The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, ed. Jubilee: The Emergence of African-American Culture

African American Review, Winter, 2003 by Toru Kiuchi

Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2002. 224 pp. $35.00

Jubilee: The Emergence of African-American Culture is a fully illustrated book accompanied by important essays. The book is based on an exhibition entitled "Lest We Forget: The Triumph Over Slavery," organized by the Schomburg Center as part of its 7th anniversary celebration in 2000-2001. This beautiful tome provides nearly 200 color or black-and-white photographs, ranging from a photograph of freed slaves in South Carolina in 1862 to that of a tree under which a father told his sons tales of Jamaican maroon heroes. The book begins with Wynton Marsalis's foreword and an introduction by Howard Dodson, director of the Schomburg Center.

Part I traces the origin and development of the transatlantic slave trade, discussing slavery not only in the United States but in the Americas and the West Indies as well. This section begins by offering the reader a frequently used engraving of a slave ship, portraits of slave-trade merchants in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a statistical map of the Atlantic slave trade, and an ironical painting of the French slave ship Marie Seraphique of Nantes, on which white gentlemen and ladies enjoy a picnic while enslaved Africans are examined by other slavers. Some of the highlights of this section include its introduction of the fact that the slaveship captains were often elevated to a higher social status after having made great profits in the slave trade and its revelation that "the long march," the transportation of African captives from the inland to the coast, "became the first of several life-threatening migrations for the African captives" well before they had to face the ordeal of the Middle Passage. The slave trade is also explored through a selection of sometimes harrowing photographs: a coffle chain with shackles, the Cape Coast dungeon doors in Ghana, and a slave branding iron. Through another photograph, we discover that African traders favored the use of cowrie shells as currency, using them extensively for the slave trade. Again, in the photograph of the Elmina Castle along the coast of Ghana--long used as a clearinghouse for the African captives who remained on standby before their shipment to the New World--we can see the same scene that Richard Wright depicted in Black Power. Another powerful photograph is one of a slave pen in Alexandria, Virginia, which is reminiscent of the way Paul D's dungeon is described in Toni Morrison's Beloved as "a cage opened into three walls and a roof of scrap lumber and red dirt."

Part I continues with an explanation of slave hire badges, revealing how "reverse" affirmative action worked. Since skilled black craftsmen, free and enslaved, outnumbered white people in the carpentry, wheelwright, and smithing crafts, a slave badge system was introduced in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1800 to regulate the number of slaves employed and to encourage the hiring of the white workers. Next, we encounter another unsettling photograph: a spiked ankle shackle with an iron ball and chains which was designed so that the spikes would cause severe injury if a slave attempted to run away. We are again visually confronted with the cold realities of slavery and the slave trade.

Another highlight of Part I is Gaff Buckley's essay "Men That Dared: African-American Military Service," an illuminating account of how African Americans fought in wars from the American Revolution to World War II. The pages that follow this essay offer concrete examples of some of the issues inherent in the anti-slavery movement in the mid-nineteenth century. For example, the most famous statement of the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement's motto "Am I Not a Man and a Brother?" portrays an enslaved African as a noble savage "pleading for the help of white abolitionists." This problematic fatherson relationship between white people and African Americans would lead to a rupture of the close relationship between former slave Frederick Douglass and radical abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, and even to W. E. B. Du Bois expressly attacking Booker T. Washington in print.

Part II describes how the first 200 years of slavery transformed enslaved Africans into a new African American people. It shows that, even though a diverse population came from the slave-trading regions along the African coast, "all Africans, regardless of their ethnic or religious backgrounds, were transformed into a single black racial group." Underscoring this view is a Mexican painting that depicts the variety of discrete racial mixing occurring among European, African, and Native American peoples. Part II goes on to discuss social relations among the enslaved Africans, pointing out that they were often able to enjoy family life in spite of the great difficulties imposed by slavery. However, one photograph of a slave family spanning five generations is comprised of only eight people, leading the viewer to conclude that many family members are missing, their lives likely taken or their bodies sold off to different slave owners.