this is an excerpt from the book - Faces at the bottom of the well: the permanence of racism
The idea of a black nation seems so far-fetched as to be ludicrous,
but if you entertain it for a minute, even as an impossible dream,
it should give you a feeling of wholeness and belonging you’ve
never had and can never have as long as blacks have to live in
a country where they are despised. —Julius Lester
THE FIRST OCEANOGRAPHERS to report unusual rumblings in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, some nine hundred miles due east of South Carolina, speculated that some sort of land mass was rising up from the ocean bottom.
Naturally, these reports were dismissed as the work of crazies or, worse, of publicity-seeking scientists. Even more outrageous seemed these scientists’ further hypothesis that this land mass was the fabled Atlantis—a body of land the ancients accepted as real - Plato describing it as the “lost continent of Atlantis.”1* But gradually people began to take seriously the message of the insistent churning that made a hundred-mile area of the ocean impossible for even the most powerful ships to navigate.
Night after night for several months, Americans sat glued to their television screens to watch the underwater camera pictures of a huge mass rising slowly out of the ocean depths.
One evening, a vast body of land roared into view like an erupting volcano. For several weeks, the area was cloaked in boiling-hot steam and impenetrable mist. When the air finally cleared, observers in high-flying planes saw a new land, complete with tall mountains that sheltered fertile valleys and rich plains already lush with vegetation.
The new Atlantis was surrounded by beautiful beaches, punctuated by deep-water harbors. From all indications, the land—roughly the size of the New England states—was uninhabited, though from afar you could see that fish filled its streams and animals in great abundance roamed its fields.
Less picturesque , but of more interest to potential developers. Scientific tests performed from planes and space satellites suggested that the earth on this Atlantis contained 42422 deposits of precious minerals, including gold and silver.
The United States and several other countries wasted no time in dispatching delegations to claim the land or portions of it.
Several skirmishes by well-armed expeditions indicated that major nations would bitterly contest ownership of the new Atlantis. Nature, however, proved a more serious barrier to occupying the new land than did greed-motivated combat.
The first explorers, an American force escorted by a heavily armed battle crew, landed by helicopter. They barely escaped with their lives.
The crew members had a hard time breathing and managed to take off just as they were beginning to lose consciousness.
The experience was sufficiently painful and scary that none of those who came out of it wanted to try a second time.
Subsequent efforts by the United States, other major nations, and independent adventurers to land either by air or by water also failed, even though the landing parties were equipped with space suits and breathing equipment that had sustained human life on the moon or hundreds of feet under the sea.
On the new continent, the air pressure—estimated at twice the levels existing at the bottom of the sea—threatened human life. One survivor explained that it was like trying to breathe under the burdens of all the world—a description that was to take on a special social significance not initially apparent.
What frustration!
This exciting new land mass seemed to be aching for exploration, and, of course, development. Ceasing their competition, the major powers cooperated in one enormously expensive effort after another, all intended to gain access to Atlantis.
All failed.
Not even the world’s most advanced technology allowed human beings to survive on those strange shores, so inviting seen from afar; and they proved totally inhospitable to a series of approaches.
A team of four U.S. Navy divers tried to reach the new land under water. A submarine entered a deep harbor and RELEASED the divers through a special chamber.
The divers swam underwater through the harbor and into the mouth of a large river.
All seemed to go well until, a few hundred yards up the river, the divers suddenly began to experience the breathing difficulties that had thwarted earlier explorers.
Turning immediately, they started back to the submarine; but they had gone too far and, long before reaching the harbor, began to lose consciousness.
The crew chief, Ensign Martin Shufford, managed to link the three groggy team members together with a slender cable and to tow them back to the submarine.
When the divers revived, they hailed Shufford as a hero. He declined the honor, insisting that he had not had trouble breathing—that, in fact, he’d felt really invigorated by the new land’s waters. And a medical check found him normal.
The only difference between Shufford and the members of his crew, and all those who had tried previously to land on Atlantis, was race.
Martin Shufford was an American black man.
Initially, neither the military nor government officials viewed this fact as significant. After all, peoples of color from other countries, including Africa, had tried to land on the new land with the usual near-fatal results. Even so, there was no denying the evidence of the Martin Shufford rescue.
African Americans did appear immune to the strange air pressures that rendered impossible other human life on the new Atlantis.
In an effort to determine whether other African Americans could survive on Atlantis—a possibility many believed given the new land’s importance highly inappropriate—the next helicopter expedition carried on board three African-American men and, as pilot, an African-American woman.
An amazed world watched the landing, filmed by a crew member and beamed back via satellite for televising.
After a cautious first few steps, the crew discovered that they needed neither their space suits nor special breathing equipment.
In fact, the party felt exhilarated and euphoric— feelings they explained upon their reluctant return, in defiance of orders, they spent several days exploring the new land as unlike any alcohol- or drug-induced sensations of escape. Rather, it was an invigorating experience of heightened self-esteem, of liberation, of waking up. All four agreed that, while exploring what the media were now referring to as “Afrolantica,” they felt free. Cautiously, blacks began wondering whether Afrolantica might not be their promised land. Incredulity changed to excitement as more and more African Americans visited it and found it both habitable and inviting.
Many people drew a parallel with the Hebrews’ experiences in the Book of Exodus (13:21), as did one black minister in an oft-quoted sermon after a trip to Afrolantica: “For the Israelites of old, the Lord made Himself into a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night to lead them to the light. Are we less needy than were they? We, like them, have wandered in a hostile wilderness for not forty but closer to four hundred years. We, like them, have suffered the destruction of slavery—and, in addition, the second-class status of segregation. Now we endure the hateful hypocrisy of the equal-opportunity era that, like the “separate but equal” standard it replaced, denies the very opportunity its name proclaims. But at long last the Lord has sent us a home that is as hostile to others as America has been to us. Let us go there and show what—given the chance—we might have done here!”
Many, but far from all, African Americans shared this minister’s enthusiasm. A spokeswoman for the opposition, having successfully demanded equal TV time, explained: “Emigrating to Afrolantica would be to abandon a civilization we have helped create for a wilderness that could prove an enticing trap. Life in America is hard for African Americans,” she acknowledged, “but, my friends, be warned. For us, the Exodus story is both inaccurate as analogy and frightening as prediction. “First, it is inaccurate as a measure of our present condition: we are not slaves to any pharaoh. Second, the forty years the Israelites wandered in the wilderness after leaving Egypt was a dire experience few of us would view as an acceptable substitute for life in America. We must not surrender the gains made through our civil rights efforts. We must not relinquish the labor of the generations who came before us and for whom life was even harder than it is for us. America, whether whites like it or not, is our land, too. We would like to visit Afrolantica, but our home is here.” A pro-emigration group introduced in Congress legislation that would provide twenty thousand dollars to each African-American citizen wishing to emigrate to Afrolantica. This “Reparations Subsidy” would finance the move and was to be repaid if a recipient sought to return in less than ten years.
Emigration opponents attacked the legislation as both bad policy and unconstitutional because it created and offered benefits based on a recipient’s race without citing a compelling state interest to justify a suspect racial classification.2 This legislation—though never enacted—sparked a debate on Afrolantica which pre-empted all other civil rights issues in households across America. Each side found support for its arguments in the nearly two hundred years of efforts—led by whites as well as blacks—to establish a homeland on the continent of Africa where slaves or ex-slaves might go or be sent.3 Both sides were as divided over the issue as were their forebears, though both acknowledged that whites had, from the beginning, fostered efforts at black emigration in an “endless cycle” of pushing blacks around in accordance with the political and economic needs of the moment.
Supporters of Afrolantican emigration took as their models three key advocates of emigration between the early nineteenth century and the 1920s: Paul Cuffe, Martin R. Delany, and Marcus Garvey. The first, Paul Cuffe, was a black shipowner from Massachusetts who, himself a constant victim of persecution (he was jailed for his refusal to pay taxes, which he withheld to protest being denied the vote and other privileges of citizenship), had determined to “emancipate” Africa. Between 1811 and 1816, Cuffe had, at his own expense, led voyages of blacks to Sierra Leone (the British having already established a colony there for the purpose of resettling several hundred destitute and friendless blacks who had gone to England after fighting on its side in the Revolutionary War in return for their freedom).4 The fact that Cuffe’s movement had been curtailed by his death in 1817 scarcely dampened the enthusiasm of the blacks who wanted to emigrate to Afrolantica. Indeed, it merely heightened their enthusiasm to revive the memory of this early black hero. Later, in the mid-1850s, the black leader, physician, and journalist Martin R. Delany had—in line with the preference of contemporary black leaders for Central America or Haiti over Africa as a place for black resettlement—arranged for two thousand black people to sail to Haiti.5 But the most potent of these great advocates of black emigration was certainly Marcus Garvey. 6 In the 1920s, this charismatic Jamaican immigrant had founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association, which managed to raise, in only a few years, ten million dollars and attracted at least half a million members. Although Garvey made definite plans for emigration to Africa, buying and equipping ships, they were frustrated when—in a highly controversial case—he was convicted of using the mails to defraud and sentenced to five years in prison, fined one thousand dollars, and required to pay court costs. Though pardoned by President Calvin Coolidge in 1927, he was deported as an undesirable alien; and his subsequent efforts to revive his movement failed.
The blacks who wanted to emigrate to Afrolantica pointed out that all these earlier advocates of emigration had themselves been driven to take their stand by their experience of slavery or segregation and by their perception that the discrimination, exclusion, and hostility from whites was never going to end. Garvey himself had told blacks that racial prejudice was so much a part of the white civilization that it was futile to appeal to any sense of justice or high-sounding democratic principles.* On the other side, American blacks opposing Afrolantican emigration pointed out that, while some blacks had indeed been interested in emigration over the last two centuries, relatively few had actually left America.8 Moreover, the initial impetus had come from whites, who had by the 1830s managed to place some fourteen hundred blacks in Liberia. Then the movement lost steam, though it was endorsed in the 1850s by the Republican party and some abolitionists supported it. These antiAfrolantica blacks maintained that African Americans must not give up their long equality struggle: after all, it had transformed the Constitution from being a document primarily protective of both property and its owners, to one aimed to protect individual rights—and as such was a shield that, however flawed, was the envy of the free world. The slavery and segregation eras were important history, but they were just that—history.
They were not cast from some eternal, social mold determining all of America’s racial policies. The plight of the black underclass was still, of course, cause for the deepest concern, but government policies that favored the already well-off while ignoring the working class adversely affected whites as well as blacks. The debilitating burdens of poverty know no color line. The lessons of history could engender hope as well as deepen despair. And history suggested that if current trends of unemployment continued, the nation would soon have to consider legislation like that enacted during the Great Depression of the 1930s. These new laws would ease, if not eliminate, poverty, improve education, and guarantee employment opportunities for all. Having worked so hard to bring about these reforms, African Americans would be foolish to leave the American table just as the long-awaited banquet was about to be served. In response, Afrolantica emigration advocates asked whether the banquet would be entirely devoid of racial discrimination.
Or would America—“our country, after all,” one of the leaders said—continue to demand that whites sit at the head of the table and be served first, leaving blacks at the foot with such dregs as they could scrape up? Then these pro-emigration blacks moved forward their big gun: Abraham Lincoln. They noted the historian John Hope Franklin’s comment that “Negro colonization seemed almost as important to Lincoln as emancipation. . . . Down to the end of the war Lincoln held out hope for colonizing at least some of the Negroes who were being set free.”9 In an 1862 bill that sought to emancipate slaves in the District of Columbia, Lincoln included a provision of one hundred thousand dollars for the voluntary emigration, to Haiti and Liberia, of former slaves; the bill was eventually enacted. In the same year, he called a group of black leaders to the White House and urged them to support colonization, stating: “Your race suffer greatly, many of them, by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word we suffer on each side. If this is admitted, it affords a reason why we should be separated.”10 Ready to rebut, blacks opposed to Afrolantica emigration cited Frederick Douglass, the most influential of the black leaders of the time. He had always opposed emigration and, in November 1858, set out his position in his newspaper, North Star, with spine-tingling clarity: We deem it a settled point that the destiny of the colored man is bound up with that of the white people of this country. . . . We are here, and here we are likely to be. To imagine that we shall ever be eradicated is absurd and ridiculous. We can be remodified, changed, and assimilated, but never extinguished. We repeat . . . that we are here; and that this is our country; and the question for the philosophers and statesmen of the land ought to be, what principles should dictate the policy of the action toward us? We shall neither die out, nor be driven out; but shall go with this people, either as a testimony against them, or as an evidence in their favor throughout their generations. We are clearly on their hands and must remain there forever. 11
To counter this black patriotism, emigration advocates vehemently recalled the hopes so often dashed as, over the years, thousands of blacks had left their homes to seek elsewhere in America some better place, a place they could call their own, where they would not be harassed—or lynched; where they could live as the free citizens the government assured them they were. * But these efforts had been almost always met by opposition and further harassment. Strongly promoting emigration to Afrolantica were black nationalist groups, who have traditionally made emigration or separation a major goal. They were especially attracted by the idea of an island of their own because their efforts to establish black communities in this country had been harshly opposed by whites, particularly law enforcement officials. For example, when in November 1969, white residents of St. Clair County, Alabama, learned that Black Muslims had purchased two large farms in the area, they organized a “Stop the Muslims” movement. Almost immediately Muslim members were subjected to criminal prosecution on various charges: trespass, “failure to register as a Muslim,” acting as agent for an unlicensed foreign corporation, and “permitting livestock to run at large.” Whites filed a civil suit for five hundred thousand dollars against the Muslims, charging aggravated trespass and infringement upon use of land.
The Muslims challenged these actions in a federal suit and obtained partial relief from a three-judge federal court.13 The court both invalidated the Alabama statute requiring registration of “communists, nazis, Muslims, and members of communist front organizations”; and halted the criminal prosecutions, except for the charge of “permitting livestock to run at large,” finding that the Muslims had failed to show that this charge was used to discourage assertion of their First Amendment rights. The court also refused to enjoin the five-hundredthousand-dollar damages action, though it acknowledged that the suit had a chilling effect on the plaintiffs’ freedom of association rights. The Black Muslims later decided to sell their farm, after almost one third of their three hundred head of cattle had been poisoned or shot. The white man who had originally sold the land to the Muslims also suffered: his business was burned, acid was poured on his car, and his life was threatened. The Ku Klux Klan bought land surrounding the Muslim farm to “keep an eye on things.” Thoroughly discouraged, the Muslims said they would sell their farm even to the Klan.14 Thus the debate raged on, as each side marshaled something out of history or experience to support its point of view. After some months, many outspoken blacks were quite ready to emigrate, but most were not. Whether ready to go or determined to stay, clearly all black people felt good about the opportunity. Blacks’ enslaved forebears had, after learning of the Emancipation Proclamation, gained the courage to leave their masters’ plantations. Now, the very idea of a continent emerged from the ocean and habitable only by black Americans awakened black pride—a term not much heard during the 1980s and 1990s. Self-esteem blossomed in the reflected glow of their Afrolantica option, and snuffed out both the manifest as well as the latent tendency toward self-deprecation that is unavoidably instilled in people subordinated by outside forces. While black people pondered, white Americans—contrary to their attitudes to black emigration in earlier decades—grew increasingly troubled by the blacks’ new confidence: some whites thought it arrogant; others, “uppity”; all were unnerved by it. The linking of Afrolantica and freedom for African Americans, coming as new racial oppression swept the country in the mid-1990s, heightened racial tensions.
Televised reports showing American blacks able to function normally on the rich new land sparked racial clashes and several attacks by white hoodlums on black communities. A man arrested at the scene of a race riot spoke for all hostile whites: “Damn! It ain’t right! The ******* got sports and pop music all tied up. Now this! It’s more than this God-fearing, America-loving white man can take!” More sophisticated, though hardly less envious opinions were common in the press, in opinion polls, and on call-in talk shows. Black people were not surprised at the hostile reaction. “As with so much else,” one black leader observed, “we are treated as aliens in our own country. Rather than view our ability to survive on the new land as a major victory for America, whites see it as a loss for them and a dangerous advantage for us.” Some conservatives feared Afrolantica could become another Cuba, insulated from American expansionism and, worse, beyond its power. Afrolantica, they warned, could serve as a rallying incentive for other third world peoples who might conclude that white influence, rather than colored incompetence, was responsible for their poverty and powerlessness. Even without Afrolantica’s insulating atmosphere, the long-subjugated colored peoples of Asia, Africa, and South America might rise up against the United States’ tendency to subvert governments and exploit indigenous people and against its economic domination that has proven as oppressive as the political colonialism it replaced. Before long, Afrolantica became a national obsession.
Government officials hinted ominously about a dire plot to undermine world stability, economic security, and the American Way of Life. As a first defense, the government launched a quiet search for black leaders or academics who would support the conspiracy theory and condemn the emigration movement as subversive. Surprisingly, none could be found, though the undercover agents offered the usual rewards of money and prestige. In the past, such rewards had proven adequate to attract those members of the race all too ready to please whites regardless of the adverse consequences for blacks. In the meantime, a large group of blacks decided to put an end to discussion and turned their energies to planning for emigration. In this they were inspired by the words of Bishop Henry M. Turner, the leader of a black emigration movement around the turn of the century: “We were born here, raised here, fought, bled and died here, and have a thousand times more right here than hundreds of thousands of those who help to snub, proscribe and persecute us, and that is one of the reasons I almost despise the land of my birth.”15 These blacks pooled their resources to obtain transportation and equipment needed to sustain life and build new communities in the new land. The Afrolantica emigration programs, like the Jewish movements to support Israel, gained the support of even blacks who did not wish to move there. The uniformity of this support served to heighten the fears of many whites that the new continent posed both a political and an economic threat. Together, government and corporate institutions erected innumerable barriers in the paths of blacks seeking to leave the country.
Visas were not available, of course; and immigration officials warned that since Afrolantica did not exist as a governmental entity, blacks moving there might sacrifice both their citizenship and their entitlement to return to America—even to visit relatives and friends. Soon these pro-emigration leaders found themselves facing an array of civil suits and criminal charges. Remembering how Marcus Garvey had been similarly hounded, blacks determined that his experience would not be repeated. They fought the anti-emigration policies with protests and boycotts. Unlike the Israelites of ancient Egypt before the first Passover, black people during this period did not rely on one leader or seek deliverance through one organization. Rather, they worked together in communities. “There is,” one black woman observed, “something of Moses within each of us that we must offer as a service, as a living sacrifice to those like ourselves.” And out of this miracle of cooperative effort was organized and implemented the Afrolantica Armada: a thousand ships of every size and description loaded with the first wave of several hundred thousand black settlers. It set out for Afrolantica early on one sunny Fourth of July morning. They never made it. Within hours of their departure, they received weather reports of severe disturbances in the ocean around Afrolantica. The island that had stood for a year in clear sunlight, a beacon of hope to longbesieged blacks, was—for the first time since its emergence—enveloped in a thick mist. The emigrants pressed on, hoping they would not have to land in bad weather. Worrying also, because radar and sonar measurements strongly indicated that whatever process had raised the lost continent was reversing itself. Then the mist rose. The sight that met the eyes of the blacks on the emigrant armada was amazing, terrifying. Afrolantica was sinking back into the ocean whence it had arisen.
The blacks on the ships knew they were witnessing the greatest natural spectacle in world history. “My God, what’s happening?” was the universal question. It was replaced almost immediately, in the minds of those who were watching from the safety of their television sets in America, by another: Was Afrolantica, after all, no more than a cruel hoax, Nature’s seismic confirmation that African Americans are preordained to their victimized, outcast state? But, to their surprise, the black men and women on board the armada felt neither grief nor despair as they watched the last tip of the great land mass slip beneath the waves, and the ocean spread sleek and clear as though Afrolantica had never been. They felt deep satisfaction—sober now, to be sure—in having gotten this far in their enterprise, in having accomplished it together. As the great ships swung around in the ocean to take them back to America, the miracle of Afrolantica was replaced by a greater miracle. Blacks discovered that they themselves actually possessed the qualities of liberation they had hoped to realize on their new homeland. Feeling this was, they all agreed, an Afrolantica Awakening, a liberation—not of place, but of mind. One returning black settler spoke for all: “It was worth it just to try looking for something better, even if we didn’t find it.” As the armada steamed back to America, people recalled the words of Frederick Douglass that opponents of emigration had cited to support their position: “We are Americans. We are not aliens. We are a component part of the nation. We have no disposition to renounce our nationality.”16 Even though they had rejected that argument, it had its truth. And it was possible to affirm it, and return to America, because they understood they need no longer act as the victims of centuries of oppression.
They could act on their own, as their own people, as they had demonstrated to themselves and other blacks in their preparations to settle Afrolantica. Their faces glowed with self-confidence, as they walked, erect and proud, down the gangplanks the next day when the ships returned to their home ports. The black men and women waiting to greet them, expecting to commiserate with them, were instead inspired. The spirit of cooperation that had engaged a few hundred thousand blacks spread to others, as they recalled the tenacity for humane life which had enabled generations of blacks to survive all efforts to dehumanize or obliterate them. Infectious, their renewed tenacity reinforced their sense of possessing themselves. Blacks held fast, like a talisman, the quiet conviction that Afrolantica had not been mere mirage—that somewhere in the word America, somewhere irrevocable and profound, there is as well the word Afrolantica.
*It was variously spelled Atlantis, Atalantica, or Atalantis; the legend of its existence and its strange disappearance persisted through the Middle Ages and even after the Renaissance. *From the Atlanta penitentiary, Garvey wrote his followers: My months of forcible removal from among you, being imprisoned as a punishment for advocating the cause of our real emancipation, have not left me hopeless or despondent; but to the contrary, I see a great ray of light and the bursting of a mighty political cloud which will bring you complete freedom. . . . We have gradually won our way back into the confidence of the God of Africa, and He shall speak with a voice of thunder, that shall shake the pillars of a corrupt and unjust world, and once more restore Ethiopia to her ancient glory. 7 *Of course, while emigration efforts have not met with broad success, blacks have constantly immigrated from one portion of the country to another, seeking opportunity and acceptance. The escapes from slavery via the underground railroad brought countless blacks both to the North and to Canada. After the Civil War, scores of blacks headed west to Kansas, Texas, and California. There were major movements of black Americans from South to North during both world wars—all seeking employment, a better life, and racial equality. 1
the fuller book is called:
The idea of a black nation seems so far-fetched as to be ludicrous,
but if you entertain it for a minute, even as an impossible dream,
it should give you a feeling of wholeness and belonging you’ve
never had and can never have as long as blacks have to live in
a country where they are despised. —Julius Lester
THE FIRST OCEANOGRAPHERS to report unusual rumblings in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, some nine hundred miles due east of South Carolina, speculated that some sort of land mass was rising up from the ocean bottom.
Naturally, these reports were dismissed as the work of crazies or, worse, of publicity-seeking scientists. Even more outrageous seemed these scientists’ further hypothesis that this land mass was the fabled Atlantis—a body of land the ancients accepted as real - Plato describing it as the “lost continent of Atlantis.”1* But gradually people began to take seriously the message of the insistent churning that made a hundred-mile area of the ocean impossible for even the most powerful ships to navigate.
Night after night for several months, Americans sat glued to their television screens to watch the underwater camera pictures of a huge mass rising slowly out of the ocean depths.
One evening, a vast body of land roared into view like an erupting volcano. For several weeks, the area was cloaked in boiling-hot steam and impenetrable mist. When the air finally cleared, observers in high-flying planes saw a new land, complete with tall mountains that sheltered fertile valleys and rich plains already lush with vegetation.
The new Atlantis was surrounded by beautiful beaches, punctuated by deep-water harbors. From all indications, the land—roughly the size of the New England states—was uninhabited, though from afar you could see that fish filled its streams and animals in great abundance roamed its fields.
Less picturesque , but of more interest to potential developers. Scientific tests performed from planes and space satellites suggested that the earth on this Atlantis contained 42422 deposits of precious minerals, including gold and silver.
The United States and several other countries wasted no time in dispatching delegations to claim the land or portions of it.
Several skirmishes by well-armed expeditions indicated that major nations would bitterly contest ownership of the new Atlantis. Nature, however, proved a more serious barrier to occupying the new land than did greed-motivated combat.
The first explorers, an American force escorted by a heavily armed battle crew, landed by helicopter. They barely escaped with their lives.
The crew members had a hard time breathing and managed to take off just as they were beginning to lose consciousness.
The experience was sufficiently painful and scary that none of those who came out of it wanted to try a second time.
Subsequent efforts by the United States, other major nations, and independent adventurers to land either by air or by water also failed, even though the landing parties were equipped with space suits and breathing equipment that had sustained human life on the moon or hundreds of feet under the sea.
On the new continent, the air pressure—estimated at twice the levels existing at the bottom of the sea—threatened human life. One survivor explained that it was like trying to breathe under the burdens of all the world—a description that was to take on a special social significance not initially apparent.
What frustration!
This exciting new land mass seemed to be aching for exploration, and, of course, development. Ceasing their competition, the major powers cooperated in one enormously expensive effort after another, all intended to gain access to Atlantis.
All failed.
Not even the world’s most advanced technology allowed human beings to survive on those strange shores, so inviting seen from afar; and they proved totally inhospitable to a series of approaches.
A team of four U.S. Navy divers tried to reach the new land under water. A submarine entered a deep harbor and RELEASED the divers through a special chamber.
The divers swam underwater through the harbor and into the mouth of a large river.
All seemed to go well until, a few hundred yards up the river, the divers suddenly began to experience the breathing difficulties that had thwarted earlier explorers.
Turning immediately, they started back to the submarine; but they had gone too far and, long before reaching the harbor, began to lose consciousness.
The crew chief, Ensign Martin Shufford, managed to link the three groggy team members together with a slender cable and to tow them back to the submarine.
When the divers revived, they hailed Shufford as a hero. He declined the honor, insisting that he had not had trouble breathing—that, in fact, he’d felt really invigorated by the new land’s waters. And a medical check found him normal.
The only difference between Shufford and the members of his crew, and all those who had tried previously to land on Atlantis, was race.
Martin Shufford was an American black man.
Initially, neither the military nor government officials viewed this fact as significant. After all, peoples of color from other countries, including Africa, had tried to land on the new land with the usual near-fatal results. Even so, there was no denying the evidence of the Martin Shufford rescue.
African Americans did appear immune to the strange air pressures that rendered impossible other human life on the new Atlantis.
In an effort to determine whether other African Americans could survive on Atlantis—a possibility many believed given the new land’s importance highly inappropriate—the next helicopter expedition carried on board three African-American men and, as pilot, an African-American woman.
An amazed world watched the landing, filmed by a crew member and beamed back via satellite for televising.
After a cautious first few steps, the crew discovered that they needed neither their space suits nor special breathing equipment.
In fact, the party felt exhilarated and euphoric— feelings they explained upon their reluctant return, in defiance of orders, they spent several days exploring the new land as unlike any alcohol- or drug-induced sensations of escape. Rather, it was an invigorating experience of heightened self-esteem, of liberation, of waking up. All four agreed that, while exploring what the media were now referring to as “Afrolantica,” they felt free. Cautiously, blacks began wondering whether Afrolantica might not be their promised land. Incredulity changed to excitement as more and more African Americans visited it and found it both habitable and inviting.
Many people drew a parallel with the Hebrews’ experiences in the Book of Exodus (13:21), as did one black minister in an oft-quoted sermon after a trip to Afrolantica: “For the Israelites of old, the Lord made Himself into a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night to lead them to the light. Are we less needy than were they? We, like them, have wandered in a hostile wilderness for not forty but closer to four hundred years. We, like them, have suffered the destruction of slavery—and, in addition, the second-class status of segregation. Now we endure the hateful hypocrisy of the equal-opportunity era that, like the “separate but equal” standard it replaced, denies the very opportunity its name proclaims. But at long last the Lord has sent us a home that is as hostile to others as America has been to us. Let us go there and show what—given the chance—we might have done here!”
Many, but far from all, African Americans shared this minister’s enthusiasm. A spokeswoman for the opposition, having successfully demanded equal TV time, explained: “Emigrating to Afrolantica would be to abandon a civilization we have helped create for a wilderness that could prove an enticing trap. Life in America is hard for African Americans,” she acknowledged, “but, my friends, be warned. For us, the Exodus story is both inaccurate as analogy and frightening as prediction. “First, it is inaccurate as a measure of our present condition: we are not slaves to any pharaoh. Second, the forty years the Israelites wandered in the wilderness after leaving Egypt was a dire experience few of us would view as an acceptable substitute for life in America. We must not surrender the gains made through our civil rights efforts. We must not relinquish the labor of the generations who came before us and for whom life was even harder than it is for us. America, whether whites like it or not, is our land, too. We would like to visit Afrolantica, but our home is here.” A pro-emigration group introduced in Congress legislation that would provide twenty thousand dollars to each African-American citizen wishing to emigrate to Afrolantica. This “Reparations Subsidy” would finance the move and was to be repaid if a recipient sought to return in less than ten years.
Emigration opponents attacked the legislation as both bad policy and unconstitutional because it created and offered benefits based on a recipient’s race without citing a compelling state interest to justify a suspect racial classification.2 This legislation—though never enacted—sparked a debate on Afrolantica which pre-empted all other civil rights issues in households across America. Each side found support for its arguments in the nearly two hundred years of efforts—led by whites as well as blacks—to establish a homeland on the continent of Africa where slaves or ex-slaves might go or be sent.3 Both sides were as divided over the issue as were their forebears, though both acknowledged that whites had, from the beginning, fostered efforts at black emigration in an “endless cycle” of pushing blacks around in accordance with the political and economic needs of the moment.
Supporters of Afrolantican emigration took as their models three key advocates of emigration between the early nineteenth century and the 1920s: Paul Cuffe, Martin R. Delany, and Marcus Garvey. The first, Paul Cuffe, was a black shipowner from Massachusetts who, himself a constant victim of persecution (he was jailed for his refusal to pay taxes, which he withheld to protest being denied the vote and other privileges of citizenship), had determined to “emancipate” Africa. Between 1811 and 1816, Cuffe had, at his own expense, led voyages of blacks to Sierra Leone (the British having already established a colony there for the purpose of resettling several hundred destitute and friendless blacks who had gone to England after fighting on its side in the Revolutionary War in return for their freedom).4 The fact that Cuffe’s movement had been curtailed by his death in 1817 scarcely dampened the enthusiasm of the blacks who wanted to emigrate to Afrolantica. Indeed, it merely heightened their enthusiasm to revive the memory of this early black hero. Later, in the mid-1850s, the black leader, physician, and journalist Martin R. Delany had—in line with the preference of contemporary black leaders for Central America or Haiti over Africa as a place for black resettlement—arranged for two thousand black people to sail to Haiti.5 But the most potent of these great advocates of black emigration was certainly Marcus Garvey. 6 In the 1920s, this charismatic Jamaican immigrant had founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association, which managed to raise, in only a few years, ten million dollars and attracted at least half a million members. Although Garvey made definite plans for emigration to Africa, buying and equipping ships, they were frustrated when—in a highly controversial case—he was convicted of using the mails to defraud and sentenced to five years in prison, fined one thousand dollars, and required to pay court costs. Though pardoned by President Calvin Coolidge in 1927, he was deported as an undesirable alien; and his subsequent efforts to revive his movement failed.
The blacks who wanted to emigrate to Afrolantica pointed out that all these earlier advocates of emigration had themselves been driven to take their stand by their experience of slavery or segregation and by their perception that the discrimination, exclusion, and hostility from whites was never going to end. Garvey himself had told blacks that racial prejudice was so much a part of the white civilization that it was futile to appeal to any sense of justice or high-sounding democratic principles.* On the other side, American blacks opposing Afrolantican emigration pointed out that, while some blacks had indeed been interested in emigration over the last two centuries, relatively few had actually left America.8 Moreover, the initial impetus had come from whites, who had by the 1830s managed to place some fourteen hundred blacks in Liberia. Then the movement lost steam, though it was endorsed in the 1850s by the Republican party and some abolitionists supported it. These antiAfrolantica blacks maintained that African Americans must not give up their long equality struggle: after all, it had transformed the Constitution from being a document primarily protective of both property and its owners, to one aimed to protect individual rights—and as such was a shield that, however flawed, was the envy of the free world. The slavery and segregation eras were important history, but they were just that—history.
They were not cast from some eternal, social mold determining all of America’s racial policies. The plight of the black underclass was still, of course, cause for the deepest concern, but government policies that favored the already well-off while ignoring the working class adversely affected whites as well as blacks. The debilitating burdens of poverty know no color line. The lessons of history could engender hope as well as deepen despair. And history suggested that if current trends of unemployment continued, the nation would soon have to consider legislation like that enacted during the Great Depression of the 1930s. These new laws would ease, if not eliminate, poverty, improve education, and guarantee employment opportunities for all. Having worked so hard to bring about these reforms, African Americans would be foolish to leave the American table just as the long-awaited banquet was about to be served. In response, Afrolantica emigration advocates asked whether the banquet would be entirely devoid of racial discrimination.
Or would America—“our country, after all,” one of the leaders said—continue to demand that whites sit at the head of the table and be served first, leaving blacks at the foot with such dregs as they could scrape up? Then these pro-emigration blacks moved forward their big gun: Abraham Lincoln. They noted the historian John Hope Franklin’s comment that “Negro colonization seemed almost as important to Lincoln as emancipation. . . . Down to the end of the war Lincoln held out hope for colonizing at least some of the Negroes who were being set free.”9 In an 1862 bill that sought to emancipate slaves in the District of Columbia, Lincoln included a provision of one hundred thousand dollars for the voluntary emigration, to Haiti and Liberia, of former slaves; the bill was eventually enacted. In the same year, he called a group of black leaders to the White House and urged them to support colonization, stating: “Your race suffer greatly, many of them, by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word we suffer on each side. If this is admitted, it affords a reason why we should be separated.”10 Ready to rebut, blacks opposed to Afrolantica emigration cited Frederick Douglass, the most influential of the black leaders of the time. He had always opposed emigration and, in November 1858, set out his position in his newspaper, North Star, with spine-tingling clarity: We deem it a settled point that the destiny of the colored man is bound up with that of the white people of this country. . . . We are here, and here we are likely to be. To imagine that we shall ever be eradicated is absurd and ridiculous. We can be remodified, changed, and assimilated, but never extinguished. We repeat . . . that we are here; and that this is our country; and the question for the philosophers and statesmen of the land ought to be, what principles should dictate the policy of the action toward us? We shall neither die out, nor be driven out; but shall go with this people, either as a testimony against them, or as an evidence in their favor throughout their generations. We are clearly on their hands and must remain there forever. 11
To counter this black patriotism, emigration advocates vehemently recalled the hopes so often dashed as, over the years, thousands of blacks had left their homes to seek elsewhere in America some better place, a place they could call their own, where they would not be harassed—or lynched; where they could live as the free citizens the government assured them they were. * But these efforts had been almost always met by opposition and further harassment. Strongly promoting emigration to Afrolantica were black nationalist groups, who have traditionally made emigration or separation a major goal. They were especially attracted by the idea of an island of their own because their efforts to establish black communities in this country had been harshly opposed by whites, particularly law enforcement officials. For example, when in November 1969, white residents of St. Clair County, Alabama, learned that Black Muslims had purchased two large farms in the area, they organized a “Stop the Muslims” movement. Almost immediately Muslim members were subjected to criminal prosecution on various charges: trespass, “failure to register as a Muslim,” acting as agent for an unlicensed foreign corporation, and “permitting livestock to run at large.” Whites filed a civil suit for five hundred thousand dollars against the Muslims, charging aggravated trespass and infringement upon use of land.
The Muslims challenged these actions in a federal suit and obtained partial relief from a three-judge federal court.13 The court both invalidated the Alabama statute requiring registration of “communists, nazis, Muslims, and members of communist front organizations”; and halted the criminal prosecutions, except for the charge of “permitting livestock to run at large,” finding that the Muslims had failed to show that this charge was used to discourage assertion of their First Amendment rights. The court also refused to enjoin the five-hundredthousand-dollar damages action, though it acknowledged that the suit had a chilling effect on the plaintiffs’ freedom of association rights. The Black Muslims later decided to sell their farm, after almost one third of their three hundred head of cattle had been poisoned or shot. The white man who had originally sold the land to the Muslims also suffered: his business was burned, acid was poured on his car, and his life was threatened. The Ku Klux Klan bought land surrounding the Muslim farm to “keep an eye on things.” Thoroughly discouraged, the Muslims said they would sell their farm even to the Klan.14 Thus the debate raged on, as each side marshaled something out of history or experience to support its point of view. After some months, many outspoken blacks were quite ready to emigrate, but most were not. Whether ready to go or determined to stay, clearly all black people felt good about the opportunity. Blacks’ enslaved forebears had, after learning of the Emancipation Proclamation, gained the courage to leave their masters’ plantations. Now, the very idea of a continent emerged from the ocean and habitable only by black Americans awakened black pride—a term not much heard during the 1980s and 1990s. Self-esteem blossomed in the reflected glow of their Afrolantica option, and snuffed out both the manifest as well as the latent tendency toward self-deprecation that is unavoidably instilled in people subordinated by outside forces. While black people pondered, white Americans—contrary to their attitudes to black emigration in earlier decades—grew increasingly troubled by the blacks’ new confidence: some whites thought it arrogant; others, “uppity”; all were unnerved by it. The linking of Afrolantica and freedom for African Americans, coming as new racial oppression swept the country in the mid-1990s, heightened racial tensions.
Televised reports showing American blacks able to function normally on the rich new land sparked racial clashes and several attacks by white hoodlums on black communities. A man arrested at the scene of a race riot spoke for all hostile whites: “Damn! It ain’t right! The ******* got sports and pop music all tied up. Now this! It’s more than this God-fearing, America-loving white man can take!” More sophisticated, though hardly less envious opinions were common in the press, in opinion polls, and on call-in talk shows. Black people were not surprised at the hostile reaction. “As with so much else,” one black leader observed, “we are treated as aliens in our own country. Rather than view our ability to survive on the new land as a major victory for America, whites see it as a loss for them and a dangerous advantage for us.” Some conservatives feared Afrolantica could become another Cuba, insulated from American expansionism and, worse, beyond its power. Afrolantica, they warned, could serve as a rallying incentive for other third world peoples who might conclude that white influence, rather than colored incompetence, was responsible for their poverty and powerlessness. Even without Afrolantica’s insulating atmosphere, the long-subjugated colored peoples of Asia, Africa, and South America might rise up against the United States’ tendency to subvert governments and exploit indigenous people and against its economic domination that has proven as oppressive as the political colonialism it replaced. Before long, Afrolantica became a national obsession.
Government officials hinted ominously about a dire plot to undermine world stability, economic security, and the American Way of Life. As a first defense, the government launched a quiet search for black leaders or academics who would support the conspiracy theory and condemn the emigration movement as subversive. Surprisingly, none could be found, though the undercover agents offered the usual rewards of money and prestige. In the past, such rewards had proven adequate to attract those members of the race all too ready to please whites regardless of the adverse consequences for blacks. In the meantime, a large group of blacks decided to put an end to discussion and turned their energies to planning for emigration. In this they were inspired by the words of Bishop Henry M. Turner, the leader of a black emigration movement around the turn of the century: “We were born here, raised here, fought, bled and died here, and have a thousand times more right here than hundreds of thousands of those who help to snub, proscribe and persecute us, and that is one of the reasons I almost despise the land of my birth.”15 These blacks pooled their resources to obtain transportation and equipment needed to sustain life and build new communities in the new land. The Afrolantica emigration programs, like the Jewish movements to support Israel, gained the support of even blacks who did not wish to move there. The uniformity of this support served to heighten the fears of many whites that the new continent posed both a political and an economic threat. Together, government and corporate institutions erected innumerable barriers in the paths of blacks seeking to leave the country.
Visas were not available, of course; and immigration officials warned that since Afrolantica did not exist as a governmental entity, blacks moving there might sacrifice both their citizenship and their entitlement to return to America—even to visit relatives and friends. Soon these pro-emigration leaders found themselves facing an array of civil suits and criminal charges. Remembering how Marcus Garvey had been similarly hounded, blacks determined that his experience would not be repeated. They fought the anti-emigration policies with protests and boycotts. Unlike the Israelites of ancient Egypt before the first Passover, black people during this period did not rely on one leader or seek deliverance through one organization. Rather, they worked together in communities. “There is,” one black woman observed, “something of Moses within each of us that we must offer as a service, as a living sacrifice to those like ourselves.” And out of this miracle of cooperative effort was organized and implemented the Afrolantica Armada: a thousand ships of every size and description loaded with the first wave of several hundred thousand black settlers. It set out for Afrolantica early on one sunny Fourth of July morning. They never made it. Within hours of their departure, they received weather reports of severe disturbances in the ocean around Afrolantica. The island that had stood for a year in clear sunlight, a beacon of hope to longbesieged blacks, was—for the first time since its emergence—enveloped in a thick mist. The emigrants pressed on, hoping they would not have to land in bad weather. Worrying also, because radar and sonar measurements strongly indicated that whatever process had raised the lost continent was reversing itself. Then the mist rose. The sight that met the eyes of the blacks on the emigrant armada was amazing, terrifying. Afrolantica was sinking back into the ocean whence it had arisen.
The blacks on the ships knew they were witnessing the greatest natural spectacle in world history. “My God, what’s happening?” was the universal question. It was replaced almost immediately, in the minds of those who were watching from the safety of their television sets in America, by another: Was Afrolantica, after all, no more than a cruel hoax, Nature’s seismic confirmation that African Americans are preordained to their victimized, outcast state? But, to their surprise, the black men and women on board the armada felt neither grief nor despair as they watched the last tip of the great land mass slip beneath the waves, and the ocean spread sleek and clear as though Afrolantica had never been. They felt deep satisfaction—sober now, to be sure—in having gotten this far in their enterprise, in having accomplished it together. As the great ships swung around in the ocean to take them back to America, the miracle of Afrolantica was replaced by a greater miracle. Blacks discovered that they themselves actually possessed the qualities of liberation they had hoped to realize on their new homeland. Feeling this was, they all agreed, an Afrolantica Awakening, a liberation—not of place, but of mind. One returning black settler spoke for all: “It was worth it just to try looking for something better, even if we didn’t find it.” As the armada steamed back to America, people recalled the words of Frederick Douglass that opponents of emigration had cited to support their position: “We are Americans. We are not aliens. We are a component part of the nation. We have no disposition to renounce our nationality.”16 Even though they had rejected that argument, it had its truth. And it was possible to affirm it, and return to America, because they understood they need no longer act as the victims of centuries of oppression.
They could act on their own, as their own people, as they had demonstrated to themselves and other blacks in their preparations to settle Afrolantica. Their faces glowed with self-confidence, as they walked, erect and proud, down the gangplanks the next day when the ships returned to their home ports. The black men and women waiting to greet them, expecting to commiserate with them, were instead inspired. The spirit of cooperation that had engaged a few hundred thousand blacks spread to others, as they recalled the tenacity for humane life which had enabled generations of blacks to survive all efforts to dehumanize or obliterate them. Infectious, their renewed tenacity reinforced their sense of possessing themselves. Blacks held fast, like a talisman, the quiet conviction that Afrolantica had not been mere mirage—that somewhere in the word America, somewhere irrevocable and profound, there is as well the word Afrolantica.
*It was variously spelled Atlantis, Atalantica, or Atalantis; the legend of its existence and its strange disappearance persisted through the Middle Ages and even after the Renaissance. *From the Atlanta penitentiary, Garvey wrote his followers: My months of forcible removal from among you, being imprisoned as a punishment for advocating the cause of our real emancipation, have not left me hopeless or despondent; but to the contrary, I see a great ray of light and the bursting of a mighty political cloud which will bring you complete freedom. . . . We have gradually won our way back into the confidence of the God of Africa, and He shall speak with a voice of thunder, that shall shake the pillars of a corrupt and unjust world, and once more restore Ethiopia to her ancient glory. 7 *Of course, while emigration efforts have not met with broad success, blacks have constantly immigrated from one portion of the country to another, seeking opportunity and acceptance. The escapes from slavery via the underground railroad brought countless blacks both to the North and to Canada. After the Civil War, scores of blacks headed west to Kansas, Texas, and California. There were major movements of black Americans from South to North during both world wars—all seeking employment, a better life, and racial equality. 1
the fuller book is called:
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shows up in the minds of those reading and once someone loses their place while reading that's it..
not understanding?
