Was the Great Migration the closest thing to an immigrant story AA's have?

[IllmaticDelta]

These aframs faced a journey more similar to immigrants than the afams who stayed in the USA and left the South to go North and West

 

[Cel 510 kid ados forever]

The jim crow laws and legacy was something real viscious.

Many ados like my gma and grandpa came to california in 30"s and 40's escaping terrorism and never wanted to go back down south.


It was also better jobs out here as well.

That why blacks came out here

 

[JadeB]

There are some similarities but it's very different overall. Also, there were Aframs up north (slavery and free people of color) and out West (free people of color) before the official dating of the Great Migration

Did these northern and western AAs got absorbed during the Great Migration? Because it seems like little of culture remains. For example, Sojourner Truth spoke Dutch and didn't have anything close to Southern accent. Are there still Dutch speaking New Yorkers left or did they all got assimilated to black Southern culture?

 

[im_sleep]

There’s quite a few similarities but the circumstances are different.

Plus this is America so none of that “hard working immigrant” narrative gets applied to us.

 

[Amestafuu (Emeritus)]

Liberia return was a migrant story.

 

[Captain Crunch]

This ain’t it breh

 

[invalid]

Liberia return was a migrant story.

That was a colonization story.

 

[xoxodede]

Did these northern and western AAs got absorbed during the Great Migration? Because it seems like little of culture remains. For example, Sojourner Truth spoke Dutch and didn't have anything close to Southern accent. Are there still Dutch speaking New Yorkers left or did they all got assimilated to black Southern culture?

Mrs. Truth was enslaved during the colonial era - and she was enslaved up north - New York.

She spoke Dutch due to being enslaved by Dutch enslavers in a heavily Dutch occupied area.

She didn't have to assimilate to Southern Culture - the difference was really just being able to speak another language and being enslaved in NY. From reading her story - she shared the same experiences as those enslaved in the South. Yet, NY abolished slavery in 1827 or something - 30+ years before 99% of ADOS.

She left NY and years later died in Micigan.

Also, I need to mention-- it's quite a myth that all the enslaved or even the majority spoke broken, "yes massa" English.

Many of them even though enslaved and without education and illiterate- they spoke just as well as the whites they were around - more than a few -- even better than them.

You can listen to many of the former enslaved speak - and even their descendants during reconstruction and Jim Crow - they spoke well. If the parent didn't- the child did.

Yes, many were challenged vocab and diction wise - but many spoke just how we speak today.

Frederick Douglass, Ms. Tubman, Ms. Truth were not the special ones who knew how to speak properly - they represent the enslaved who spoke just like them.

 

[invalid]

These aframs faced a journey more similar to immigrants than the afams who stayed in the USA and left the South to go North and West

Also, there were around 50,000 free blacks that left Louisiana for Paris after the Louisiana Purchase. Add to that the black GIs who stayed in France after WWI.

According to Tyler Stovall, a professor at Berkeley -

In many ways, African Americans came to France as a sort of privileged minority, a kind of model minority, if you will—a group that benefited not only from French fascination with blackness, but a French fascination about Americanness.

African Americans in France - Wikipedia

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Did these northern and western AAs got absorbed during the Great Migration?

The Western Aframs were basically Free People of Color from the South. They got absorbed by later migrations plus they didn't make a distinct "Western" Afram culture. The Northern Afram situation was different and they were comprised of descendants from early Northern Slaves + Free People Of Color/Fugitive slaves from the South.

Because it seems like little of culture remains.

Nah. In fact, a ton remains. The Northern Aframs are the one who created the modern "Afram" identity, along with many other things

The Black Yankees (free people of color in the north)

The newly formed Black Yankee ethnicity of the early 1800s differed from today’s African-American ethnicity. Modern African-American ethnic traits come from a post-bellum blending of three cultural streams: the Black Yankee ethnicity of 1830, the slave traditions of the antebellum South, and the free Creole or Mulatto elite traditions of the lower South. Each of the three sources provided elements of the religious, linguistic, and folkloric traditions found in today’s African-American ethnicity.30



Although less wealthy than the Louisiana Creoles, the Black Yankees had developed a strong supportive culture that could withstand the buffeting of social upheaval. They were usually ostracized from mainstream society due to the endogamous color line. According to contemporary accounts, they responded with grace and dignity, making a virtue of their separation. It was not uncommon to see lines of quiet, well-behaved children following their parents to Sunday service with the gravitas and pietas of Roman elders. Their preachers taught that they were put on earth to be tested.31 Their lot was to serve as example to the white folks of how civilized Christians behave.

Most Black Yankees distinguished themselves from slaves—indeed many families had no history of slavery but descended from indentured servants. Nevertheless, many were active contributors to and activists in the abolition movement. This is in strong contrast to the biracial elite of the Gulf coast and Latin America, who owned slaves and defended slavery as a noble institution.32 The contrast was due to the lack of an independent Black ethnicity among Hispanic planters of part-African ancestry, and this lack was due, in turn, to the absence of an endogamous color line.

In some ways, Black Yankee culture (religion, language, music, dance, food, costume) was indistinguishable from that of White Yankees. For example, the boisterous interactive style of many African-American church services today would have been alien to them, since it originated in the slaveholding South. Daniel A. Payne was a Black Yankee, a career AME minister in Philadelphia. He was a sympathizer of the Underground Railroad, so its organizers asked him to preach to a group of newly escaped slaves. His diary reports:

After the sermon, they formed a ring, and with coats off sung, clapped their hands and stamped their feet in a most ridiculous and heathenish way. I requested that the pastor go and stop their dancing. At his request they stopped their dancing and clapping of hands, but remained singing and rocking their bodies to and fro.33

Although the endogamous color line was stricter in the antebellum North than in the antebellum South, it was less strict in 1850 and 1860 than in 1970 and 1980.34 The children of interracial marriages in the Northeast were usually census-reported as “Negroes” rather than as “Mulattoes.” This resembles today’s customs and contrasts with the more permeable color lines of the lower South. According to Joel Williamson, “In 1850 in the five states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, mulattoes actually outnumbered blacks by 24,000 to 22,000, while in the older-settled New England and Middle Atlantic states blacks outnumbered mulattoes by about three to one.”35


The Black Yankees set many of the patterns of modern African-American life. They developed the supportive church-centered social structure found in African-American communities today. Long before the South was segregated, they faced isolation and cyclical rejection by mainstream society. They were also the first to articulate the dilemma that continues to occupy Black thinkers to this day: integration versus separatism.

Essays on the U.S. Color Line » Blog Archive » The Color Line Created African-American Ethnicity in the North













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When Freerick Douglass (southerner) came North and met Northern Aframs

Douglass considered himself to be neither White nor Black, but both. His multiracial self-identity showed in his first autobiography. Introducing his father in Narrative, Douglass wrote, “My father was a white man.” In this text, his mother was a stranger whom he had never seen in daylight, he could not picture her face, and he was unmoved by news of her death.4 Not only did Douglass adopt a fictional Scottish hero’s name, he emphasized his (perhaps imagined) Scots descent through his father. When visiting Great Britain in 1845-47, Douglass extended his stay in Scotland. He immersed himself in Scottish music and ballads, which he played on the violin for the rest of his life. Having plunged into a Scottish ethnic identity, Douglass wrote to his (then) friend, William Lloyd Garrison, “If I should meet you now, amid the free hills of old Scotland, where the ancient ‘black Douglass’ [sic] once met his foes… you would see a great change in me!”5 Upon arriving in Nantucket, Douglass hoped to represent a blending of both endogamous groups, a man who was half-White and half-Black:

Young, ardent, and hopeful, I entered upon this new life in the full gush of unsuspecting enthusiasm. The cause was good, the men engaged in it were good, the means to attain its triumph, good…. For a time, I was made to forget that my skin was dark and my hair crisped.6

But acceptance by White society was out of reach for Douglass. He discovered that, in the North, there was no such thing as a man who was half-Black. White ships’ caulkers in New Bedford denied him a chance to work at his craft because in their eyes he was all Black.7 When he joined the Garrisonians on a boat to an abolitionist convention in Nantucket, and a squabble broke out because the White abolitionists demanded that the Black abolitionists take lesser accommodations, Douglass found himself classified as Black by his friends. Later in Nantucket, Douglass so impressed the Garrisonians with his public speaking that abolitionist Edmund Quincy exchanged reports with others that Douglass was an articulate public speaker, “for a ******.”8 Repeatedly, Douglass tried to present himself as an intermediary between America’s two endogamous groups. But the Garrisonians made it clear that he was expected to present himself as nothing more than an intelligent “Negro.” He was told to talk only about the evils of slavery and ordered to stop talking about the endogamous color line. “Give us the facts [about being a slave]. We will take care of the [racial] philosophy.” They also ordered him to “leave a little plantation speech” in his accent.9 In their own words, they wanted to display a smart “******,” but not too smart.

Douglass’s cruelest discovery came after he broke with the Garrisonians and went out on his own. Abolitionist friends of both endogamous groups had warned him that there was nothing personal in how Garrison had used him. The public did not want an intermediary; they wanted an articulate Black. Douglass soon discovered that his friends were right. His newspaper, The North Star,failed to sell because it had no market; White Yankees wanted to read White publications and Black Yankees wanted to read Black ones. Indeed, Black political leaders resented Douglass’s distancing himself from Black ethno-political society. There was no room in Massachusetts for a man who straddled the color line.

Douglass dutifully reinvented himself. He applied himself to learning Black Yankee culture. “He began to build a closer relationship with… Negro leaders and with the Negro people themselves, to examine the whole range of Negro problems, and to pry into every facet of discrimination.”10 Eight months later, The North Star’s circulation was soaring and Black leader James McCune Smith wrote to Black activist Gerrit Smith:

You will be surprised to hear me say that only since his Editorial career has he seen to become a colored man! I have read his paper very carefully and find phrase after phrase develop itself as in one newly born among us.11

From that day on, Douglass never looked back. The public wanted him to be hyper-Black and so hyper-Black he became. His later autobiographies reveal the change.12 Narrative (1845) says that his “father was a white man,” My Bondage and My Freedom (1854) says that his father “was shrouded in mystery” and “nearly white,” and The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1882-1892) says flatly, “of my father I know nothing.”13 Narrative says that his mother was a stranger whose death did not affect him, and Bondage and Freedom reports that he was “deeply attached to her,” Life and Times says that “her image is ineffably stamped upon my memory,” and describes her death with “great poignancy and sorrow.”14



* * * * *

The clash between how Douglass saw himself in 1838 and the public persona that he was forced to portray, was due to the presence of African-American ethnicity in the North.17 Free citizens of part-African ancestry in the South, especially in the lower South, lacked the sense of common tradition associated with ethnic self-identity. This essay traces the emergence of African-American ethnicity and the subsequent evolution of the color line in five topics: Origins of African-American Ethnicity explains how the imposition of a unique endogamous color line eventually led to the synthesis of a unique ethno-cultural community in the Jacksonian Northeast. African-American Ethnic Traits outlines the customs of the Black Yankee ethnic group to show that they gave birth to many of today’s Black traditions. The Integration versus Separatism Pendulum introduces a debate that has occupied Black political leaders since colonial times. The Color Line in the North contrasts the harsh enforcement of the intermarriage barrier in the free states with the more permeable systems of the lower South (as presented in the preceding three essays). The National Color Line’s Rise and Fall concludes this section on the endogamous color line by presenting two graphs. The first shows that which side of the endogamous color line you were on was most hotly contested in U.S. courts between 1840 and 1869. The second shows that the color line grew abruptly stronger during Reconstruction, was at its harshest during Jim Crow, and began to recover only around 1980.

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For example, Sojourner Truth spoke Dutch and didn't have anything close to Southern accent. Are there still Dutch speaking New Yorkers left or did they all got assimilated to black Southern culture?

the Afro-Dutch dialect and its speakers, got absorbed into the larger, non-Dutch based, Afram population and/or became the foundation to some of the "Black Indian" tribes around New York/New Jersey where remnants of the dialect may remain

Closer to the present, the Ramapough Lenapes or Ramapough Mountain Indians*, a clan of mixed black, Indian and Dutch heritage still live in the Ramapo Hills of New Jersey. They spoke a b*stardized form of Dutch, which still had some 200 speakers in 1910. This Jersey Dutch died out sometime between the 1920s and 1950s, although some Dutch-derived expressions apparently survive among their elders. Researchers in 1910 as well as in recent years found that some of them still knew a nursery rhyme called Trippe Trappe Troontjes, which was also mentioned by Teddy Roosevelt as the one piece of Dutch he remembered learnning from his grandmother; and on one of his African trips Roosevelt discovered that it was also known by the South African boers who had carried it there from Holland 300 years before.

In the early 20th century, Dutch researchers found other surviving pockets of Dutch descended directly from that of the colonial settlers of New Amsterdam, in the Hudson Valley as far north as Schenectady. I have found at least anecdotal evidence of families in the Catskills who spoke Dutch on a daily basis into the 1940s or 50s. So the language survived nearly three full centuries after the end of Dutch influence in North America. And who knows, it seems quite likely that somewhere in New York or New Jersey, there still lives a geezer or two who learned, on their mother’s knee, a smattering of that colonial Dutch.

THE MONDAY EVENING CLUB: Why we don't all speak Dutch: Language extinction and language survival

 

[xoxodede]

Also, there were around 50,000 free blacks that left Louisiana for Paris after the Louisiana Purchase. Add to that the black GIs who stayed in France after WWI.

According to Tyler Stovall, a professor at Berkeley -

In many ways, African Americans came to France as a sort of privileged minority, a kind of model minority, if you will—a group that benefited not only from French fascination with blackness, but a French fascination about Americanness.

African Americans in France - Wikipedia

Do you have another source for this?

It wasnt many free African-Americans- or those who classified themselves as "black" - "negro" during that time.

If anything they were free Haitians who had migrated to Louisiana and decided to leave to France. Many of them went to Liberia as well.

That number is way too high. It was only 13k total during and after slavery who went to Liberia. Most of them went in the 1830-40's and sadly many were enslavers as well - and didn't see themselves the same as the enslaved.

I have never heard to that many of us going to France.

If this is true - would love to learn more.

 

[The Odum of Ala Igbo]

The jim crow laws and legacy was something real viscious.

Many ados like my gma and grandpa came to california in 30"s and 40's escaping terrorism and never wanted to go back down south.


It was also better jobs out here as well.

That why blacks came out here

Are they from Texas, Arkansas or Louisiana?

 

[Cel 510 kid ados forever]

Are they from Texas, Arkansas or Louisiana?

Yup most california blacks came from there.

Alot of creole blacks is out here

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Do you have another source for this?



I have never heard to that many of us going to France.

If this is true - would love to learn more.

I've seen that number mentioned before but it sounds

The first stop was the Arc de Triomphe, where the encyclopedic Stevenson said former American slaves who made it to France in the 19th century came to sense freedom beyond the reach of bounty hunters.
“For the first time, you’re not looking over your shoulder, going, `Are they after me? Are they going to catch me?’” said Stevenson. “There were laws that protected the African-Americans who came here.“
Stevenson cited unofficial figures indicating that up to 50,000 free blacks came here from Louisiana in the decades after Napoleon sold the territory to the United States in 1803, fearing greater restrictions under the new authorities.
The best-known wave of black Americans to France came during World War I, when some 200,000 came to fight.
“Ninety percent of these soldiers were from the South, and the idea that they could actually talk to white women without immediately being lynched was a revelation to them,” said Stovall, author of “Paris Noir: African-Americans in the City of Light,” by phone.
“They wrote letters back home ... that were often published in the black press,” he said. “That helped create this idea of France as this paradise of racial tolerance.“
After the war, many black musicians migrated to feed France’s infatuation with jazz.

https://www.gadsdentimes.com/article/DA/20080112/lifestyle/603229277/GT/

 

[xoxodede]

I've seen that number mentioned before but it sounds




https://www.gadsdentimes.com/article/DA/20080112/lifestyle/603229277/GT/

Yeah, I'm not buying it - until proven otherwise. With multiple sources. Again, we would have heard about that -- that's a LARGE number - triple the number of FPOC, their enslaved and those freed when agreeing to go to Liberia.