Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [404]
The history of the Afro-American, Du Bois contended, revolved around this perennial conflict—“this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.” What seemed essential, however, was that blacks, while seeking admission to white society, not sacrifice their racial heritage and individuality.
He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.74
Without the advantage of Du Bois’s hindsight on Reconstruction and its tragic aftermath, blacks in the postwar years confronted the paradox of racial identity—how to define themselves as a people and as a race in relation to a society made up largely of whites who viewed themselves superior by virtue of the color of their skin, their Anglo-Saxon heritage, their mental endowments, and their future prospects. Since they aspired to the same rights exercised by white citizens, some blacks thought it imperative to underscore their Americanism, to demonstrate the ardor of their national loyalty, to disprove current theories of racial inferiority, and to show how much more acculturated they were to American ways and values than the recent arrivals from Europe. “We want to understand that we are no longer colored people, but Americans,” John Mercer Langston told a black gathering in 1866.
We have been called all manner of names. I have always called our people negroes. Perhaps you don’t like it—I do. I want it to become synonymous with character. We are no longer negroes simply—no longer colored people simply, but a part of the great whole of the mighty American nation.75
To affirm their American identity, blacks noted the various cultures that made up the civilizations of the world and the emergence of a new “race” in the United States. Whether descended from Europeans or Africans, they suggested, Americans—white and black—were in the process of developing racial characteristics “as severely individual” as those of Europeans, Asians, and Africans. Surely, the voice of the AME Church would argue, no one could expect black people in the United States to be Africans after their lengthy residence in this land.
To say that we could have preserved our African characteristics after dwelling for almost three centuries upon this continent, is most unphilosophical. Were it true we would be the most stolid race of the world—but whoever credited the negro for stolidity! The fact is, we are thoroughly Americans, and by reason of the fact that we have been here longer than the majority of the new American race, we have developed more fully than they, the characteristics by which it is to be known.
If the “negro character” differed in any respect from that of other citizens, the editorial concluded, the reason seemed abundantly apparent—“their character, is not American. Ours, is.”76
So intent were some blacks on demonstrating their identification with American values that they contrasted the advantages they enjoyed by virtue of their long exposure to white Americans with their less fortunate brethren in Latin America and the Caribbean. The Negroes of the Spanish West Indies and Brazil were singled out, in particular, as “the lowest of our race on the American continent,” largely because most of them were African-born and had not yet thrown off “its barbaric usages.” Even the Haitians, although “a noble race” with a proud history, lacked “those elements of order, of cool deliberation, of submission to authority” necessary for good government. But blacks in the United States had learned