Not just Josephine Baker: African Americans abroad
In which I reflect on Tamara J. Walker's terrific BEYOND THE SHORES: A HISTORY OF AFRICAN AMERICANS ABROAD, and offer museum tips for photography fans
“Whites Only” drinking fountains. Voter disenfranchisement and intimidation. Lynching, and the blind eye the law turned towards it. Systemic legal discrimination infused the lives of African Americans in the American South for a century after the Civil War. White lawmakers wrote new laws - known as Jim Crow laws - designed to keep formerly enslaved African Americans and their descendants separate from white Americans wherever possible.
Between the 1910s and the 1970s, millions of African Americans living in the South upped sticks and left in an exodus known as the Great Migration. Many moved to northern cities like Chicago and New York. But African Americans did not just move north in search of a better life. Some left the country entirely.
This collective experience of international travel, migration, and return is the subject of the remarkable BEYOND THE SHORES: A HISTORY OF AFRICAN AMERICANS ABROAD (Crown/Penguin Random House, 2023) by my dear friend and writing think-tank buddy, Tamara J. Walker, Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University.
By charting the lives of a diverse array of African Americans who travelled everywhere from Buenos Aires to Tokyo, from Kenya to Uzbekistan, and from Austria to Vietnam, Walker connects US history and the Great Migration to larger, global histories.
Braided through the book is a moving personal and family memoir. Some early twentieth-century African Americans signed up for or were drafted into the army. Walker’s own grandfather lost an eye at Normandy to D-Day.
Other African Americans who went abroad were writers — poets, playwrights, and essayists like Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin. In Paris, London and Berlin, singers, dancers, actors, and musicians graced musical halls and theatres. These exiles enjoyed opportunities that were closed to them in the US.
Still others had professions and chose destinations that people don’t immediately associate with mid-twentieth century African Americans. Engineers went to Soviet republics in the 1930s. A society influencer settled in Mannheim, Germany in the 1950s. A major contribution of BEYOND THE SHORES is that it enriches a story that most people know only through a couple of super-famous examples like James Baldwin or Josephine Baker.
These travellers’ lives reveal how white people abroad saw African Americans as more human than their compatriots did back home. Yet while white folks in places like Moscow and Paris liked to feel more enlightened than Americans in this regard, African Americans did experience anti-black racism in these spaces.
Black expatriates could climb higher and into more spheres in their professions abroad than they could back home. Yet they still hit glass ceilings and experienced racially motivated discrimination and violence.
White people in Europe could be naive about racism and discrimination in their own backyards. This is still the case. White Europeans point at US gun violence and feel complacent about its absence in their own countries. This studied innocence ignores how words, actions, and laws can be weapons, too.
On a recent visit to Huis Marseille, a photography museum in Amsterdam, I happened upon these striking photos c. 1929 of singer, tap-dancer, actor and acrobat Ulysses “Slow Kid” Thompson (1888-1990). Thompson was married to a fellow African American, the singer and dancer Florence Mills, who found success in Paris around the same time that Josephine Baker did. Mills’s story features in the first chapter of BEYOND THE SHORES.
Thompson’s signature routine involved statue-esque, frozen-in-time poses. With bent knees and elbows and head tilted upwards, the stance captured here by a photographer at the Weimar-based Atelier Robertson (Hans Robertson, perhaps?) reminds me of ancient Egyptian tomb sculpture.
Was Thompson inspired by the visuals of ancient Egypt, which had been all the rage in the West for some time, and especially since workers under the direction of the British archeologist Howard Carter had broken into the tomb of the pharaoh Tutankhamun in 1922? I would love to know…..
Also in Amsterdam right now is the annual touring World Press Photo Contest, an international photojournalism and photo-documentary exhibition. I was so busy studying the extraordinary photos that I only photographed a couple. No matter - my phone camera does not do justice to these masterpieces, many of which are on the contest website, and perhaps even coming to a location near you.
Below is last year’s Photo of the Year 2022 by Amber Bracken. (A selection of previous winners tours with the current exhibition.) This is the only entry ever to win Photo of the Year without depicting a human figure. The scene shows a roadside memorial to a nearby unmarked mass grave discovered in 2021: that of the infamous Kamloops Residential School in British Columbia, Canada.
Since the nineteenth century and well into the second half of the twentieth, the Canadian government forcibly removed Indigenous, First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children from their families and placed them in residential schools. Here children were forced to assimilate to white Canadian culture, punished for speaking their own languages, and often experienced abuse and violence. The residential school system continued into the 1990s.
The memorial of clothes hanging on crosses powerfully evokes lost lives and the part played by the Catholic Church. Forcing children to assimilate had been tied to a rhetoric of “civilizing” them and saving their souls. Last year, Pope Francis formally apologized for the complicity of the Church.
This harrowing story brings me back to BEYOND THE SHORES. The singer and dancer Florence Mills (who would marry Ulysses Thompson, pictured earlier in this essay), was abducted off the stage in her home town of Washington, D.C. at the age of nine. Arrested for underage performing, Mills spent a year “at an institution run by local nuns”, against her family’s wishes. Mills’s family were not even able to visit.
BEYOND THE SHORES brings to light lives and perspectives that re-configure US and African American history. How often I am reminded of the people in this book is a testament to the enduring importance of remembering their stories - and of the skill of the storyteller.
Need more reading recommendations? Check out my last two newsletters for a thriller-on-the-beach starring a whale (Whaling by Nathan Munday), and a transcontinental escape-memoir-travelogue (A Flat Place by Noreen Masud’s). Others recs are embedded in newsletters in “Takes and Recs” segments. I hope you enjoy running across them - and love the books!
References
Tamara J. Walker, BEYOND THE SHORES: A HISTORY OF AFRICAN AMERICANS ABROAD (Crown/Penguin Random House, 2023).
Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography, Amsterdam. Variétés: Photography and the Avant Garde. Exhibition runs until 22 October, 2023.
World Press Photo Contest 2023 is on view in de Nieuwe Kerk, Amsterdam, until. 24 September, 2023. For the show’s international tour dates from Mexico to Australia, check out this page.
You can also find me on www.surekhadavies.org,
BlueSky (@drsurekhadavies.bsky.social),
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