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Research
Paper on "From Sunup to Sundown"
“Dr. Rawick was an author,
teacher and political activist. He was best known for his
research on slavery, which resulted in his book From Sundown to
Sunup: The Making of the Black Community. The book, published in
1972, has been translated into more than 12 other languages. Dr.
Rawick also compiled the slave narratives done by the WPA in the
late 30s into The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography.
Rawick taught History and Sociology at the University of
Missouri-St. Louis for the last 11 years of a teaching career,
which spanned 35 years. He also taught at Washington University,
Wayne State University, State University of New York, University
of Chicago, and others. Dr. Rawick was involved in leftist
politics from his earliest days at Oberlin College where he
received his bachelor's degree.”
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George Rawick’s From Sundown to Sunup is by far the most
successful modern book in regard to slave culture. As moving and
touching as Rawick’s breakdown of slave life is his rendition of
American narrow-mindedness towards black people.
When Americans look at enslavement, they enchant up figure of
tired black bodies picking cotton from sunup to sundown under
Southern skies. That representation is to some extent true,
however, as the distinguished and eminent writer Geroge Radwick
details, the lives of slaves in America’s racist system were
complex and dissimilar. Perceiving slavery through the viewpoint
of what slaves did most of the time, furnishes a means to draw
some essential peculiarity and find some fundamental
commonalties between the different experiences of North America.
To most Americans, in addition to most scholars, slavery in the
USA is generally thought of as property slavery much the same as
with the plantation economies of the South. One of the biggest
underestimation’s in the whole sphere of historiography is
without doubt the contribution of the slaves to the forming and
building of America as a civilized life. Slavery is an
exceptional establishment not only in view of its horrors but by
virtue of it was something very cruel and abhorable.
According to George Radwick the southern attitude seems so often
a matter of temperament that is indistinct character speaking
itself against a general tendency in worldly affairs which
opposed the fixed investment of wealth in land and human
property. In other words, the South fabricated personality
rather than minds of singular or primary power. But the
character and disposition are of a singular and assisting force.
One product of the ascent in interest in the black experience
was the reappearance of published materials illustrating the
encountering of slavery first-hand. In 1972, Greenwood Press
published the first nineteen volumes of The American Slave in
two series under George Rawick’s editorship. Volume 1, From
Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community introduced
the narrative materials in the other eighteen books.
In this book George Rawick traces the narratives of
Afro-Americans and in doing so breaks numerous fables that have
encircled the subject of black slavery for a long time. Rawick
illustrate that African-Americans is an essential and necessary
part of our annals.
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He presents a picture of life from the view point of the slaves
in a very efficient and effective manner. His courageous and
daring readings of the narratives go a long way in the direction
of an understanding of the master-slave relationship. George
Radwick pursues to elucidate how the slaves made their own world
and oppose to become creatures of their master’s choice.
“ American Negro slavery was a human institution, albeit
exceedingly an inhuman one. Yet rarely has the discussion of
slavery in North America proceeded from this premise. Rather
almost all historians have presented the black slaves as
dehumanized victims without culture, history and community. The
assumption that the slave was a total victim is at its heart
elitist and untenable. What flows from itself is the view that
the slaves could not help himself because he had no culture,
history, community or opportunity for change and development and
that, consequently, he had to be liberated by those whose
history has fortunately left them intact and thus in human terms
better equipped to help him.
But if the slave had a history, then his behavior changed over
time as he learned from the past and met new experiences. Men
however do not move in their own behalf or make revolutions for
light and transient reasons. Only when they can no longer stand
the contradictions in their own personalities do they move in a
sharp and decisive fashion. The victim is always in the process
of becoming the rebel, because the contradictions demand this
resolution.”
In George Rawick perspective United States slavery has passed
through in the course of the last quarter of a century. Three
large subject matters in the study of slavery have undergone
modification in the course of those years. The first and
foremost is the impact of slavery affixed to blacks; the second
is the profitability of slavery as an commercial institution;
and the third is the matching archives of slavery in the new
world.
George Rawick illustrated American slavery as a system wherein
slaves lived in families, were in general well cared for
physically by masters, and were disciplined no more seriously
than rebellious children or for disorder.
In common with most white southerners and most white scholars in
the Western world of the early twentieth century, George Rawick
also adhered to the fact that race sets human behavior to a
substantial, although generally unspecified, magnitude. It is
not unexpected consequently that Rawick and the bulk of American
historians who ensued his lead should see the inefficiencies of
slavery and the social and moral behavior of blacks under
slavery as an outcome of the Negro’s race and not as a result of
slavery.
As Rawick said, the character of the two systems varies in view
of the fact that race of the slaves varied. In the South, he
concluded, the slaves were Negroes, who for the most part were
by racial quality compliant rather than defiant, lighthearted
instead of dismal, charming instead of irritable, and whose very
fault invited paternalism rather than restraint. George Rawick
depicted a slave community that was quite self-governing, full
of cultural and social variety, and controlled in only finite
ways by the master.
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George Rawick, in describing the independent and diverse life of
blacks under captivity in his book, From Sundown to Sunup,
admits that at one time he had recognized the idea of Sambo. His
denial of it came, clearly, when he was able to clarify himself,
as he acclaimed, of the implicit racism and elitism from which
he thought the idea was used.
Negro servitude is among those traditions that were once
carefully thought about as an agreeable, if not applauded, while
by today’s value judgments they are taken into account as evil.
Rawick do not think it is conceivable today for a historian to
write a sufficient history of slavery from the position that
slavery was good. The effective word here is adequate, for
George Rawick no doubt that a person living, in our culture
could, either from his or her own choice or from a conventional
aloofness, enter adequately into the values of a past society to
write about slavery from that point of view. Rawick do not think
that history would be read. He further argued that what was
written would be seriously amateur, not history. For the
variance amid antiquarianism and history is that the following
has an important and essential association with the present
while the former does not.
Works Cited
http://www.umsl.edu/services/library/blackstudies/rawick.htm.
George P. Rawick Papers
From Sundown to Sunup by George Rawick
http://www.eco.utexas.edu/Homepages/Faculty/Cleaver/amrcp.htm.
Preface to 2nd Edition
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