Sambo's demise

"pathology" rationale: the structural impetus toward black unemployment that has long plagued the U.S. economy. Contrary to Moynihan's pompous suggestion, blacks can hardly thank "the healing powers of the democratic ideal and the creative vitality of the Negro people" for any success they have gained in the past 15 years. Rather the Gutman book testifies that creativity prospered long ago in the "living space" provided by antibellum slavery. It may have been after slavery that blacks had to struggle to keep that adaptive spark alive as doors to Northern skills and skilled jobs slammed shut. An "unidentified 38-year-old black man" summed up the trouble in 1965:

No one with a mop can expect respect from a banker, or an attorney, or men who create jobs, and all you have is a mop. Are you crazy? Whoever heard of integration between a mop and a banker?

As "Black is Beautiful" became a black community byword in the late '60s, advocates of black pride began to hunt for "useable history"--evidence for a cultural asset in black roots. Gutman's thesis, to be followed by one on black urban life after 1960, furnishes blacks with a sympathetic and un-patronizing, if non-radical model of their heritage. "Kinship ties" and generational memory may go a long way toward explaining how blacks fell together during the early Civil Rights Movements. And "fictive" kin adoption may shed light on why black children in the North still grow up knowing any number of "uncles" and "aunties" who belong to the outer reaches of their kinship network or are not among their blood relatives at all. To forge these links slaves may have been obliged to lay low for a century--the Gutman report obviously places family concern above class militancy--but the life that slaves made on the sly can now bolster faith in black cultural courage, resilience and craftiness. Exslave Robert Smalls undermined the acuity of "assimilation" theories back in 1863 when he told a white interviewer, "No sir, one life they show the masters and another they don't."

"I am not ashamed of my grandparents for being slaves," Ralph Ellison once wrote. "I am only ashamed for having at one time been ashamed." For all its cumbersomeness and speculative weak spots, Herbert Gutman's study has pried open an exit from black historical shame. Regardless of the later trials of Northern unemployment and additional problems that further study will undoubtedly point out, the message for slave history seems clear. The Sambo stereotype will just have to shuffle on out.