Black Movements in America.

Black Movements in America. By Cedric J. Robinson. (New York and London: Routledge, c. 1997. Pp. ii, 179. Paper, $16.99, ISBN 0-415-91222-9.)

Is it possible to cover the four-hundred-year history of African Americans in the New World, to recount that history in a coherent and compelling fashion, to challenge established historical interpretations, and to do it all within 150 pages, without leaving gaping holes for reviewers to swoop down and peck at? Of course not, or so you would think until you read Black Movements in America. Cedric Robinson reaches for the unreachable in this work, and he gets pretty close to grasping it. In constructing his history of mass black political movements Robinson synthesizes some of the finest work on Afro-America, from Edmund S. Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975), which begins the book, through Herbert Aptheker's work on slave rebellions, Leon F. Litwack's North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (Chicago, 1961), Du Bois's book on Reconstruction, to less well known studies that tie African American protests to various movements occurring beyond the United States. At one level this work represents a narrative history to accompany and provide context for Robinson's earlier pathbreaking work on black Marxism.

The focus on black political movements may seem somewhat forced at times--early slave revolts fitting into a kind of movement culture--but it does enable Robinson to describe African Americans as pivotal actors determining the course of American history. By giving blacks agency, Robinson is able to challenge the work of numerous historians. He disputes, for example, Gordon Wood' s famed characterization of the radicalism of the American Revolution, which is founded in an erasure of the issue of slavery and those slaves who opposed the patriots. Robinson also argues that it was black abolitionists, David Walker and Martin Delany in particular, who gave force and direction to the abolitionist movement. He also delineates the central role of African Americans in the Civil War and, in accord with Du Bois's notion of a "General Strike" and contra James MacPherson, among others, what might be considered the African Americans' self-emancipation.

Robinson provides a very clear sense of African Americans' position in the larger Atlantic world. He does this by examining not just the ways in which two twentieth-century world wars helped change the position of blacks in the United States, but also how the Haitian revolution and worldwide anti-colonial movements became transformative events. Given this admirable use of a wide-angled lens to examine American history, however, Robinson's bifurcation of movements into cultures of resistance and accommodation seems a little forced and simplistic. He argues, for example, that the separate cultures of slaves and freed blacks, kept together by the campaign waged against slavery, created "two alternative Black political cultures" in the aftermath of emancipation (p. 96). Yet the complexity of the story Robinson is telling suggests that the methods of protest and accommodation thrown up by these entwined cultures might be used by either group, albeit to varying degrees. Greater attention to gender, status, color, region, and religion--and recognition of a global context in which the United States' growing imperial dominance diverted some African Americans from a sense of identity of interests with Africans and Afro-Caribbeans--might have led Robinson to an attempt to transcend this cultural dualism.

Despite this caveat, Black Movements in America ought to appeal to a wide audience. Some historians may object to Robinson's interpretation, but the fact that the work provides an accessible and polemical synthesis may contribute to its appeal as a classroom text. The book's particular strength may be that it forces the reader to make some kind of response, to think critically about the author's underlying politics and, by extension, those of all other historians also.

ROBERT GREGG Richard Stockton College of New Jersey