In the 1970s, as a teenager, I took a solo trip from my home in Toronto to visit family in Washington, DC, and foolishly asked my grandmother, May Edwards Hill, what she thought of the black operatic characters Porgy and Bess. May, born in 1896 and raised in a prosperous family that fitted proudly into the ranks of what was then called “the talented tenth”—America’s elite, university-educated blacks—tore a strip off me for even mentioning the characters popularized in the 1935 folk opera by George Gershwin, a white composer. The disabled Porgy, who wheeled himself about on a cart, and Bess, an unfaithful lover, were lowbrow Southern blacks who, despite poverty and suffering, loved each other and lived with gusto and passion. Even as fictional characters, they nauseated my grandmother.
“We have enough stereotypes to combat as it is,” May muttered, “and they just bring shame down on all Negroes with their cavorting around and their immorality.” Her complaint reflected one of the most troubling paradoxes about black identity in North America. For four hundred years, we’ve been seen to be less than human. And so, to compensate, we must be more civilized than the civilized. We place unreasonable expectations on ourselves, such is our desire to succeed in the world and to be accepted as equal to those who dragged us across the Atlantic Ocean.
By the age of ten, I was well versed in black history and entranced by accounts of how my white, civil-rights-activist mother and black, graduate-student father formed a union against all odds, married in the American South in 1953, and decamped that very week to spend the rest of their active lives fighting for human rights in Canada. Dad’s own father and grandfather had combined their work as ministers in the African Methodist Episcopal church disseminating the social gospel in the black communities they served. Stories had filtered down through the generations about my great-great- grandfather purchasing freedom for his wife, his children, and himself in Maryland in 1860. “How did he get the money?” We speculated about it at the kitchen table. “Probably stole it,” came one response, with a cackle. But when the laughter subsided, we were quietly warned: “If you don’t fight racism, you become part of the problem.”
Stories abounded in my family about WEB Du Bois, whose essay collection The Souls of Black Folk stands out as one of the seminal works of African-American literature of the twentieth century. Du Bois, who was born in 1868 and lived to the age of 95, became the first black to obtain a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1895 and went on to become one of the architects of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp).
In 1900, Du Bois coined a phrase that spread like a grass fire and became a mantra among observers of race relations in America: “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.” And in September 1903, Du Bois published “The Talented Tenth,” one of his most famous essays. In it, he argued that only the elite of the African-American population could pull the rest of the black population up by its bootstraps, and that education would save the black people of America.
“Was there ever a nation on God’s fair earth civilized from the bottom upward? ” he wrote. “Never; it is, ever was and ever will be from the top downward that culture filters. The Talented Tenth rises and pulls all that are worth the saving up to their vantage ground.”
For people like me, being black and having access to a good education carried certain obligations. It wasn’t good enough to get A’s in school—you also had to ball up your fists and charge into battle if anybody used the word “nigger.” In the workplace, it wasn’t good enough to merely succeed professionally. You had to change the world, too.
So what happened to this forward-looking, educated, socially engaged, black middle class? They were a powerful force for social change, leaders and supporters of civil rights movements, eloquent speakers and writers for the plight of North American blacks, and for Africa itself. Africa needs them now, but are they interested in Africa?
This question arose in my mind last year when news broke about genocide in Sudan. It had also troubled me a decade earlier, when we learned about genocide in Rwanda. In her 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “A Problem From Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide, Samantha Power notes that no African-American political leaders staged demonstrations or held hunger strikes while 800,000 people were killed over a hundred days in the Rwandan genocide. “No significant Rwandan diaspora lived in the United States; few African-Americans identify specific ancestral homelands and lobby on their behalf the way Armenians, Jews, or Albanians might,” Power wrote. Ironically, while North American blacks were applauding the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as president of South Africa in 1994, Rwandans were being butchered in the worst genocide since the Holocaust. We, along with the rest of the world, stood by and let it happen.
Global indifference to the Rwandan massacre and to ongoing African atrocities have been much studied. But let’s not forget blacks in the diaspora, by which I mean peoples around the world who are of African heritage and who feel connected to each other and share a sense of kinship with the continent. From us, one might expect dedicated action. Instead, from the vast majority, there has been a haunting silence not unlike that of people who stand implicated, yet immobile, at the cemetery gate.
I am about to embrace, with some reluctance, the very paradox that deserves incineration—that obligation to outcivilize the civilized. In so doing, I place an unfair moral burden on the shoulders of African-Americans and African-Canadians. But what else is there to do? To whom else can we turn?
Over the centuries, there have been many examples of blacks on this continent reconnecting with Africa. In 1792, some 1,200 black United Empire Loyalists became so disgusted with their ill-treatment in Nova Scotia that they sailed from Halifax to create a colony in Sierra Leone. In 1824, emancipated American slaves sailed to Africa and founded Liberia. Shortly after creating the Universal Negro Improvement Association in 1914, Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican, was leading a massive black organization with hundreds of chapters in the United States, Canada, and across the world. Garvey urged blacks in the Americas to embrace a “back to Africa” movement and argued in favour of founding a black nation in Africa. The son of a stonemason, Garvey left school at the age of fourteen and his populist movement celebrated black pride. He couldn’t have differed more from WEB Du Bois, but both men exuded passion about Africa.
Du Bois, who helped found the naacp and spent forty years organizing Pan-African Congresses, led the way in bridging Africa and America. “The mystic spell of Africa is and ever was over all America. It has guided her hardest work, inspired her finest literature, and sung her sweetest songs,” Du Bois wrote in his 1962 biography of the American abolitionist John Brown. For him, social progress for blacks in America went hand in hand with the liberation and development of African countries. After earlier trips to Africa, he finally moved to Ghana in 1961 at the age of ninety-three. Du Bois died there on August 27, 1963, the day before the famous civil rights march on Washington, DC.
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