• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

To counter the self-debasing images with which their people had been inculcated, black spokesmen needed to confront their cultural and national origins. While almost unanimously rejecting emigration and affirming their American heritage and identity, they might have been expected to harbor ambivalent feelings about their relationship to Africa. To identify with Africa raised the specter of a separate nationality, as well as awkward questions about backwardness and semi-barbarism, and might encourage those whites who still wished to return them there. For some blacks, in fact, the remoteness of Africa, both geographically and culturally, and the effects of race mixing in the United States only served to accentuate their Americanness. “We are not Africans,” one black leader proclaimed, “but a mixed race, mingling Saxon, Indian, and African blood.” Rather than deny the past, however, numerous black spokesmen preferred to embrace it as a source of racial pride. To reject emigration did not require blacks to reject Africa as their ancestral homeland, any more than English, Irish, and German Americans felt compelled to dissociate themselves from their national origins.

Should a man despise his mother because she is black, or an African? All Africans are not black. If being born in Africa makes a man an African, then we are not Africans; but no matter where the place of our birth, we are still the descendants of Africans, and, of course, belong to that race.82

Nor did blacks necessarily subscribe to the prevailing image of Africa as a hopelessly backward, semi-barbaric Dark Continent with neither a past nor a future; on the contrary, the impressions conveyed in the black press tended to emphasize the rich and varied cultures and the ancient Negro empires from which they were descended. Africa had been the very cradle of civilization, with the black race acting as “the promoters and the originators of social progress.” The first significant and “brilliant” culture in the world had been founded by the Egyptians, a mulatto people who had been instructed in the rudiments of art and industry by Ethiopians, a pure-black people. If portions of Africa now resembled a Dark Continent, for which the barbaric slave trade conducted by Europeans bore partial responsibility, that same darkness had once engulfed the Caucasian race and vestiges of it still existed among whites. “What should we think of the Caucasian race if we had to judge that race from the wild and naked brutes of Andaman, or even from the ‘lazzaroni’ of Naples?” Scoffing at the notion of African inferiority, a black leader in North Carolina noted that the Anglo-Saxon had once worn a “brass collar on his neck and the name of his Norman master marked on it.” With equal cogency, the New Orleans Tribune asked, “Who are you that boast yourselves over the descendants of Africans? A few centuries ago, your forefathers were savages, in the wilds of Britain, Germany or Gaul; we Americans, of whatever nationality, are all alike descended from barbarians.” The extent to which the black press and leadership reflected the conceptions of Africa that reposed in the great mass of Afro-Americans remains difficult to determine; many exslaves were no doubt too preoccupied with survival in the United States to concern themselves with such matters, while others may have been the subject of a caustic observation by the official voice of the African Methodist Episcopal Church: “It is possible, even now, for a negro to say, ‘What have I to do with Africa?’ and not be frowned down; nay, it is somewhat popular.”83

What admittedly compounded the problem of identity and conceptions of Africa was the extent to which Americans, including many blacks, had been inculcated with the notion that whiteness was not only more acceptable but more beautiful and alluring. The slaves who thought they would turn white with emancipation were very few but those who resorted to artificial devices to approximate white features numbered in the thousands and laid the basis for several