Abstract
Kelly Miller, longtime professor of sociology at Howard University and one of the leading black intellectuals from the turn of the century until his re-tirement in 1934, begins his 1908 article, “Radicals and Conservatives,” as follows:
When a distinguished Russian was informed that some American Negroes are radical and some conservative, he could not restrain his laughter. The idea of conservative Negroes was more than the Cossack’s risibilities could endure. “What on earth,” he ex-claimed with astonishment, “have they to conserve?” According to a strict use of terms, a “conservative” is one who is satisfied with existing conditions and advocates their con-tinuance; while a “radical” clamors for amelioration of conditions through change. No thoughtful Negro is satisfied with the present status of his race…. Radical and conser-vative Negroes agree as to the end in view, but differ as to the most effective means of attaining it.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Kelly Miller, Radicals and Conservatives and Other Essays on the Negro in America (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), pp. 25–26.
Rhett S. Jones, “Structural Isolation and the Genesis of Black Nationalism in North America”, Colby Library Quarterly, 15 (December, 1979): 252–66.
John B. Boles, Black Southerners, 1619–1869 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).
Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968).
Lerone Bennett, Jr., “The Road Not Taken”, Ebony, 25(10) (August, 1970): 71–76.
T. H. Breen and Stephen Innes, “Myne Own Ground:” Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).
Joel Kovel, White Racism: A Psychohistory (New York: Vintage Books, 1971)
Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975).
See, for example, Gary B. Nash, Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early America (Englewood Cliffs, NJ): Prentice-Hall, 1974)
Rhett S. Jones, “Black over Red: The Image of Native Americans in Black History”, Umoja (Summer, 1977), 13–29
Theda Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979)
Daniel K. Richter, “Whose Indian History?” William and Mary Quarterly 50:2 (April, 1993): pp. 379–393.
Two discussions of this among the Creek are J. Leitch Wright, Creeks and Seminoles (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986)
Kathryn E. H. Braund, “The Creek Indians, Blacks, and Slavery”, Journal of Southern History 57 (November, 1991): pp. 601–36.
Kevin Mulroy, Freedom on the Border: The Seminole Maroons (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1993).
Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992)
Rhett S. Jones, “Mirroring the Double Failure: African and Native American Roots of Oppugnancy”, New England Journal of Black Studies 9 (1990): pp. 1–17.
Perdue, Slavery; William G. McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986).
Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981).
Robert Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country (Ithaca, NY): Cornell University Press, 1998).
David Hackett Fisher, Albion s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Ox-ford University Press, 1989).
Joseph M. Murphy, Santeria: African Spirits in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), p. 27.
For a discussion of this in Barbados see Gary A. Puckrein, Little England: Plantation Society and Anglo-Barbadian Politics (New York: New York University Press, 1984).
David Barry Gaspar, Bondsmen and Rebels: A Study of Master-Slave Relations in Antiqua (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).
John K. Thornton, “African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion”, American Historical Review 96 (October, 1991): 1101–13.
Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community (Cam-bridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 219.
William D. Piersen, Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Sub-Culture in Eighteenth Century New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988).
Herbert S. Klein, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean (New York: Ox-ford University Press, 1986).
A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr. In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 104.
Robert J. Cottrol, The Afro-Yankees: Providence’s Black Community in the Antebellum Era (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982), p. 14.
Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Culture in the Chesapeake (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), p. 319.
William D. Piersen, From Africa to America: African American History from the Colonial Era to the Early Republic (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996), pp. 86–87.
Graham Russell Hodges, Slavery and Freedom in the Rural North (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1997), p. 16.
Mechal Sobel, The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth Century Virginia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987)
Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North Carolina (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).
Robert K. Fitts, Inventing New England’s Slave Paradise (New York: Garland, 1998).
Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country’s Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), p. 87.
Frank Lambert, “I Saw the Book Talk: Slave Readings of the First Great Awakening”, Journal of Negro History 77 (Fall 1992): 195.
Joan Gundersen, “The Double Bonds of Race and Sex: Black and White Women in a Colonel Virginia Parish”, Journal of Southern History 52 (August 1986): 351–72.
Carole Shammas, “Black Women’s Work and the Evolution of Plantation Society in Virginia”, Labor History 26 (Winter 1985): 5–27.
Debra L. Newman, “Black Women in the Era of the American Revolution in Pennsylvania”, Journal of Negro History 61 (July 1976): 276–89.
R. S. Jones, “In the Absence of Ideology: Blacks in Colonial America and the Modern Black Experience”, Western Journal of Black Studies (Spring, 1988), p. 35.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2002 Gayle T. Tate and Lewis A. Randolph
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Jones, R.S. (2002). Black Creole Cultures: The Eighteenth-Century Origins of African American Conservatism. In: Tate, G.T., Randolph, L.A. (eds) Dimensions of Black Conservatism in the United States. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230108158_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230108158_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-0-312-29370-3
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-10815-8
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social & Cultural Studies CollectionSocial Sciences (R0)