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Clark Atlanta University

Review: Shapes of the Black American Past


Author(s): John Henrik Clarke
Source: Phylon (1960-), Vol. 38, No. 2 (2nd Qtr., 1977), pp. 212-215
Published by: Clark Atlanta University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/274685 .
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212 PHYLON

disciplined account that engages us in the rhythm of Africa, her seasons and
her people. The subject matter, if not quite the style, is reminiscent of Camara
Laye's Dark Child. But Haley's narrative becomes difficult in recounting the
African-American experience. The development of a distinctive African-Ameri-
can culture is a complex chapter in our history. It does not lend itself to the
clarity and simplicity which characterize Haley's portrayal of boyhood in
eigtheenth century West Africa. How, for example, should the slave's accommo-
dation and resistance to the slave master, his culture and his oppression be
treated?
Haley acknowledges African survivals among the slaves: gestures, facial ex-
pressions, cries of exclamation and "these blacks' great love of singing and
dancing." These traits, however, are interpreted as incidental and unconscious.
What the author apparently considers as weightier matters of culture seem to
survive only among the Kintes. For example, the slave community which Haley
describes appears not to be composed of families. In sharp contrast to the Kinte
family unit, the other slaves in Roots appear as a collection of unattached in-
dividuals. The implication is that most slaves lived outside the bonds of kinship
and marriage. At issue is not literary style or emphasis, but rather the interpre-
tation of the African-American experience. While the Kinte family is among an
elite in its oral tradition, it is not unique in its family structure and function.
Recent scholarship on the slave family would have informed Haley's work.
Haley's perception of average slaves comes apparently from prevailing assump-
tions that their families were unstable, their marriages casual and their culture
chaotic. Herbert Gutman, in The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-
1925 (which like Roots was published in late 1976), presents evidence that slave
marriages were of long duration; that families were structured in kinship net-
works with strong intergenerational ties; and that some aspects of slave culture,
specifically marriage customs and naming practices, apparently developed in-
dependent of and in spite of Anglo-American culture and the circumstances of
slavery.
This kind of evidence calls for further revision of the African-American story.
With a careful reading of history and an imaginative working of art, the story
will continue to unfold in all of its complexity. Our debt is to Haley for in-
troducing this story to the public and for engaging the nation in pursuit of its
past.
Carole Meritt
Emory University

SHAPES OF THE BLACK AMERICAN PAST


THE SHAPING OF BLACK AMERICA. By Lerone Bennett, Jr. Illustrations by Charles
White. Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, Inc., 1975.
In his previous book, The Challenge of Blackness (1972), Lerone Bennett has
said:
If Black people are not what white people said we were, then white
America is not what it claims to be. What we have to deal with here
therefore is a contestation at the level of reality. We are engaged in a
struggle over meaning, a struggle over truth. And it is my argument
here that Blacks and not whites embody the common interest and the
truth of American society.
In a collective way, this is what the present book, The Shaping of Black America,
is about. In a general way this is what all of the books of Lerone Bennett are
LITERATURE OF RACE AND CULTURE 213

about. His books are inquiries into the contradictions in American society in its
relationship to black people. Lerone Bennett writes history, social science, and
political science and engages in prophesy all at the same time. His talent reflects
a special kind of development that needs to be looked at, at least briefly, if we
are to understand his achievement as a social historian.
He is of that new generation of restless black Americans who have given
birth to what is referred to as the "Black Revolution." This movement literally
demanded a reevaluation of the part that people of African descent have
played in the making of America and the circumstances that brought them here.
In his first book, Before the Mayflower (1961), Bennett began to answer the
demand for reevaluation of Afro-American history. This book ends with a
warning that is also prophecy. "If we do not stand up and create the America
that was dreamed," he says, "if we do not begin to flesh out the words of the
creed, the commonwealth of Silence will come to a definite and apocalyptic end."
In his writing Lerone Bennett brings the reader face to face with the uncomfort-
able truth about America's racial conflict. This is the essence of his value as a
social historian.
The Shaping of Black America represents the flowering of his talent. All of
his previous books seem to have been part of the preparation for the writing of
this book, his most profound commentary to date on the nature of the black
experience. He calls his book "an essay toward a new understanding of the long
and continuing attempts of Africans and African descendents to possess them-
selves and the new land." He calls attention to the need for "a new conceptual
envelope for Black American history." He says further: "It should be clear by now
to almost everyone that understanding the Black experience requires new con-
cepts and a radically new perspective."
At once, Lerone Bennett demonstrates what he means by new concepts and a
radically new perspective in the opening chapter of his book called "The First
Generation." Because, as he says, "blacks lived in a different time and a different
reality in this country," it should then stand to reason that the honest interpre-
tation of their history requires a different insight and a different frame of
reference. The book begins dramatically as follows:
In August, when the shadows are long on the land and even the air
oppresses, the furies of fate hang in the balance in Black America.
It was in August, in the eighth month of the year, that three hundred
thousand men and women marched on Washington, D.C. It was in
August that Watts exploded. It was in August, on a hot and heavy
day in the nineteenth century, that Nat Turner rode. And it was in
another August, 344 years before the March on Washington, 346 years
before Watts, and 212 years before Nat Turner's war, that "a Dutch
man of Warr" sailed up the river James and landed the first genera-
tion of black Americans at Jamestown, Virginia.
The Dutch ship and its cargo altered irrevocably the destiny of what was to
become the United States. The seeds of the only original culture that America can
show to the world were arriving on this Dutch ship. Also arriving was the em-
bryo of a conflict that, after more than three hundred years, is still' unresolved.
Lerone Bennett refers to this cargo as "the black gold that made capitalism possi-
ble in America." In this reference he is completely on the case. Nationally, it gave
America the means to become a world power. Internationally it created the
basis for the industrial revolution and the maiden world of science and tech-
nology.
These first Africans were not chattel slaves. They were indentured servants,
a major point that is often missed. Bennett deals with this aspect of slavery
214 PHYLON

searchingly and very carefully shows how the indentured-servant status was
transformed into chattel slavery. After the period of indenture, this first gen-
eration of blacks became early Americans in many ways. Some of them became
the owners of land and slaves. Others became part of the craft and technology
class that helped to tame a young and raw America. Labor was needed and this
is what these first blacks meant to the colonists.
The indentured servant system was not created for the blacks who landed in
Jamestown, Virginia. The system was intact long before they arrived, with
large numbers of white indentured servants. In the second chapter, Bennett
examines this rather neglected issue of white servitude. In the following passage
he explains some of the reasons for the neglect:
Although great care has been taken to hide the fact, black bondsmen
inherited their chains from white bondsmen, who were, in a manner
of speaking, America's first slaves. And as America moved, in the
middle of the seventeenth century, toward a fateful decision that
would define it forever, increasing attention was directed toward the
status of these white bondsmen, who pioneered in both servitude and
slavery. To understand what happened to blacks in the second half of
the seventeenth century, one must first understand what happened
to these whites in the first and second half of the seventeenth cen-
tury. For they ran the first leg of the marathon of American servitude
before passing on the baton of anguish to the reds and the blacks.
Bennett continues his explanation in this manner:
The second and possibly more important reason for the centrality of
white servitude is that it was, as Eric Williams noted, "the historic
base upon which Negro slavery was constructed." In other words,
white servitude was the proving ground for the mechanisms of con-
trol and subordination used later in African-American slavery. The
plantation pass system, the slave trade, the sexual exploitation of
servant women, the whipping post and slave chain and branding
iron, the overseer, the house servant, the Uncle Tom: all these
mechanisms were tried out and perfected first on white men and
women. Also tried out and perfected first on white men and women
was the theory of racism. It is not the least of the paradoxes of this
period that Colonial masters used the traditional Sambo and the
minstrel stereotypes to characterize white servants, who were said
to be good-natured and faithful but biologically inferior and sub-
ject to laziness, immorality and crime.
And thus the seed that was going to develop into modern racism was planted.
That is worth noting. For the first one hundred years during the period of
European exploration into the broader world, Europe as well as Africa was a
hunting ground for slaves. Sometime during the second century of the settle-
ment of America, the white slaves began to shake off their bondage. They became
racists rapidly in order to identify themselves with the rest of white America.
They measured their identification and their status to the extent that they
were furtherest from the red man and the black man in appearance and in
human consideration. It was only then that the color factor became prevalent in
black and white relationships.
In his chapter "Red and Black" Bennett shows that the relationship between
blacks and Indians was both good and bad. Some blacks joined whites in a fight
against the Indians and some blacks joined the Indians in a fight against the
LITERATURE OF RACE AND CULTURE 215

whites. In the Seminole wars in Florida, blacks and Indians joined in the most
meaningful alliance of those groups that is on record about the Seminole wars.
General Thomas Sidney Jesup was moved to say in the 25th Congress, 2nd
Session, 1837-38:
This, you may be assured, is a negro, not an Indian war; and if it
be not speedily put down, the South will feel the effects of it on
their slave population before the end of the next season.
Because the winters were long in New England and black labor could not be
used the year round, slavery in this part of America was not as successful as
in the South. In the chapter "The Black Founding Fathers," Bennet shows how a
class of freed blacks developed into the first responsible black elite. These men
took it upon themselves to use their acquaintanceship with the basic literature
of their day in order to ask relevant questions about the promise of America.
Against great odds they founded the early black churches, newspapers, maga-
zines, and community institutions. To a present generation of young blacks who
talk so much and know so little of nineteeth century black culture, this chapter
should be compulsory reading.
In the chapter "The World of the Slave," Bennett gives us a panoramic view
of the way slaves lived and how they struggled against their environment. It
was during this period that the slaves began to learn what most slaves learned
eventually, that their masters were unworthy of ruling them. This was the begin-
ning of the liberation of the mind that would ultimately loosen the chains on the
slaves no matter how tight they had been.
Freedom came at last and was well paid for in spite of the denial by many
white historians, Lerone Bennett tells us in "Jubilee." From the latter part of
the eighteeenth century to the eve of the Civil War, blacks were instruments
of their own liberation as well as partners with white abolitionists who had
their own reasons for participating in black liberation. These nineteenth century
blacks, written about with such great feeling and understanding in this book,
laid the basis for black radical activity in the twentieth century. I do not think
that we are going to understand present-day movements until we have a
clearer picture of their nineteenth-century antecedents. We have the pictures
here. All we have to do is to view them and understand them.
John Henrik Clarke
Hunter College

CLASS AND CASTE AGAIN


SOCIAL INEQUALITY: CLASS AND CASTE IN AMERICA. By Lucile Duberman. Philadel-
phia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1976; 314 pp. No Price Indicated.
In Social Inequality Lucile Duberman sets for herself the task of disentangling
the complex lacings of social inequality. Three explicitly stated objectives for
the book are offered: to acquaint undergraduate sociology students with the
study of inequality; to bring some clarity and order to the chaotic state of this
field; and to treat the caste component of the stratification system.
The author offers several closely connected reasons for the need of a book of
this type, all of which in her view are in turn related to a general neglect of
the area by sociologists. Accordingly, she reasons that since sociologists, like
most other Americans, have geneuinely believed that opportunity is open to
individual effort and that America is truly a democratic society (with all that
that implies) they have been unwilling to face the social realities that counter
this smug view of the American society.

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