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

IllmaticDelta

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Mardi Gras Indians

In March 2009 the American Festivals Project headed to New Orleans, where African Americans have been "masking Indian" for Mardi Gras since the 1880s. Some say the inspiration was a touring Wild West show; others say it was to honor Indians who aided runaway slaves. No one really knows. The Mardi Gras Indian ritual includes songs and dances, fellowship, and rivalry.






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All on a Mardi Gras Day is the story of New Orleans’ black carnival traditions: the Zulus, Indians, Baby Dolls, Skeletons and the men and women who carried on these traditions for over a century. This one hour documentary was originally aired nationally on PBS stations, and received the Louisiana Filmmaker Award at the New Orleans Film Festival. Set to the beat of classic New Orleans music from Professor Longhair, the Meters, Dr. John, Earl King and the Wild Magnolias, this film has become a carnival tradition of its’ own.
 

IllmaticDelta

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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)

to add to that

They (that old issue negro stock of Virginians) didn't all try to become "Indians" though, so today you have people that are related where some identify as "Lumbee Indian", "Afram and Lumbee or Black Indian" and others only as "Afram". For example



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(Afram identified but of the same stock as Lumbee identified people)


What is 'PenderROCK'?

In the beginning was the Walker Family Reunion. Then came the Wheelers. Then came the Williams. So it became the Walker+ Family Reunion.

There used to be the Jacobs Family Reunion. There was also the Merritt Family Reunion. They beget the Jacobs-Merritt Family Reunion.

The Walker+ people and the Jacobs-Merritt people are kin. They started having reunions together -- the Jacobs-Merritt/Walker+ Family Reunion.

The name became rather long and cumbersome.

Who are these people and why are they all in the same family group? They are descendants of people who have lived in Pender County since at least 1765 (Esther Jacobs was on the tax roll that year). They were colored people. They were colored beige. They were colored yellow. They were colored red. They were colored brown.

North Carolina had many clans of free colored people. Each clan was heavily interrelated and was also related to neighboring clans. So the Pender colored people are kin to the Robeson colored people and the Sampson colored people and the Brunswick & Bladen & Columbus colored people.

Some of the other people no longer identify themselves as “colored”. They have become Indian or white. The Pender people continued to be called colored or mulatto. Today, they self-identify as black and/or African American. But they’re still colored beige and colored yellow and colored red and colored brown. And they’re still trying to be free.


Half of the surnames [Jacobs, Messick, Walker, Wheeler] have lived in Pender County since the 1700s. Thus, the combined reunion was renamed the Pender Reunion Of Colored Kindred (PenderROCK).

Half of the families [West, Merritt, Williams] came to Pender from nearby Sampson County in the 1880s. PenderROCK has been strengthened by the increasing attendance of Sampson County cousins who share the same lineage

PenderROCK > 'PenderROCK'?


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IllmaticDelta

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Black Indians

Black Indians are people of mixed African-American and Native American heritage, who have strong ties to Native American culture.[2] Many Indigenous peoples of the Eastern Woodlands, such as the Narragansett, Pequot, Lumbee and Cherokee, have a significant number of African ancestors.



We Still Live Here: Black Indians of Wampanoag and African Heritage.

Brought to you by Anne Makepeace and Makepeace productions, “We Still Live Here” is a documentary that gives insight into the complexities of defining identity when you are both of African and American Indian descent. The documentary features Black Indians of Wampanoag and African heritage sharing their experiences and perspective on issues like retaining their rich cultural heritage and encountering colorism.



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What was it like to write the screenplay about the African Burial Ground?

It was a lot of hard work, but I actually enjoyed it because, again, it's the family interest. I had an opportunity to tell the story about how Africans had helped to build New York, which was something that was totally missing from New York history books. The discovery of this burial ground was really proof that Africans had been here, not just a few, but -- you may know the burial ground was about five to six acres in size, and they estimated about 20,000 men, women, and children were buried there. So for me to be able to help correct the history of the city of New York, it was a lot of hard work, but it was very gratifying, one of the most gratifying experiences of my life.

It was difficult for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was finding images of the Africans. I think one of the most difficult aspects of putting this documentary together was collecting the illustrations of enslaved Africans at work. But I found a wonderful artist by the name of Charles Lilley, and his illustrations are used throughout the documentary. I gave him illustrations of Europeans at work, and through those early illustrations we basically were able to indicate the manner in which Africans did their work. And that work, in New York, was clearing the land, clearing the roads. Broadway then was actually a narrow Native American trail that the Africans had to widen. Greenwich Village, in the 17th century, was made up of farms. So getting the illustrations to help people understand the lives of the workers was really the most difficult part.

Did you find any of your family inside the burial ground?

No. I tried to find documentation, and I now maintain that I have a reason to believe, and a belief beyond reason, that I had family in that African Burial Ground. But, no, I do not have documentary evidence of that.

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What relationship did the Native Americans have with the African Americans?

You came to the right guy. It's an interesting relationship that Native Americans and African Americans have, because many of the first Africans who were brought here as slaves intermarried with the Native Americans. Many of them ran away. A lot of the slave runaways went to Native American communities throughout the East Coast. That's why today if you meet the Native Americans from Maine -- the Mi'kmaq, the Narragansett, the Pequot, the Ramapough, the Shinnecock, the Powhatan -- and all the way up to the northeastern seaboard, they're usually identified as "black Indians" because they have intermarried with Africans as well as with Europeans.

My family history is the Lenape [Native Americans] who intermarried with the first Africans and some of the first Dutch. My great-great-grandfather was Samuel DeFreese -- my mother's name was DeFreese, that's a Dutch name. Some others in the family were named de Groot and van Dunk, and, basically, they are the descendants of the Lenape who were here for thousands of years. And so when the Africans and the Dutch arrived in the 1600s, in my family they didn't just fight, they also married. And so that's the legacy of this particular family.

Do you feel that your research on the burial ground has left a lot of questions unanswered or a lot of information that you don't know?

When you're really doing research and finding answers, that always leads you to areas where you've got more questions. And it's very true at the burial ground. Just by bringing the information about the burial ground to light, in this particular case, at least we have a classroom on Manhattan Island that's thinking about the burial ground. You have your own questions. You pose questions today that I've never heard about the burial ground. So, hopefully, the whole track of learning and discovery is going to lead to more information.

Why, in your opinion, was the burial ground excavation such a big discovery in New York?

I think the burial ground excavation was a big discovery because of the opportunity to learn about a part of American history which really has not been explored. Most of the history books written before the discovery of the burial ground usually place the presence of African Americans on the periphery. They say, "There was slavery, but it didn't really happen in the North." Well, a five-acre burial ground with 20,000men, women, and children on Manhattan Island is an indication that there was a presence of Africans here.

I think the discovery of the burial ground is very important because it really opened the window into the past. It gave us an opportunity to see what the role of slaves was in the United States. Very often we think of slavery as being something in the Southern states -- the Carolinas and Mississippi and Alabama -- of blacks picking cotton. Well, you learned an important part of history in that the presence of Africans on Manhattan Island showed that they were colony builders.
That when they came here with the European settlers, they were the ones who cleared the land for the town of New Amsterdam, they were the ones who cleared the roads, they cleared the fields for the farms. And they didn't just do it on Manhattan Island, they did this literally from Albany to Argentina. All along the eastern seaboard in the Americas and the Caribbean, enslaved workers in the 16th century and 17th century were primarily helping to build the colonies.








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I heard a lot of statistics in the video, like infant mortality rate or how slaves were treated. What statistic is most important to you?

If I had one statistic of slavery to share -- and I'm not even sure it's in the film -- it's the fact that from 1492 to 1776, of the 6.5 million people who came to the Americas, 5.5 million were Africans. If there's a statistic from the burial ground, it's the fact that of the 419 remains that were excavated, over 40 percent were children under the age of 12. Those to me are some very important facts to know.

You know all this information to write that script for the documentary about the cemetery. How did you find this out? Did you find out from interviewing people, or if you knew it previously, how did you find that out?

I was fortunate in that my family history went back to the era of the African Burial Ground and earlier. So when the burial ground was unearthed in 1991, I had that as a sort of background. That gave me a passion; it didn't give me much information. But then I had to go study more at the various libraries, and find as many experts as I could. I found some of the finest experts, like James Shenton, who is on the burial ground video. He is a professor at Columbia University and author of some of the most popular history books in America. And T. J. Davis is another historian. I found some of the finest historians, sociologists, archaeologists, scientists who were knowledgeable on the subject, and they helped to tell the story, which is the way you put together a documentary. You get as much research as you can, and then you find the people who know more than you and you tap them. You have to learn to take advantage of the sources, the resources, because if you want to tell the story, you want to get the best information.

How did finding the skeletons in the African Burial Ground affect you personally?

I sort of marveled at the skeletons. I never had a real interest in skeletons; they were just part of the project that I signed on to do a documentary about. I frankly didn't think it was appropriate to photograph the skeletons. I didn't think it was appropriate to excavate the skeletons, but this was something that was being done. And, to me, if we're going to find any value in this whole project, I felt that I had to try to do right by the skeletons. I would try actually to tell their story. They certainly weren't capable of telling their own story. Maybe they do in some ways, just by the images. Maybe I was totally wrong about it being inappropriate to videotape them, because they themselves are now the evidence of their own lives, and they allow students and adults to see them. You can form your own conclusions and raise your own questions about their lives.

When you went on the site, did you find it very emotional to be able to see all these bodies and skeletons -- like what could be your ancestors and everything?

You hit the right button. Any connection, any thought I had that this was an ancestor of mine, then it would move me. But I would try to use that passion to contact another expert, read another book. It was empowering to me. It was invigorating whenever I connected my own family to the burial ground.

Teaching Multicultural Literature . Workshop 6 . Authors and Literary Works . Interview




These areas are historically known for "Black Indians"

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IllmaticDelta

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outsider culture is the only common strain that unites all AAs.

The most common bond that all Aframs shared was music of the church and shared experiences/the struggle.


everything else breaks down along regional differences

Afram culture is very regional but it all flows cross-country.
 

NZA

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The most common bond that all Aframs shared was music of the church and shared experiences/the struggle.




Afram culture is very regional but it all flows cross-country.
the black church is the most mainstream historically, but black faith is now pretty diverse. a lot of black people come from different religious traditions. especially in the north east where islam and judaism are relatively common among black folks. their music traditions differ from the church.
 

IllmaticDelta

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the black church is the most mainstream historically, but black faith is now pretty diverse. a lot of black people come from different religious traditions. especially in the north east where islam and judaism are relatively common among black folks. their music traditions differ from the church.

Those aren't that big of a factor though on a larger scale.
 

IllmaticDelta

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New Orleans Brass Band Tradition








The tradition of brass bands in New Orleans, Louisiana dates to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Traditionally, New Orleans brass bands could feature various instrumentations, often including trumpets, trombones, clarinets, saxophones, sousaphones and percussion. The music played by these groups was often a fusion between European-styled military band music and African folk music brought to the Americas by west African slaves and the idiom played a significant role in the development of traditional jazz. Early brass bands include the Eureka Brass Band, the Onward Brass Band, the Excelsior Brass Band, the Tuxedo Brass Band, the Young Tuxedo Brass Band, the Camelia Brass Band, and the Olympia Brass Band.

The Treme Brass Band, while not as old, has members who have been influential throughout New Orleans Brass Band music, as well as being renowned in its own right.

A well-known use of these bands is for the New Orleans jazz funeral.

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Jazz Funeral





One of the more distinguished aspects of New Orleans culture is the jazz funeral. Architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe noted in 1819 that New Orleans jazz funerals were "peculiar to New Orleans alone among all American cities." The late jazzman Danny Barker, writing in his book Bourbon Street Black, noted the funeral is seen as "a major celebration. The roots of the jazz funeral date back to Africa. Four centuries ago, the Dahomeans of Benin and the Yoruba of Nigeria, West Africa were laying the foundation for one of today's most novel social practices on the North American Continent, the jazz funeral."

The secret societies of the Dahomeans and Yoruba people assured fellow tribesmen that a proper burial would be performed at the time of death. To accomplish this guarantee, resources were pooled to form what many have labeled an early form of insurance.

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When slaves were brought to America, the idea of providing a proper burial to your fellow brother or sister remained strong. As time passed, these same concepts that were rooted in African ideology became one of the basic principles of the social and pleasure club. As did many fraternal orders and lodges, the social and pleasure club guaranteed proper burial conditions to any member who passed. These organizations were precursors to debit insurance companies and the concept of burial insurance.

The practice of having music during funeral processions, Danny Barker said, was added to the basic African pattern of celebration for most aspects of life, including death. As the brass band became increasingly popular during the early 18th century, they were frequently called on to play processional music. Eileen Southern in The Music of Black American wrote, "On the way to the cemetery it was customary to play very slowly and mournfully a dirge, or an 'old Negro spiritual' such as 'Nearer My God to Thee,' but on the return from the cemetery, the band would strike up a rousing, 'When the Saints Go Marching In,' or a ragtime song such as 'Didn't He Ramble.' Sidney Bechet, the renowned New Orleans jazzman, after observing the celebrations of the jazz funeral, stated, "Music here is as much a part of death as it is of life.




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In the 1970s and 1980s, the New Orleans brass band tradition experienced a renaissance, with bands breaking away from traditional stylings and adding elements of funk, hip hop, and bop to their repertoires. Some notable exponents of this style of brass band include the band Def Generation, members of the next generation of Nevilles who created hip hop over live brass bands influencing, Soul Rebels Brass Band, Rebirth Brass Band, the Stooges Brass Band, the Hot 8 Brass Band, the Lil Rascals Brass Band, Youngblood Brass Band and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band. Also, a number of groups outside the United States have begun playing this style of music.

The style of the music is often characterized by the use of the sousaphone in place of a bass violin to play the bass-line. The sousaphone may play a traditional jazz walking bass-line or groove on a riff. Trumpets, trombones, saxophones, and other horns play melodies and harmonies loosely over the bass-line. Often the lines are greatly embellished with improvisation. A typical setup includes two percussionists, one playing a marching bass drum and a cymbal mounted on the drum and another playing a snare drum (the snare drummer often switches to a drum kit when not marching). Many variations on this exist, including the use of additional percussionists, cymbals, drums, whistles and Scratch DJ's.

The style has moved beyond New Orleans and can now be found in such places as Japan with the Black Bottom Brass Band; the Netherlands with the Happy Feet and the Hurricane brass bands; Scotland with the Criterion Brass Band; England with the Renegade Brass Band; Australia with the Horns of Leroy Brass Band; Phoenix, Arizona with the Bad Cactus Brass Band; Boston, Massachusetts with the Hot Tamale Brass Band; Hartford, CT with the Funky Dawgz Brass Band; Tennessee with Halfbrass; Minnesota with the Jack Brass Band and the Dirty Shorts Brass Band; Missouri with the Funky Butt Brass Band; Georgia with the Half Dozen Brass Band; Cincinnati, Ohio with The Cincy Brass; and Madison, Wisconsin with the Mama Digdown's and Youngblood;Richmond,VA No BS! Brass brass bands.

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NZA

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Those aren't that big of a factor though on a larger scale.
they actually are, from the influence of malcolm x, the million man march, 5%ers in hip hop, the black cultural and intellectual base has been trending further and further away from the black church. it's gotten to the point where if you see any black man with a beard in philly, you would probably be right to assume he was a muslim.

and i havent even mentioned the impact that secular communism of the black panthers and the afrocentric spirituality movement have had...

and back to music tradtions, today, so many young black people are disconnected from the church, gospel music, or even live musicianship, really.
 

Rhapscallion Démone

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Hip-hop, R&B, soul food, project/inner city/hood culture.

That's all I can think of.

I hate to say it, but there really isn't much that can constitute black culture in America...but it's ten times more than what white culture is (nothing).

I'm African though...and West Indian...we got our own culture. America is just a community culture and a clusterfukk in itself.
:mjpls:

African American Music genres
Gospel
Jazz
Swing
Blues
Rock and Roll
R&b
Soul Music
Motown
Funk
Disco
Hip hop
Neo Soul
House
New Jack swing
Crunk....and the list is goes on

Some African American Cultural Movements

The Harlem Renaissance
The Civil Rights Movement
The Black Power Movrment
The Black Arts Movement
Hip hop Movement
Black Lives Matter Movement

Some Genres and concepts of African American Literature

Black Poetry
Slave Narratives
Spiritual Narratives
Prose Narratives
Black short fiction
Short story cycle

We have our own unique culture and history too .....
 

IllmaticDelta

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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

As you know these were often intertwined



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W.E.B. Du Bois – The father of modern Pan-Africanism?


But this was not true. Du Bois was proud of his African ancestry and often talked of his African-born great grandfather, whom he said had been brought as a slave to America from the Gulf of Guinea. In 1923, Du Bois paid his first visit to Africa, to a region in Liberia where he believed his ancestors had come from. Despite Marcus Garvey’s attacks on him, Du Bois continued to be viewed by Africans as the father of modern pan-Africanism. His role in establishing the Pan-African Congresses and his agitation for an end to colonialism, made him an inspiration to many African leaders, among them Nigeria’s Nnamdi Azikiwe, who met him while a student in the US, and Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, who first met Du Bois at the 1945 Pan-African Congress in Britain. Also there was Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta and Malawi’s Hastings Banda.

W.E.B. Du Bois - The father of modern Pan-Africanism?


Pan-Africanism

Pan-Africanism, the idea that peoples of African descent have common interests and should be unified. Historically, Pan-Africanism has often taken the shape of a political or cultural movement. There are many varieties of Pan-Africanism. In its narrowest political manifestation, Pan-Africanists envision a unified African nation where all people of the African diaspora can live. (African diaspora refers to the long-term historical process by which people of African descent have been scattered from their ancestral homelands to other parts of the world.) In more-general terms, Pan-Africanism is the sentiment that people of African descent have a great deal in common, a fact that deserves notice and even celebration.

History of Pan-Africanist intellectuals
Pan-Africanist ideas first began to circulate in the mid-19th century in the United States, led by Africans from the Western Hemisphere. The most important early Pan-Africanists were Martin Delany and Alexander Crummel, both African Americans, and Edward Blyden, a West Indian.

Those early voices for Pan-Africanism emphasized the commonalities between Africans and black people in the United States. Delany, who believed that black people could not prosper alongside whites, advocated the idea that African Americans should separate from the United States and establish their own nation. Crummel and Blyden, both contemporaries of Delany, thought that Africa was the best place for that new nation. Motivated by Christian missionary zeal, the two believed that Africans in the New World should return to their homelands and convert and civilize the inhabitants there.

Although the ideas of Delany, Crummel, and Blyden are important, the true father of modern Pan-Africanism was the influential thinker W.E.B. Du Bois. Throughout his long career, Du Bois was a consistent advocate for the study of African history and culture. In the early 20th century, he was most prominent among the few scholars who studied Africa. His statement, made at the turn of the 20th century, that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line” was made with Pan-Africanist sentiments in mind.

For Du Bois, “the problem of the color line” was not confined merely to the United States and its “Negro Problem.” (During those years, it was common for many in the United States to refer to the problem of African Americans’ social status as the “Negro Problem.”) Du Bois’s famous statement was made with the clear knowledge that many Africans living on the African continent suffered under the yoke of European colonial rule.

Among the more-important Pan-Africanist thinkers of the first decades of the 20th century was Jamaican-born black nationalist Marcus Garvey. In the years after World War I, Garvey championed the cause of African independence, emphasizing the positive attributes of black people’s collective past. His organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), boasted millions of members, envisioning and then making plans for a return “back to Africa.” Garvey’s Black Star Line, a shipping company established in part to transport blacks back to Africa as well as to facilitate global black commerce, was ultimately unsuccessful.

From the 1920s through the 1940s, among the most-prominent black intellectuals who advocated Pan-Africanist ideas were C.L.R. James and George Padmore, both of whom came from Trinidad. From the 1930s until his death in 1959, Padmore was one of the leading theorists of Pan-African ideas. Also influential were Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire, who were natives of Senegal and Martinique, respectively. A disciple of Padmore, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, was also an important figure in Pan-Africanist thought.

Despite their origins outside the United States, such Pan-Africanist thinkers drew many of their ideas from African American culture. Furthermore, James and Padmore resided in the United States for significant periods of time. An exchange of ideas about Africa and peoples of African descent took place between those intellectuals and African Americans, with African Americans taking the lead. It was, in many ways, a black Atlantic intellectual community. Senghor and Césaire, in particular, were greatly influenced by Du Bois and by several Harlem Renaissance writers, especially Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay. In the 1930s and ’40s, the African American actor and singer Paul Robeson was also a significant contributor to the continuing exchange of ideas.

By the late 1940s the African American intellectual leadership of the movement had receded, with Africans now taking the lead. That was due in part to the leftist or communist sympathies of many Pan-Africanist advocates, as in the late 1940s and early ’50s, the United States was in the midst of a Red Scare, when Americans with communist affiliations or sympathies were actively persecuted and prosecuted. The most-important figure of this period was Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, who believed that European colonial rule of Africa could be extinguished if Africans could unite politically and economically. Nkrumah went on to lead the movement for independence in Ghana, which came to fruition in 1957. Many African Americans cheered those developments in Africa.

Pan-Africanist cultural thinking reemerged with renewed force in the United States in the late 1960s and ’70s as one of the manifestations of the Black Power movement. By the early 1970s it had become relatively common for African Americans to investigate their African cultural roots and adopt African forms of cultural practice, especially African styles of dress.

In subsequent decades perhaps the most-prominent current of ideas that can be called Pan-Africanist has been the Afrocentric movement, as espoused by such black intellectuals as Molefi Asante of Temple University, Cheikh Anta Diop of Senegal, the American historian Carter G. Woodson, and Maulana Ron Karenga, the creator of Kwanzaa. With its roots in the 1960s, Afrocentrism gained particular popularity in the United States during the 1980s. The movement emphasizes African modes of thought and culture as a corrective to the long tradition of European cultural and intellectual domination.

The Pan-African Congress movement
During the 20th century advocates of Pan-Africanism made many efforts to institutionalize their ideas and to create formal organizations to complement the work of Pan-Africanist intellectuals. The first meeting designed to bring together peoples of African descent for the purpose of discussing Pan-Africanist ideas took place in London in 1900. The organizer was Henry Sylvester Williams, a native of Trinidad. The meeting was attended by several prominent blacks from Africa, Great Britain, the West Indies, and the United States. Du Bois was perhaps the most-prominent member of U.S. delegation.

The first formal Pan-African Congress (the first to bear that name) took place in 1919 in Paris and was called by Du Bois. That meeting was followed by a second Pan-African Congress two years later, which convened in three sessions in London, Brussels, and Paris. The most-important result of the second Pan-African Congress was the issuance of a declaration that criticized European colonial domination in Africa and lamented the unequal state of relations between white and black races, calling for a fairer distribution of the world’s resources. The declaration also challenged the rest of the world to either create conditions of equality in the places where people of African descent lived or recognize the “rise of a great African state founded in Peace and Goodwill.”

After a third Pan-African Congress in 1923 and then a fourth in 1927, the movement faded from the world picture until 1945, when a fifth Pan-African Congress was held in Manchester, England. Given that Pan-Africanist leadership had largely transferred from African Americans to Africans by the mid-1940s, Nkrumah, Kenyatta, and Padmore played the most-prominent roles at that congress. The only African American present was Du Bois.

With the coming of independence for many African countries in the decades following World War II, the cause of African unity was largely confined to the concerns of the African continent. The formation of the Organization for African Unity (OAU) in 1963 solidified African leadership, although a sixth Pan-African Congress was held in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in 1974. A successor organization to the OAU, the African Union (AU), was launched in 2002 to further promote the social, political, and economic integration of Africa.

Calls for Pan-Africanism could still be heard in the United States at the turn of the 21st century, but by then the movement had generally come to stand for the unity of the countries on the African continent, especially sub-Saharan Africa.
Pan-Africanism
 

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The Pan-African Conference movement was begun in Chicago in 1893 with such people in the leadership as Bishop Henry McNeal Turner. This Pan-African movement continued with conferences held in England in 1900 under the direction of Trinidadian Henry Sylvester Williams, with W. E. B. DuBois and other African Americans playing a prominent role.

In the aftermath of World War I, the Pan-African movement was revived with DuBois organizing a Congress in Paris in 1919 with other leaders from the African world, including Addie W. Hunton, who had gone to France during the war to work with African-American servicemen suffering under deplorable conditions.

The [Marcus] Garvey Movement—the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA)—founded in Jamaica and relocated in New York, reached its zenith during the 1920s with millions of members and supporters, its Negro World newspaper and its establishment of chapters throughout the world, including the African continent.

www.workers.org/2007/us/detroit1967-0816/



Atrocities committed by the Belgians in Congo, the British in southern Africa and East Africa as well as the French, Germans, Spanish and Italians in other regions of the continent, had a tremendous impact on Africans living in the western hemisphere. The descendants of Africans who were enslaved in the North America, the Caribbean and Latin America, began to hold meetings on how they could have an impact on alleviating the problems of European intervention in their ancestral home. These Africans saw a direct connection between the colonialism, national oppression, racism and race terror inflicted on people in the West and the conditions under which people were living in the homeland.

As a result in 1893 the first noted Pan-African Conference was held in Chicago. This meeting, which lasted for an entire week, is now recognized as a turning point in the struggle of Africans to build an international movement against colonialism and imperialism and for national independence and continental unity.

The 1893 Chicago Congress on Africa predated by seven years the first formal international Pan-African conference that was held in London in 1900 under the direction of Trinidadian-born Henry Sylvester Williams. This Congress was attended by such activists as Bishop Henry McNeal Turner of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) and Bishop Alexander Walters of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ).

Although notables such as Edward Wilmont Blyden of Liberia and Booker T. Washington had promised papers but did not attend, a broad range of topic were discussed including “The African in America”, “Liberia as a Factor in the Progress of the Negro Race”, and a very challenging presentation entitled “What Do American Negroes Owe to Their Kin Beyond the Sea”.”

Henry McNeal Turner utilized the Chicago Congress to advance the notion of repatriation as a mechanism for building self-determination among Africans in the West and on the continent. He had warned the African-American people some months before that France had demonstrated territorial designs on the nation of Liberia.

This conference in 1893 pave the way for the Pan-African conference held in Atlanta, Georgia some two years later in 1895 that was sponsored by the Steward Missionary Foundation for Africa of Gammon Theological Seminary.

The 1895 meeting was attended by people such as John Henry Smyth, who served as a minister resident and consul general to Liberia. In his paper presented to the Atlanta gathering he stated that “European contact has brought in its train not merely the sacrifice, amid unspeakable horrors, of the lives and liberties of twenty million Negroes for the American market alone, but political disintegration, social anarchy, moral and physical debasements.”

Some two years later the African Association was formed in England on September 24, 1897. This organization was spearheaded by Henry Sylvester Williams, a lawyer from Trinidad, who would later play an instrumental role in organizing a Pan-African Conference in London in July of 1900. This gathering is often considered as the turning point in the world-wide struggle for African unity and liberation that characterized the 20th century.

During the period of the first decade of the 20th century, there were a number of efforts to form race organizations in the United States and other parts of the Diaspora. In 1905, the Niagara Movement was formed on the United States and Canadian borders.
Pan-African News Wire: The Expanding United States Economic and Military Role in Africa

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The Long March to Unity

From a group of black people with aspiration for the integration of the black society all over the world to the establishment of OAU, the later AU, Pan Africanism has come a long way through centuries. Here are the milestone happenings in the history of Pan Africanism.

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The Long March to Unity

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