Natives Help Create Black CommunitiesMy own Creek ancestors escaped the 1832 removal of the Creek nation and hid out in another part of the South. They still spoke their language, but otherwise had few other Creek people around them. So they cast in their lot with the newly-freed Africans, and one white, who were nearby. They were forming the "Colored" community as members of the local churches, schools and social networks. Some of them still maintained their Creek identity while still being teachers of "Negro" children and holding leadership positions in the Negro churches. This happened right after the Civil War, as the newly-free African community was re-inventing itself as a literate, Protestant politically-active society.
The East Coast Multiracial
My family was not the first Native American family to take part in this process. On the east coast free African sailors in the 1700s were forming their own Masonic lodges and churches. Many of these seamen, such as ship owner Paul Cuffe, were half-Native. Cuffe's mother was Wamponoag Indian, and his wife was as well. He organized ships to take free blacks to Africa for settlement, decades before the establishment of Liberia by the federal government. (Recent DNA testing from Liberia has shown Native American ancestry among some Americo-Liberians.)
Multi-racial people also formed a large part of the "Colored" population in the Chesapeake Bay region. A large number of white indentured women had married enslaved Africans who labored beside them, and produced a generation of free-born black children. A large number of Native American communities still existed in the Chesapeake and Delmarva regions, and many of them moved between the "Indian" and "Negro" realms depending on where they were working.
Church Split over Racial Self-Perception
On the Delmarva peninsula there was a Methodist church, and the bishop assigned them a new pastor. Many members of the congregation considered this new pastor to be a "Negro," and were offended, saying they were Indian and not Negro, and demanding a white or Indian preacher. The congregation split in two, once faction accepting a Negro identity and later associating itself with the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) denomination. The other faction stood by their Indian identity. Of course, before the split, the congregation included several families who had been worshipping and marrying together for several generations. The split represented the split of several extended families into two different "racial" identities.
The AME denomination, then headquartered in the north, was also recruiting congregatrions of former slaves in the south, congregations that had been in existence during slavery but not yet associated with a national black-identified organization.
The First Name Change Prior to the Civil War, many of the free black churches and lodges in the northern states had the word "African" in their title, such as the African Methodist Episcopal church. People of color were not too sure if they were welcome, or wanted to enter into the "American" identity. After emancipation, there was a change to "negro" as an added identifier to a new identity as blacks were now bonafide U.S. (or American) citizens,as stated in the 14th amendment. Later, leaders argued for "negro" to be capitalized, as an ethnic identity as "Negro". Then the identifier became "black" and most recently "African American" (sometimes hyphenated, sometimes not).
The Loss of the Mulatto Identifier
"Mulatto" dropped off the US census in 1920, aritificially inflating the official size of the "negro" population. Futher assaults on mixed race status by Walter Plecker and others discouraged multi-racials and Native Americans from asserting their identities as neither "black" or "white." Not until the 2000 census, did non-white, non-black, natiive born individuals regain the legal right to identify themselves as they chose outside of the official categories.
Black American Identity Not Simply a Transplanted African Identity
There have been recent attempts to portray contemporary U.S. African-American culture as merely a transplanted African culture, as if an ocean and centuries of separation account for nothing, as if a high degree of cultural and biological mixture with non-African elements in North America account for nothing. This fits in well with the quasi-Marxist definitions of diaspora Africans and part-Africans as "colonialized" or "oppressed" people, suffering in a monolithic situation. This ignores the large number of partly-African slave
owners in Jamaica, Haiti, and Charleston, South Carolina. This also ignores the large number of Colored troops who made George Washington's victory possible.
Native Americans are Now Defined Out of Black History.
I once unintentionally offended a woman when I suggested that U.S. Black culture is re-invented every generation or so, just as white American identity is re-invented to fit new realities. I had challenged the idea that African identity had somehow remained unchanged for three centuries on North American soil.
What I was trying to suggest was that as black identity was redefined, Native Americans and blacks with Native ancestry and/or culture were also erased from the reality of African American history. I knew this was true because my own family had been part of the process.
This assault on partly-Native blacks is now coming from the highest levels of academia. Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., himself has participated in this. (Despite what follows, Professor Gates, I sympathize with your recent struggle with being disrespected in your home by civil servants who your taxes support.) In his PBS series
African American Lives Professor Gates makes the most general comments about Native Americans, revealing little specific knowledge about any particular Native American culture.
Even worse, Harvard professor Claudio Saunt, is quoted on-camera saying that most blacks with Native American ancestry inherited it from white slave-owners who were part-Indian. Professor Saunt, who has extensively researched southeastern Indian societies, should know better than to make such a generalization for the following reasons: He ignores partly African individuals who were culturally Indian and who were recognized as such on the federal Dawes Rolls, even among slave-holding, pro-Confederate nations such as the Chickasaw.
Professor Saunt also ignored that many African Americans have Native ancestry from Northeastern nations, Plains Nations, Canadian Aboriginals, and other Native societies that had no connection to Southern plantation slavery. Perhaps he was being quoted or edited out of context, but perhaps I am being too generous.
Self-Policing of Black Identity
Professor Jack Forbes calls this process the "self-policing" of the black community. But it is also part of the continued re-invention of Black identity. Somehow, an acknowledgement of non-African influence in official Black History is threatening, as if that makes black identity less "black." Does that mean Frederick Douglas's life, writing, and activism is less a part of Black history because his father was Scottish-American? Or is Malcom X's life and autobiography only a 75% Black event because he was 25% white? Of course not. That would be absurd. Yet somehow acknowledgement of Native American influence must be avoided at all costs. What is at stake here?
Why can't Native American and Multi-racials be recognized as co-creators of modern Black America, and by extension, non-black America (which still has constant African American infusions of music, culture and politics.)?
