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    From David Walker to Barack Obama: Ethiopianists as Keepers of the African Dream
    From David Walker to Barack Obama: Ethiopianists as Keepers of the African Dream
    From David Walker to Barack Obama: Ethiopianists as Keepers of the African Dream
    Ebook152 pages1 hour

    From David Walker to Barack Obama: Ethiopianists as Keepers of the African Dream

    By Emma S. Etuk PhD

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    About this ebook

    In FROM DAVID WALKER TO BARACK OBAMA, Dr. Emma S. Etuk contends that well-known Ethiopianists have o?ered the inspiration for black freedom and must not be forgotten.

    Ethiopianists and Ethiopianism have little or nothing to do with the government or the country known today as Ethiopia in East Africa. Ethiopianists shared the common belief, hope, and faith in Africa as the land of their ancestors to which, by the grace of God, they would return as free people. They based their hope and faith in Africa upon a biblical text found in Psalm 68:31: Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God. Ethiopianism was the ideology, and Ethiopianists were the apostles of the ideology.

    In this study, Etuk o?ers studies of well-known Ethiopianists W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Edward Blyden, Henry Garnet, Alexander Crummell, Bishop Henry Turner, Martin R. Delany, David Walker, and Frances E. W. Harper, the famed African American poet. Etuk, a professional historian, resurrects these names with a new perspective and argues that these men and women were the keepers of the African Dream. He provides an exhaustive record of their speeches, writings, and actions to provide a solid foundation for his thesis that Ethiopianists are the keepers of the African Dream.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisheriUniverse
    Release dateMay 24, 2011
    ISBN9781462014187
    From David Walker to Barack Obama: Ethiopianists as Keepers of the African Dream
    Author

    Emma S. Etuk PhD

    EMMA SAMUEL ETUK is a bestselling and award-winning author, international motivational speaker, and professional historian. He is also president of Emida International Publishers. He earned a PhD in United States history from Howard University in Washington, DC. Etuk lives in Maryland; this is his fourteenth book.

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      Book preview

      From David Walker to Barack Obama - Emma S. Etuk PhD

      Contents

      Acknowledgments

      Foreword

      CHAPTER ONE

      Who Were The Ethiopianists?

      CHAPTER TWO

      Ethiopianists And Africa: Walker & Delany

      CHAPTER THREE

      Ethiopianists And Africa: Garnet & Crummell

      CHAPTER FOUR

      Ethiopianists And Africa: Blyden & Turner

      CHAPTER FIVE

      Ethiopianists And Africa: W. E. B. Du Bois

      CHAPTER SIX

      Ethiopianists And Africa: Marcus Garvey

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      Ethiopianists And Africa: Frances E. W. Harper

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      Message Of The Ethiopianists

      CHAPTER NINE

      Ethiopianists And Africanity

      CHAPTER TEN

      Conclusion: Keepers Of The Dream

      Notes:

      Selected Bibliography

      About the Author

      ADVANCE Praise for the Book

      Dr. Emma S. Etuk’s From David Walker to Barack Obama: Ethiopianists as keepers of the African Dream is a welcome addition to the academic bookshelf. In this careful scholarly analysis, Dr. Etuk thoroughly documents the rise and growth of Ethiopianism, a history-centered prophetic movement asserting that the people of the black race will someday be free from slavery, economic exploitation, and global domination.

      That this message of hope and faith occurred long before Dr. Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech and was integral to later anti-colonial and African nationalist movements is enlightening. That it originated in the United States is instructive.

      Dr. Etuk expertly weaves this inspiring history through the lives of proponents, including Frances E. W. Harper, David Walker, Martin Robinson Delany, Henry Highland Garnet, Alexander Crummell, Edward Wilmot Blyden, Henry McNeal Turner, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Marcus Garvey.

      I enthusiastically recommend this interesting and informative book to scholar and student alike.

      — Dr. David A. Rausch,

      author, professor and lecturer.

      In his provocative book, Dr. Etuk, a literary tour-de-force, has explored the message of hope and faith handed down by the Ethiopianists. Rich in detail and thoroughly written, this book is certain to be an inspiration to all those of the African diaspora.

      — Dr. Alyson L. Hall,

      President,

      The Glacoma Center, P.C.

      Bowie, Maryland.

      A message of hope carefully presented through an intricate narrative of the accomplishments of people of African descent.

      A compulsory reading for all.

      — John O. Davies-Cole, Ph.D.

      MPH, Public Health Practitioner.

      Another riveting account of the rich African history by Dr. Etuk . The school of thought so strongly highlighted in this book challenges one’s thought process, revealing the prophetic mandate placed upon people of African descent and the[ir] challenges. Again, a must read for the African scholar and young Africans both in the Diaspora and at home.

      — Clarissa Kayosa Segun,

      The Solid Rock Foundation.

      This book is dedicated to

      President Barack H. Obama

      of the United States of America

      and his revolutionary team.

      May Africa experience the kind

      of change that we can believe in.

      Acknowledgments

      As always first, I wish to thank my God from whom all blessings flow, for the gift of life without which nothing is achievable. I thank Him for the good health which has sustained me in the pursuit of knowledge acquisition. I owe all that I am to Him.

      The idea for a work on Ethiopianism was made available to me in 2003 by a precious friend and colleague, Dr. Alem Hailu, who teaches in the African Studies Department at Howard University, Washington, D.C. He had asked me to contribute a paper for presentation at an annual meeting of a historical Association.

      I chose the topic, Replenishing the Dream: Revitalizing the Hopes, Ideals, and Heritages of Ethiopianism. Although circumstances prevented the paper from being presented, I found the subject quite interesting and delved further into it. Dr. Hailu deserves my sincere thanks and appreciation.

      Many who have read my books have found the name of Professor Sulayman Nyang associated with them and I wish to thank him for his mentorship, encouragement and keen interest in what I do. Such friendships are rare in today’s busy world. I thank you very much Dr. Nyang for your continuous assistance and encouragement. The world needs more of your type.

      When I first completed the draft of this book, Dr. Alyson Hall, of the The Glacoma Center in Prince George’s County, was the first to volunteer to write me a blurb, in spite of her very busy schedule. Then came along Dr. David A. Rausch, my former History professor at Ashland University, Ashland Ohio, and Dr. J. Davies-Cole, my fellow member at Church of the Living God. I thank you all for sharing your views on this subject.

      Recently, I have had the good fortune of working with one of the most hard-working women that I know, Dr. Maggie Sizer, the Dean of Academic Affairs at the Arlington Campus of Strayer University, in Virginia. She is also responsible for the suggestion that I include a woman among the list of Ethiopianists in order to balance the gender aspect of the book. Dean Sizer, I thank you for your interest and favor.

      Finally, I must thank all my readers worldwide who buy my books, now numbering fourteen, and who share in the dissemination of ideas and knowledge in our world. You are very important to me since I cannot travel to all the nooks and corners of this world to spread my ideas. And, in particular, to all of you who love the field of intellectual history and who will include this text as teaching material in your classrooms, I thank you in advance.

      Foreword

      Ethiopianism is a term that captures a variety of ideas on black unity and history in the minds of black intellectuals working in the field of ideas and identities among human groups.

      [Ethiopianism] had its Western counterpart [among those] who created a number of concepts to help the European peoples battle their way out of the thick forest of concepts, ideas, experiences and intellectual and political predicaments growing from their encounters with the ancient peoples; and most significantly, with respect to their encounter and relationship with the Greeks, the Romans and the Muslim World.

      [European] ideas of renaissance, enlightenment and reformation grew out of these intellectual undertakings of their men of letters and thought since the beginnings of the post-medieval period. One cannot talk about Ethiopianism unless one pays close attention to the impact of the Bible and the Quran on the African Mind. These two texts grew out of the Hebrew Bible known as the Torah to Jews in the modern world.

      The stories about the ancient Ethiopians and the numerous narratives about their activities are highly valued in the sermons of black preachers in the Old and New Worlds. For example, during the days of slavery the abolitionist campaign drew heavily from these scriptures and they served as sources of inspiration to blacks yearning for freedom and new life in the world.

      Although the Muslim narrative in the Quran and the Hadith literature also talked about blacks from Ethiopia and Bilal is a celebrated figure for Muslims as the Queen of Sheba is remembered by black Jews and black Christians, in the special case of the modern day African-Americans, Ethiopianism came through the creation of a concept and a term from the recently deceased Imam W. D. Muhammad, the son of Elijah Muhammad who led the Nation of Islam in the United States of America.

      In writing this Foreword for Dr. Etuk’s volume on Ethiopianism, I should hasten to add here that this idea grew out of the intellectual and political debates in American and Western societies. Caught in the web of slavery and eager to free themselves from the yoke of White domination, black intellectuals did something that paralleled what was similarly done by the late Martin Luther King.

      This is to say, they used the Bible and the Constitution to make their case. The fundamental difference between the Kingian approach and the Abolitionist approach lies in the differences in the intellectual and political tools available to the intellectual and political actors. In the case of Dr. King, he had the opportunity to deploy both the Bible and the American Constitution to his end.

      However, those who chose to oppose slavery through their abolitionist activities could only employ the biblical narrative and the creation story that linked all human beings to Adam and Eve. Although the peddlers of slavery manipulated the Hammite story to make blacks drawers of waters and hewers of wood, their campaign against black freedom and black equality did not save their nefarious enterprise. The American Civil War came and went and these violators of human rights and dignity ended in the trash can of history.

      In writing this Foreword at this juncture in history, when Barack Obama serves as the first black President of the United States of America, it is imperative to bring to the attention of the readers of this text how the term Ethiopia is connected to the names of several other peoples living on the African continent. One of the greatest political coincidences in African history is the unacknowledged fact that this is the only continent with five states having the same name.

      That is to say, Nigerians, Ethiopians, Mauretanians, Nigeriens and Sudanese are all answering to the same name. Their names mean Black. The linguist will tell you that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, that the country called Nigeria is named after the River Niger. If this was true, as popular legend gives credit to Flora Shaw, the girl friend and later the wife of Frederick Lugard of Nigeria, then that country would be known to geographers as The Nigeria.

      [This] was a tradition in English when a country named after a river bears the definite article. Both in English and in French, the small African country called The Gambia bears the definite article. All countries named after a river are so called.

      Moving from the linguistic discourse on Nigeria, one can go on to say that

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