Africa Today – September 2, 2024

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Dr. Sterling Stuckey was a distinguished professor of history at the University of California, Riverside.

In 1994, he was awarded the presidential chair at the University of California, Riverside.

He is the author of many books and articles, among them The Ideological Origins of Black Nationalism,

Slave Culture, Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America,

Going Through the Storm, The Influence of African American Art in History,

African Culture, and Melville's Art.

He was at Northwestern for many years.

In the 1960s, he was the Midwest Regional Representative of CORE.

He was also the chair of the Emergency Relief Committee, ERC, for Haywood Counties in Tennessee.

He hosted a number of Freedom Riders in the early 1960s.

He was a member of the International Black World and worked with and knew such people as Malcolm X

and John Killens, Lerone Bennett, Paul Robeson, Jan Carew, C.L.R.

James, Walter Rodney.

He was one of the founders of the Amistad Society, a committee on Negro history and culture.

He wrote sections in the Mississippi Summer Curriculum of 1964, worked with Bob Moses.

The Journal of African American History, in fall of 2006, put together a special edition on the life and work of Dr. Sterling Stuckey,

including essays by Robert Hill, who people know from his work with Garvey,

Michael Gomez, who's done a lot of work around the issue of the African diaspora, and Clement Price.

Dr. Stuckey joins us today to talk about his life and work and the re-release of his book, Slave Culture, Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America.

25th anniversary is coming out again.

We're looking forward to it.

Dr. Stuckey, thanks for making the time.

It's a pleasure to be here.

I didn't realize that I've been that busy.

Yeah, you've been that busy.

And, you know, I spent a lot of time editing.

I had to team that down.

I had to make some choices there, Dr. Stuckey.

You were born in Memphis.

You moved to Chicago.

I'm interested in why you chose the route, because you're in academia very quickly, and you moved through with a consistency.

What was it about your family, your life, that drove you that way?

Well, a black family living in Memphis, Tennessee,

the early 20th century or late 20th century is going to have all manner of problems in a place like Memphis.

Not being able to serve on juries, not being able to vote regularly, not being able to be on the police force, the fire department, being subjected to violence and so on.

So it was a decision that my mother and father made that grew out of a discussion with my father.

We had a discussion with some family relatives from Arkansas who had spent time in the North and suggested that they might want to move from Memphis to the Chicago area where we have relatives,

because it will offer far better opportunities for the children.

I had a sister, and they were referring to my sister, Jean, and to me in that regard.

And so within a year or two, my parents took that advice and moved from Memphis to Chicago,

were welcomed by Memphis.

I had relatives in Chicago, and that was a very important development in my life.

Far more later, I realized, than I realized immediately,

because in intellectual terms, I found a great deal of reinforcement being offered in Chicago.

Chicago was an important blues center, just as Memphis was.

An important jazz location.

When I was living in Memphis and only 12 or 13, the bandmaster of the high school that I attended was Jimmy Lunsford,

a great jazz conductor in the 20th century.

When we moved to Chicago in the 1940s, the bandmaster of DuSable High School was Captain Walter Dyett,

and he trained such people as Dorothy Donegan and the percussionist whose name escapes me for the moment, Walter Perkins.

So there were great band conductors at both Manassas High School in Memphis and in Chicago.

So that kind of reinforcement was being offered.

Your mother was a poet, was she not?

That's right.

And she knew people, she knew Margaret Burgos.

She knew Margaret, yes.

And your mother, was she writing in Memphis?

Or did she begin to write more when she got to Chicago?

She began to write in Memphis and continued to write when we reached Chicago.

As a matter of fact, she has offered the most extensive writings on slavery of anyone since Paul Lawrence Dunbar.

But hers, her poetry is very different from Dunbar's.

It's a more biting, more ironic poetry of slavery than Dunbar's.

So that influence of her with respect to the writing of slave poems,

was to have a big impact on me later because I was primarily to devote myself to the study of slavery and to write on slavery.

And I was hearing through her poetry tales similar to what one might hear if one's reading William John Faulkner's collection of tales

or E.C.L. Adams' collection of tales being expressed poetically.

And I was also learning from her something for which I didn't have a term.

I didn't have a term, certainly.

Until many years later, the dialectic in terms of the bringing together of ideas that seemed to be confrontational in a way.

Melville talks about the union of remote associations.

And one has that in about five or six different poems of hers that were written in Memphis and in Chicago, bringing the two together.

So her poetry was a big influence.

Together with the work that she wrote.

The work of Sterling Brown, the poet out of Howard University in Washington, D.C.

Strong man.

Put me in touch with major folklorists.

Not only did I benefit from reading his poetry, but it was he who suggested that I read Harold Colander and Alan Lomax and others.

So I had, I brought into graduate school a very comfortable attitude toward my culture, African American culture, into which I was born.

A very distinguished historian at UC Berkeley.

Lawrence Levine saw me some years after an essay that I had written in graduate school at Northwestern called Through the Prism of Folklore, The Black Ethos in Slavery.

He said, Sterling, that must have taken you a tremendous amount of courage to have written that.

Because historians at that time didn't recognize folklore as an important subject matter for the study of slavery.

I don't know what I said to Levine at the time.

But the answer to that, honestly, was that it took no courage at all.

I was born into it.

I grew up listening to it.

The first musical selection that I recall having heard was Listen to the Lambs, R. Nathaniel Detz.

Spiritual, though written after slavery.

A group of Le Moyne College students around the piano in my grandparents' front room were singing it.

It was a song of courageous beauty.

I was two or three when I heard it.

So I had that kind of influence when I was very, very young.

You know, as I looked at some of your work and we talked about it, I want to say a few more things before we move into the kind of the gist of our discussion today.

Not everyone chooses to be a scholar activist.

You chose to be a scholar activist.

How did you navigate that?

Was it just like one hand and the other?

Because you were not just involved.

You were always involved.

And you were in the movement.

You were in the middle of things in the 1960s.

Well, you know, this is a very good question.

And let me tell you precisely what the turning point was, if I can speak of movement into civil rights for me.

There was a demonstration on 43rd Street in Chicago in support of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee by members of the Congress of Racial Equality Corps.

They were carrying picket signs in front of a Woolworth's store there.

I happened to be walking along that street noticing that this demonstration was taking place, urging blacks not to go into the Woolworth's store.

But one of the persons with the picket sign just handed the picket sign to me and I just as naturally grasped it and continued to picket with them that day.

And then later asked, what's the name of your organization?

They said, COIN.

I said, may I join?

That's how I became involved.

But it was no—I didn't see that as a disjunction from the civil rights movement.

I've been involved in civil rights.

It was a period of the 60s.

There was tremendous agitation going on in the South and not a little bit in the North as well.

And that was a part of our struggle.

So that's how I viewed it.

You know, as I looked to—I was looking to a book reading about the Black Heritage TV series, which was on,

which was with Vincent Hardy.

Yeah.

And you were part of that and also looking at the international black world.

And, you know, Walter Rodney, C.L.R. James, William Strickland, Gerald McWhorter, Robert Hill, you know, Vincent Hardy, Malcolm X.

You knew all these people.

You met all these people.

Share with us, I mean, looking back or however you want to look at it, Dr. Stuckey, those experiences of people who,

most of us and many of us, revered today.

I met Malcolm at, as I recall, the Temple No. 7 restaurant in Harlem in the early 60s.

I walked in.

Shortly after I walked—let me go back a bit.

I wrote three articles for Muhammad Speaks in the early 60s.

One on Ida B. Wells, another on Nat Turner, and a third on Henry Holland Garnett.

And I received a letter—I had not met him before—from Malcolm X congratulating me on those three pieces in Muhammad Speaks

in which he said further that this is the sort of work that we need to see more of.

So I have a three or four paragraph letter from Malcolm that I've had for 50 years.

That was our first contact, my first contact, direct contact with Malcolm.

Later I walked into this Temple No. 7 restaurant—I think that's what it was called—in Harlem.

Malcolm came over, shook my hand, and immediately began to talk about various intellectuals who had been in that restaurant in the past week or so.

He had no problem in dealing with intellectuals, none whatsoever.

At that table, this or that person was seated a night or two ago, and so on.

And that's how our discussion with Malcolm—

Later, as chair of the Amistad Society in Chicago, my colleagues in that group and I invited Malcolm to come to Chicago to give a talk.

Malcolm came to Chicago, gave a talk.

He must have drawn about a thousand people.

It was a big turnout.

He was debating another man on—

The subject was integration versus separatism.

Homer Smith was the person he was debating.

Homer was a very nice man, but he just couldn't deal with Malcolm's way with the crowd and so on.

After the debate, I said,

Minister Malcolm, I'd like for you to come into the office here.

It wasn't my office.

It was a building that we were renting for that particular day, I think, from the packinghouse.

I think from the Packinghouse Workers Union.

I said, I want to talk to you.

I had a checkbook in my hand.

When Malcolm came in, I closed the door.

I said, Minister Malcolm, we would like to pay you for your transportation to Chicago.

He said, that won't be necessary.

The Honorable Elijah Muhammad takes care of that.

I said, well then, may I write you a check for an honorarium?

He said, I don't accept honorarium.

Now, that to me was very interesting about Malcolm.

I mean, he could very easily have accepted—

he could have accepted a check from this organization.

So that's how I met Malcolm.

I didn't have any further contact with him.

But I have a letter from him, and the organization of which I was a part invited him to Chicago.

And I was quite impressed by what I took to be absolute candor.

He didn't have to say any of that.

He could have accepted a check.

And I would have known.

But who else would have known except Malcolm himself?

And he didn't accept that.

But that was my contact with Malcolm.

Vincent Harding, I read for the first time in—

I guess it was in Black World.

Or was it First World?

Hoyt Fuller?

No.

It was Negro Digest.

Okay.

He—Vincent wrote a piece, To the Gallant Black Soldier Now Dead.

I think that was its title.

And I was very impressed by that and wrote to him.

And we began to exchange letters that way.

John Killens had come—I don't know if you mentioned John or not.

I did mention John.

John Killens had come to Chicago as part of the Amistad Lecture Series as well.

That's when I first met John directly.

John Henry Clark, what a wonderful man he was.

Not because every time I came to New York, he said,

Sterling, we have a room here for you.

And not because he kept a pipe that I was smoking at the time.

There is some sort of artifact that reminded him of me.

He was a very generous human being.

And so I met these gentlemen.

But they were much better known than I was at the time.

Did you think, Dr. Stuckey, that—because there were challenges.

There were obviously challenges in this period of history and challenges internally in the movements of African people.

Did you get the sense?

Did you get the sense that what you were doing was on the vanguard of something?

How did you see that, this period of history?

When I was in graduate school, studying under George Fredrickson,

I wrote a paper for a seminar.

And the paper was Through the Prism of Folklore, the Black Ethos in Slavery.

That paper was in direct opposition from the direction in which slave studies had been going for decades in this country.

Because I was saying, in effect, you can't really analyze slave behavior, slave thought,

unless you have some understanding of slave tales, of slave dance, of slave music generally, the spirituals and so forth.

At the time, I didn't know that the blues were also created by slaves.

So these were profound contributions on the part of slaves.

This was the argument that I was making.

And that was the argument that led Levine to just ask, didn't it take you a lot of courage to have written that?

So what I was doing was diametrically opposed in a certain way to what most historians had been doing, ignoring folklore.

Just ignoring it.

So there was opposition there.

And that was coming right out of the movement into the intellectual world.

But the intellectual world was already beginning to transform itself to some extent as a result of challenges from the movement.

At what point do you begin to look very specifically into not just the experiences on the Middle Passage

or the experiences of African people in the New World,

but begin to look into Africa and culture and redefining slave culture?

When does that come to you, Sterling?

Almost from the beginning.

I was looking at Africa.

Though I was to intensify that attention.

But almost from the beginning.

And looking at the slave tales, the tales of the Congaree.

They treat Sea Island experiences out of the Carolinas in Georgia.

Faulkner's The Days When the Animals Talked.

There's an African presence.

So I was referring to Africa in the essays that I was writing.

It was very important.

I recall when I wrote my dissertation,

the director of the dissertation, George Fredrickson, came to me.

His office was next to mine.

I was a graduate student.

He said, who do you think you're writing for?

I said, well, for fellow colleagues.

He said, but you know that most historians don't accept the view that slave culture affirmed an African presence.

I wrote.

I had devoted one paragraph to the African presence in slave culture in that dissertation.

My colleagues did not like that because they knew that that was very much in opposition to what most historians believed.

What I did, it was a great boon to me that Fredrickson called my attention to it.

And challenged me about it because I spent an additional 10 or 12 years

studying African ancestral values.

The writing on African ancestral values that constituted a single paragraph initially just skyrocketed,

bloomed into perhaps, well, the first 98 pages of slave culture in relatively fine print are devoted to that very issue.

And then when you look at the documentation for that near 100-page treatment chapter,

you find that the documentation is as detailed, if not more so, than the first 98 pages.

So what began as a one paragraph reflection on African values and slavery blossomed into a great many paragraphs.

And close to a couple of hundred pages.

And that's, in a sense, that is the foundation stone of the book.

Because that had not been done before.

How does slave culture affirm an African presence?

Well, when the blues were created, when most slave art was created, you had a multiplicity of African ethnic peoples.

Ethnic people in this country.

Not just in the South, but primarily in the South.

Du Bois says that it was the interchange of African rituals that established the spirit of the black church in America.

Slaves exchanging African rituals.

So what you have here is a form of Pan-Africanism taking place

during the Creative Act.

Slaves acting in concert.

Slaves from different ethnic groups acting in concerts and creating art forms.

What a beautiful affirmation of Pan-Africanism that was.

When you have Africans from different ethnic groups in America involved in creating an important art form

while all being subjected to a brutal form of enslavement.

How that...

How inspiring that was.

As these new bonds were being established among them.

So it becomes an African presence in a sort of universal sense.

It's not just Ashanti, but it's African.

Because there are many other ethnic groups involved in the process.

In the creative process.

When slaves came in and began to, at some point, to dance the ring shout,

we know that African children, slave children, by the time they could walk,

were getting into that counterclockwise dance called the ring shout,

which was a sacred dance, as participants from different ethnic peoples.

There's a fair amount of literature on that subject.

So for the Denmark Vesey conspiracy in South Carolina,

in the 1820s,

you had Igbos and two or three other ethnic peoples

with thousands of followers

who, according to Vesey's design,

were to converge in revolutionary activity

from three different ethnic peoples to converge.

So it was an African presence in political revolutionary activity like that.

As well as an artistic activity.

One of the extraordinary things about slave art is that

slaves used art as a form of protest.

I don't know of any people who've used art more as a form of protest

than slaves right here in North America.

The Negro spiritual is somewhat subtle,

but undeniable form of protest.

The blues, well, Douglas says of the blues

that when listening to this music as a child,

he became convinced that slaves were boiling over

with the bitterest anguish,

every tone,

and appealed to God for release from slavery.

Bitter anguish, therefore, was a bitter critique of slavery.

So that, which is in direct contrast

to scholars who tell us that slaves were Sambos,

laughing one minute, crying another minute.

Or the slaves, that the mind of the slave was just a blank tablet

on which the master class etched out what it wanted to etch out.

Douglas says slaves were boiling over,

the souls of slaves were boiling over with the bitterest anguish.

Douglas talks more about the souls of black folk

than anyone I've read.

Far more than Dr. Du Bois, for that matter.

Which leads one to believe that Dr. Du Bois took the very title

of the souls of black folk from Douglas' description

and narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass

of the souls of his soul and the souls of other slaves around him.

You're using, correct me if I'm off base here,

you're using Pan-Africanism,

this notion of the African,

Pan-Africanism very clearly in a different sense.

You're using Pan-Africanism to talk about the various language groups

of the African continent and the culture there

in contrast to a global notion.

Am I on base here, Dr. Du Bois?

Well, there is a global quality about my use

in that so many different African ethnic peoples

were represented on the plantations of the South.

Not just one or two,

but dozens of ethnic people were represented

and coming together at some point,

acting in concert in the creative process.

So that's a kind of global artistic creation taking place.

After a while, no one is calling it just Ashanti,

though it does appear that the Ashanti had quite an impact

in the creation of the blues.

One gets that impression from reading Richard Wright's

Black Power, which came out in 1954.

And Wright himself was not aware of it.

In the process of talking about describing certain events,

he talks about moving into an area near what was

the Kamasi, the capital at one point,

or talking about Ashanti rights of circumcision and so on.

Certain rights of circumcision,

which appear to have been Ashanti.

Now, if that's accurate,

then this is a revolutionary development.

As revolutionary as Wright,

having observed these black women dancing a particular kind of dance

in Ghana when he was there in 1954,

and being absolutely intrigued by it,

and then thinking that he had seen it somewhere before,

where, oh, for God's sake, yes, in America,

in Mississippi and other different locations.

So that was a revolutionary finding on Richard Wright's part.

To go to Ghana in the 1950s and to find a dance

so analogous to what he grew up experiencing in Mississippi.

Talk to us and break it down specifically

what ring shout means and how it manifested itself, Dr. Stuckey.

At one point during my research,

I'm looking at the South, at South Carolina, Virginia,

even in North Carolina,

which is not supposed to have had the ring shout necessarily,

Georgia and so forth,

I began to see references to black people

forming themselves into rings all over the place.

Forming themselves into rings,

they're singing and they're dancing and so on.

I didn't know, I didn't know what meaning was behind that.

And finally, I read a book by an art historian,

an art historian at Yale,

who was talking about the four moments of the sun

in which he describes many African cultures that he had studied

being characterized, some features of the cultures being characterized

by movement in a counterclockwise direction.

People dancing in a counterclockwise direction on sacred occasions.

The best source, best single source for understanding the ring shout

would be Robert Ferris Thompson's book,

The Four Moments of the Sun.

But let me say, you said break it down.

You find that the people who were singing the Negro spirituals

very often were moving in a counterclockwise direction.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson writing about that

in Army Life and the Black Regiment talks about

coming upon soldiers.

He was commanding these soldiers for the Union forces

having formed themselves into a counterclockwise direction

while singing Negro spirituals.

So that the ring shout was an anchor,

a foundation for the Negro spiritual.

It was a foundation for the creation of the blues.

Douglass talks about himself being in the circle,

not understanding what was going on.

He's very young.

He understood it much better by the time he wrote

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.

And then again the ring shout.

Marshall Stearns in The Story of Jazz talks about

the ring shout being a pivotal feature,

literally pivotal feature of jazz.

So that you have the three greatest forms of black art in America

all connected with the ring shout.

That is to say the shout is a foundation,

a foundation or an anchor for spirituals,

for the blues and for jazz.

When did you recognize the ring shout?

I think I read in one of your pieces that

you read Frederick Douglass again and again.

When did Sterling say,

I see the pieces tying together here?

That's a good question.

I'm not going to try to kid anyone.

It's not an easy question because

it was coming on gradually.

This recognition of the importance of this sacred dance.

And then at some point much later

I try to put it all together

and draw certain conclusions about it.

I'm not the first to have drawn those conclusions.

I began to understand it after

it must have taken me almost a year or two

to have a good understanding

of what the shout was about.

And you know from having read the

the foreword to the

25th anniversary edition of Slave Culture,

which is in the process of coming out again now this year,

that the ring shout is still evolving.

Almost monthly and yearly

the ring shout,

some form of ring shout expression

is being discovered

that Stauffer talks about.

I had no idea that the song that slaves sang

as they moved in a counterclockwise direction

influenced the people who wrote

the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

I had absolutely no idea

that it influenced those who wrote

John Brown's Body.

That would have been very moving

and it is very moving to know

that this black art form

was highly influential

in artistic expression

that is regarded as national in America.

John Brown's Body,

the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

So it is still evolving.

Wynton Marsalis

in a recent important composition of his

entitles a movement

in that composition, Ring Shout.

There is a representation of the ring shout

on the floor

of a federal building

in Washington, D.C.,

a federal building that now sits on land

beneath which was the old cemetery there,

New York Cemetery,

Negro Cemetery there.

And it's called the New Ring Shout.

So we're learning more and more

about the ring shout every day.

So it has taken on,

it had taken on a life of its own

over which I had virtually no control,

about which I was,

discovering more and more things.

I had no idea in the 1980s

that this ritual

that I was trying to make so much of

consisted of a great deal more

than I had any awareness of.

This we now know,

that it extended its reach

beyond the black community

to the American landscape as a whole,

on which one might recognize

art such as John Brown's body

at the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

It's still going on.

Dr. Sterling Stuckey,

we're talking with,

he's a distinguished professor of history

at the University of California, Riverside,

before that, Northwestern.

He, in 1994,

he held the presidential chair

at the University of California, Riverside.

This is the 25th anniversary

of, and will be released now,

Slave Culture, Nationalist Theory,

and the Foundations of Black America.

Dr. Sterling, what does this do

to the way that African people

and African culture

and the role of religion

is placed in the context of American history?

What new table does this give us?

What new what?

Table.

What new platform

or new consciousness does this present to us,

coming from the work you're talking about

with the Ring Show

and the depth of African culture

in American history?

What can we forget about America

for what we need to add to it?

Well, it's depth, you say, in American history,

and that's a key word, because

we notice a lot of the power of African culture

in the creative process

in places that are far beyond Africa's shores.

That's precisely the very depth of African culture,

finding expression among

those who have filled hands

in the American slave South,

being the transformation

of the culture to some extent,

being engendered by representatives of the culture

who are living in slavery

and are creative in slavery,

creating in slavery.

So it means that they had to have

enormous confidence to do that,

and both were participants in this process.

So it's a wonderful question,

and it's a question that deserves

a lot more thought

and some writing,

because this is a new dimension.

There were blacks,

as you first put the question to me,

I was thinking,

yeah, it's really a fine question,

because there were blacks who felt that

blacks in America are going to lead

the African diaspora at one point.

Then later,

Dr. Du Bois rejected that notion

in the 1940s,

that blacks in America were going to be

the pathfinders for Africans generally.

And I think he was right about that.

I think Du Bois was right about that.

But it's no put-down at all

of blacks in America

when they are that influenced by Africa.

They do live in America,

and when they do,

and when they see

the ways in which

the larger culture

has been transformed

by African culture,

I cite once again

the Battle Hymn of the Republic

and John Brown's body,

they know more than ever

the role that they've been playing

culturally and influencing

America generally.

It's been, I would say,

a unique role.

There's been no other role

played like it

of the black American culturally

has played.

But it's a question that needs to be,

to use your phrase,

broken down

and thought about

and written about.

I think it may be another step,

perhaps the next step,

in looking at African cultural expression

in North America.

There's Christianity.

I was storing this

as I was reading it

in some of the other articles

in the Anniversary Edition

and the Tribute Edition

of the Journal of African American History.

Trying to say it right here,

does Christianity inform

Africans and African American culture,

or is it African and African American culture

that finds its own safe place

in Christianity?

Maybe some of these questions

are questions that perhaps

I should take home with me.

It's a good question.

Christianity certainly does,

to some extent, inform,

to a large extent,

inform African consciousness,

in my view.

I think it informed

the African consciousness

of those African ethnic people

who were creating

these new forms of music

and dance.

They were Christian,

perhaps in a deeper sense

than the people

in the larger society.

One could say that they were

taking Christianity

far more seriously.

And,

thus inspired,

were able to create

much of this wonderful music.

So I think it has been,

it's a two-way process.

They breathed

fresh humanity

into Christianity,

but were led to do that

by Christian inspiration.

They were willing to,

despite the horrors of slavery,

to forgive white people

who were willing to repent.

That's the Christian concept.

If you're willing to repent,

say you're sorry

for what you've done,

we will forgive you.

But as we know,

there have been virtually

no public confessions of guilt

with respect to the way blacks

have been treated in this country.

That's interesting.

But so that Christian,

that Christian option is there

that in a sense blacks

have offered to whites

since slavery,

during slavery,

and since slavery,

that they apparently

have taken more seriously

than members of the largest society

on the whole.

You know,

I was,

as I looked through your,

through your works,

and I looked through some

of the older works,

two or three names came to mind

that I see a lot,

or I saw often in your work.

One, of course,

we talked about

was Frederick Douglass,

but then both David Walker

and Henry Highland Garnett

and the most important

book I was looking at there,

David Walker was

in defense of African right

and liberty,

and Henry Highland Garnett

was nationalism,

class analysis,

and revolution.

Talk about those figures

in this picture

that you're drawing for us,

Dr. Stuckey.

Yeah.

About David Walker,

it's fascinating to realize

that W.E.B. Du Bois

has observed that David Walker

has offered us

the most tremendous

reflection on slavery

that we have,

the most tremendous attack

on slavery

has come from David Walker.

That's what's Du Bois'

final judgment on Walker,

which means if that is so,

we know that there were

a number of outstanding attacks

on slavery

by major abolitionists,

William Lloyd Garrison,

and a host of other abolitionists.

But Du Bois says that

the most powerful attack

on slavery has come

from David Walker.

That rate,

that lifts Walker

in one's estimation

to a very high height.

So that's significant

because Du Bois,

in one of his initial comments

about Walker

and those black folk,

refers to his wild

appeal to the colored citizens

of the world.

But then later he says

it is the most significant

attack yet on slavery.

So that Walker was,

I think of him as an almost

sacred human being.

It was Walker who could not

imagine white America

trying to get blacks

out of this country,

trying to get blacks

to leave America.

And he tells us in his appeal

that he thought

that was very bad,

that they should attempt

to reconcile themselves

with us before we leave.

That's something to think about.

You should instead attempt

to reconcile yourselves

with us before we leave.

After having done us that damage,

you should reconcile yourself.

So he was a man of great,

great character,

perhaps the greatest influence

of all on Henry Holland Garnett,

who had been a slave,

proposed perhaps

the greatest confrontation

between slaves and slave masters

in his call to slaves

to rise up in the 1840s.

But despite the fact

that he was black

and had grown up

in a black family and so on,

and had been subjected

to all manner of mistreatment,

as blacks as a whole

had been from whites,

is very deeply interested

in the white working class

and wants to see justice

for white workers

throughout the world.

And Garnett is advocating this

in the 1840s,

before the Communist Manifesto

came out.

He's concerned about

the white working class

and fairness and justice

for the white working class.

So they were two

important figures.

And one of Du Bois' heroes

was close to

Henry Holland Garnett

and Alexander Crummell

from the American Negro Academy.

And Crummell is quoted

at considerable length

in my book,

Slave Culture,

on Henry Holland Garnett.

Du Bois went to West Africa,

to Liberia,

and he said he had come upon

Garnett's,

where the soul of the ocean

rushes,

while the currents of the ocean

rush toward the soul

of Henry Holland Garnett.

So Garnett was important

to Alexander Crummell,

he was very important to Garnett,

Walker was very important

to Garnett,

and to Du Bois.

It's all there in the book

if one wants to work one's way

to that kind of,

to those relationships.

Your memory is so good,

Dr. Stuckey.

Pardon me?

Your memory is so good.

You remember things by date

and detail

and almost by page.

Well, Garnett,

let me make a confession.

In one way,

it was almost painful for me

to see Douglas

given the credit

that heaven knows he deserves

for having first described the blues.

And I thought to myself,

Garnett has been underestimated

all along,

mainly because he and Garnett

had their differences.

This is going to make it

even more difficult

for Garnett to receive

the attention that he deserves.

I'm sort of joking in a way,

but I'm serious too.

I think Garnett deserves,

when you read that chapter on Garnett,

he's a wonderful figure,

a wonderful human being,

deeply and radically Christian.

So, but this last,

I won't call it his last,

but this achievement of Douglas's

is monumental.

Adrienne Rich,

one of the most distinguished poets

of our time,

says that Douglas wrote

a purer English than John Milton.

Douglas wrote,

Frederick Douglas wrote

a purer English than John Milton.

This is in my book.

It was taken out

by one of the editors

before I called

and expressed my extreme anger

and was put back in the book.

Someone didn't like the idea

of this ex-slave Douglas

being able to write,

in her view,

a purer English than John Milton.

And John Milton is generally up there

where they associate him,

that is with Shakespeare.

How should the ring shout,

Dr. Stuckey,

how should it inform us in,

here in the 21st century?

I mean, there's talk about

the African diaspora,

the large numbers of African people

who found themselves in Brazil

and Panama, et cetera.

How does it inform,

how does it inform our place

and our role

and our sense of history here

when we talk about the Caribbean,

the African diaspora,

African people worldwide?

What glue does it provide us?

I'm not sure.

You know, I suspect that there is

a lot more glue

than we could ever imagine.

That is to say,

Du Bois in the Philadelphia Negro

talks about the ring shout

in the West Indies.

One of the few references to the ring shout

in the West Indies that I've seen.

I learned very early on

that you don't discount

what Du Bois has to say that easily.

He was a man of immense learning.

What I'm getting at is that

it's very likely that you have

far more evidence of the ring shout

in the Caribbean,

in Brazil,

in other places in the Americas

than we are aware of.

I would bet on that.

There's a tremendous amount of

counterclockwise movement and art

in the West Indies

from those Africans who came from sections

of black Africa

where the sun moved

in a counterclockwise direction.

So, but again,

you've raised a big question.

And I haven't, honestly,

I haven't really thought about that too much.

I backed away from it.

Well, I can't go and try to research that too.

Okay.

But the questions keep coming up.

Someone will.

Richard Wright, I mean,

Richard Wright had no conception,

really, of African culture in America.

He doubted it.

He doubted it even more,

if that's possible,

than Ralph Ellison.

Because Ralph Ellison didn't believe

in African influences.

You would think that he would think

that blacks were more influenced by Greece.

Seriously.

By Athens.

It's not my intention just to be...

That's Ellison,

who tells us that

black writers should not have any interest

in dialect

when there are writers like Walt Whitman

and Herman Melville around

to show us a more revolutionary

use of language,

which means he did not read

Moby Dick very carefully,

because one of the most brilliant uses

of dialect in Moby Dick

is by Herman Melville,

where you have a black man

referring to slaveholders

and to whites generally,

whites who were against blacks,

as Masa Shark.

Masa Shark.

So Ellison didn't know that.

So that there's so much

that we need to disavow.

In order to see ourselves clearly,

and not just misrepresentations of whites,

but about some of our own people.

James Rowland Johnson,

a wonderful artist,

novelist, intellectual,

NAACP activist,

tells us that dialect has but two full stops,

humor and pathos.

Not so.

He tells us that in 1922,

and apparently that view

has held its way now for what,

90 years?

That dialect is either humorous

or it's sad.

Not so at all.

I'm a little more gentle,

a lot more gentle with James Rowland Johnson.

But you can't just throw out a language

that millions of people are still speaking,

which is what he tried to do.

And you've done some work on Paul Robeson,

have you not?

I have.

And what's the texture of what you're doing?

Because Robeson, of course,

as were many people in the 1960s,

were involved in looking at different directions

for organizing African peoples,

socialism, communism,

very, very prominent.

Well, to follow up on what was said

about James Rowland Johnson

and Ralph Ellison and dialect,

when Robeson did the Emperor Jones,

Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones,

in London in 1925,

he had done it in New York prior to that time,

British critics,

who've been completely ignored by American critics,

thought that he used the language

that O'Neill put in his mouth, so to say,

so effectively, one said,

that he should now give us his Othello.

He should now give us Shakespeare in English.

He uses this so powerfully.

It was all the rage.

His use of language,

and in this case it was Negro dialect

that Eugene O'Neill had written

for this play, The Emperor Jones,

he uses so forcefully

that he demonstrated a rebirth

of slave genius in the theater,

in the European theater.

In 1925,

as he had in America in the previous year.

This was the same time in 1925

that critics,

within months of his having launched a concert career,

were calling him some

the greatest singer in the world.

So these two contributions

were being made almost simultaneously in 1925,

both in dialect,

because his first five years of concertizing

were spent singing

in Negro dialect exclusively.

So this was an enormous contribution

on Robeson's part

that the world does not yet know about.

I came upon it by looking at

NAACP files in the 1920s

when NAACP was having

almost complete coverage

of theatrical performances

by Robeson sent to them.

Du Bois may have arranged that,

but that's where you can find that evidence.

We're speaking with Dr. Sterling Stuckey.

He has a long history,

distinguished history.

As we walked in,

he said he had retired,

but he was working more than ever before

and writing more than ever before.

Very active in the movements

of the 1960s core

and the international black world,

working with issues of the Freedom Riders,

working with the Amish,

the Amistad Foundation,

the Mississippi Summer Project.

And coming out right now,

available is

Slave Culture, Nationalist Theory

and the Foundations of Black America.

This is the 25th anniversary

of its original release.

And our last moments here,

reflections, Dr. Stuckey,

on this course here

of your work and your writing

and what you're saying.

Oh, I tell you,

to be honest,

I had not realized

how long that course has been,

how involved it has been,

except in recent months,

for some reason.

It's been a tremendous degree

of interest expressed in slave culture,

far more than I ever imagined.

People inviting you

to speak in different places

and so on.

And what certain scholars

have written about

that finally convinces you

that you haven't been out there

in the vineyard all by yourself,

working without certain people

being observant.

So that's encouraging

because after you've done it

for so long

and felt that you,

and felt that you

pretty much are still pioneering,

it can be a bit disheartening.

But I find that

it's anything but that.

I mean,

it's anything but disheartening now.

So that's encouraging.

Dr. Stuckey,

thank you so much for your time.

You're leaving,

making big footprints every day

for all of us.

And it's a real honor

to have you here on Africa Today.

And you're always welcome.

As you were talking about going back

and thinking about some of the questions,

you think about some of those questions

and we'll be in contact

and we'll have you on the air again.

Maybe we'll do it again.

I've enjoyed it.

I would look forward to it, okay?

My pleasure, sir.

Thank you.

Thank you, Lucy, for the questions.

It's been 2018,

you know,

when damitians went to school,

I miss you and my friends.

And now,

it's,

it's probably the

time when I see you more and more,

speaking to people around me,

has it so stuck with you

to this particular stage?

Does that impact you?

Dr. Dr. Michael Dentist University

the American Literature Academy

in South Carolina

if you are going to go there,

Thank you.

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