Transponder Alpha 200600i01
===start here===[PANG says:]
....Worth looking at....
http://www.inmotionaame.org/home.cfm;jsessionid=80301172401136182832468?bhcp=1
PANGosaurus~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~cyber-Cogito ergo cyber-Sum~~
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The African-American Migration Experience
New societies, new peoples, and new communities usually originate in
acts of migration. Someone or ones decide to move from one place to
another. They choose a new destination and sever their ties with
their traditional community or society as they set out in search of
new op****tunities, new challenges, new lives, and new life worlds.
Most societies in human history have a migration narrative in their
stories of origin. All communities in American society trace their
origins in the United States to one or more migration experiences.
America, after all, is "a nation of immigrants."
But until recently, people of African descent have not been counted
as part of America's migratory tradition. The transatlantic slave
trade has created an enduring image of black men and women as
trans****ted commodities, and is usually considered the most defining
element in the construction of the African Dias****a, but it is
centuries of additional movements that have given shape to the nation
we know today. This is the story that has not been told.
In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience presents a new
interpretation of African-American history, one that focuses on the
self-motivated activities of peoples of African descent to remake
themselves and their worlds. Of the thirteen defining migrations that
formed and transformed African America, only the transatlantic slave
trade and the domestic slave trades were coerced, the eleven others
were voluntary movements of resourceful and creative men and women,
risk-takers in an exploitative and hostile environment. Their
survival skills, efficient networks, and dynamic culture enabled them
to thrive and spread, and to be at the very core of the settlement
and development of the Americas. Their hopeful journeys changed not
only their world and the fabric of the African Dias****a but also the
Western Hemisphere.
These journeys did not originate in the east with the 1619 arrival of
Africans in Jamestown, Virginia, as is commonly believed, but almost
a century earlier, further south. Indeed, African-American history
starts in the 1500s with the first Africans coming from Mexico and
the Caribbean to the Spanish territories of Florida, Texas, and other
parts of the South. And as early as 1526, Africans rebelled and ran
away in South Carolina.
[PANG: Note that Estevánico, one of the three companions of the
Spaniard Alvar Núńez Cabeza de Vaca during his (and theirs) almost 6
000 miles across what is now the United States, from the Atlantic
coast to the Pacific coast (1542) was the first black man to cross
our country even before it existed as such.
These precursors were followed by successive generations of runaways
who did not confine themselves to running North and to Canada on the
Underground Railroad as traditional history teaches us. With
pragmatism and efficiency, they also moved south to Mexico, or took
their canoes to the Bahamas. They left the plantations and settled,
secretly, in the urban centers of the South or found refuge in the
swamps and among Native populations.
The new interpretation of African-American history that we present
here also puts the Caribbean, Haitian, and contem****ary African
immigrations into the unfolding of the African-American migration
experience. Peoples of the African Dias****a have contributed
immensely to the fabric of African America and the nation. They too,
with their specificities, are part of the African-American
experience. Whether they came from Saint Domingue in 1791 and settled
in Louisiana, left the Bahamas in the nineteenth century to develop
Miami and Key West, Florida, or recently moved from Nigeria to Texas.
Migration has been central in the making of African-American history
and culture and in the total American experience. The transatlantic
slave trade was fundamental to the development of the colonial
economy; and after the War of Independence, the domestic slave trade
was the engine that enabled the expansion of the cotton economy not
only within the United States but also, through trade, to the
international scene. In the twentieth century, black migrations from
the South were crucial to America's urban industrial development.
They transformed a southern, rural population into a national, urban
one, and the black presence throughout the country has influenced
American legal systems as well as social and cultural policies and
practices.
In addition, the cultures of black migrants from the South, the
Caribbean, Haiti, and Africa have had an extraordinary impact on
American arts and culture.
In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience underscores and
explains the extraordinary diversity of African Americans living in
the United States today. For the first time in history all the
components of the African Dias****a are gathered together. The United
States is the only place, the present time the only time. African
Americans, Africans, Afro-Caribbeans, Central Americans and South
Americans of African descent, as well as Africans and Afro-Caribbeans
born in Europe live side by side, each group bringing its
specificities, culture, and sense of identity. The ethnic and
cultural diversity of the black population has never been greater,
and richer. And it is all part of the African-American migration
experience. This site gives the op****tunity to African descended
peoples to trace their own histories and the histories of the other
groups that form the African Dias****a. It is a resource for
discovering their common and not-so-common histories and exploring
future possibilities.
It is an invitation to every person of African descent in the United
States to revisit their and their families' migrations histories, to
determine their roles in the making of African-American and American
history. This site does not enable users to trace their genealogy,
but it provides context for fa****oning family histories, and
background for understanding the unique histories and contributions
of immigrants from Africa, Haiti, and the Caribbean.
Today's 35 million African Americans are heirs to all the migrations
that have formed and transformed African America, the United States,
and the Western Hemisphere. They are the offspring of diverse African
ethnicities who also include in their genetic makeup Europeans,
Native Americans, and Asians. They represent the most diverse
population in the United States, a population that has embraced its
varied heritages created by millions of men and women constantly on
the move, looking for better op****tunities, starting over, paving the
way, and making sacrifices for future generations.
The face of African America now looks like a New Yorker in Atlanta, a
Mississippian in Chicago, a Nigerian in Houston, and a Haitian in
Miami. From coast to coast, north to south, the interaction between
peoples of varied backgrounds, cultures, languages, religions, and
migratory experience has produced a unique population whose
expression, music, food, institutions, styles, clothes, literature,
arts, and sense of identity all reflect the fertile diversity brought
about by centuries of African-American migrations.
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