Books by John H. Bracey, Jr.

Black Nationalism in America (1970)  / Conflict and Competition: Studies in the Recent Black Protest Movement (1971)

Free Blacks in America, 1800-1860 (1971) / American slavery: The question of resistance (1971) / Black Matriarchy: myth or reality? (1971) 

  / Black Workers and Organized Labor  (1971)  / Black in the Abolitionist Movement (1971) /   / The Rise of the Ghetto (1971)  / The Black Sociologists (1971)

   Black Protest in the Sixties (1991)  / African-American Women and the Vote (1997)

Strangers and Neighbors  (1999)  / African American Mosaic (2004) / Papers of the NAACP  (2006)

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Black Nationalism in America.

Edited by John H. Bracey, Jr., August Meier, and Elliott Rudwick. New York, The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1970.

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Introduction

 (John H. Bracey, Jr., August Meier, Elliott Rudwick--July 1969)

John Bracey sketches his interpretation of black nationalism:

First, Black America exists in a state of colonial subordination to White America. Black America is a colony. It is and has always been subjected to political, economic, social, and cultural exploitation by White America. These circumstances define Black America's "underdevelopment" as a nation. Political decisions are made by whites outside the black community; no black bourgeoisie with any meaningful economic power has been allowed to develop, and the major vehicles for cultural expression such as schools, radio, television, and the printed media are under white control.

Second, black nationalism is a variety of the nationalisms of non-Western peoples in general, and of the black peoples of Africa and the West Indies in particular. Years ago in his study of this question for the Carnegie-Myrdal volume, An American Dilemma, Ralph Bunche noted that the same historical conditions that produced nationalism throughout the Western and non-Western worlds were operative in the United States among black Americans.

Third, the development of black nationalism has been slow and winding, but persistent and intensifying, from 1787, if not earlier, to the present. The documents in this volume testify to the persistence of nationalist ideologies and institutions. To even consider the idea of "integrating" black churches and social clubs requires tremendous effort. To compare the experience of Black America to that of immigrant groups who came to the United States voluntarily is to distort the reality that for the vast majority of black people most of the time they have spent in this country has been as slaves. And few slaves, if any, were ever concerned with joining the "mainstream" of American society. The documents in Part Five of this book certainly indicate the intensification and pervasiveness of nationalism today.

Fourth, the different social strata of Black America exhibit nationalism in varying degrees. The intensity or strength of black nationalist sentiment and institutions can generally be related both tot he colonial status of black Americans. Black nationalism has shown greater strength and persistency in the minds and institutions of lower—class blacks than among the black upper classes and intelligentsia. Historic factors account for this, as they account for the slow and uneven development of black nationalism, but there is no justification for the view that nationalism is of little importance among blacks or no more than an "extremist" ideology.

In antebellum United States, north and south, free Negroes, because they were few, beleaguered, and cut off from meaningful contact with the enslaved black masses, were limited in the development of nationalist alternatives to mutual-aid and fraternal societies, separatist churches, conventions, and emigration schemes. the enslaved masses developed the "invisible church" as E. Franklin Frazier so aptly puts it, as their chief nationalist expression.

After the Civil War the nationalism of the masses of freedom asserted itself in aspirations for "40 acres and a mule" and for emigration to Africa and elsewhere. But black political leaders who tended to be middle and upper class opted for the limited but tangible benefits of assimilation, and the masses, left without leadership, channeled their nationalistic impulses into their churches and into further development of their folk culture. The nationalist stance of some black church leaders at the turn of the century is not surprising, given such impulses among their constituents.

In the next generation Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, whose contrasting ideologies are paralleled among black leaders in colonial Africa and the West Indies, symbolized the bourgeois nationalisms of the masses and of the western-trained elites during this period. Du Bois was too ambivalent, Washington set the price for the development of an economic base for nationhood too high, a broad multiclass nationalist movement failed to develop. Given the strident racism and imperialism, perhaps such a nationalist movement could not develop at this time in Black America any more than it could in colonial Africa or the West Indies.

After World War I Garvey tapped the latent nationalism of the masses, but he failed for a number of reasons to come to grips with the bourgeois nationalism manifested in Du Bois's Pan-Africanism, or the Harlem Renaissance. Consequently, through the 1920s the black masses remained separate from their potential leaders and thinkers. The jobs movements of the Depression demonstrated that the masses still harbored nationalist feelings. So did the thrust from local black communities in the South to secure the "equal" side of the Supreme Court's "separate but equal" formula. In the fifties and sixties the integration movement was middle-class run and oriented: no one can contend that the pressure of the black masses produced the Brown vs Board of Education decision in 1954, or that there was then any great rush of lower-class blacks to get their children into white schools.

In the sixties with the combination of successes and failures of the civil rights movement, some younger middle-class blacks turned more and more to a nationalist rhetoric in an attempt to gain wide support for their essentially assimilationist goals and to maximize any gains from the annual summer rebellions of the lower-class blacks. Since then, the unstructured rebellions of the black lower classes have been linked to the articulated rhetoric and ideologies of the black middle-classes and intelligentsia. for the first time in the history of the United States, there is a full-blown black nationalist movement with nationalist leadership and a nationalist ideology which is accepted and openly espoused through all strata of the black population. Bourgeois and cultural nationalism predominate, but such groups as the League of Revolutionary Black Workers suggest the prospect of a strong, continuing revolutionary wing of nationalism.

This interpretation of the sources and nature of black nationalism will, of course, be subjected to the charge of insufficient monographic evidence. But this is more an indication of the antilower class and antinationalist bias of most historians—black or white—of the black experience—than it is of overinterpretation on my part. It is true that scholars have written little on the subject; but I would argue that one of the few detailed studies we have of black nationalism, written by one of my co-editors, supports my contention that today's black nationalism results from a long historical development and is not merely a specific response to immediate conditions. More research is needed. But for scholars to ignore the actions of the black masses and the many manifestations of black nationalism, and then to decry the lack of evidence on which to base any conclusions, is to have one's cake and eat it too.

Our disagreement as scholars mirror a larger disagreement in American society. the future of the black man is still very much undecided. We think or readers will agree that the centuries-old conflict between White America's rhetoric of equality and the reality of oppression will continue, as will the conflict between Black America's blackness and its "Americanness."

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Contents

Source: Black Nationalism in America. Edited by John H. Bracey, Jr., August Meier, and Elliott Rudwick. New York, The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1970.

posted 26 January 2007

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updated 19 October 2007

John H. Bracey, Jr. has taught in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American— Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst since 1972. His major interests are in African American social history, radical ideologies and movements, and the history of African American Women; more recently his interests have focused on the interactions between Native Americans and African Americans and Afro-Latinos in the United States. He previously taught Afro-American history at Northern Illinois University and at the University of Rochester. During the 1960s, he was active in the Civil Rights, Black Liberation, and other radical Movements in Chicago.

His publications include several co-edited volumes, including Black Nationalism in America (1970), African-American Women and the Vote: 1837-1965 (1997), Strangers and Neighbors: Relations Between Blacks and Jews in the United States (1999), and African American Mosaic: A Documentary History from the Slave Trade to the Present (2004). Professor Bracey has co-edited (with the late August Meier and Elliott Rudwick) a number of other volumes on various aspects of African American experience. Bracey's scholarship also includes editorial work [with August Meier and Sharon Harley] on the microfilm series Black Studies Research Sources (University Publications of America), which includes the Papers of the NAACP, A. Philip Randolph, Mary McLeod Bethune, the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs, and Horace Mann Bond.

Books by John H. Bracey, Jr.

Black Nationalism in America (1970)  / Conflict and Competition: Studies in the Recent Black Protest Movement (1971)

Free Blacks in America, 1800-1860 (1971) / American slavery: The question of resistance (1971) / Black Matriarchy: myth or reality? (1971) 

  / Black Workers and Organized Labor  (1971)  / Black in the Abolitionist Movement (1971) /   / The Rise of the Ghetto (1971)  / The Black Sociologists (1971)

   Black Protest in the Sixties (1991)  / African-American Women and the Vote (1997)

Strangers and Neighbors  (1999)  / African American Mosaic (2004) / Papers of the NAACP  (2006)

Sources: U Mass  / Bracey Bio