Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
336
Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
336eBook
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Overview
First published in 2002, Freedom Dreams is a staple in the study of the Black radical tradition. Unearthing the thrilling history of grassroots movements and renegade intellectuals and artists, Kelley recovers the dreams of the future worlds Black radicals struggled to achieve.
Focusing on the insights of activists, from the Revolutionary Action Movement to the insurgent poetics of Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, Kelley chronicles the quest for a homeland, the hope that communism offered, the politics of surrealism, the transformative potential of Black feminism, and the long dream of reparations for slavery and Jim Crow.
In this edition, Kelley includes a new introduction reflecting on how movements of the past 20 years have expanded his own vision of freedom to include mutual care, disability justice, abolition, and decolonization, and a new epilogue exploring the visionary organizing of today’s freedom dreamers.
This classic history of the power of the Black radical imagination is as timely as when it was first published.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780807007853 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Beacon Press |
| Publication date: | 08/23/2022 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Random House Publisher Services |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| Sales rank: | 1,013,884 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Dreams of the New Land
Africa I guard your memory
Africa you are in me
My future is your future
Your wounds are my wounds
The funky blues I cook
are black like you—Africa
Africa my motherland
America my fatherland
Although I did not choose it to be
Africa you alone can make me free
Africa where the rhinos roam
Where I learned to swing
Before America became my home
Not like a monkey but in my soul
Africa you are rich with natural gold
Africa I live and study for thee
And through you I shall be free
Someday I'll come back and see
Land of my mothers, where a black god made me
My Africa, your Africa, a free continent to be.
Ted Joans, "Africa"
Schoolhouse Rock didn't teach me a damn thing about "freedom." The kids
like me growing up in Harlem during the 1960s and early 1970s heard that
word in the streets; it rang in our ears with the regularity of a hit song.
Everybody and their mama spoke of freedom, and what they meant usually
defied the popular meanings of the day. Whereas most Americans
associated freedom with Western democracies at war against communism,
free-market capitalism, or U.S. intervention in countries such as Vietnam or
the Dominican Republic, in our neighborhood "freedom" had no particular tie
to U.S. nationality (with the possible exception of the black-owned Freedom
National Bank). Freedom was the goal our people were trying to achieve; free
was a verb, an act, a wish, a militant demand. "Free the land," "Free your
mind," "Free South Africa," "Free Angola," "FreeAngela Davis," "Free Huey,"
were the slogans I remember best. Of course, "freedom" was also employed
as a marketing tool to sell us things like Afro wigs, hair care products, and
various foodstuffs, but even these commodities were linked in our minds to
the black struggle for independence, not just in the urban ghettos but around
the world. "Freedom" even became a kind of metonym for Africa—the home
we never knew, the place where we once enjoyed freedom before we were
forcibly taken in chains across the sea. We drank Afro-Cola, which came in a
blue can emblazoned with a map of the African continent, partly because
slick marketing executives told us it contained the taste of freedom, partly
because we pretended it was nectar from the motherland.
Of course, not everyone identified with Africa or associated the continent
with
dreams of freedom, but we were living in Harlem, of all places, during the era
of the "black freedom movement." Formal colonialism had ended throughout
most of Africa—the exceptions being southern Africa and the Portuguese
colonies—so those who paid attention to such things were excited by the
prospects of a free and independent Africa. By the time I enrolled at California
State University at Long Beach, the black studiesBlack Studies program
there reignited my nascent, underdeveloped Pan-African vision of the world.
Our professors turned diehard party people and wannabe Greeks into angry
young "Afrikans." And we had good reason to be angry. After twelve years of
public miseducation, reading works by pioneering black scholars such as
Eric Williams's Capitalism and Slavery, Cheikh Anta Diop's The African
Origins of Civilization, George E. M. James's Stolen Legacy, Angela Davis's
Women, Race, and Class, W. E. B. Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk and
Black Reconstruction in America, J. A. Rogers's World's Greatest Men and
Women of African Descent, among others, opened up a whole new world for
us. We learned of the origins of Western racism, the history of slavery, the
rise and fall of African kingdoms before the European invasion, the Egyptian
roots of Western civilization. We were particularly obsessed with the large-
scale civilizations along the Nile—Egypt, Ethiopia, Nubia—as were
generations of Afrocentric scholars before us, as Wilson Moses recently
pointed out in his valuable book Afrotopia. Indeed, the title alone explains
why we junior Afrocentrists were attracted more to the powerful states of the
ancient world than to the civil rights movement: We looked back in search of
a better future. We wanted to find a refuge where "black people" exercised
power, possessed essential knowledge, educated the West, built
monuments, slept under the stars on the banks of the Nile, and never had to
worry about the police or poverty or arrogant white people questioning our
intelligence. Of course, this meant conveniently ignoring slave labor, class
hierarchies, and women's oppression, and it meant projecting backwards in
time a twentieth-century conception of race, but to simply criticize us for
myth making or essentialism misses the point of our reading. We dreamed
the ancient world as a place of freedom, a picture to imagine what we desired
and what was possible.
Sometimes we couldn't read fast enough; other times, we were so
overtaken with emotion we put our books down and wept, or fantasized about
revenge. More importantly, we began to see ourselves—as earlier
generations of black intellectuals had—as part of an African diaspora, an
oppressed "nation" without a homeland. Many of us gravitated to campus
black nationalist groups, imagining Africa as our true home, either as a place
of eventual return or a place from which we were permanently exiled. At least
in our minds, we joined a long line of black thinkers who believed that to
achieve freedom we first had to get out of Dodge.
Exodus
Few scholars or activists today take proposals to leave America and return to
Africa or some other "homeland" seriously. Back-to-Africa proposals in
principle are almost universally dismissed as "escapist" or associated with
essentialist, romantic ideas about black cultural unity. Critics dwell on the
impracticality of such schemes, or they point to sharp cultural and class
differences that keep the black world divided. They are not wrong to do so,
but any wholesale dismissal of the desire to leave this place and find a new
home misses what these movements might tell us about how black people
have imagined real freedom. The desire to leave Babylon, if you will, and
search for a new land tells us a great deal about what people dream about,
what they want, how they might want to reconstruct their lives.
After all, the history of black people has been a history of movement—real
and imagined. Repatriation to Liberia and Sierra Leone. Flight to Canada.
Escape to Haiti. The great Kansas Exodus. The back-to-Africa movements of
Bishop Henry McNeil Turner and Marcus Garvey. The 49th State movement.
The Republic of New Africa. The Rastafarian settlement of Shashamane,
Ethiopia. I'm goin' to Chicago, baby, I can't take you along. Space is the
Place. The Mothership Connection. All these travel/escape narratives point
to the biblical story of Exodus, of the Israelites' flight out of Egypt. It isn't a
coincidence that the stream of black migrants who fled the South for Kansas
and Oklahoma in the late 1870s were called "exodusters," or that one of the
South Carolina emigration societies was called the Liberian Exodus
Association. Indeed, as Eddie Glaude points out in his recent book Exodus!
Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America, the
book of Exodus served as the key political and moral compass for African
Americans during the antebellum era, and it would continue to do so after the
Civil War. Exodus provided black people with a language to critique
America's racist state and build a new nation, for its central theme wasn't
simply escape but a new beginning.
Exodus represented dreams of black self-determination, of being on our
own, under our own rules and beliefs, developing our own cultures, without
interference. Even before New World Africans laid eyes on the Bible, the
fundamental idea behind Exodus was evident in the formation of Maroon
societies throughout the Americas. Maroon societies were settlements of
renegades from the plantation system made up primarily of runaway slaves,
some indigenous people, and, in a few instances, white indentured servants
who rebelled against the dominant culture. These settlements often existed
on the run, in the hills or swamps just outside the plantation economy.
Africans tended to dominate these communities, and many sought to
preserve the cultures of their original homelands while combining different Old
and New World traditions. Over time, Africans adopted elements of various
Native American cultures, and vice versa, and Europeans relied on aspects of
these cultures for their own survival. In the words of political scientist Cedric
Robinson, these movements were inventive "rather than imitative,
communitarian rather than individualistic, democratic rather than Republican,
Afro-Christian rather than secular and materialist[;] the social values of these
largely agrarian people generated a political culture that distinguished
between the inferior world of the political and the transcendent universe of
moral goods." The impulse toward separatism, defined broadly, is rooted in
maroonage and the desire to leave the place of oppression for either a new
land or some kind of peaceful coexistence.
The problem with modern "Egyptland" is that it claimed to be a republic,
and too many black people—slave and free—invested their own blood, sweat,
and tears in building or protecting the country. Therefore, in the United States
the impulse to leave conflicted with black claims to full citizenship and full
remuneration for our contribution to the nation. Prior to the adoption of the
Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, the question as to whether or not African
Americans were citizens of the United States had not been settled. The
experiences of free African Americans during the antebellum era demonstrate
that citizenship was beyond their grasp, and the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850
and the Dred Scott decision of 1857 denying black people citizenship rights
cleared up any ambiguity on the matter. While some black leaders insisted
on their right to citizenship during the mid-nineteenth century, others such as
Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Jermain Loguen, James T. Holly, Samuel Ringgold
Ward, Paul Cuffe, and Martin Delany called on black people to find a
homeland of their own. Not that they were willing to relinquish their claims to
citizenship; rather, they reached a point of profound pessimism and began
deeply to question their allegiance to and identification with the United States.
Whether they thought about leaving or not, the question of citizenship
always loomed large, compelling some to renounce the United States
altogether. Nineteenth-century black activist H. Ford Douglass once said: "I
can hate this Government without being disloyal, because it has stricken
down my manhood, and treated me as a saleable commodity. . . . I can join
a foreign enemy and fight against it, without being a traitor, because it treats
me as an ALIEN and a STRANGER." Emigration not only rendered African
Americans "transnational" people by default, but it remained at the heart of a
very long debate within black communities about their sense of national
belonging. The debate was further complicated by the fact that many white
people supported emigration. The American Colonization Society was formed
within the U.S. House of Representatives in 1816 for the purpose of deporting
free black people to Liberia. Its leading members included Henry Clay, Daniel
Webster, and Francis Scott Key, composer of the "Star Spangled Banner."
During the Civil War, President Lincoln's initial program to reconstruct the
nation included an elaborate plan to deport black people, first to Liberia and
later to what he believed was a more practical location—Central America.
When the prospect of enjoying real citizenship emerged on the horizon
during Reconstruction, emigrationist sentiment among African Americans
ebbed and Lincoln's plan won very few adherents among black leaders.
However, despite the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, the question
of African American citizenship had not been resolved, and with the collapse
of Reconstruction and the erection of Jim Crow, the situation took a turn for
the worse. In the South, black people were denied the right to vote and hold
public office, access to the public schools that they had helped established
and continued to finance with their tax money, and any semblance of justice.
Instead, African Americans were subjected to mob violence and "lynch law."
Between 1882 and 1946, at least 5,000 people, the vast majority of whom
were black, were lynched in the United States. Black communities had to
deal not only with a steady stream of lynchings but also with a constant
threat of invasion by armed, murderous white mobs. In the decade from 1898
to 1908, "race riots" broke out in Wilmington, North Carolina; Atlanta; New
Orleans; New York City; Phoenix; South Carolina; Akron, Ohio; Washington
Parish, Louisiana; Birmingham, Alabama; Brownsville, Texas; and
Springfield, Illinois; to name but a few. Historian Carter G. Woodson
expressed the problem poignantly in his 1921 essay "Fifty Years of Negro
Citizenship as Qualified by the United States Supreme Court": "The
citizenship of the Negro in this country is a fiction."
Most black people believed there was an order higher than the
Constitution. Psalm 68, verse 31 of the Bible had promised redemption for
the black world: "Princes come out of Egypt. Ethiopia stretches forth her
hands unto God." This passage was as important to Pan-Africanist and
emigrationist sentiment as the book of Exodus, becoming the theological
basis for what became known in the nineteenth century as Ethiopianism.
Ethiopianism spread throughout the black world, from the Americas to Africa,
calling for the redemption of Africa by any means necessary. One of the
earliest published examples of this doctrine was Robert Alexander Young's
Ethiopian Manifesto: Issued in Defense of the Blackman's Rights in the
Scale of Universal Freedom (1829), which predicted the coming of a new
Hannibal who would lead a violent uprising to liberate the race. The black
abolitionist speaker Maria Stewart echoed some of the ideas in Young's
manifesto, drawing on scripture to argue that Africans were the "chosen
people." While she identified herself as African, described America as "the
great city of Babylon," and believed that black people possessed a distinct
national destiny apart from that of other Americans, she did not advocate
emigration.
Because the Bible, not the specifics of our lineage or heritage, framed
most nineteenth-century black conceptions of national destiny, Ethiopia took
on greater importance than any other nation or region of Africa. It was also
known as Abyssinia, and black people the world over considered it the cradle
of civilization. Ethiopia has remained one of the black Christian world's
principal icons and, in some ways, might be called an African Jerusalem. As
historian William Scott explained, many African Americans believed
that "Ethiopia had been predestined by biblical prophecy to redeem the black
race from white rule." Its reputation as a beacon of hope and strength for
Africa and the African diaspora was strengthened in 1896, after Menelik II,
leader of the Amhara, united Ethiopia's princes to defeat Italy. Italy's
humiliating loss to Ethiopian armies in the battle of Adwa demonstrated to
the world that Europe was indeed vulnerable, and it rendered Africa's "holy
land" the only independent nation on the continent. For many black
observers, it appeared as if prophesy would come to pass. Groups such as
the short-lived Star Order of Ethiopia, founded by Grover Cleveland Redding,
called on African Americans to move there. The Ethiopian ambassador to the
United States also encouraged black people to settle there. By 1933 the
African-American community in Ethiopia numbered between 100 and 150.
When Italy invaded Ethiopia again in 1935, this time successfully, the entire
black world mobilized in its defense, some volunteering for military service.
Nineteenth-century emigrationists looked upon Africa as the new
promised land, a land of milk and honey where its offspring in the diaspora
could return and thrive. Bishop Henry McNeil Turner of the African Methodist
Episcopal (AME) Church emerged as one of the most outspoken advocates
of emigration. As vice-president of the American Colonization Society (ACS),
Turner supported black emigration to Liberia during the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. The AME missions under his guidance promoted
redemption as uplift ideology—the idea that education, modernization, and
devotion to God would uplift the continent and the race. At the same time,
Bishop Turner had no love for the United States, once describing the
Constitution as "a dirty rag, a cheat, a libel, and ought to be spit upon by
every Negro in the land." He believed that white supremacy generated black
self-hatred and that no black man could achieve manhood unless blacks
could protect and govern themselves. Turner attracted a significant following,
especially among poor workers and farmers who believed that any place was
better than the Jim Crow South. One Mississippi man wrote to the ACS
asking for assistance, comparing his circumstances to slavery and
asking, "Oh my God help us to get out from here to Africa."
Most nineteenth-century proponents of repatriation viewed the imminent
return of African Americans as a kind of civilizing mission, bringing
Christianity to the heathens and technology and knowledge to the backward
natives. Africa needed to be redeemed not from European colonialism but
because it was a civilization in decline. Redemption translated into uplift
ideology, a radically different cultural approach to "return" from the early
impulse toward maroonage. By the end of the century, Africa's most vocal
Negro redeemers tended to be formally educated elites who drew their
ideological arsenal from Western notions of national destiny, race, progress,
and civilization. Men such as Alexander Crummell, Henry Highland Garnet,
Bishop Turner, Edward Wilmot Blyden, and the lesser-known leaders of
emigrationist organizations dreamed of turning their ancestral homeland into
modern, "civilized," powerful nations where black people could create their
own wealth and rule themselves. They imagined a society patterned on the
best of the West—its schools, railroads, factories, and religion—without the
racism, inequality, and oppression. While they desired "Africa for the
Africans," limited autonomy if not total independence, and freedom for all (at
least in theory), they also wanted to participate in the international market as
equals.
For the next few decades, Liberia became the model for the benefits of
civilization; it was upheld by African-American intellectuals as evidence that,
if left alone, black people could develop a free and industrious nation on the
basis of their own intelligence, frugality, and good planning. Liberia was to be
a black man's utopia, the land where race prejudice was a thing of the past
and every person in the republic enjoyed the fruits of citizenship.
Unfortunately, this is not what happened. In their haste to defend Liberia,
most commentators ignored or played down the role of the United States (via
the Firestone Rubber Company) as an imperialist presence in the colony and
the position of Americo-Liberians as a new, exploitative ruling class. As a
result, the indigenous population of Liberia was exploited and oppressed by
African Americans, who had ironically returned to their ancestral homeland to
escape tyranny.
Few emigration advocates during this period questioned the Western
model. Edward Wilmot Blyden was among the few to propose adopting
elements of traditional African culture, but only after years of study. His early
works, A Voice from Bleeding Africa (1856) and The Call of Providence to the
Descendants of Africa in America (1862) both argued that God allowed
enslavement of black people so that they might be converted to Christianity.
It was now the manifest destiny of black people to return to their ancestral
homeland and bring the benefits of Christianity and "civilization." By the end
of the century, following a thorough study of Islam, he wrote a series of
articles proposing that black people develop an African personality (as
opposed to copying European culture) and defending indigenous African
culture, including polygamy and traditional family practices. He argued that
African cultures were naturally communal and did not allow private ownership
of land, and that their emphasis on collective responsibility for the entire
community rendered homelessness, poverty, and crime nonexistent. And
because all adult women were in marital relationships, he argued, there were
no "spinsters" or prostitutes.
Blyden's defense of traditional African culture might be one of the first
explicit examples we have of what later would be called African
communalism or African socialism—the idea that precolonial societies were
inherently democratic and practiced a form of "primitive communism" that
could lay the groundwork for a truly egalitarian society. In the shadow of the
failed Paris Commune, the upsurge of working-class socialist movements
throughout the Western world, and growing concern about the dangers of
industrialization, Blyden's celebration of African communalism is particularly
striking. Of course, we now know that African social organization ran the
gamut from hunter-gatherer societies to large-scale, class-stratified societies
based on agriculture, slave labor, and even limited manufacturing, and that
traditional family and gender relationships were based on severe hierarchies.
What is noteworthy, however, is the fact that Blyden and others imagined
Africa as a place free of exploitation and believed that this model might lay
the basis for a new society of black settlers. Rather than worship Western
culture and modernization, Blyden at least toyed with the idea that
traditional, precapitalist life might offer a superior road to freedom.
Redemption
Marcus Garvey, founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association
(UNIA)—the largest "African redemption" movement in the history of the
world—promoted a vision of a New Africa that embraced certain Western
ideas and technologies but transformed them to suit black people's needs.
He created African Fundamentalism, a revision of Christianity rooted in
Ethiopianism, African Methodism, and a variety of religious beliefs that would
eventually make their way into the Rastafarian faith. As Robert Hill points out,
Garvey argued that Adam and Eve and their progeny were black and that
Cain was stricken by God with leprosy (whiteness) as punishment for the
murder of his brother, Abel. The white race, in other words, began as lepers
punished by God. But Garvey differed from the Ethiopianists by insisting that
the Egyptians were blacks who enslaved the Hebrews. Garvey's strong
identification with the Egyptians makes perfect sense given his argument that
we descended from a powerful civilization. His vision of the power of
indigenous African culture was ancient, rooted in Egypt and Ethiopia, not in
contemporary African culture, for he accepted Oswald Spengler's idea that
African civilization was among those in decline. Only a movement for Africa's
redemption could restore Africa's original glory. Interestingly, while he did not
identify with the enslaved Jews of ancient times, he did identify with the
modern Zionist movement. Garvey called his own movement Black Zionism,
comparing the struggle for an African homeland with the Jewish movement for
a homeland in Palestine. He patterned his Universal African Legion after the
Jewish Legion, which came to be seen as a Jewish national guard for
Palestine. He even received significant patronage from Jewish financiers such
as William Ritter of the United States and Abraham Judah and Lewis
Ashenheim of Jamaica.
Garvey founded the UNIA with his first wife, Amy Ashwood, in his native
Jamaica in 1914. It began as a benevolent association, but when they moved
to Harlem in 1916, Garvey transformed the UNIA into a mass-based, global,
black nationalist movement intent on redeeming Africa and establishing a
homeland for the black world. In some ways the UNIA resembled an army
preparing for battle, which might be expected of any nationalist movement
born in the midst of the greatest European nationalist conflict of all time:
World War I. Yet like most race leaders at the time, Marcus Garvey was heir
to an older warrior tradition rooted in the Old Testament. Redemption, after
all, was a violent and bloody proposition. Betray God and He might smite
your first born, take you down by sword or plague, crush you to earth or
drown you. Nat Turner, leader of a bloody slave revolt in Virginia in 1831, was
told by God that slavery was to be eliminated by bloodshed, even if it meant
sacrificing the master's women and children. It was God's will, and the signs
from heaven were clear: "I should arise and prepare myself, and slay my
enemies with their own weapons." Nat Turner was not out of step with the
leading black abolitionists of the day. Besides Robert Alexander Young's
prediction of a race war led by a new Hannibal, David Walker warned white
people that God was prepared to take His vengeance out on them, and that
when the slaves rose up and cut their throats, it was God's will. "The whites
want slaves," he wrote in his Appeal, "and want us for their slaves, but some
of them will curse the day they ever saw us. As true as the sun ever shone in
its meridian splendor, my colour will root some of them out of the very face of
the earth."
The UNIA never actually waged war anywhere, but World War I militarism
had a profound impact on the organization's gender politics, according to the
historian Barbara Bair. Garveyite parades, pageants, poetry, and songs, as
well as speeches and documents, drew on metaphors of war that defined
gender roles within the movement. Black men assigned to the UNIA's African
Legion performed military drills, symbolizing assertiveness, readiness, and
self-defense. UNIA leaders wore elaborate uniforms resembling European
imperial designs, therefore reversing the dominant image of black men as
subordinate. Garveyite leadership exuded strength, dominance, and
nationhood. The Black Cross nurses symbolized the nurturing role of women
by ministering to the needs of soldiers and the community as a whole. They
wore white habits that, likewise, reversed the dominant image of black
womanhood. Challenging stereotypes of black women as hypersexual
Jezebels, the Black Cross nurses were "angels of charity and mercy," holy
sisters united in purity and devotion to their own community and to the
greater redemption of Africa.
In many respects, Garvey's vision of the proper role of black men and
women in a new, liberated society differed little from those of previous
generations of black nationalists, who embraced the prevailing notion that
African redemption equaled manhood redemption. The strength of the nation
as a measure of manhood, after all, was a common characteristic of modern
nationalism. The writings and speeches of Crummell, Edward Blyden, and
even W. E. B. Du Bois described Africa as the "fatherland," and the
redemption of the fatherland was almost always framed in terms of manhood
rights. Not surprisingly, early Pan-Africanist and emigrationist organizations
were almost entirely male affairs. While politics was considered an
exclusively male domain in this era, masculinity was especially pronounced
in black nationalist politics because of its roots in the struggle against
slavery. Despite the fact that abolitionism developed alongside woman
suffrage, the struggle against slavery by free blacks and even white
abolitionists was cast as a struggle for manhood rights largely because
servility of any kind was regarded as less than manly. Black men's inability
to protect their families under slavery was considered a direct assault on their
manhood, since manhood was defined in part by one's ability to defend one's
home. Thus, it is not surprising that black abolitionist appeals emphasized
manhood rights and violence as strategies of liberation. Abolitionists like
David Walker, John Russwurm, and Henry Highland Garnet called on slaves
to "act like men" and rise up against slavery, and their appeals were
frequently echoed by black women activists. From Maria Stewart to Ida B.
Wells, black women chastised black men for failing to fulfill their manly role
as defenders of the race.
Consequently, women barely figured in most Pan-Africanist or
emigrationist imaginings of what the New Land might look like, except in
Garveyism. Thanks to critical scholarship by Barbara Bair, Ula Taylor,
Michelle Mitchell, and others, we know that women participated at all levels
in the UNIA and were central to the construction of modern black
nationalism. Garveyite women spoke, taught, organized local meetings, and
wrote and edited texts (though always under the threat of male censorship),
and in so doing simultaneously challenged and reinforced gender divisions
and conventions in the movement. The UNIA's construction of gender in the
auxiliaries extended to its conception of Africa under colonial domination,
which was symbolically conceived as a benighted woman in need of
salvation. Motherland replaced the more common nineteenth-century word
fatherland, as representations of Africa in the Garveyite press ranged from the
nursing mother whose children had been torn from her breast by slavery to
the shackled woman raped by imperialist masters. Defending Africa from
imperialism was tantamount to defending black womanhood from rape; black
men were called upon to redeem this oppressed and degraded black woman,
our mother of civilization, in a bold, chivalrous act. Rape symbolism was not
just a convenient metaphor but carried specific historical resonance in light of
the history of sexual terrorism visited upon black women in slavery and
freedom. These themes reappear over and over again in Garveyite songs,
such as "The Universal Ethiopian Anthem," "God Bless Our President,"
and "Legion's Marching Song":
The Legion here will fight for Africa there,
We are going to avenge her wrongs,
We are coming, oh Mother Africa,
We are four hundred millions strong. . . .
No cracker will dare seduce our sister,
Or to hang us on a limb,
And we are not obliged to call him mister,
Or to skin our lips at him. . . .
Clearly, the UNIA was very conservative when it came to gender. Among
other things, it promoted Victorian mores, the patriarchal family, and the idea
that women's primary roles centered on caregiving, domesticity, and race
building by way of reproduction and education. But in the context of a racist
culture that viewed black women as immoral, licentious, and criminally
inclined, or faithful but ignorant members of a servant class, placing black
women on a pedestal to be exalted and protected radically challenged the
status quo. Although the pedestal created its own limitations, both for
women's autonomy and independence and for their participation within the
leadership of the UNIA, black women did exercise more power in the Garvey
movement than they had in other Pan-Africanist organizations of the day.
Structured along the lines of African-American churches, the UNIA elected
a "male president" and a slate of male officers along with a "lady president"
and women officers who oversaw the female auxiliaries and juvenile division.
The Parent Body Leadership, its international body, designated one position
for a woman—fourth assistant general president, which was held by Henrietta
Vinton Davis, one of the UNIA's leading orators. Women who held these
elected and appointed positions were more than tokens; they often used their
platforms to challenge the movement's gender conventions. Amy Jacques
Garvey, Marcus Garvey's second wife, used her position to write a column in
the Negro World featuring stories about women in traditionally male
professions—physicians, executives, bankers, engineers, etc.—and profiled
strong, heroic black women such as Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman.
She covered a range of controversial issues, from birth control to women's
roles in political movements, and she encouraged women's participation in
the public sphere. Although her argument was based partly on the idea that
women's special virtue, unique spirituality, could soften "ills of the world,"
Amy Jacques Garvey was just as quick to describe women as warriors. In a
scathing critique of the UNIA's failure to promote more women to important
leadership positions, she portrayed some male leaders as cowards who
harbored "old-fashioned tyrannical feelings" and predicted that the
women "will press on and on until victory is ours. . . . Ethiopia's queens will
reign again, and her Amazons protect her shores and people." Likewise,
Henrietta Vinton Davis called on women to be prepared for battle like their
foremothers in Africa and America: "If our men hesitate, then the women of
the race must come forward, they must join the great army of Amazons and
follow a Joan of Arc who is willing to be burned at the stake to save her
country."
Garveyism continues to exist today, but its heyday was really the 1920s.
It was a movement founded in the midst of war, steeled on war metaphors,
and practically destroyed by a war waged by the U.S. state and colonial
governments throughout the world. Internal conflicts also destabilized the
Garvey movement; corruption, theft, and bad investments (not to mention
poor political judgments like Marcus Garvey's decision to meet with leaders
of the Ku Klux Klan) all contributed to the collapse of the UNIA. Perhaps the
outcome was inevitable. After all, the economic philosophy undergirding
Garveyism was independent enterprise and entrepreneurship. In this
philosophy, industries such as the Black Star Line would not only serve
black people but would also be a source of capital placed entirely in black
hands, wealth for a rising race. The problem was that Marcus Garvey trusted
his lieutenants; he didn't believe they would skim wealth off the top or
consider their personal desire for wealth above the greater good of the African
world.
I doubt that most of Garvey's followers imagined the New Land as an
African version of American capitalism, a land of entrepreneurs hawking
commodities and opportunities at every turn. Instead, the Black Star Line
was less a business venture than the new ark. Africa, or somewhere other
than here, marked a new beginning, a beautiful, peaceful, collective life where
needs were fulfilled and poverty was a thing of the past. It was not unlike the
vision of the promised land radical Jews had hoped Israel would become—a
socialist paradise modeled after the kibbutz. Just as the kibbutz draws on
ancient ideas of how God intended men and women to live their lives, ancient
Africa in the black imagination continues to be a window on our dreams of
the New Land.
Space Is the Place
What does the New Land look like? Singer-songwriter Abbey Lincoln tells us
in her 1972 song "Africa," a paean to the continent, the home she had been
searching for, the "land of milk and honey." She sings not about a lost past
but a hopeful, glorious future; she sings of a deep longing for a place like
Africa, for it was remembered and experienced as a world that kept us whole.
Lincoln's lyrics echo a massive body of literary, visual, musical, and political
texts. We read them in the writings of Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Aimé
Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, Leon Damas, Margaret Danner, Margaret Walker,
Nicolas Guillén, Sonia Sanchez, Langston Hughes, Jayne Cortez, Paul
Robeson, Melvin B. Tolson, Ted Joans, and Carolyn Rodgers. We see them
in the paintings and sculptures of Aaron Douglass, Lois Mailou Jones,
Sargent Johnson, Charles Alston, Meta Warwick Fuller, Hale Woodruff,
Wifredo Lam, Betye Saar, John Biggers, Richmond Barthé, Faith Ringgold,
Melvin Edwards, Jeff Donaldson, Camille Billops, and Bill Maxwell. We hear
them in the music of Duke Ellington, Randy Weston, Melba Liston, John
Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Lee Morgan, Horace Parlan, Pharoah Sanders,
Archie Shepp, Sun Ra, Max Roach, Yusef Lateef, Bob Marley, Mutabaruka,
Mandrill, X-Clan, Blackstar, Harmony, Poor Righteous Teachers, and Tonton
David. And I've barely scratched the surface.
The desire to pack up and leave persisted well into the late twentieth
century, although it seems as though the story of Noah's ark from Genesis
might have overtook the Book of Exodus as the more common analogy of
flight. Increasingly, the ark has taken the form of the modern space ship, and
the search for the New Land has become intergalactic. Predictions of the
destruction of Earth abound. Genesis, indeed.
For at least a century, a long line of black intellectuals and religious
leaders have contemplated space travel, including the Honorable Elijah
Muhammad of the Nation of Islam. One of the most famous, if not the most
fascinating, black proponents of space travel was the Birmingham-born
pianist/composer Herman Sonny Blount, better known as Sun Ra. As early
as the 1950s, he called his band an Arkestra, and he claimed that he had left
this earth only to return. He, too, looked backward to look forward, finding the
cosmos by way of ancient Egypt. Critical of racism in America and
elsewhere, he promoted a kind of interplanetary emigrationist movement.
Dressed in metallic outfits that might best be described as ancient Egyptian
space suits, Sun Ra's Arkestra played an advanced form of music that
incorporated vocalists, dancers, and electronic instruments long before they
became popular. He did not consider his music jazz, nor did he accept
the "avant-garde" label. As he once said, "It's more than avant-garde,
because the 'avant-garde' refers to, I suppose, advanced earth music. But
this is not earth music." At the heart of Sun Ra's vision was the notion of
alter/destiny—the idea that through the creation of new myths we have the
power to redirect the future. He penned many poems and songs promoting an
Alter/destiny, including "Imagination":
Imagination is a Magic carpet
Upon which we may soar
To distant lands and climes
And even go beyond the moon
To any planet in the sky
If we came from
nowhere here
Why can't we go somewhere there?
Sun Ra and his Arkestra inspired other Afrofuturists, interstellar fellow
travelers, such as George Clinton, founder of Parliament/Funkadelic,
Jamaica's Lee Scratch Perry, and Chicago disc jockey "Captain Sky," whose
radio shows spoke metaphorically of space travel to bring attention to the
conditions of black people in the United States. Perry and Clinton, in
particular, employed the image of the ark as a mode of space travel. Perry,
who made dub records charting "the relationship between madness,
space/time travel, the Old Testament, and African identity," called his studios
The Black Ark, and made records such as Heart of the Ark, Build the Ark,
and Black Ark in Dub. Clinton's ark took the form of the "Mothership," a funky
flying saucer designed to take all the party people to a better place.
Not surprisingly, the most visionary strand of hip-hop culture also
embraces a politics of escape not averse to interstellar time travel. During hip-
hop's infancy, the pioneer Bronx disc jockey Afrika Bambaataa and his
various groups—the Jazzy Five, Cosmic Force, and the Soul Sonic Force—
embraced the space-age styles as well as the impulse to escape the
wretchedness of daily life through dance music. Founder of the Zulu Nation —
a politically conscious organization of rappers, break-dancers, graffiti artists,
and others associated with 1970s hip-hop culture—Bambaataa is perhaps
best known for his hit song "Planet Rock." By the early 1990s, the themes of
exodus, the search for paradise, even African redemption became more
pronounced in the music of groups such as Poor Righteous Teachers,
Arrested Development, Digable Planets, Jungle Brothers, De La Soul, Tribe
Called Quest, PM Dawn, and X-Clan, among others. More recently, artists
such as Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Dilated Peoples, Afu Ra, Natural Resource,
Common, Reflection Eternal, and Dead Prez, among others, have continued
to explore some of these themes.
These artists might be described as modern ancients redefining freedom,
imagining a communal future (and present) without exploitation; all-natural,
African, barefoot, and funky. A product of many influences, from
Rastafarianism and the Five-Percent Nation (a youth-oriented Islamic group)
to science fiction, some of these groups advocated vegetarianism, natural
hair, and a pace of life where humans were the masters of time rather than
the other way around. Poor Righteous Teachers, whose notion of "pure
poverty" signifies both a knowledge of the condition of black folk and a
position from which to critique forms of oppression, called for the creation of a
new utopia within the city by transforming the way people live their lives.
Others, like X-Clan, combined a politics of resistance with a politics of
escape in songs such as "Xodus," "Cosmic Ark," and "Arkilogical." In addition
to fighting racism in their place of residence, in part by founding their own
black radical political movement called Blackwatch, they sing songs that
advocate a return to "the East"—what they imagine as a peaceful, classless,
oppression-free Africa. Decked out in beads, leather, ear and nose rings, big
walking sticks, and a wild assortment of African garments, the men and
women of X-Clan had a startling visual presence. Musically they mixed the
sound of African drums with samples from Parliament/Funkadelic. And
despite the serious revolutionary rhetoric, X-Clan never lost a sense of humor:
Its ark was a pink Cadillac.
Songs by groups such as Digable Planets, PM Dawn, even De La Soul
promoted an alternative vision to the violent and artificial realities of urban life.
The tragically short-lived Arrested Development (one of the original Southern
hip-hop groups, let's not forget) focused much of its music on reconstructing
relationships between human beings across lines of color, gender,
generation, and spirituality, and of reconnecting black people to the natural
world. These themes are especially pronounced in songs such as "People
Everyday," "Mama's Always on Stage," "Children Play with Earth," "Natural,"
and "Dawn of the Dreads." Their wildly popular 1992 hit "Tennessee," from
their debut album Three Years, Five Months, and Two Days in the Life of . . .
captures the desire for a new space, a place in the countryside away from
urban chaos, and yet it is a place with a history of pain and violence
that "Speech," the lead rapper, must reckon with. It is God who tells him
to "break / outta the country and / into more country":
Where the ghost of
childhood haunts me.
Walk the roads my
forefathers walked,
climbed the trees my
forefathers hung from.
Ask those trees for all
their wisdom,
they tell me my ears are
so young. . . . Home
go back to from
whence you
came. . . . Home.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Take me to another place
Take me to another land
Make me forget all that hurts me
Let me understand your plan.
In one sense, "Tennessee" parallels the Exodus story in that God tells the
singer to go find salvation, except that the new Israel is situated in Egyptland
itself, after the apparent overthrow of the Pharaoh.
Another powerful but little-known example of hip-hop's vision of an
earthbound utopia, free of fratricidal violence, full of natural beauty and
splendor, is "Sunny Meadowz" by Oakland-based rapper Del tha Funkee
Homosapien, which appeared on his 1991 debut album, I Wish My Brother
George Was Here. That Del was produced by Ice Cube (Del's cousin) and
the Lench Mob, known to most hip-hop fans for their notorious gangsta
rhymes of mayhem and misogyny, makes "Sunny Meadowz" even more of a
curiosity. He opens by declaring war on all the thugs and fake rappers,
promising to snatch their gold chains and gold "fronts" (teeth) and return
them "to the caves of the Motherland / and ride a rhinoceros back to the other
land." Listen to his description of "the meadowz":
D. E. L., the eighteen-year-old dweller of the meadow,
It sure in the hell beats living in the ghetto.
Things are peace and everything's settled
With a goodnight snooze on a bed of rose petals.
I wake up in the morning feeling happy and refreshed. . . .
Before the day is over, the singer journeys past earth, reclines on a hippo,
writes "scriptures by the old wishing well," and lives a wonderful life where
everything is clean and natural. Although he does have a maid in the
meadowz, and in his imagination his music keeps him paid, freedom is
conceived in the "Sunny Meadowz" not in terms of materialism but as a way
of living, a way of being in the world that is at once intensely personal and
collective. This is not the image one usually associates with the hip-hop
generation, especially at the beginning of the twenty-first century. And yet it
is pervasive, especially among some of the young contemporary "spoken-
word artists" who are also products of hip-hop culture. Consider the following
stanzas by Mariahdessa Ekere Tallie:
I want to walk barefoot
in a place where barefoot has no name
in a place where soul on Earth
is natural
a place where toes in soil
is common as
true love
laughter
and birth. . . .
I want to walk barefoot
in cities without streets
where admiration is a deep silence
and conversations are replaced by the eloquence of eyes
barefoot in a place
where excuses are not enforced in law books
where there is no law
only that which is right. . . .
The imagery has changed; even the geography has shifted from Africa to
anyplace but where we are now. But the dream of Exodus still lives in those
of us not satisfied with the world as we know it. It is not the only dream.
There is yet another radical tradition that insists that we can all live together
in peace and harmony, but only if we transform society together. For many
black radicals seeking justice, salvation, and freedom, the vision of socialism
proved to be especially compelling, even if incomplete.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Aja MonetIntroduction: Freedom Dreams: From Noun to Verb, Fall 2021
Preface
“When History Sleeps”: A Beginning
1. Dreams of the New Land
2. “The Negro Question”: Red Dreams of Black Liberation
3. “Roaring from the East”: Third World Dreaming
4. “A Day of Reckoning”: Dreams of Reparations
5. “This Battlefield Called Life”: Black Feminist Dreams
6. Keeping It (Sur)real: Dreams of the Marvelous
“When History Wakes”: A New Beginning, Fall 2021
Sources
Acknowledgments
Index