Reclaiming Black Culture

...All that exists is a need—and the articulation of this need on the part of black intellectuals—to have a sense of the past...

...They rejected what the masters tried to teach—particularly values like obedience and docility...

...Among these themes—transmitted by peer groups, clandestine congregations, songs and stories—were: the importance of family, a strong sense of community and group spirit, a belief in their own moral and practical superiority compared to the hypocritical and lazy slaveholders, admiration for those who learned to read and write, and a love of freedom...

...And everyone felt responsible for nurturing, protecting and educating the children—a fact of particular importance when a parent died or was sold...

...Where and from whom did the slaves learn...

...His conception of the term does not merely encompass severely restricted formal education, but the whole range of transactions that influence the way people acquire knowledge, think, feel, and act...

...What did the slaves actually learn...

...Indeed, on many plantations the lines between families and the larger group were indistinct, intensifying the sense of solidarity...

...It provided them with the fortitude to survive, the will to protect and help each other, and I lie courage to struggle against a condition ihe> knew to be immoral...

...Nevertheless, the reader is left with a puzzle: If the culture fashioned by the slave quarter protected the black personality and the black family through the most oppressive days of slavery, how did it fall into neglect during the past century...

...1750-1925 (1976)—two books that shifted the emphasis from blacks as victims, shaped and molded by their white masters, to blacks as actors...

...Early advocates of busing, for example, frequently averred that blacks needed to be in a minority wherever they went to school because of their lack of cultural resources...

...To endure and ultimately to survive is to triumph over one's oppressors...

...In short, holds Webber, they were a society within a society, and were not (as others have argued) rendered prostrate by an institution as tightly controlled as a concentration camp...

...Webber organizes his study around three central questions: What did the whites want their slaves to learn and what teaching methods did they use...

...The slave narratives, autobiographies and folklore cited by Webber soon demonstrate that the slaves were successful in "actively creating, controlling, and perpetuating their education...

...He presents numerous examples of their taking an active role in the upbringing of their children—playing with them, teaching them to hunt and fish, training them in practical skills, inculcating in them the values of the quarter community, and planning for their future...

...Reviewed by Diane Ravitch Assistant Professor of History and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University...

...Did this happen because it was primarily an oral tradition in a society where the written word predominated...

...In the process of offering his evidence, Webber punctures numerous popular beliefs...

...Webber shows, too, that slave fathers were not absent figures...

...However much one wishes Webber had gone on to take up the issue, Deep Like the Rivers—written in an unem-broidered, straightforward prose, happily free of polemics or jargon—is a deeply moving book...

...Thomas Webber has made an important contribution to the recovery of a past that was very nearly forgotten...

...Out of sight of master and overseer, too, the slaves established their own religion and their own community structure...

...They neither mimicked white culture nor aspired to assimilate into il, and they did not live in a wasteland...

...to remember is to vindicate one's ancestors...

...The culture the slaves created was a source of strength in adversity...

...The issue, though, is of more than academic interest...

...The author sets out to uncover the "educational processes" within the slave quarter community...

...author, "The Great School Wars, " "The Revisionists Revised"_ How the legacy of slavery has affected black culture and family life is one of the most hotly debated questions among some of our best contemporary historians...

...Now we have Thomas Webber's Deep Like the Rivers—the latest addition to this revisionist literature and a work that enriches those before it...

...This historiography was challenged by Eugene D. Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll (1974) and Herbert G. Gut-man's The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom...

...the only black culture, therefore, was one of poverty...

...Was the meaning of black culture distorted and discounted as it was reflected through white accounts...

...For many years, the prevalent understanding among historians was that the institution of slavery damaged black culture, personality and family life...

...Why did black social scientists like E. Franklin Frazier miss the import of the culture Webber describes...

...Instead, they developed and passed on—often without the whites knowing it?a unique set of cultural themes actively fashioned . . . from both the culture of their African past and the crucible of their experiences under slavery...

...Although Webber does not discuss the ramifications of his work for current policy, his findings are a direct challenge to the deeply embedded assumption that blacks were and are culturally deficient...

...As recently as 1972, a prominent black sociologist contended that "blacks do not have a sense of the past...

...For by his definition of the past, the historian establishes the assumptions on which social policy is built...

...In its pages, men and women emerge through their own voices as individuals with names and emotions, not simply as statistics awash in the great sea of History...

...What Webber's study implies is that blacks must be recognized as an ethnic group with its own history and values, and not thought of as a degraded caste whose skin color it its mark of inferiority...

...This is not to suggest a philosophical argument for black nationalism, but rather that black Americans can lay claim to a culture as vital and creative as any other in the nation...

...Others maintained that slavery was too shameful to serve as a positive source of identity...

...While still legally slaves," Webber writes in his closing sentence, "the black men, women and children of the quarter community successfully protected their psychological freedom and celebrated their human dignity...

...Without getting into the present-day discussion of the black family, he documents in lavish detail how the nuclear unit—the ideal of the slave community—was supplemented by members of the extended family and others who were not necessarily related by blood or marriage...