The Florida Folklife Reader

African American and West Indian Folklife in South Florida

10 ‘’ ‘’ African American and West Indian Folklife in South Florida Joyce M. Jackson Present-day MetroPolitan MiaMi, Which encoMPasses Most of Dade County, is an evolving environment that illustrates the historical flow of cultural ideas between diverse populations. The black population provides an excellent example of this diversity. Although the 1980 Census Summary of the General Population Characteristics reported that there were 280,434 blacks in the county, it did not mention that they came not only from the United States, but also from the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa. In this essay, I will examine some aspects of the folk culture of two African Diaspora groups in Miami—African Americans and West Indians. the african aMerican Presence Since they first came to the Miami area in the early nineteenth century, African Americans have responded to a broad range of experiences—slavery, urban migration, disenfranchisement during the Jim Crow era, the struggle for civil rights and economic freedom, and today, a new political activism. Throughout the episodes of their history, African Americans have found ways to educate, strengthen, comfort, inspire, motivate, and entertain their minds and spirits, thereby making it possible to survive and grow beyond the external circumstances of their lives. A rich and immense body of tradition has emerged from this struggle for survival. African American folk culture includes the songs, verbal lore, crafts, and occupational skills that African Americans brought from both 11 African American and West Indian Folklife in South Florida rural agricultural areas and other urban centers. These traditions are composed of more than skills that can be learned by example, such as improvising the lead in a gospel song, piecing a quilt, or break dancing. They also include the concepts, cultural values, aesthetics, and worldviews that make African American folk expression unique. Many of these emerged directly from the values shared by various African societies. When Africans were transported to the sugar plantations of the Caribbean , then to the cotton plantations and farms in the southern United States, they brought their traditional ways of thinking and living with them. Since many Africans had lived in close and prolonged proximity with Europeanderived culture, they were able to exercise a cultural selectivity by tenaciously retaining those elements of their African heritage that were most valuable to them. This selective process and subsequent synthesis of African and European elements defines the evolution of a distinct African American culture. In African American folk traditions, however, the African elements are usually more prevalent. Religion The culture of urban African Americans reveals much about the boom, bust, and subsequent redevelopment of their communities. Throughout the process of community change, African Americans have selectively chosen to hold on to long-cherished ways of doing things. The rhythm and flavor of African American urban community life takes one in many directions. The church is a good place to begin, for it serves as the most important community institution for newly arrived families. It is also one of the strongest and mostenduring transplants to urban life. For many African Americans, the church family replaces to a substantial degree parts of the extended family that were left behind. African American migration patterns follow well-traveled corridors. People from rural areas leave some relatives and move to urban areas with other branches of their families; over time, others may follow. In this manner, entire communities can be gradually transplanted. Many of the African American churches in Miami were organized with memberships based on rural congregations . Some of the smaller churches are still shaped by members arriving from rural areas in Florida or other southern states. In the early 1920s, some residents of Calvin, Georgia, moved into the West Perrine community and founded the church that became Mt. Moriah Baptist Church. Families from Perry, Georgia, moved into the Goulds community in the mid-1920s, and some still have their church membership at Mt. Carmel Unity Baptist Church. 12 Joyce M. Jackson The church is the place where the raw edges of migrational change are softened, where old flavors and sounds from home are not discarded, but blend in comforting ways in a new urban gospel pot. There you can find the elders who perform black sacred songs and prayers holding on to a tradition that surely represents continuity not just from the rural South, but from older African roots as well. One can go to the Church of Christ in the Goulds community and...