What is Black American Culture? (inspired by The Salon)

[IllmaticDelta]

related

 

[South Side Reject]

One of the best threads I've seen on here. It should be stickied.
IllmaticDelta and K.O.N.Y serving it up like scholars.

 

[hatechall]

Yes indeed. Haitians retained a good number of some African cultural traits, but still a lot were lost during slavery and their culture is very unique compared to other African culture. One would think Haitian vodou is the exact same copy and paste of African Vodun, but its not Vodou actually has strong European Catholic influence along with African Vodun influence. If you go to the deep south AA culture retained significant amount of African cultural traits i.e the Gullah and see this thread. So if we are going to talk about Haitians retaining more of their African "roots" than AA's than we have to know which specific region in the south, because for example in some places in the south AA's still retained African based Martial Arts "Knocking and Kicking".

I'd never heard of this before. Unfortunately, there's not much info on it.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

related

One of the most popular "HillBiIlly" associated songs ever...

Statue of John Henry outside the town of Talcott in Summers County, West Virginia

A sign by the C&O railway line near Talcott, West Virginia.

John Henry is an African-American folk hero and tall tale. He is said to have worked as a "steel-driving man"—a man tasked with hammering a steel drill into rock to make holes for explosives to blast the rock in constructing a railroad tunnel. According to legend, John Henry's prowess as a steel-driver was measured in a race against a steam powered hammer, which he won, only to die in victory with his hammer in his hand as his heart gave out from stress. The story of John Henry is told in a classic folk song, which exists in many versions, and has been the subject of numerous stories, plays, books and novels.[1][2] Various locations, including Big Bend Tunnel in West Virginia, Lewis Tunnel in Virginia, and Coosa Mountain Tunnel in Alabama, have been suggested as the site of the contest.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Double standards and haters. It's funny how some will try to throw shade at AAVE (Black Dialect aka Ebonics) without understanding it's roots and not realizing that Creole/Pidgins/AAVE all came about the same way. For example...



Misconceptions About “Black Dialect”


I would like to shed some light on black dialect, which some individuals now call “Ebonics,” and how such came to be. It kinda irks me that people keep referring to it as being “made up” or some sort of street slang. They think it’s the same thing that you might hear from rappers which really isn’t the case. Black Dialect or Ebonics originated in the American south from slaves and eventually spread out when blacks began to leave the South. In fact, if you want to see or hear it in it’s true form just go find some old slave narratives or even old Blues lyrics. Rappers actually rap in a a combination of “Black Dialect” and street slang. Real black dialect has no slang. Black dialect is really Southern White American English with Africanisms. It formed the same way West African pidgins, Jamaican Patois and Creoles formed. Famous African American writers like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Paul Dunbar wrote many of their works in this dialect.

What people call "Ebonics" today used to be called "Black Dialect" or "Black English". A quick history comparing "Black Dialect or Ebonics" "Gullah" and West African Pidgins


Southern American English




The Gullah Creole and "black dialect" are related. The main difference is that "Black Dialect" is closer to Standard English while Gullah has more pure African influence. One can say that "Black Dialect" is watered down Gullah. Yall may not know this but an AfroAmerican Gullah speaker and a Jamaican Patois speaker can somewhat understand each other but speakers of "Black Dialect" can't understand either one. An article take from the Jamaican-Gleaner website...

A follow up to this post in regards to Afram AAVE, slang and jargon

Rapping and the Dancehall style (they call it Deejaying in Jamaica) are cousins and here is the connection
black american oral traditions---->Jive/Patter---->Scatting--->Jazz/tribal poetry-->Rapping
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Jive/Patter + scatting-->Toasting--->Deejay===Dancehall style

The Story Of English Program 5 Black On White

Program five in the series Story of English examines the origins of Black English, beginning with the influx of Africans to the American continent caused by the slave trade. In the American south, Gullah is spoken on the Sea Islands near the South Carolina coast. The old plantations bred a different strain and other regions of the south are equally unique. Footage of pidgin English speakers in West Africa is also featured. This video also discusses the roots of rap, the uses of rap in public schools, and jive talk with Cab Calloway -- including showing the efforts of non-African-American entertainers to utilize the style, with mixed success.

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[IllmaticDelta]

It's more than music....must have missed this post from me...









Folklore and Oral traditions
Gospel
Shout Bands/music
Negro spirituals
Dance
HBCU
Baptist-Holiness-Pentecsotal church
Fashion
Food
Regional subcultures
Blues
Zydeco
Rock/Rock n Roll
Gullah-Geeche
Louisiana Creole
Black Indians
Mardi Gras Indians
Afro Seminole
Funk
HipHop
Jazz
Jazz funeral
Religious subcultures
Hoodoo
Voodoo
Brass Bands
HBCU bands
Black Cowboys/Rodeos
Speech/Dialects
Slang
Soul
Disco
House music
Electronic dance
Rural related culture
Civil Rights
Black Power/Pan-Africanism/Afrocentrism

...plus many other things


keep in mind that this is what makes up the modern "Afroamerican" identity and culture ..


One thing people must remember is the full blown modern AfroAmerican identity came about due to the struggle and jim crow laws. Before that, you had people with regional flavors culturally and you had different classes of AfroAmericans or what came to be Black Americans.


Origins of African-American Ethnicity or African-American Ethnic Traits


The newly formed Black Yankee ethnicity of the early 1800s differed from today’s African-American ethnicity. Modern African-American ethnic traits come from a post-bellum blending of three cultural streams: the Black Yankee ethnicity of 1830, the slave traditions of the antebellum South, and the free Creole or Mulatto elite traditions of the lower South. Each of the three sources provided elements of the religious, linguistic, and folkloric traditions found in today’s African-American ethnicity.30


http://essays.backintyme.biz/item/19

posted elsewhere but I'll post them here

 

[IllmaticDelta]

the slave traditions of the antebellum South

 

[IllmaticDelta]

The Origin of Sweetgrass Baskets

Sweetgrass baskets are almost identical in style to the shukublay baskets of Sierra Leone, where learning to coil baskets "so tightly they could hold water" was an important rite of passage in West African tribes like the Mende and the Temne.

This basket-making tradition came to South Carolina in the 17th century by way of West African slaves who were brought to America to work on plantations. West Africa resembles South Carolina in both climate and landscape, and rice had long been cultivated there. In slaves, plantation owners gained not only free labor but also a wealth of knowledge and skill.

One such skill was basketry. Using a type of marsh grass known as bulrush, slaves coiled sturdy, intricate work baskets called fanners. Fanners were used for winnowing, the process of tossing hulls into the air to separate the chaff from the rice. Other work baskets held vegetables, shellfish, and later, cotton.

Sweetgrass Baskets - South Carolina State Handicraft

Coil Baskets Weave History

 

[IllmaticDelta]

..more southern plantation related culture

African American Christianity, Pt. I:
To the Civil War

The story of African-American religion is a tale of variety and creative fusion. Enslaved Africans transported to the New World beginning in the fifteenth century brought with them a wide range of local religious beliefs and practices. This diversity reflected the many cultures and linguistic groups from which they had come. The majority came from the West Coast of Africa, but even within this area religious traditions varied greatly. Islam had also exerted a powerful presence in Africa for several centuries before the start of the slave trade: an estimated twenty percent of enslaved people were practicing Muslims, and some retained elements of their practices and beliefs well into the nineteenth century. Catholicism had even established a presence in areas of Africa by the sixteenth century.

UVA Lib.
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Funeral in Guinea, west Africa, drawn by a French painter, ca. 1789 (detail)

UVA Lib.
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"Heathen practices in funerals," drawn by a Baptist missionary in Jamaica, ca. 1840 (detail)

Preserving African religions in North America proved to be very difficult. The harsh circumstances under which most slaves lived—high death rates, the separation of families and tribal groups, and the concerted effort of white owners to eradicate "heathen" (or non-Christian) customs—rendered the preservation of religious traditions difficult and often unsuccessful. Isolated songs, rhythms, movements, and beliefs in the curative powers of roots and the efficacy of a world of spirits and ancestors did survive well into the nineteenth century. But these increasingly were combined in creative ways with the various forms of Christianity to which Europeans and Americans introduced African slaves. In Latin America, where Catholicism was most prevalent, slaves mixed African beliefs and practices with Catholic rituals and theology, resulting in the formation of entirely new religions such as vaudou in Haiti (later referred to as "voodoo"), Santeria in Cuba, and Candomblé in Brazil. But in North America, slaves came into contact with the growing number of Protestant evangelical preachers, many of whom actively sought the conversion of African Americans.

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Slaves baptized in a Moravian congregation, drawing entitled "Excorcism-Baptism of the Negroes" in a German history of the Moravians (United Brethren) in Pennsylvania, 1757 (detail)

Religion and Slavery

In the decades after the American Revolution, northern states gradually began to abolish slavery, and thus sharper differences emerged in the following years between the experiences of enslaved peoples and those who were now relatively free. By 1810 the slave trade to the United States also came to an end and the slave population began to increase naturally, making way for the preservation and transmission of religious practices that were, by this time, truly "African-American."

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UVA Lib.

Slave preaching on a cotton plantation near Port Royal, South Carolina, engraving in The Illustrated London News, 5 Dec. 1863
On Secret Religious Meetings
"A Negro preacher delivered sermons on the plantation. Services being held in the church used by whites after their services on Sunday. The preacher must always act as a peacemaker and mouthpiece for the master, so they were told to be subservient to their masters in order to enter the Kingdom of God. But the slaves held secret meetings and had praying grounds where they met a few at a time to pray for better things." Harriet Gresham, born a slave in 1838 in South Carolina, as reported by her interviewer, ca. 1935


"[The plantation owner] would not permit them to hold religious meetings or any other kinds of meetings, but they frequently met in secret to conduct religious services. When they were caught, the 'instigators'—known or suspected—were severely flogged. Charlotte recalls how her oldest brother was whipped to death for taking part in one of the religious ceremonies. This cruel act halted the secret religious services." Charlotte Martin, born a slave in 1854 in Florida, as reported by her interviewer, 1936


"Tom Ashbie's [plantation owner] father went to one of the cabins late at night, the slaves were having a secret prayer meeting. He heard one slave ask God to change the heart of his master and deliver him from slavery so that he may enjoy freedom. Before the next day the man disappeared . . . When old man Ashbie died, just before he died he told the white Baptist minister, that he had killed Zeek for praying and that he was going to hell." Rev. Silas Jackson, born a slave in 1846 or 1847 in Virginia, as transcribed by his interviewer, 1937
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more excerpts
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Julia Cart

A Gullah "praise house," a surviving example of slaves' secret meeting places, and its pastor, Rev. Henderson; St. Helena Island, South Carolina, 1995

This transition coincided with the period of intense religious revivalism known as "awakenings." In the southern states increasing numbers of slaves converted to evangelical religions such as the Methodist and Baptist faiths. Many clergy within these denominations actively promoted the idea that all Christians were equal in the sight of god, a message that provided hope and sustenance to the slaves. They also encouraged worship in ways that many Africans found to be similar, or at least adaptable, to African worship patterns, with enthusiastic singing, clapping, dancing, and even spirit-possession. Still, many white owners insisted on slave attendance at white-controlled churches, since they were fearful that if slaves were allowed to worship independently they would ultimately plot rebellion against their owners. It is clear that many blacks saw these white churches, in which ministers promoted obedience to one's master as the highest religious ideal, as a mockery of the "true" Christian message of equality and liberation as they knew it.
In the slave quarters, however, African Americans organized their own "invisible institution." Through signals, passwords, and messages not discernible to whites, they called believers to "hush harbors" where they freely mixed African rhythms, singing, and beliefs with evangelical Christianity. It was here that the spirituals, with their double meanings of religious salvation and freedom from slavery, developed and flourished; and here, too, that black preachers, those who believed that God had called them to speak his Word, polished their "chanted sermons," or rhythmic, intoned style of extemporaneous preaching. Part church, part psychological refuge, and part organizing point for occasional acts of outright rebellion (Nat Turner, whose armed insurrection in Virginia in 1831 resulted in the deaths of scores of white men, women, and children, was a self-styled Baptist preacher), these meetings provided one of the few ways for enslaved African Americans to express and enact their hopes for a better future.

African American Christianity, Pt. I: To the Civil War, The Nineteenth Century, Divining America: Religion in American History, TeacherServe, National Humanities Center


what yall know about the African based frenzy dance known as the "Ring Shout" basically being the origin of "getting the holy ghost" action

Hear that Dembow/reggaeton beat they're beating/stomping out

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Mojo Workin': The Old African American Hoodoo System

In this book, Katrina Hazzard-Donald explores African Americans' experience and practice of the herbal, healing folk belief tradition known as Hoodoo. Working against conventional scholarship, Hazzard-Donald argues that Hoodoo emerged first in three distinct regions she calls "regional Hoodoo clusters" and that after the turn of the nineteenth century, Hoodoo took on a national rather than regional profile. The first interdisciplinary examination to incorporate a full glossary of Hoodoo culture, Mojo Workin': The Old African American Hoodoo System lays out the movement of Hoodoo against a series of watershed changes in the American cultural landscape. Throughout, Hazzard-Donald distinguishes between "Old tradition Black Belt Hoodoo" and commercially marketed forms that have been controlled, modified, and often fabricated by outsiders; this study focuses on the hidden system operating almost exclusively among African Americans in the Black spiritual underground.

Mojo Workin'

If you listen to older Blues, they make many references to Hoodoo


John the Conqueror

John the Conqueror, also known as High John the Conqueror, John de Conquer, and many other folk variants, is a folk hero from African-American folklore. He is associated with a certain root, the John the Conqueror root, or John the Conqueroo, to which magical powers are ascribed in American folklore, especially among the hoodoo tradition of folk magic.



Black cat bone

A black cat bone is a type of lucky charm used in the African American magical tradition of hoodoo. It is thought to ensure a variety of positive effects, such as invisibility, good luck, protection from malevolent magic, rebirth after death, and romantic success.[1]

...Got a black cat bone
got a mojo too,
I got John the Conqueror root,
I'm gonna mess with you...

—"Hoochie Coochie Man," Muddy Waters
The bone, anointed with Van Van oil, may be carried as a component of a mojo bag; alternatively, without the coating of oil, it is held in the charm-user's mouth.[2]


Mojo (African-American culture)

Mojo /ˈmoʊdʒoʊ/, in the African-American folk belief called hoodoo, is an amulet consisting of a flannel bag containing one or more magical items. It is a "prayer in a bag", or a spell that can be carried with or on the host's body.

Alternative American names for the mojo bag include hand, mojo hand, conjure hand, lucky hand, conjure bag, trick bag, root bag, toby, jomo, and gris-gris bag.[1]


Goofer dust

Goofer dust is a traditional hexing material and practice of the African American tradition of hoodoo from the South Eastern Region of the United States of America.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

The Black Yankees

The newly formed Black Yankee ethnicity of the early 1800s differed from today’s African-American ethnicity. Modern African-American ethnic traits come from a post-bellum blending of three cultural streams: the Black Yankee ethnicity of 1830, the slave traditions of the antebellum South, and the free Creole or Mulatto elite traditions of the lower South. Each of the three sources provided elements of the religious, linguistic, and folkloric traditions found in today’s African-American ethnicity.30

Black Yankee ethnicity was also not the same thing as membership in America’s Black endogamous group. The difference between Black Yankee ethnicity and Black endogamous group membership is that ethnicity is to some extent voluntary whereas which side of the color line you are on is usually involuntary. Mainstream America assigns to the Black side of the endogamous color line people of many different ethnicities whose only common trait is a dark-brown skin tone. These include West Indians, some East Indians (sometimes), recent African immigrants, and (until recently) African-looking Muslims and Hispanics. Finally, the endogamous color line was imposed in 1691 but the earliest evidence of Black Yankee ethnicity dates from the mid 1700s.

Although less wealthy than the Louisiana Creoles, the Black Yankees had developed a strong supportive culture that could withstand the buffeting of social upheaval. They were usually ostracized from mainstream society due to the endogamous color line. According to contemporary accounts, they responded with grace and dignity, making a virtue of their separation. It was not uncommon to see lines of quiet, well-behaved children following their parents to Sunday service with the gravitas and pietas of Roman elders. Their preachers taught that they were put on earth to be tested.31 Their lot was to serve as example to the white folks of how civilized Christians behave.

Most Black Yankees distinguished themselves from slaves—indeed many families had no history of slavery but descended from indentured servants. Nevertheless, many were active contributors to and activists in the abolition movement. This is in strong contrast to the biracial elite of the Gulf coast and Latin America, who owned slaves and defended slavery as a noble institution.32 The contrast was due to the lack of an independent Black ethnicity among Hispanic planters of part-African ancestry, and this lack was due, in turn, to the absence of an endogamous color line.

In some ways, Black Yankee culture (religion, language, music, dance, food, costume) was indistinguishable from that of White Yankees. For example, the boisterous interactive style of many African-American church services today would have been alien to them, since it originated in the slaveholding South. Daniel A. Payne was a Black Yankee, a career AME minister in Philadelphia. He was a sympathizer of the Underground Railroad, so its organizers asked him to preach to a group of newly escaped slaves. His diary reports:

After the sermon, they formed a ring, and with coats off sung, clapped their hands and stamped their feet in a most ridiculous and heathenish way. I requested that the pastor go and stop their dancing. At his request they stopped their dancing and clapping of hands, but remained singing and rocking their bodies to and fro.33

Although the endogamous color line was stricter in the antebellum North than in the antebellum South, it was less strict in 1850 and 1860 than in 1970 and 1980.34 The children of interracial marriages in the Northeast were usually census-reported as “Negroes” rather than as “Mulattoes.” This resembles today’s customs and contrasts with the more permeable color lines of the lower South. According to Joel Williamson, “In 1850 in the five states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, mulattoes actually outnumbered blacks by 24,000 to 22,000, while in the older-settled New England and Middle Atlantic states blacks outnumbered mulattoes by about three to one.”35


The Black Yankees set many of the patterns of modern African-American life. They developed the supportive church-centered social structure found in African-American communities today. Long before the South was segregated, they faced isolation and cyclical rejection by mainstream society. They were also the first to articulate the dilemma that continues to occupy Black thinkers to this day: integration versus separatism.

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[IllmaticDelta]

the free Creole or Mulatto elite traditions of the lower South

 

[IllmaticDelta]

@ 1:00



The info below gives some info on the dynamics of the line of demarcation between the "old issue negroes" and the newly freed slaves in Carolinas and Virginia



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[IllmaticDelta]

Part detective tale, part social and cultural narrative, "Black Gotham" is Carla Peterson's riveting account of her quest to reconstruct the lives of her nineteenth-century ancestors. As she shares their stories and those of their friends, neighbours, and business associates, she illuminates the greater history of African-American elites in New York City. "Black Gotham" challenges many of the accepted "truths" about African-American history, including the assumption that the phrase "nineteenth-century black Americans" means enslaved people, that "New York state before the Civil War" refers to a place of freedom, and that a black elite did not exist until the twentieth century. Beginning her story in the 1820s, Peterson focuses on the pupils of the Mulberry Street School, the graduates of which went on to become eminent African-American leaders. She traces their political activities as well as their many achievements in trade, business, and the professions against the backdrop of the expansion of scientific racism, the trauma of the Civil War draft riots, and the rise of Jim Crow. Told in a vivid, fast-paced style, "Black Gotham" is an important account of the rarely acknowledged achievements of nineteenth-century African Americans and brings to the forefront a vital yet forgotten part of American history and culture

Another influential "Black Yankee"

James McCune Smith (April 18, 1813 – November 17, 1865)

was an American physician, apothecary, abolitionist, and author. He is the first African American to hold a medical degree and graduated at the top in his class at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. He was the first African American to run a pharmacy in the United States.

In addition to practicing as a doctor for nearly 20 years at the Colored Orphan Asylum in Manhattan, Smith was a public intellectual: he contributed articles to medical journals, participated in learned societies, and wrote numerous essays and articles drawing from his medical and statistical training. He used his training in medicine and statistics to refute common misconceptions about race, intelligence, medicine, and society in general. Invited as a founding member of the New York Statistics Society in 1852, which promoted a new science, he was elected as a member in 1854 of the recently founded American Geographic Society. But, he was never admitted to the American Medical Association or local medical associations.

He has been most well known for his leadership as an abolitionist; a member of the American Anti-Slavery Society, with Frederick Douglass he helped start the National Council of Colored People in 1853, the first permanent national organization for blacks. Douglass said that Smith was "the single most important influence on his life."[1] Smith was one of the Committee of Thirteen, who organized in 1850 in New York City to resist the newly passed Fugitive Slave Law by aiding fugitive slaves through the Underground Railroad. Other leading abolitionist activists were among his friends and colleagues. From the 1840s, he lectured on race and abolitionism and wrote numerous articles to refute racist ideas about black capacities.

The first African American to receive a medical degree, this invaluable collection brings together the writings of James McCune Smith, one of the foremost intellectuals in antebellum America. The Works of James McCune Smith is one of the first anthologies featuring the works of this illustrious scholar. Perhaps best known for his introduction to Fredrick Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom, his influence is still found in a number of aspects of modern society and social interactions. And he was considered by many to be a prophet of the twenty-first century. One of the earliest advocates of the use of "black" instead of "colored," McCune Smith treated racial identities as social constructions, arguing that American literature, music, and dance would be shaped and defined by blacks.

The absence of James McCune Smith in the historiographic and critical literature is even more striking. He was a brilliant scholar, writer, and critic, as well as a first rate physician. In 1882 the black leader Alexander Crummell called him "the most learned Negro of his day," and Frederick Douglass considered him the most important black influence in his life (much as he considered Gerrit Smith the most important white one). Douglass was probably correct when, in 1859, he publicly stated: "No man in this country more thoroughly understands the whole struggle between freedom and slavery, than does Dr. Smith, and his heart is as broad as his understanding."

As a prose stylist and original thinker, McCune Smith ranks, at his best, alongside such canonical figures as Emerson and Thoreau. His essays are sophisticated and elegant, his interpretations of American culture are way ahead of his time, and his experimental style and use of dialect anticipates some of the Harlem Renaissance writers of the 1920s. Yet McCune Smith has been completely ignored by literary critics; and aside from one article on him, he has remained absent from the historical record.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

As I said before, the "Afram" ethnicity and culture is very multi layered and more complex than many people realize. Afram splinter or subgroups are very regional for example (this also gives more context into the mullato or creole traditions of the lower south)

Basically the Lumbee became an offshoot of Aframs because they didn't want to adhere to the basic 2 tier USA colorline. The ancestors of the Lumbees were called "old issue negroes" which meant they were free(d) before the Civil War.


Free People of Color in the USA

Many free people of color were born free. By the 19th century, there were flourishing families of free coloreds who had been free for generations. In the United States many of the "old issue" free people of color (those free before the Civil War) were descended from African Americans born free during the colonial period in Virginia. Most of those were descendants of white servant women who entered into relationships with African men, indentured servant, slave or free. Their relationships demonstrated the fluid nature of the early working class, before institutionalized slavery hardened lines between ethnic groups. Many of their descendants later migrated to the frontiers of North and South Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee, and west, as well as further south

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The people who are known as Lumbees today refused to go to schools with newly freed slaves. This is how they got their own school and helped further their identity as "Indians" rather than "Coloreds-Mulattos-Negroes-Blacks"

Education and recognition

In 1868 the legislature elected during Reconstruction created a new constitution, which established a public education system for the first time in North Carolina. In an effort to re-establish white supremacy, the following year the state legislature required segregated schools to be established for whites and blacks (in the whites view of the binary society, free people of color, or African descended, were essentially included in the latter category because of slavery history). The ancestors of the Lumbee, long free, objected to having to send their children to school with the children of newly emancipated slaves.

Following Reconstruction, in 1885, through the effort of the Democratic representative Hamilton MacMillan, the North Carolina legislature formally recognized the people in Robeson County as "Croatan Indians." It authorized them to establish separate schools for their children. By the end of the 19th century, the "Indians of Robeson County" (as they then were named) established schools in eleven of their principal settlements.[31]

In 1887, the Indians of Robeson County petitioned the state legislature to establish a normal school to train Indian teachers for the county's tribal schools. With state permission, they raised the requisite funds, along with some state assistance, which proved inadequate. Several tribal leaders donated money and privately held land for schools. Robeson County's Indian Normal School has evolved into Pembroke State University and later still, the University of North Carolina at Pembroke

Lumbee | World Public Library - eBooks | Read eBooks online