Diaspora
Now's
the Time for Unity
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Aubrey
W Bonnett
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February in every year marks a period devoted to the commemoration and celebration of Black History month. It is a time recognized since 1976 as one in which to reflect and ponder the accomplishments of African Americans, despite historically overwhelming odds.
But Black History month is more than a recitation of contributions. It is also a description of the odyssey of struggle, protest and resistance by a dispossessed group of Americans, in an effort to force states and the nation to live up to the promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. African Americans and West Indian Americans have a common bond in the quest to attain the promise of this creed.
Many West Indian immigrants and their descendants have historically played important roles in this fight for emancipation and liberation. Early immigrants such as Pan -Africanists Edward Blyden, George Padmore and Marcus Garvey, and poet activist Claude McKay, were among the first West Indians to become well known and well respected in the African American struggle for racial equality.
Other famous West Indian Americans include: former U.S. representative the late Shirley Chisholm; Franklin Thomas, former head of the Ford Foundation; federal appellate Judge Constance Baker Motley, the first black woman appointed to the federal Judiciary.
Prominent also are activists, the late Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Toure); Roy Innis, Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan, minister of the Nation of Islam. Other notables include world renowned actor Sidney Poitier; civil rights activist and singer Harry Belafonte; Earl Greaves, philanthropist, business man and publisher of Black Enterprise; and Colin Powell, the first black U.S. Secretary of State. They have all made impressive contributions on behalf of African Americans.
It should also be noted that the struggle for civil rights for African Americans, culminating in what is known as the civil rights movement, also overlapped with the struggle in the West Indian colonies to bring about decolonization, independence and nationhood for West Indians of all races.
Many of the populist leaders in the movement for nationhood- Norman Manley, Eric Williams, Cheddi Jagan, Linden Forbes Sampson Burnham, Eric Gairy, Alexander Bustamante, and Errol Barrow for example, were influenced by the audacious attempts of charismatic leaders such as Martin Luther King and others who were not afraid to challenge the American monolith, even at the point of threats to their own personal safety.
These actions inspired our own leaders in the Caribbean who were often in mutual interaction with their African American counterparts in universities, churches or through the labor movement.
But interaction among these groups has not been without conflict. At the beginning of the twentieth century, West Indian Americans and African Americans held negative stereotypes of each other and rarely interacted socially.
In the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s the children of some West Indian immigrants downplayed their ethnicity and attempted to integrate into the African American community, negative images of each other changed slowly.
Secretary Powell in his autobiography, My American Journey (1995), recalls his African American father in law's reaction when he proposed marriage to his daughter, Alma: "All my life I have tried to stay from those damn West Indians, and now my daughter is going to marry one!"
What is undisputed in today's America, however, is the coming together of the African American and West Indian groups at important junctures. They coalesce to oppose racial and ethnic discrimination by the dominant white majority, and agencies of the state at federal, local or county levels, and to protest for the poor and disenfranchised among their midst.
It is in this contextual framework that Black History month should be viewed. Not simply to recall the successes of yesteryear, but to plan and strategize for the challenges that still have to be overcome by both groups, in their quest for full and complete inclusion in the American nation, and to minimize and to neutralize divisive attempts to fragment their unity in this regard.
Dr Aubrey W Bonnett is a Professor in the department of American Studies at SUNY College at Old Westbury, New York. Born in Guyana he attended Tutorial High School in Georgetown before leaving to pursue higher education abroad. Bonnett holds the distinction of being the First Black PhD in Sociology from City University, New York.
He is a prolific writer and has published many books and articles including:
Emerging perspectives on the Black Diaspora (ed. Aubrey W. Bonnett and G. Llewelyn Watson, University Press of America, Maryland, 1990).
Institutional Adaptation of West Indian Immigrants to America :An Analysis of Rotating Credit Associations , Aubrey W. Bonnett, University Press of America, Washington, D.C., 1981.
Group Identification Among Negroes: An Examination of the Soul Concept in the U.S.A., Aubrey W. Bonnett, Century Twenty- One Publisher, California, 1980.
Note:
Carter G Woodson, a distinguished African American historian, who is often hailed as the father of black history, initiated this period. Woodson chose the second week of February for Negro History Week because it marks the birthday of Frederick Douglass, who greatly influenced the black American population, and significant events in black American history. For example:
February 23, 1868: W. E. B. DuBois, important civil rights leader and co-founder of the NAACP, was born.
February 3, 1870: The 15th Amendment was passed, granting blacks the right to vote.
February 25, 1870: The first black U.S. senator, Hiram R. Revels (1822-1901), took his oath of office.
February 12, 1909: The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded by a group of concerned black and white citizens in New York City.
February 1, 1960: In what would become a civil-rights movement milestone, a group of black Greensboro, N.C., college students began a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth's lunch counter.
February 21, 1965: Malcolm X, the militant leader who promoted Black Nationalism, was shot to death in Harlem, New York.
