The Americans are Coming!

Chapter 1: American Negroes as Racial Models-From “Honorary Whites” to “Black Perils”

13 1w American Negroes as Racial Models From “Honorary Whites” to “Black Perils” In October 1890, the Virginia Jubilee Singers, ten graduates of Hampton Institute in Virginia, arrived in Cape Town, South Africa, for a tour that was scheduled to take several weeks but would last nearly five years.1 Their performances fostered a powerful new era of black transnational relationships between the United States and South Africa and would transform the South African image of American blacks into models. A decade before the publication of Booker T. Washington’s celebrated autobiography, Up from Slavery, which championed the progress that he and other African Americans had made in moving from slavery into freedom, the Virginia Jubilee Singers spread the “up from slavery” narrative of African American success around the world. Their five years in South Africa encouraged the growing idea among Africans and African Americans that they were of the same race, bound together in a program of transnational racial uplift. They did so even as whites attempted to subject the Jubilee Singers and other African Americans to racially restrictive laws aimed at Africans, declaring all blacks worldwide a subordinated people. The Virginia Jubilee Singers, along with other American Negroes in South Africa , also made visible a global color line more than a decade before W. E. B. Du Bois’s landmark essay collection, Souls of Black Folk, advanced this important idea. This global color line highlighted the white supremacy ethic that undergirded European colonialism, American Jim Crowism, and imperialist empire building, as well as the developing political, religious, educational, and cultural bonds between American Negroes and Africans. The Jubilee Singers were not the first American blacks to go to South Africa. Black American sailors had been part of America’s whaling crews since the eighteenth century, and in 1862, a Confederate warship, the Alabama, docked 14 w Providential Design in Cape Town and carried American slavery and racism to South Africa with African American slaves serving the crew and entertaining passengers. The slaves performed minstrel shows for white South Africans sympathetic to the Confederate cause and bitter about Britain’s ending of slavery in the Cape Colony;2 such shows had begun in the United States in the late 1820s, and they featured white performers in blackface caricaturing enslaved and free blacks. Crew members cheered on the “coons” and “niggers” who were their shipmates. During the American Civil War—the defining event that began the up from slavery narrative of black freedom and progress—blackface minstrelsy continued to circulate negative images of black Americans in South Africa. The renowned white Christy Minstrels of England also went to Cape Town in 1862. Among their stock characters, in blackface, were Jim Crow, a lazy and dullwitted plantation slave, and Zip Coon, a buffoon and dandy who mangled the English language and supposedly menaced white women.3 The Jubilee Singers, all of them Negroes (in the language of the time), were no cartoon figures but rather professionals with a serious purpose beyond sharing their glorious music. Their depictions of American Negro life and history contrasted sharply with the persistent and pervasive narrative of black inferiority in the American South as well as in South Africa. On tours of South Africa from 1890 to 1892 and from 1895 to 1898, the Jubilee Singers captured the imagination of the entire country with about a thousand wildly popular concerts featuring exultant and moving American Negro spirituals, dramatic and comedic skits, and minstrelsy.4 the liberation message o f emanc i pati on in word and so ng As noted, the Virginia Jubilee Singers were from Hampton Institute, which was founded in 1868 as a teacher-training and industrial school for former slaves. Hampton was a paradox, representing both the emancipationist activities of black Americans and the post–Civil War restrictions on their freedom. The school stood in the shadow of Fort Monroe, whose commander, Benjamin Butler, had been the first Union general to allow African Americans, as a matter of policy, to escape from slavery behind Union lines. Fort Monroe was also the site of the first large-scale land redistribution for African Americans during the war, a model for Gen. William T. Sherman’s Special Field Order 15 that famously mandated forty acres and a mule for African American freedpeople. Yet President Andrew Johnson’s Amnesty Proclamation of 1865 required the Freedman’s Bureau—a government agency designed to ease the freedman’s transition from slavery to freedom and to help in the general...