The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (68 page)

4.
“Henry Highland Garnet’s Speech at an Enthusiastic Meeting of the Colored Citizens of Boston,”
The Weekly Anglo-African,
September 19, 1859, reprinted in Sterling Stuckey,
The Ideological Origins of Black Nationalism
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), 183. Garnet’s ideal of “a grand centre of negro nationality” was strikingly similar to
Ahad Ha-’Am’s view of
Zionism in 1912, as summarized by
David Vital: “The true aim of Zionism, namely the fostering of a new national life and a new national consciousness in all parts of scattered Jewry, was not the achievement of ‘a secure refuge for the people of Israel,’ but of ‘a fixed centre for the spirit of Israel.’ ” Vital,
Zionism: The Crucial Phase
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 60.

5.
Martin Robison Delany,
The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States. Politically Considered
(Philadelphia: printed by author, 1852), 158.

6.
Ibid., 12–13, 159, 203–08. Although Delany’s book denounced both the
ACS and
Liberia, he reprinted a long extract from the
First Annual Report of the Trustees of Donations for Education in Liberia,
which presents a rather glowing picture of the Republic; he also defended the colonizationist Benjamin Coates, who reported that he had recently left the ACS. Ibid., 35, 162–68.

7.
Hollis R. Lynch,
Edward Wilmot Blyden, Pan-Negro Patriot, 1832–1913
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 117–18; Judith Stein,
The World of Marcus
Garvey: Race and Class in Modern Society
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 154–56. Both Blyden and Garvey were West Indians who favored black “
racial purity,” who were deeply prejudiced against mulattoes, and who lacked the respect for American institutions that was so pronounced among even radical American blacks such as Henry Highland Garnet.

8.
Floyd Miller,
The Search for a Black Nationality: Black Emigration and Colonization, 1787–1863
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), 236–40. Douglass changed his mind and canceled the trip when the outbreak of war offered new opportunities, as he put it, to “serve the cause of
freedom and mankind.”

9.
See especially Nell Irvin Painter,
Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), 71–145.

10.
Edwin S. Redkey,
Black Exodus: Black Nationalist and Back-to-Africa Movements, 1890–1910
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1969), 298. Redkey also points out that there was little commercial trade between the United States and West Africa and consequently little cheap transport, in contrast to the shipping facilities between the United States and Europe (299).

11.
See Isabel Wilkerson,
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration
(New York: Random House, 2010).

12.
Ibid., 23–58; Moses,
Golden Age of
Black Nationalism,
76, 197–219; Joel Williamson,
After Slavery: The Negro in South Carolina During Reconstruction, 1861–1877
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1965), 110–11; James E. Turner, “Historical Dialectics of Black Nationalist Movements in America,”
Western Journal of Black Studies
1, no. 3 (Sept. 1977): 164–80.

13.
Redkey,
Black Exodus,
22–35, 150–286; P. J. Staudenraus,
The African Colonization Movement: 1816–1865
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 251. In 1868 Delany urged blacks to sail to
Liberia on the ACS-sponsored
Golconda
; he continued to correspond with William Coppinger, seeking appointment as U.S. minister to Liberia, a post that was actually conferred on Garnet. Miller,
Search for a Black Nationality,
266.

14.
Redkey,
Black Exodus,
44.

15.
Much further attention needs to be given to the writings of black women, who are almost wholly ignored in the standard historical accounts but whose views are becoming accessible in such collections as Henry Louis Gates, ed.,
The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers,
30 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), and in such studies as Jacqueline Jones,
Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present
(New York: Basic Books, 1985).

16.
Marcus
Garvey and UNIA Papers,
vol. 5 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 586–87, 610. Garvey, who hoped to use Liberia as a base for expelling white imperialists from Africa, had earlier claimed that Liberia was founded “for the purpose of helping the refugee slave and the exiled African to re-establish a foothold in his native land; therefore, no Liberian, neither at home nor abroad, has any moral or other right preventing Negroes to return to their home to do the best they can for its development.”
Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers,
vol. 4 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 632–33. But his praise of Liberia’s founders and leaders did not prevent President
King’s government from forbidding on June 30, 1924, the entry of any UNIA members into the country. Garvey’s advance party, which arrived in July, was promptly seized and deported. “Press Release by Ernest Lyon, Liberian Consul General in the U.S., July 10, 1924,” in ibid., vol. 5, 611; Stein,
World of Marcus Garvey,
210–13.

17.
Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers,
vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 25–27, 55–57.

18.
Ibid., 56.

19.
Ibid., 56–57; ibid., vol. 5, 531. As early as 1829,
David Walker, in his famous
Appeal, in Four Articles; together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World,
had played with this inversion, noting that the
Egyptians who enslaved the
Israelites “were Africans or coloured people, such as we are—some of them yellow and others dark—a mixture of Ethiopians and the natives of Egypt—about the same as you see the coloured people of the United States at the present day.” Yet, aside from emphasizing the relative mildness of the Israelites’ bondage compared to that of the American blacks, Walker was religious enough to side with God and identify his cause with that of Moses. Reprinted in Stuckey,
The Ideological Origins of Black Nationalism,
47, 50, 104, 111.

20.
Lawrence W. Levine,
Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 23, 50–52, 137; Dena J. Epstein,
Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 244–51; Louis R. Harlan, “Booker T. Washington’s Discovery of
Jews,” in
Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward,
ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 274. For black celebrations of deliverance, see William H. Wiggins Jr.,
O Freedom! Afro-American Emancipation Celebrations
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987).

21.
Waldo E. Martin Jr.,
The Mind of Frederick Douglass
(Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1984), 109–10, 123, 201;
The Frederick Douglass Papers,
Series One,
Speeches, Debates, and Interviews,
ed. John W. Blassingame, vol. 3,
1855–63
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 556; Delany,
Condition,
18–19; Lynch,
Edward Wilmot Blyden,
63–65; August Meier,
Negro Thought in America, 1880–1915: Racial Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Washington
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963), 248; Arnold Shankman, “Friend or Foe? Southern Blacks View the Jew, 1880–1935,” in
Turn to the South: Essays on Southern Jewry,
ed. Nathan M. Kaganoff and Melvin I. Urofsky (Charlottesville: American Jewish Historical Society by the University Press of Virginia, 1979), 109–14; Harlan, “Booker T. Washington’s Discovery of Jews,” 268–75. For a broad overview of early Jewish-black relations, nothing can rival Harold David Brackman’s unpublished diss., “The Ebb and Flow of Conflict: A History of Black–Jewish Relations Through 1900” (Ph.D. diss., University of California Los Angeles, 1977). A few American blacks had encountered Jews as Southern planters and slaveholders (one of whom,
Judah P. Benjamin, became the second most powerful leader of the Confederate States of America), and as Northern merchants and abolitionists. For different approaches to the history of Jewish-black relations, beginning with the Iberian and Caribbean background, see David Brion Davis,
Slavery and Human Progress
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 82–101; Robert G. Weisbord and Arthur Stein,
Bittersweet Encounter: The Afro-American and the American Jew
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1970); David Levering Lewis, “Parallels and Divergences: Assimilationist Strategies of Afro-American and Jewish Elites from 1910 to the Early 1930s,”
Journal of American History
71, no. 3 (Dec. 1984): 543–64; and Hasia R. Diner,
In the Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks, 1915–1935
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977). Despite some historical errors, Lenora E. Berson’s
The Negroes and the Jews
(New York: Random House, 1971) contains important information and insights, but it is almost useless to scholars because it lacks notes, any reference to sources or bibliography, and an index.

22.
Herbert Aptheker, ed.,
A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States,
vol. 1 (New York: The Citadel Press, 1969), 349, 456; Blassingame,
Frederick Douglass Papers,
3:556; Harlan, “Booker T. Washington’s Discovery of the Jews,” 277n10. Compare these statements by blacks to the jurist Louis Marshall’s boast to the 1926 annual convention of the NAACP: “We were subjected to indignities in comparison with which to sit in a ‘Jim Crow’ car is to occupy a palace.” Quoted in Lewis, “Parallels and Divergences,” 546.

23.
Diner,
Almost Promised Land,
28–81, 89–115. The Yiddish newspapers Diner analyzes had a readership of more than 550,000 by 1925. For examples of ethnic jokes and stereotypes, see Levine,
Black Culture,
302–06; Diner,
Almost Promised Land,
92–93.

24.
Diner,
Almost Promised Land,
118–91; Harlan, “Booker T. Washington’s Discovery of the Jews,” 271–74; Lewis, “Parallels and Divergences,” 546–62; Lynch,
Edward Wilmot Blyden,
63–65. Blyden, like Douglass before him, felt an affinity with Arabs and Islam. Yet, apart from the Jewish homeland in Palestine, he wanted to admit Jews to Africa while excluding whites. His views drew on an African American tradition of “Ethiopianist” biblical interpretation, according to which Jethro, an Ethiopian priest, was the divinely appointed religious mentor of Moses, who married a black Cushite.

25.
Lynch,
Edward Wilmot Blyden,
64–65; Diner,
Almost Promised Land,
22–23.

26.
An investigation of the complex sources of discord between blacks and Jews, which became increasingly apparent in the 1930s, lies beyond the scope of this study. It is worth emphasizing, however, that in addition to concrete conflicts between ghetto-imprisoned blacks and Jewish landlords and merchants, the long-standing advice “to emulate the Jews” was bound to backfire as the disparities in education, wealth, and power between the two groups continued to widen. Few Jews or blacks were sensitive to the cultural differences that prepared Jews for the competitive struggles of urban life and that made the success of the black “Talented Tenth” irrelevant to the needs of the black masses. Many blacks were angered by the condescending and
patronizing counsel of wealthy
Jews who kept insisting that they had endured much worse discrimination and suffering than blacks had. For some blacks, traditional anti-Semitic dogma furnished the easiest explanation. Much valuable information on this subject, especially for the 1960s, can be found in Weisbord and Stein,
Bittersweet Encounter.
But the deteriorating relationship between the two groups requires further comprehensive and dispassionate study.

27.
Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers,
vol. 5, 127.

28.
Ibid., 621.

29.
Ibid., vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 245, 317, 466; ibid., vol. 3 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 215–16; ibid., vol. 5, 127–28.

30.
Ibid., vol. 5, 621.

31.
Ibid., 627; Stein,
World of Marcus Garvey,
200–204. Some of Garvey’s followers, such as
Arthur L. Reid, became active anti-Semites in the 1930s (Weisbord and Stein,
Bittersweet Encounter,
46). There are obviously echoes of Garvey’s ambivalent rhetoric in
Malcolm X’s outburst in a 1963
Playboy
magazine interview: “The Jew never went sitting-in and crawling-in and sliding-in and freedom-riding, like he teaches and helps Negroes to do. The Jew stood up and stood together, and they used their ultimate power, the economic weapon. That’s exactly what the Honorable
Elijah Muhammad is trying to teach black men to do. The Jews pooled their money and bought the hotels that barred them.” Quoted in ibid., 97.

32.
For a time, Garvey enjoyed a considerable revival, symbolized by the naming of Marcus Garvey Park in Manhattan and by the publication of such works as Amy Jacques’s
Garvey and Garveyism
(1963; repr., New York: Collier Books, 1970), and the reprinting by Arno Press of
Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey,
ed. Amy Jacques (New York, 1968). I am indebted to Professor Clarence Walker for sending me a sample of his current and devastating reevaluation, “The Virtuoso Illusionist: Marcus Garvey,” now published in Walker,
Deromanticizing Black History: Critical Essays and Reappraisals
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 34–55.