at some point lost much of their relevance. (Stuckey, 1987:4-8).

The Africans understood that they were being carried out of the land of their birth to an unknown destination. The story of Gullah Joe covers the fate of Africans from capture on the west coast of Africa to enslavement in the New World and provides additional evidence that Africans had a previous lifestyle that was preferable to North American plantation life. Gullah Joe betrays a considerable degree of acculturation or adaptation to the environment in the United States, for the old African refers to ‘some er dem niggers’ jumping off the boat and being drowned. Then Joe describes how the European ‘overpowered dem what was on de boat an th’owed’ em down in de bottom er de ship. An’ dey put chain on em....’ The story reveals the tension between loyalty to the tribe and loyalty to the community of blacks in South Carolina as indicated by Joe’s desire to see his tribe ‘one more time’(an idea strongly linked in his mind to freedom or a return to Africa) (Stuckey, 1987:6).

For the slave, the retention of important features of the African cultural heritage provided a means by which their new reality could be interpreted and their spiritual needs at least partially met. The division between the secular and the sacred, which is so prominent in Western culture, did not exist in Africa before the introduction of European Christianity and the European slave trade.

For decades before, and generations following the American Revolution, Africans engaged in religious ceremonies in their quarters and in the woods unobserved by whites. From their earliest arrival until the outbreak of the Civil War, millions of slaves practised traditional forms of worship with no concern for white approval. However, the possibility that whites might discover the guiding principles of African culture kept Africans on guard and led them to keep the essentials of their culture hidden. Such secretiveness was dictated by the realities of oppression and helped to prevent whites acquiring knowledge of slave culture in order to eradicate it (Stuckey, 1987:7).

Part of African culture was the oral tradition of recording history, which is an increasingly recognized method of historical documentation. Slave songs are part of this oral tradition. They contain psycholinguistic evidence of the African slave’s longing for freedom and Africa. One such song, Deep River, originated in Guildford County, North Carolina (where it signified both a body of water and the Quaker meetinghouse) (Fisher, 1953). One slave reportedly told his Quaker benefactor that he wanted to ‘cross over’ to Africa, the home of camp meetings! On the Port Royal Islands of South Carolina, in 1823, Africans sang of the African home of which their forebears knew. Around 1824, a song on these Islands expressed the slave’s intentions to follow earlier colonists back to Africa and echoed the colonization propaganda that emigrants were doing their Father’s will by expatriating themselves to Liberia.

The slave songs heard at camp meetings invariably and subtly rejected the idea that Africans were bom to serve whites. They were clear enough about their faith to create an art form that, through emotional tone alone, spoke of their unhappiness. These Negro spirituals formed the basis of the only musical art form indigenous to America: the blues and jazz.

Perhaps the most familiar of these songs is the spiritual Steal Away where the lyrics ‘steal away, steal away, steal away to Jesus’, have less to do with the Nazarene than with embarking on a return trip to Africa on the same vessel that brought them to the colonies. Despite these heartfelt desires, so very few Negroes sailed to Africa that even the most enthusiastic advocates of colonization doubted its feasibility. For many slaves, the delay in their manumission and repatriation was the work of the devil. Jesus had brought Africans to the American shores so that they might return home with the gospel light. Jesus had been prevented from doing his work by Satan who had ‘rolled stones in the way’.

The ‘parting songs’ of Africans who sailed for Africa played a part in conditioning those who remained behind for colonization. These songs compared the difficulty of securing emancipation for repatriation to that of Daniel’s deliverance from the lion’s den. During the Civil War, African slaves on the Port Royal Islands, were understood to sing that Daniel locked the lion’s jaw and would similarly end their servitude expressing their longing for the opportunity to return home, (Fisher, 1953). These Port Royal ‘wish songs’ were misunderstood by the slave owners and were dismissed as unintelligible.

Between 1824 and 1825, the ‘Jacob’s ladder’ theme began to emerge in Negro spirituals. At that time, news from Liberia about the American Colonization Society (ACS) and its call for the gradual emancipation of the slaves was of great interest. The ACS had attempted to select only deeply religious and pacific African emigrants. A colonizing missionary leader in Liberia, Lott Cary, led his fellows in a mutiny in 1823-24 because the colonists were denied their expected home rule for which they had petitioned the Society’s slave holding Board of Managers. The Board influenced the US government to send the warship Porpoise to Liberia. Ralph Randolph Gurley, the ACS secretary, peacefully negotiated a constitution with the colonists. When slaves in the eastern states heard the news from Liberia, many of them wished that they had been there but, for safety’s sake, the musical expression of that wish be veiled. At first, slaves wished that they had been in Liberia during the mutiny because they would gladly have laid down their lives for what they believed was a just war. Fighting to make that country right for its people would have been progress - in other words, like climbing Jacob’s ladder (Fisher, 1922).

Spirituals were bom as the religious vision of slave society came into focus and the slaves began to apply their spiritual consciousness to their material conditions. As Sterling Stuckey observes:

Too often the spirituals are studied apart from their natural, ceremonial context. The tendency has been to treat them as a musical form unrelated to dance and certainly unrelated to particular configurations of dance and dance rhythm. Abstracted from slave ritual performance, including burial ceremonies, they appear to be under Christian influence to a disproportionate extent. Though the impact of Christianity on them is obvious and considerable, the spirituals take on an altogether new coloration when one looks at slave religion on the plantations where most slaves were found and where African religion, contrary to the accepted scholarly wisdom was practiced. (Stuckey, 1987:5)

For almost two years, beginning in 1823 until the ban on news from Africa was lifted in 1825, not a word was heard directly from the Liberian colonists. The recipients of mail from Africa called the people together (perhaps to help them decode the letters) who reacted to the news in song. They sang of freedom and reacted to the news as if they had heard directly ‘from heaven’ (Fisher, 1922).

Being on good terms with the ancestral spirits is an important part of African spirituality. This was true in North American slave culture as well, particularly in South Carolina during the 1820s, where Africans were the majority population. Blacks in the rural areas of South Carolina were isolated from whites and maintain, to date, cultural and linguistic distinctions from other African-Americans. There, an essentially African religion was practised, with free blacks and slaves gathering to worship. The assumption that American-born blacks were the only acculturated blacks and that being acculturated meant no longer being African is to underestimate African culture and to overestimate the culture of the slave master (Stuckey, 1987:43).

Pan-African Slave Revolts and Ethiopia

It was this racial climate that produced the 1822 Denmark Vesey conspiracy in Charleston. Vesey was bom into a Pan-African environment. He was a slave when Pan-African consciousness was bom, and a young adult when hundreds of thousands of Africans were imported into the West Indies and North America. Nearly 40 000 slaves were brought into South Carolina alone between 1800 and 1807. Vesey’s vision was fused with those of Africans from various parts of Africa and those in the New World. His formative values came from contact with Africans and, to a lesser extent, with whites, the latter accelerated by his facility in several European languages - an achievement not uncommon among Africans in the New World (Dalby, 1971). At church and in his home, Vesey preached from the Bible, comparing the Negroes to the children of Israel and quoting passages which authorized slaves to massacre their masters. Joshua, 6:21, was a favourite citation: ‘And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword’ (Stuckey, 1987). Vesey’s brand of Christianity complemented the African religious and cultural practices widespread in Africa, which encouraged insurrection by preaching the conjurer’s doctrine of invincibility.

Vesey surrounded himself with lieutenants from several African ethnic groups: Monday Gell, an Ibo; Mingo Harth, a Mandingo; and Gullah Jack, an Angolan. His choice of leaders from different African peoples was designed to maximize cooperation among the ethnic groupings. These ethnic fighting groups may well have been a combination of African-born and first-generation American Negroes. The conspiracy gave direct political expression to the values found in the folklore of South Carolina blacks, one in which Ibo and Congo-Angolan influences were considerable (Starobin, 1970:30-31).

Africans were at the centre of this conspiracy which involved native-born Negroes from both the city of Charleston and the surrounding countryside. The conspiracy relied heavily on the participation of urban slaves who constituted 60 per cent of the Charleston population. Vesey’s ultimate objectives are not clear. The overthrow of the whites in the region would not ultimately lead to freedom, but merely to endless battles with the whites on American soil. Given the proximity of the Atlantic ocean, sailing back to Africa may have been Vesey’s intention. However, this would almost certainly have ended with a fate similar to that of Joseph Cinque, who led a revolt on the Cuban slave ship Amistad in 1839 and, more than three decades earlier, to that of Babo on the Trial. In both instances the revolutionary African’s plans were thwarted because they had to rely on white navigators and contend with ethnic revolts at sea. Nevertheless, in both revolts, as in the Vesey conspiracy, the Africans displayed a capacity to cooperate (Stuckey, 1987:35-37).

In the conspiracy, African nationalism provided the impetus for diverse African peoples to cooperate in a struggle for freedom from slavery and oppression. As Starobin notes:

The memory of their previous cultural identity and national independence was still strong, and they could appeal to other blacks on this basis. A profound consciousness of the African homeland was revealed when Prince Graham, after his conviction, at his own request, was transported to Africa on board a vessel which sailed from Charleston. (Starobin, 1970:4)

The conspiracy was betrayed. Monday Gell testified against the others in exchange for leniency. Mingo Harth, Gullah Jack, Peter Poyas and Denmark Vesey remained silent throughout the interrogation. Peter Poyas responded with a cryptic smile, and from the gallows stated to the others ‘Do not open your lips; die silent, as you shall see me do’. Vesey, it appears, remained silent from the moment the plot was discovered until his death. In the event 35 conspirators were hanged in one morning of mass executions; 53 were released, either found innocent or discharged; 31 were sentenced to death or pardoned on condition they be deported from the United States; 11 were found not guilty but their owners were required to send them outside the boundaries of the United States; and more than 40 were sent to Africa or the West Indies where they developed and practised their own version of liberation theology.

Another spiritual source of Pan-Africanism (Ethiopianism) is found in an obscure passage of Psalms 68:31 which prophesied that ‘Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God’. The use of ‘Ethiopia’ as a synonym for black Africa as a whole, and not merely for the actual Christian kingdom, also known as Abyssinia, has remote origins in the English language and was commonplace during the Renaissance and Reformation. In Elizabethan drama, Africans are often referred to as ‘Ethiops’, and the Greeks referred to the ‘Ethiopians’ or the ‘burnt face people’. The term planted the belief that blacks were a chosen people with a special and distinctive destiny - a providential role similar to that of the Old Testament Jews. It also sowed the seeds of Pan-Negroism, or Pan-Africanism (Drake, 1970; Chirenje, 1987).

The idiom of Ethiopianism was central to the rise of black political protest literature in Jacksonian America. In 1829 Robert Alexander Young, a black New Yorker, published The Ethiopian Manifesto, Issued in Defence of the Black Man ’s Rights in the Scale of Universal Freedom. This work was addressed not only to American blacks but to ‘all those proceeding in descent from the Ethiopian or African people’. It paraphrased the biblical prophecy to make it an explicit affirmation of black nationality:

God ... hath said ‘surely hath the cries of the black, a most persecuted people, ascended to my throne and craved my mercy; now behold! I will stretch forth mine hand and gather them to the palm, that they become unto me a people, and I unto them their God.

Young predicted the coming of a messiah who would ‘call together black people as a nation in themselves’ (Stuckey, 1972: 37).

In the same year David Walker published a more elaborate and inflammatory call for black liberation. His Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, which called for the slaves to rebel against their masters, sent shock waves through the South. In the introduction to the third edition...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I The Roots of Pan-Africanism
• Part II Individuals as Global Actors
• Part III National Organizational-Level International Actors
• Conclusion
• Index