1619, and the contradiction at the founding
In August 1619 an English privateer landed some twenty captive Africans at Point Comfort in Virginia. It was not the first arrival of Africans in the Americas — that had begun a century earlier under the Spanish — but it is the moment American memory returns to, and in 2019 Ghana built the Year of Return around its four-hundredth anniversary.
By the time thirteen colonies declared independence in 1776, chattel slavery was the legal foundation of the southern economy and written into the constitution of 1787 by evasion: the three-fifths clause, and a twenty-year protection for the slave trade. The men who wrote that all men are created equal owned people as they wrote it. The Civil War of 1861 to 1865 was fought over whether that could continue. Roughly 750,000 died, and the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery in 1865.
Reconstruction, its defeat, and the long migration
For a brief decade after the war, Black men voted and held office across the South. Reconstruction was then dismantled by terror and by a political bargain in 1877 that withdrew federal troops. What followed was Jim Crow — segregation enforced by law and by lynching — and it lasted into the 1960s.
Between roughly 1916 and 1970 some six million Black Americans left the rural South for the cities of the North and West. The Great Migration remade Chicago, Detroit and New York, and in Harlem it produced a flowering of literature, music and thought — the Harlem Renaissance — whose reach was Atlantic. It was in this world that W. E. B. Du Bois worked; he renounced his American citizenship, moved to Accra at Kwame Nkrumah's invitation, and died there in 1963. He is buried in Accra, on the eve of the March on Washington.
The movement, and what it did and did not win
The civil rights movement dismantled legal segregation in a decade of organising: the Montgomery bus boycott from 1955, the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, Birmingham, the March on Washington in 1963, Selma in 1965. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were the result. Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968; Malcolm X in 1965.
The laws changed faster than the conditions. The wealth gap, the prison population and residential segregation all outlasted the statutes, and the movement that took the name Black Lives Matter after 2013 was in part an argument that the unfinished business was structural, not attitudinal. In 2008 the country elected Barack Obama, the son of a Kenyan father — a first that settled less than it seemed to.
A newer diaspora
The African-American story is old. The African-immigrant story is new. Large-scale voluntary migration from the continent is mostly a phenomenon of the last fifty years, and Ghanaian, Nigerian and Ethiopian communities are now among the most educated immigrant groups in the country by measured attainment. The remittances they send home are, for several African economies, larger and steadier than foreign aid.
For Ananse these are not two separate audiences. The reader in Bronx or Houston whose parents left Kumasi in the 1990s, and the reader whose ancestors were carried through Cape Coast Castle four centuries ago, are reading the same paper.