African Americans in the Modern Era

Included in this section are the following entries with the primary source documents listed below in italics.

Migration, Industrialization, and the City

Adapted from essays by Carlo Rotella, Boston College

Last Affair: Bessie's Blues Song by Michael Harper Excerpt from Manchild in the Promised Landby Claude Brown

The History of African American Music

Adapted from essays by Lori Brooks, Berea College, and Cynthia Young

African American Folklore and Folkways

Adapted from essays by Edward Pavlic, University of Wisconsin

The African American Literary Experience

Adapted from essays by Emily Bernard, Smith College

A Poem for a General, by Phillis Wheatley, and His Response

"An Address to the Negroes of the State of New York" by Jupiter Hammon

"We Wear the Mask" by Paul Laurence Dunbar Excerpt from Invisible Manby Ralph Ellison "Bitter Fruit of the Tree" by Sterling Brown

The African American Family

Adapted from essays by N'tanya Lee; sidebar essays by Hallie S. Hobson

Letters from George Steptoe to William Massie

Deed for Sales of 2 Family Members

A Letter from Reverend J. W. C. Pennington to His Family Still in Slavery

The African American Religious Experience

Adapted from essays by Ian Straker

Letter from a Slave on the Subject of Religion

Excerpt from The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, A Coloured Lady

A Former Slave Discusses the Importance of Religion

Preamble to Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the United Statesby David Walker

The Autobiography of Omar ibn Said

From the year 1900 forward, African Americans began to make slow and steady progress toward the goal of becoming full-fledged members of American society. At many times the progress did not seem to consist of many appreciable advances. Given the legacies of slavery and the Deep South, however, African Americans had an extraordinary journey to undertake. If one considers that nine out of ten black Americans still lived in the South at the beginning of the twentieth century, one realizes both how short the relative history of African American social advance has been and just how far African Americans have come in one hundred years.

By the early twentieth century, the age of the explorers of the American West had already largely passed. The buffalo had been cleared from the Great Plains, and the American Indians had been chased from many of the lands where they had settled after having been pushed westward decades before. The early westward migration had begun—not the Hollywood journey of the covered wagons, but the beginnings of the journey that would find its end in the dust bowls and the silent films that would put Los Angeles on the map for the rest of the world.

In Africa and India the age of colonial domination and pillage, along with missionary efforts to convert the indigenous "godless" populations, was still flourishing. In the United States a different sort of colonization—a colonization from within—was emerging out of the poor and miserable circumstances of necessity and migration. African Americans began to leave the South in droves, the bulk departing during two distinct waves, one occurring approximately between 1915 and 1930 and the second in the post-World War II era between 1945 and 1965. Many left for western Texas, Kansas City, the Southwest, and California. Many more traveled north to Chicago, St. Louis, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. This segment of American history is recorded in the migratory tracks of the spirituals coming out of the southern plantation societies; the evolution of blues, rag-time, and swing into jazz music; and a secondary progression of all these sources into the roots of rock and roll, soul, and—in the last quarter of the twentieth century—rap and hip-hop. While music is by no means the only, or even the principal contribution of African Americans during the twentieth century, it does provide an excellent example of the weave of black American cultural influences within the development of modern American culture.

And this fact is not without its own very particular and powerful significance. The weaving of African and European traditions—the extraordinary confrontation between these two bodies of cultural information—coincides exactly with the rise of the American empire.

If one asks a young child today on the other side of the globe what the word America means, the immediate response is likely to be embodied in two names: Michael Jackson and Michael Jordan. While in the writing of serious history, it may be considered glib to try to convey the significance of any period by invoking the name of a popular music entertainer or professional athlete, this reality has special import as far as the story of America and African Americans in the twentieth century is concerned. The migration of African Americans north, and specifically into the great northern American cities, is the story of the rise in the collective fortunes of the United States. Put another way, much as Paris was the great capital city of the world during the nineteenth century, or Rome was considered such two thousand years ago, the eyes of the world turned to New York during the twentieth century. Principal among the reasons for the world's collective fascination with New York were those elements of American culture that were invented by black Americans during a century in which they struggled to gain full membership in the larger American society.ﾀﾀ