African-American Ideas

Black nationalist, or autonomic, strategies are the oldest ideological approaches developed by African-Americans. The slave revolts, especially those before the nineteenth century, that aimed to create maroon societies modeled after remembrances of African social organizational patterns perhaps best reflect the anteriority of black nationalism among African-American ideologies. Autonomic approaches are also the most varied and complicated of African-American ideologies, but they can be divided into two broad categories: protonationalism and separatism. Protonationalism refers to strategic visions that emphasize autonomy in the realm of civil society, the desire to reside in semiautonomous towns and regions, and the preference for preserving distinct cultural practices. Richard Allen's (1760–1831) creation of the African Episcopal Methodist Church in 1794 and W. E. B. DuBois's call for blacks to build on their group strengths in the 1930s or the 1960s era campaigns for "community control" of African-American communities are examples of protonationalism.

Separatism has a more delimited terrain, encompassing emigration and efforts to create an independent African-American nation-state within the United States, such as Martin R. Delany's and others' proposals to emigrate to Africa, Canada, or South America during the 1840s and 1850s; Marcus Garvey's 1920s plan to repatriate to Liberia; or the Republic of New Africa's 1960s desire to create an African-American nation-state in the U.S. South.

Autonomic discourses are shaped by their sociohistorical context; they tend to surge and ebb in relationship to the economic and political position of blacks in U.S. society. As a rule, black nationalism swells during sustained economic downturns. Autonomic philosophies are also sensitive to the interplay of dominant and emerging ideologies. This is particularly true regarding questions of cultural difference. For instance, between 1850 and 1925, the era historian Wilson Moses terms the golden age of black nationalism, nationalists were ambivalent toward African culture and rejected Africanisms or cultural carryovers. Like the social Darwinists of the day, they often viewed Africans and African-Americans as "underdeveloped" or even "backward," although they usually ascribed environmental or religious, rather than genetic, causes. Consequently, they preferred European-American high culture. To a large extent, black power, the protonationalism that developed during the "turbulent sixties" (1955–1975) was predicated on Africanization, the adoption of actual or imagined African cultural values and practices.

Evidence from several years of the National Black Politics Study from 1979 to 1992 suggests that proto–black nationalism remained the predominant perspective of the majority of African-American people in the late twentieth century. For instance, political scientists Darren W. Davis and Ronald Brown discovered that 84 percent of African-Americans believed blacks should buy from black-owned businesses; 83.3 percent believed blacks should be self-reliant; 73.8 percent wanted blacks to control their communities' economics; and 68.3 percent believed blacks should govern their communities. Another 70.7 percent thought black children should learn an African language, and 56.5 percent advocated participating only in all-black organizations.