Freedom on my mind pdf

Freedom on My Mind A History of African Americans with Documents

SECOND EDITION

Deborah Gray White

Rutgers University

Mia Bay

Rutgers University

Waldo E. Martin Jr.

University of California, Berkeley

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FOR BEDFORD/ST. MARTIN’S Vice President, Editorial, Macmillan Learning Humanities: Edwin Hill Publisher for History: Michael Rosenberg Senior Executive Editor for History: William J. Lombardo Director of Development for History: Jane Knetzger Developmental Editor: Jennifer Jovin Editorial Assistant: Lexi DeConti Senior Production Editor: Rosemary Jaffe Media Producer: Michelle Camisa Production Supervisor: Robert Cherry History Marketing Manager: Melissa Famiglietti Copy Editor: Arthur Johnson Indexer: Leoni Z. McVey Cartography: Mapping Specialists, Ltd. Photo Editor: Cecilia Varas Photo Researcher: Bruce Carson Permissions Editor: Eve Lehmann Senior Art Director: Anna Palchik Text Design: Boynton Hue Studio Cover Design: John Callahan Cover Photos: Top to bottom: Olaudah Equiano: Portrait of an African, c. 1757–1760 (oil on canvas), Ramsay, Allan (1713–1784) (attr. to)/Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter, Devon, UK/Bridgeman Images; Harriet Tubman: Lindsley, H. B., photographer (Harriet Tubman, full-length portrait, standing with hands on back of a chair) between c. 1860 and 1875. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2003674596; Madame C. J. Walker: The Granger Collection, New York; Shirley Chisholm: © Everett Collection Historical/Alamy Stock Photo; U.S. President Barack Obama: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images.

Copyright © 2017, 2013 by Bedford/St. Martin’s.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except as may be expressly permitted by the applicable copyright statutes or in writing by the Publisher.

For information, write: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 75 Arlington Street, Boston, MA 02116

ISBN 978-1-319-06604-8 (ePub)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Acknowledgments and copyrights appear on the same page as the text and art selections they cover; these acknowledgments and copyrights constitute an extension of the copyright page.

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Preface for Instructors Why This Book This Way

“Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed,” wrote Martin Luther King Jr. in his “Letter from Birmingham City Jail.” Written in April 1963 while he was incarcerated for participating in a nonviolent protest against racial segregation, King’s letter was a rebuttal to white religious leaders who condemned such protests as unwise and untimely. King’s understanding of freedom also summarizes the remarkable history of the many generations of African Americans whose experiences are chronicled in this book. Involuntary migrants to America, the Africans who became African Americans achieved freedom from slavery only after centuries of struggle, protest, and outright revolt. Prior to the Civil War, most were unfree inhabitants of a democratic republic that took shape around the ideals of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Although largely exempted from these ideals, African Americans fought for them.

Writing of these enslaved noncitizens in the first chapter of The Souls of Black Folk (1903), black historian W. E. B. Du Bois proclaimed, “Few men ever worshipped Freedom with half such unquestioning faith as did the American Negro.” Du Bois saw a similar spirit among his contemporaries: He was certain that “there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes.” Yet Du Bois lived in an era when freedom was still the “unattained ideal.” Segregated and disfranchised in the South, and subject to racial exploitation and discrimination throughout the nation, black people still sought “the freedom of life and limb, the freedom to work and think, the freedom to love and aspire.” Moreover, as long as black people were not free, America could not be the world’s beacon of liberty. The black freedom struggle would continue, remaking the nation as a whole.

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Our Approach Like Du Bois, we, the authors of Freedom on My Mind, take African Americans’ quest for freedom as the central theme of African American history and explore all dimensions of that quest, situated as it must be in the context of American history. Our perspective is that African American history complicates American history rather than diverging from it. This idea is woven into our narrative, which records the paradoxical experiences of a group of people at once the most American of Americans — in terms of their long history in America, their vital role in the American economy, and their enormous impact on American culture — and at the same time the Americans most consistently excluded from the American dream. Juxtaposed against American history as a whole, this is a study of a group of Americans who have had to fight too hard for freedom yet have been systematically excluded from many of the opportunities that allowed other groups to experience the United States as a land of opportunity. This text encourages students to think critically and analytically about African American history and the historical realities behind the American dream.

The following themes and emphases are central to our approach:

The principal role of the black freedom struggle in the development of the American state. Our approach necessitates a study of the troubled relationship between African Americans and the American democratic state. Freedom on My Mind underscores the disturbing fact that our democracy arose within the context of a slaveholding society, though it ultimately gave way to the democratic forces unleashed by the Revolution that founded the new nation and the Civil War that reaffirmed federal sovereignty. Exempt from the universalist language of the Declaration of Independence — “all men are created equal” — African Americans have been, as Du Bois insightfully noted, “a concrete test of the underlying principles of the great republic.” Most vividly illustrated during the political upheavals of Reconstruction and the civil rights movement — which is often called America’s second Reconstruction — African American activism has been crucial to the evolution of American democratic institutions.

The diversity of African Americans and the African American experience. Any study of the African American freedom struggle must recognize the wide diversity of African Americans who participated in it, whether they did so through open rebellion and visible social protest; through more covert means of defiance, disobedience, and dissent; or simply by surviving and persevering in the face of overwhelming odds. Complicating any conceptions students might have of a single-minded, monolithic African American collective, Freedom on My Mind is mindful of black diversity and the ways and means that gender, class, and ethnicity — as well as region, culture, and politics — shaped the black experience and the struggle for freedom. The book explores African Americans’ search for freedom in slave rebellions, everyday resistance to slavery, the abolitionist movement, Reconstruction politics, post-emancipation labor struggles, the great migration, military service, civil rights activism, and the black power movement. It shows how American democracy was shaped by African Americans’ search for, as Du Bois put it, “human opportunity” — and the myriad forms and characters that this search assumed.

An emphasis on culture as a vital force in black history. Freedom on My Mind also illuminates the rich and self-affirming culture blacks established in response to their exclusion from and often adversarial relationship with American institutions — the life Du Bois metaphorically characterized as “behind the veil.” The rhythms

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and structure of black social and religious life, the contours of black educational struggles, the music Du Bois described as the “greatest gift of the Negro people” to the American nation, the parallel institutions built as a means of self-affirmation and self-defense — all of these are examined in the context of African Americans’ quest for freedom, escape from degradation, and inclusion in the nation’s body politic.

A synthesis that makes black history’s texture and complexity clear. While culture is central to Freedom on My Mind, we offer an analytical approach to African American culture that enables students to see it as a central force that both shaped and reflected other historical developments, rather than as a phenomenon in a vacuum. How do we process black art — poetry, music, paintings, novels, sculptures, quilts — without understanding the political, economic, and social conditions that these pieces express? When spirituals, jazz, the blues, and rap flow from the economic and social conditions experienced by multitudes of blacks, how can we not understand black music as political? Indeed, African American culture, politics, and identity are inextricably entwined in ways that call for an approach to this subject that blends social, political, economic, religious, and cultural history. Such distinctions often seem arbitrary in American history as a whole and are impossible in chronicling the experiences of African Americans. How can we separate the religious and political history of people whose church leaders have often led their communities from the pulpit and the political stump? Therefore, Freedom on My Mind sidesteps such divisions in favor of a synthesis that privileges the sustained interplay among culture, politics, economics, religion, and social forces in the African American experience.

Twenty-first-century scholarship for today’s classroom. Each chapter offers a synthesis of the most up-to- date historiography and historiographical debates in a clear narrative style. So much has changed since Du Bois pioneered the field of African American history. Once relegated to black historians and the oral tradition, African American history as a scholarly endeavor flowered with the social history revolt of the 1960s, when the events of the civil rights movement drew new attention to the African American past and the social upheaval of the 1960s inspired historians to recover the voices of the voiceless. Women’s history also became a subject of serious study during this era, and as a result of all of these changes, we now survey an American history that has been reconstituted by nearly a half century of sustained attention to race, class, and gender.

Drawing on the most recent scholarship, this text not only will deepen students’ understanding of the interconnectedness of African American and American history but also will link African American struggles for political and civil rights, individual autonomy, religious freedom, economic equity, and racial justice to other Americans: white, red, yellow, and brown. As Americans, these groups shared a world subject to similar structural forces, such as environmental changes, demographic forces, white supremacy, and the devastating effects of world events on the American economy in times of global economic upheaval or war. Sometimes blacks bonded with other groups, and sometimes their interests clashed. Often the experiences of other Americans ran parallel to the African American experience, and sometimes African American resistance served as a template for the resistance of others. Freedom on My Mind recounts this complex historical interaction. Although more than a century has unfolded since Du Bois wrote Souls, we have tried to remain true to the spirit of that text and write, with “loving emphasis,” the history of African Americans.

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The Docutext Format We believe that the primary goals of our book — to highlight the deep connections between black history and the development of American democracy, illustrate the diversity of black experience, emphasize the centrality of black culture, and document the inextricable connections among black culture, politics, economics, and social and religious life — could not be realized to their fullest extent through narrative alone. Thus Freedom on My Mind’s unique docutext structure combines a brief narrative with rich, themed sets of textual and visual primary documents, reimagining the relationship between the narrative and the historical actors who form it. The narrative portion of each chapter is followed by a set of primary sources focused on a particular chapter topic. Each set is clearly cross-referenced within the narrative so that students can connect it to and interpret it in terms of what they’ve learned. Carefully developed pedagogical elements — including substantive introductions, document headnotes, and Questions for Analysis at the close of each set — help students learn to analyze primary documents and practice “doing” history.

These visuals and documents showcase and examine a rich variety of African American cultural elements and underscore the abiding connections among African American political activism, religious beliefs, economic philosophies, musical genres, and literary and fine art expression. A host of pictorial source types — from artifacts, photographs, paintings, and sculpture to cartoons and propaganda — and documentary sources ranging from personal letters, memoirs, and poetry to public petitions and newspaper accounts illuminate the primary evidence that underpins and complicates the history students learn. Taken together, documents and images as varied as slave captivity narratives, early American visual portrayals of black freedom fighters, the writings of free blacks like Absalom Jones and James Forten, scenes of everyday realities in the 1930s, accounts from Tuskegee Syphilis Study participants, the narratives of the civil rights era, reflections on redefining community in a diverse black America, and the responses of #BlackLivesMatter protesters and the police to the deaths of young black men all provide students with a vivid and appealing illustration of the interplay of societal forces and the centrality of African American culture to American culture. By placing these historical actors in conversation with one another, we enable students to witness firsthand the myriad variations of and nuances within individual and collective black experiences and to appreciate the points at which African Americans have diverged, as well as those at which they have agreed. Together with a narrative that presents and analyzes their context, these documents facilitate students’ comprehension of the textured, complicated story that is the history of African America.

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Support for Students Freedom on My Mind includes a variety of carefully crafted pedagogical features to help students grasp, assimilate, analyze, and recall what they’ve learned. Each chapter opens with a thematic vignette illustrating the issues confronting African Americans of that time period and then transitions to an informative introduction that sets out the thesis and takeaway points of the chapter. A chapter timeline highlights the most significant events of both African American history and general United States history during that time period, providing a quick reference for students. At the end of each chapter’s narrative, a Conclusion allows students to retrace their steps through the chapter and previews the chapter that follows. A Chapter Review section provides a list of key terms — all of which are bolded when first defined in the narrative and listed with their definitions in a Glossary of Key Terms at the end of the book — as well as three to five Review Questions encouraging students to think critically about the deeper implications of each chapter section and the connections between sections.

In addition to the visual sources in the document sets, the narrative is enhanced by the inclusion of over 160 images and 35 maps and By the Numbers graphs, each with a substantive caption that helps students relate what they’re seeing to what they’ve read and analyze quantitative data.

To facilitate further research and study, we have included extensive Notes and section-specific lists of Suggested References at the close of every chapter. Finally, we have provided an Introduction for Students that introduces students to the work of the historian and the practice of primary source analysis, and two Appendices that include a wide variety of tables, charts, and vital documents, many of them annotated to provide a deeper reference tool. We are confident that these elements will be useful not only for students but also for instructors who wish to introduce students to the practice of history and provide the resources their students will need for research projects, further reading, and reference.

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Support for Instructors We structured this book with the instructor in mind as well as the student: We believe that the book’s docutext format provides the convenience and flexibility of a textbook and source reader in one, allowing instructors a unique opportunity to incorporate primary readings and visuals seamlessly into their classes and introduce students to primary-source analysis and the practice of history. The Document Projects and the pedagogy that supports them can be used in many ways — from in-class discussion prompts to take-home writing assignments or essay questions on exams. An Instructor’s Resource Manual for Freedom on My Mind provides a variety of creative suggestions for making the best use of the documents program and for incorporating rich multimedia resources into the course. The Bedford Lecture Kit and online test bank provide additional instructional support. For more information on available student and instructor resources and the wide range of books that can be packaged with this text at a discount, see the Versions and Supplements section on pages x–xii.

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New to the Second Edition Based on reviewer feedback to the first edition, we decided to consolidate the written and visual primary sources at the ends of the chapters into mixed-source Document Projects. As a result, we were able to expand the number and types of documents offered on a particular topic, such as those on the Middle Passage (chapter 1), debt peonage (chapter 9), lynching (chapter 9), and the Tuskegee experiments during World War II (chapter 11). The new edition also gave us the opportunity to add wholly new document sets on the codification of slavery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (chapter 2) and the Black Lives Matter movement (chapter 15).

Outside of the Document Projects, we expanded coverage of key topics in both African American and general U.S. history. In the eighteenth century, we further explore the impact of the Great Awakening on slaves’ lives (chapter 3) and go into more depth about the significance of Crispus Attucks to American Revolutionary history (chapter 3). We examine African Americans’ roles in the War of 1812, both as members of the nation’s military forces and as free black civilians (chapter 4). We added to our examination of the evolution of race relations over the last one hundred years by discussing racial discrimination in labor unions (chapter 10), white backlash against affirmative action in the late 1960s and early 1970s (chapter 14), increased tension among blacks and other racial groups that also felt marginalized and oppressed (chapter 14), and the relationship between the black community and law enforcement (chapter 15). Finally, we updated the last chapter to include an analysis of President Obama’s second term.