Reformation
of Black Identity in Young, Walker and Douglas
(abstract)
Many themes run throughout African American literature during the first-half of the nineteenth century, uniting what are in many ways disparate narratives. In three different decades, Robert Alexander Young, David Walker, and Frederick Douglass each address the issue of race identity in antebellum America. Within their respective texts, the reformation of a free white man—from recognizing oppressed African Americans as mere brutes to acknowledging their existence as human beings—results in several different, yet inter-related modes of action. In the “Ethiopian Manifesto”, Young uses such self-reformation as a route to repentance and, consequently, salvation from an angry God of justice. In his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, Walker employs it not only as a means towards the repentance of and salvation for those who unjustly oppress others, but also as a driving force behind the amelioration of race relations in antebellum America. Over twenty years after Young and Walker, Douglas similarly incorporates the theme of self-reformation in “The Heroic Slave” in order to create a benevolent relationship between a white and a black character. In each author’s text, the recognition of Africans as men and not brutes stimulates some sort of action. Without the acknowledgement of African Americans as human beings, those contributing to the oppression of others in Young’s “Manifesto” and Walker’s Appeal are damned, and race relations in the latter as well as Douglass’ “The Heroic Slave” perhaps doomed. Self-reformation of the oppressors’ understanding of black identity ultimately serves as an integral catalyst that moves the texts away from such dreadful conclusions and provides hope for those who wrongfully bind the chains of oppression.
In the nineteenth century, many people believed that African Americans were not only inferior to whites but, furthermore, of a different species altogether. As Sterling Stuckey notes in his essay, “David Walker: African Rights and Liberty”, racist beliefs continued to pervade both Northern and Southern states during the first half of the century in which Young, Walker and Douglass write their texts. Even though many Northern states had granted varying degrees of freedom to people of African descent, “there, too, blacks were considered a breed apart, inferior” (118). Throughout America, thinking of African Americans as inferior to whites perhaps justified their oppression. Regardless of such possible explanations, the identity of blacks as perceived by their oppressors undoubtedly had many effects on antebellum America: “In striving to counter racist charges of inferiority, early Afro-American authors understandably sought to shape their portrayal of black male heroes in accord with middle-class definitions of masculinity” (Yarborough, 168). Consequently, the reformation of whites’ opinions of blacks works as a motivating narrative device in Young, Walker and Douglass’ texts.
