Michael O. West refers back to Booker T. Washington, a man
who some might consider anti-intellectual, and his speeches that disapproved of
academics. Washington made his opinions clear, in that there was no use in a
man studying French if his home and farm were neglected. After Washington’s
death I 1915, W.E.B. DuBois would become the new voice for Black American
education, and the push for industrial training would be replaced by
Pan-Africanism. The introduction makes clear that that there were those who
favored industrial education, those who favored regular academics, and those
who favored Afrocentrics, and they would all come to blows.
Celeste Day-Moore,
of Hamilton College, provides the first essay in the book, and explores the
early Black intellectuals as Francophiles. Maybe they saw French as an entry
ticket into a world of beautiful things? Did DuBois, who’d been to Europe, see
the French bohemian life as a way of living cheap with plenty of time for
study? Black intellectuals, on arriving in Paris, used to find themselves free
of all the racism they’d known at home. They brought their love of all things
French back to the USA, and Black colleges were now a hotbed of Francophilia.
Day-Moore titles
her essay “Every Wide-Awake Negro Teacher of French Should Know” and recounts
how the Black colleges all taught French. It would be a way of making a window
into the outside world, away from all the racist confines of American life. She
suggests that the Black US troops in WWI experienced the color-blindness in
France, and that is a perfectly intelligent suggestion. However, she doesn’t
mention, and nor did the Black troops see, the amount of hostility towards the
Senegalese troops who were fighting in France. My only real problem with her
essay is that she name-drops a huge number of Black luminaries whom I’ve never
heard of. The footnotes take up as many pages as the essay itself! Perhaps she
should create a course based entirely on this essay?
Next comes Reena
Goldthree, with her essay on Bernardo Ruiz Suarez and his 1920’s studies of the
Latino versus American Black man. Her study, like that of Suarez, explore the contact
between the Black American and the Spanish-African, and whether there would be
any progress through unity. Ruiz Suarez had faced racism in his native Cuba, as
one of only three men of African ancestry to graduate from law school in
Havana. He would also have been aware of an earlier movement in Cuba called The
Independents of Color (unfortunately unknown to most US students) who were
massacred by US-backed forces. One of the questions of the author, and that of
Ruiz Suarez in the 1920’s, was whether the Black man would lose his identity
through encounters with Whites, and whether the Spanish-Black man would lose
HIS identity through absorption with the English-speakers. Though not quoted by
Goldthree, the memoir Down These Mean
Streets explores this topic as well; the author, a dark-skinned Latino, is
both drawn in the Black underworld, and at the same time pushed into it, by
both racist whites and his own family’s shame of having African ancestry.
This book contains
essays on the Black American response to hate, the refuge in the Black
churches, and (as studied by DuBois) how those Black churches may have held
progress back. A strong theme in this book is how the Black intellectuals,
desperate to escape racism, were on the lookout for new ways of expansion.
Prior to the 1970’s (most of these essays focus on the pre-radical era) there
was greater emphasis on exploring fields normally occupied by Whites.
Ruiz-Suarez wanted to learn what made 1920’s America great, and tried to break
from the confines of anti-Black racism in Cuba. Then there was DuBois, the
Ivy-League educated academic, and the various Pan-Africanists in the USA. I’ll
give this book credit for unbiased reporting, but also for unearthing a trove
of writing that I would otherwise never have known.
No comments:
Post a Comment