In Retrospect
George Rawick's _From Sundown to Sunup_ and the Dialectic of Marxian Slave Studies
Alex Lichtenstein
In 1964, on leave from Wayne State University's Monteith College, George Rawick traveled to London to acquaint himself with the West Indian Marxist and author of _The Black Jacobins_ (1938), C. L. R. James. At the time, James was the mentor-in-exile for a small nucleus of Detroit ex-Trotskyites who called themselves the "Facing Reality" committee. Rawick, having gravitated toward this sect when he moved to the Motor City, sought out the man who remained its theoretical and political inspiration a decade after his deportation from the United States. In London, James asked Rawick to give an impromptu lecture on American history to a small audience in his living room. When Rawick finished speaking, James simply asked "What do you know about the slaves' reaction to slavery." "Not a hell of a lot," Rawick admitted, feebly citing Benjamin Botkin's collection of Federal Writers Project (FWP) interviews done with ex-slaves during the late 1930s, Lay My Burden Down (1945). "Why don't you look at those," James suggested. 1
Out of this encounter grew Rawick's monumental documentary project, for which he is justly celebrated, the forty-one-volume _The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography_ (1972-1979, published in three installments), which eventually made all the FWP interviews with former slaves readily available to scholars and students. The historical profession's belated willingness to take the testimony of former slaves as seriously as the documentary record left by the slaveholders helped revolutionize the study of slavery during the 1970s. Both the great insights afforded by the interviews themselves, as well as their well-documented flaws, are worthy of a separate essay and will not receive consideration here. Instead, I want to direct attention to the significance of Rawick's own neglected monographic contribution to the historiographic transformations in the study of race and slavery, _From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community_, which appeared as volume 1 of _The American Slave_ in 1972. 2
Intended both as "a substantive essay on slavery" (p. 163) and an introductory companion to the published FWP interviews, _From Sundown to Sunup_ sketched in eight brief chapters a sweeping history of American slavery and racism. In Part 1 of the book, "The Sociology of Slavery in the United States," Rawick focused on the African background of the slaves, slave religion, the slave family, the treatment of slaves by their masters, and slave resistance. In a very brief second part of the book, "The Sociology of European and American Racism," he shifted somewhat incongruously to a complex discussion of the historical relationship between slavery and racism in the New World....
[In the] programmatic statement written for the Socialist Workers' party in 1948 ["The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the USA"], James claimed that "the independent Negro struggle [for democratic rights] has a vitality and a validity of its own" that socialist revolutionaries should not subordinate to the class struggle. Furthermore, James insisted, the black struggle had "deep historic roots" and "an organic political perspective" which could be traced to the resistance against slavery, black abolitionism, and black participation in the Civil War. 7
This privileging of black liberation represented a powerful synthesis of black nationalist, anticolonialist, and socialist thought that sat somewhat uneasily within the Trotskyist movement. By the early 1950s James and his followers (the Johnson-Forest Tendency) had fused this perspective on the "Negro question" with an almost syndicalist faith in the revolutionary capacity of the rank and file working class, rejecting outright the classic Marxist-Leninist need for a vanguard party. Naturally enough this precipitated their exit from the Trotskyist camp. The crystallization in James's thought of the foregrounding of the autonomy of black struggle and the belief in the radical potential of working-class "self-activity," as it came to be called, proved immensely appealing to Rawick and a subsequent generation of New Leftists. 8
The importance of this history of Marxian doctrinal disputes to Rawick's later work becomes clear when one examines his contributions to left-wing publications during the 1960s. In three obscure articles published in socialist journals of politics and culture between 1964 and 1968, Rawick developed the ideas that would take shape as _From Sundown to Sunup_. First, the insistence, derived from James, that a black liberation movement "objectively" pushed forward the class struggle; second, the recognition that African Americans drew on their unique historical experience, their own cultural "tools," in conducting this struggle; and third, Rawick's vigorous dissent from both Stanley Elkins's account of slaves as abject victims and the communist historiography of slavery dominated by the figure of Herbert Aptheker. 9
Shortly after his visit with James in London, Rawick published an article on the American civil rights movement in the British Marxist journal, _International Socialism_. In it, he proclaimed the emerging black movement the "vanguard of the forces of an emerging new society," which drew on a unique set of cultural and political weapons "forged under slavery and segregation." Implicitly attacking the Elkins thesis, Rawick noted that "under slavery, the American Negro instead of becoming a brutalised and infantilized creature . . . built a community and culture out of the remnants of the African past and out of the American experience." He directly referred to the FWP interviews he had discussed with James. "It was out of the life and the community portrayed in the Slave Narrative Collection that the modern Negro community grew and it is within the traditions of that experience that the present Negro movement takes place," Rawick concluded. 10
By the late 1960s Rawick understood the failure of historians to utilize the ex-slave interviews as "a telling commentary about American racism." For Rawick, this raw material inspired the dismissal of the idea of an "infantilized" and dysfunctional black identity. As did many historians of his generation, Rawick began the decade profoundly receptive to Elkins's argument about the destructiveness of slavery to the slave personality. In _Sundown_, he confessed in a footnote that he had once begun a lecture on slavery by claiming that "the worst thing about slavery was that it produced slavish personalities" (p. 54). Elkins's work had at first provided the sectarian Left with a rationale for the failure of African Americans to become revolutionaries; consequently, for Rawick, rejecting the vanguard role of white radicals meant overturning the Elkins thesis. As early as 1961, Rawick wrote to his former adviser, Merle Curti, that he found Elkins's book, _Slavery_, "brilliant, perverse, wrong-headed, and wrong." By 1968, exploring the roots of Black Power in the pages of SDS's Radical America, Rawick firmly rejected the "theory of the slave and his descendants as Victim" and saw in Elkins and the social science that followed in his wake (most notably the Moynihan Report on the "chaos" of the black family) a "conservative defense of existing social relations." 11
If Elkins offered Rawick no conceptual means of grasping the historical sources of the autonomy of the black liberation struggle, communist historian Herbert Aptheker's search for a heroic tradition of revolutionary resistance to enslavement, for which Nat Turner was the quintessential example, represented an uninviting alternative. Aptheker, Rawick felt, "overemphasized the bloody conflicts" as "the only events ultimately worthy of a revolutionary historiography" and foolishly "portrayed black slaves as virtually always on the barricades." With a clever nod to Elkins, Rawick suggested in _Sundown_ that blind rebellion in the face of the prohibitive circumstances of North American slavery would indeed "have been child-like behavior" (pp. 74-75). 12
Between Sambo and Nat, however, lay an entire spectrum of slave behavior, culture, and personality that could "be related to a revolutionary theory and practice," according to Rawick. Although Aptheker's left-wing infantilism was preferable to Elkins's victimology, in Rawick's view the communist historiography "ignores or misinterprets the day-by-day, nonheroic, but potent ways in which the slaves built their community and defenses against the slave system and prepared the way for their own emancipation." This critique of Aptheker, and by extension of the long history of the CP's approach to the "Negro question," grew out of a conception of working-class "self-activity" that C. L. R. James and his followers counterpoised to the need for a revolutionary party to raise the consciousness of the industrial working class. Indeed, the analogy with working-class social movements was never far from Rawick's mind, and he coupled it with a critique of the American CP's idealized version of a highly conscious revolutionary American proletariat. The very term "self-activity," though initially derived from Hegel's well-known formulation of the master-slave relation in _The Phenomenology of Mind_, was initially applied by James, Rawick, and the Facing Reality group to the everyday forms of resistance practiced by the industrial proletariat. Here the wildcat strike, the slow-down, the ceaseless unorganized braking of the exploitation of capital on the factory floor came to represent revolutionary activity and, indeed, the path to revolutionary consciousness. So too, for Rawick, the slave "self-activity" found in religion, culture, the family, and the forging of a community, became the arena of credible, realistic, and relentless opposition to slavery. 13 ...
In addition to his contribution to a black nationalist paradigm of slave history and to his fruitful dialogue with Genovese, Rawick's book also opened up two other avenues of research that have had a major impact on the recent study of American race relations. Although he devoted but a few pages to abolitionism, Rawick attempted to resurrect the view once associated with James and DuBois that "the abolitionist movement was essentially a product of the black community" (p. 111) and that black self-liberation remained the key to grasping the central meaning of the Civil War and Reconstruction. As with his interpretation of slave culture, Rawick's perspective on abolitionism represented an oblique rejection of both Elkins and Aptheker. The former had scornfully dismissed the abolitionists in Slavery as ineffectual, indeed counterproductive, a position with which Rawick took issue. Yet, unlike Aptheker, Rawick refused to see blacks as a mere adjunct to a heroic white abolitionist tradition. Here again the work of James appears decisive in shaping Rawick's approach. In a penetrating 1949 essay, "Stalinism and Negro History," James had excoriated Aptheker for portraying black abolitionist organizations as having "no politics of their own" and serving only to "corral Negroes and bring them into the popular front coalition" with white abolitionists. James concluded that "any history of the Civil War which does not base itself upon the Negroes, slave and free, as the subject and not the object of politics, is ipso facto a Jim Crow history." 22
No doubt this critique of the "Stalinist" history of abolitionism provided the inspiration for Rawick's assertions in _Sundown_ that "abolitionism was at all times dominated by Afro-American freedmen, not by whites" (p. 111), and "the Civil War represents at its fullest the emergence of black Americans playing leading roles in the development of American society" (p. 116). Typically, for Rawick these remained assertions, since he presented no evidence from the interviews or elsewhere to support his exaggerated restatement of DuBois and James. Two of the most important recent documentary projects in African-American history, the Freedmen and Southern Society project and the Black Abolitionist papers, have subsequently provided massive documentation placing African Americans at the center of both emancipation and abolitionism, and lend provisional support to views that may have appeared extreme when articulated by Rawick in 1972. 23
A similar dynamic of unsupported generalization that nevertheless sparked groundbreaking research can be found in Rawick's concluding chapters on the history of racism and its relationship to the development of capitalism and the American working class. In Rawick's view, capitalism required a complete reordering of the human personality to bring it into accord with the alienation of human labor. Eighteenth-century capitalism not only was the wellspring of the commodification of labor, but also of American racism. The European who accommodated himself to the new relationships of a capitalist society "met the West African as a reformed sinner meets a comrade of his previous debaucheries" (p. 132), Rawick wrote. In glimpsing in African work patterns, precapitalist social relations, and "nonrepressive" attitudes about sexuality the shadows of their former selves, Europeans sought to "deny that about themselves which they wanted to abjure" (p. 133). An entire ideology of racial difference and white supremacy grew from this effort to distinguish themselves from this "other," as we might say today. 24
This insight has worked its way into some of the most interesting and controversial scholarship in recent years: the study of the history of "whiteness." In brief, historians of the white working class have begun to explore how the longing for a different self, supposedly visible in black culture, has been transmuted into loathing, whether in racial politics, widespread assumptions about black "laziness," critiques of "wage slavery," or cultural forms such as blackface minstrelsy. As David Roediger puts it in The _Wages of Whiteness_ (1991), "blackness came to symbolize that which the accumulating capitalist had given up, but still longed for. . . . all of the old habits so recently discarded by whites adopting capitalist values came to be fastened on blacks" (p. 95). For Rawick and his followers this formulation contained within it the consequent recognition that antiracism must be the key to the "self-emancipation of the working class." If racism and the validation of "free labor" sprang together from a common set of historical circumstances, breaking this dyad becomes the precondition for any transformative social movement in the United States. 25
Such a view, obviously associated with the legacy of James, found its most influential expression in the embrace of black nationalism characteristic of late sixties romantic revolutionism. The post-1968 partisans of black labor radicalism believed that the autonomous and vanguard struggle of the black working class--perhaps most evident in the development of a black consciousness movement inside Detroit's auto plants--would generate a complementary class-consciousness among white workers. Full revolutionary class-consciousness among whites would, in turn, require their own abandonment of race-consciousness--the "abolition of whiteness," in David Roediger's words. Indeed, Rawick concluded _Sundown_ with the suggestion that the "mass disaffection from the values and behaviors of older America" associated with the counterculture "has taken much of its cultural apparatus from the black community" (p. 158). Whatever the status of this dialectical relationship between black nationalism and New Left syndicalism as politics today, Rawick's claim that "the pressure of blacks for equality intensifies all social conflicts in the U.S." (p. 159) remains a useful paradigm for assessing the connection between race and class in working-class history and culture.
...[T]he impact of Rawick's work derives from a key legacy that he shares with C. L. R. James: the opening up of popular and mass culture as an area of American Marxist historical inquiry and a window onto the everyday consciousness of the working class. As James biographer Paul Buhle has remarked, "James identified the black worker as the key to working-class mobilization and self-understanding," but in his studies of popular culture, he also "offered a picture of culture . . . [that was] equivalent to the working-class economic-social struggle for self-organization and for self-transformation." Robin Kelley, a young scholar of African-American culture and politics working very much in the veins initially mined by Rawick, notes in his introduction to a new edition of James's _A History of Pan-African Revolt_ (1995), that "what is unique is James's claim that revolutionary mass movements take forms that are often cultural and religious rather than explicitly political" (p. 15). When applied to African and African-American history, this insight reveals the "revolutionary potential of Black nationalism" (p. 17). Rawick's achievement was to take this conception and trace black culture back to "the inner life of the slaves." 26...
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