Elisabeth Ngestirosa Endang Woro Kasih, S.Pd., S.S., M.A.
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THE OBJECTIVE
This chapter discusses the issues
surrounding African Americans and their
struggle for self-definition within the United
States of America, through an exploration of a
range of assertive modes of expression.
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• African-American history is the part of
American history that looks at the history of
African Americans or Black Americans.
• Most African Americans are descended from
Africans who were brought directly from Africa
to America and were forced into slavery. .
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• Slavery existed in the United States during the
18th and 19th centuries. Slaves worked clearing
trees, starting crops, and picking cotton.
• Of the 10.7 million Africans who were brought
to the Americas until the 1880s, 450 thousand
were shipped to what is now the United States.
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Black slaves could not blend into the dominant
white population.
– Many slaves were from Africa and had noticeable
physical and cultural differences from American
whites.
– Some slaves were African Americans born into
slavery.
– They were easily identifiable by sight.
– They could be easily recaptured.
– They were seen as fundamentally different from
whites.
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• Racial Segregation in the United States refers to the
segregation of facilities, services, and opportunities such
as housing, medical care, education, employment, and
transportation in the United States along racial lines.
• The term mainly refers to the legally or socially enforced
separation of African Americans from whites, but it is
also used with regards to the separation of other ethnic
minorities from majority mainstream communities.
• Signs were used to indicate where African Americans
could legally walk, talk, drink, rest, or eat.
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Civil Right Movement
• The civil rights movement in the United States was
a decades-long struggle by African Americans to
end legalized racial discrimination,
disenfranchisement and racial segregation in the
United States.
• The movement has its origins in the Reconstruction
era during the late 19th century, although the
movement achieved its largest legislative gains in
the mid-1960s after years of direct actions and
grassroots protests.
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1. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)
It was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that
upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation laws for
public facilities as long as the segregated facilities were
equal in quality – a doctrine that came to be known as
"separate but equal".
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2. Brown v. Board of Education (1954)
It was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in
which the Court ruled that U.S. state laws establishing
racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional,
even if the segregated schools are otherwise equal in
quality.
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3. Rosa Louise McCauley Parks
(February 4, 1913 – October 24,
2005)
She was an American activist in the
civil rights movement best known
for her pivotal role in the
Montgomery bus boycott.
The United States Congress has
called her "the first lady of civil
rights" and "the mother of the
freedom movement.
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4. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968)
• He was an American Christian
minister and activist who became
the most visible spokesperson and
leader in the Civil Rights Movement
from 1955 until his assassination in
1968.
• King is best known for advancing
civil rights through nonviolence and
civil disobedience, inspired by his
Christian beliefs and the nonviolent
activism of Mahatma Gandhi.
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5. El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz/ Malcolm
X (1925 – 1965)
He was an American Muslim
minister and human rights activist
who was a popular figure during the
civil rights movement.
He is best known for his staunch
and controversial black racial
advocacy, and for time spent as the
vocal spokesperson of the Nation of
Islam.
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Recovering Black History
• The civil rights movement in the United States was
a decades-long struggle by African Americans to
end legalized racial discrimination,
disenfranchisement and racial segregation in the
United States.
• The movement has its origins in the Reconstruction
era during the late 19th century, although the
movement achieved its largest legislative gains in
the mid-1960s after years of direct actions and
grassroots protests.
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Recovering Black History
1. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An
American Slave Written by Himself (1845)
• Douglass had to find ways out of the imposed
silence of slavery in order to tell the world ‘outside’
of its horrors
• The Narrative is a kind of prototype for so many
African American literary forms as it charts the
journey from slavery by linking it with the assertion
and command of language.
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Recovering Black History
2. W.E.B. Du Bois in 1903
• He was the first African American to earn
a doctorate
• Du Bois’s famous definition of ‘double-
consciousness’ for the African American
• Du Bois wrote of the ‘twoness – an
American, a Negro; two souls, two
thoughts, two unreconciled strivings;
two warring ideals in one dark body,
whose dogged strength alone keeps it
from being torn asunder’
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Imaginative Cultural
Retrieval
African American expression provided a
means of ‘claiming the I’ through telling
personal and cultural histories.
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Imaginative Cultural
Retrieval
1. Malcolm X in his Autobiography
Malcolm X, was an American Muslim minister
and human rights activist who was a popular
figure during the civil rights movement. He is
best known for his staunch and controversial
black racial advocacy, and for time spent as
the vocal spokesperson of the Nation of Islam.
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Imaginative Cultural
Retrieval
2. Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991)
A film set at the turn of the century in the South
Carolina islands dealing with a Gullah family of slave
descendants who have retained their ancestral
connections to Africa and yet are being pulled into the
world of the ‘mainland’ with all its new pressures and
demands.
The film is about storytelling and the importance of
passing on the memories of the people as a mode of
cultural anchorage.
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Imaginative Cultural
Retrieval
3. Toni Morrison’s fiction, The Bluest Eye
Morrison combats marginalization through the
reconstructive process of telling African
American history to remind her audience,
both black and white, of the restrictions
imposed on the opportunities of young
blacks, as in this section from The Bluest Eye.
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New Black Voices: Rap
• In contemporary American culture, hip hop, in its
diverse forms, suggests another medium in which
the drive for self-expression can be seen in African
American life.
• Rap music’s emergence in the 1980s, in particular,
articulated a youthful, vital voice, at once rooted in
the everyday traditions and sources that have been
discussed above, but also which tried to create a
new mode of expression.
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New Black Voices: Boyz
N the Hood (1991)
John Singleton’s film : Boyz n the Hood is a rites of
passage story dramatizing the triangular relationship
between
• the sports star (Ricky)
• the ‘gangsta’ (Doughboy)
• the boy ‘in between’ (Tre)
all struggling to come to terms with the ghetto life of
containment, control, surveillance and oppression
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New Black Voices: Boyz
N the Hood (1991)
Singleton’s film offers various narrative codings and
recodings of masculinity, from excessive gang
violence and misogyny to patriarchal guidance for
wayward sons, but its overarching theme is
education, from the ‘street’ and school, as well as
from Tre’s black nationalist father, furious styles, and
his successful, but estranged, mother.
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Conclusion
Manning Marable:
• African American identity is much more than race.
It is also the traditions, rituals, values, and belief
systems of African American people … our culture,
history, art and literature … our sense of ethnic
consciousness and pride in our heritage of
resistance against racism.
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