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Culture, Identity, and Community:

From Slavery to the Present

F

rom the early 17th century to the mid-19th century,

more than a half-million Africans were enslaved

and brought to the shores of North America to pri-

marily engage in cash crop cultivation. Scholars, activists,

and others have written extensively about the implications

of the process by which human beings were intention-

ally taken from their homes, separated from family and

friends, raped and tortured, and forced into a permanent

and servile status. One of the most remarkable and tragic

eras in human history, the Atlantic Slave trade—despite its

destructive and dislocating tendencies—did not have the

power to completely obliterate the lives of enslaved Afri-

cans. Instead the resiliency of their collective spirit allowed

them to continue or create new cultures, identities, and

communities in the Western Hemisphere. Indeed, this story

is far from a narrative of destruction, defeat, and death; it is

ultimately a chronicle of human triumph against seemingly

impossible odds.

Feeding the growing labor demands of rice, sugar,

tobacco, and cotton plantations during the era of slavery,

enslaved Africans and their Creole or American-born de-

scendants forged distinctive communities out of a complex

set of Atlantic African cultural, political, and social pasts.

In many instances, they even adopted or assumed group

identities in the Western Hemisphere such as “Coroman-

tee,” “Amina,” “Eboe,” “Chamba,” “Canga,” or “Lucumí,”

which harkened back to their African past. Although these

enslaved communities were also shaped by European and

Native American values—as well as the socially limiting

institution of plantation slavery—the foundations of these

cultures, identities, and communities were and continue to

be solidly African. Th e result of this mixture of Atlantic Af-

rican social and cultural mores shaped the creation of such

uniquely African American forms and traditions as jazz,

blues, gospel, and rap music; John Henry, High John the

Conqueror, and Brer Rabbit folk tales; the Charleston, the

ring shout, and break dancing; Gullah, Geechee, and other

Africanized variants of English; and even the preparation

and use of certain foods (e.g., collard greens, rice, black-

eyed peas, okra, and gumbo). Clearly then, African cultural

practices not only infl uenced African American culture,

but also were a shaping feature of American culture.

Th e notion that enslaved Africans and their descen-

dants successfully managed to maintain active cultural links

to their African past has been debated for decades. Schol-

ars, from a wide range of disciplines, have contributed their

perspectives on multiple sides of this issue. As a result of

such attention, four schools of thought have emerged dur-

ing the course of the 20th and 21st centuries—the Annihi-

lationist, the Africanist, the Creolization, and the Diasporic

schools. Sociologist Robert E. Park, the father of the An-

nihilationist school, wrote in 1919 that American slavery

destroyed all vestiges of African culture and that nothing

in the culture of African Americans living in the U.S. South