George M.Fredrickson's Black Liberation

...As Fredrickson himself notes, when Marcus Garvey imagined a model for the liberation movement he hoped to build, he looked not to the United States or to Africa or to the West Indies, but to the republican struggle against British rule in Ireland...

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...It is not surprising, then, that he would find a "remarkable congruence," and this certainly enables the sort of historical comparison with which he is most comfortable...

...After all, the almost simultaneous emergence of draconian systems of white domination during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in societies 122 • DISSENT But, in the end, one puts Black Liberation down without a clear sense of how different the histories or historiographies of the United States and South Africa now look, and with a nagging sense of dissatisfaction...

...He followed with an equally timely but even more ambitious work, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (1981), an exploration of the deep histories of institutionalized segregation in both societies...

...Such are the risks and pitfalls that accompany the tempting prospects...

...His earliest book in this area, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (1971), was a pioneering study of the construction of racialist ideas, North and South, in the nineteenth-century United States...

...And so, the lessons that Fredrickson draws— careful, thoughtful, and inspired as they are by a deep and abiding commitment to the construction of a multicultural and nonracial democracy— provoke some skepticism...

...Fifteen years ago, he concluded White Supremacy with lingering optimism about African-American prospects for achieving "equality of essential rights and free choice about their destiny" and with profound pessimism about South Africa's prospects for avoiding race war and the eventual victory of a punitive African nationalist regime...

...He concludes Black Liberation with a wholly different assessment...

...Mindful of the hopelessness and alienation to be found in much of black America as well as of the absence of a "broadbased anti-racist political movement in the United States," he is immensely impressed by the inclusive vision and the ideological and tactical flexibility of the ANC, and he believes that the ANC's experience might serve as a useful model for African-Americans (without mentioning the violent divisions that have recently beset black South Africa and threaten the vitals of the Mandela government...

...Fredrickson is by no means the first scholar to glimpse the logic of comparing race relations in the United States (and especially the Southern United States) and South Africa...

...He even suggested that African-American progress might serve as a useful model for black South Africans...

...George Fredrickson is one of this country's most prolific and influential historians of race relations and racial thought...

...He would like to enrich our understanding of black struggles against racial oppression and draw contemporary lessons from the stories of two significant examples...

...Part of the problem is that there is an unresolved tension between what Fredrickson would like to do in this work and what he is prepared to do...

...Lessons and prognostications, it appears, do not easily or clearly flow from comparative history...

...This does not mean that a comparative analysis is unattainable...

...Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa is in many ways a sequel to White Supremacy, though it can easily stand on its own...

...Yet, Fredrickson is only prepared to define the world of politics and ideology in such a way as to encompass the upper echelon of black leaders in both societies, almost all of whom were educated in the traditions of Euro-American culture and evangelical Christianity...

...But we do not gain much of a grasp of what were effectively mass (and very diverse) political movements conducted by people largely excluded from the official arenas of politics, in which the strains of ethnic nationalism, racial separatism, and localistic loyalties were undoubtedly more powerful and in which the "congruences" were quite limited...

...it means that such an analysis must be conceptualized and organized differently...