INTERVIEW: Tamara J. Walker, Author of Beyond the Shores: A History of African Americans Abroad

Interview by Hillary Moses Mohaupt

Dr. Tamara J. Walker’s Beyond the Shores: A History of African Americans Abroad chronicles the poignant histories of a diverse group of African Americans who left the United States, and explores in her own family’s journeys around the world.

Drawing on years of research, Walker takes readers from well-known capital cities to more unusual destinations. Readers may recognize some of the people she mentions, while most are less known but no less important.

Throughout the book, Walker draws on Black publications that tell the stories of African Americans abroad and encourage people to seek a different life — in much the same way that African American TikTokers and other content creators still do today.

Walker in an associate professor of Africana studies at Barnard College of Columbia University and the co-founder of The Wandering Scholar, a 501c3 non-profit whose mission is to make international education opportunities accessible to students from underrepresented backgrounds.

Below is our conversation.

Hillary Moses Mohaupt: One of the things I loved about this book was the really beautiful weaving of your personal story and the stories of these other individuals in the past, or not so distant past. How did you approach the research for this book, both the parts that were about your family’s experiences and the parts that were about other African Americans?

Tamara J. Walker: A lot of the research varied from chapter to chapter because I had the opportunity to interview some people personally, but that wasn’t something I could do with other people. Then there was someone like Philippa Schuyler, who was the subject of a chapter I wrote about the Vietnam era and was a piano player who had tremendous success. She was heavily documented in her childhood because both of her parents were really savvy, and her mother was a really meticulous record keeper. Her papers are now at the Syracuse archives, so I was able to do some more conventional research, at least for me, because I’m an archival historian.

And then there were others who had been really heavily documented in the Black press. I think that’s one of the more consistent sources — it really made for another character of the book. I mean, I wrote this really character-driven narrative of history where I focused on individuals who encapsulated each decade of the twentieth century and what was at stake for African Americans when it came to leaving the country and going to different parts of the world. And the people who were always chronicling that story were members of the Black press, like the Pittsburgh Courier, the Baltimore Afro-American, Chicago Defender, Ebony Magazine. I really wanted to spotlight just how carefully the Black press had documented the story of African Americans going, and sometimes returning home from, abroad more than any other sources.

The mainstream media was slow to pick up on this story, were inconsistent in how they chronicled it, and not nearly as thorough, in terms of attending to all the reasons that these people had for leaving the U.S. The Black press was really integral to my research, and they were so central to inspiring African American travelers to pursue life on other shores.

As far as the family side of it, I did a little bit of interviewing my older family members, especially, to get a sense of what they remembered, including my aunt who had lived in Austria. But I soon found that she was so distant from all this — she was just a toddler when my grandparents were stationed in Austria. Her memories were scant and faint, so I leaned on my skills as a historian, especially my skills honed by researching people who could not speak across the years and I could not directly speak to, and that’s where I tried to put my family story in conversation with these other stories. That’s why it felt so natural to move between the personal and these larger scale narratives: I knew that wherever our story left off, another story would pick up.

That for me was especially visible in the case of Mabel Grammer, who reminded me so much of my grandparents. Mabel Grammer had worked for the Baltimore Afro-American, and she eventually fell in love with a man named to Oscar Grammer, and ends up going with him to Germany after World War II where he is stationed. And she arrives there without a clear sense of her own purpose. She does find her purpose, and she provided an opportunity to tell that story through the lens of military women and get me closer to understanding my grandmother’s experience during this time. There were important points of distinction, but there were enough points of overlap that I could find in Mabel Grammer’s story more of an understanding of what this experience was like for my grandmother.

HMM: I love what you’re saying about better understanding your own grandparents through the stories of other people. You write beautifully about “grandparents being wasted on the young” (130) and the questions you never thought to ask your grandparents about their experiences. I want to go back to what you were saying about the Black press and how the Black press was another character. Can you talk about the role of the Black press in shaping when and how African Americans went abroad?

TJW: For me it was a revelation because I’m a historian of Latin America. I’m not someone by training or in my professional life who is researching African American history, so for me it was really an incredible discovery to find so many Black newspapers that were accessible online. I wrote this book during COVID and was really fortunate to access so many of my research materials online. Some of these papers I grew up with, they were in my grandparents’ living room and my mom’s living room and in waiting rooms around Black America. But there were so many other publications, like the Afro-American, that I just hadn’t been familiar with.

And I was increasingly aware, as I was researching this book, just how involved these publications were in chronicling this widespread phenomenon of African Americans leaving the United States, beginning in the late 19th and early 20th century. They’re chronicling the World War I era, the era in the 1920s when African American entertainers were going to Europe, so they’re interviewing those folks when they get back from those tours, or attending some of the lectures that these travelers, once they return home, are giving to different social clubs and fraternities and sororities and mutual aid societies and reflecting on their experiences.

They’re also sending reporters overseas to report on these phenomena — these performers who are making names for themselves on this global stage. In the process they are taking in the sights and sounds of these European cities and starting to write about these places as tourist destinations, which then produces a new wave of tourists who can go and see their favorite performers on stage in places where they can actually go, because so many of the venues where African Americans were performing in the US were segregated. So it was a real revelation to these attendees to go to these places in Paris and London and elsewhere, and know that their money was green, was being accepted, and their presence was welcome at hotels, in museums, and in various other places around Europe. The Black press was really influential, beginning in the late 19th century but especially in the late 1920s, in creating the modern African American traveling corpus.

HMM: You note throughout the book this tension for African Americans who go abroad. when they encountered white Americans in Europe or other places, the white Americans wanted, as you write, “to carry Jim Crow as far across international waters as they possibly could” (35), and yet the Europeans, welcomed African Americans, invited them to spend money, welcomed them to be audience members. That seemed to me to be a common experience among the people that you profiled.

TJW: To me it was really striking to encounter all of these reports in the Black press and in the memoirs that the people I profile, about their experiences with white Americans. It was often with a degree of shock that all these miles away from home that they would find as travelers that they couldn’t escape the racism that they had set out to put behind them. Whenever there were white Americans, they would see those same attitudes and expectations that Black people would be treated as lesser than.

One reporter in the Afro-American was telling a story about a friend who had visited Paris and stayed in a hotel. This hotel had welcomed Black guests and white American guests. The Black guest, the friend of the reporter, had said that there were signs that the white Americans had put up in the hallway that said “No Mexicans, No dogs, No N-words Allowed.” Eventually the hotel took the signs down. They waited until nighttime, so you could tell the hotel was trying the thread a fine needle so as not to alienate any of the guests, including the racist white ones, but they did take the sign down, and that was a remarkable thing. And the reporter, Ollie Stewart, said the only surprising thing about this was that the hotel took down the sign. It was clearly a common occurrence.

It also came up in the chapter about the agronomists who go to the Soviet Union. They end up in Uzbekistan but en route they stop in Moscow, in need of a haircut after their long journey form the US. They were struggling to even ask where they could get a haircut, because they were expecting to hear, like they had in the US, that there was nowhere that was going to attend to them. But the staff at the hotel said, “Well, we have a barbershop here at the hotel, just go there.” And the men go there and encounter some white Americans who are so outraged to see these Black Americans that they put up a big fuss, and ultimately they’re the ones that get kicked out, not the Black men that they were hoping to get kicked out.

It was a pretty consistent set of experiences. I think that when you look at the landscape of Black travel reporting on TikTok, on Instagram, there are similar kinds of episodes. Not necessarily people wanting to travel with Jim Crow, because officially that’s ended in the United States, but still there are certain assumptions that white travelers travel with. It’s part of the story. And it’s not just the story of African American going abroad. It tells us something about white Americans when they go abroad, what kind of assumptions and expectations they travel with and why it is they’re traveling in the first place, if the expectation is to find exactly what they left behind. For me it was important to flag, not just as something that Black American travelers had to put up with, but to reveal something about white American travelers as well.

HMM: In the chapter about Florence Mills, you mention that in the absence of African American writers and producers, the stories of African Americans did not matter to mainstream publications. Many Black publications have folded, and yet we’ve seen more representation in writer’s rooms and production companies, and an TikTok. How do you think representation has shifted?

 TJW: I recently wrote a piece about TikTok, about how these modern social media content creators are picking up where the Black press left off, in that they’re providing these firsthand, on the ground experiences, and doing it because they have been underserved by mainstream publications.

One person I write about is a woman named Nicole Phillip, who had published an essay in the New York Times in 2018 about her experience studying abroad in Florence. Part of what she talks about in both the TikTok and the Times essay is that she had this very romantic view of Italy fed to her by mainstream culture, and it turned out that was white experience of Italy. Her experience as a Black woman in Italy was a shock to her. It was a shock how much racism and anti-Blackness she encountered. Her TikTok presence is in service of making sure other people don’t have those experiences, of Italy, of Mexico, of other parts of the world that she travels to. She’s very clear that she wants to prepare people for what it might be like.

There’s no singular experience of being Black in the world, because it varies based on age, based on skin tone, based on sex and sexuality, whether you’re in the city or in the countryside. She is acknowledging that these media outlets are presenting a white view of these places.

These content creators, like those Black press writers and reporters, know something that has always been obvious to them, and has escaped the attention of the mainstream media, which is that when you travel you can never leave your race behind. It influences everything, for better and for worse. And to pretend otherwise is to do a disservice to the place and to the people that you’re addressing. There’s no such thing as a race neutral experience of these destinations. I think that’s something that was true in the Black press in the 20th century, and that we can continue to see thanks to these content creators.

HMM: I love that throughline from newspapers to TikTok. In some ways it makes me think about your descriptions of your own experiences traveling through Europe. Towards the end of the book, you describe touring Europe with your family and with Black Paris Tours, and about how tourists often ask their tour guides “to serve as a medium between past and present, a conjurer of our shared history who can take us along the same streets our forbears walked and help us travel back in time.”

It strikes me — especially as you have these chapters that are your family’s stories — that you are in some ways the same kind of medium you describe here. What is the historian’s role in interpreting the past and being that sort of medium between the past, the present, and the future?

TJW: I really love writing about ordinary people, and one of the real honors for me is to draw attention to and elevate people who during their own lifetimes might not have thought they would be talked about all of these years later. They certainly understood themselves to be special and their experiences to be meaningful, but they weren’t always made to feel in their time that other people thought that. For me, so much of what I value about my work as an historian is elevating them and honoring the way they lived their lives, and their sense of justice, and their way of moving through the world, and what it made possible for other people.

I see myself doing that as well, in terms of having travel experiences and writing about those experiences in ways that hopefully will make it easier for other people to move through the world, or make it possible for other people to see themselves in my position. Travel allowed me to see myself as capable of things that hadn’t occurred to me before, carved out ways forward for me that I didn’t know existed. So, yes, I see my work and my own life as making those connections between past, present and future.

HMM: Because you did such a powerful job of weaving your story and your historical research together, I’m wondering if you have any advice for other people who are considering writing a book that balances both history and memoir?

TJW: I’m used to writing at a remove because of how distant in time and place I’ve tended to be from my historical subjects, so it was hard for me actually to write about myself at first. I found safety and comfort in writing about my relationship to travel. It’s clearly so essential to who I am and to my journey and life story, but it didn’t feel like the most intimate thing to talk about. I think that it’s important to have a sense of safety for yourself, as far as what subjects you feel comfortable writing about.

When I think of memoir, I think of flaying oneself open and leaving no stone unturned and leaving no truth unspoken. But we’re all such layered complicated people, there are so many parts of ourselves that we deserve to keep for ourselves or the people we feel most safe with. I think sometimes women and people of color often bear the burden of flaying ourselves open for the sake of having our humanity recognized and respected, and I don’t think you should have to do that to be respected and understood as human beings.

And there are these extraordinary people, when we think of history, but there are also really ordinary people, and I come from them, so it was important to me to talk about myself and my family, to make the point that this isn’t just a story about those three or four bold faced names in Paris in the 1920s.

I also just had fun with it, in terms the puzzle of putting the book together: making the choices about what parts of my personal story and family story were going to connect to the narrative chapters I’d already chosen, or, conversely, which parts of my family story were going to determine which subjects I would choose for the narrative chapters. There was a lot of back and forth between the memoir and narrative bits that was really fun from a writerly perspective to puzzle out. I also made sure that the memoir sections of the book could function as their own little story that you could read from beginning to end.

Often historians tend to think of ourselves as researchers and purveyors of particular arguments, but in writing this book I really wanted to celebrate being a writer and a storyteller, and to find joy in that, and to take risks with that, and to challenge myself in that way as well.

HMM: Is there anything I haven’t asked about that you’d like to share?

 TJW: One thing that I always see as connected to the story within the book is the work that I do for my non-profit that came out of my experience of travel as a young age. When I was a Fulbright fellow I went to a regional gathering of Fulbright fellows and noticing in this big group in this crowded room that I was the only Black person. I happened to be seated next to a representative of the Fulbright program, from the State Department.

That conversation has stuck with me for 20 years now, because the person I spoke to ultimately attributed the homogeneity to a pipeline program. I took the point that I had benefited because of my early travels to Mexico and France. Those things made me want to major in Spanish and study abroad in Argentina, and those were the things that I was able to use to get into grad school for Latin American History and then to use in my application for a Fulbright.

The reason behind the non-profit was to create opportunities for people who had come from backgrounds similar to mine, to have opportunities to travel in ways that would alter the course of their lives, just as travel had done for me. I was really fortunate to be in the right place at the right time, with the right sort of resources available to me, and it wasn’t something I took for granted.

We work with a small group of wandering scholars, and in fifteen years we’ve managed to change the course of these students’ lives. It really has been a real continuation of my own travel experiences to make those kinds of experiences possible for others. I think of it really as inseparable from my own experience. The nonprofit never would have existed had I not had these experiences when I had them, and that’s the reason we work with the age group we work with.

HMM: You have the past, present, and the future as interlocking pieces.