Whither African-American: What's in a Name?
Posted: Monday, July 04, 2011
by Walter Rhett
Charleston Perlo
I am proud of my American experiences. My American journey has many memories. Yet some folk think I shun those moments and my patriotism because I gladly identify myself as African-American. They are troubled by the hyphen and the word African. They see it as contentious, separate, dividing. They wish it were something I would abandon.
I am proud that as a high school student, I organized a memorial observance for Dr. King in 1968 in the public park of my southern hometown. Later that year, in June, when I crossed the platform set up in our high school stadium, I became the first African-American male graduate of my town's formerly segregated high school. I know that my neighboring senator, Jesse Helms of North Carolina, argued loudly and vociferously that Dr. King was a communist, intent on undermining American democracy and overturning America's way of life, and offered proof in the form of documents of Dr. King's contacts with communist sympathizers. I know that many opposed my attendance at the school of my choice, arguing that others had the right to separate.
There are those who still hold that belief. But the republic didn't fall.
I am proud that after Strom Thurmond, my state's senator, moved to cut off senate floor debate, the King Holiday bill was passed under the leadership of Bob Dole by a Republican senate—something the Democrats, despite Ted Kennedy's urging, had been unable to do.
Along my American way were frightening and funny moments for this African-American, some humiliating, others inspiring. As a member of the high school band, I heard the N-word (no hyphen needed) yelled into the echo of a clear fall football night and there was no doubt it was directed at me, standing on the goal line before half-time, waiting on the drum major's whistle to start the show. That year, I got nominated for the fund raising slave auction, bid on by the worst group of mischief loving seniors in the school. My mother and her friends stood for Dixie when we performed it as an encore at the all-region band concert, where I sat first chair. The African side of our experience had never been exposed to the southern protocol that required standing for Dixie like it was the national anthem.
What's more American than sports? I saw Pistol Pete Maravich play as a prep school star, scoring 50 points against a brand new local college playing in our high school gym because the just established college didn't have an athletic facility or a senior class. I remember Marion Salerni, now a high school coach in Burke, VA, then a smooth, jump shooting 6'4'' forward from Charleston's Bishop England HS, recruited by that local college--a private religious college originally founded to block integration and maintain racial segregation (division) in religious higher education.
In college, as a student at Ohio State, war was a main issue: Viet Nam came to claim nearly 50,000 American lives. The protests against the war resulted in the deaths at Kent State. I found myself under injunction when my cousin called to say my name appeared in the lead story on the front page of the Columbus Dispatch.
Time has proved we were right on the war; the dominoes fell in the other direction, tilting and tumbling toward democracy and freedom, and are still failing faster than our policies can keep pace. Despite Glenn Beck's imaginary Caliphate, our habit of ignoring the genocide and rape in the Sudan, the Ivory Coast, and elsewhere, the Berlin Wall crumbled, Grenada and Haiti got occupied by American troops, and the union of the evil empire dissembled into a series of satellite nations. Yet our recent treaty with Russia, reducing the world's nuclear threat, came close to being blocked by members of the US Senate.
Two decades ago, I voted for Strom Thurmond, who is still a pariah to my liberal friends who know nothing of the details of my state's history or have never examined Thurmond's actual record, or talked to the black elected officials of towns he assisted, preferring to evaluate his record by speeches and sound bites rather than evidence.
One of Thurmond's biggest achievements was aimed at me and other students of my generation who were African-American. While governor, Thurmond persuaded the state legislature to rebuild the state's public elementary and high school schools for “Negroes” (as we were called then) and add new buildings and dorms to the state's then segregated college. A widely held liberal view holds that this large capital expenditure was done to duplicitously support the doctrine of “separate but equal,” but in fact a close reading of the legal record shows that the state's lawyers made precisely the opposite argument: that since Negroes paid only ten to twenty percent of local and state taxes, it amounted to discrimination against whites to use their tax dollars in support of building or operating Negro schools.
That argument has expanded today, to a tour de force against all social benefit programs, especially at the federal level, in which taxes address inequality.
Here is a comment from a writer in Charleston that expresses that justification--and frustration:
Since the mid 60's we have spent $16 Trillion on means tested government income re-distribution programs (welfare). We are now $14 Trillion in debt and have 44 million people on food stamps, over 40 million kids getting free school lunches, 9 million more on WIC, about 8 million in subsidized housing, 5 million on TANF, 8 million on SSI (including 1.2 million kids), about 49 million on Medicaid and 71 million households not paying federal income taxes because of EITC and the Child Tax Credit. Does anybody really think more debt or taxes to pay for more income re-distribution programs is really going to help anything? How can a tax system be called "fair" when 47% of households are getting a free ride on the backs of the 53% who are paying income tax and carrying their own weight in society? What part of that is sustainable? What part of that is fair? All the corporations combined have never received this much of the taxpayers money. The cost of all the wars this country has ever fought doesn't come close to this massive shift of wealth from the people who earn it to the people who do not earn it. And no - I am not wealthy, just sick and tired of paying other people's bills while the poor folks "benefits" just keep getting growing and getting passed from generation to generation.I feel the writer's frustration at the lack of change. Not only has poverty the stubbornly persisted, it has also expanded in SC for children and families. I see firsthand the shortage of wages and benefits for willing workers, and the crushing shift of the burdens of poverty onto the government's rolls. I have 30 year friends unemployed.
I do think the writer overlooks the private sectors subtle shift of costs and benefits to government rolls. Remember Wal-marts once posted on local stores bulletin boards contact numbers for food stamps and other social services, since many of their employees worked “part-time,” less than 35 hours a week, and qualified. That's one example: the world's largest business enterprise had employees working in its stores whose wages qualified them for food stamps. They were also users of other safety net programs, including earned income tax credit (EITC), subsidized school lunches, subsidized housing, and health care.
Rep. George Miller's Congressional committee estimated the shifted Wal-mart costs to government may total as much as $1.5 trillion annually.
But many argue, as our commenter did by principle, why should Wal-mart stock holders subsidize higher wages for workers by lowering earnings. But is a wage increase really a subsidy?
So who gives? Who is entitled? Who owns the capital? The Republican default position is the corporation and the wealthy. The Democrats (Thurmond was one when he was governor) point to the importance of the greater good. But does help create dependence? Rob the country of self reliance?
I learned in my American journey (where I have been called colored, Negro, black, Afro-American and African-American), it's not enough to react and oppose. We have to act and stand for solving the problems we confront. We may have different views, but I stand with you if your solution will honestly take us forward and grow opportunity and prosperity for all rather than a few, without tricks and deception. I stand united with you if you are willing to take on the complicated work of stopping all sides from gaming the system.
Something is wrong when 47 percent of Americans don't earn enough to pay taxes, and our collective benefits for health and education are surpassed by countries in Europe and Asia. Something is wrong when, since the recession (2009), 88% of the growth in income has gone to corporate profits and wages and salaries have only grown one percent.
I know you don't blame the victim. I learned that as an African-American. You see my seeking a public educational choice was framed as imposing and limiting the rights of others to free association, and was considered a step on a slippery slope for government to determine who Americans could hire and who they do business with. Many felt it ended American independence and set up a government tyranny still raging wild.
In the midst of the rage against tyranny, I remember it began as a demand that American process and opportunity be open equally to all. I remember that the freedom of slaves was once seen as an act of government intrusion and tyranny, a taking of property and wealth. I know many believed women's suffrage intruded on state's rights. And I remember Coleman L. Blease, SC governor in 1910, he actually encouraged lynching.
My daughter was one of only six African-Americans in her MBA class at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, America's oldest and first business school, established in 1902. Her skills made money for an American business as she consulted in Canada for a year. She met Tuck's first ever African-American graduate (1986!) who was a devoted alumnus and noted business leader who died last year (2010). She actively recruits new hires of all backgrounds for her firm, has trusted judgment valued by her peers, and works out big, leading edge decisions for her clients. Her firm ranks in America's top five in revenue and working conditions and leads the world in several areas.
Her position in an American firm, enabling her to buy a house in an American city, has something to do, no matter how small or minute, with Strom Thurmond, an arch segregationist, rebuilding Negro schools in the early 1950s, against the prevailing American political winds; her father crossing the color line to graduate from schools strictly separated by race; her grandfather and grand uncles fighting in a segregated US Army to preserve European democracy; her paternal grandmother's grandfather given the responsibility for gathering eggs and minding the chickens as a young enslaved boy in Virginia; and Dartmouth's recognition that equality implies and could accommodate diversity. She is good people: well trained, fierce, persistent, skilled at modeling problems, listening openly, and using change to build progress to expand rather than exploiting cute tricks. (And no, her office doesn't have the number for the local food stamp office posted on her bulletin board.)
Then why do I call myself—African-American? Am I trying to divide myself from other Americans? Or am I embracing the full range of my heritage? Is the name a thin wedge? Does it trigger stereotypes its opposers won't let go? Is it a veiled demand for a welfare state? Or are its critics mounting an attack against self-determination?
My social DNA has a double helix, a unique development rooted in the words, deals, and concepts of American history—and my own experience.
By whatever appellation, singular or plural, enjoined or standing alone, throughout human history communities have tenaciously identified its members with pride. Russia has over 170 ethic groups, including Tartars, the Rus (Russia!), Bashkirs, Mordvins, Chechens, and others for whom states are named. Turkey has a host of ethnic groups, organized around four language groups, and include the Azeris and the Zakas.
The practice has also caused horrendous conflict and sometimes mass death. In Africa's Rwanda, the Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa were major populations; conflicts among the group led to a horrible genocide in 1994, inflicted on the Tutsi by the Hutu militia that lead to a 100 day death total of a million people—after a plane crash killed Rwanda's Hutu President.
Off the coast of southern Africa, in the frigid waters of the South Atlantic, the small island of St. Helena, a British principality where Napoleon was held in exile, has a population 25% Chinese!
Identifying yourself is done is all kinds of ways and is part of a friendly pride that points to achievements, history. Is there anybody who doesn't know where a Tar Heel is from? Or Roll Tide? Or what state wears cheesehead hats in the form of a cheese wedge to celebrate and cheer its football team?
One southern city is known by its airport abbreviation, ATL. Weather fiercely describes Barack Obama's hometown, the Windy City. Royalty lends its title to the Queen City. Who doesn't know LA is in CA?
Of course, others argue I'm missing the point. There are no Euro-Americans. Yes, but there are Irish-Americans, many who identify as Irish and celebrate St. Patrick's Day. Mexican-American make up the majority of California's population.
More Poles live in Chicago then in Poland, where it's easy to find a pierogi or kielbasa. Italian-Americans have a famous subset. If not by name, by culture, heritage, history, and neighborhood, America's ethnic richness was and is kept alive. Colin Powell learned Yiddish from the Jewish shop keeper he worked for as a teenager.
Food, especially, is associated with national and regional heritage identities. A Po'boy is a very different taste from a Philly cheese steak or a Charleston Perlo, or a West Indian pepper pot, a dish of peas and rice, or a Cuban arroz con pollo or plantains, a whole barbequed pig, with a mustard or tomato based sauce.
I have met Puerto Ricans born in New York, proud to be from Harlem; Chinese born in Ireland who can slag with the best of them; Japanese born in Peru; North Africans from France; and black descendants of South Carolina's oldest, freedom founding families. I've seen black and white families change the spelling of their surnames by a single letter.
These markers matter. I once got the name wrong for Obama's father's Kenyan community, identifying it as Kikuyu rather than Luo. I received a dozen emails and tweets in a matter of hours.
But I use the appellation, African-American, because I believe it is a true reflection of the whole of my complex, unique American experience. A decade of research reading the micro copies of colonial newspapers repeatedly turns up the word African to describe the members of my community.
As often advertised in the newspaper for slave sales off the incoming ships, their place of origin was general, mentioned as the Rice Coast, the Gold Coast, the Windward Coast; sometimes more specific, Angola, the Congo, Dahomey. But these were places of embarkation, not the home communities that shaped the character that Charleston European population easily recognized in its diverse African population. A Charlestonian in the 1700s could easily tell you whether an African was a Fulani, or Hausa, Twi or Akan, Mande or Yoruba or Wolof. Often their African ethnic community was included in the ads describing run aways.
While Virginians had little interest in identifying the ethnic origins of the Africans who were enslaved, South Carolina's European population, a minority statewide, and in the city of Charleston, where Africans made up 70 percent of city's colonial population, there was keen curiosity and recognition of the differences in the Africanity of the blacks. Angolans were independent; those from the Rice Coast (the Senegambia region) were filled with good humor and seldom sullen, trustworthy despite their differing collective interests. Other groups were known as excellent snitches. It was a member of one of these groups that revealed to the authorities, the Vesey plot, the plan of the largest rebellion of enslaved in America, organized by a freed black, Methodist and Presbyterian Denmark Vesey, who won his freedom in a local lottery, when his ticket gained the price of $1500. (Yes, in Charleston, urban slaves had money and often conducted their own business and hired whites, but that's a different story.)
In good standing as a local Presbyterian until he was hanged, Vesey, who spoke nine languages (five African), was a sailor and master carpenter whose Dutch master retired to the city. Vesey's brilliant innovation in the history of slave revolts was to organize a large group of 12,000 slaves stretching far into the countryside's plantations. He organized his rebellion by ethnic groups. Each African ethnic community was given an assigned task. Vesey recruited known leaders of each group and let them use their influence to recruit others.
One of these was a leader of the Angolan community, the largest African ethnic group in the Charleston community, and the namesake for “Gullah,” (Angola = Gola = 18th century British enunciated, “Gullah.” He was known as Gullah Jack, (Jack Pritchard) an Angolan metaphysician, who lived at number 5 Hasell Street. The official account describes his death as infirm. Others take this to mean he cursed the town's slaveholders with his last dying breath.
In December, 2010, I was present when the headstone for David Sparkman was dedicated on a small historic family cemetery on on the high ground of an inlet marsh on Daniel's Island. David Sparkman escaped from slavery in Georgetown at the beginning of the Civil War and traveled clandestinely to Beaufort's St. Helena's Island, where he found safe harbor in the hands of the Union troops who controlled the island, the first captured southern territory.
That capture is well described, in diary, historical, and oral history accounts:
Reverend Walker's niece Emily Walker recalled her mother sending their trusted slave "Daddy Jimmy" to Retreat Plantation to get the family's longboat, Santa Ana, to town to evacuate them. The boat arrived at 9:00 at night. With a lantern rigged under a canopy, six burly slaves rowed Emily, her cousin Sarah Stuart with two infants, and her father up the Beaufort River past Brickyard Point and across the Coosaw River to the mainland. As they landed in the morning, they heard the boom of the big Union guns in Port Royal Sound.
The St. Helena Island planters had gathered on Dr. Jenkins' veranda at Land's End to watch the battle. Captain John Fripp told his slaves to keep together, stay on the plantation, plant provisioning crops for their own sustenance, and forget the cotton. He wished them well and left St. Helena Island.
Conveniently for the white population of Beaufort, there was a steamer moored at the town dock on 7 November. Many of the inhabitants who had not evacuated the night before put their belongings aboard the paddle wheeler and went directly to Charleston.Another strong African sign survived in the names and language. Well into the early 20th century, African names were given to male and female children, and you can see the influence of place, religion, and Europe in other names. Affra,Toby, Bobo are carried directly from Africa's communities; Affra from central Africa, Fatima from Islam, Maria from Portugese Catholicism.
In an striking historic example, a Mende song survived in its original language, passed down for more than a century by the women in a family from Harris Neck, Georgia. This five line song, a funeral dirge in its Mende community, became a children's lullaby in Georgia. It was first recorded in 1932 by Lorenzo Turner during field research on African language survivals and was later rediscovered in both Georgia and Sierra Leone. Listen to it here, at this link.
The drummers in New Orleans Congo Square on Sunday, the one day a week they were permitted to play were African. The official city Drum Major who played for city functions in Charleston was—an African. The spirituals, sang at worship and death, in the fields to pace the world, in the quarters to express the yearning for freedom were African. The crafts, the one pot cooking, the grave decorations, the architectural proportions, the principles of herbal medicine that were transferred and rediscovered, the animal stories and folktales were African contributions to America.
Lastly, “African” is a world view shaped by an open community constantly engaged in broadening its power and principles, embracing new friends, and finding new avenues of expression and witness. In Charleston and along the Carolina-Georgia coast, the physical presence of genes still speaks of Ethiopia and Somalia, of Arab lands and Angola, of Masai and Twa faces whose markings and stature are as identifiable now as they were two centuries ago.
To eliminate the word, “African,” is to eliminate all of my American experience before Africans were granted citizenship by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. I seek to claim the whole experience—both when America said I was an African and when it said I was an American with limitations, restrictions, and ideological baggage—because I was--African.
My history includes every footprint in the dust. I have no chip on my shoulder, and take no joy or guilt and blame none for the suffering. But truth links human community and the divine when powered by love. So I don't fear the light. African-American embraces both sides, the achievements and contradictions, and the peace, persistence and loving mercy to climb past the bare spots as I hear somebody calling my name.
So African-American for me means the widest possible choice, the widest net for capturing the whole of history and fate, its destiny and hardships, its record and speech, its living and celebration its laughter and tears.
After all, I'm American. I wouldn't won't to leave anybody out.
This Article has been viewed 817 times. (Not updated in real-time.)
Top-level comments on this article: (3 total)Very intriguing article. I was a page in the US Senate when Thurmond was in senate. I recall the respect for him, even when his aides had to wake him up to vote.
Walter, this was one of the finest articles I have ever read...perhaps THE finest. Refer to yourself as you wish, but to me you are an American that we all need to emulate. What a great country this would be if all did view it as you do. I was raised in Alabama during the very years you mention, served in the army during the Korean conflict, just during the time the Army began to de-segregate.
Although I was white, my parents taught me from birth to respect all people regardless of color. I am now 80 and I still say Yes Sir and No Sir to elderly black people as I did when I was young. God bless you my friend.Joel, thanks for your extraordinary kind praise and your great appreciation for the real quality of life in the South, with its characters and communities.
Hey Walter! I quite agree with Greg! I took a long time to read it first and then read again to understand each and every line...
Very interesting....
Regards, ChiradeepAs the writer, I wanted the stories to tell themselves. I wanted to get out of the way, and let the stories tell readers something about themselves and about my experiences. Even tone was important to the coherence of the work; tone leveled the writing field so each story speaks without endorsement or condemnation, without an editorial.
The editorials were actually the balanced transitions where I returned to the question of "whither?"
The whole point was to show the rich complex history and irony of life any and everywhere; to avoid snap judgements and dig deeply and openly to appreciate all the stories of everybody, beyond place or name. It is a tour de force of African and American history, a direct primer of experiences for the uninitiated or mis-informed. And it broadens the conversation. The revision must include some kind words for your ancestral home.
We want your comments! If you can read this, you don't have javascript enabled, so you can't use this comment system. Please enable javascript.