The African American Folklorist Manifesto

AS SEEN IN THE 6TH ISSUE OF THE PRINT MAGAZINE

By: Lamont Jack Pearley
Founder & Editor-in-Chief 

Black American Studies have always been hybrid. Black American Folklore and Ethnomusicology studies are found in literature, memory, and cultural engagements, including literary and anthropological methodologies. Plus, Black American scholars have always utilized, yet have not been credited for creating and implementing, folkloristic, anthropological, archeological, sociological, and ethnomusicological methods. W.E.B. Du Bois is a perfect example. From his introduction and definition of  “sorrow songs” of the Negro, to his detailed work called The Philadelphia Project, Du Bois’ methodology lives in folkloristics, ethnomusicology, and cultural anthropology, though never mentioned in the discipline. However, during the same era as Du Bios’ early work, we find the establishment of American Folklore in the Americas. I am compelled to speak about Charlotte Forten Grimké, the first person to document and write about the field hollers and Black spiritual hymns she heard on St. Helena Island in 1864. William Still, an abolitionist who comes out of the camp of Charlotte Forten Grimké’s family, is spoken of as an abolitionist due to his work transporting escaping slaves to their meeting points and hiding locations. Yet, Still engaged in what we would come to call ethnographic fieldwork and autoethnography as he interviewed and documented the stories of the slaves he helped to escape and wrote reflexive journals about the experiences. However, three white men of the folklore studies and anthropological discipline are credited and consistently taught as those who established the American Folklore Society and its publication, The Journal of American Folklore. Their names are Franz Boaz, Francis James Childs, and William Wells Newell. 

Boaz was considered progressive in his day. Zora Neale Hurston comes from his camp. Childs also has a significant history, though my interest does not lie with him or his scholarship. It is Newell I want to discuss here. Newell is among the many white scholars who set the tone for Black Narrative—what I call Blues Narrative—in the “White Space” of Folklore Studies and cultural documentation. In the first volume of the Journal of American Folklore, Newell clearly states the mission and topics of the publication. He also describes who and what the subjects are: The Vanishing Traditions of Relics of Old English Folklore, Lore of Negroes in the Southern States of the Union, Lore of Indian Tribes of the North Americas, and Lore of French Canada, Mexico and other “Primitive” peoples. Like Walter Plecker, he reclassified and possibly misclassified folk according to their scientific agendas. Newell was quite interested in the story of those once referred to as the American Indians. Walter Plecker was a physician who championed Virginia's 1924 Racial Integrity Act, which restricted interracial marriage and defined all non-white people as "colored,” further removing the Indigenous Peoples from the land as they were reclassified during census collections.  Newell othered the Blues People's Narrative, asserting their folklore, tradition, and engagement were primitive, suggesting Blacks should assimilate to Euro, Anglocentric lifeways.

As a practitioner and documenter of Black Blues People Narrative, I initially found it extremely difficult to find Black American scholars who wrote about, interviewed about, researched about, and disseminated the story of African American Folklore. I worked in the field of folklore as an applied folklorist before re-entering the university to obtain my graduate degrees. My introduction to ethnomusicology comes through folklore studies and musicology. Learning and training as an applied folklorist, my scholarship led me to the works and writings of John Wesley Work III and his family, Henry Edward Krehbiel, James H. Cone, and others. To be clear, it is composer and scholar Work III, Black Theologian Cones, and the activist poet LeRoi Jones [now known as Amiri Baraka] whose readings and ideologies inform my scholarship. My work from the beginning has been grounded in what I call the “Blues People,” a term I adopted from LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), who wrote the bible of Blues narrative. I consider Blues People the bible of Black Narrative because it addresses and calls to attention the connections of space, land, worship, tradition, and experience to Black musical expression, and how all of those things interact and culminate on the Americas through its travel from Africa. 

The only real difference in our scholarship is my focus is primarily on Black America, the Black American South, and descendants, specifically, with no fundamental outer continental influences, for the acceptance of shared folk beliefs that still look to be cultivated in the Americas. I often use African American and Black American interchangeably because I believe there is an intersection. Some Black folk don’t use the term African American, and some don’t think the term Black connects to the continent of Africa. My use of the terms is based on who I am addressing. I am addressing the Blues People who function on the Americas through varied descriptions and titles. For me, the title Blues People gives a direct connection to America and American experiences.

Many scholars, community activists, writers and other artists have stated that Black Americans have no culture, that we were robbed of our African traditions and were given fowl like slaves were given massa’s throwaways. I do not beg to differ…I emphatically disagree! The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan said we were robbed of our name and culture. In the mid to late 80s, until gangsta, drug dealing, and gunplay rap took over in the mid-to-late 90s, Hip Hop and the songs of Black liberation by many emcees explained Black America didn’t have a culture. When you hear Brother J or KRS One, even the god Rakim, speaking of Africa, Egypt, and Kemet, they are inadvertently denouncing Black Southern Folk Belief which is downplaying Black American culture, tradition, and engagement, saying that everything we are or came from is based on another continent.  Even now, there exists an argument that Hip Hop as a representation of a folk group and an engagement of groups' music, art, fashion, and vernacular - altogether, a behavior, if you will -  is not of Black America, solely.  This is quite significant to me as a former emcee, turned country Blues practitioner, member and descendant of the Blues People, and child of the Great Migration. The Blues People are Black American Southerners and their descendants, those born into slavery and those reclassified from their indigenous tribes. Those who practiced hoodoo, Pentecost, Black magic, Igbo, Hebrew, Moorish, Pan-African, Christianity, and other folk belief traditions cultivated on what was once referred to as Turtle Island. It is the Black American experience that constructs the Blues People. Cultural memory and genealogy in this space create an intersection between self-identity and informed identity—meaning, in some cases, individuals choose to be of one of the many Blues People ideological beliefs. In contrast, others are born into it and know no other way.

Navigating the cultural atmosphere, I noticed that anything specific to the collection, discourse, and dissemination of Black Americans, again, was not from Black American perspectives. I found the voices of Black American scholars in Folklore, and then Ethnomusicology, was explicitly absent. The recent re-discovery and veneration of Zora Neale Hurston seemed enough for the anthropology discipline. The many scholars I spoke of earlier were never mentioned in the space, with the exception of John Wesley Work III and Eileen Southern. James H. Cone, Du Bious, Jones/Baraka, and other Black writers and collectors had no place in the Folklore Studies and Ethnomusicology documentation, maybe because these scholars and cultural workers had other titles or functioned in different disciplinary spaces. 

In 2018 I was introduced to the American Folklore Society and its annual conference by a great scholar named Dr. Simmon Brooner.

There, I found the Black American academic and community scholar voices I’d been looking for there. Also, some months prior, through intense research, I found a significant scholar of Black American Folklore, Dr. Shirley Moody-Turner. Turner is substantial to the establishment of the African American Folklorist platform. In my work researching literature and information collected by, and presented by, Black scholars for my organization Jack Dappa Blues Heritage Preservation Foundation, I stumbled across Turner’s book Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation. That chance event led me to interview Turner, and she further informed me of the AFS. The meeting and interviewing of Moody-Turner, attending my first annual American Folklore Society conference, and my work with my organization led to the creation, founding, and establishment of the African American Folklorist newspaper, which evolved into a magazine and online platform. The African American Folklorist Platform (AAF) is a hybrid print and online publication of peer-reviewed and curated written and mixed media content on Black American cultural expression and folklore. The AAF’s main objective is to be a platform for Black Americans to own and contextualize, in our terms, the many communities, identities, spaces, and practices that make up Black culture as it relates to Black folk. By showcasing works of academics, community scholars, lay researchers, young emergent scholars, activists and advocates, and cultural and artistic practitioners, the platform seeks to conserve and engage Black folklife across disciplines. We prioritize works by Black practitioners and welcome works by allies and advocates for Black tradition and human wealth. AAF aims to inspire bold exchange, critical dialogue, and progressive, radical discourse in, for, and by our culture. AAF was launched in 2018 and is published by the Jack Dappa Blues Heritage Preservation Foundation, INC. 

The birth of the public-facing publication results from an urgency to disseminate Black American, BIPOC narratives, tangible and intangible cultural traditions, and the patterns of interactions by a folk group through their experience and understanding, individually and collectively—like the acronym of FUBU, For Us By Us. The need to take up such a mantle is due to the inception and trajectory of the discipline in the academy. This is also an issue in the organizations of museums and nonprofit spaces that look to teach and raise awareness of cultural matters. We know that the idea of museums, art galleries, art collectors, and installation curators have mostly, if not always, worked through a Eurocentric elitist lens.  Shirley Moody Turner argues in her book Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation, “Folklore—as a field of scientific inquiry, as a discursive practice, and as a representational strategy—came to play an important role in justifying racial constructions and legitimizing Jim Crow as the new status quo.”  Moody’s assertion can be confirmed by William Wells Newell’s early vision of collecting dying traditions of primitive, savage, and poor Negroes, American Indians, poor Whites, and the Canadian French. Though Newell was less interested in public practice than his counterparts in the Chicago folk society, his views on White supremacy and many other versions of it were well situated in the field.

 Moody’s quote is also very relevant as we look at the public practice and documentation of Black traditions as early folklorists and ethnomusicologists presented Black southern lore and expression. Without even discussing the conflict of academic versus public, and including the progressive scholars at the time, there were still racial implications. John Roberts addresses this topic in Theorizing Folklore, Vol. 52, No. 2/4, Apr. - Oct., 1993, Theorizing Folklore: Toward New Perspectives on the Politics of Culture Volume of the '90. The African American Folklorist collaborates with practitioners and, at the same time, looks to put trained folklorists and ethnomusicologists with people of practice and folk group members to present in scholarly and public spaces the cultural expressions, interactions, and traditions of the people. In the genealogical family tree of Black Scholars in Folklore Studies and Ethnomusicology, Dr. Ebony Bailey states, “As folklorists, we must identify the construction of race and the mechanisms that denigrate, devalue, and dehumanize Blackness.” Taking the baton from Moody, Bailey lays out the creation of the folk—folk meaning "Black Folk" and its racialized suggestions—through the disciplinary discourse. However, Bailey conjures and venerates Du Bios' work as he is the progenitor of the term “Black Folk” in the academic and social arena. I want to thank Dr. Wanda Addison who,  at a breakfast meeting where she, Dr. Anna Wood Lomax, Dr. Marilyn White, and I sat, broke down the meaning of Folk defined by Du Bios and why there is a clear and concise difference between the use of “Black People” and “Black Folk.”

As I stated earlier, I use Black American and African American interchangeably. There are three versions of Black Americans pertaining to the term and title “African American.” 1 - Those who Identify with Africa and that they are descendants of African prisoners of war. 2 - Those who, by default, are classified under the title due to complexion and culture. 3 - Those who do not identify with the term or title but have been re-classified as African American. All who are under the umbrella of African Americans and Black Americans have to look no further, as this is the manifesto for the raising our voice, representation, story, legacy, and repository. Our scholarship is not questioned in OUR space that we share with “other.” You, we, have the final say in how our perspective, language, communication, and expression are shared. I AM BLUES PEOPLE!