For Howard Dodson, one of the foremost experts on African American history, the election of President Barack Obama was not just a momentous occasion for blacks in America, but for people throughout the entire African diaspora.
The shared experiences of people of African descent is what led Dodson, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, to write Becoming American: The African American Journey, a dual chronology tracing Africans through both global and American history.
Dodson spoke with BlackEnterprise.com‘s Marcia A. Wade about the African American relationship to American democracy and the parallels one can draw from the experiences of blacks in America and abroad.
BlackEnterprise.com: How did you come up with the title Becoming American? Would you say that African Americans are, in fact, now Americans?
Howard Dodson: I thought about a group of black people gathering in New York in 1831 to talk about their Americanness and to affirm themselves as Americans. At exactly the same time that that happened there were very strong political initiatives by both friends and foes of African Americans to convince the free black population to move to Africa. Their position was that they were born and their parents were born in this country, that they had worked to make the country what it was, and they had, at times, gone to fight on behalf of the country. And therefore they were as much Americans as anybody else who had stepped off the boat in the 1820s or 1830s, and they had no intention of going anywhere.
How did you determine what features would best illuminate the journey of Africans to becoming American citizens?
Some things are foundational. You can’t really talk about the African American experience without talking about the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution itself. You can’t talk about the African American experience without dealing with the Emancipation Proclamation, etc.
Some of the others were chosen because they speak to specific moments in history, but more importantly are actually interrogating the African American relationship to American democracy and our status as citizens in this country.
Why was it important to place African American history into the context of global history?
In this book, I try to position the African American experience in the context of what was going on globally, especially in the black world. Sometimes the relationship between an event in the United States and one in the Caribbean is not a direct and linear one, but they may in fact be brought on by the same kind of political and social forces.
It is my hope that, as African Americans go through the timeline, it will create some expanded notion of their place in the world and of their relationship to the world.
What would you say is the relevance of this book in regard to the world witnessing the election of the first American president of African descent?
I consider Barack Obama’s election the fullest affirmation by the United States of the Americaness of African Americans that has ever been made. But there is a larger kind of subtext to the subtitle: The African American Journey. The subtext is that America itself is still becoming America. The notion of the United States specifically becoming America, as described in its founding creed, is a process that is over 200 years old and is not yet complete.
What I hope this book reveals is that our history goes back really to the beginning of human kind. It’s been central and core to the evolution of the United States and has touched America and has indeed in many instances defined America in ways that have not been fully recognized by the broad, general public, both black and white.
Excerpted from Becoming American: The African American Journey by Howard Dodson (Sterling Publishing, Available Feb. 3, 2009)
Too often, the telling of the story of African Americans begins with the transatlantic slave trade, and the whole of our history has too frequently been organized around our victimization during the eras of slavery and racial segregation. The triumphs of the civil rights movement, especially the role of Martin Luther King Jr., are chronicled, as are the recent challenges facing blacks in urban America. The centrality of blacks’ self-initiated activities in the making of African American history is not always apparent, and their active role over the last two hundred plus years in defining and redefining the very concept of America and Americans is usually not fully appreciated.
Becoming American: The African American Journey offers a unique chronological approach that affords readers an opportunity to begin discovering the active, generative role blacks have played in the making of America as we know it today. It also reveals the ways in which blacks’ attempts to make America live up to its founding creed have kept them on the path to “Becoming American.â€
Chronologies like timelines are useful devices for locating specific people, events, and activities in their proper contexts. African American history, which traces its roots back to Africa, has unfolded within the context of the formation, development, and underdevelopment of the American (USA) nation-state as well as the broader African and global world. While there is not always a causal relationship among events, people, and activities, there are frequently associational ones. Events in Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean, for instance, frequently resonate with, if not draw some inspiration from, events and movements in the United States. And vice versa. The anticolonial struggles in Africa during the 1950s and 1960s inspired the civil rights movement in the United States. And the civil rights movement was a catalyst for the antiapartheid struggle in South Africa.Of equal significance, the victories won by African Americans in their civil and human rights struggles encouraged the development of the women’s and gay rights movements among others.
Reading Becoming American helps us see and understand the ways in which the African- American experience relates to and at times interacts with things that are happening in the United States and the wider world.