LIFE UPON THESE SHORES: Looking at African American History 1513-2008
By Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Knopf, 512 pp., $50.
America’s racial divide, that loathsome fault line through the nation’s soul, is now a decade into its sixth century with no end in sight.
In Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African American History 1513-2008, Henry Louis Gates Jr. gives readers the view from the African-American side of the divide. The Harvard scholar traces the history of African-Americans from the arrival of the first slave to the election of Barack Obama as president.
Telling such an epic tale requires a big book, and this one includes almost 500 large format pages and hundreds of essays written around more than 700 illustrations and photos. (Life Upon These Shores, which will be released Tuesday, is available as an e-book but should be experienced in “real book” form.)
The book’s segmented format does not produce an exhaustive narrative but rather short snapshots of subjects informed by Gates’ lifetime of scholarship. While these pieces are brief, they do not lack depth. And the history he recounts often is at odds with the history we remember from school, partly because he goes into areas most school courses do not and partly because he tells things the way they were, not the way we would like them to be.
While we view as villains the white slave traders and the colonial demand for slaves, Gates points out that rulers in Africa also were complicit by selling unwanted elements within their own people — in essence, getting rid of their enemies. He also points out that the vast majority of the slaves sent to the New World went to places such as Cuba and South America.
His portrayal of Abraham Lincoln is unflinching. The 16th president was not the Great Emancipator, he writes, but rather the great Unionist and colonist.
Lincoln’s No. 1 priority was preserving the Union. As he wrote to Horace Greeley: “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union.”
Lincoln timed the Emancipation Proclamation to keep the border states loyal, turn European sentiment against recognizing the Confederacy as a separate nation and deprive the South of some of its conscript labor force by giving slaves even more reason to flee to the North.
(Ken Ellis: Chronicle illustration)
And once the slaves were free, it was Lincoln’s hope that they could be relocated to other nations because in his view the races were incompatible.
Gates pulls no punches with abolitionists, many of whom favored the end of slavery but didn’t want African-Americans anywhere near their communities. He also assails Woodrow Wilson for his order segregating all federal agencies.
In some cases, though, people rose above expectations. John Marshall Harlan, born into a slave-holding Kentucky family, cast courageous lone dissenting votes as an associate justice on the Supreme Court in the Civil Rights Cases decision, which struck down federal civil rights legislation, and Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld southern segregation laws.
Gates covers most of the high-profile subjects you would expect, including Jackie Robinson and the Tuskegee airmen. But readers will meet lesser known figures such as Milton Howard, a Texas-born slave who was sent to Ohio to gain an education. When the Civil War broke out, he became a servant to a Union officer. Later, he joined an African-American fighting unit, where he was forced to take command after all of its officers were killed. By doing so, he won the Medal of Honor.
Aside from coverage of President Lyndon B. Johnson, Texas in general is not prominent in Life Upon These Shores. Galveston’s role in the early slave trade is noted. The book also recounts racial violence in Beaumont, Brownsville, Longview and Houston, including fighting that broke out in 1917 between police and black troops stationed at Fort Logan.
The most prominent Texan in the book is Jack Johnson, the turn-of-the-century Galveston boxer who drew the wrath of whites for his ability to beat white fighters and also for his high-profile romances with white women.
One disappointment is the relegation of Rep. Barbara Jordan to a couple of paragraphs in an essay about the increase of African-American power in the 1970s, while more trivial subjects merit whole essays.
But this quibble should not deter prospective readers. The one thing that comes through over and over is that whatever progress has been made has come with a very high price and been excruciatingly difficult. This book pulls together a valuable account of the African-American experience upon these shores. It is a worth a read by all Americans who want to learn where we have been as a nation.
Posted By: Siebra Muhammad
Tuesday, November 22nd 2011 at 5:37PM
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