The Black community in the USA

Résumé du document

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude […] shall exist within the United States” reads the 1870 thirteen Amendment to the American Constitution. This decision put an official end to the triangular trade, which brought more than fifteen million black slaves to America between the 16th and the 19th century. Such a deportation is the deepest origine of one of the most important social issue in the modern world : the condition of black people in the United States. “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour line” said the famous black protest leader W.E.B. Du Bois. And this was particularly true in America. Blacks had to combat the deep-rooted traditionalism of the American society in order to gain recognition gradually. That's why one can wonder what was the evolution of the African Americans'condition throughout the 20th century. If they were no longer slaves, did they become for all that full-fledged citizens, and what were the different faces of this quest ? And, basically, to what extent this situation questionned the old democratic ideal of the United States ?

The corpus set is made up of five texts, which represent a sixty-year period, from the early 1900s to the late 1960s. These sixty years underlines an evolution, the evolution of the black issue in the United States, all the more so as the five authors were all committed in blacks'struggle – and in different ways. But that also means that one musn't let he or she deceive by this partial point of view about the black issue; while reading the texts, one must keep in mind that all their authors were committed. In addition, if violence and discrimination are perceptible in these five texts, never any event is mentionned; that is also what is to complete.
The first document distances itself from the others by its date of publication – 1903 – that makes it a starting point in the reflection. Its author, W.E.B. Du Bois, was one of the most important black leader in the early 1900s, as he took part in the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909, and didn't hesitate to denunciate the blacks'oppression in his book The Souls of Black Folk. Even if they were written half a century later, both following documents are in the same vein of a nonviolent exposure of blacks'condition. Ralph Ellison, in his famous fiction Invisible Man, bears witness to blacks'search of identity in the American society. James Baldwin, as famous as writer than as activist in the civil-rights struggle, delivers here an essay, first published as an article on the Black Muslim separatist movement, extracted here from his 1963 best-seller The Fire Next Time.
The last two texts present a more radical aspect of blacks'struggle. The Autobiography of Malcolm X is the book which turned this black militant leader and advocate of black nationalism in the 1960s into an ideological hero, especially among black youth. Eventually, Stokely Carmichael, if he began by supporting nonviolence, became the leader of black nationalism, originator of its rallying slogan “Black Power”, which merged self-defence tactics, self-determination, political and economic power and racial pride, presented here in his book Black Power.

Extraits

[...] Du Bois, was one of the most important black leader in the early 1900s, as he took part in the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909, and didn't hesitate to denunciate the blacks'oppression in his book The Souls of Black Folk. Even if they were written half a century later, both following documents are in the same vein of a non-violent exposure of blacks'condition. Ralph Ellison, in his famous fiction Invisible Man, bears witness to blacks'search of identity in the American society. James Baldwin, as famous as writer as as activist in the civil-rights struggle, delivers here an essay, first published as an article on the Black Muslim separatist movement, extracted here from his 1963 best-seller The Fire Next Time. [...]

[...] Recognition also supposed the existence of a proper identity. And in the early 1900s, African Americans were precisely in search of an identity. Their problem was their American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body” explains Du Bois. How could blacks situate themselves as they were far from Africa, but not accepted in the American society? Their wish, continues Du Bois, was to “merge [their] double self into a better and truer self”. [...]

[...] To whites' mind, blacks came to be slaves; why should things change? Why should they the dominants let them become their equals? That's what Carmichael has perfectly understood when he says: goal of the racists is to keep black people on the bottom, arbitrarily and dictatorially, as they have done in this country for over three hundred years.” And each time black people tried to organize themselves, they were immediately charged with doing “racism in reverse” or “reverse segregation”. That's a characteristic attitude of someone who has all the power to protect it and maintain his domination. [...]

[...] phantom . a figure in a nightmare” all relative to blacks. In addition, blacks could also intrigue the whites, but intrigue them just as bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus side shows” would. Actually, it is just here a matter of arousing whites' most squalid curiosity, which emphasized again and again what they claim to be as blacks' difference in world that looks on in amused contempt and says Du Bois. But if whites were so careful to affirm blacks' difference, it was because it enabled them to establish and maintain their domination. [...]

[...] If these five authors had a different approach to the blacks' issue, they first seem all to agree on the condition of blacks in the American society, these new “freedmen”. As Du Bois expresses it, they had above all to “escape both isolation and death”. Ignorance is certainly the first and the simplest whites' attitude towards blacks. First and simplest because it doesn't require any particular involvement or more precisely, it doesn't require any involvement at all. “People refuse to see says the “invisible of Ellison. That's all, one might want to say. [...]