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

African American Review, Winter, 2003 by Toru Kiuchi

In the essay entitled "Sacred Legacies," Annette Gordon-Reed demonstrates that American slavery and racism were "inextricably entwined" and that, "although white slave owners did have overwhelming power, they were not gods." The power of the masters notwithstanding, enslaved Africans adapted their African religious heritages to their New World realities and reinvented them in a series of new Afro-Christian religious practices. We next see rare photographs of the first African Baptist Church of Richmond, Virginia, and an adorned gravesite, followed by Gayraud S. Wilmore's powerful essay "The Religion of the Slave." We are then presented with rare photographs of the 22 June 1827 issue of Freedom's Journal, the first African American newspaper in the United States, and the first 1859 issue of the Anglo-African Magazine, the first African American literary journal in the United States. Additional documents and photographs of the first African American schools and colleges are supplemented by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s essay "The Talking Book," excerpted from his 1988 book The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. Adopting a global standpoint, this essay refutes all the arguments that have been made in the past that African Americans were somehow less than fully equal members of the human race.

Part II also examines almost all of the contemporary musical forms and vernacular dances of the Caribbean and the Americas, tracing their roots to the earlier slave culture that existed in those areas. The discussion continues in the same vein, showing that Southern American speech patterns, cuisine, and quilt making were all influenced by enslaved Africans. Amiri Baraka's essay "The Phenomenon of Soul in African-American Music" corroborates these analyses, arguing that soul and funk (feelings connected directly with the African American experience) have never ceased to exist in black music and culture despite a commercial dilution that was designed, largely, to cater to white audiences.

The final section, Part III, relates to the impact of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation on the more than 36 million African-descended people living in the United States. The highlight here is John Hope Franklin's definitive essay "The Emancipation Proclamation: An Act of Justice," which serves as a conclusion to Jubilee. This essay details quite interesting historical facts. For instance, we are told that at 10:45 a.m. on 1 January 1863, when the draft of the Emancipation Proclamation was brought to the White House, President Lincoln found a mistake in the text. After correcting it, Lincoln took up the pen again to sign the Proclamation, but his hand shook so hard that for a moment he could not write. Another interesting fact is that in the preliminary draft nothing was said about the use of blacks as soldiers, but that in the final draft President Lincoln added a clause stipulating the reception of former slaves into the armed services.

Jubilee, with its transatlantic focus, consistently uses the term enslaved Africans, focusing on the tragedy of slavery in a global context. Such a viewpoint is also apparent in the book's broad examination of slavery in the Americas and the West Indies as well as in the United States. Jubilee thus spans both the time and geography of the African Diaspora, progressing from the early eighteenth to the late nineteenth century, and ranging from the West Coast of Africa to the Americas and the West Indies. Jubilee ends with the remark that "enslaved Africans and their descendants have been active, creative, thinking human beings who made their own histories and cultures during slavery and continue to do so today." Overall, Jubilee will prove helpful and useful to critics and students who are beginning to explore the history of African slavery more widely than they have done before.