Reading Hebrews and 1 Peter with the African American Great Migration

Diaspora, Place and Identity

Jennifer T. Kaalund

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780567685223
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Kaalund examines the constructed and contested Christian-Jewish identities in Hebrews and 1 Peter through the lens of the "New Negro, " a diasporic identity similarly constructed and contested during the Great Migration in the early 20th century. Like the identity "Christian, " the New Negro emerged in a context marked by instability, creativity, and the need for a sense of permanence in a hostile political environment. Upon examination, both identities also show complex internal diversity and debate that disrupts any simple articulation as purely resistant (or accommodating) to its hegemonic and oppressive environment. Kaalund's investigation into the construction of the New Negro highlights this multiplicity and contends that the rhetoric of place, race, and gender were integral to these processes of inventing a way of being in the world that was seemingly not reliant on one's physical space. Putting these issues into dialogue with 1 Peter and Hebrews allows for a reading of the formation of Christian identity as similarly engaging the rhetoric of place and race in constructive and contested ways.

Part I

MODELS OF ETHNO-SPATIAL REASONING

Chapter 2

A Place to Call Home: The Great Migration and the Making of the New Negro

Displacement is a defining feature of the construction of African American identity. The transatlantic slave trade violently created a diasporic people. This rupture marks the first of many displacements influencing the collective identity of African Americans. In his book The Making of African Americans: The Four Great Migrations, Ira Berlin writes, “The entire African American experience can best be read as a series of great migrations or passages, during which immigrants—at first forced and then free—transformed an alien place into home, becoming deeply rooted in a land that once was foreign, unwanted, and even despised.”¹ Each migration not only transforms spaces and conceptions of home but also presents an opportunity to challenge perceptions and renegotiate African American identity.

These migrations create writings on the earth, a black geography. As Stèphane Dufoix describes, “An individual or collective movement across the surface of the globe is a geography in itself, a writing on the earth.”² The image of inscribing the earth is poignant for a people whose identity, particularly in the southern United States, had become so strongly associated with the land. In the early twentieth century, leaving “the South”³ not only “uprooted” an identity formed on the premise that the Negro was made to work the land but also created a space to reimagine and refashion the Negro into the New Negro.⁴ However, the New Negro is not a people; it is a trope about a people, people determined to create their own homes. The soil of the South, fertilized by the blood, sweat, and tears of the people who tended it, yielded a harvest of folks whose freedom would be denied. The vision of freedom was as diverse as the people who dared to dream and demand it. The New Negro is a paradox of sorts, containing both the old and the new, the option to stay in the South and to flee it. It is emblematic of both the connection between place and identity and also identity’s inherent malleability.

The Great Migration and the myriad of influences that led to it were the impetus of this new identity, an identity publicly formed and popularized in the early twentieth century that came to be known as the New Negro. This chapter will highlight the creativity, complexity, and diversity of this identity. This time period not only marked the mass movement of a people but also ushered in a revolutionary approach to the distribution of information. It was during this time that local and regional newspapers and magazines flourished; their circulation throughout the country transformed the ways in which ideas were communicated. The proliferation of recording and distributing sermons also occurred for the first time in US history. While progressive in some aspects, post-Reconstruction United States did not yield for black Americans the promises of full citizenship. Disenfranchisement, racial violence, and new economic opportunities were also motivating factors for the migration. And yet, despite the allure to leave the South, many African Americans chose to stay. Both staying in and leaving the South created a diasporic identity defined as the New Negro, an identity that is both constructed and contested.

I identify three characteristics of the Great Migration that differentiate the New Negro from the (Old) Negro identity as diasporic identities. First, the migration is voluntary; that is, people chose to move from one part of a nation to another, while others chose to stay.⁵ Second, this migration involved the complex negotiation of an identity in relation to nation, class, gender, and ethnicity and was strongly inflected by religion. Finally, this movement produced creative expressions—art, literature, sermons, and letters—that illustrate the rhetorically imaginative ways in which a New Negro identity was conceived, maintained, and challenged. This is a study of a “socio-spatial event” that facilitates a rethinking of the ways in which “subaltern lives are shaped by and shape the imaginative, three-dimensional, social, and political contours of human geographies”⁶ when their spatial orientation is altered. Positing that migration creates a space in which to renegotiate identity, the Great Migration of the early twentieth century in the United States thusly made the New Negro possible. The creation of a seemingly coherent identity that both resists and accommodates its oppressive environment, however, is accompanied with internal debates and occlusions that not only challenge but also actively participate in its formation.

This chapter will explore the New Negro as a constructed and contested diasporic identity representative of instability, creativity, and the need for a sense of permanence in a hostile political environment. The rhetoric of space and race or ethno-spatial reasoning is integral to this process of inventing a way of being in the world that is not reliant on one’s physical space. The historical context and the impetus of the New Negro is the Great Migration. The early twentieth century was a period of tremendous change in the United States, and one that witnessed pronounced cultural creativity. This is the context in which this identity is (re)formed. The New Negro is a signifier that rejects or recasts its past while concomitantly building upon it to present itself as “new” or different. The result is an unstable identity. The New Negro is an elite identity construct that often masks its internal diversity with a perceived unity. This African American migratory experience and its resultant identity embody an ambivalence concerning issues of hope, belonging, and autonomy that attempt to transcend dichotomies, contradictions, space, and time.

The Historical Context of the Great Migration

During the first few decades of the twentieth century, millions of black Americans moved west and north out of the southern United States. In fact, “By 1930, more than 1.3 million resided outside the South, nearly triple the number at the turn of the century.”⁷ Following James N. Gregory, this mass movement of people created a diaspora. He explains, “I invoke the diaspora concept in part because it calls attention to global contexts and encourages us to think about the relationship between internal and transnational migration. It also emphasizes the importance and dynamism of this subject. . . . Diasporas have life and movement and power—exactly the qualities of moving southerners in twentieth-century America.”⁸ This migration provided all of this for African Americans. The promises of freedom from the Civil War era had been circumscribed, and African Americans sought to secure their long overdue rights.

Factors Contributing to the Great Migration

A number of significant circumstances contributed to this mass movement of black people in the early twentieth century in the United States. One major factor was the economy. There were natural disasters such as flooding and the boll weevil epidemic that destroyed crops and had a devastating effect on the Southern economy.⁹ The migration itself had a negative impact on the Southern economy that was subsisted with black labor. Additionally, as a result of World War I, immigration from Europe ceased, creating new opportunities for immigrants to the North.¹⁰ The war not only created jobs—and thus, new economic opportunities for blacks—but also contributed to an expansion of self-perception for many African Americans. Soldiers exposed to other parts of the world for the first time began to see themselves as part of a larger black community. This diasporic thinking, however, was not limited to soldiers and was not novel.

Many blacks in the United States considered themselves part of the African diaspora dating back to the early nineteenth century. Though some black Americans sought to return “home” to Africa, others sought a home outside of the South, while continuing to maintain a connection to Africa.

Disenfranchisement and racial injustice also contributed substantially to the migration. Black men and women’s inability to participate in the political system became codified, in many ways nullifying Southern blacks’ citizenship. Painter writes, “Poll taxes, the white primary, literacy, and understanding clauses, and grandfather clauses made voting practically impossible for 90 percent of black men who lived in the South. They no longer lived in a democracy in which they could elect their representatives.”¹¹ The right to vote was also withheld from poor white men who were not able to meet these requirements. Class, as well as race, played a significant role in the creation of a national identity. Polling sites were spaces of exclusion: they were places where black bodies did not belong. Poll taxes and other such restrictive practices presented a major defeat to perceived notions that freedom from slavery would equate to full citizenship. The reality for African Americans was that, in addition to a loss of opportunity (e.g., land ownership, better jobs, and education), there was also a loss of national pride. The irony of black soldiers who fought for the country but returned to a country that would not fight for them and their rights was not lost on African Americans. As a result, African Americans perceived themselves as a nation within a nation. The desire to embrace full citizenship and express their complete humanity was inextricably linked to their ability to vote. As a result, the inability to participate in the political process further exacerbated racial tensions. At times, these tensions escalated into violence.

Racial violence was a propelling and compelling force of the Great Migration. Lynching, occurring mostly, but not solely, in the South was an act of gruesome violence and included beatings, hangings, tortures, and mutilations. The resurgence of the Klu Klux Klan also occurred during this time period. The summer of 1919, referred to as the Red Summer, is emblematic of the racial tension and violence that proliferated across the country.¹² Examining the Red Summer within the context of other race riots, Voogd writes, “The sad distinction of the Red Summer riots remains the fact that so many riots occurred in so short a span of time.”¹³ The North (and West) could be construed as both the land of opportunity and a place of violent erasure. The violence existed before and continued beyond the summer of 1919. In 1921, the riot in the Greenwood section of Tulsa, Oklahoma, often referred to as a Black Wall Street, destroyed a vibrant and prosperous black community.¹⁴ Violence, or the threat thereof, was omnipresent for African Americans. To understand the extent of the violence, Tolnay and Beck conclude that there were “2805 [documented] victims of lynch mobs killed between 1882 and 1930 in ten southern states. . . . The scale of this carnage means that, on the average, a black man, woman, or child was murdered nearly once a week, every week, between 1882 and 1930 by a hate-driven white mob.”¹⁵ These atrocities projected the past cruelty of slavery into the present. Riots, which often resulted in black bodies hanging from trees, served as a constant reminder of the expendability of black bodies and the pervasiveness of the danger living in America posed to African Americans.

It is in this context of violence, unfulfilled promises, unrealized hope, and economic deprivation that millions of people fled the South. Having lost hope in the prospect of viable future in the South, many resolved that the only way to obtain a (better) life was to leave. In 1917, an article in the African Methodist American Church Review aptly summarized the reasons for the exodus:

Neither character, the accumulation of property, the fostering of the Church, the schools and a better and higher standard of the home had made a difference in the status of black southerners. Confidence in the sense of justice, humanity and fair play of the white south is gone. . . . One migrant articulated the same mood in verse: “An’ let one race have all de South—here color lines are drawn—For ‘Hagar’s child’ done [stem] de tide—Farewell—we’re good and gone.”¹⁶

And yet, not all of “Hagar’s children” fled the South. Many black Americans chose to stay in the South. In his book American Civilization and the Negro (1916), Dr. Charles Victor Roman argues two reasons that blacks would not leave the South. He writes,

In the first place this is his home, and in the second place there is nowhere to go. He is not going back to Africa any more than the white man is going back to Europe or the Jew is going back to Palestine. . . . The slave-trade was the diaspora of the African, and the children of this alienation have become a permanent part of the citizenry of the American republic.¹⁷

It is equally as important to consider those wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• INTRODUCTION
• Part I MODELS OF ETHNO-SPATIAL REASONING
• Part II A NEW NEGRO HERMENEUTIC
• CONCLUSION
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright