Documenting Black Lives and Culture: A Lineage of African American Initiatives

Since at least the early 16^th century, Africans have had both a free and enslaved presence on the North American lands that eventually became the United States. Accompanying the Spanish explorers, a century before the British brought slaves to Jamestown. Before his untimely death, Gerald L. Davis (1941-1997) was examining the legends of Estebanico/Stephen Dorantes (ca. 1500-1539), a Moroccan African enslaved by Spanish explorers in New Mexico. Currently, archaeology has provided the fullest evidence of the African presence in the material culture and architecture they built along coastal South Carolina and the Northeast coast of Florida in the 16^th and 17^th centuries.  In 1687, in one of the first Black/Indigenous freedom communities in what became the US, escaped enslaved Africans sought refuge from the British colonies by seeking freedom in Spanish territories in Florida, at Fort Mose and St. Augustine. When the Spanish lost Florida to the British in 1763, this maroon community fled to Cuba to maintain their freedom. These earliest African presences and traditions in colonial America, have yet to be fully examined by folklorists.

Communities of enslaved and free African Americans in the U.S. had difficulty in openly building their own organizations until significant numbers became free, which begins to happen during the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. When they could establish their own organizations, part of their mission was to build traditions that served their needs, often using and adapting the master’s tools at first. Among those first institutions free Blacks established were churches, mutual aid societies, and fraternal organizations, membership organizations which offered education, and bases for community and political organizing. These sites maintain community genealogies and records of community life and practice such as Bishop Richard Allen’s (1760-1831), Collection of Spiritual Songs and Hymns (1801). Because the colonial project of slavery enforced the erasure, fragmentation, exclusion, segregation, stigmatization, and distortion of African/African American cultural traditions, these organizations sought to create safe spaces for the expression of Black identity and discussion of political ideas. These sites were also places in which African Americans generated narratives and imagery illustrating Black humanity which countered racial stereotypes that perpetuated ideas about the incapacity of Blacks to join civilization.

Churches and community and civic organizations fostered initiatives that addressed the most urgent needs of Black communities, among them, the abolitionist movements to end slavery. Some of the earliest known folklore scholarship by African Americans emerged during the American Antislavery Movement (1830-1870). Both Frederick Douglass (ca. 1818-1895) and Charlotte Forten (1837-1914) participated in abolitionist efforts to awaken the American public to the horrors of slavery through their ethnographic writings. She taught at the Penn Center on St. Helena Island in South Carolina, the place where the US government tested, prior to the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, whether enslaved field working African Americans could transition into freedom. Douglass spoke and wrote about his own autoethnographic observations of slavery, as he and others experienced it, in order to describe and critique the inhumanity of the institution of slavery for abolitionist audiences in the US and abroad. Recruited in 1861 to teach formerly enslaved communities in South Carolina during the Civil War, Forten chronicled her daily reflections of life in African American Sea Island communities as they transitioned from slavery to freedom during a governmental experiment testing whether Black people had the capacity to handle freedom.

The Great Migration added new understandings to Black folklorists’ thinking and theorizing about Black cultural traditions and focused attention to new forms of Black culture and Black organizations in urban centers. Migrants from diverse locations interacted in Northern urban centers and cultivated an emphasis on African American cultural traditions in new ways as several budding folklorists began to recognize the vitality carried by migrants filled with the hope that they could capitalize on newly available opportunities and achieve full civil rights and equality. This period sparked Renaissances in several urban centers, such as New York, Washington, DC, and Philadelphia, and a bit later, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Los Angeles, where groups of artists met in salons to interact with the richly diverse creative perspectives of Black writers, scholars, artists, musicians, photographers, and filmmakers from across the US and Caribbean. They wrestled with the values of traditional knowledge, wisdom, Black ways of being in their specific new urban contexts, and the abilities of migrants to navigate the cultural adaptations required by these new contexts.  Arturo Schomburg (1874-1938), a Black Puerto Rican librarian in the New York Public Library system, created a center for archiving the publications and creations of this generation as well for other Black historical and cultural productions. Charles Chesnutt (1858-1932), Langston Hughes (1901-1967), Arna Bontemps, Charles S. Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), Richard Wright (1908-1960), Ralph Ellison (1913-1994), and Sterling A. Brown are among the writers who engaged folklore from the different communities making up urban migrant Black communities.

Disillusioned with America’s continuing support of segregation and racism, numerous African Americans sought refuge and built expatriate creative communities in other nations, seeking to live in an environment that recognized their full humanity. While Paris was an important center for resettlement, African Americans built communities in Liberia and several African nations, European nations, the Caribbean, Mexico, and other parts of Latin America.  Among expatriate ancestors whose work drew on African American folklore are James Baldwin (1924-1987), Frank Yerby (1916-1991), and Richard Wright (1908-1960).

The Modern Civil Rights Movement (1954-1965), the end of legal segregation in 1964, and the Black Power and Black Arts Movements (1965-1975) opened new opportunities for the development of deeper scholarship Black culture by African American ancestor/scholars.  Inspired by access to new areas of opportunities, African Americans built urban cultural and history museums, research centers, and organizations that prioritized research on African American and Diasporic traditional cultures. With the birth of academic ethnic studies programs across the nation in predominantly white institutions and HBCUs, beginning in 1968, several new organizations led by African American scholars arose that promoted research of African  based cultures in the US and Diaspora.  Furthermore, African American folklorists began to attain academic training in folklore studies in quantifiable numbers. Several African American museums also emerged to present community knowledge and artistic expression to the communities that supported them.   

Notable among them:  

Smithsonian’s Program in Black American Culture (PBAC)   

Association of African & African American Folklorists (AAAAF)

Center for Black Music Research (CBMR)

Association of African American Museums (AAAM)

In addition, there are several organizations and businesses emerging out of Hip-Hop culture and cultural expressions.

The struggle against racism, sexism, homophobia, colonialism and protest against persistent police violence toward Black men and women continues and has expanded into a coalition of organizations seeking local, national, international, and intersectional justice and equity. Much of the energy of this movement is centered in the Midwest, where police have killed several unarmed Black people, male and female.  Public spaces within urban communities are often the settings for vernacular artwork and traditional culture which is often displayed through murals, communal gardens, and music for the benefit of the local community. 

Black Lives Matter and Music: Protest, Intervention, Reflection (2018), edited by Fernando Orejuela and Stephanie Shonekan, and “The Urban Art Mapping Project” co-led by David Todd Lawrence begin to document and examine the creative expressions of this movement.