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Students of African American history have often seen it as linear in character, beginning in slavery and moving broadly forward to emancipation and freedom. In his new book, "The Making of African America: the Four Great Migrations", Ira Berlin modifies and deepens the linear view. Berlin describes African American history as showing a "contrapuntal interplay of movement and place." (p. 19) He also emphasizes the active role of African Americans in creating their own identities and characters rather than in simply responding passively to the many hardships and indignities they were forced to endure. Berlin is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland. He has written extensively on African American history, with a focus on the 200 years of slavery.
Berlin's metaphor of a "contrapuntal" history is particularly telling because he emphasizes throughout the importance of music to the character of African American life. From the call and response patterns brought from Africa to the shouts and spirituals of the slaves, and through gospel, rock, jazz, and rap, African Americans have expressed themselves through music and enriched American life. Berlin is especially interested in the blues as a source of African American expression. In addition to music, Berlin sees family and religion as defining features of African American life over the centuries.
The book is organized around what Berlin describes as the Four Great Migrations in African American life and the intervening periods of relative stasis. The movements and the stasis create the counterpoint. Thus, the first migration involved the infamous Middle Passage in which members of many different peoples in Africa were captured and crossed the Atlantic in foul and unspeakable ships to become slaves. Ultimately, they lost their tribal identities to become African Americans. Upon reaching the eastern part of the United States, the new African Americans were able to learn a new language, adjust to a new place, and form family ties. Some of them won freedom at an early stage and some migrated elsewhere. This was the first period of stasis.
The second migration involves what Berlin calls the "Passage to the Interior". With the expansion of the United States, slave traders carried off many African Americans to the South and West uprooting families and the lives slaves had made for themselves in the East. After the Civil War, a period of stasis set in as African Americans were rooted to the land in the South and attempted to make lives for themselves as farmers or sharecroppers. There was little movement northward through the end of the Nineteenth Century.
The third migration was the "Great Migration" of the 20th Century during which African Americans reinvented themselves. Ultimately place changed. African Americans identified themselves as the most urban group in America rather than as overwhelmingly rural as had been the case in the 19th Century. Escaping farming, the boll weevil, and Jim Crow, African Americans were fought against the different forms of racial discrimination they faced in the North The aftermath of the migration was the formation of a new form of city life.
The final migration in Berlin's journey began in 1965 with the passage of both the Civil Rights Act and the Immigration and Nationality Act. As a result of the latter law, blacks from both Africa and from the Caribbean immigrated to the United States in numbers that had not been seen since the early 19th Century. The African Americans descended from those who endured the Middle Passage faced an uneasy relationship with the newcomers. At the outset of the book, Berlin recounts a meeting in which a recent Ethiopian immigrant in 2004 asked at a community meeting "am I not African American" and received a chorus of a response "no, no, no, not you."
African American life had to resolve itself again, this time between the individuals whose ancestors have lived in the United States for many years and the newcomers. The tension, and steps towards its resolution were epitomized in the election of Barack Obama to the presidency and the overwhelming support he ultimately received from the black community. President Obama, of course, is not a descendant of individuals who were subject to the Middle Passage or to American slavery.
With empathy and insight, Berlin's book offers an excellent overview of the history of African American life. It will enrich the reader's understanding of our nation's history and ideals.
