In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • We Contain Multitudes:Arguments for African American Equality
  • Cheryl Greenberg (bio)
Clare Corbould . Becoming African Americans: Black Public Life in Harlem, 1919-1939. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. xiv + 278 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95.
Robert L. Hayman Jr. and Leland Ware, eds. Choosing Equality: Essays and Narratives on the Desegregation Experience. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009. xiii + 391 pp. Forward, notes, bibliographical essay, and index. $65.00.

Is nationalism or integration a surer strategy for African American success in the United States? With all due respect to Brown, is equality of schools more important than their racial integration? Is a black identity better forged by minimizing or emphasizing African origins? Although many political and policy activists presume these choices to be in opposition, historians have come to understand that each has proven indispensable for black advancement and, further, that these seemingly contradictory positions have often been held by the same people. For evidence of this we need look no farther than W. E. B. Du Bois—cofounder of the NAACP, champion of Pan-Africanism, Communist and expat—or Booker T. Washington, whose private financial support of desegregation cases belied his public advocacy of black and white social relations "as separate as the fingers." Black organizations likewise embraced multiple and apparently conflicting strategies, as when Marcus Garvey's nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Association helped needy African Americans to access New Deal programs while insisting that white governments would never grant equal opportunity to nonwhites. Certainly American society and American racism are so complex that no single strategy for racial equality works for all time or all cases. More provocatively, many victories were achieved not by the coexistence but by the synergy of opposites.

That apparently contradictory approaches to African American equality are in fact compatible and even mutually reinforcing becomes clear in the juxtaposition of the two books under review here. Clare Corbould's Becoming African Americans: Black Public Life in Harlem 1919-1939 explores cultural [End Page 548] attempts to establish American black intellectual and political legitimacy by embracing the community's African as well as American commitments and roots. Robert Hayman Jr. and Leland Ware have edited Choosing Equality: Essays and Narratives on the Desegregation Experience, which revisits the Brown decision and its aftereffects in the state of Delaware, addressing (among other topics) nationalist and integrationist understandings about race and education. Different in style, approach, and usefulness to historians, these two books help unpack the intersections of identity and political advocacy.

Corbould explores the era of the Harlem Renaissance, that outpouring of materials by black artists, musicians, writers, and scholars after World War I. African Americans had benefitted far less from emancipation or a world made "safe for democracy" than they had hoped. At the same time, hundreds of thousands had moved out of the rural South and found that the relative freedom of the North offered a safer haven for black artistic and political expression. These frustrations and opportunities coalesced in black urban centers such as Harlem, New York. Corbould, like others before her, explores the art and intellectual production of this period, focusing particularly on the expanded use of African themes, subjects, motifs, and perspectives. She argues these artists and essayists sought a "usable past" to lift their people in their own eyes and in the eyes of their fellow citizens. Rejecting white stereotypes of a savage, uncivilized Africa, black men and women in the interwar years emphasized the continent as the cradle of civilization and celebrated its multiple cultures of vivid artistry, intellectual learning, sophisticated rhythms, and powerful spirituality. The restoration of Africa's heroic past challenged contemporary assumptions about the benevolence of slavery and the intellectual and social inferiority of people of African descent. At the same time, these black artists and intellectuals asserted their Americanness and their contributions to American life. Black people, products of this noble history, had risen courageously above the challenges of slavery to build a uniquely American landscape. African Americans had become hyphenates.

In pursuit of these intellectual and political ends, new black organizations like Carter Woodson's Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (1915) emerged to uncover and celebrate...

pdf

Share