Review

Textbooks, Readers, and References

The African American Experience: An Historiographical and Bibliographical Guide, by Arvarh Strickland and Robert E. Weems, Jr. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001. 447 pages. $95.00, lib. bdg.

This history of African Americans is a useful addition to survey texts in the field. Franklin's and Moss's From Slavery to Freedom, the most venerable text, is encyclopedic and difficult to assign together with other works. The Hortons' more compact volume has the benefit of covering the territory and giving students a good chronological and topical grounding in African American history, while giving the instructor room to assign additional monographs and primary literature. The authors' relative brevity does not, for the most part, compromise depth and quality of presentation. In addition to historical narrative and commentary, the work includes many boxes containing biographical profiles and segments of important documents in African American history, including Booker T. Washington's Atlanta Compromise speech and Martin Luther King's "Letter From Birmingham Jail." Further helping concretize the authors' presentation are many illustrations and maps. Along with the commonly included "tight pack" schematic of the middle passage and advertisements for slave auctions and runaways are maps showing routes of the Underground Railroad and Great Migration, as well as provocative pictures like one of a flag flying outside NAACP headquarters saying, "A Man Was Lynched Yesterday." Among their biographical sketches the Hortons have included many notable women, including some not so frequently featured, like Civil War nurse and teacher Susie King and expatriate entertainer Josephine Baker. The text is written for community or four-year college students, although it could also be used in an advanced high school class. Inclusion of footnotes is useful, though a bibliography, always helpful for doing papers, is lacking. The narrative is tersely written and it is easy for students to grasp the main points without getting buried in detail.	1
One of the qualities that make the Hortons' book lively and effective in presentation is that, unlike many survey texts, it is written from a distinct point of view. Influenced by progressive strains of American social history, the authors delineate ways in which African Americans became involved in broader issues of class conflict. Class politics had become intertwined with the politics of race as early as the seventeenth century, when a large number of African Americans took part in Bacon's Rebellion against the Virginia planter gentry in 1676. The elites countered this interracial lower class alliance against them, state the Hortons, in the passage of laws against miscegenation. In the Great Awakening emphasis is given to the incorporation of uninhibited African worship styles and leadership of lowly blacks and whites, which made elites fret over their loss of control. In the Revolutionary era, the authors depict Crispus Attucks as the leader of dock workers, sailors and the unemployed, of black white and Indian lineage, aroused against inflation, irregular employment, impressments and underpaid British sailors taking their jobs. In the Antebellum segment evolving modes of black resistance to white supremacy are set within description of the growing sectional struggle. The Hortons nicely describe the black colonization and abolition movements, fleshing out such important characters as abolitionist writer David Walker and minister Henry Highland Garnet. They pursue these threads of black nationalism versus equality and integration movements down through DuBois versus Garvey, and the civil rights versus black power movements. This dialectic is an important theme which others sometimes do not adequately highlight.	2
The authors are weaker in describing the welter of events that make up the civil rights movement. They devote much space to the Freedom Rides, for example, but only a paragraph to the crucial Birmingham campaign. There is no mention of Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth and the movement he had begun before inviting King to give the campaign national prominence. Nor is there the contrast between King's failure in the Albany Movement the year before, due to the adroit maneuvering of a clever sheriff who was the opposite number of Bull Connor. Oddly there is no mention of Connor at all, though his brutality, captured on television, effectively played into the hands of the movement's organizers, galvanized popular support outside the South, and caused Kennedy to introduce the bill that would become the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Most seriously there is no mention at all of the epic Selma campaign, which brought on the Voting Rights Act and marked the dramatic climax to the civil rights phase of the Black Revolution. The authors' portrayal of the black power movement, including segments on the Black Panthers and Angela Davis, is fuller and more nuanced. This is true also of their descriptions of Shirley Chisolm's, Jesse Jackson's and Harold Washington's political campaigns and in their discussions of black feminism and conservatism. Taken as a whole, the Hortons' text, together with supplements, should serve instructors of one-semester courses in African American history quite well.	3
African Americans have written about themselves and their experience at least since the eighteenth century. In the years since the civil rights movement, there has been an unparalleled proliferation of writings by and about African Americans in history, literature and the social sciences, but there has been no bibliographical compendium since 1928. Arvarh E. Strickland and Robert Weems have ably set out to fill this void by editing a multidisciplinary bibliography compiled by writers in a host of subject fields and a variety of disciplines, including history, education, sociology, political science, psychology and musicology. What emerges is a rich, interrelated set of bibliographical essays on a wonderfully broad range of African American experience. Each chapter looks at a different field of study through a chronologically organized essay, followed by a list of books. In most of the essays, titles are imbedded in rich thematic material especially valuable for teachers of history. The chapter on the military, for example, follows blacks' participation in all of the nation's wars, elucidating issues, personalities and events around each war and the books and memoirs that cover them. White fears of arming blacks coupled with prejudices about their capability in battle, set against mounting need for African Americans' service, is among the themes discussed.	4
The survey of literature and critical writing is one of the most useful for teachers who want to explore the important themes and periods of African American life. It is marked by discursive segments detailing contemporaneous and recent artistic and critical works. The segment on the Harlem Renaissance notes Langston Hughes's and Zora Neale Hurston's mining of blues, jazz, folk tales and sermons for the content of their stories. The effects of minstrelsy, "the black image in the white mind," on the work of early black movie actors like Bert Williams is also commented upon. This theme is echoed most recently in Spike Lee's Bamboozled. Film has become such a powerful medium that more on black film makers and actors might have been included, either here or in a separate chapter.	5
Overlap and complementarity in a number of titles, periods and themes occurs in many of the book's categories. This is a positive attribute which serves to broaden the reader's understanding of each of these categories. The civil rights and black power movements as well as black nationalism are covered from literary, intellectual, political, women's theological/religious, athletic and business angles. The profusion of African American women writers is surveyed thematically in the sections on literature and on women. Music complements literature and the arts, as in the jazz of the Harlem Renaissance. It also overlaps religion, forming much of the expressive basis of worship, as the authors in the music and religion sections describe. Books exploring major controversies and debates in African American history are delineated in a number of the sections. Usually they embody white articulation of a myth or stereotype and blacks' refutation of it. The chapter on black families details the literature that highlights their functionality and adaptability, in contrast with the negative view expressed in Daniel Patrick Moynihan's 1965 position paper. The chapter on sexuality details literature on the white myth of black hypersexuality. So too in the athletics chapter and the chapter on women. The underclass debate is briefly delineated in the chapter on migration and urbanization. Included are works of urbanologist William Julius Wilson, but not his important When Work Disappears (1996).	6
This bibliography is by no means exhaustive. In each area of study it represents only a good selection of the most important titles. Regrettably, only a few of the slave narratives are included. Books and articles also continue to deluge us, and this compendium tails off somewhere around 1997. But as a survey of literature it is most useful, and several of the essays, such as the ones on labor, women and business are first rate.	7
California State University Long Beach Stephen Berk

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.