|
|
|
Book Review
| A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration. By Steven Hahn. (Cambridge: Belknap, 2003. 610 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-674-01169-4.)
|
| A coherent narrative of the first fifty years of African American history following emancipation has long eluded historians. Melding a vast and diverse literature with his own extensive biographical database, Steven Hahn has provided us with an intriguing new perspective on this era, now reframed as the making and remaking of black political consciousness, the echoes of which would be evident in twentieth-century mobilizations as disparate as Garveyism and the civil rights movement. Framed chronologically by the final decades of slavery and the Great Migration and conceptually by the interplay among private life, communal structures, and formal politics, Hahn's study goes far toward supplying the coherence we have missed, enabling us better to understand how "the relations and developments of one era created both the limits and possibilities in the next" (p. 4). Here is food for rethinking a crucial era in American as well as African American history. |
1
|
|
Hahn's decision to frame his study as one that pits the urban against the rural and advocates of a "liberal integrationist framework" (p. 6) against nationalists seems to be something of a false start, however. It is never made clear just why these spatial and political boundaries should be drawn, given that the historical actors themselves so freely trampled across them. Within their lived experience, whether during Reconstruction or the civil rights movement, rural and urban mobilizations have been more often than not aspects of the same political process. As Hahn himself shows, emigration and migration ebbed and flowed inversely with access to mainstream politics. Moreover, blacks seeking to escape the murderous white reaction to their efforts to build a more democratic South were prepared to go to either Liberia or Kansas, expressing thereby less the suppressed nationalism of organic ideologues than the pragmatic survival strategies of ordinary folk. |
2
|
|
More compelling are Hahn's efforts to ground formal electoral politics in the grass-roots politics of communities, indeed, a politics determined by the distinctive social relations of those communities. With their efforts to forge solidarity among themselves, which challenged the fundamental trajectory of the power relations defining master and slave, even slaves lived in inherently political worlds. Silently correcting Eugene Genovese's famous declaration that slaves were not political men, Hahn shows how slave politics were an inescapable consequence of labor relations in which group ties emerged to counterbalance and mediate the extreme individualism ostensibly promoted by the master's paternalism. As Hahn is careful to acknowledge, however, slave politics could also be built upon accommodation with as well as resistance to the slave regime, especially where slaves had won customary property rights that could engender conflicts as well as solidarities. With that concession, however, comes the paradox faced by others attempting to recover the agency of subordinated groups: why did the slaves' exercise of power (the core meaning of politics, after all) never seriously threaten the slave regime before the disruptions of civil war? |
3
|
|
Hahn's most original argument, and certainly the core theme binding his narrative together, is that the kinship relations in black communities—slave and free—were the enabling feature of their politics. Even as all else changed in black life, kinship remained the predominant basis for African Americans' political loyalties: in slave work groups, in contraband camps during the Civil War, in the organization of Union League chapters, in the very act of voting itself, and finally in migration and emigration campaigns. Indeed, so much rides on "the sinews of kinship" (p. 172) woven through this study that it is surprising how opaque and unexamined the concept itself remains. It is even difficult to judge from Hahn's text just how strong the evidence for these kinship relations is in the particular cases he discusses, since he often merely cites the fact of common surnames. Given the well-known practice wherein ex-slaves freely chose new surnames after emancipation, however, it is not clear exactly what kin relationships those names denote. |
. . . |
There are about 450 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
