BLACK NATIONALISM
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Classical black nationalist theory holds that blacks must unite, gain power, and liberate themselves. As these goals were being articulated by free blacks in antebellum America, blacks held in slavery were generating their own culture. But most free blacks did not understand that the development of an autonomous slave culture was a force that challenged white dominance, and the few who did failed to relate this development to liberation theory.
Journalist and physician Martin R. Delany, for example, did recognize that African slaves arrived in America knowing how to cultivate rice, cotton, and tobacco and possessing skills that were used in workshops and animal husbandry on slave plantations. But he failed to incorporate this insight systematically in his theory. Other free black nationalists, however, did not recognize the skills brought to America by Africans, nor did they appreciate the art that slaves were creating within their culture. Thus they failed to respond to Frederick Douglass's recognition that slave art reflected African values. He realized that the slaves' music was an ironic mixture of sadness and joy that helped them confront their predicament and noted that it derived directly from their African heritage. In later years, jazz and blues would draw on this same emotional and spiritual legacy.
But whatever the degree of understanding of slave culture by nationalists, none thought whites would permit blacks to build a political system of their own in America. Consequently, they resolved that real freedom for their people would not come until the African motherland was redeemed. In his Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, published in 1829, David Walker advanced this and other principles on which nationalists would build. He denounced the avarice that he thought motivated Europeans in their relations with one another and with people of color. But he did not consider whites by nature an enemy. If they were willing to atone for their crimes, reconciliation was possible.
Henry Highland Garnet, an ex-slave and disciple of Walker, thought racism resulted mainly from whites having seen blacks in a low condition for so long. In his "Sidney" letters, which began appearing in the late 1830s, he brilliantly pursued this argument, contending that as blacks struggled to improve their condition, whites would be won to their cause. Moreover, he insisted that the oppressed would have to liberate themselves or they would never be truly free, a position with which Delany agreed. Delany, however, thought the problem was greater, for he was convinced that blacks would never have enough white friends in America to make real freedom possible. Their only hope, he observed a few years before the Civil War, was for some to build a powerful black state elsewhere that would win respect for blacks who remained in America. Nevertheless, like most antebellum nationalists, he persisted in opposing every sign of racism.
The government's abandonment of black rights during and after Reconstruction made it evident to nationalists that their people needed not only self-reliance but, more sorely than ever, power. Douglass stated this as well as anyone ever had: "No man can be truly free whose liberty is dependent upon ... others, and has himself no means in his own hands for guarding, protecting, defending, and maintaining that liberty.... The law on the side of freedom is of great advantage only when there is power to make that law respected."
After Garnet immigrated to Africa where he died in 1882, Delany and Bishop Henry M. Turner became the dominant figures on the nationalist scene. Alexander Crummell, who had spent years in Africa seeking to advance both Christianity and the cause of black emigration from the United States, joined them as a major force in nationalist circles toward the end of the century. It was Turner, however, who took the lead in back-to-Africa agitation.
Crummell was an important influence on W. E. B. Du Bois, who worked with whites while advocating a conception of freedom that he thought would fulfill the needs, spiritual and material, of his people and, indeed, of all humanity. Opposed to class privilege, Du Bois upheld values of cooperation sacred to Walker and Garnet. But his socialist preferences were not shared by Marcus Garvey, who in the 1920s built a mass movement based on black capitalism and a return to Africa. Garvey's emphasis on color distinctions, however, placed his nationalism outside the classical tradition.
In the 1930s, Paul Robeson raised nationalist theory to new heights. With his command of African languages, folklore, and anthropology, Robeson propounded a conception of culture that recognized the self-generative activity, largely African in origin, that had produced the spirituals and prepared the way for blues and jazz. Despite such achievements, he was convinced that black culture was being strangled in America, that it could truly flower only when values were the issue, not the color of one's skin. No narrow nationalist, Robeson regarded Africa as an artistic and spiritual frontier on which problems common to humanity might be worked out, and he urged his people to search for values there that might, in combination with the technology of the West, advance that process.
In the 1950s and 1960s the most prominent nationalist organization was the Lost-Found Nation of Islam, which had been established in Detroit in the 1930s and was quietly rehabilitating many blacks from society's "lower depths." Although Elijah Muhammad was its head, it was the charisma and articulate rage of Malcolm X, his chief aide, that captured the attention of black people as a whole, broadening the influence of the organization. Its preoccupation with race, however, rather than broader human values, was at sharp variance with classical nationalist thought. In 1964, with his influence growing in the civil rights movement, Malcolm X left the Nation.
Respect for Malcolm X and a growing sense of white America's reluctance to share real power with blacks led the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (sncc), a pivotal force in the civil rights movement, to urge blacks to rely on themselves to secure freedom—hence, the organization's call for black power in 1966. Like Malcolm, sncc looked to the independent nations of Africa as a source of inspiration and support. But sncc failed to ground black power in the best of the nationalist tradition, and black nationalism was left in disarray even as its standard was being raised by the flower of America's black youth.
Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967); Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (1987).
Sterling Stuckey
Author
