That a people, once proud members of mighty African tribes, who had gone through slavery, pestilence, discrimination, segregation, and even natural disaster were able to survive and prevail against the odds is a prime example of the indomitable tenacity of the human spirit. Such a painful journey would have destroyed lesser beings but the story of the transplantation and transformation of the African American community has been one of the greatest flights of the human spirit in recorded history. That story, however, has been distorted and reconstructed originally as a means of control to discredit Blacks and to assuage the conscience of racists. Through continued repetition by the media and popular belief systems generation after generation of African Americans have also begun adhering to such false beliefs about their Black history and cultural identity that they themselves don't know the truth behind these stories and notions commonly held true but with no factual bases. The myths are many and varied, but they are generally organized around ten dominant notions.
1 The Myth of Tarzan and the Black Void
The popular myth depicts conquering Europeans carrying the blessings of civilization to naked "savages" who sat under trees, filed their teeth and waited for fruit to drop into their hands. This is a gross perversion of European and African history, for Europe’s eminence came after the fall of Africa and as a direct result of one of history’s greatest crimes, the 400-year horror called the slave trade. When this event started, life in some African states compared favorably with life in some European states. In fact, in some areas of Africans were a step or two ahead. Thus, on the West Coast of Africa, from whence came most of the ancestors of American Blacks, there were complex institutions ranging from extended family groupings to village states and territorial empires. Most of these polities had all the characteristics of modern states—armies, courts, internal revenue departments. Indeed, more than one scholar has paid tribute to the "legal genius of the African."
2 The Myth of Original Slavery
That Black people came to English America in slavery and White people came in freedom is not true at all. In fact the first Black immigrants, the 20 Africans who landed at Jamestown, Virginia, in August 1619, a year before the arrival of the Mayflower, were not slaves. Nor, for the most part, were the first Whites free. They came, these first Blacks, the same way that many, perhaps most, of the first Whites came — under duress and pressure. They found a system — indentured servitude — which made it possible for poor Whites to pay for their passage by selling their services to planters for a stipulated number of years. Under this system, which TV and textbooks generally overlook, tens of thousands of Whites were shipped to the colonies and sold to the highest bidder. In Virginia, then, as in other colonies, the first Black settlers fell into a well-established socioeconomic groove that carried with it no implications of racial inferiority. After working for a number of years as indentured servants, some were freed according to law and custom. Before the introduction of slavery, they accumulated land, voted, testified in courts and mingled with the masses of Whites on a basis of relative equality. And it should be borne in mind, in considering the myth of original slavery (read: sin), that freedom preceded slavery, and integration preceded racism.
3 The Myth of Immaculate White Creation
This myth fostered the erroneous idea that America was the exclusive creation of Europeans and the sons and daughters of Europeans when, in fact, America was founded not by Europeans alone but Europeans, Africans and Indians working together and in opposition in a complicated and counterpoint of interests, dreams and passions. As a matter of fact, Black explorers — servants, slaves and free men — were among the first non-Indian settlers of the land, and there is some evidence that African sailors explored the New World before Columbus. Blacks were with Pizarro in Peru, Cortes in Mexico, Menendez in Florida.
William Alexander Leidesdorff, for example, played a key role in the founding of San Francisco, and at least 26 of the 44 founders of Los Angeles were descendants of Africans. Nor can we forget Jean Baptiste Pointe Du Sable, who founded the city of Chicago, an event the Indians immortalized in the saying: "The first White man to settle in Checagou was a Black man."
4 The Myth of Absence
The myth of absence, which expresses this idea and intention, operates not by misinterpretation and slander but by silence and exclusion. By simply not mentioning certain realities and by removing Black actors from scenes in which they played supporting and sometimes starring roles, the manipulators of the myth change the color of the past and control perceptions and acts in the present. It is not accident, therefore, that the dominant images of popular history, the images of Minutemen, Pilgrims, Cowboys and Soldiers in Blue, are white images.
5 The Myth of Sambo
In almost all popular (and too many scholarly) discussions of this period, we are asked to accept a portrait of fat, happy, docile slaves who were almost members of the family, slaves who loved old "marsa" and "missus" with a passion and cried bitter tears when Lincoln "freed" them. Practically all of this is sheer fantasy. For although some Blacks (then and now) exploited the White fantasy for personal gain, most slaves maintained a sense of expectancy and resistance. Confronted with perhaps the most coercive social systems the world has ever known, these slaves resisted with every weapon they could lay hands on. They slew masters and mistresses in hand-to-hand combat. They poisoned whole families. They staged more than two hundred revolts and conspiracies. And they ran away in droves.
6 The Myth of the Broken Circuit
It is a myth promoting the false belief that the African American family bond is weak because Black love short-circuited during slavery and that the family unit further disintegrated during the Jim Crow era. But these stories have been proven untrue, for we now know from research and social studies that the Black family was a strong institution until at least the third decade of the 20th century. According to Herbert G. Gutman, author of The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, Black families were as stable as Southern White households and Northern White ethnic households until the 1930s.
7 The Myth of the Wayward Workers
The myth of the wayward workers makes its victims work and derides them for working. It maintains, in the face of the whole of American history, that Blacks are lazy and shiftless vagabonds who won’t work. But as everybody over 40 knows, the truth is an exact opposite. It was the work of Black workers, it was the work of unpaid and underpaid slaves and sharecroppers, that changed the flora and fauna of America and created the capital that made possible the economic growth from which they were excluded by fraud and violence. And one can say, with only slight exaggeration, that before Blacks were forced out of the work force, they were the only people in America who did any real work. This fact is embedded in the language, where the phrase, "to work like a Negro," acknowledges in an underhanded and often derogatory manner the falsity of the myth and America’s debt to Black workers.
8 The Myth of the Missing Economic Gene
For several years after emancipation, Blacks held their own in the open market, serving both Black and White customers. Then, as Jim Crow expanded, Black barbers, caterers and artisans were displaced and the myth of the missing economic gene was created to explain their absence. But the history of pioneer African and African-American business leaders and the achievements of modern entrepreneurs, who have created business empires despite great odds, tells us that there is nothing wrong with the business genes of Black folk that fair play and an open market would not cure.
9 The Myth of the Defiling Dole
It was internal giving, it was communal sharing and caring, that enabled Blacks to survive the vilest punishment inflicted on a people in the Western world. From the very beginning—read the slave narratives and the new studies by Black and White scholars — the slaves assumed responsibility for one another, and the slave tradition was deepened and extended in free Black communities, which organized their own United Ways. By 1831 there were more than 43 Black benevolent or mutual aid societies in Philadelphia alone. By that time, the free Blacks of Philadelphia and other cities were handling their own welfare cases. A White commentator said the free Blacks of New England were "seldom seen in the almshouses, for they have many benevolent societies... and in case of need are ready to help each other."
This tradition of self-help and communal support spilled over into the 20th century with the work of Black club women and Black ministers and fraternal organizations. There are men and women living today who remember the old communities of the South where it was traditional to go from house to house collecting pennies and dimes to bury indigents and care for the sick.
10 The Myth of the Crab Barrel
The myth refers to the behavior of crabs in a barrel, pulling down the one climbing higher up the container in order to get away first. This false belief compares human behavior to crabs, that people act like captured crustaceans who, according to the myth, pull down lucky crabs who reach the top of the barrel.
Perhaps the best evidence against the myth is the endlessly repeated litany, from the days of George Washington to the days of Ronald Reagan, that Black people huddle together and refuse to betray one another. To counter this tendency, mythmakers use every medium to persuade Blacks, especially successful Blacks, to stand apart and stop identifying with other Blacks. Integration has intensified these efforts. If we can credit the evidence in Black Life in Corporate America, and other books to unusual lengths to keep integrated students and executives from talking to one another and supporting one another.
Despite centrifugal forces, inevitable in a situation of oppression, the history of Black America has been a history of "many thousands gone," helped and applauded by their brothers and sisters. And old Black proverbs says, "If you knock the nose, the eye cry." Which means that an injury to one member of the family is an injury to all. This idea, the idea of Black familyhood and the peculiar Black American stress on brotherness and sisterness, runs like a black thread through the whole of Black history. It was a living reality on the slave ships where, according to Orlando Patterson and other scholars, "it was customary for children to call their parents’ shipmates ‘uncle’ and ‘aunt,’" and for men and women "to look upon each other’s children mutually as their own." The same dynamic operated on the slave plantations and was noted by Black and White witnesses who said that a Black who betrayed another Black was held "in greater detestation than the most notorious thief." We learn from the same source that adult slaves generally called each other "brother" and "sister." The "brother-sister" principle informed the struggles of Reconstruction and Jim Crow periods and was perhaps the only reason Blacks survived in America. There were betrayers, then and later, but the people survived, then and later, because of the spirit than the force that tried to pull them apart.
At DiversityWorking.com, we make sure the jobs we post are open for all minority groups, especially to African Americans, Asians, Hispanics, Native Americans, the disabled, war veterans, women, and gays and lesbians. Our jobs database is kept up-to-date and with a variety of employment opportunities at top Fortune 500 companies in America. Your future looks brighter with DiversityWorking!
Visit us now and post your resume for top managers and recruiters to find you.
African American Culture
In 1926 African American scholar Carter Godwin Woodson organized the first Negro History Week, to focus attention on previously neglected aspects of the black experience in the United States. Woodson chose February to coincide with the birthdays of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, as well as the anniversary of the founding of the NAACP. Renamed Black History Week in 1972, the observance was extended to become Black History Month in 1976. During February, lectures, exhibitions, banquets, cultural events, and television and radio programming celebrate the achievements of African Americans. Since 1978, the U.S. Postal Service has participated in Black History Month by issuing commemorative stamps honoring notable African Americans.
Within days of the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., Congressman John Conyers of Detroit introduced a bill calling for a national holiday honoring Dr. King. Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, various states enacted such a holiday, but Congress did not.
Finally, in 1983, the U.S. Congress established a national holiday in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. The holiday is observed annually on the third Monday in January, a day that falls on or near King’s birthday of January 15. Like Black History Month, Martin Luther King Day emphasizes educational and cultural observances, such as lectures and exhibits about King’s life and philosophy.
African American scholar and activist "Maulana" Ron Karenga invented the festival of Kwanzaa in 1966, as an alternative to the increasing commercialization of Christmas. Derived from the harvest rituals of Africans, Kwanzaa is observed each year from December 26 through January 1. Participants in Kwanzaa celebrations affirm their African heritage and the importance of family and community by drinking from a unity cup; lighting red, black, and green candles; exchanging heritage symbols, such as African art; and recounting the lives of people who struggled for African and African American freedom. People who celebrate Kwanzaa hope to strengthen the black community by adhering to seven guiding principles, designated by words from the Swahili language:
1. umoja (unity)
2. kujichagulia (self-determination)
3. ujima (collective work and responsibility)
4. ujamaa (cooperative economics)
5. nia (purpose)
6. kuumba (creativity)
7. imani (faith)
Juneteenth is the oldest known celebration of the abolition of slavery. Dating back to 1865, it was on June 19th that Union troops, led by Major General Gordon Granger, landed at Galveston, Texas, with news that the war had ended and that all slaves were now free. This was two and-a-half years after President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which had become official January 1, 1863. The Emancipation Proclamation had little impact on the Texans due to the minimal number of Union troops present to enforce the new executive order. However, with the surrender of General Lee in April of 1865 and the arrival of General Granger's regiment, the forces finally were strong enough to influence and overcome the resistance. Originally celebrated primarily in Texas and Louisiana, Juneteenth is now celebrated in black communities all over the U.S. with picnics, block parties, parades and family reunions.
Another important African-American holiday is Malcolm X Day, which is celebrated on May 19, to commemorate the achievements of Malcolm X, a prominent black nationalist during the days of the Civil Rights Movement. Malcolm X Day is celebrated in most American cities with a significant African-American population, including Washington DC.
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
African-American-Church
African American Churches and Religion
Enslaved Africans brought their own religious beliefs and practices with them when they were forced on ships from Africa to the New World, but slaveowners mounted a systematic and brutal campaign to de-Africanize them, and strip them of their mostly animist, polytheistic, or Muslim beliefs. African religious practices, considered "heathen", were strictly forbidden, and drums were outlawed for fear that the talking drum would be used by slaves to communicate over distances to plot rebellions.
Christianity
Christianity was used as a tool to subjugate slaves and make them easier to control. Whites deliberately omitted or downplayed its equalizing and liberating elements and dogma and emphasized passages of the Bible that urged obedience to one's master and piety. However, slaves seized upon the story of Moses leading the "children of Israel" out of Egypt to the "Promised Land," and Old Testament notions of a fierce, warrior God who protected and worship developed by African slaves included such elements of West African religions as ring shouts; call and response; a belief in the supernatural; and the existence of the Kalunga Line, the unseen line beneath bodies of water where one could commune with the spirits of deceased ancestors, and related river cults. (The practice of some captives snatching up their children and hurling themselves into the sea during the Middle Passage is regarded by some historians as not simply suicide, but an act of fear and desperation committed in the hope that, in death, they would join their ancestors at "home on the other side.")
Many of these African influences persist today in mainstream African-American religious worship: in the "amen corner," praise shouts, ring shouts, "gettin' happy," and in gospel music; altered states of consciousness and speaking in tongues; and in the resonance of the Jordan River in spirituals and liturgical imagery and in full-immersion and river baptism. Some historians contend that the persistence of Islamic religious practice and culture can be seen in the continuing custom among older women of the Georgia Sea Islands and elsewhere in the South to cover their heads with hats or scarves during worship. The so-called "hat queens" of the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), women known for their striking millinery in worship, also may be, at least in part, a continuation of this Islamic tradition.
The language of Negro spirituals, regarded by whites as mere expressions of faith, contained messages of endurance and deliverance. Some songs, like I Got Shoes ("Everybody talkin' 'bout heaven ain't goin' there") secretly mocked the hypocritical piety of slavemasters. Slaves also used shouts, praisesongs and hymns to sound warnings and signal escape attempts. The singing of Steal Away ("to Jesus") was a widely used code to signal that the time to escape had come. A seemingly innocent shout in an open field of, "Bird in the air!" served as a diversion to armed, game hunting overseers and a signal to those prepared to do so to take flight and head North to freedom. And the spiritual Swing Low, Sweet Chariot ("comin' for to carry me home") was used often to refer to the Underground Railroad.
Richard Allen was a former slave and an influential deacon and elder at the integrated and affluent St. George's Methodist Church in Philadelphia. In 1787, Allen founded the all-black Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church after St. George's white members, increasingly uncomfortable with the large number of blacks the charismatic Allen had attracted to the church, began relegating black worshipers to the church balcony. Over time, growing numbers of African-American congregations withdrew from the Methodist Episcopal Church. In 1816, representatives of these congregations convened to establish the African Methodist Episcopal Church, consecrating Allen is their bishop. The AME Church became the first national black Church in U.S. history.
Historically, separate churches have enabled blacks to worship in their own culturally distinct ways and assume positions of leadership denied to them in mainstream America. In addition to their religious role, African American churches traditionally have provided political leadership and served social welfare functions, such as providing for the indigent and establishing schools, orphanages and other social service institutions.
The comment by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, that, "...eleven o'clock Sunday morning is the most segregated hour, and Sunday school is still the most segregated school of the week," remains true today. The polarization of American society along racial lines is, perhaps, starkest when it comes to religious worship.
Today, the vast majority of African Americans practice some form of Protestantism, with evangelical churches, such as the pentecostal COGIC; A.M.E., Baptist and Methodist churches accounting for the majority of church membership. Black membership in the Catholic Church also has risen steadily over the past half decade, in great part the result of parents eschewing public education for their children and opting to send them instead to Catholic schools. Because of the persistence of segregation and separatist choice, and because of their fundamentally more African styles of worship, generally, African Americans historically have established and maintained churches separate from those of whites.
Islam
Many Africans had been converted to Islam generations before the advent of the trans-Atlantic slave trade through intermarriage, trade or as a result of conquest. This religious practice was quashed in the early days of slavery, but some scholars contend that the fabric of African American culture is shot through with Islamic threads evident in, among other things, the blues.
Islamic religion and practice exist in the African-American community in many forms, in black nationalist Moorish Science Temples, some in operation since 1913; in the mosques of the Nation of Islam, another black nationalist sect established in Detroit in 1931; in numerous other black nationalist-leaning masjids around the country; and in mainstream Islamic mosques, as well.
Other religious movements
Today, a number of African Americans are members of a group called the Nation of Islam, a quasi-religious organization with a black nationalist liberation theology founded in 1935. Poole, who changed his name to Elijah Muhammad, soon emerged as the leader of the Nation of Islam. Elijah Muhammad established temples in Detroit, Chicago, and the Nation of Islam reached its height in the 1960s and early 1970s, steadily declining in popularity after the assassination of Malcolm X. At present, Louis Farrakhan leads the Nation of Islam.
Traditional and Animist Practices
Other African Americans continue the centuries old practice of Voodoo, or Vodun, a heavily syncretic melding of elements of Catholicism and the Yoruba and Akan religions of Nigeria and Ghana, the points of origin of many of their ancestors. Still others have begun to explore and embrace Akan and Yoruba in their purer forms. Vodun in the U.S. in the past has been most prevalent in New Orleans among adherents who were nominally Catholic. But now free to express their spirituality within a distinctly African context, many practitioners of Vodun have dropped the cloak of Catholicism completely. As with Yoruba and Akan, there are Vodun devotees in various cities nationwide. Most notably, in cities with large black and Latino populations, there is sometimes a confluence of these three religions in expatriate African and African-American communities and in the Latino community, with the practice of Santeria, the Latin American version of Vodun.
What dispute led to the founding of the African Methodist Episcopal Church?
The origins of the A.M.E. Church lay in a controversy over the segregation rules at St. George's Methodist Church in Philadelphia in 1787. The white elders ordered black members of the congregation to sit in a separate gallery. Several African Americans, including Richard Allen, an ex-slave and lay preacher, refused, founding their own Methodist congregation, the Bethal Church. In 1816, Allen went further, founding the A.M.E. Church, the first independent, black-run Protestant denomination. The A.M.E. Church became active in philanthropy, education, and the abolitionist movement.
