Women Who Travel Podcast: The Long Legacy of African American Expats
Abbey Lossing
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In her book Beyond the Shores: A History of African Americans Abroad, Dr. Tamara J. Walker recounts stories of 20th century African-Americans who chose to build their lives outside of the United States—everywhere from Paris to Nairobi. Lale chats with Tamara about the romantic notions of 20th century Paris and the creatives who made it their home, like James Baldwin and Florence Mills, as well as her own travel experiences around the world and what it means to be a global citizen.
Lale Arikoglu: Hi there, I'm Lale Arikoglu, and this is Women Who Travel. Today, in honor of Juneteenth, we are talking about African Americans traveling and making their homes abroad.
Tamara J. Walker: This idea of searching for a place where I could be myself and not have to choose between the person I was at school and the person I was at home and just feel like all of my different selves could be fully integrated. So that was a big part of the story of travel for me.
LA: My guest is Dr. Tamara J. Walker. Her book, Beyond the Shores, recounts stories of 20th century African Americans who chose to build their lives outside of the United States. It's everywhere from Paris to a remote village in Soviet Uzbekistan, to Nairobi, but Tamara also weaves reflections on her own travel experiences and her family's throughout the book.
I feel like for so many people, and I include myself in this, often a sort of curiosity in travel and hunger for travel comes from a family member or adult in your life when you were a child growing up who was out there in the world or had come back with stories of these places and adventures, and it sparks something. And for you, it sounds like it was your grandfather, and you have a reading that you promised you'd share. If you don't mind—
TJW: I would love to.
LA: —reading it for us now.
TJW: I knew my grandpa had joined the army as a young man in Alabama, lost his right eye on a Normandy beach during World War II, and eventually settled with his wife and kids in Colorado Springs near the military base at Fort Carson. Those were basic facts that explained everyday facets of my life, like the way my grandparents both spoke with a southern twang, why my grandpa had a glass eye, and how we ended up being among the small handful of black people to call the Mountain State our home. But in my self-absorbed youth, I'd rarely given much thought to his life and career beyond that. I'd always assumed that the knickknacks on every shelf and in every cabinet around the house, beer steins from Austria, chinoiserie vases, porcelain dolls dressed in Korean hanboks and stacks of old postcards had come from friends or flea markets.
It had never occurred to me that my grandpa had been to other parts of the world beyond the battlefields of France, or that my grandma and the eldest of their nine children had also traveled with him. There was so much though that no one ever spoke of. They never spoke of the beginning of the story, the journey itself, or the early days and months of adjusting to their new world and way of life. No one spoke either about the complexities of being black and what was once part of the Third Reich, of being American in an occupied state, or being back in the United States after all those years away. And I, living proof that grandparents are wasted on the young, never asked about any of it. It never even occurred to me that there were many questions to ask about the beginning and the end and all the points in between until it was much too late.
LA: Tamara's grandfather was drafted into the military in the 1940s. He was sent to Europe to fight on behalf of a country that had not given him or his people the opportunity it freely handed to others, but to him, representing the US was a defining part of his travels even beyond his military service.
TJW: I learned so much from him. I learned what it meant to represent my country. I got a Fulbright fellowship to study in Peru, and it was this moment that was really profound in my life because it was right when he was dying. And I remember, before going, him giving me so much advice about how much was kind of weighing on this moment, how important it was that I do my best and that I put my best foot forward and represent not just myself and my family, but my country. And it felt like an extension of what he had been doing in his military service. And so I learned a lot just about the idea of being a representative of more than just yourself.
One of the kind of common threads that would run throughout our conversations, and it often happened whenever I traveled, was the idea he would say, "We have a lot riding on you." And it was a way that I would just get a lot of strength in knowing that I wasn't just there for myself and for my own enjoyment, I was there obviously to edify myself, to improve my language abilities or to do research or to do whatever it was that I was supposed to be doing when I was there, just a reminder that I was doing something for more than just myself and that they were proud of me, my family, and that also they were excited about whatever I was going to do with the opportunity and the experience that was before me.
LA: You said that it gave you strength, but that also sounds like quite a lot of pressure.
TJW: It was a lot of pressure. Yeah.
LA: For sure. I was like, that is the weight of the world on your shoulders.
TJW: Oh, absolutely. Because when I would call sometimes crying from being in Argentina and being homesick and having people stare at me and call me names, he would say that. And I was like, "Well, I just want to be comforted, and I want you to tell me I can come home anytime and instead, what you're saying is that we have a lot riding on you." So yeah, there was a lot of pressure there, but he felt a lot of pressure in terms of his military service because so much was riding on him doing that job. And that was something that a lot of African American soldiers during World War II understood, that they were fighting not just for their country, but for their people back home, in the hopes that in providing the service and performing the sacrifice, that African Americans would gain rights at home. So he obviously wasn't thinking of me in those same terms, but I think he was used to thinking about someone traveling as being about more than just themselves, and that there was always something bigger that it was connected to.
LA: And I suppose when you kind of think about it through that lens and remind yourself of that, it means that, as well as when you are facing the fun and the joy of being somewhere like Argentina, that when the unpleasantries that you kind of briefly noted you experienced, that also kind of as a reminder that it is a much bigger thing and that others have experienced it too, and you're not alone in it. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but.
TJW: No, that's it exactly. Yeah. That there is community even in these kinds of solitary experiences, and that every interaction you have when you're traveling matters, even those negative interactions. And we can have negative impacts on people. People can have negative impacts on us, and all of those matter.
LA: After a short break, Tamara takes us to France and beyond, following the African American expats of the 20th century and the community that they found or sometimes didn't.
Tamara's book, Beyond the Shores, starts us off so many romantic notions of Americans abroad, in 1920s Paris.
I mean, it sounds like I'm asking such an obvious question, but what is it about Paris that has historically drawn Americans and specifically black Americans there in search of something new?
TJW: Yeah, I think Paris in the 1920s was a place of opportunity for African Americans. It was a place where performers could find opportunities to perform on stages and in nightclubs. People had opportunities to dream, I think, not just to fit within really kind of narrow roles that had been assigned to them in the US whereas in Paris, and I don't want to overstate the romance and the opportunity in Paris, and I talk about the ways in which Paris was also a complicated city. But on that front, there were just so many more possibilities when it came to performing and to imagining careers outside of what was going on on stage. And there were places of opportunity as far as just being able to experience the joy of travel and the joy of urban life. Because in Paris, unlike in New York where a lot of these entertainers came from, you could sit at tables at the very restaurants where you performed.
And New York at places like The Cotton Club, African Americans couldn't sit in the audience. They couldn't actually have so much as a glass of water at the places where they were performing on stage. And so, many of the nightclubs in Paris were places where African Americans, once they were done with their sets and their routines, they could join the audience. They could order food and drink, they could be just like everyone else and be in these integrated spaces where they could dance and dine and just feel like whole people rather than just performers.
Word started to spread through the black press about the opportunities that the city held for African American performers, but also for African American visitors. It was a place where people could expect to be treated like human beings and where their money was accepted and where their presence was welcomed. And that wasn't just true of the nightclubs, it was also true of the hotels and the restaurants. And that stood in really stark contrast to what was happening in the US, not just in New York City, but in cities around the country. So Paris had just had this reputation early on for being a really welcoming city in multiple senses of the word. And I think that's where some of that romance started to get attached to it.
LA: You mentioned that Paris and France wasn't without its own complications. Could you dive a little deeper into that for me and kind of paint that picture?
TJW: Paris in the 1920s was a really global city. It was home to people from around the world and people from around the French Empire. And there were people from the African continent, from the Caribbean, from various parts of Asia, and those were people who encountered a lot of difficulties and obstacles when it came to making a life in Paris and making a living and laying claim to citizenship and belonging. And so when we often, especially in the US, talk about Paris and talk about Americans in Paris, we tend to overlook the difficulties that black Parisians, for example, were experiencing and Afro-French people were experiencing. And African Americans often had this positive and welcoming experience precisely because they were American.
And precisely because they weren't trying to make claims to belonging in Paris. They had a country, and they were not trying to ask things of France and the French people. And I think that's part of what made it possible for them to have these pleasant experiences. France itself has a really complicated history of colonialism and slavery and all of those things were visible on the ground in Paris in the 1920s. And those were things that African Americans were aware of and understood that their experiences in Paris were quite different than their black counterparts from places like Martinique or from Senegal. And so they had a privilege as Americans.
The other thing that was happening in Paris was that a lot of white Americans were also visiting the city in the early 20th century, and a lot of them were expecting to travel with Jim Crow, which is to say that they were expecting to find segregation, the very kinds of segregation they encountered, and in many cases enjoyed, at places like The Cotton Club and were really shocked to find in Paris this degree of integration where you could go to a nightclub and dance across the color line where black men and white women would be dancing together, white men and black women would be dancing together. And a lot of them had a problem with it, and they had a problem with the hotels that welcomed the black visitors. So there's that other kind of dimension.
LA: Astonishing level of entitlement and ignorance to enter into a country with.
But of course, while Paris may be where we start, it's certainly not the whole story. 20th century African American travelers were going all over the world in search of new opportunities and experiences.
TJW: They were going to London and to Berlin and to other parts of Europe. To Italy, for example, but they were also going further east. I write about some African Americans who went to Uzbekistan. I write about Richard Wright going to Argentina. I write about people going to Tokyo and to the African continent. And in all of those places, they have really interesting, and in some cases romantic, but also quite complicated experiences. And a lot of that depended on who was traveling as well.
One example that I think is really interesting is the example of a Peace Corps volunteer who I write about who went to Kenya during the Civil Rights Era in the late '60s, 1970s. And this was a period when there had been a lot of discussion in the black community about going back to Africa. It was a period of African decolonization where Africa was charting a new path towards its future, and it seemed like a place of possibility, right? In the same way that Paris in the 1920s was a place of possibility, the African continent was a place of possibility. But the person I write about went there as a volunteer for the Peace Corps and in many ways as a representative of the US, and it meant that he had to shoulder a couple of different kind of roles, not just as himself, but as a black man from this country that was not enjoying a very good reputation on the world stage and having, in many ways, to kind of answer for his country.
LA: Just in the examples you cited, there are so many different examples of where African Americans were traveling and why and how, what's the connective tissue in terms of what they were searching for? As time goes by, we are kind of talking about it the entire 20th century.
TJW: Yeah.
LA: What are people searching for?
TJW: I think the thread that connects the stories that I try to tell and the stories that we can see unfolding even today, is this search for home and belonging and even a search for oneself.
And the reason that African Americans were leaving, they were drawn to so things. In certain cases, they were drawn to Paris, they were drawn to Tokyo, they were drawn to the Soviet Union, but they were also in many cases being forced to leave. And it's something I wanted to capture. The sense that people were giving up something too in leaving. They weren't just gaining these really cool life experiences and gaining a sense of adventure. They were giving up a place in their home country. A lot of people had to leave their families behind to pursue these opportunities. And a lot of them felt like they were giving up on their country. And it's why so many people did ultimately come back to the US after spending time abroad, because they wanted to reclaim the country and ask more of it, right? Demand that it live up to its ideals and its promises. And so that's part of the story too. It's not just a story about where they went, but why they left the United States in the first place.
LA: We're going to take another break and when we're back, what it means to be a global citizen and also who gets to claim that mantle.
We've talked so much about people traveling and search of opportunity and learning and sense of freedom, but so much about travel, and I'm speaking about the present day, hinges on having access to it, particularly financially. You've started The Wandering Scholar. Could you tell me a little bit about what it is and what its intentions are?
TJW: The Wandering Scholar is a nonprofit that has two interrelated missions. The first mission is to make international travel opportunities accessible to high school students from low-income backgrounds. And the second mission is to produce multimedia content that embodies our vision of engaged globally competent citizenship. And it came about because I and my partner in The Wandering Scholar, Shannon Keating, both had these really profound experiences of travel as young people. And it turned out, without knowing each other, we traveled similar paths. We had both been scholarship students at private schools that had trips to Mexico as part of the curriculum, and we both went on those trips. And then, in college, we both studied abroad in Argentina. And then we both realized how much of our own careers had been shaped by those experiences. That's why I got a Fulbright was because I had these experiences that told the funders, the Fulbright organization, that I could carry out the kind of research that I was proposing, that I had the language skills and the ability to kind of hit the ground running.
And the other thing that was kind of at the heart of me founding The Wandering Scholar was an experience at this kind of regional gathering of Fulbrights when I was in Peru, where I looked around the room and I didn't see anyone who looked like me. And I happened to be sitting next to someone from the Fulbright Organization talking about this, and one of the things they mentioned was that there was a pipeline problem. And so, what I wanted to do with The Wandering Scholar and what Shannon and I managed to do is to create more of a pipeline for these and other kinds of experiences, because we give rising high school juniors and seniors the opportunity to travel and experience things that they had never experienced before, and to learn things about themselves that really chart the course of their future. And they end up going to college and studying lots of wonderfully interesting things and traveling when they're in college, and once they graduate college, becoming global citizens. That's exactly what we wanted them to do. And they also tell really interesting stories about their experiences.
LA: Becoming a global citizen also comes with responsibility, right? Once you get to move around the world, you then have to think about how you're doing it.
TJW: Yeah.
LA: And how you're being intentional about it and the impact that you are leaving on the places that you visit and the communities that you visit, which I know is something that you've come up against in the past. And I think maybe had your eyes open to on that first Mexico trip you took when you were very young. How can we as travelers be thoughtful about the places we are visiting and impact them positively?
TJW: Yeah.
LA: Is it even possible sometimes? And I mean, I travel so much, and I think is there ever a world in which I'm ever going to be wholly a positive thing when I arrive in this place?
TJW: Yeah. Yeah. So just to your point about my Mexico trip, I want to go back to it because it's a common kind of conundrum that we face when it comes to youth travel. I participated in a high school travel program that was focused on voluntourism, service tourism, where we spent a week at an orphanage in Mexico. And I write about just all the things I was kind of attuned to then, but also blind to at the time in terms of the impact of our presence at this orphanage and what it must have been like for those young people to have to constantly, first of all, give up space in their home to these visitors because we had a pair of dorm rooms all to ourselves, me and my fellow high school classmates. But also the fact that they were constantly being introduced to and saying goodbye to this steady stream of American visitors.
LA: This trend of so-called voluntourism, service trips, created for vacationers to "do good" while on their trip, has absolutely ballooned in recent years.
TJW: So what we try to do at The Wandering Scholar is recognize that so many of those programs are not going anywhere, but that we can add something else to the experience by allowing the students and their research leading up to the trip and in producing research or documentation projects while they're on the trip, that they can treat the people in these host countries as possessing really valuable knowledge. And that knowledge is more than just this kind of common narrative of people being poor but happy, but that they have really interesting histories and personal stories and culinary traditions to share, and that while our students are there, they can get something else out of that experience beyond just building a school or whatever it is that people are doing on these...
LA: It's an exchange. It's actually an exchange.
TJW: It's a real genuine exchange, and it enriches every part of the experience. It's a more meaningful experience for the people in the host country as well. They get a different understanding of who Americans are. That's also because we serve a really diverse student population. A lot of first-generation Americans, a lot of first-generation college students, low-income students, who also changed the face of American travelers. They're not just a monolith. So, then, that also makes for really meaningful interactions. And our students, because of the backgrounds they come from, have a degree of resilience, but also cross-cultural competency that makes for really meaningful interactions.
And we had students go to Italy, for example, and one of them recognized her father's story in an encounter that she had in Italy because her father was from Senegal, eventually migrated to the US, but the first place he went when he left Senegal was to Italy. And he was a street vendor in Italy, and she encountered all these Senegalese street vendors. And she was like, "That's my dad's story." And that is also her story. And that's a really interesting arc for her to be in Italy under very different circumstances than her father was. And those Senegalese street vendors saw in her their future and their children's futures. And I think that's just such a beautiful way of experiencing the world that it's not happening nearly enough.
LA: And it's only by getting access to travel that she was able to see that.
TJW: Absolutely.
LA: Earlier on, you mentioned, I guess almost like the weight of, as a traveler, feeling compelled to change people's perceptions of what an American traveler is and how they move around the world. What can listeners learn from the way that you travel and that you've evolved as a traveler, as you've got more and more experience doing it and ask those hard questions?
TJW: We try at The Wandering Scholar to be as intentional as possible. We don't want to discourage people from traveling, but we do want to encourage people to travel with their politics and to ask themselves questions about the impact that they'll have on the places that they go, and also to educate themselves about how these kinds of places are trying to manage tourism in sustainable ways. So Venice, for example, is just a place where people often go to have particular kinds of moments on bridges, but the city of Venice asked people not to stand on bridges, but you wouldn't know that looking at Instagram, because you have so many people who are standing on bridges trying to get that perfect photograph, and it's such a beautiful city. How could you not? But that's something that the city does not want people to do. So how do you reconcile those two things?
LA: All right, well, to wrap things up, you are talking to me from New York City, where I also am. We talked so much about traveling and using travel as finding a sense of home. I know that you haven't necessarily found it in your travels. So many of the people that we were talking about at the beginning ended up returning to New York or have roots in New York. Does New York feel like home in some way for you?
TJW: That's a great question and a tough question. I think it does. And I think there's a reason that so many of those people come back to New York, right? Because there is so few places like it. I don't want to say there's no place like it, but it is a place that, for now at least, still nurtures and embraces and celebrates a certain kind of creativity and originality and possibility. It allows for dreaming in a certain way. It's also a really diverse city, and that is no small thing. What New York kind of represents is just this place where people have always come from all over the world throughout its history. It's a history that is made by newcomers and remade over and over again by newcomers. And so I really love that about New York. It always makes me feel like anything is possible. So for now, at least, it is home.
LA: Tamara, thank you so much. This has been just a fascinating journey through parts of the world, and also just, I've loved hearing you talk about yourself as a traveler and kind of guide us as to how to do it the right way, or at least try to. So, thank you so much. If people want to follow along your work and your travels, is there anywhere on the internet they can find you?
TJW: Well, one place where I am spending a lot of time these days thinking about the kinds of things we've been talking about is the Substack for my nonprofit. It's called Postcards from TWS. Postcards from The Wandering Scholar. And that's a place we've been putting out monthly content that really embodies our vision of engaged globally competent citizenship. I'm not a social media person beyond that, but it's been a really compelling place to think and to imagine and just to recognize that we're all works in progress and there's no single way of moving through the world. And that's a thing we're talking about and thinking about together.
LA: I am Lale Arikoglu, and you can find me on Instagram @lalehannah. Our engineers are Jake Lummus and James Yost. The show's mixed by Amar Lal.
This episode was produced by Michele O'Brien. We have production support from Pran Bandi and Vince Fairchild. Chris Bannon is Condé Nast's Head of Global Audio. See you next week.
Originally Appeared on Condé Nast Traveler
