Blassingame, John W. The Slave Community. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.

Title:

The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Ante-Bellum South

Author:

John Blassingame

Year of Publication:

1972

Thesis:

Adds slave narratives to the list of common sources to balance a sense of what enslaved people thought and felt about their condition. Defining slavery as a "total institution" such as the U.S. military, U.S. prisons, and the Holocaust and combining methodologies in psychology (interpersonal theory, among others - 184), Blassingame concludes that proximity to freedom of action, expression, and love allowed for more personality types than the infantilized "Sambo" caricature. 

"The inescapable conclusion which emerges from an examination of several different kids of sources is that there were many different slave personality types. Sambo was one of them. but because masters varied so much in characer, the system was open at certain points, and the slave quarters, religion, and family helped to shape behavior, it was not the dominant slave personality. Rather than identifying with and submitting totally to his master, the save held onto many remnants of his African culture, gained a sense of worth in the quarters, spent most of his time free from surveillance by whites, controlled important aspects of his life, and did some personally meaningful things on his own volition. This relative freedom of thought and action hlped the slave to preserve his personal autonomy and to create a culture which has contributed much to American life and thought." (viii)

Time:

19th century prior to Civil War

Geography:

Plantation South

Organization:

I. Enslavement, Acculturation, and African Survivals

II. Cutlure

III. The Slave Family

IV. Rebels and Runaways

V. Plantation Stereotypes and Roles

VI. Plantation Realities

VII. Slave Personality Types

- In some places, this seems like an explanation of Du Bois's double consciousness. In other places, he seems to be arguing for infantilization.

- This analysis seems to argue that the imminent threat of death has an infantilizing effect, and that the degree of surveillance and violence will determine the degree of infantilization. This marks Jews as almost totally infantlized by the Holocaust, even though he shows examples of some people who had influences that led them to be more prone to survival

- This is not a typology of personality types of enslaved people; unless we consider the types to be "house" and "field" as well as "Sambo" (infantilized) and more resilient enslaved people. 

Appendix: A Comparative Examination of Total Institutions

- 

Critical Essay on Sources

Select Bibliography

Type:

Methods:

Psychological analyses

Sources:

"white autobiographies, plantation records, agricultural journals, and travel accounts." (viii) Also includes travel and slave narratives.

Historiography:

Keywords:

Themes:

Critiques:

- I would like more info about where some of the images came from and analysis of them.

- This could probably use more analysis of how a 20th century phenomenon such as the Holocaust (or more broad, ahistorical comparison such as "prisons" could be considered a useful comparison to slavery. Also, could guess at the reasons why Blassingame didn't include genocide against Native Americans, but it makes sense to spell it out

- Develops a good rationale for why we should look at narratives of enslaved people (they describe emotions and thoughts of enslaved people best).

- Ironic that he dismisses Harriet Jacobs and embraces Gustavus Vassa

- "While slaves were generally submissive, they did not regress to the infantile dependency, extreme obsequiousness, unquestioning obedience, and abject docility of the concentration camp inmate primarily because they were not treated as harshly as the inmates. Whatever the cruelty inherent in slavery, the slaves were not systematically starved, forced to stand naked for hours in freezing weather, worked eighteen hours daily, and customarily tortured and murdered as the concentration camp victims were." (214)

Quotes:

Berry, Daina Ramey. The Price for Their Pound of Flesh : The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation. Boston: Beacon Press, 2017.

Draft for coursework, 2019

Dr. Daina Ramey Berry’s  prizewinning The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation (2017) relentlessly pursues the human story so commonly absent from an economic history of slavery. Distinguished historian of women and slavery at the University of Texas at Austin, Dr. Berry sits among contemporaries such as Edward Baptist, Sven Beckert, and Stanley Engerman, the latter whose deeply problematic and highly controversial Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (1974) in many ways lays to rest. A beneficiary of Engerman and Fogel’s collected data, Berry developed her own extensive database of price indexes and also pioneered the discovery and  of thousands of records of Southern Mutual Insurance (now Southern Mutual Life Insurance Company). This, however, does not begin to scratch the surface of the primary sources Dr. Berry consults, including “plantation records, diaries, trading company records, bills of sale, receipts, auction report, insurance companies, titles, deeds, gifts, court records,” and according to Berry, any record that “included name, age, sex, monetary value, and year data” across the over twenty archives and ten years of research she spent in pursuit of this history. (208). While the The Price for Their Pound of Flesh primarily situates itself in the 19th century, it is not a chronological history.

Dr. Berry instead organizes the book based on the life cycle of an enslaved person, which not only includes an accounting of their lives before the womb, but long after in the form of will contestations, cadaver sales, and insurance claims. From this vantage point, she produces an intellectual history with enslaved people interpreting their own value, in their own words when she can find them. Her work is thus distinguished from historical works that pursue commodification through the value of enslaved labor, but the value of the enslaved body. This unique, whole-life cycle approach allows her to look at different types of internal and external values, four of which she categorizes beginning with  “soul value,” which she defines as how enslaved people interpreted their own value as human beings, separate from the imposition of slave owners. “Appraisal value” is that value ascribed by traders and buyers who anticipated how much output enslaved people would bring. Market value is the price for which they were paid, and finally “ghost value” describes the ways in which enslaved people were valued even after their death.

As the chapters progress, the reader is confronted with a subheading of average 19th century appraised values and sale prices for females and males and their corresponding 2014 dollar amount. Overall, the value of each child doubled during their survival and ascent into adolescence, peaked in midlife and older adulthood, and depreciated during old age. While all of the chapters stand on their own merit, chapters 1, 3, and 6 flesh out Berry’s meanings for appraisal value, soul value, and ghost value. Detached from a chronological perspective, the chapters are free to interweave examples from time and place as they feel appropriate. Chapter 1 discusses ways in which northern and southern slave owners ascribed value to childbearing women, with the former often seeing pregnant women as liabilities, and southern traders looking to capitalize on future workers given the ability to hire out enslaved labor, the global context being a reduction in enslaved people imported while enslaved women and men bore the costs in labor of keeping their children alive before they were of working age. In chapter 3, Berry deftly reads sources against the grain to explore how parents instilled “soul value” within their children, providing them with the ability to endure. Chapter 6 on ghost values illustrates how owners anticipated enslaved people’s deaths by taking out insurance policies, arguing over inheritances, which often involved family separation, and the cadaver trade also widely explored by other scholars.

The Price for Their Pound of Flesh deserves its many accolades and is unimpeachable in its novel and humanizing approach. There are, however, areas where shared knowledge is assumed and Berry’s intentional dramatizations need more solid grounding, such as her claim that “[y]oung men, on the other hand, experienced complications such as shame or lack of arousal resulting from being forced to have sex on demand. As a result, they were physically assaulted by enslavers and spent much of their early teens and twenties on the auction block. Sometimes they took the stand with their parents, and on other occasions, their parents tried to purchase them” (63). In the next paragraph, she produces a well-documented vignette about an enslaved father and son on the auction block, but there is no apparent reference to the literature on forced breeding nor any primary source. From her statement, one could presume that a young enslaved man might also not be aroused for a number of additional reasons besides timing, including not being able to choose his partner, having to perform under duress, his or feelings of compassion toward his forced partner. Without any source cited, the reader is left to speculate.

 Despite complaints so common to trade publications, Berry’s inspiring approach encourages other ways of looking at how enslaved people assessed their own value. As much has been written on how enslaved people worked to emancipate themselves through self-purchase or flight, it might be interesting to look at ways these two approaches might intersect. In sum, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh succeeds where many fail as it interrogates unyielding sources for ways in which enslaved people assessed their own value as people and as commodities amidst a bevy of external evaluations of their productive potential and market price. With such an excellent undergirding of quantitative data and a powerful narrative quality, this book will leave undergraduate students with a perspective on slavery without the trappings and baggage of approaches that have so consistently reified the dehumanizing gaze.

Berlin, Ira. The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations. New York: Viking, 2010.

Title: The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations

Author: Ira Berlin

Year of Publication: 2010

Thesis:

A work of synthesis that includes Berlin's trademark primary research, then binds together four migrations that serve as a "contrapuntal" to John Hope Franklin's slavery to freedom master narrative. Berlin's work serves to complicate the movement of Africans and African Americans by examining forced and unforced migrations; the first two: the Transatlantic Slave Trade and Atlantic migration to Southern plantations are clearly forced. South to North migration is certainly coerced, and immigration of Africans after a long hiatus between 1924 and 1965 opens up new possibilities for African American identities connected to how people were able to stay or forced to move. This conflagration of migrations, according to Berlin, is the ground on which African American culture developed.

Time: 15th-20th centuries

Geography: Black Atlantic / U.S.

Organization:

Prologue

- Argues that enslaved people had a much larger hand in freeing themselves than they are given credit for

- Concerned with collective Black consciousness

- First plantation, then industrialization force African Americans to move (tobacco & rice to cotton/sugar)

- Attempts to correct slavery to freedom paradigm

CHAPTER ONE - Movement and Place in the African American Past

- Middle Passage retains the standard meaning but takes on a metaphorical meaning in this chapter, allowing it to describe a number of forced migrations

- Place described as both rootedness and exclusion ("stay in your place")

CHAPTER TWO - The Transatlantic Passage

CHAPTER THREE - The Passage to the Interior

CHAPTER FOUR - The Passage to the North

CHAPTER FIVE - Global Passages

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Type:

Methods:

Sources:

Largely a synthetic work

Historiography: Definitely makes use of John Hope Franklin's work as counterpoint.

Keywords:

1965 Voting Rights Act (overrides the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act)

1965 Immigration and Nationality Act

Themes:

Critiques:

Questions:

Quotes:

Notes:

How might this be useful for my research? Migration and movement is certainly a theme that arises in the development of African American communities in the West, so this book will be helpful in thinking about the long durée. 

20min book talk here - https://www.c-span.org/video/?303077-7/the-making-african-america

Beckert, Sven. Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development. Early American Studies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

Title:

Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of Economic Development

Author:

Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, eds.

Year of Publication:

2016

Thesis:

Generally, that Capitalism and slavery developed hand-in-hand in the Americas, countering two long-held beliefs: that capitalism was impeded by slavery and that the North in the U.S. was not deeply invested in slavery. The authors in the essays that follow explore how this relationship played out regionally and thematically.

Time:

1776-1865

Geography:

Primarily Americas / U.S.

Organization:

Introduction. Slavery's Capitalism

- Products of enslaved people and evidence of their work is everywhere (3)

- Persistent perception that slavery was anathema to capitalism and impeded its development (3)

- Baptist - slavery fuels the Great Divergence. (15)

- See: Rosenthal - slavery, not the railroads, developed modern systems of management (15)

 - Chambers on U.S. investments in Cuba - see how John Q. Adams was part of ensuring exports went to St. Petersburg (21)

PART I. PLANTATION TECHNOLOGIES

Chapter I. Toward a Political Economy of Slave Labor: Hands, Whipping-Mahcines, and Modern Power - Edward E. Baptist

Chapter 2. Slavery's Scientific Management: Masters and Managers - Caitlin Rosenthal

Chapter 3. An International Harvest: The Second SLavery, the Virginia-Brazil Connection, and the Development of the McCormick Reaper - Daniel B. Rood

- Grain harvesting developed in VA under slavery, not the Midwest. - purpose of grain reapers to save time, not labor (desire for enslaved laborers increases) (16)

PART II. SLAVERY AND FINANCE

Chapter 4. Neighbor-to-Neighbor Capitalism: Local Credit Networks and the Mortgaging of Slaves - Bonnie Martin

- Important to note that mortgages of enslaved people were handled locally.

Chapter 5. The Contours of Cotton Capitalism: Speculation, Slavery, and Economic Panic in Mississippi, 1832-1841 - Joshua D. Rothman

Chapter 6. "Broad is de Road dat Leads ter Death": Human Capital and Enslaved Mortality - Daina Ramey Berry

- Important work on ways enslavers and others reaped benefits from enslaved people who died. (18)

Chapter 7. August Belmont and the World the Slaves Made - Kathryn Boodry

- Works on largest banking houses supporting cotton - key to understand how this formed the bedrock of modern banking (19)

PART III. NETWORKS OF INTEREST AND THE NORTH

Chapter 8. "What have we to do with slavery?" New Englanders and the Slave Economies of the West Indies - Eric Kimball

- Develops these connections - benefitting from both goods and developments made from enslaved labor. Ultimately, NE is dependent on enslaved labor for its financial viability (21-22)

Chapter 9. "No country but their counting-houses": The U.S.-Cuba-Baltic Circuit, 1891-1812

Chapter 10. The Coastwise Slave Trade and a Mercantile Community of Interest - Calvin Schermerhorn

- Demonstrates how coastal trade moved people, bank notes, products, etc.

PART IV. NATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND NATURAL BOUNDARIES

Chapter 11. War and Priests: Catholic Colleges and Slavery in the Age of Revolution - Craig Steven Wilder

Chapter 12. Capitalism, Slavery, and the New Epoch: Mathew Cary's 1819 - Andrew Shankman

Chapter 13. The Market, Utility, and Slavery in Southern Legal Thought - Alfred L. Brophy

Chapter 14. Why Did Northerners Oppose the Expansion of Slavery? Economic Development and Education in the Limestone South - John Majewski

Notes

Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

Type:

Methods:

Sources:

Historiography:

- Eric Williams - demonstrates British capitalist development to its role in enslaving Africans in the Caribbean. (4)

- Cites a number of scholars who followed Williams (Mintz, etc.)

Historiography on U.S. is rather minimal in comparison, but

- Gandin - Empire of Necessity, Beckert - Empire of Cotton,

- Baptist - The Half Has Never Been Told. And a conference entitled "Slavery's Capitalism" in 2011. (5)

- Emphasis on this end led to looking into businesses and Universities' histories of enslaving. (6)

- Turn toward new scholarship on U.S. slavery & global capitalism already has a foundation in Stuart Hall, Eric Wolf, Cedric Robinson, Robin Blackburn. (8)

- Pomeranz on sugar as form of calories (also Mintz covered this, no?) (9)

- Marxist interpretations often involve slavery vs. Capitalism dynamic, so new histories of Capitalism are divorced from this idea (9)

- Tutino (9)

- Capitalism & Abolitionism used to be seen as hand-in-hand; now that is being questioned (10)

- See: Stephen Berhrendt on British fine-tuning seasons of trade to create a more efficient/risk-averse & profitable trade (10-11)

- Smallwood credited with use of ledgers as sources (11)

- Rediker credited with vessels as race-making (11)

Keywords:

"Second Slavery" - post 1808 where modernity and slavery are conjoined (12)

Themes:

Critiques:

Questions:

Quotes:

Notes:

Rood's work makes me wonder how many other technologies began strictly as time-saving (not labor-saving) devices in order to maximize the use of enslaved people.

Anderson, Carol. White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide. New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2017.

For coursework, 2018… in a sentence: Anderson’s main argument is that paying attention only to the more overt and popularized forms of racism is troublesome; making sure we look at more subtle forms is key.

Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Divide (New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2017).

Anderson’s book developed from an op-ed piece she wrote after Darren Wilson murdered Michael Brown in a hail of bullets in Ferguson, Missouri. Rather than follow the standard line that “African Americans, angered by the police killing of an unarmed black teen, were taking out their frustration in unproductive and predictable ways—rampaging, burning, and looting,” she instead developed an argument that identifies white rage as a focal point for inquiry.[1] White Rage develops a pragmatic, yet hopeful look at specific efforts by white supremacists to roll back, mitigate, or otherwise nullify gains made during Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Movement, with a postscript on voting rights.

            Anderson begins with a dressing down of Reconstruction: Lincoln’s lukewarm attitude toward African Americans, Johnson’s repeal of land grants and welcoming policy toward confederates are just some of the gems she includes. If anyone were to doubt the slow progress in the South, Mississippi did not ratify the 13th Amendment until 2013![2] Where the antebellum South made black synonymous with slave, the post-Reconstruction era rebranded African Americans with “idleness,” “pauperism,” and other words that have endured to make black and criminal synonymous.

            For readers uninterested in the unconscionable damage meted out in physical and psychological punishment to people of color generally and African Americans specifically, a consistent strand in her work is to expound on the financial and competitive loss to the U.S. as a whole through its refusal take responsibility for educating its citizens. As an example, she points to Prince Edward County, Virginia, as one of the many places that shut down schools rather than comply with Brown, resulting in a six-year loss of education during a critical period for 2,700 African American children.[3] If one were to expand on this to measure the tangible effects of institutional racism on the U.S. economy, it would boggle the mind.

            After a harrowing tour through the Nixon and Reagan years whose strategies not only paved the way for the modern carceral state, but also perfected race-neutral language that concealed racist appeals, Anderson alights on another strand that takes us to the end of her book: voting rights. Voting is basic measure of citizenship by most standards, heroically fought during the Civil Rights years and just as quickly stymied by various tricks. The most recent (2008) Supreme Court decision gutting the Voting Rights Act is only the pinnacle of formal and informal challenges to the African American vote, most recently voter ID laws, purging of voter rolls, and voting challenges, but historically, “rigging precinct boundaries” and reducing enforcement of the Voting Rights Act.[4]

Seldom do books written for a mass audience receive reviews in academic journals, and when they do, it is more uncommon for them to withstand the (perhaps envious) scorn delivered by their academic peers. Similarly, White Rage has received scant attention from academia; yet, it was curiously addressed by Walter Mead of Foreign Affairs. He lauded Anderson’s achievements and briefly summarized the book, but his main purpose was to discount her work based on her linking of the Reagan administration to the crack epidemic.[5] One wonders if he read past the introduction. Another review by Brain Odom is also short, but perhaps more helpful in highlighting her main argument, which is to show how white resistance to African American progress has concealed itself in a suit and tie, embedded in state legislatures and judicial systems.[6] While her framework is primarily legalistic, she also tracks all manner of formal and informal physical violence.

Unlike many books produced for a general readership, White Rage is heavily footnoted; however, it relies heavily on journalistic pieces to support its more controversial claims. This can be viewed in more than one way: the more traditional is to discount it for lack of references to peer-reviewed journal articles and books. Another way to look at it would be from a democratic perspective; Internet links to newspapers are more widely available to a mass audience. First, they are typically readable for all audiences; second, they are available with access to a computer and the Internet in most libraries. Journal articles with stronger empirical weight are available only with privileged access and are more arduous to read. While specialists in the field may be left wanting, her book is meant for the general public.[7] What emerges is an excellent and well-developed argument on the ways in which institutional white supremacy has been a regular feature of American life and a true impediment to racial equity and the overall health of the nation since the end of Reconstruction. White Rage could complement an undergraduate course on civil rights or even form a basic outline from which to refer.

[1] 2.

[2] 22. For bound categories, see: Charles Tilly, Durable Inequality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

[3] 84.

[4] 31.

[5] Mead, Walter. "White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide." Foreign Affairs 95, no. 6 (2016): 179.

[6] Odom, Brian. "White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide." The Booklist 112, no. 18 (2016): 6.

[7] It is clear by the discussion questions in the back of the book that she and the publishers mean this to be a book that could be used in a secondary or higher education setting.

Wright, Richard. Black Power: Three Books From Exile: Black Power, The Color Curtain, and White Man, Listen! Harper Perennial Modern Classics. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008.

Title: Black Power

Author: Richard Wright

Year of Publication: 1954

Thesis:

Finds that Nkrumah's strategy in the Gold Coast, to harness the power of all factions against the British was an effective revolutionary strategy and counsels Nkrumah to aim toward modernizing Ghana as quickly as possible and with a strong militant flavor (even though he uses the term "militant," he clarifies that he means something more like 'urgent and determined.').

Time: 1950s
Geography: Gold Coast/Ghana
Organization: Numbered chapters with no title, culminates in letter to Kwame Nkrumah.
Type: Sort of a participant observer travel ethnography. 
Methods:
Sources:
Historiography: One of the earlier mentions of "black power" as a term.
Keywords: modernity
Themes: modernity

Critiques:

Problematic essentialization of "Africa," problematic depictions of Ghanaians as backward. 

"I could well understand why the British, when they first saw it, thought it was a joke. They could not believe that a black man could take the political methods that Europe had perfected and apply them to Africa." (88)

I reached a street corner and paused; coming toward me was a woman nursing a baby that was still strapped to her back; the baby's head was thrust under the woman’s arm and the woman had given the child the long, fleshy, tubelike teat and it was suckling. (There are women with breast so long that they do not bother to give the baby the teat in front of them, but simply toss it over eh shoulder to the child on their back...) (69) See Morgan, Jennifer L. “Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder: Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1500-1770.” William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 1 (1997): 167–92.

But that pidgin English! I shuddered. I resented it and I vowed that I’d never speak it…. I started; the steward was at my elbow, holding a platter of fried fish; he’d come so silently upon me that I was nonplused. (68)

Questions:
Quotes:
From the kindle version:

Connections:
Being of African descent, would I be able to feel and know something about Africa on the basis of a common “racial” heritage? (18)

How much of me was African? Many of my defensive-minded Negro friends had often told me with passion: “We have a special gift for music, dancing, rhythm and movement…. We have a genius of our own. We were civilized in Africa when white men were still living in caves in Europe….” To me talk of that sort had always seemed beside the point; I had always taken for granted the humanity of Africans as well as that of other people. And being either uninterested or unable to accept such arguments, I’d always remained silent in such conversations. (20)

Suffice it to say that the British did not originate this trading in human flesh whose enormous profits laid the foundations upon which had been reared modern industrial England. The honor for the launching of that crusade against Africa rested upon the pious shoulders of the Portuguese who had had the right, under a papal bull of 1455, to subject to servitude all infidel peoples. (22)

I’d long contended that the American Negro, because of what he had undergone in the United States, had been basically altered, that his consciousness had been filled with a new content, that “racial” qualities were but myths of prejudiced minds. Then, if that were true, how could I account for what I now saw? And what I now saw was an exact duplicate of what I’d seen for so many long years in the United States. (79)

Racialization of slavery:
Slavery was not put into practice because of racial theories; racial theories sprang up in the wake of slavery, to justify it. [compare this to Ibram X. Kendi's & others' contentions] (24)

Slavery as an economic system that affects all:
Thanks to slavery, the poor whites of the New World were retarded for more than two centuries in their efforts to gain political and social recognition, and it was not until the Civil War in America abolished slavery, thereby enthroning industrial production as the new way of life, that it could be said that the New World had had any real need of poor white people at all…. (25)

Class development:
“You see, we Freetowners have been in contact with Europe for a long time. We are called Creoles. It’s from us that the English draw their best African leaders, teachers, doctors, lawyers. If we didn’t have the help of the English, we’d be swamped by the natives in Sierra Leone. (31)

Conversation with a Nigerian Supreme Court Justice:
“That’s why we drove the English out of America,” I told him. “Mr. Justice, it all depends upon how free you want to be. I’m neither anti-nor pro-British, but if I lived under British rule and wanted to develop and exercise my natural and acquired powers and the British said no, I’d be anti-British. Tell me, do you believe that the American colonies were right in taking their independence?” (33)

Clapback:
“Haven’t you tried to find out where in Africa you came from, sar?” “Well,” I said softly, “you know, you fellows who sold us and the white men who bought us didn’t keep any records.” (54)

Analysis of sexuality:
I stared out of the bus window, I was amazed at the utter asexuality of the mood and the bearing of the people! Sex per se was absent in what I saw; sex was so blatantly prevalent that it drove all sexuality out; that is, it eliminated all of that evidence of sublimated and projected sexual symbolization with which Western men are habitually prone to decorate their environment in depicting to themselves the reality of the hidden bodies of their women. The hair of the women was plainly done, wrapped tightly in black strings and tied in plaited rows close to the skull; no rouge or powder showed on any woman’s cheeks; no fingernails were painted; and, save for a few tiny earrings of gold, they were bare of ornamentation of every kind. (58)

Source and locus of real power is in the people:
These beautiful bungalows, I was told, had been built expressly by the British authorities for the creature comforts of the new African ministers, many of whom had only recently been released from prison where they had been serving terms for sedition. But the wily black ministers, full of an old-fashioned distrust of Europeans, had had the unheard-of temerity to refuse to live in the bungalows, had stifled their natural yen for a modern domicile, and had remained, much to British astonishment, in the neighborhoods of their constituents. (67)

On Freedom:
My mind flew back to the many conversations that I’d had in Chicago, New York, London, Paris, Rome, Buenos Aires about freedom, and I could picture again in my mind the white faces of friends screwed up in disgust and distaste when the word “freedom” was mentioned, and I could hear again in my memory the tersely deprecating question shot at me across a dinner table: “Freedom? What do you mean, freedom?” But here in Africa “freedom” was more than a word; an African had no doubts about the meaning of the word “freedom.” It meant the right to public assembly, the right to physical movement, the right to make known his views, the right to elect men of his choice to public office, and the right to recall them if they failed in their promises. At a time when the Western world grew (75)

How I see his definition of Black Power:
“You have fused tribalism with modern politics,” I said. “That’s exactly it,” he said. “Nobody wanted to touch these people. The missionaries would go just so far, and no farther toward them. One can only organize them by going where they are, living with them, eating with them, sharing their lives. We are making a special drive to enlist women in the party; they have been left out of our national life long enough. In the words of Lenin, I’ve asked the cooks to come out of their kitchens and learn how to rule.” (82)

Notes:

Woodard, Komozi. A Nation Within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

Title: A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) & Black Power Politics
Author: Komozi Woodard
Year of Publication: 2005
Thesis:
“While Clayborne Carson and some other historians have claimed that black nationalism was the cause of the early demise of the Black Revolt, this book argues that the politics of black cultural nationalism and the dynamics of the Modern Black Convention Movement were fundamental to the endurance of the Black Revolt from the 1960s into the 1970s.” (loc 332)
“By 1974, Baraka’s faction of the Congress of African People moved to the Left, repudiating black nationalism and embracing a revolutionary Third World Marxism.” (loc 343)
1.     African Americans are an oppressed nationality subjugated by racial oppression in the United States. Black nationality consciousness took form in the context of slavery, racial oppression, and group conflict in America” (loc 348)
2.     “…the chief sources of contemporary black nationality formation are urban.” (loc 353)
a.     This is owed to ghettoization of African American communities (loc 361)
3.     Many members of the Black intelligentsia, rather than assimilate, embraced Black nationalism, especially when found they had to give up their Black identities in order to do so. (loc 386)
4.     Urban renewal, in addition to bureaucratization, contributed to the spread of Black nationalism” (loc 392)
5.     “By setting in motion these grassroots communities and a radical black intelligentsia at the same time, the 1960s witness an unprecedented fusion between the nationalism of the grass roots and the nationalism of the emerging college-educated elite. Since a number of these college students grew up in the black ghettos, that fusion prepared the conditions for the development of a grassroots intelligentsia.” (loc 392)
6.     “Group trauma can and does form group identity.” (loc 397)
Strategies:
-       Align with other groups on an international front (colonialism, neo-colonialism, internal colonization)
-       Elect representatives
-       “Develop parallel Black institutions” in response to urban crises (loc 415)
Five phases in development of Black nationality:
-       Slavery
-       Free blacks in the urban north/Haitian Revolution
-       Oppression after failure of Reconstruction
-       Great Migration
-       Second ghetto (created in migrations from 1940s-1970s)

“Voting black Republicans in the South were necessary to secure national power for the party; without their votes the Republicans would have won the war only to lose the White House and the Congress. Thus, the Reconstruction aim of bringing the South back into the Union pivoted on black participation in the national political community.” (loc 665)

“Finally, the most fundamental reason that the absolute colonization plans were rejected is that black labor was the foundation of the Southern economy. Slavery was not only a system of racial domination; it was an economic mode of production. In reconstructing the war-torn Southern economy, the situation of black labor was critical. Fantastic, racist schemes of building that regional economy without African Americans simply courted catastrophe.” (loc 665)

20th-Century Black Nationality (loc 740)
-       Class formation
-       Urbanization
-       Ghetto formation
-       Anticolonial action (loc 745)
-       Du Bois – Souls of Black Folk  - Black culture can be traced through folk songs/fomented a sense of nationality around African heritage (loc 757)
-       *Look up Hubert H. Harrison – socialism & Black nationalism (Loc 768)
Time: 1960s-1970s
Geography: Newark, NJ, but also national and international in scope
Organization:
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. Rise
1.     Groundwork: The Impact of Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba, Robert F. Williams, and Malcom X on Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts Movement
2.     Black Fire: Imamu Amiri Baraka and the Newark Uprising
3.     The Ballot or the Bullet? The Politics of Cultural Nationalism in Newark
4.     The Modernization of Cultural Nationalism: The Black and Puerto Rican Convention and the Election of Newark’s First Black Mayor
Part II. Zenith and Decline
5.     It’s Nation Time: Building a National Black Political Community
6.     Hard Facts: Kawaida Towers and the Dilemma of Cultural Nationalism in Black America
Conclusion: Winter in America
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Type:
Methods:
Sources:
Historiography:
Keywords:
Congress of African People (CAP) – hosts Black Power conferences in Atlanta * Note to self to look up records of these conferences – HUGELY diverse list of attendees (see loc 293)
African Liberation Support Committee – (ALSC) – creates agenda & submits to both parties in congress (304)
National Black Assembly
Black Women’s United Front
Black Revolt
Civil Rights Revolution
Second ghetto
Black Freedom Struggle: “is a protracted collective effort to abolish racial oppression and to advance black equality. The black freedom movement is heterogeneous by nature.” (loc 421)

“…the entirety of African American efforts to knock down the barriers to black equality in the U.S. and to overcome the obstacles of social, cultural, and economic development of peoples of African descent.” (loc 427)

Nationalism: “an ideological movement for the attainment and maintenance of autonomy and individuality for a social group, some of whose members conceive it to constitute an actual or potential nation.” (loc 432) Borrowing from Anthony Smith, to determine the strength of such a heterogeneous movement, people studying these movements need to figure out “the extent and intensity of their activities; the complexity of their organizations; the extent to which their ideology is diffused to the group and the number of their adherents; the unity and dedication of the hard core of the membership; the clarity and articulation of their goals; the importance of nationalist issues to both members and their groups… and, the consistency and duration of the movement as a whole.” (loc 451)

“Hence, Smith concludes that strong nationalist movements develop four essential components: a dedicated hard core imbued with new nationalist values and tastes; an array of institutions and organizations; a set of clearly articulated myths and rituals, distinguishing its nationalism from other ideologies, and a fairly broad diffusion in the cities.” (loc 457)

Themes:

“First, if sociologists predicted that African American urbanization would lead to assimilation, then why was there such a phenomenal spread of black nationalism in the 1960s?” (loc 308)

“Second, … what role did black cultural nationalism play in the black freedom movement of the 1960s: did it accelerate or retard the process of black nationality formation? And how so?” (loc 308-315)

“What are the dynamics between black nationalists and black Marxists?

“And finally, what is the relationship between black people and America? Are African Americans an ethnic group along the same lines as Irish Americans, Jewish Americans, and German Americans, destined to be assimilated into American society? Or do they constitute an oppressed nationality locked out of White America, fundamentally in conflict with the established social, economic, and political order of the United States?” (loc321-326)

Herrenvolk democracy

Critiques: Too heavily centered in urban life? I wonder too, how this might connect with Benedict Anderson – can you have a nation without a press? If so, can you create one?

Quotes:

“Thus, one of Baraka’s most important creative achievements is his ‘artistic reordering’ of the African American odyssey in search of identity, purpose, and direction.’ (loc 114)

“…the most important dimension of Baraka’s avocation is his role in developing the politics of black cultural nationalism.’ (loc 114)

“The Modern Black Convension Movement hastened black nationality formation by helping to create a black national political community. While black elected officials on the local, state, and national levels developed structures like the Congressional Black Caucus to enhance their political positions, black grassroots organizations rallied their forces to define their own agenda.” (loc 288)

 Notes:

This introduction offers a clear rationale as far as Woodard’s questions, answers, and rationale. He includes well-defined sociological sections on nationalism, which contributes to clear explanations of how Baraka, et. al. fit into this spectrum.

 This introduction helps put into perspective the debate over the Civil Rights Movement, the “Long” Civil Rights Movement, and the Black Freedom Struggle. The latter allows students of Black history to look at acts of resistance as contributing to a whole (at least according to Woodard’s definition) rather than be forced to consider it an “antecedent.” Connects to the idea of Harding’s “river of resistance.”

Under thesis, point 5, I am drawing a few connections and achieving more clarity in areas that were once slightly blurry. For example, I will have to check this, but I am pretty sure in Lisa Corrigan’s Prison Power, she discusses the rhetoric of prison intellectuals, which connects to this idea of grassroots intelligentsia (although her work emphasizes development from within the prison vs. elsewhere). Also, I believe this connects to Richard Wright’s argument in Black Power that Nkrumah’s ability to succeed lay in his unification of classes. In that case, it does speak to how a critical mass of people remains critical in a large-scale revolution.

Note – title comes from Martin Delaney, but excellent section on historical Black people speaking on Black nationhood.

Black participation in terms of assimilation seems to happen only when they can be useful to a party cause—their voting power, when absolutely necessary; their free labor always necessary in some form or another.

Things to study: The long history of Black conventions

Supplemental videos/interviews:

https://www.democracynow.org/2014/1/10/amiri_baraka_1934_2014_poet_playwright

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OY_2rHIt-cI

Wood, Peter. Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion. New York: Norton, 1996.

Review I wrote for coursework in 2020:

Peter H. Wood published Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (1974) contemporaneously alongside Fogel and Engerman’s controversial Time on the Cross and within a few years of groundbreaking works by historians Eugene Genovese, John Blassingame, Phillip Curtin, and Herbert Gutman. Wood breaks the mold that had, for decades, confined historians to cotton belt plantation studies in the middle third of the nineteenth century. Wood appears to have anticipated noted slavery scholar Ira Berlin’s celebrated article, “Time, Space, and the Evolution of Afro-American Society on British Mainland North America” (1980) by several years. Berlin, surveying the body of scholarship on slavery, called for a shift from thinking of slavery as a singular, static phenomenon. Instead, he cited the importance of considering when and where as essential components of any slavery study. The explosion of slavery studies following Berlin’s prescriptions remains undeniable. However, Berlin appears to have alighted on an already developing trend. Wood’s prescient work not only connected to a nascent school of Atlantic history but also dominated its niche topic of rice production in the Carolinas for decades. He remains complemented and strengthened, but unsurpassed by Daniel Littlefield and Judith Carney, two historians who researched rice in South Carolina and West Africa. [1]

Relying heavily on demographics, studies of contemporary Gullah speech, newspapers, wills, letters, and other plantation records found across a number of archives, Wood argues convincingly that an often-skilled, independent, malaria-resistant, enslaved Black majority in South Carolina brought with them the technical knowhow for rice production. Mortality and morbidity still high due to the brutal conditions of slavery on rice plantations, enslavers shipped increasing numbers of West Africans to work. Large numbers of skilled Black people stoked fears among whites, provoking a mix of repression and “calculated benevolence.” (loc 7416) Wood’s steady ascension to the ultimately unsuccessful Stono Rebellion and other false starts along the way buoy his exploration of white repression and Black resistance.

Wood’s work is prophetic. For example, as he explores Gullah speech as an example of cultural retention, he notes, “It was an outgrowth of [enslaved people’s] ingenuity, not of their ignorance, and it served its function well.” (loc 4265) Language scholars widely accept the premise that all languages perform the basic function of communicating meaning. Furthermore, maintaining multiple linguistic registers, such as code switching between African American vernacular and so-called “standard” English requires more, not less mental acuity. Wood’s examination of enslaved people’s rice production thus affirms Black people’s ingenuity long after colonial slavery and enters a modern linguistic debate long before its time.

The Black majority in South Carolina felled trees for masts, planted and produced rice, and lent their martial talents against the Yamasee Confederacy, without which, according to Wood, South Carolina may never have existed. (loc 2884) While Black people contributed to the success of South Carolina and, by extension, to the subsequent development of the U.S., this is not a contributionist history. [2] Enslaved people labored under duress, and Wood demonstrates the circumstances leading to a unique Black majority culture of survival and resistance.

[1] Littlefield’s argument that slave-owning rice planters were not only aware of, but actively pursued enslaved people of particular ethnic identities (based on their own conceptions of ethnicity, however poorly informed) and Judith Carney’s exploration of “agrarian genealogy” and gender do not substantially challenge Wood’s assertions. See: Littlefield, Daniel C. Rice and Slave: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991 and Carney, Judith A. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. For excellent work on comparative historical linguistics and rice cultivation, see Fields-Black, Edda L. Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. She argues, in addition to Wood’s thesis, that Luso-African traders provide researchers a window into previously unexplored stateless societies.

[2] Historian Robert Harris defines contributionist history as dealing mostly with individuals and less so with group action. In African American historiography, this led to an unfortunate focus on a few token individuals. See: Harris, Robert L. “Coming of Age: The Transformation of Afro-American Historiography.” The Journal of Negro History 67 (1982): 115.