African Retentions & Black Contributions

A Cultural Exchange in America

Overview

The Negro was an enchained section of America’s peasantry and has unrepentantly and greatly molded  American culture.  There have been both folk and formal contributions in  politics, labor, education, religion, sports, art, and music. 

Slavery was a crucial dilemma, in which contact between blacks and whites were close and often intimate, though an outer show of social distance and social untouchability existed. There was a reciprocal cultural exchange.  In the South especially, there was a subtle and an unrecognized effect of blacks upon a developing American culture.  Often there has been an energetic and clashing interaction of black culture with the rest of American culture.

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African Retentions in Language and Folklore

Like others, Africans brought with them their culture to the New World.  In the British colonies and the USA, those cultures did not land in a receptive soil so that which was not usable for survival was lost.  But many argue the existence of African survivals, an argument which is less convincing for the USA than the Caribbean and Latin America, places that had a greater tolerance for difference than Protestant (and puritanical) America.

Africans who spoke the same language were often separated from one another to suppress insurrections.  There remain, some believe, verbal and nonverbal African communications in American culture:

1. The nonverbal sounds Americans used to say “yes” (um hum), “no,” and “I don’t know.”

2.  Certain exclamatory sounds which indicate delight or disgust such as “umph, umph, umph!”, smells good “um,” smells bad “um” with different intonations.

3.  Intonations of exclamatory words (the manner and the style of the exclamation rather than the words themselves are African survivals) “lawd!”, “chile.”

4.  Carryovers of specific words from various African languages, including goober nut, gumbo, tote, yam, okay (or OK), jitterbug, jazz, dig, honkie, and so forth.

With their own language patterns, Africans came to this country and learned the English and the French vocabularies, using them often to the dictates of their own language patterns.  This carryover also occurs, it is argued, in American pidgin and Creole:

1.  In several African languages, urgency is expressed by repetition.  In Wolof, the word “now” is leegi, pronounced “legi.”  Consequently, to express “right now” in Wolof, one says leegi, leegi.  In pidgin English this feeling of urgency is expressed by saying “now, now.”

2.  In several African languages no distinction is made between the letter “L” and the letter “R.”  Consequently, “fried” potatoes in pidgin becomes flied potatoes.

3.  Few African languages have a th sound; consequently, “that” and “those” become dat and dose.

There are Africanisms, too, in American folklore.  American classics such as Uncle Remus and the Tar Baby contain stories that some claim are of West African origin and with not very much transformation.  These stories, they point out, have maintained plot, sequences, and events identical to those in West African folklore.

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African Retentions in Art

African art can be found in modern Western art.  Picasso, Braque, Modigliani were struck by the powerful rhythms, abstract forms, and artistic vision of African art in the ethnological museums of Europe. African ideas thus initiated the Cubist movement and altered the course of modern art.

The modern expressiveness of radical simplicity and distortion of the human figure, some have argued, replicates the vision of African artists.  Some modern artists use “interior” space in their sculpture, similar to that of African sculpture.  The African custom of painting images on their buildings may have also influenced the popularity of mural painting in America.

African Retentions in Music

In American music both song and dance, some argue, often include Africanisms.  African polyrhythms are the foundation of jazz, with its intricacies, repeated themes, syncopations, embellishments, and improvisations. As with African music, performers have the freedom of individual interpretation and embellishment.

American songs, particularly spirituals, some point out, show traces of Africanisms in rhythm and vocal style.  The “call-response” and “leader-chorus” songs prevalent among American spirituals are direct African carryovers.

American dances which feature a combination of active head-and-hand, body-pelvic movements are suggestive of African dance.  It is said that the American Charleston is nearly identical to an Ashanti ancestor dance.

Black American Contributions: Exploration

Initial contributions came in exploration of the Americas: Pedro Alonzo Nino, in the fifteenth century, explored America, sailing to the New World with Columbus.  Estevenico, in the fifteenth century, explored America’s southwestern territory.  Jean Baptiste du Sable founded present-day Chicago. 

Black American Contributions: The Economy

By the simple act of survival, blacks made an inestimable contribution to posterity: cleared lands, planted crops, built houses and cities.  The Negro made possible the existence of a leisure class, that included George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and other Southern leaders.  Developing the Southern economy and culture, the Negro contributed also to the economic and industrial development of the North. 

Black American Contributions: Inventions and Discoveries

Blacks received more than 5,000 patents, ranging from machine guns and electronic devices to method of utilizing atomic energy.  

1. Granville T. Wood’s telephone transmitter.

2.  Jan Matzeliger’s shoe-lasting machine. 

3.  Garret Morgan’s traffic lights and gas mask.

4.  Norbert Rillieux’s sugar evaporating machine. 

5.  Dr. Charles Drew’s process for the utilization and storage of blood plasma.

6.  Dr. Daniel H. William’s pioneer work in open-heart surgery. 

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Black American Contributions: Democracy

In the republic established by the founding fathers, slaves, women, children, and men who did not own property were not allowed to vote, and considered incapable of the full responsibilities of citizenship.  Through resistance, eloquence, and persistence, the Negro moved America closer to its professed ideals and basic principles.  

1.  Toussaint L’Ouverture established Haiti as an independent black-ruled state, causing Napoleon to give up his idea of an American empire.

2.  Crispus Attucks, Peter Salem,. Salem Poor, and many hundreds of others fought in the American Revolutionary War.

3.  Frederick Douglass struggled throughout his life for the rights of blacks.

4.  Sojourner Truth exemplified the role of blacks in the Women’s Suffrage movement.

5.  Black Reconstruction officials supported the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Constitutional Amendments.

6.  W. E. B. Du Bois’s contributions include the Niagara Movement, NAACP, and his writings. 

7.  Martin L. King, Malcolm X, leaders of SNCC, CORE, and so forth.

The Negro has been in combat for America in foreign and domestic wars.  Black people fought to oppose the so-called enemy of their country and for justice for all black people.

1.  In the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, the American black hoped to gain freedom from bondage.  He thought if he put his life on the line for this country, he would surely gain his freedom.

2.  In the Civil War, he fought in the hope that, as a reward, he would gain his freedom.

3.  In the Spanish-American War of 1898, he showed concern over American involvement abroad by fighting gallantly, hoping America would open its doors to him when he returned; it didn’t.

4.  World War I saw the black man in segregated units, receiving less pay and performing menial jobs, away from the front lines where he mighty received too much recognition and too much honor.

5.  World War II was, for him, practically a repetition of World War I.

6.  The Korean conflict saw the black man in integrated units, but treatment of him was the same in Korea as it was when he returned home:  oppressed.

7.  Vietnam saw the highest percentage of black soldiers fighting on the front line for America and not for themselves, because upon their return home, they still had to fight discrimination and oppression.

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Black American Contributions: Arts & Sciences

Blacks and black-white relations have long been the subject of great American literature by white authors, including Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, novels of William Faulkner, Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, poems by Walt Whitman, essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson, and so forth.

Contributions of black poets, playwrights, novelists, historians, essayists and others are long and impressive.

American music includes spirituals, jazz, and rock.  Black musicians have given modern American music its form, its direction, and its “soul.”

Benjamin Banneker, astronomer and mathematician, wrote a dissertation on bees; he constructed what was probably the first American-made clock.  A Georgia slave was in part responsible for the invention of the cotton gin, Jo Anderson helped Cyrus McCormick develop his reaping machine.  Norbert Rillieux invented a vacuum cup which revolutionized the sugar refining industry.  Elijah McCoy of Detroit received more than fifty patents for devices concerning telegraph and electricity.  Jan E. Matzeliger created the shoe-lasting machine.  Matzeliger’s patent was purchased by the United Shoe Machinery Company of Boston.  It reaped millions of dollars, but Matzeliger died in obscurity.

Lucy Terry

Popular songs attributed to blacks, such as “Roll Jordan, Roll” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” were not the first attempts at verse by blacks in the United States.  An Indian raid on the Massachusetts town of Deerfield in 1746 was documented in couplets by Lucy Terry, a semiliterate slave girl, it was called “Bors Fight.”

Paul Lawrence Dunbar

In 1896 Dunbar, son of former slaves, presented Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896), a book which won for him a national reputation.  Aware of the minstrel tradition, Dunbar wrote first his poems written in the dialect of plantation folk.  Others of his writings are in the tradition of Robert Burns, treasured by literate black Americans who emerged from plantation slavery.  Dunbar’s writings have never been out of print, including dialect poems that made him famous. 

James Weldon Johnson

A contemporary of Dunbar was James Weldon Johnson.  Johnson was known mainly for his pop song lyrics, including 

Source: Bain, Mildred, et al. From Freedom to Freedom: African Roots in American Soil. Milwaukee, Wis: Purnell Reference Books, 1977.

Go, Tell Michelle African American Women Write to the New First Lady Edited Barbara A. Seals Nevergold and Peggy Brooks-Bertram

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posted 11 August 2008