ASCAC - African and African-American Studies Curriculum

by Dr. Greg Kimathi Carr

Introduction:

Relevance to multicultural cross-cutting competency

The success of students of African descent depends in large measure on a basic understanding of the nature and function of African identity. Instructional approaches, content standards and assessment instruments which do not consider and include the self-concept of the diverse student populations being taught open the door for many misunderstandings. Many students of African descent, their parents and their communities have come to view public institutions with suspicion because of the historical nature of racism in American society. Intelligent and successful strategies aimed at teaching the student of African descent must initially and continuously address the fundamental concept of identity and its relationship to the realizing of human potential. ?In adopting the Multicultural Cross-Cutting Competency, the School District of Philadelphia has stated that generating cross-cultural understanding "is indispensable if we are to succeed in creating the culturally inclusive educational environment necessary for all our students to thrive in today's world and into the 21st century. " This goal cannot be achieved without first understanding the ways in which students of African descent have come to their current position, the ways in which they view the world, and the aspirations, intentions and agendas they bring to the educational system with them from their various communities. This introductory essay is designed to present a general cultural perspectives which will assist the educator in making the most effective use of the cultural content infused in the Curriculum Frameworks. An additional goal is to provide a general sense of current "first voice" and other source material on topics which communicate the particular and unique needs, struggles and challenges which have faced and continue to face Africana communities. The myriad of historical examples, sources and events which converge to create the tapestry of the Africana experience in the United States are provided in great detail throughout the Curriculum Frameworks and will be discussed in this essay only as occasional chronological markers for the overarching narrative.

EDUCATIONAL IMPACT

Education is the process through which human institutions (families, social groups, states, nations, polities) reproduce their cultural and civil components from generation to generation. During the past 500 years, the shift in geopolitical relations of power which attended the birth of the modern nations of the Western Hemisphere in general and the United States in particular has been premised in large measure upon the creation and maintenance of a common set of characteristics which transcend nations and have come to be grouped under definitions of "whiteness." European ethnic groups of various cultural and geographical origin, through the process of "discovering," exploring, appropriating and maintaining governmental control over lands previously unknown to them, have managed to maintain discrete cultural identities while simultaneously generating common cultural and political markers of social relations. These common characteristics found their philosophical blueprints in the writings and traditions of Europe, in particular the traditions of the "Enlightenment," which also served to generate a narrative of European history which stretched from a reconstructed image of ancient Greece through the "Revolutionary Age" of the 18th century. Equally important to the creation of Europe-centered civil societies, particularly those West of the Atlantic ocean, however, was the impact of the encounters of Europeans with various indigenous peoples across the globe. These encounters contributed two distinct but interrelated elements to the construction of "whiteness" as a cultural perspective and paradigm for social and civic governance. The first element was the incorporation of non-European cultural contributions by various European ethnic groups who engaged in cultural and social state building in the Western Hemisphere. The second element was the strengthening of definitions of "whiteness" by posing "non-whiteness" as an opposing racial, social and cultural category of "other." While all "non-whites," regardless of biological, social or cultural distinctiveness, were relegated to varying degrees of inferiority through this essentially racial cultural perspective, the position furthest removed from "whiteness" was and continues to be "blackness." In an increasingly sophisticated manner beginning with basic differentiations based on skin color, hair texture and physical features and intensifying to include racial categorization of social and cultural traits and perceptions of human potential based on those categorizations, "blackness" became an indispensable component of white racial, cultural and national identity. The need for a cheap, experienced and pragmatically-inexhaustible labor force to maximize profit for agriculture-based European ventures in the "New World" intensified and forever intermingled the histories and futures of Europeans with what became and continues to be the most distinct and easily-identified single population-based marker of "blackness": peoples of African descent. Because of the "browning" of societies in the Western Hemisphere in general and the United States in particular, the preservation of civil societies premised in part on social structures dominated by "white" people has increasingly occupied the attention of the multi-racial, multicultural populations of these societies. While non-white citizens of the United States have joined civic discourse in increasingly representative numbers, perhaps the most stubborn vestige of the constructed and maintained emphasis on "whiteness" is the educational system (public and private). Accordingly-and precisely because the cultural perspective of "whiteness" is intergenerationally transferable without regard to biological difference-the social status of "black" Americans based on racial inferiority has been maintained.

LEGAL PRECEDENTS

Because the very cultural differences which mark populations of African descent have been associated with "blackness" and, therefore, inferiority, African-American students face the twin negative impacts of centuries of racial discrimination based on both social status and cultural identity. In addressing the pervasive nature of this discrimination as a prerequisite to redressing racial discrimination in public education in the early 1950s, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund presented the testimony of African-American Psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark on the subject of the self-image of African-American schoolchildren. The Clarks's research, simplified and abbreviated in public discourse over the years as the "doll test" research, was offered to demonstrate that African-American schoolchildren had internalized inferiority complexes based on skin color. In a series of decisions in 1954 and 1955 aimed at redressing institutional racism in public education, the U.S. Supreme Court decreed that desegregation of public education was a necessary prerequisite to insuring the success of African-American students. The issue of the impact of the cultural perspective of "whiteness," imparted through the educational process independent of the racial population being educated, was not addressed. In the two generations since the legendary "Brown" decisions, opinion on the impact of "desegregation" on the erasure of opinions on African-American inferiority and the barriers to social equality and career and life success to which they contribute has been decidedly mixed. ?Legal historian Girardeau A. Spann, in distinguishing the rhetorical impact of the Brown decisions from the actual impact, notes that, as an actual matter, the decisions did not accomplish the erasure of race-based classifications in pubic education. Spann writes that, as of 1993, "a third of the black students attending public schools in the United States still attend all-black schools, and 63 percent attend schools that are at least half black." Further, private schools, gerrymandered district lines, unequal funding, white flight, residential housing patterns, and resegregation are among the many factors that converged to assure that Brown v. Board of Education is more of a public relations success than an actual weapon in the assurance of quality education for African-Americans . The dismantling of legal apartheid in the United States triggered by the Civil Rights and global anti-colonial movements of the 1950s-1960s promoted institutional access to previously excluded racial and cultural groups as well as women. However, the positive elements of non-white social institutions, particularly with regard to creating an identity-based sense of investment in civic structures, were severely curtailed. African-American students in Philadelphia currently matriculate in a desegregated public education system in which they are the numerical majority, a de facto African-American school district supervised largely by non-African-Americans. Their investment in that system, reflected in levels of academic achievement and enthusiastic whole-system participation, is informed as much by their attitude towards the educational system as it is by the educational system's attitude toward them. An educational system which reproduces cultural and civic structures premised on the "othering" of markers of Africana identity will continue to fail students of African descent. No amount of whole-school reform initiatives will cause African-American students to invest their best efforts in a process in which they feel under-valued as social, historical and cultural beings. Accordingly, the successful implementation of the District's performance standards and Cross-Cutting Competencies relies in significant measure on instructional practices which understand, develop and celebrate the sources of African-American historical, social and cultural being. These types of instructional practices, modeled throughout the Curriculum Frameworks, will help to insure African-American student success and, subsequently, the creation of enthusiastic, valuable and contributing members of American civil society.

II. Origins and Historical Contributions

Africa and Africans in the Western Imagination:

The contemporary history of Africa and African people, including African-Americans, has been written as an appendage to what has come to be known as "modern history." Modern history is essentially the record of the encounter between Europeans and European civilizations and cultures with the civilizations and cultures of other people. The concept of "modern history" presumes concepts of "ancient" and "medieval" history. These "stages" of history, moving from "prehistory" to the present and the future, rely on the concept of historical progress from a more primitive age to the present era, which reflects the upward movement of mankind. ?It is important at this juncture to understand that there are many ways of conceptualizing and recording information about the past. The science and method of recording history is known as "historiography." Like any other systematic approach to collecting, arranging and interpreting information, historiography abides by a set of rules for its practice. Unlike other intellectual endeavors, however, the practice of recording history is the practice of explaining the way in which present-day human beings are understood and relate to one another. When an individual asks "who am I?" they pose this question against family, group, national and global narratives of the past, or histories. African-Americans search for group identity has too often led them to access narratives written by others for reasons often different and sometimes even opposed to the reasons African-Americans seek to reconstruct the past. Western historiography has been used to help construct the narrative of "whiteness" referred to above. While any number of famous European historical thinkers, from Herodotus and Thucydides to Vico, Marx and Gibbon could be cited as key figures in shaping contemporary perspectives on "modern history,: one figure looms large above all others on the subject. The German philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel (1731-1830) set the general framework in which European historical identity has been created and through which non-European cultures, particularly African cultures and civilizations, have been moved to the margins of human history. In his famous series of lectures on "The Philosophy of History," Hegel made the pronouncement that "the history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom," a consciousness grounded in the development of "reason." For Hegel, persons or groups who are depicted as lacking rational thought have no history. World history is the record of the rise of reason from age to age, as human beings develop increasingly sophisticated understanding of the rational laws of the universe. The most "modern" statement of human civilization's understanding of reason is America, "the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World's History shall reveal itself " ?By Hegel's standards, people without the indicators of reason (i.e. material and spiritual progress based on rational thought) have no place in historical development. This sets the stage for his assessment of the "history" of African people. Hegel uses his view of reason to separate Africa as a conceptual entity, and the subsequent physical segmentation of Africa has endured to this day as one of the fundamental acts of European geographical determinism toward non-European lands and people. ?Hegel summarizes the history of Europe and the rest of the world by explaining the central thesis behind his geographical determinism: that the environment (climate) of the world which is the most temperate is the only place where reason could have flourished. When combined with the fact that the so-called "temperate" areas of the world are where white people resided, it becomes clear that Europeans (in Hegel's Germanocentric view, specifically Germans) were destined to give the world modern history. Others from places where it was either too cold (Eskimoes) or too hot (Africans) could not develop reason given both their environmental circumstances and the physical characteristics they developed in order to adapt to such circumstances. ?For Hegel, Europe marks the culmination of all human history which had transpired before it. He writes that:

From this point, Hegel turns his attention to Africa, and, in so doing, lays the specific foundation for the current history of Africa. He divides the continent into three parts: so-called "sub-Saharan" Africa, which he calls "Africa proper"; so-called "European Africa," the coastland above the Sahara; and the so-called "river region of the Nile," which, according to Hegel, "is in connection with Asia." ?This separation of Africa allows Hegel to extract from African history those elements which he will not concede to African culture and civilization: namely, the Mediterranean-area cultures of North Africa and, more importantly, the complex and awesome achievements of Nile Valley civilizations which run from East-Central Africa to the Mediterranean sea. The contemporary division of Africa into discrete cultural/geographical parts and the removal of Egypt from Africa finds its conceptual roots in Hegel. ?Having separated much of African culture from "Africa proper," Hegel goes on to argue that "Africa proper, as far as History goes back, has remained-for all purposes of connection within itself-the land of childhood, which lying beyond the day of self-conscious history, is enveloped in the dark mantle of night. " He then launches a litany of what have become familiar stereotypes about African life and culture. He identifies cannibalism, savagery, immortality, stupidity and superstition as common traits of African culture, arguing that the lack of basic human reason has turned Africa into a cultural backwater which lies on the historical margins of world history. What is worse still is Hegel's assertion that, as Africans were, Africans still are. ?Hegel distills his list of Africans' sub-human characteristics into one major characteristic. He writes that, "from these various traits it is manifest that want of self-control distinguishes the character of the Negroes." Continuing, Hegel seals Africa's historical fate by writing that "this condition is capable of no development or culture, and as we see them at this day, such have they always been. The only essential connection that has existed and continued between the Negroes and Europeans is that of slavery. " The only exceptions to this relationship with the African continent, according to Hegel, were to be found in "European Africa" and the Nile Valley, neither of which was allegedly "Africa proper." Though Hegel's ruminations on historical philosophy are nearly two hundred years old, the general attitude towards Africa, African people and the relationship of Africana cultural, social and intellectual contributions to world history remain the same.

Origins of Humankind and African "Prehistory":

Prior to its severe regional depopulation through the enslavement and wholesale relocation of millions of Africans to sites across the Western hemisphere, the continent of Africa served as the birthplace and primary sociocultural incubator of modern humanity. The contemporary emphasis on the past 500 years of human history caused by the disproportionate influence of European-descended peoples in the "modern era" often obscures the paleolithic, neolithic, classical and medieval cycles of human history which preceded the rise of "Europe" and in which non-European populations such as Africans and Asians figured prominently. While the geographical origin of Homo Sapiens Sapiens is a topic of interest primarily to biologists, anthropologists and geneticists, the recontextualization of narratives of human origins also serves as a marker of trans-cultural and trans-geographical identity for all human beings. Most importantly for contemporary African Americans, however, is the realization of the cultural commonalties and complexities of Africa, including the rise, development and diffusion of intra-continental social and cultural complexes. It is important to note at this juncture that history must not be restricted to the period after the development of known writing systems, but should include all periods before the development of such systems. African societies often interacted with, influenced and were in turn influenced by non-African societies and served as the incubator and developer of many of the cultural practices and social conventions and structures which eventually found their way to the western hemisphere with Africans. It is generally agreed upon among scholars that the ancestors of modern human beings originated in Africa. From the 1974 discovery of Australopithecus atarensis in the Rift Valley region of East Central Africa through the genetic identification of "Mitochondrial Eve" as the "mother" of all human beings, students of human biology agree that the African continent is the home of the widest range of biological types found on the planet, a simple indicator of its primacy as the "cradle of humankind." The earliest hominid activity found in the world is in East Africa. As human beings posed solutions to the challenges of group survival, Africa served as the site of the earliest stirrings of social relations, cultural construction and historical consciousness. The controlled use of fire in Africa dates back at least 60,000 years. The increasingly precise and efficient size and shape of microlithic tools (spearpoints, picks, cleavers) reveal and demonstrate the development of early systems for passing information from generation to generation. The domestication of animals and cultivation of plants led to increases in geographically sedentary and socially-stable societies in which the division of labor and construction of other social roles occurred. Of the many "ice ages" experienced by the earth over the course of its development, the most significant for human beings to date has been the "Würm II" ice age of approximately 70,000 to 10,000 B.C.E. The glaciers which descended from the northern polar cap covered most of Europe and created climatic changes in Africa. In addition to the racial differentiation of African migrants to Europe from those who had remained on the African continent, the Würm II age led to the creation of a cooler and wetter Eastern Africa and a cooler and drier Western Africa. This made the forest regions of Africa more habitable by large groups of humans and created a balance between the savannah and forest regions. ?During this period, human societies developed most rapidly in Africa, unimpeded by the encroaching polar ice. Approximately 10,000 years ago, as the savannah regions of the current Sahara area of northeast Africa began desertification, large populations migrated into the Nile Valley region of East Africa and the Sahel and forest regions of central and West Africa. This migration process led to the rise of the most significant and widespread classical African cultures discovered to date. These early Africans are knowable largely through what Historian Elizabeth Isichei calls "the solid quantifiable data about economic life and technological change" which their remains reveal. The earliest historical records, it can be advanced, are the "artifacts" of culture (e.g. tools, artwork, articles of clothing, etc.). Most continental African sites of early human society have not been excavated, so many early African societies and the material remains they left are no doubt waiting to be (re)discovered, thus adding to the rich tapestry of African historical narrative. ?The fact that the societies labeled Mousterian (Egypt, Nubia), Arterian (Maghrib, Sahara) and Sangoan/Lupemban (Central and West Africa) manifest what Isichei calls "astonishingly widespread" similarities indicates a general unity of African approaches to building society and culture. The development of African languages and more complex cultures is usually dated to 10,000 B.C.E .

Nile Valley Culture:

In the chronicle of human existence as attempted by modern historians, the struggle to identify and explain the sources of contemporary social and cultural institutions and practices is often informed by contemporary political needs and desires . The linchpin moment for the construction of "Western Civilization" has been the identification of classical Greece as the primary source of the western tradition in politics and culture . ?Review of the primary sources which remain from ancient Greece reveal what was widely acknowledged by modern historians until the middle of the seventeenth century: That the Greeks found themselves in a cultural exchange, often as junior partners, with a number of other peoples, including the inhabitants of Northeast Africa, a land known to them as Aegyptos (or Egypt). The political exigencies of an emerging European bloc of international superpowers who relied on racial exploitation to fuel their empire building caused European intellectuals to, for the first time, devote serious attention to discussing the racial identities of these classical-era Northeastern African and their contemporary descendants. The resulting drive to "separate Egypt from Africa" is best illustrated by Hegel's classic pronouncement on the relationship of Egypt to Africa and Africa to the "world" again found in the pages of his text on "The Philosophy of History":

What may appear at first to be an antiquated opinion of Africa and African people remains in place today as the justification for many types of educational reform aimed at African students. For many in charge of teaching children of African descent, their students arrive as the junior partners of world history, cultural beggars from a historical tradition with very little save fascinating but ultimately trivial cultural peculiarities to offer. Contemporary African-American cultural expressions, from Hip Hop to distinct systems of language use are informed by a cultural perspective which, transmutations and syntheses notwithstanding, stems from a long cycle of African historical identity, including Nile Valley civilizations. Modern researchers have countered the politically-driven removal of Egypt from Africa with findings which reestablish the African biological, cultural and social roots of classical Nile Valley civilization. The most prominent researcher of African descent to work in this area was the Senegalese iconoclast Cheikh Anta Diop (1923-1986), who marshaled linguistic, botanic, anthropological, archaeological and other research to undergird his contentions. As contemporary researchers delve deeper into the study of the similarities between classical Nile Valley society and other African civilizations, Diop's pioneering hypotheses, while undergoing constant refinement, are nevertheless being borne out. Egyptian history as a manifestation of the Nile Valley cultural complex stretches from the Khartoum mesolithic cultures of the sixth millennium B.C.E. through the Badarian, Amratian and Gerzean cultural complexes of Lower Nubia and Upper Egypt in the period stretching from 4,500 B.C.E. to 3,500 B.C.E. Classical Egyptian history has been periodized by reference to a chronology of Egyptian rulers written by a Heliopolan priest named Manetho in the third century B.C.E. Manetho is said to have written his text in order to educate the Greek population of Alexandria, though it was said to have been commissioned by Ptolemy Philadelphus in order to correct earlier histories written by Greek historians such as Hecataeus and Herodotus . Manetho's actual text does not survive: instead, only discussions of it in the work of Josepuhus, Julius Africanus, Syncellus and Tarasius, later Jewish and Christian historians, survive . Manetho divided nearly 3,000 years of Egyptian history into 30 dynasties of rulers, known as the "per-uahs" or "Pharaohs" (literally "great houses"). According to modern archaeologists, these dynasties stretch from 3200 B.C.E. to approximately 332 B.C.E., interrupted by periods of national instability with the unifying symptom of invasion of foreigners from the north and subsequent expulsion of foreigners from southern Egyptian rulers . The first six dynasties (3200 B.C.E. to 2181 B.C.E.) were responsible for the construction of all the major pyramids, the institutionalization of the expansive Egyptian state system (centered around several dozen administrative centers, or "nomes") and the writing of the major surviving Egyptian religious and cultural texts. After intervening periods of stability and instability, the central Pharaoh of the twelfth dynasty (2040 B.C.E.), Amen-em-hat, reestablished by then ancient Egyptian literary, administrative, architectural and cultural forms in what was called Whm Msw (literally "repetition of the birth" or, colloquially, "renaissance"). Another period of national instability punctuated by invasion from foreigners led to the rise of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties (1570 B.C.E.), among whose Pharaohs were Ahmose, the female ruler Hatchepsut, Akhnaten, Djehutymose III and Ramses II. (also known as "Rameses the Great"). More instability presaged the rise of the twenty-fifth dynasty in 750 B.C.E. and its trio of famous rulers, Piiankhi, Shabaka and Taharqua. By the twenty-seventh dynasty, the first Persian invaders assume the throne of Egypt and, in 332 B.C.E., the first invaders of European descent, the Greeks, established control over the northern delta. By this time, dynastic Egyptian national society was at least thirty centuries old. Classical African civilization in the Nile Valley was not assimilated into invading cultures with the fall of northern Egypt into Greek, then Roman and Persian hands. In the south, the African civilizations of Kush, Meroë and Axum flourished and carried Nile Valley society into the medieval age of African history. Recent scholarship has discovered cultural commonalties between classical Egypt and other African societies in areas such as governmental structure, spiritual and religious systems, social rituals (e.g. circumcision and initiation) and artistic form, among others .

Medieval Africa to the Eve of the Enslavement:

African social formations are generally considered to have followed migration patterns which have only relatively recently begun to reveal themselves to geographers, anthropologists and other students of human culture. According to Richard Newman, the reliance of African societies on agriculture was virtually complete by two thousand years ago. With this reliance came the rapid spread of a mode of production which greatly increased the number of people living in centralized societies, which in turn created larger socio-cultural complexes. The largest areas of settlement reflected the following factors: the annual rise and fall of flood waters, which turned certain river valleys and lake shores into prime settlement sites; areas in the highlands with rich volcanic soils, which sustained farming; the technological innovation of iron making, which made sites rich in iron ore strategic locations which gave home to key societies around which other groups gathered and found direction and emulation of cultural practices . Eventually, as trade between more sedentary and established societies developed, kinship networks were spread, systems of conscription based in enslavement appeared in areas, and these activities congealed into larger governmental structures, of which "kingdoms/chiefdoms," "religious states," and "stateless societies" are three major types. Even larger "empires" based on the production of commodities and more expansive interregional trading opportunities appeared, of which Egypt is perhaps the example with the longest continuous history. Because of the open nature of many African social systems which could accommodate the incorporation of strangers through marriage, societies expanded rapidly . Among the more prominent and geographically-expansive African state complexes of the medieval period were Ghana, Mali, Songhai and Kanem. The Ghanian state covered an expanse of land bordered on the west by the Atlantic Ocean, the Niger River valley on the east and the Sahel region to the north. The Ghanian influence over many of the trans-Saharan trade routes, particularly with regard to their powerful salt and gold repositories, made the Ghanian state well known beyond Africa. By 1076, invaders from the Maghrib area, the Almoravids, were able to splinter the governing apparatus of the Ghanian state. ?By the mid 13th century, however, Africans led by the Mandingo ethnic group and the Keita family were able to annex smaller states and create a federation of societies that became known as the Mali empire. The Malian era saw the strengthening of ties between African and Arab cultures, culminating in the appropriation of Islam as the religion of state governance and Arabic as the language of intellectual work in West Africa. By the mid 15th century, as Europe stirred from its last "Dark Age," Mali had been superceded by the Songhai empire, a federation of African societies whose geographical boundaries would have rivaled the modern United States in size. One of the most prominent features of the Songhai empire was its educational system, famous beyond its state borders. The great mosques at Timbuctu, Gao and Jenne produced a series of brilliant African Muslim scholars. Groupings of Africans could just as easily re-form in response to impulses such as the decentralization of power in a large empire, the erosion of strategic alliances with neighboring groups, or invasions and/or conquests which might accelerate instability. By the time of medieval African history (approximately 600 C.E. to 1500 C.E.), non-African groups such as the Arabs, Romans and Chinese intensified the longstanding intercultural contact between Africans and non-Africans. During this period, the Roman name "Africa" (the proper adjective form of the Latin Afer, or "the south west wind") replaced the Greek term "Ethiopia" (Greek for "burnt face") as the name for the entire continent south of the European mainland. ?One of the consequences of African cultural and material exchanges with non-Africans was the identification of urban patterns of settlement by non-Africans as the central sites of "African civilization," which was not always the case. Cultural and religious traditions such as Christianity, Islam and Judaism served as sites of intercultural dialogue. Ultimately, the large-scale engagement of European nations with Africans from the fourteenth century onward altered world history in unforeseeable ways. ?Though European incursions as colonizers in Africa can be traced back at least to the Ptolemaic period in Northeast Africa and the colonization of Cetua on the north Moroccan coast in 1415 by Portugal, the last decade of the 15th century serves as a significant marker in the construction of the emerging global system of intercultural economic, political and military relations. Historian John Henrik Clarke argues that three events which took place in 1492-93 symbolize the emergence of this new system. The first event was the opening of the Western hemisphere to European exploitation symbolized by the first voyages of Christopher Columbus. The second event was the routing of the African and Arab cultural, political and military occupiers of medieval Spain, thus helping to galvanize the political energies of an emerging European consciousness given political and religious fervor by Charlemagne and infusions of cultural and intellectual capital from Asia and Africa. This era, which has come to be known culturally as the "Enlightenment," dawned in full vigor just as the third event, the decline of the last major West African nation, the Songhai polity, occurred . The reemergence of European interest in Africa, this time couched in a voracious praxis of global conquest and exploitation described as "the modern world system" by the French social scientist Immanuel Wallerstein , had two major cultural effects. The first was the framing of the cultural perspective of "whiteness" as a series enabling identity characteristics, which has been described. For Africans brought to the Western hemisphere as labor to work lands simultaneously being depopulated of their indigenous inhabitants, the second effect was the process of bonding based on cultural commonalities made possible by the condition of "blackness" imposed upon them by the conditions of their new environment.

III. Enslavement and Push Factors:

H.E. Boubou Hama has commented in relation to the African view of history that "a people that has long been victorious does not have the same consciousness of its past as one that has long been subjugated. " Africans fought to preserve images of victory so that they could point to a historical narrative of triumph to strengthen their efforts to reestablish an order consistent with historical and social optimism. While oppression and exclusion from emerging Western societies shaped and informed the resistance of enslaved Africans, it was not then nor is it now the central defining characteristic of Africana worldviews. Cedric Robinson makes the distinction between the sources of African resistance and the conditions that made that resistance necessary over the past five hundred years. In noting that Africans had to generate frameworks of resistance to respond to European oppression, he correctly observes that "this experience, though, was merely the condition for Black radicalism-its immediate reason for and object of being-not the foundation for its nature and character." ?Stressing, therefore, that African traditions of resistance to oppression and exclusion cannot be understood merely within the contexts of their genesis, he continues, writing that "it is not a variant of Western radicalism whose proponents happen to be Black. Rather, it is a specifically African response to an oppression emergent from the immediate determinants of European development in the modern era and framed by orders of human exploitation woven into the interstices of European social life from the inceptions of Western civilization ." ?Nevertheless, the role of oppression and exclusion in the modern Africana historical experience does extend beyond providing a galvanizing force against which Africans organized and resisted. African cultural practices adapted various elements of Western thought and culture and turned them to use in resistance struggles. Many of these initial vestiges of oppression and exclusion remain embedded in African-American cultural practices to this day. ?Rhett Jones identifies four distinct stages through which African cultural practices passed, "each representing a synthesis or fusion of events in the previous stage." He contends that the first synthesis was the fusion of the many cultures the enslaved Africans brought with them, saying that they soon realized that, "in addition to important differences among them, there were certain underlying cultural similarities. " ?The second synthesis came "as a result of the need of blacks to meet the challenge of Christianity," a need made immediately vital because of the disruption of African spiritual practices which were heavily dependent on family lineages, most of which had been severely or totally disrupted. Jones notes that, "as late at the 1730s, the vast majority of slaves and many free blacks were not Christians," and that, until the mid 18th century, enslavers were not generally concerned with African religious practices. The third synthesis, accomplished after Africans had assimilated some forms of Christianity, was the modification of the syncretic religious traditions received through combining African and European practices to reflect the larger role black women played in African cultural life. The final synthesis, which took full root in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, was the incorporation of European political thought, such as the struggle for concepts such as "liberty," "individual freedoms" and the like into African frames of reference . ?Many students of the African-American historical experience examine the oppressive and exclusionary nature of American civil society and its intellectual and cultural foundations without paying sufficient attention to the stages transformation and incorporation which Jones describes, particularly the fourth stage. Africans in the United States did not arrive as "blank slates" ready to be filled with the concepts of "liberty and justice for all." Rather, they assimilated the high rhetorical pronouncements of the Franklins, Jeffersons, Madisons and Adamses into pre-existing African worldviews. In this manner, then, elements of European oppression and exclusion were actually turned by Africans to serve their goal of securing political and cultural autonomy.

V. Resistance to Oppress/Diversity and the Diaspora:

Africans resisted enslavement from the time they were descended upon by rival African ethnic groups working on behalf of European traders through the Middle Passage and directly into the first moments of chattel enslavement in the Western hemisphere. This resistance to oppression has continued throughout the African world and the eras of de jure and de facto enslavement, colonialism and neocolonialism. In the United States, resistance to oppression has continued as an unbroken thread informing the struggles to end enslavement, legal apartheid (Jim Crow), and race-based denial of access to equality of both opportunity and outcome in the full panoply of human endeavor in American civil society. Revolts of enslaved Africans took place throughout the Western hemisphere within the briefest of time periods following their disembarkment. In the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, major rebellions occurred in places such as Brazil, Santiago, Lina, Barbados, Puebla, Jamaica, Haiti, Lima and Suriname outside the borders of what would become the United States. The most famous rebellions were the uprisings in Brazil which led to the creation of the independent African "quilombos" and the African state of Palmares in 1630, the revolts of the Jamaican "maroons" (Spanish for "runaways") and the Haitian Revolution, a sustained anti-colonial war which culminated in the declaration of the first free republic of African people in the modern Western hemisphere in 1804. In the colonial North America, the frequency and extent of acts of African resistance frequently provoked expressions of alarm and concern by colonial governments and militias. The greatest fear during this period was of armed African rebellion, a fear played upon in the early stages of the colonies war with Great Britain by Lord Dunmore, a British colonial governor who promised freedom to any African-American who would join the British in armed struggle against the colonies . A number of ordinances restricting the movement of both enslaved and nominally "free" Africans were passed in the 17th and 18th centuries, including statutes which prohibited African-American women from using cooking fires while indoors due to the propensity of arson . Historian Vincent Franklin has noted that a central element of African-American resistance to oppression has been the advocacy for self-determination. He quotes an elderly African-American woman as responding to an ethnographic field study question posed to her in the early 1970s with the statement "Well, from the start, it should be said that we are a nation. The best of us have said it and everybody feels it. " This sentiment informed the struggle for African resistance in the United States, a struggle which drew upon examples of African resistance and the study and understanding of the importance of African history to African-American identity. By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, African Americans had established complex social and cultural structures through which to view the larger U.S. society and their places in it. African-Americans had successfully incorporated "Old World" pre-enslavement artistic, cultural and spiritual traditions into new traditions grounded in the experience of enslavement. The mastery of speaking and, particularly for African Americans in the northern U.S, reading and writing in non-African languages such as English and French was a central component of this process. In South and Central America, the Caribbean and the southern U.S., African religious traditions combined with Christianity to produce "theologies of resistance" such as Vodun and Santeria. In places such as Haiti, these theologies served as the spiritual basis for political revolutions . In the U.S., nominally free African Americans in the north pointed to the successful Haitian Revolution of 1804 as evidence of excellent African resistance to oppression. At the same time, these largely-Christian African Americans found in the Christian Bible a symbol of spiritual and cultural resistance that became the first major Pan-African signifier: "Ethiopianism." ?African-American ministers and thinkers such as Philadelphia's Richard Allen and Absalom Jones and Boston's Prince Hall, David Walker and Maria Stewart found support for the eventual triumph of Africans (Ethiopians) in the Biblical passage of Psalms 68:31: "Princes shall come out of Egypt, Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God. " Religious Historian Gayraud Wilmore writes that:

This great prophecy of Psalm 68:31 became a forecast of the ultimate fulfillment of the people's spiritual yearning. It is impossible to say how many sermons were preached from this text during the nineteenth century, but we know that Richard Allen, Prince Hall, Lott Carey, Henry Highland Garnet, Alexander Crummell, Edward W. Blyden, James T. Holly and Bishop Henry McNeil Turner were all eloquent expositors of Psalm 68:31. They made it the cornerstone of missionary emigrationism both in the United States and in Africa . The Ethiopianist movement was more than the simple adaptation of a Biblical-historical narrative to the uses of African American resistance. It represented an attempt by African-Americans to reconnect themselves to an African past from which they had been violently disassociated. Simultaneously, enslaved African-Americans Denmak Vesey, Gabriel Prosser and Nat Turner, who combined Christianity with African spiritual traditions, led rebellions aimed at sparking nation-wide revolts of enslaved Africans. In 1850, the United States passed the Fugitive Slave Act, insuring the inevitability of a clash between pro and anti-enslavement forces. Among the most prominent African-American abolitionists of the antebellum period were Frederick Douglass, Martin Robison Delany, Sojourner Truth and Henry Highland Garnet. Philadelphia's Robert Campbell, a Jamaican by birth, explored the Niger valley of West Africa along with Delany in a search for a place where African Americans might relocate . ?African Americans organized resistance to enslavement in a number of ways prior to the Civil War. In addition to engaging in abolitionist organizing, speaking and lobbying, they produced newspapers, books, pamphlets and other anti-enslavement documents and organized literary societies such as Philadelphia's Library Company of Colored Persons and Reading Room Society and Boston's all-female Afric-American Female Intelligence Society of America . Although the importation of enslaved Africans was outlawed after 1808, enslavement continued as the cornerstone of southern United States. production and a significant element in northern United States business investment and the federal gross national product. Production of cotton, the staple crop in the agrarian South, was expanded greatly by the introduction of the "cotton engine" ('gin) in the late 18th century. Enslavement as both an economic and cultural foundation of the United States South was intractably interwoven into the fabric of Southern life. In the Northern United States, the first full ruminations of the Industrial Revolution presented the possibility of expanding their already solid commercial grip on the manufacturing and trade of the cash crops grown in the South. Politically, Southerners and their economic allies (merchants, bankers) had held control over the federal government since the beginning of the republic. Of the first sixteen presidents, many of the most significant, such as Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Jackson were Southerners, and the political and intellectual template of the young republic bore the stamp of the so-called "middle south," particularly Virginia (the "birthplace of presidents") as much as any other region in the country. The Civil War began essentially a conflict between elements of the southern agrarian bourgeoisie and its middle class, controllers of a thriving southern "slaveocracy," and an emerging northern industrial bourgeoisie who favored a nationally-regulated-and heavily northern influenced-political, economic and trade system. Calling upon the culture of oppression and exclusion, southern ruling-class elements galvanized the general white population to lay down their lives for what eventually became known as "The Lost Cause." This same appeal to white supremacist cultural perspectives would galvanize working class and poor whites behind the Ku Klux Klan, segregated labor unions, and resistance to the Civil Rights Movement, Affirmative Action and other legal and social movements designed to remedy past discrimination. No one in the United States expected the Civil War to become the greatest conflict in United States history before or since in terms of human capital and national resources. In the North, lukewarm popular support of the war erupted into wholesale violent resistance to the idea in places like New York and Cincinnati when the thought of fighting to win the freedom of Africans took root in the popular imagination as a reason for the war besides preserving the national union. In fact, a popular slogan of the day summed up the attitude of the majority of white northerners: "To the flag we are pledged, all its foes we abhor, And we ain't for the nigger, be we are for the war. " Meanwhile, African-Americans argued passionately and widely to be allowed to fight on their own behalf. Insurgents like those who escaped northward on the Underground Railroad and their leaders, such as Harriet Tubman, had not waited for the declaration of war to decide the issue of their self-determination. When sectional conflict finally bloomed in the blaze of cannon fire at Fort Sumter, African-American combatants found themselves taking up arms on both sides, as had been the case in the American Revolutionary War less than a hundred years before. Their primary purpose continued to be one of securing freedom for themselves and their families, superceding any notions of undying loyalty to either the Union or the Confederacy . After two more large wars, the Spanish-American War at the close of the 19th century and World War I at the turn of the 20th, African-Americans resolutely declared that their patriotism would be defined as much by how the United States treated them as by the success of the U.S. military against foreign powers. This sentiment found its greatest national African-American voice in the "Double V(ictory)" (at home and abroad) campaign spearheaded by the national African-American press during World War II and contributed to the desegregation of the U.S. military the approaching Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s. During the Civil War, more than 175,000 African-Americans served in the Union Army, from the first actions along the Mississippi River to the celebrated attack on Fort Wagner immortalized in the motion picture "Glory" to the final skirmishes of the war . Enslaved Africans abandoned the plantations of their enslavement in the thousands, creating what W.E.B. DuBois called "the general strike" which helped break the back of the Confederate South . The years between the end of the Civil War and the end of Reconstruction (1865-1877) saw African-Americans focus their energies on securing the legal, political and economic guarantees which would lead to equality of opportunity in an increasingly industrial U.S. political economy. The years immediately following the war saw the passage of the "Civil War Amendments" to the United States Constitution. The 13th Amendment abolished enslavement; the 14th Amendment guaranteed full citizenship and extended the protection of the federal law to all citizens, an "equal protection clause" which has been evoked by a wide variety of Americans over the years; the 15th Amendment addressed voting rights. Securing the protection of the "Civil War Amendments" took African-Americans leading a "second reconstruction" a century later to more substantially secure. During the years of federally-supervised "Reconstruction," African-American legislators participated in, and in places like South Carolina, led initiatives such as the drive to institutionalize free public education for all Americans . African-Americans paid particular attention to education and economic development in the years of Reconstruction, using the schools set up by organizations such as the American Missionary Society and the Freedmen's Bureau to expand antebellum efforts to gain education. Bureau schools served over 25,000 formerly enslaved Africans; institutions of higher education, often named for Freedmen's Bureau officials such as Oliver O. Howard and Clinton B. Fisk or prominent whites such as Abraham Lincoln or the Abolitionist William Wilberforce opened their doors as well. In Atlanta, African-Americans opened Morris Brown College, the only African-American-founded college in the Atlanta University System, named for the second Bishop of the A.M.E. Church. African-American mutual aid societies, fraternal and sororal orders expanded their efforts at African-American self-help. ?By the end of the 1870s, however, the North and South had succeeded in striking an uneasy political truce, with many ex-Confederates resuming their posts in the national legislature. The resolution of the hotly contested presidential election of 1876 by Rutherford Hayes's removal of the last federal troops from the South sealed the political fate of African Americans in the region and would converge by the end of the century with the pull of economic opportunity and political access to spur an exodus of millions of African-Americans northward. ?With the "great compromise" of 1876-77, political Reconstruction came to an end. By the end of the century, the southern states had rewritten their constitutions to exclude African Americans from legal entitlements; a companion white cultural perspectives, nurtured in the folk music and theater traditions popularized by writers such as Stephen Foster and entertainment forms such as blackface minstrelsy, lent the name of a character from its tradition to the era's politics of disfranchisement, legal exclusion and violent repression. "Jim Crow" was the title character in a popular minstrel song of the era, and soon came to represent both the politics and culture of white supremacy . ?Simultaneously, Europeans were moving to consolidate their colonial interests on the African continent. Brenda Gayle Plummer notes that, while the end of the 19th century was a placid period for Europeans that still evokes fond nostalgia of Europe and North America, it was an era of profound and disruptive change for Africans on the African continent and in the Diaspora. German Chancellor Otto von Bismark called a conference for Berlin in 1885, where the United States agreed to the division of African territories among fourteen European states without the consultation of Africans . ?Culturally, the last quarter of the 19th century witnessed the rising expression of the most unique cultural forms to be produced on American soil: the cultural production of Africans in the U.S. In music, the spirituals, blues and ragtime informed the steady rise of American popular music, particularly in its folk and country forms. In literature, the work of Paul Lawrence Dunbar and Charles Chestnutt became known to white audiences, even as the African-American literary community held up figures such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and others. The ironic African-American comedic tradition gave birth to the early days of "vaudeville," which by the middle of the next century had triggered the first and second generations of nationally-popular white comedians. By the end of the century, however, the cultural perspectives of Jim Crow had congealed in forms such as poll taxes, "grandfather clauses," white primaries to insure that African Americans would receive neither the credit nor the ability to enjoy the contributions they had made economically and culturally to the nation. White "scientists" led the popularization of the notion that African Americans were biologically inferior and fated for extinction, a scientific notion which found its American roots in the early 19th century but which extended into European Enlightenment figures such as Carl von Linne and J.F. Blumenbach, among others . While African Americans were being stereotyped and caricatured, continental Africans were being portrayed as bloodthirsty savages by the very Europeans who were violently assaulting them in texts such as Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness . The entire period stretching from the end of Reconstruction to the end of the century was labeled "The Nadir" by African-American historian Rayford W. Logan, who traced the history of racist attitudes toward African-Americans in the presidential administrations and mass media of the period. Logan writes that the period represented "a succession of weak Presidents, between 1877 and 1901, [which] facilitated the consolidation of white supremacy in the South, and Northern acceptance of victory for 'The Lost Cause'" . As early American imperial interests expanded through the Caribbean, Pacific and Central American spheres, the coming of European World War I saw the increasing exclusion of Africans from U.S. political life . ?The primary reason for U.S. imperial interests, namely the regional expansion of markets for American goods and services, prefigured the coming globalization of economic ventures and the generation of identity markers which would protect and expand middle and late capitalist superstructures. Cultural icons which helped to generate public opinion which supported U.S. foreign and domestic policy became important. European ethnic and cultural groups who immigrated to the U.S. during this period sought to assimilate and used "whiteness" as a catch-all common ground . The voices of groups which were discriminated against or oppressed began to be more widely portrayed as "anti-patriotic." Among these voices were the political activists in African America, many of who came into prominence during the first of the great phases of migration as African-Americans left the Southern U.S. for the North and West in the late 19th century and during and after World Wars I and II. ?In the first decade of the twentieth century, African-Americans continued their push for rights at home and their advocacy of the interests of African people globally. On the African continent, the "partition" of African lands among European nations which began in earnest at the Berlin Conference of 1884-85 was meeting with the unabated resistance of African ethnic and political groups such as the Ashanti and Ethiopians. Already having established a long record of commenting of injustices across the African world , African leaders in the Western hemisphere met with other Africans at the First Pan-African Congress, held in Westminister, England in 1900. Among those present were Anna Julia Cooper, James T. Holly, Alexander Walters and W.E.B. DuBois from the United States. ?Domestically, the lynching of African Americans had reached epidemic numbers. Ida Bell Wells, a journalist from Holly Springs, Mississippi, investigated and wrote against lynch violence and was driven from the South for 30 years after her Memphis, Tennessee newspaper office was burnt to the ground by a white mob. By the end of the decade, race violence had spread to other cities and, in the wake of a white vs. African-American battle in Springfield, Illinois in August, 1908, white liberals initiated a meeting between prominent African-American leaders and themselves which led to the founding of the predominantly white National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909. ?By the 1920s, Civil Rights organizations such as the NAACP and the Urban League (founded 1911) spearheaded national drives for African-American equality while African-Americans participated in these organizations as well as in exclusively African-American organizations such as Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League of the World (founded 1914), the largest organization of African people devoted to political, cultural and social solidarity that has ever existed, before or since. The UNIA and ACL attracted a wide range of Africans, including participation from a number of African-American scholars such as John E. Bruce, Arthur A. Schomburg, Carter G. Woodson and William Ferris, who were prominent in African-American scholarly organizations such as the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (1916) and The American Negro Academy (1897) . ?By the 1930s, the increasing industrialization of the U.S. economy had greatly spurred the rise of labor union solidarity in the white working class. African-Americans, excluded historically from the largest unions and resident by now in great numbers in the Northern and Midwestern industrial centers such as Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and Detroit, organized groups such as A. Phillip Randolph's Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids and made alliances with radical groups such as the Communist Party in order to protect their emerging labor and social interests. Groups such as the Nation of Islam and the Moorish Science Temple filled the Africana nationalist vacuum left by the fragmentation of the UNIA, which also nevertheless continued to operate in the wake of Garvey's deportation in 1927. The election of Franklin D. Roosevelt as President in 1932, an election made possible by the wholesale defection of African-Americans from the Republican Party in the wake of the Great Depression, brought the "New Deal," a package of social reform initiatives and entitlements aimed at providing social and economic support for all Americans. African Americans, whose interests were represented in part by a "kitchen cabinet" of advisors to Roosevelt which included educator Mary McCleod Bethune and economist Robert C. Weaver, benefited greatly from the New Deal social programs. African-American cultural interests also continued to inform United States popular culture. The aesthetic contributions of the "New Negro Renaissance" which stretched from the mid 1890s to the 1930s, symbolized by Alain Locke's 1925 anthology entitled The New Negro, had captured part of the cultural perspectives of African-America. This era, commonly referred to as the "Harlem Renaissance" era, actually involved African-American cultural workers across the country and congregated in cities such as Washington, D.C., Indianapolis, New York, Philadelphia and Atlanta, among other places . Anthropologists Melville Herskovitz and Franz Boas wrote about what African-American scholars such as DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, Benjamin Mays and Arthur Huff Faucet had identified as the African essence of African-American culture. The last generation of African-Americans who experienced enslavement were interviewed and their recollections preserved as a result of the efforts of young interviewers for the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal program . The advent of World War II and the subsequent technological revolutions in first radio and then television spelled the end of expensive travelling big bands. The subsequent explosion in sales of recordings meant that the huge influence on American popular music wielded by figures such as Scott Joplin in ragtime and Bessie Smith in the blues literally built recording giants such as Columbia Records, who capitalized eventually upon the "rhythm and blues" and subsequent "rock and roll" genres developed by the smaller touring groups of the 1940s and 1950s. Simultaneously, motion pictures used the racist caricaturization of African-American images to solidify notions of whiteness and turn racial prejudice into a profitable tool for the movie industry. Signature films such as "Birth of A Nation" (1915), "Gone With the Wind" (1939) and the entire series of Shirley Temple films highlighted offensive racial stereotypes. Ironically, even as independent African-American filmmakers fought racial stereotyping, African-American actors in white films such as the Academy Award-winning Hattie McDaniel, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson and Eddie "Rochester" Anderson devoted off-camera time to working for Civil Rights. Jazz, "America's classical music," merged the complex compositions of Edward Kennedy Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane with the more accessible but no less complex stylings of Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Dinah Washington to lead America through phases of musical cultural innovation which still echo through the rhythmic structure of the best of contemporary hip hop music. ?The years after World War II saw the rise of the Civil Rights Movement and the decline in independent African-American social institutions. An African-American population heartened by wartime prosperity was undeterred by the advent of the "Cold War," which saw the demonization of African-American radicals such as DuBois, Charlotta Spears Bass, the pioneering African-American editor of the California Eagle and the first woman to run for vice president of the U.S., and the first American international superstar entertainer, Paul Robeson. Organizations such as the Council for African Affairs continued to press the United States on issues of Pan-Africanism while domestic activism escalated in the wake of the 1954 Brown decisions. Subsequent national attention focused on the 1955-56 Montgomery Bus Boycott, the emergence of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as a major voice in Civil Rights, and the desegregation of public education represented by the integration of Little Rock Central High School in 1957 and the sit-in movement symbolized by African-American college students at North Carolina A&T in 1960. ?The Civil Rights Movement was helped immensely by the global decolonization movement. David Birmingham notes that "the decolonization of Africa was one of the turning points in the history of the post-war worldThe liberation of Africa from European rule followed on the heels of the independence gained by India and other colonies in Asia. The struggle for political freedom by the peoples of Africa also helped to open the way for the civil rights movement in North America. " On the African continent, many of the leaders of African independence movements in what became known as "the decade of Africa" had been exposed to the writings of African-Americans, including Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah, Nigeria's Nnamdi Azikiwe and Kenya's Jomo Kenyatta. Nkrumah and Azikiwe both lived and studied in Philadelphia during their early years. ?The first half of the 1960s was the most intense and effective period of the movement to end legal apartheid in the United States Social protests in southern cities such as Birmingham, Montgomery, Nashville, New Orleans and Jackson were supported by organizing in and financial and personnel support from the North. Young people, organized into the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee at the urging of Ella Baker, Secretary to King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, launched an interracial attack on segregation and, through efforts such as "Freedom Summer" in 1964, helped empower thousands of southern African-Americans, including the major public intellectual from Mississippi, Fannie Lou Hamer. By 1965, however, the youth of SNCC, radicalized by their southern campaigns, the death of Nation of Islam spokesperson and Pan-African nationalist El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X) and the seeming ineffectiveness of integrationist strategies, broke with the mainstream Civil Rights leadership and pursued more nationalist strategies. ?The 1960s marked the watershed of the Civil Rights Movement of the post-war period and the escalation of the ongoing Africana nationalist efforts of previous generations. By the late 1960s, the major political and legal reforms attributable to the Civil Rights Movement such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965 brought little ongoing satisfaction to African Americans faced with the fires of northern cities erupting in racial violence. By the time that President Lyndon B. Johnson's Kerner Commission declared that there were "two Americas," separate (white and black) and unequal, the cries of "Black Power" raised in the throats of younger African-American leaders and thinkers such as SNCC Chairman Stokely Carmichael had captured the imagination of African-America. ?Politically, the decade between the 1965 insurrection in the Watts section of Los Angeles and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam in 1975 saw an explosion in the number of African-American elected officials. Culturally, the philosophy of "Black Power" was popularized in music such as James Brown's "Say it Loud! (I'm Black and I'm Proud"), Marvin Gaye's "Trouble Man" album, the experimental jazz of Pharaoh Sanders, and the proto-rap of The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron. Boxer Muhammad Ali's odyssey from 1960 Olympic boxing champion to Nation of Islam Member and Malcolm X confidant, Vietnam War conscientious objector and political spokesman symbolized the transformation of the African-American athlete. A generation of young athletes such as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (Lew Alcindor) and Ahmad Rashad (Bobby Moore) changed their names in emulation of the former Cassius Clay and the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City saw the protest of the condition of African-Americans by John Carlos and Tommie Moore immortalized in international sports lore. Ali, who combined the defiant imagery of early 20th century heavyweight champion Jack Johnson with the invincibility and racial appeal of Joe Louis and the symbolic significance of Jackie Robinson and Althea Gibson, was the key figure in perhaps the single most important Pan-African cultural event of the 1970s: the 1974 "Rumble in the Jungle" in Kinshasa, Zäire. The event, hosted by Zäirian dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, and promoted by the largely unknown Don King, was preceded by a musical festival featuring, among others, James Brown, vocalist Bill Withers, the Spinners, African popular musician Hugh Masekela and bluesman B.B. King. The "Black Woodstock" was followed by the Ali-George Foreman heavyweight title bout, with Ali claiming that his task was the reclamation of the world title on behalf of Africans worldwide. Foreman, a heavily-favored champion clearly favored by white Americans seven time zones away, was defeated by Ali. ?Intellectually, an explosion of African Americans with university degrees combined with student and community protests resulted in the concentrated push for the study of Africana history and culture in all levels of the U.S. educational system. "Black Studies" programs and departments were initiated across the country at colleges and universities and, based upon the research done by African-American scholars and sympathetic non-African-Americans for over two centuries, an intellectual movement arose which institutionalized that research tradition. Organizations such as the African Heritage Studies Association (1968), the National Council for Black Studies (1972) and the Association for African Historians (1973) wrote documents which argued that an "afrocentric" perspective on the human past should be integrated into intellectual work at all levels. These efforts resulted in the appearance of the first Ph.D. program in African-American Studies in the world at Temple University in Philadelphia in 1985. By the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, the reconfiguration of the U.S. economy in the throes of the expansion of the service and information industries and rapid white flight from large urban centers to suburbia introduced new challenges to African-American progress. By the end of the 1980s, many urban centers had become predominantly African-American and Latino, with African-American political leaders left to participate in governing with shrunken tax bases caused by white individual and corporate flight. General unemployment soared and African-American unemployment skyrocketed. Globally, the eventual disintegration of the Soviet Union presaged the beginning stages of cultural and political reconfiguration as countries such as India, China and Japan began to exert more influence on U.S. interests and fortunes. Corporations began to export jobs to areas such as Mexico, Korea and Indonesia, where labor was procured at wage slave rates, leaving domestic U.S. workers of all colors with few options save public assistance, crime and the "shadow economy" of drugs and other illicit activity. As African Americans moved into many of the political positions which they had coveted in previous decades, empowered by the removal of barriers of de jure discrimination, they faced de facto segregation in areas such as education, labor and business. The continuing interest in linking African-American fortunes with Africans globally demonstrated across the African-American community combined with the intensifying democratization movement in Africa to spur Pan-African educational, cultural and business interests. Currently, African Americans are reexamining their positions in the United States, seeking to create effective coalitions with other oppressed groups and engaging in serious discourse over what the philosopher Cornel West has called "the future of the race."

VI. Urban Life and the Philadelphia Experience/Community and Culture :

African-Americans have been a vital part of the Philadelphia community since its inception in the seventeenth century by William Penn, an owner of enslaved Africans. By 1720, there were at least 2,500 African Americans in Pennsylvania, many of who were enslaved. An act imposed in 1693 required Africans in the city to carry passes. Although Pennsylvania's Gradual Abolition of Slavery Act of 1780 spoke to the abolition of enslavement, it allowed newborn African-American children to remain in the enslavement of their enslaved mother's owners for 28 years after their birth. Africans struggled to generate independent lives in Philadelphia. The Free African Society, formed in 1787 was the first African-American beneficial society in the country. Its founders, the aforementioned Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, also pioneered the African Church, which split into the First African Church of St. Thomas (pastored by Jones) and Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church (pastored by Allen). Bethel A.M.E. Church currently continues to worship on the oldest piece of land continuously owned by African-Americans in the country, in south Philadelphia . In the summer of 1793, the intervention of African Americans as caretakers and crisis support played the central role in allowing the city to survive a Yellow Fever plague which killed almost 10% of the city's population . African Americans in Philadelphia played prominent roles in the abolitionist movement, playing host to several of the early Negro Conventions, including the first Convention in 1830 . Literary and social organizations, schools and labor support guild also flourished in the Philadelphia of the early to mid 19th century. Among the more prominent of these organizations were the Institute for Colored Youth (now Cheney University), Mercy Hospital, the African Grand Lodge of Masons Hall (Pennsylvania Hall) and the African Fire Association. African-Americans participated in the Civil War from Pennsylvania and were trained at Camp William Penn, just outside the city limits. ?The history of African-American struggle in Philadelphia includes periodic violent clashes with white Philadelphians. Race riots occurred in 1829, 1835, 1838 and 1849. The 1838 riot saw whites destroy Pennsylvania Hall, the Shelter for Colored Orphans and a number of African-American churches and private residences. African-Americans weathered an election-day riot in 1848 and gained the right to vote in 1871, after a riot which saw the murder of the dynamic young African-American educator and political leader Octavius Catto . ?By the beginning of the 20th century, the small but dynamic African-American population of Philadelphia counted in its ranks some of the most prominent leaders in the nation, including the editors of the oldest continually published newspaper in the United States, the Philadelphia Tribune (1884-present); artist Henry Ossawa Tanner; jurists Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander and Raymond Pace Alexander, sociologist Arthur Huff Fauset and his sister, writer Jessie Redmon Fauset, and vocalist Marian Anderson, among many others. The first major work of urban sociology, W.E.B. DuBois's The Philadelphia Negro (1898), drew a portrait of an African-American community in Philadelphia which was already showing the ill-effects of under-employment and racial discrimination. Between the beginning of the century and the 1960s, the African-American population swelled by some 800% in the wake of the great migrations. As the population swelled, African-American leaders struggled for the rights of the new immigrants. African-Americans received the right to public housing in Philadelphia in 1943, built communities and churches and began to wield political power, making Crystal Bird Fauset the first African-American woman in the country to be elected to a state legislature. By the 1960s, African-Americans in Philadelphia played active roles in the Civil Rights Movement under the leadership of figures such as Raymond Pace Alexander, Leon Sullivan and Cecil B. Moore. The 1960s and 70s saw Philadelphia take a prominent role in the Black Power Movement, hosting the Black Power Conference of 1968. In 1983, African-Americans supported the mayoral candidacy of Wilson Goode, who became the city's first African-American mayor, whose administration earned infamy for its decision in 1985 to bomb a residential district of west Philadelphia which included a dwelling occupied by the nationalist organization MOVE. ? ?As an important site of African-American cultural, Philadelphia has served as the home of key figures in both the production and documentation of African creative work. Alain Locke, the aforementioned anthologist, philosopher and cultural historian, resided for a time in Philadelphia, as did Dizzy Gillespie, Paul Robeson and Billie Holliday. Philadelphia was the birthplace of jazz impresario John Coltrane and the multitalented Pearl Bailey and Patti LaBelle. Philadelphia's contribution to jazz history, well-documented by contemporary historian Harrison Ridley Jr., extends from the early days of the Clef Club, the African-American musician's union founded by legendary band leader Jim Reece Europe. The soul and R&B music explosions of the 1970s saw the rise of Philadelphia International, whose masterminds Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, presided over the rise of groups such as the O'Jays and Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes. On the contemporary hip-hop scene, "Illadelphia" is home to the influential live-music hip hop group The Roots and the trendsetting female MC, Bahamadia, among many others. The city of Philadelphia enters the twenty-first century as a municipal complex in crisis. While still the core of the nation's fourth largest megalopolis, Philadelphia's population has declined from 2 million in 1960 to 1.5 million in 1995. Nearly one hundred thousand jobs disappeared between 1980 and 1994 in all fields save the service sector, which actually grew by over 46,000 jobs. While job loss has slowed in recent years, the continuing growth in low-paying service jobs has combined with the continued loss of well-paying manufacturing employment to identify Philadelphia as a city in crisis .

VII. Social Movements and Legal Reforms:

The general context of African-American social movements and legal reforms was discussed earlier. This section of the essay focuses briefly on the movement for quality public education for African Americans in Philadelphia which led specifically to the creation and development of the African and African-American Studies division in the late 1960s. Historian Vincent P. Franklin notes that "the fact that blacks were never more than 10 percent of the city's population before 1900 meant that they exercised only limited control over educational decisions affecting black children. " Currently, African-Americans comprise 64% of the public school system. White students comprise less than 20%. On November 17, 1967, over 3,500 African-American high school students walked out of schools across the District in order to protest against the general quality of public schooling and to present a list of demands to the public authorities. Among the demands presented by the students were the teaching of African-American history, the right to wear traditional African clothing in schools and the changing of the names of several predominantly African-American high schools to honor African-American leaders . One of these schools, Benjamin Franklin High School, was to be changed to Malcolm X High School. Clearly the focus on African history and culture was a legacy of the continuous African-American commitment to discrete identity formation as one element of resistance to national and local oppression and marginalization. ?A subsequent rally of students and community leaders at the Board of Education resulted in a riot instigated by then Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo and two busloads of uniformed police. As a result of the police action, 57 persons were arrested, most of them students, and 22 were seriously injured . On April 16, 1969, the Deputy Superintendent for Instruction, David A. Horowitz, issued a directive on African and Afro-American History and Culture which stated that " the policy of the School District of Philadelphia requires every school to provide a well-rounded program of African and Afro-American history and culture for every child as an integral part of his total school experience. " The memorandum based this policy on the recommendations of an Ad Hoc Committee for the Infusion of African and Afro-American Heritage which had begun meeting 14 months before. A nine point implementation strategy was identified for making sure that the Africana experience became a mandatory part of the school curriculum, including staff development, curriculum reform, program planning, the identification of appropriate instructional materials and textbooks, and the initiation of courses for parents. Also in the wake of the student and community-initiated struggle to have African and African-American studies integrated into the Philadelphia public school curriculum, a number of resource guides, model curricula and instructional resource tools were generated. Among the earliest was a 1967 booklet entitled African Culture [Peoples Living South of the Sahara]. The text, while purporting to help students "question and understand the new realities of Africa's rebirth" and providing valuable information on the continent, nevertheless followed the Hegelian separation of North Africa-including Egypt-from the rest of Africa . Two years later, William C. Green, Curriculum Specialist in African and Afro-American Studies for the District, supervised the creation of a resource tool entitled The Black Experience in America which stated that "a history of Africa must start with Egypt, although a few years ago many historians would have defined Egypt as a part of the Middle East. " The detailed discussion of the Africana experience from prehistoric times to the present, including detailed narratives, timelines, supporting bibliographies, charts and tables, conveyed a tone which was grounded in the long tradition of African-Centered textbook scholarship represented by writers such as J.W.C. Pennington, William Wells Brown, Willis Huggins, John G. Jackson and W.E.B. DuBois, among others . Over the years, the District has produced documents such as The World of Africans and Afro-Americans and Key Competencies: African and Afro-American Studies, testaments to the intellectual work of local historians and researchers such as Reginald Bryant, Constance E. Clayton, Edward W. Robinson, Jr. and Edward Sanders, among others. The distinguished elder African-American historian John Henrik Clarke planned the general historical outlines used in the early curriculum guides . After his election as Mayor in 1971, Rizzo made good on a campaign promise to force the resignation of sympathetic Superintendent Mark R. Shedd and effectively stymied the efforts of the School Board with regard to a number of initiatives, including the curriculum-wide infusion of African-American Studies. Twenty three years later, however, a news release was issued by the District which stated that the Board and Superintendent "reaffirmed their commitment to the inclusion of African and African-American history and culture as an integral part of its overall instructional program for every student, kindergarten through 12th grade ." The current inclusion of African and African-American Studies in the Multicultural Cross-Cutting Competency is a value-added, welcome but historically ancillary initiative to the generation-old commitment to the infusion of Africana course content in the curriculum of the predominantly-African Philadelphia public school system.

VIII. Conclusion:

At the end of the Civil War, Harriet Wright, a formerly enslaved African recently emancipated from Cuthbert, Georgia, learned of the opening of a school in a railroad boxcar by the American Missionary Association. Mrs. Wright and her three children walked from Cuthbert to the site of the school in Atlanta, Georgia. When the head of the Freedmen's Bureau, General Oliver Otis Howard, visited the school in 1868, he was moved by the passionate will to learn and achieve demonstrated by the young African-American students, laboring to acquire education in the shadow of the plantation. He asked the students what he should tell those in the north who might inquire as to their progress. One of the young men in the classroom replied, "Sir, tell them we are rising. " ?One hundred and thirty years later, the words of Richard Robert Wright, Sr., were forever linked with the Philadelphia School District by his granddaughter, Ruth Wright Hayre, the first full-time African-American teacher and senior high school principal in the Philadelphia public school system and its first female Board President. Dr. Hayre made the words the motto of a program for college-bound elementary school students and they have since become the motto of every educator and student participant in the Children Achieving agenda of the District. ?As perhaps the most potentially-important Cross-Cutting competency, Multicultural consciousness extends beyond the appreciation of difference to concern itself with the very essence of human identity and valuation and the process by which groups are often brought into conflict. Sociologist Stanford Lyman has written that an analytical as well as practical separation of the situations, rights, opportunities, privileges, and immunities of blacks on the one hand and immigrants on the other has been part of American social thought since at least 1782. At that time, Hector St. John de Crevecoeur "defined 'the American' as an amalgam of the several European strains together with those of the indigenous Indians but confined mention of the Africans in the new nation to a solicitous concern for their slave status. " Other ethnic and cultural groups have struggled to avoid the "stain" of "blackness" since the dawn of the Enlightenment era. The poet Maya Angelou has immortalized the fact, however, that, regardless of attempts to manage the reappropriation of global African self-image and identity, Africans have continued and will continue to "rise." As a discursive rejoinder to young Richard Wright's declaration, the last stanza of her poem, "And Still I Rise " reads: