The/a history of the ADOS experience and impact in Europe

[IllmaticDelta]

I don't think most people are aware of the huge ADOS history in Europe from the more recent times, all the way back to more than 200 years ago. So this thread will bring to light some of that history. To start off

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JAMES c00nEY (BACK, LEFT) SEEN WITH COLLEAGUES IN ALEX DAY’S BEACH ENTERTAINERS OF MORECAMBE, LANCASHIRE IN 1910 IS SAID TO HAVE SETTLED IN THAT TOWN AROUND 1902 BUT HE MARRIED A LOCAL GIRL IN 1898, HAVING WORKED AS A CIRCUS PERFORMER AND WITH THE BOHEE BROTHERS, AND SERVED IN THE ARGENTINE NAVY. HE DIED IN MORECAMBE IN 1932.

CALVIN HARRIS RICHARDSON AND THOMAS LEWIS JOHNSON STUDIED IN STOCKWELL,
LONDON IN THE LATE 1870S. WITH THEIR WIVES, SISTERS ISSADORAH AND HENRIETTA,
THEY WENT TO CAMEROON IN 1878 AS BAPTIST MISSIONARIES. HENRIETTA JOHNSON DIED
THERE AND HER HUSBAND RETURNED TO ENGLAND IN JANUARY 1880, VERY ILL. AFTER
MISSION WORK IN THE U.S.A., JOHNSON SETTLED IN LONDON THEN BOURNEMOUTH
WHERE HE DIED IN 1921. HIS TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS A SLAVE WAS PUBLISHED IN
BOURNEMOUTH IN 1909 – A MUCH SMALLER EDITION HAD BEEN PUBLISHED IN LONDON
IN 1882. THE RICHARDSONS REMAINED IN CAMEROON THEN RETIRED TO THE U.S.A.


Incredible images show Samuel Ringgold War who escaped to Britain in 1853 and had his book Autobiography of a Fugitive Slave published in 1855, Marta Ricks who was born a slave in Tennessee before arriving in Britain via Liberia and even met Queen Victoria, and Thomas Lewis Johnston who went to Cameroon as a Baptist missionary before settling in England.


more...

Spoiler

MARTHA RICKS. BORN A SLAVE IN
TENNESSEE SHE WAS SENT TO LIBERIA IN
1830. IN 1892 SHE SAILED FROM AFRICA
TO LIVERPOOL AND FULFILLED A LONG
AMBITION TO MEET QUEEN VICTORIA. SHE
PRESENTED THE MONARCH WITH A QUILT
SHOWING LIBERIAN COFFEE PLANTS. BRITISH
NEWSPAPERS REPORTED HER VENTURE
WITH SURPRISE AND RESPECT. COPYRIGHT
NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, LONDON,





Other striking shots show world bantamweight boxing champion George Dixon who fought in London in 1890, Peter Thomas Stanford who became the minister of Hope Street Baptist church in Birmingham, UK in 1889 and Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield who sang for Queen Victoria in Buckingham Palace.



Their remarkable stories are told in Jeffrey Green’s new book, Black Americans in Victorian Britain, published by Pen and Sword.

GEORGE DIXON WAS THE WORLD
BANTAMWEIGHT BOXING CHAMPION IN
1888 AND FOUGHT IN LONDON IN 1890.
HE WAS A FEATHERWEIGHT CHAMPION
FROM 1891. BORN IN HALIFAX, NOVA
SCOTIA, IN 1870 HE LIVED IN BOSTON,
MASSACHUSETTS.



“British attitudes were affected by the testimony of these black witnesses who informed the British and Irish about life in the United States,” he writes in the book’s introduction.



“Individuals made their homes in Britain and married British people to an extent which might have surprised historian Benjamin Quarles who commented in 1969: ‘they posed no threat to the laboring man or to the purity of the national blood stream. Hence they received that heartiest of welcomes that comes from a love of virtue combined with an absence of apprehension’.

PAUL DUNBAR’S POEMS WERE WELL
RECEIVED IN AMERICA AND IN 1897 HE
VISITED ENGLAND FOR SOME MONTHS.
THE TIMES REVIEWED HIS COOPERATION
WITH AFRO-BRITISH COMPOSER SAMUEL
COLERIDGE-TAYLOR, NOTING HE POSSESSED
AN ‘UNDENIABLE POETICAL GIFT’.




“Some refugees did not return after slavery was abolished and the Confederacy defeated.

PETER THOMAS STANFORD FROM VIRGINIA
MIGRATED TO CANADA AND IN 1883 TO
ENGLAND, WHERE HE BECAME THE MINISTER
OF THE HOPE STREET BAPTIST CHURCH IN
BIRMINGHAM IN 1889. HE LEFT FOR THE
U.S.A. IN 1895 AND PUBLISHED THE
TRAGEDY OF THE NEGRO IN AMERICA
IN 1898.


“These and other experiences of African Americans in nineteenth-century Britain reveal overlooked elements in the history of the American people and aspects of the nature of Victorian Britain. Uncovered fragments are part of a mosaic, sometimes with only one piece discovered.”

MOSES ROPER TOURED BRITAIN IN THE LATE 1830S, MARRIED A WELSH WOMAN, AND
THEY MIGRATED TO CANADA. ROPER REVISITED BRITAIN, AS DID HIS WIFE AND DAUGHTERS.



Green’s book aims to name those Americans who immigrated to Britain in the hope that they will be researched in more detail, if he has been unable to find much out.



It also deals with the legacy those immigrants left and the effect it had on America and those who still lived there.

WILLIAM PETER POWELL BORN IN
1834 LEFT NEW YORK WITH HIS
PARENTS AND SIBLINGS IN 1850. HE
STUDIED IN DUBLIN AND MANCHESTER
AND QUALIFIED AS A DOCTOR IN 1858.
HE WORKED IN TWO LIVERPOOL
HOSPITALS AND WHEN THE U.S. CIVIL
WAR BROKE OUT, THE ENTIRE FAMILY
RETURNED TO NEW YORK WHERE
DR POWELL SERVED IN A WASHINGTON
ARMY HOSPITAL. HE DIED IN
LIVERPOOL IN 1916. COURTESY
NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS
ADMINISTRATION WASHINGTON DC
FROM RECORDS OF THE DEPARTMENT
OF VETERANS AFFAIRS, RG 15.
THANKS TO JILL L. NEWMARK OF THE
HISTORY OF MEDICINE DIVISION AT
THE NATIONAL LIBRARY OF MEDICINE
IN BETHESDA, MARYLAND.



“Having crossed the Atlantic towards the rising sun, they had rejected the United States of America,” added Green.



“A number went further east by migrating to Australia and New Zealand suggesting their ambitions had not been satisfied by life in Britain. Thousands of British people migrated to the Antipodes, so we cannot be sure what had encouraged that secondary black migration which like the African American presence in Victorian Britain, is under-researched.

ELIZABETH TAYLOR GREENFIELD
WAS RAISED IN PHILADELPHIA.
SHE WAS BLESSED WITH A SUPERB
SINGING VOICE, WHICH LED HER
TO EUROPE AFTER A NEW YORK
CITY CONCERT IN 1853. IN 1854
SHE SANG FOR QUEEN VICTORIA AT
BUCKINGHAM PALACE.



“The often superficial nature of newspaper reports and inconsistencies in official documents with the spelling of names is one difficulty but the almost total absence of ‘race’ as a concept is a major problem.



“No British birth, marriage or death registrations indicate ‘race’ or ‘color’ as American documents did. Schools, colleges, churches, chapels, graveyards, and street directories do not distinguish between the people they listed. For migrant African Americans, whose entire lives had been defined by the colour of their skin, this official blindness and its apparent recognition by the majority of Britons was so different to their natal land.

“African Americans who had lived in Victorian Britain had an impact on kinfolk in the United States. They influenced the British.”

JESSE EWING GLASGOW FROM
PENNSYLVANIA STUDIED MEDICINE
AT EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY WHERE HE WROTE THE HARPERS FERRY
INSURRECTION IN 1859. HE DIED
IN DECEMBER 1860, A FEW WEEKS
BEFORE GRADUATION.

The Incredible Experiences of Former Slaves Who Fled To Britain During The 19th Century Have Been Unveiled In This New Book | Media Drum World

 

[IllmaticDelta]

James McCune Smith (April 18, 1813 – November 17, 1865)

was an American physician, apothecary, abolitionist, and author in New York City. He was the first African American to hold a medical degree and graduated at the top in his class at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. After his return to the United States, he became the first African American to run a pharmacy in that nation

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Ira Frederick Aldridge (July 24, 1807 – August 7, 1867)

was an American and later British stage actor and playwright who made his career after 1824 largely on the London stage and in Europe, especially in Shakespearean roles. Born in New York City, Aldridge is the only actor of African-American descent among the 33 actors of the English stage honoured with bronze plaques at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon. He was especially popular in Prussia and Russia, where he received top honors from heads of state. At the time of his sudden death, while on tour in Poland, he was arranging a triumphant return to America, with a planned 100-show-tour to the United States.

Ira Aldridge: the black actor who became the toast of Victorian London

Ira Aldridge: the black actor who became the toast of Victorian London | The Times

 

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[IllmaticDelta]

Paris Noir - African Americans in the City of Light' is the most comprehensive and compelling documentary on the remarkable migration of pioneering African Americans who sought freedom from America's strife and found acceptance and great achievement abroad.
Beginning with World War 1 soldiers, the film weaves together the contributions and influence of writers, musicians, intellectuals, entertainers and artists in Paris of the 1920s to 1950s.

Rare photographs and footage show never-before-seen images of
- Josephine Baker as she evolved from showgirl to WWII spy,
- brings together together the Harlem Renaissance writers Langston Hughes and Claude McKay with their Caribbean and African counterparts Leopold Senghor, Aimé Cesaire and the Nardal sisters.
Viewers follow
-Lt. James Reese Europe and his 369th Harlem Infantry Regiment onto the WWI battlefields
-then relive the exciting explosion of jazz in Paris' nightclubs of Montmartre.
- Artists Henry Ossawa Tanner and Augusta Savage, among others literally paint a vibrant picture of growth of the African American talent on French soil.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

"Black Russians - The Red Experience"

Shadow and act profiled the documentary "Black Russians - The Red Experience". A story of the lives and experiences of the black Americans who went to the Soviet Union during the Stalinist era in search of an ideal life. Escaping from racism and the Great Depression, they dove into new lives, having “nothing to lose” and no reason to turn back. Did they find what they were looking for? Their descendants who live in Russia and America today will share a story of their ancestors as well as their own.

A dream of racial equality behind the Iron Curtain may seem counterintuitive to Americans today, but for African-Americans escaping the violence and hate at home in the 1920s and onward, immigration to the Soviet Union seemed like a road to long-denied freedom and respect.

In this early stage of the Soviet Union, although some measures already curtailed the freedoms previously offered to many minorities after the Bolshevik Revolution, it still appeared as a welcoming land to those marked as second-class citizens in the U.S.

As Joy Gleason Carew writes in her book, “Blacks, Reds, and Russians: Sojourners in Search of the Soviet Promise,” the majority of black immigrants to the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, did not embark on this life-changing trip as a “messianic quest.”

Those who went for political training hoped to organize communities of color back home, according to Carew. Those who signed contracts for industrial or artistic projects were happy to land a job during the time of the Great Depression at home, where they also were fleeing the “pressures of Jim Crow.”

One such actor was Wayland Rudd (1900-1952), who started his performing career at the Hedgerow Theater in Pennsylvania. He first gained notice for his part in Eugene O’Neill’s “Emperor Jones.”

When his career goals limited by racism in the American entertainment industry, Rudd moved to the Soviet Union in 1931 to pursue a career on stage and screen. Eventually he graduated from Moscow’s Theatrical Art Institute and worked at the Stanislavsky Opera and Drama Theater.

Although many others followed Rudd’s example, he became the face of the Soviet ideological machine in its promotion of racial justice in the Soviet Union and its criticism the injustice perpetrated against ethnic minorities in the so-called “free” West.

The Soviet-born, U.S.-based filmmaker Yelena Demikovsky is producing a documentary called “Black Russians – The Red Experience” that addresses this unusual pattern of immigration. In the upcoming film, Demikovsky interviews the descendants of the black American émigrés, including Rudd’s son, Wayland Rudd Jr., a Moscow-based musician, and Russian television host, Yelena Khanga, the granddaughter of a Mississippi cotton farmer and a Polish-Jewish American woman, who relocated to Soviet Uzbekistan.

Like many Russians, Demikovsky grew up watching the 1936 Soviet film “The Circus,” in which a young American circus star (Lubov Orlova) performing in Russia initially hides her child from the Russian people, afraid they will condemn her because the father of her child is black.

“The key message of the film is that in the Soviet Union, nobody cares about race,” Demikovsky told RBTH. “The message implies ‘We love them all.’”


Since the movie’s release, generations of Russians have fallen in love with the mysterious black child, who is widely accepted at the end of the film. For many years, few people knew that the actor, James Patterson, was actually the son of a black American who moved to the Soviet Union and married a Russian.

Demikovsky discovered Patterson’s story in the 1990s, after reading Allison Blakely’s book “Russia and the Negro.” She was surprised to discover that quite a few black American professionals traveled to the Soviet Union, a new country, where everybody was pronounced “equal.”

“I started asking my friends, Americans and Russians if they’ve ever heard about this tide of African-American immigration,” Demikovsky said. “Nobody had any idea. This entire chapter of U.S.-Soviet history seemed to be completely ignored and unknown.”

It’s difficult to verify the number of people who left America for the Soviet Union, according to Carew.

“Sources indicate that several hundred blacks went for a range of reasons and stayed for varying lengths of time… Additionally, some made more than one trip; and others went and never returned to the United States,” Carew wrote.



Post-Soviet Russia and the United States still share the bond created by the life stories of Rudd, Patterson, and their contemporaries, who made the brave and controversial choice to move to an unknown, foreign place and create art. This unusual twist in history is still contributing to the forging of new relationships, according to Demikovsky, who befriended James Patterson, now in his 80s and living in the U.S., during her work on “Black Russians – The Red Experience”.

“If I only knew when I was little, and loved the boy from the “The Circus,” that one day I’ll become his friend,” Demikovsky said.

African-Americans' search for equality led to the Soviet Union

 

[IllmaticDelta]

 

[IllmaticDelta]

AFRICAN AMERICAN INTEREST & EXPERIENCES IN RUSSIA: A BRIEF HISTORY

Robert Fikes, Jr., Librarian at San Diego State University, recounts the history of the African American presence in Russia from the 19th century, noting that African Americans have had a long and prominent history in the region, continuing to the present day, with a focus on the scholarly interest in the history and language by members of the African American intelligentsia.

In early February 1869, Cassius M. Clay, the liberal American ambassador to Russia, was uncertain how Czar Alexander II would react to his personal request to have “a colored American citizen, presented to his Imperial Majesty, as there was not precedent.” He need not have worried however, as Civil War veteran and pioneering black journalist Capt. Thomas Morris Chester from Pennsylvania, was then asked to accompany the czar riding alongside the monarch and his staff in the annual grand review the Imperial Guard – stalwart men splendidly attired in tall black leather boots and gleaming gold and silver helmets crowned with a doubled-headed eagle – and following the awe-inspiring pageantry was treated to a fine meal at the dining table of the royal family. The educated and proudly erect son of an ex-slave, he gladly accepted the invitation and enjoyed an experience unparalleled for an African American in the 19th century. The black editors of the New Orleans Tribune thought the event significant enough that the ambassador’s dispatch to Washington concerning Capt. Chester’s gracious treatment in St. Petersburg was reprinted in the newspaper, believing it would be “instructive to the (racist) white population of the Southern States,” an example of how they should, in the ambassador’s words, “elevate the African race in America.”

Thomas Morris Chester



Capt. Chester was not the only noteworthy African American to visit or reside in Russia, an unexpected reality that extends back to the late 1700s when black sailors were reported roaming the port cities of the empire. In 1824 Nancy Gardner Prince joined her husband who was a servant in the czar’s palace and recounted in a self-published book her nine-year stay there as a successful businesswoman and charity volunteer. Celebrated Shakespearean actor Ira Aldridge made his first tour in Russia in 1858; future Artic explorer Matthew Henson learned to speak Russian while trapped in the ice-bound harbour of Murmansk in the early 1880s; the Fisk Jubilee Singers sang spirituals in Russia in 1896; and Harvard-trained diplomat Richard T. Greener served as the American commercial agent at Vladivostok at the turn of the century; while Mississippi native Frederick Bruce Thomas (a.k.a. Fyodor Fyodorovich Tomas) was a leading restaurateur and collaborated in building a grand entertainment complex in Moscow prior to the Russian Revolution.

Late 19th and early 20th century black visitors to Russia were a talented and enterprising lot who, though far away from home in a less known region of Europe, nonetheless felt acceptance there and appreciated their temporary and long-term stays in Russia, a faraway asylum from the unrelenting racism that awaited them back home. Eventually, the long acquaintance with Russia and the Soviet Union would result in a rather surprising scholarly interest in its people, history, and culture.

Ida Forsythe

In the early 1900s of a number of African American professionals were in Russia’s teeming western cities. These were mostly entertainers in touring troupes, widely known as picaninny or c00n shows, which profited from the vogue of black popular culture introduced to Europe and at its height from the turn of the century until the mid-1920s. In 1904 dancer Ida Forsyne began her nine-year stay in Europe using St. Petersburg as her home base, introducing the cakewalk and even adapting Cossack dance in her solo routine. A close friend who also spoke “perfect Russian” was actress-singer Laura Bowman who partnered with Pete Hampton performing in the troupe Darktown Entertainers which included Forsyne’s cousin Olga “Ollie” Bourgoyne; and Coretta Alfred, formerly of the Louisiana Amazon Guards, who studied at music conservatories in Moscow and Leningrad until reinventing herself as the actress and opera singer Coretti Arle-Tietz. Married to a Russian professor, Alfred died in Moscow in 1951. Both Burgoyne and songbird Abbie Mitchell, proprietor of a women’s apparel shop in the city that had 27 employees, were privileged to give command performances for the ill-fated Czar Nicholas II.

Ida Aldridge as Othelo

Other black groups and individuals who left an impression on Russian audiences in the period include the Fisk Jubilee Singers, in 1896; Pearl “The Mulatto Sharpshooter” Hobson, 1904 to circa 1916; the Creole Belles in 1905 with Georgette Harvey who took up residence in St. Petersburg when the troupe dissolved; the Black Troubadours, 1907; the Black Diamonds, 1912; Minnie Brown, 1915 to 1916; the Leland Drayton Revue, the first black jazz artists to enter the country in 1925; Sam Wooding and his Chocolate Kiddies, 1925; Benny Peyton’s Jazz Kings and the elegant male dance team of Rufus Greenlee and Thaddeus Drayton who hoofed for Stalin in 1926.



Arriving in 1904 were jockey Jimmy Winkfield who won the Moscow Derby, the Emperor’s Purse, and married a Russian baroness; and Robert Josias Morgan, the first black Eastern Orthodox priest. Though we cannot trace precisely when globetrotting business promoter-writer Henry F. Downing might have arrived, he possessed expert knowledge of the country as demonstrated in his play “The Shuttlecock; or Israel in Russia” (1913) with a cast of characters who personified upper class Russian society. And, as was the case with other African Americans, political instability compelled boxer Jack Johnson to curtail his stay in Moscow in 1914.

George Tynes & Family

With the Bolshevik rebellion and World War I decided, African Americans departed for the nascent Soviet Union in two distinct groups: those attracted to and desiring to help fulfil communism’s promise of racial and social equality, and assorted artists and intellectuals lured by a welcoming totalitarian bureaucracy wanting to showcase its self-proclaimed accomplishment of anti-racism and international brotherhood in contrast to the United States. An early African American convert to communism was Brooklynite Otto Huiswoud, who in 1922 sailed to the Soviet Union to attend the Fourth Comintern. A trickle of visitors to the “worker’s paradise” in the 1920s grew substantially in those years leading up to World War II and included the left-leaning poet Claude McKay; agronomist George Tynes, writers Langston Hughes and Dorothy West; civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois; concert vocalists Paul Robeson, Marian Anderson and Roland Hayes; and a host of others fed up with American racism who chose to become permanent residents to live, work, fight, raise a family, and die there. Some lesser-known African Americans may have regretted their decision to emigrate there, among them factory worker Robert N. Robinson, whose presence was thoroughly exploited for propaganda value and who was prevented from returning to America; activist Lovett Fort-Whiteman, called “the reddest of the blacks,” a victim of the Great Purge who died in a Siberian gulag in 1939; and interior decorator Lloyd Patterson, mortally wounded in the German bombing of Moscow in 1941.



With the onset of the Cold War era and excesses of Stalinism exposed, African American attraction to communism waned dramatically. Confidence in the possibilities of a “Soviet miracle” was replaced with scepticism and revulsion. There remained, however, some evidence of continuing interest and curiosity in the culture and people of this enormous country. In the early 1950s there was an all-black Russian plaintext unit working inside the National Security Agency (NAS) that bolstered the career of James Pryde who became chief of a Soviet analysis section. In 1958 the government sent four Russian-speaking black guides to assist the American National Exposition in Moscow (among them Norris Garnett who later as a U.S. Embassy cultural attaché was expelled for allegedly inciting African students to actions “hostile to the USSR”); and novelist Ralph Ellison began teaching American and Russian literature at Bard College.

During the 1960s novelist-sculptor Barbara Chase-Riboud visited with dissident Russian artists; opera singer Simon Estes finished third at the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow; affected by the achievement of Sputnik mathematician Raymond L. Johnson and Charles V. Bush, the first black Air Force Academy graduate, learned Russian; television host Brian Gumble and symphony conductor Isaiah Jackson earned their degrees in Russian history at Bates College and Harvard University, respectively; poet Dudley Randall, who studied Russian at Wayne State University and had translated poems by Pushkin and Simonov, spent four months in the USSR; future astronaut Mae Jemison studied Russian throughout high school; and Barack Obama Sr. met the mother of the President in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii.

Herbert C Miller

In the 1980s budding talk host and Navy Ensign Montel Williams mastered Russian at the Defense Language Institute; Gary Lee was the Washington Post’s bureau chief in Moscow; in 1989, John O. Killens published Great Black Russian: A Novel on the Life and Times of Alexander Pushkin; and in 1981 Andrea Lee published the highly acclaimed memoir Russian Journal. More recently, Ann Simmons was a reporter in Time magazine’s Moscow bureau; and diplomat Pamela L. Spratlen was posted in Moscow and Vladivostok before her appointment as U.S. Ambassador to Kyrgyzstan.

What has been least publicized about African American interest in Russia is the extent to which black scholars have studied and written on Russian life and culture. In the late 1950s Franklyn Jenifer, an alumnus and president of Howard University (a school that offers a Russian minor) learned Russian while working at the Library of Congress. In 1954, upon completing his thesis on Russian-Quaker interaction, Frederick P. Willerford graduated from the Columbia University Russian Institute. Six years later Allan B. Ballard Jr. wrote his dissertation at Harvard on the Soviet state farm system, followed in 1967 by linguist Herbert C. Miller who wrote on the fundamentals of Russian intonation at Pennsylvania State University. In 1971 Allison Blakely defended his dissertation on Russia’s Socialist Revolutionary Party at the University of California at Berkeley, and is best known today for his 1986 book Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian History and Thought, published by Howard University Press. Stephanie Scruggs’s Ph.D. in Russian linguistics was earned at Brown University in 1982.

African American Interest & Experiences in Russia: A Brief History | Afropean – Adventures in Black Europe: your guide to the Afro European diaspora and beyond

 

[IllmaticDelta]

- brings together together the Harlem Renaissance writers Langston Hughes and Claude McKay with their Caribbean and African counterparts Leopold Senghor, Aimé Cesaire and the Nardal sisters.
Viewers follow
-Lt. James Reese Europe and his 369th Harlem Infantry Regiment onto the WWI battlefields
-then relive the exciting explosion of jazz in Paris' nightclubs of Montmartre.
- Artists Henry Ossawa Tanner and Augusta Savage, among others literally paint a vibrant picture of growth of the African American talent on French soil.

THE NEGRO RENAISSANCE FROM AMERICA BACK TO AFRICA: A STUDY OF THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE AS A BLACK AND AFRICAN MOVEMENT

The Negro Renaissance (1920-1930) also known as the Harlem Renaissance was a notable historical phase and a cultural and political development of great significance in the making and maturation of a Black Personality in the United States. Worthy of a genuine renaissance as the name implied, the movement in spite of some weaknesses, laid the foundations for what is known as black culture, or precisely Negro culture, in the United States. Synchronically and diachronically it marked one of the highest points, and perhaps an unsurpassed apex of Negro American nationalism since the Emancipation of the African slaves. Profoundly negro was the Harlem Renaissance and powerful was the movement to the extent that it developed beyond the American boundary to reach Europe and Africa. African Renaissance which commenced in the 1930's and the most articulate and best expressions of which were Negritude and Pan-Africanism owed its emergence in part to the Harlem Renaissance.^ The investigation in this study has been focused around three major areas of interest: (1) Afro-American influence upon African literature, (2) Afro-American impact on the awakening of African consciousness, and (3) Afro-American contribution to the rehabilitation of African history and civilization. Afro-American influence on African literature came from the Negro ethnic literature which was produced by the Negro Renaissance, its major contributors being Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay. Afro-American political influence from the Renaissance period came from W. E. B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey through their writings and militancy.^ The study was conducted using historical research methodology and causal-comparative research methodology. The first methodology enabled us to bring together and closely examine the diverse historical elements which pertained to the awakening of African consciousness and the rehabilitation of African history and civilization. The causal-comparative methodology was mainly used to establish causal relationships between the literature of the Negro Renaissance and African literature.^ The study shows that Negritude and Pan-Africanism, and through them, African Renaissance, owed much to the Negro Renaissance, thus attesting to the evident contribution of Afro-Americans in the making of modern African consciousness. ^

"THE NEGRO RENAISSANCE FROM AMERICA BACK TO AFRICA: A STUDY OF THE HAR" by CODJO ACHODE

The problem is practical as much as philosophical. Jacques Chevrier, a professor of African literature at the Sorbonne, estimates that only a few dozen books by African authors are published in French-speaking Africa each year, compared with several hundred in France. Bookstores "have almost disappeared from African countries, and those that do exist are frequented mostly by expats," Chevrier told me. There are hardly any African publishing houses, and the market for literature in local dialects is very small because of high illiteracy rates. Books also remain a luxury, far beyond the means of most Africans.

Yet this invisible literature has a rich history. Indeed, it's not entirely surprising that African literature in French should flourish outside Africa, since it was, in fact, born in exile -- in Paris, the destination of choice for young Africans with intellectual aspirations. Most of today's African writers trace their roots to Negritude, the literary movement that developed in the 1930's and advocated black cultural expression as a protest against French colonial rule. Founded by two university students, Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal and Aimé Césaire of Martinique, who had moved to Paris in the early 30's on scholarships, Negritude gave rise to a revolutionary new generation of African and Caribbean writers.
Continue reading the main story

As the eminent critic Boniface Mongo-Mboussa, of the Congo Republic, said when I interviewed him in a Paris cafe this winter, "Before Negritude, African literature was a colonial literature that pretended it was African." Until the movement took hold, African writers had not embraced many of the stylistic innovations of 20th-century literature, like stream-of-consciousness narrative. Nor had they used those innovations to challenge colonialism. Even French Africa's most accomplished writers, novelists like Paul Hazoumé of Benin and Bakary Diallo of Senegal, adhered to colonial attitudes about progress and celebrated European culture as markedly superior to African well into the 30's.

But if Paris was the intellectual heart of Negritude and French Africa, the movement's inspiration came from America and the Harlem Renaissance. The Negritude writers admired Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Alain Locke and W. E. B. Du Bois, black authors who visited or lived for a while in France, drawn to its intellectual vitality and relative lack of bigotry. In Mboussa's view, "Negritude, possibly the greatest cultural movement in modern black Africa, would simply not have been possible without the Harlem Renaissance."

There was also a broader American influence at work in France, starting in the 20's, when Hemingway and Fitzgerald haunted the cafes of Montparnasse and Josephine Baker dazzled audiences with her sensuous dances and naked breasts. By the 30's, the Harlem Renaissance had swept through France, enthralling African, French and American writers alike with its brash, subversive spirit.

It was this energy that Césaire tapped in "Return to My Native Land," a book-length poem published in 1939, in which he coined the word "négritude." Césaire's wrenching chant of self-affirmation announced a new era of intellectual and cultural sovereignty for black writers in French. "My blackness is not a stone flung deaf against the clamor of the day," he wrote. "My blackness is not a tower or a cathedral / it plunges into the red flesh of the soil / it plunges into the blazing flesh of the sky."

Out of Africa

1. The genesis of the concept
The concept of Négritude emerged as the expression of a revolt against the historical situation of French colonialism and racism. The particular form taken by that revolt was the product of the encounter, in Paris, in the late 1920's, of three black students coming from different French colonies: Aimé Césaire (1913–2008) from Martinique, Léon Gontran Damas (1912–1978) from Guiana and Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001) from Senegal. Being colonial subjects meant that they all belonged to people considered uncivilized, naturally in need of education and guidance from Europe, namely France. In addition, the memory of slavery was very vivid in Guiana and Martinique. Aimé Césaire and Léon Damas were already friends before they came to Paris in 1931. They were classmates in Fort-de-France, Martinique, where they both graduated from Victor Schoelcher High School. Damas came to Paris to study Law while Césaire had been accepted at Lycée Louis Le Grand to study for the highly selective test for admission to the prestigious École Normale Supérieure on rue d'Ulm. Upon his arrival at the Lycée on the first day of classes he met Senghor who had already been a student at Louis le Grand for three years.

Césaire has described his first encounter with Senghor as friendship at first sight which would last for the rest of their fairly long lives. He has also added that their personal friendship meant the encounter between Africa and the African Diaspora.[1] Césaire, Damas and Senghor had individual lived experiences of their feeling of revolt against a world of racism and colonial domination. In the case of Césaire that feeling was expressed in his detestation of Martinique which, as he confessed in an interview with French author Françoise Vergès, he was happy to leave after high school: he hated the “colored petit-bourgeois” of the island because of their “fundamental tendency to ape Europe” (Césaire 2005, 19). As for Senghor, he has written that in his revolt against his teachers at College Libermann high school in Dakar, he had discovered “négritude” before having the concept: he refused to accept their claim that through their education they were building Christianity and civilization in his soul where there was nothing but paganism and barbarism before. Now their encounter as people of African descent regardless of where they were from would lead to the transformation of their individual feelings of revolt into a concept that would also unify all Black people and overcome the separation created by slavery but also by the prejudices born out of the different paths taken. Césaire has often evoked the embarrassment felt by people from the Caribbean at the idea of being associated with Africans as they shared Europe's ideas that they were now living in the lands of the civilized. He quotes as an example a “snobbish” young Antillean who came to him protesting that he talked too much about Africa, claiming that they had nothing in common with that continent and its peoples: “they are savages, we are different” (Césaire 2005, 28).

Beyond the encounter between Africa and the French Caribbean Césaire, Senghor and Damas also discovered together the American movement of Harlem Renaissance. At the “salon”, in Paris, hosted by sisters from Martinique, Jane, Paulette and Andrée Nardal, they met many Black American writers, such as Langston Hughes or Claude McKay. With the writers of the Harlem Renaissance movement they found an expression of black pride, a consciousness of a culture, an affirmation of a distinct identity that was in sharp contrast to French assimilationism. In a word they were ready to proclaim the négritude of the “new Negro” to quote the title of the anthology of Harlem writers by Alain Locke which very much impressed Senghor and his friends (Vaillant 1990, 93–94).

Négritude (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

 

[IllmaticDelta]

 

[Secure Da Bag]

1700s or 1800s?

 

[Sinnerman]

I was familiar with the African Americans who went to Europe in the early twentienth century, but wow, had no idea it went this far back

 

[IllmaticDelta]

1700s or 1800s?

1800s

 

[IllmaticDelta]

I was familiar with the African Americans who went to Europe in the early twentienth century, but wow, had no idea it went this far back

yeah, aframs were traveling the globe, even pre-emancipation than most people realize

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Bill Richmond (August 5, 1763 – December 28, 1829)

was a British boxer, born a slave in Richmondtown, Staten Island, New York. Although born in British America, he lived for the majority of his life in England, where all his boxing contests took place. Richmond went to England in 1777, where he had his education paid for. He then apprenticed as a cabinetmaker in York.

In the early 1790s, Richmond married a local English woman, whose name was probably Mary Dunwick, in a marriage recorded in Wakefield on June 29, 1791. Richmond and his wife had several children.

According to boxing writer Pierce Egan, the well-dressed, literate and self-confident Richmond was a target for race hatred in Yorkshire. Egan described several brawls involving Richmond because of insults. One brawl occurred after someone labeled Richmond a "black devil" for being with a white woman—probably a reference to Richmond's wife.

According to Egan, Richmond fought and won five boxing matches in Yorkshire, defeating George "Dockey" Moore, two unnamed soldiers, one unnamed blacksmith and Frank Myers.

By 1795, Richmond and his family had moved to London. He became an employee and household member of Thomas Pitt, 2nd Baron Camelford, a British peer and naval officer. A boxing enthusiast, Pitt may have received boxing and gymnastic instruction from Richmond. Pitt and Richmond visited several prize fights together.