Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

344 // WALDO E. MARTIN, JR.
African Americans are preeminently a nation, with a collective sensibility sustained
by a distinctive heritage. Regard the powerful twin need for self-definition
and self-determination, sociologist E. U. Essien-Udom has argued that "If we
understand nationalism broadly as the effort of a people to assert their identity
and dignity as human beings, then...the share of Afro-Americans in the articulation
of the 'African Personality' looms larger than is generally acknowledged."
The crucial issue, Essien-Udom contended, is "the self-assertion of a people:...
their unswerving assertion and defense of the dignity of the African Peoples not
only in America but also those in Africa." 5
That Africans and their descendents have lived within a white-dominated territory
and nation-state has complicated the history of Black nationalism. Not surprisingly,
therefore, territorial separatism has been an important element of Black
nationalism since its earliest expressions. Early on innumerable New World
Africans sought to create their own worlds apart from European American domination,
such as maroon or runaway slave societies. A far more widespread and
influential separatist thrust resulted in the development of relatively autonomous
institutions. The most important of these was the Black church, especially the
antebellum development of independent Black denominations. Within Black
church or religious history as well as the larger early Black experience, special
mention must be made of what religion historian Albert Raboteau has aptly
termed the "invisible institution" of the slave church. In stark opposition to the
proslavery religion of the slaveholders, slave religion provided a vital sanctuary for
renewal and self-validation and vigorously promoted a collective Black identity
and liberation struggle. 6
Scattered evidence of proto-Black nationalist sentiment and institutions can
thus be found before 1800. As a formal doctrine and movement, however, Black
nationalism proper emerges alongside the nationalism of the new American
nation in the late 1700s and early 1800s. This formative period illumines two
interrelated aspects of the Black nationalist tradition with particular meaning for
its resurgence in the 1960s and early 1970s. First and foremost, the dialectic
between African American nationalism and American nationalism represents the
ambivalence of African Americans toward both Africa and America. The second
aspect—Black nationalism as a historically complex phenomenon—has followed
directly from the deep-seated African American ambivalence toward both halves
of itself. A critical examination of selected elements in the history of Black
nationalism lays bare a complicated and multifaceted trajectory.
Black Americans, fundamentally hybrid like Americans generally, have created
a liminal nation poised precariously between the American nation and increasingly
distant memories of African nations. Consistent with this line of thinking,
an influential number of 1960s activists concluded that African Americans, like
other oppressed peoples of color, represented an internal colony of the United
States. Black nationalists saw themselves engaged in a version of anti-colonial
struggles worldwide. 7