Charles Young in Five Acts

2020 ◽  
pp. 77-123
Author(s):  
Khary Oronde Polk
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
American Military ◽  
The Third ◽  
Chain Of Command ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
The U.S

This chapter considers the life and work of Charles Young, the third African American officer to graduate from West Point, and the first to reach the rank of colonel. Through his quest for leadership in the U.S. Army and performances of martial valor, Young strove to prove by his own example that black people could—if given a chance—excel as officers in the U.S. military. Though committed to American military imperialism, Young became frustrated by the forms of racial discrimination that impeded his progress up the army chain of command. In 1906 he began to channel his critique of American militarism into a play he wrote about the Haitian Revolution and his idol, Toussaint Louverture. Never published during Young’s lifetime, the five-act drama is examined as an allegory of antiblack racism, prophetic memoir (Young chose exile in Africa rather than submit to racist rule in the United States), as well as the most pronounced articulation of the emergent Pan-African political awakening of America’s first black military imperialist of the twentieth century.

Africa in the Shuffle

1995 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-23
Author(s):  
Immanuel Wallerstein
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
New York Times ◽  
The United States ◽  
The New York Times ◽  
The U.S

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, the study of Africa in the United States was a very rare and obscure practice, engaged in almost exclusively by African-American (then called Negro) intellectuals. They published scholarly articles primarily in quite specialized journals, notably Phylon, and their books were never reviewed in the New York Times. As a matter of fact, at this time (that is, before 1945) there weren't even very many books written about African-Americans in the U.S., although the library acquisitions were not quite as rare as those for books about Africa.

Migration to Haiti in the Context of Other Contemporary Migrations

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Fanning
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
New Nation ◽  
The U.S

This chapter examines the migration to Haiti in the context of other contemporary migrations. Although organizations and sponsors called the migrants from the U.S. to Haiti “emigrants,” in some senses they were colonists and in other senses exiles. The African American migrants differed from most European colonists in that they were attracted to their destination by its independence from their home nation. But they were not forced to leave; leaving was an act of conscience. To a greater extent than any Europeans since the Puritan “Pilgrims,” they sought refuge from exclusion in the home nation in the actively sympathetic philosophy of the new nation. Even as they retained American customs, the free blacks embraced Haiti's constitution, tacitly rejecting that of the United States. Ultimately, the African American emigrants were political pilgrims, and this is what distinguishes their experience from that of contemporary migrants and colonial adventurers.

The Shock Waves of the Haitian Revolution

Slave No More ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 164-196
Author(s):  
Aline Helg
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Shock Waves ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The United States ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
Northern United States ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Haitian Revolution

This chapter explores the shock waves caused by the Haitian Revolution and the massive slave insurrection that took both the Americas and Europe by surprise. Despite the rarity of large-scale revolts after 1794, the Saint Domingue insurrection did have a lasting impact on the slaves. The greatest lesson they retained from Haiti was that the institution of slavery was neither unchangeable nor invincible. Amid the troubled backdrop of the age of revolutions, many attentively followed the legal changes upsetting their owners, like the Spanish Códigno Negro, the French abolition of slavery, gradual emancipation laws in the northern United States, and the ban of the slave trade by Great Britain and the United States. Furthermore, after 1794, protests during which slaves claimed freedom they believed to have been decreed by the king or the government, but hidden by their masters, multiplied.

The Optics of Liberian Emigration

2020 ◽  
pp. 145-167
Author(s):  
Aston Gonzalez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Political Leadership ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Colonization Society ◽  
Fugitive Slave

This chapter explores the life and work of Augustus Washington, the free African American photographer, who envisioned more rights and freedoms than those available in the United States. Anticipating a future in the United States bound by racial restraints, he packed up his successful photography studio in Hartford, Connecticut, and emigrated to Monrovia, Liberia. Washington worked closely with the American Colonization Society to convince black Americans to leave their homeland for Liberia and attempted to provoke viewers of his images to envision the potential of black rights in the United States that he enjoyed in Liberia. Washington’s images promulgating black Liberian political leadership and economic promise abroad offered a vision of freedom that belied a hierarchical, and often oppressive, Liberian society. In the wake of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, his images brought into focus the debates among African Americans about the uncertain, and perhaps imperiled, future of black people in the United States.

Remarks by Stephen Pomper

2017 ◽  
Vol 111 ◽  
pp. 123-127
Author(s):  
Stephen Pomper
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
International Law ◽  
Security Council ◽  
The United States ◽  
Single Event ◽  
Humanitarian Emergency ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Face ◽  
Legal Justification ◽  
The U.S

We are having this conversation now because of the April 7 strikes on the Shayrat Airfield in Syria, but the question of how one justifies forcible measures in the context of a humanitarian emergency, and in the face of a deadlocked Security Council, is one that deserves urgent attention beyond the context of any single event. Progress toward answering this question has, however, been mired in a long-standing debate between those who believe that there is no credible international law justification for humanitarian intervention—and that the U.S. government should instead justify interventions like those taken at Kosovo and Shayrat as morally “legitimate”—and those who believe a legal justification can and should be put forward. I am very much in the latter camp and will use my time now to explain how I arrived at this position as a policy and as a legal matter by looking at three questions: the first question is whether legal justification is the direction that the United States should go in as a matter of policy. The second question is whether legal justification is credibly available as a matter of international law. The third question (which assumes the answer to the first and second is yes) is how to go about articulating and disseminating such a justification. Let me take these in order.

Race, Space, Time

Peyote Effect ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 169-176
Author(s):  
Alexander S. Dawson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
African American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Short History ◽  
Spanish Inquisition ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Over Time

We begin the book’s conclusion with the juxtaposition of two different stories of peyotism: the creation of an ecotourism business featuring Wixárika peyotism in Potrero de la Palmita, Nayarit, in 2010 and the short history of an African American peyotist church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the 1920s. The former is licit, enjoying support by a state committed to economic development, while the latter faced constant threats from the police before collapsing, in part due to its members’ fear of arrest. These two stories remind us of the central roles that place and time play in the history of peyotism across the U.S.-Mexican border, but they also force us to consider the ways that ideas about race have informed the battles over peyote in Mexico and the United States. Particularly striking is the fact that the racial prohibitions enacted by the Spanish Inquisition resonate with current law. Also notable is the fact that Mexicans and Americans have deployed similar ideas about race over time in their battles over peyote. This speaks to the underlying anxieties that indigeneity evokes in both societies, as well as the role that indigenous subjects have played in the creation of whiteness in both the United States and Mexico.

An Africana Philosophical Reading of Du Bois’s Political Thought

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lewis R. Gordon
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
New England ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Black People ◽  
Philosophical Anthropology ◽  
The United States ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
The Status ◽  
Global Influence

Lewis R. Gordon’s essay focuses on Du Bois’s shift from New England liberalism to international radicalism and his global influence in Africana thought, despite his focus on African American politics. Though Du Bois’s expectation of equality for black people in the United States was a supremely radical idea on its own, it was his association with the black tradition of addressing social contradictions and imagining a future of grappling with them that led to the development of his radical philosophical anthropology. Du Bois, like many other Africana scholars, used his theories to express why black people could no longer wait to challenge the status quo. Therefore, Africana political theorists must assert the humanity of people of African descent, which necessitates an explanation of why they are human and how they have historically been excluded from definitions of humanity.

Building a Black Bridge: China's Interaction with African-American Activists during the Cold War

2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 114-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hongshan Li
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Relations ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Policy Objectives ◽  
And Function ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The U.S

This article examines the interactions between the People's Republic of China (PRC) and African-American activists during the Cold War. Relying mostly on archival records and personal documents in English as well as Chinese, the article shows that the construction of the new “black bridge” was made possible because of the PRC's determination to achieve its policy objectives, the African-American activists' needs in fighting for racial equality, and the U.S. government's strict ban on travel to China. Both the PRC and the black activists were new to these transnational interactions, and they worked together in such an unprecedented manner that they redefined the nature and function of Sino-American cultural relations. The black bridge facilitated a limited flow of people and information but also carried misinformation that eventually led to greater misunderstanding and fiercer confrontation. The bridge began to fade in the late 1960s and early 1970s as Beijing was forced to readjust its policy toward the United States, which soon lifted its ban on travel to the PRC.

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