www.newsandletters.org
|
|
NEWS & LETTERS, April 2002
Column: Black-Red View by John AlanBush's Black museum While it was not in the headlines or announced on the six o'clock news, on Dec. 28 President Bush signed legislation to establish a presidential commission of 23 members to create a National Museum of African American Culture in the mall in Washington, D. C. This legislation was introduced by Rep. John Lewis, and quickly sailed through both houses of Congress. During the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, Lewis was a militant leader of SNCC and thought that the idea of the 1963 March on Washington was unduly tame. Whoever these commissioners may eventually be, they should be aware that they can't separate African-American culture from the African-American history of freedom struggles. And if they do so, they would be guilty of presenting an African-American culture outside of the unique life of a nation divided into two races since the 17th century. Culture is not merely a work of art, a novel, a painting or music. It is a whole way life, filled with contradiction, alienation and the will of many people to overcome the contradictions and create a world without estrangement. The Abolitionists and the runaway slaves created a substantial culture, which opposed the culture of slavery by organizing a permanent attack against the institution in newspapers, pamphlets, books and mass meetings. They used every available cultural form to put American slavery on trial. For example, during the bitter debate over the fugitive slave law and whether or not the U.S. Constitution was pro-slavery, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote and published UNCLE TOM'S CABIN, the most popular anti-slavery novel. Whether you like Stowe's novel today or not, for its time it was a great leap forward in American culture when the new self consciousness of the opponents of slavery refused to merge with state power and wealth and began to distinguish itself from them. The culture created by Abolitionists makes freedom its actual goal and not a hope or a theory. They built an organization to make the North a haven of freedom for runaway slaves and an underground railroad to carry them there. This encouraged many slaves to devise their own ingenious methods of escape, such as using forged free papers to prove their status as a free person if it became necessary. Fredrick Douglass, the most famous of ex-slaves, used a sailor's free papers to board a train from Maryland to the North. In other cases, men disguised themselves as women and women disguised themselves as men. The continuous underground resistance and open rebellion against slavery and the culture created by slaves and Abolitionists brought on the American Civil War and, at the same time, changed the original purpose of that war from preserving the Union into a war to abolish slavery. As we know, the freedom culture promoted by the Abolitionists didn't survive very long after the emancipation of the slaves; it was brutally replaced by a rapacious culture of monopoly capitalism, white supremacy and lynching. The immediate reaction that many Southern African Americans had to this regime of terror was to organize and migrate to Kansas. On the other hand, Booker T. Washington, the influential head of the Tuskegee Institute, urged African Americans to stay in a segregated violent South and work hard to develop its capitalist economy. This division between Washington's economic philosophy and African-American masses acting on their own thinking generated a debate among African-American leaders for decades. 'TASK WAS TO DEFINE CULTURE' W.E.B. DuBois thought that Washington's philosophy of voluntary surrender asked African Americans to give up their political power, civil rights and higher education. However, when hundreds of thousands during World War I and the 1920s left the South, on their own volition, to live and work in urban areas of the North, it made the debate about Booker T. Washington's accommodation philosophy vanish into thin air. This historic migration by African-American masses at the same time was a change in their self-consciousness. Alain Locke, a prominent Africa n-American intellectual at that time, wrote that the result of the migration was the birth of a "New Negro." According to Locke, this "New Negro" was freeing himself from the degrading negative images imposed upon him and finding himself as he really was, a people with a rich culture. Locke wrote: "The task of the New Negro was to define his culture and his contribution to what had been thought a white civilization." Locke wrote those words when the Harlem Renaissance was booming. A time when African-American novelists, poets, artists, jazz composers, musicians and dancers were creating a new vibrant culture rooted in their own experience. Today, African Americans still must emphatically define their culture not only as museum pieces that show their integrality to American culture, but their contribution to enrichment of the idea of freedom in an area in which white civilization has been impoverished. |
|
Home l News & Letters Newspaper l Back issues l News and Letters Committees l Dialogues l Raya Dunayevskaya l Contact us l Search Published by News and Letters Committees |
