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Books by Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Daughters of the Diaspora: Afra-Hispanic Writers
(2003 /
Singular Like a Bird: The Art of Nancy Morejon
(1999)
The
Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells (1995) /
Erotique Noire/Black Erotica
(1992) /
Homespun
Images
( 1989)
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A Black By Any
Other Name . . .
By
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
A name is an expression of
individual or group identity, so
the word that an ethnic group
uses to identify itself has
important historical, political,
and even philosophic
ramifications. For example,
Native Americans reject the term
“Indian,” a misnomer which
reflects the ignorance of
European explorers, in favor of
a name that identifies them as
the autochthonous inhabitants of
this country.
Black Americans have used
various names—African, colored,
negro, Afro-American, Black, and
African American—to identify
themselves. Sometimes these
terms were used interchangeably,
but, more often than not, one
term predominated during a
particular historical period.
Until about 1915 (through
slavery, Reconstruction, and the
post-reconstruction periods) the
word “colored” was commonly used
to designate persons of African
descent, and even as late as
1909, when the National
Association of Colored people
was founded, and 1912, when
James Weldon Johnson’s important
The Autobiography of
an Ex-Colored Man was
published, the term was still in
general usage.
Beginning in 1915 with the
advent of World War I and the
migration of Blacks from the
South to the North and from
rural areas to urban centers,
Black people in this country
espoused new concepts of self
and of race. The publication of
Alain Locke’s The New Negro
in 1924 and Carter G. Woodson’s
initiation of Negro History Week
in 1926 and his founding of the
Journal of Negro History
[1916] and of the Association of
the Study of Negro Life and
History inaugurated a new period
in Black cultural development.
The shift from “colored” to
“Negro” in popular usage
reflected a profound change in
racial ideology. For the first
time, there was a collective
affirmation of ethnicity on both
the political and the cultural
levels, as evident by the Garvey
movement and the Harlem
Renaissance in the arts. From
1915 to 1965, the word “Negro”
symbolized the prevailing
ideology, that Black People
could realize their greatest
potential through integration
into the mainstream of American
society.
In 1965, however, Malcolm X
enunciated his concept of
blackness and initiated a
movement that hastened a
profound effect In very phase of
American life—politics,
education, business, the arts,
etc. Malcolm committed a radical
and revolutionary act by
rejecting the term “negro” in
favor of the word “Black,” and
in so doing (1) he placed the
protest movement of the 1960
within the historical context of
Black nationalism, (2) he
established a confrontational
dichotomy—Black versus
White—which characterized race
relations in this country, and
(3) he rejected the White,
Anglo-Saxon, protestant, middle
class norm as a standard for
assessing Black culture.
In a brilliant stroke of genius,
Malcolm used the word “Black” to
affirm and to validate the
physical (dark skin, kinky hair,
wide nose, full lips) and the
cultural (Black speech, the
blues, gospel music, funkiness)
characteristics of the race.
Like Harriet Wilson in her 1859
novel
Our Nig, Malcolm
employed irony and semantic
inversion in using a term of
denigration as a means of racial
affirmation to move Black people
from the “If you’re white,
you’re all right; if you brown
stick around; if you’re black,
get back” mentality to a “Black
id beautiful” positive frame of
reference.
Historically, then
Afro-Americans have called
themselves “colored,” “Negro”
and “Black,” but even in the
earlier periods race leaders,
particularly the proponents of
militant racial protest,
consistently used “Black” as a
term of ethnic identification.
For example,
David Walker (1829) “ . .
. the world may see that we the
Blacks or Colored People
are treated more cruelly by the
white Christians of America.”
Nat Turner (1831) “ . . .
it had been said of me in my
childhood by those by whom I had
been taught to pray, both white
and black, . . . that I
would never be of any use to
anyone as a slave.”
Frederick Douglass (1852)
“There are seventy-two crimes in
the State of Virginia, which if
committed by a black man,
subject him to the punishment of
Death; while only two of the
same crimes will subject a white
man to the like punishment of
death.”
W.E.B. Du Bois (1903)
“Away with the black man’s
ballot, by force or fraud—and
behold the suicide of a race.”
Marcus M. Garvey (1923)
“Let white and black stop
deceiving themselves. Let the
white race stop deceiving
themselves. Let the white race
stop thinking that all black
men are dogs and not to be
considered as human beings.
Langston Hughes (1926)
“The road for the serious black
artist, then, who would produce
a racial art in most certainly
rocky and the mountain is high.”
Malcolm X (1960) “As a
collective mass of Black people
we have been deprived not only
of civil rights, but even our
human rights. The right to human
dignity . . . the right to be a
human being.”
Thus, the term has political
connotations, for it expresses
militant opposition to racial
oppression through its
association with black
nationalism, “ . . . a body of
social thought, attitudes, and
actions ranging from the
simplest expressions of
ethnocentriam and racial
solidarity to the comprehensive
and sophisticated ideologies of
Pan-Negroism or Pan-Africanism,”
according to John H. Bracey et
al in
Black Nationalism in America.
It is not by chance that W.E.B.
Du Bois, perhaps the greatest
theoretician of Black
nationalism in the twentieth
century, entitled his seminal
work
The Souls of Black Folk
in 1903.
A few individuals in the Memphis
community have suggested that
Blacks should call themselves
African American. To do so would
be to deny the historical
evolution of racial identity and
terminology, as well as the
political ideology inherent in
the concept of Blackness. A few
individuals argue that the term
“African American” is preferable
because it reflects our
geographic origins, but it is
our ethnicity and not our
geography which defines us as a
people. The word “African” does
not accurately describe our
ethnicity because the many-nationed
continent of Africa is
ethnically diverse, including
four major races: Black African,
European or Caucasian, Indian,
and Asian. Indeed, Black
Africans make up only 70% of the
continent’s population.
Secondly, the term “African”
does not accurately describe the
Black American, who has
undergone three hundred years of
struggle: the trauma of the
Middle Passage, the brutality of
slavery, the violence of the
segregation period, and a
cathartic rebirth in the Civil
Rights Movement. The existential
dimensions of his life in the
western hemisphere changed the
African into a Black American.
As Harold Cruse explained:
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“With regards to
African motherland,
the American Negro
is not an African,
not even remotely.
Not only has three
hundred years of
time separated him
culturally from
Africa, bit, also,
has several thousand
miles of
geographical
distance cut him off
from any kind of
real communication
with Africa. It must
be clearly
understood that our
racial and cultural
experience as a
group is distinctly
American” (from
[Raymond F] Betts,
The Ideology of
Blackness). |
Some elements of African
culture, however, did survive,
but they were changed into forms
that were distinctly American:
slave narratives, jazz, the cake
walk, gospel music, Uncle Remus
tales, the blues, etc.
We, Black Americans, have
selectively retained that which
is good in our African heritage,
but we have rejected the
customs, values, and lifestyles,
which are at variance with our
American reality. We reject
polygamy, note merely because it
is illegal in this country and
immoral in our church, but, more
importantly, because it leads to
the sexual exploitation of and
the economic exploitation of
children.
Let us
reaffirm our ethnic identity
through the continued use of the
term “Black American.”
March 1,
1984—3:00 am
LeMoyne-Owen
College
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Back in the days of SNCC, in its
last throes under Stokely C. and
Rap Brown, there was an advance
on the use of the terms
"colored," "Negro," and "Black."
From SNCC propaganda we learned
that these terms were stages of
consciousness. SNCC did not
emphasize like Malcolm so much
the cultural and the physical. I
remember having such a political
discussion with my girlfriend
Cecily then who was rather fair
(a cousin of Thurgood Marshall)
how the term "black" applied to
her.
Steve Biko use the word "Black,"
as well to refer to political
consciousness, as one can
discern from this quote: ""Being
black is not a matter of
pigmentation. Being black is a
reflection of a mental attitude"
(Steve
Biko: Black Consciousness in
South Africa).
In SNCC propaganda, "colored"
had an "upper" class
connotation. "Negro" was the
people in their state of
survival in their use of what
Sterling Plump called "black
rituals"; that is, they (the
Negro) were the collective
creators of blues, spirituals;
dances; tales, and other folk
forms identified as American
Negro. It was my feeling that
James Brown was more Negro than
black, though he popularized
"I'm Black and Proud." JB was
not about the liberation of
black people, which was the goal
of SNCC Black Power propaganda.
JB was an enterprising
entertainer.—Rudy
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I use the term Negro both ironically and seriously. Ironically, because currently we former Negroes no longer use that term to identify ourselves, preferring African American or Black, and yet both African American and Black are ambiguous with respect to identifying us as specifically and/or exclusively coming from the USA; in reality all Blacks who are born and reared anywhere in the western hemisphere are African Americans. Moreover, just as African does not identify where in Africa our ancestors came from, American does not identify where in the western hemisphere we come from unless one assumes the great nation chauvinism which claims that when we say American we are ipso facto talking only about the United States and that anywhere else in the western hemisphere is not America.
I use the term “Negro” seriously to specify that we are talking about those of us in the African Diaspora who were culturally shaped by and in turn have shaped and/or significantly influenced the culture of the United States of America. The term “Negroes” differentiates us from Afro-Cubans, Brazilians, Haitians or others “Blacks” born and reared in the Western Hemisphere. Negroes initiated the backbeat and the concept of swing in music. Samba, zouk, calypso, etc. do not have a pronounced backbeat, and those forms which do, such as reggae, do so as a direct result of the influence of “Negro” music.
The upshot of all of this is that when we abandoned “Negro” we actually muddied the water of self-identification, even as we thought we were making things clearer. In one sense we were clearer in identifying with Africa—which “Negro” obviously does not since there were and are no “Negroes” in Africa—but in another sense we confused the issue of the specificity of our Americaness by simply saying America. The irony is that we dropped one label and picked up another in an effort to be clearer, but our new term is actually more ambiguous than the older term even though the older term had its own limitations.—Kalamu
ya Salaam,
Let's Have Some Fun
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The title of a possible
discussion of the Negro in
Louisiana presents difficulties,
for there is no such word as
Negro permissible in speaking of
this State. The history of the
State is filled with attempts to
define, sometimes at the point
of the sword, oftenest in civil
or criminal courts, the meaning
of the word Negro. By common
consent, it came to mean in
Louisiana, prior to 1865, slave,
and after the war, those whose
complexions were noticeably
dark. As Grace King so
delightfully puts it, "The
pure-blooded African was never
called colored, but always
Negro." The gens de couleur,
colored people, were always a
class apart, separated from and
superior to the Negroes,
ennobled were it only by one
drop of white blood in their
veins. The caste seems to have
existed from the first
introduction of slaves. To the
whites, all Africans who were
not of pure blood were gens de
couleur. Among themselves,
however, there were jealous and
fiercely-guarded distinctions: "griffes,
briqués, mulattoes, quadroons,
octoroons, each term meaning one
degree's further transfiguration
toward the Caucasian standard of
physical perfection.—Alice
Dunbar-Nelson:
People of Color in Louisiana,
Part I. The Journal
of Negro History VOL. I., No. 4
October, 1916.
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Pilgrimage to an Ancestral Land:
Ghana /
Miriam in
Ghana
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Notable Black Memphians (Miriam
DeCosta-Willis)—This
biographical and historical study by Miriam DeCosta-Willis (PhD,
Johns Hopkins University and the first African American faculty
member of Memphis State University) traces the evolution of a major
Southern city through the lives of men and women who overcame social
and economic barriers to create artistic works, found institutions,
and obtain leadership positions that enabled them to shape their
community. Documenting the accomplishments of Memphians who were
born between 1795 and 1972, it contains photographs and biographical
sketches of 223 individuals (as well as brief notes on 122 others),
such as musicians Isaac Hayes and Aretha Franklin, activists Ida B.
Wells and Benjamin L. Hooks, politicians Harold Ford Sr. and Jr.,
writers Sutton Griggs and Jerome Eric Dickey, and Bishop Charles
Mason and Archbishop James Lyke—all of whom were born in Memphis or
lived in the city for over a decade. . . . |
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posted 17
June 2010 |
