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NY Times, Aug. 29, 2018
Sterling Stuckey, 86, Dies; Charted African Culture in Slavery
By Sam Roberts
Sterling Stuckey, an eminent black historian who challenged his white
colleagues by documenting how uprooted Africans not only retained their
culture while they survived slavery but eventually suffused the rest of
American society with their transplanted folkways, died on Aug. 15 in
Riverside, Calif. He was 86.
His death was confirmed by his wife, Harriette Stuckey, who said he had
a stroke nine days earlier in his office. He taught history at the
University of California, Riverside, from 1989 until he retired in 2004.
He had recently finished the manuscript of his latest book, “The
Chambers of the Soul: Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville and the Blues.”
Through meticulous research, Professor Stuckey sought to discredit the
white academics who had dominated and, in his view, devalued the field
of African studies.
Early on he was bitterly critical of “numerous white experts on black
Africa,” as he described them, who “have elaborated a fabric of untruths
to rationalize continued white control over African studies.”
Beginning with his breakthrough essay, “Through the Prism of Folklore:
The Black Ethos in Slavery,” published in 1968 by The Massachusetts
Review, Professor Stuckey maintained that political and cultural studies
of Africa must encompass people in North America and the West Indies.
He wrote that enslaved workers imported to those places from diverse
tribes, with slavery as a unifying force, perpetuated and adapted their
traditional music, dance, poetry and art to resist the efforts of
slaveowners to destroy or demean that heritage, and that those
traditions went on to imbue modern American culture.
That overlooked cultural history was evolving, he said, while in
colleges as well as in the cotton fields “the besmirching of the African
past” became pivotal to the process not only of enslaving blacks but of
destroying their spiritual and psychological moorings.
“His article stood out as the harbinger of the new slavery studies that
would be taken up in the next decade,” Prof. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham,
chairwoman of Harvard’s history department and president of the
Association for the Study of African American Life and History, said in
a statement after Professor Stuckey’s death.
In 1970, when “Through the Prism of Folklore” was included in an
anthology of essays, Julius Lester, an author and professor, wrote in
The New York Times Book Review that Professor Stuckey had methodically
made the case that in the long years of slavery the black spiritual —
among other cultural tools, like the ring shout dance — “was a major
weapon of resistance to that dehumanizing institution (which others have
found only ‘peculiar’) and the principal means through which the slaves
fashioned and maintained an identity separate from that which the
slaveholders fought to impose upon them.”
Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the Hutchins Center for African
and African American Research at Harvard, said in an email that
Professor Stuckey had “helped us to see that the enslaved Africans who
came to the New World did not sail alone: They brought their various
cultures and belief systems along with them.”
“And out of these rich resources,” he added, “they, in contact with
dozens of other African and European cultures for the first time,
improvised the world’s first truly Pan-African culture, an African
American culture, as it were, in the New World, similar in form to that
of its several antecedents, but different, unique. And that is the
culture to which all Americans are heir today.”
Professor Stuckey’s black nationalist ideology jelled as a student at
Northwestern University. He met Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois,
picketed a Woolworth’s store in Chicago to protest segregation in the
South, and supported a voter registration project in Tennessee sponsored
by the interracial Congress of Racial Equality.
He often praised champions of black nationalism. “Each proposed to build
on this nationalism as a means to end prejudice, though none saw it as
an ultimate goal,” he wrote, adding the caveat that “one by no means
must be a separatist to be a black nationalist.”
Eric Foner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning history professor at Columbia
University, said in an email that Professor Stuckey, along with several
other historians, “was a pioneer of the study of slave culture and how
it became the springboard for slave resistance and for later black
nationalism.”
Professor Stuckey’s books included “Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory
and the Foundations of Black America” (1987) and “Going Through the
Storm: The Influence of African American Art in History” (1994).
Ples Sterling Stuckey Jr. was born on March 2, 1932, in Memphis. His
mother, Elma Earline Johnson Stuckey, had been a teacher in the South
and a hat checker and a maid in Chicago before becoming a supervisor for
the Illinois labor department. After retiring, she published her first
poetry collection when she was 69.
His father had been a waiter at the historic Peabody Hotel in Memphis
before moving the family to Chicago when the couple’s son was 13.
Professor Stuckey worked part-time as a high school teacher and postal
clerk while earning his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from
Northwestern. He joined its faculty in 1971 and became a full professor
in 1977.
He left for the University of California, Riverside, in 1989 and, most
recently, was distinguished professor emeritus of history there.
In addition to his wife, who was Harriette Coggs before they married, he
is survived by a daughter, Lisa Dembling; a son, Cabral Wiley-Stuckey; a
granddaughter; and a great-granddaughter.
Professor Stuckey once said in an interview that while growing up he was
most inspired by two books, Du Bois’s “The Souls of Black Folk" (1903)
and “Folk Songs of North America” (1960), by the ethnomusicologist Alan
Lomax.
Transplanted blacks who suffered under slavery, he said, were united by
a centripetal force, which inspired Pan-Africanism, spirituals and the
blues.
“Though slave culture was treated for centuries as inferior, it was the
lasting contribution of slaves to create an artistic yield that matched
their enormous gift of labor, in tobacco and cotton,” Professor Stuckey
wrote in his preface to the 25th anniversary edition of “Slave Culture”
(2013). “We must add that the intellectual as well as the cultural and
economic history of the African American is rooted in slavery.”
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