In the shadow of the Fall of America and years of the ICE White Terror, of the systematic destruction of our democracy, our freedoms, and our humanity by the criminal Trump regime’s Fourth Reich, we are confronted with a horrific example of the future to which we may be headed in the legacies of history and systems of unequal power from which we struggle to emerge in the anniversary of the 1873 Colfax Massacre.
Theft of citizenship as vote suppression and as genocidal murder, white supremacist state terror, and police gun violence are among the hungry ghosts who bedevil us still, and should there remain any question of the existential active threat of racist terror and the necessity of resistance by any means necessary, we may look to such examples.
No matter where you begin with divisions of identitarian politics in service to elite wealth, power, and privilege, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
To this let us give the only reply it merits; Never Again!
As written by Gwendolyn Midlo-Hall and Keri Leigh Merritt in Jacobin, in an article entitled The 1873 Colfax Massacre Was a Racist Attack on Black People’s Democratic Rights: The worst episode of Reconstruction Era violence occurred 150 years ago today in northern Louisiana. The 1873 Colfax Massacre saw white supremacists slaughter 150 African Americans, brutally thwarting their hopes for autonomy and self-governance.; “The Civil War did not end in the Deep South in 1865. The proslavery, pro-Confederate legacies powerfully persisted, shaping the telling of our history and knowledge about people, places, and events: our perception of reality.
This is precisely why many Americans have never heard of one of the most important episodes of mass murder in US history: the racist, bloody Colfax Massacre of April 13, 1873 — exactly one hundred fifty years ago today — when white supremacists slaughtered over one hundred fifty black men in the northwest corner of Louisiana.
Colfax
Located in the heart of the Red River Valley, Colfax was a highly prosperous area in the global cotton economy prior to the Civil War. But flush times for planters ended abruptly after secession. New Orleans fell to the US Army early, in April 1862. After Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freed those enslaved in Confederate-occupied territory in 1863, the US Army conducted a ten-day raid up the Red River to Alexandria, where the Confederate governor of Louisiana, Thomas Moore, owned a large plantation.
During the Civil War, the US Army enlisted nearly two hundred thousand armed black men — an astonishing 10 percent of all troops who served. Composed of formerly enslaved men, refugees, and free blacks, these soldiers were tasked with maintaining order, ensuring peace, and protecting polling places.
But when former enslavers began complaining about the black occupation troops, President Andrew Johnson quickly removed them. By the fall of 1867, the number of soldiers in Louisiana had dwindled to only twenty thousand men. The US government decided to redirect its military might toward western colonization, resulting in the murderous removal of indigenous people.
The US government had abandoned the region, as well the people in it, leaving political, judicial, and police power up for grabs.
In the Red River Valley, too few troops meant chaos and contention, as there was no longer a functioning home guard, military patrol, or military commission. The US government had abandoned the region, as well the people in it, leaving political, judicial, and police power up for grabs.
The character of wealth changed, as access to goods and supplies became paramount. Within this shifting landscape, a new group of merchants emerged, competing through violent, insurrectionary means. The Red River Valley transformed into a highway of militarized desperados and warring factions, with no clearly established governmental authority. Murder, gun violence, and terror became the order of the day.
Louisiana’s new constitution, enacted in 1868, created an enclave of Republican power along the Red River, an area that was majority-black and deeply divided. Grant Parish was carved out of Rapides and Winn Parishes and named triumphantly for President Ulysses S. Grant. The parish seat, Colfax, took the surname of his vice president, Schuyler Colfax, Jr.
Yet with so few troops to counterbalance the power of former enslavers and their kin, laws enforcing the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments — providing citizenship and the right to vote to all men — were applied timidly and to little effect. Federal election supervisors in rural areas had no police power and were reduced to poll watchers.
That same year, to help keep peace, the Louisiana state legislature established a five-thousand-man militia, half white and half black. The white troops were mainly Confederate veterans; the black troops, Union veterans. During bitter struggles over control of the state government, the militia fragmented along racial lines, with one sector becoming the military arm of a terrorist organization called the White League after 1873. The boundary line between these white supremacists and black Republicans was Bayou Darrow, located seven miles north of Colfax.
Freedmen voting in New Orleans, Louisiana, 1867. (Wikimedia Commons)
Violence quickly enveloped the region. The brutality was primarily carried out by the Knights of the White Camelia, a white supremacist organization akin to the better-known Ku Klux Klan.
During the wave of terror unleashed before the 1868 election, the political assassination rates among both black and white Louisianans had been staggering. As an 1875 congressional report later revealed, there were 1,081 politically motivated murders, 137 shootings, and 507 other verified outrages in the state alone.
Still, as brutal as the 1868 election had been in Louisiana, the 1872 election and its aftermath were even deadlier. Not only was the gubernatorial election disputed, but several of the local elections were, too. Like four years earlier, the real political strife seemed to center in the Red River Valley, with Grant Parish the eye of the storm. In tiny Colfax, the county seat, the local elections were hotly contested. A group of armed black Republicans began occupying the county courthouse, claiming political victory.
Then everything exploded on Easter Sunday, 1873.
Massacre
The power struggle in Colfax had first turned deadly earlier in April, when a band of white supremacists murdered a black man in his front yard. Union veteran William Ward, who served as a black state representative, local Radical leader, and militia captain, ordered his company to muster immediately.
Historian LeeAnna Keith estimates that about three hundred black militiamen, along with their families, flocked to Colfax’s town center, occupying the courthouse (which, in the war-torn rural South, was a “repurposed” plantation stable). Ward, who had grown up enslaved as a carpenter in Virginia, began drilling the men openly in the town’s streets, organizing watches to keep families safe. Armed with guns, they quickly dug entrenchments, erected breastworks, and “posted sentries” around their commandeered area.
Judge William Phillips, a white “scalawag” from Alabama who earned a reputation by openly fathering a child with a black woman and by rallying black voters through promises of land, horses, and tools as part of reparations for slavery, joined forces with the black guards. Under the joint leadership of the white Phillips and the black Ward, local African Americans coalesced around what historian Joel Sipress has deemed “a new type of militant Black politics.”
White supremacists in the Red River Valley used these events to incite as much racial fear as possible. Over the next few days, three hundred white men poured into Colfax from Grant and surrounding parishes, forming an all-white paramilitary counterforce. Under the leadership of C. C. Nash, a former captain of the Confederate Army, they ordered the black militia and their families to leave Colfax under threat of violence. With more manpower and weaponry than the Republicans (they even had a small cannon, a relic from the war), white Democrats began the battle just after noon on Easter.
After hours of skirmishing, the former Confederates found a gap in the levee on the riverbank and positioned their single cannon there. While the weapon fired continuously upon the black freedom fighters, a former plantation overseer led a group of thirty whites in a direct attack against the black militia. One group of black Republicans instantly surrendered and was taken prisoner. Although Nash promised to free the men in the morning, a younger band of white terrorists executed them in cold blood, under the cowardly cover of the night.
Roughly sixty Republicans flooded the courthouse, exchanging fire with the white militia, who finally compelled a black captive to set fire to the courthouse roof. Some of the black Radicals perished in the fire. The men who tried to surrender, numbering between fifty and seventy, were ultimately shot to death. As a steamer pulled into Colfax the night of the massacre, one of the terrorists climbed on board, “armed to the teeth,” offering to give the passengers a tour of “dead n—–s . . . for there were a hundred or so scattered over the village and the adjacent fields.”
Nearly all the dead were brutally slain after they had surrendered.
Only three white Democrats perished during the attack, but the number of African Americans murdered is much more difficult to ascertain. Most of the witnesses were slaughtered. Evidence was lost because bodies were buried in the trenches in front of the courthouse in mass graves or dumped into the Red River.
What we do know is that nearly all the dead were brutally slain after they had surrendered and that almost fifty human beings were callously murdered after being held as political prisoners for hours. We know that not one scintilla of evidence was presented that any of the black men who defended the Colfax courthouse ever committed a single crime. They were simply freedom fighters, assassinated during their quest for independence and political power.
Colfax remains the single largest massacre in Louisiana history. It also spurred one of the worst legal decisions in Supreme Court history, United States v. Cruikshank (1875), which gave control of constitutional amendments and civil rights laws back to the white Confederates that had seceded from the Union. The ruling effectively ended Radical Reconstruction by prohibiting the use of the Enforcement Act of 1870 to prosecute white supremacist terrorists like the Ku Klux Klan. Cruikshank nearly erased the myriad black political gains won after emancipation, re-empowering local white oligarchs — former enslavers.
Legacy
White supremacy has long been an effective tool for US elites to maintain their place at the top of society. Stoking racism and hatred, they have prevented lasting interracial working-class coalitions and managed to keep most black Americans at the bottom of society.
Reactionary forces have likewise been successful at whitewashing history, including that of the Colfax Massacre. Contrary to the historical marker that served as the only headstone for the murdered — erected over half a century later — Colfax was never a riot. As the worst instance of white supremacist violence during Reconstruction, Colfax brutally thwarted black citizens’ hopes for autonomy and self-governance.
One hundred fifty years later, we recognize Colfax for what it really was: a racist massacre and a violent political message to potential black voters throughout the South. And we honor the heroic dead, vowing to continue their fight for democracy.”
On this day we meet in solidarity with our comrades and bearers of the Torch of Liberty, to swear our oaths and make our plans for the upcoming year of liberation struggle throughout the world; to make mischief for tyrants and bring a Reckoning to those who would enslave us.
Among the legacies of our history we must escape if we are to create a free society of equals and a United Humankind, slavery is a horror of depravity and terror which defines the limits of the human. The Abolition of slavery and its epigenetic consequences must always be a first priority mission for anyone who places their lives in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, because it is a canary in the coal mine of unequal power, a symptom of the tyranny of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and a clearly evil example of a general condition of dehumanization and commodification as a casus belli for democracy.
In America we fought the Civil War against a Confederacy which was nothing more grand than a human trafficking syndicate which had declared itself a nation to evade morality and the rule of law; here the African slave stood in as a figure for all the exploited labor of the time, which included all women, many children, and whole sectors of our economy; what was a sailor, a miner, or any worker forced to sell his time in brutal and dehumanizing conditions but a slave? With the crusade of liberty which began as Abolition and became a second American revolution in the Civil War, all of the exploited classes united in solidarity to seize power and cast their owners down from their thrones. This is how we freed the slaves in America, and its how we must unite to free the slaves now.
Among its greatest horrors is that slavery today is not a marginal crime but one central to the internal contradictions of our civilization; it is omnipresent and touches our lives everywhere, like the violations of invisible hands which seek to shape us to their own purposes as commodities and labor which creates wealth and power for others who own us. Slavery is a pervasive and endemic harm, and an inherent evil of capitalism; nearly everything we own and use is an artifact of slavery in some form.
The United Nations figures there are fifty million slaves now living; including “28 million in forced labour and 22 million in forced marriage. Almost one in eight of all those in forced labour are children. More than half of these children are in commercial sexual exploitation.”
I once pointed out the ubiquity of slavery in our society and the banality of evil hiding in plain sight to my Forensics students using the skeleton in the school biology classroom as an example; “Ever wonder why the skeleton in your biology class is so tiny? It’s a child skeleton, like most, and like most they come from processing factories in places like the one in India which was just shut down, from which some four thousand skeletons were bought by schools all over America and Europe. The supply for this trade originates in India’s inheritable debt law; you can be put to work to pay off your grandfather’s debt, and they don’t have to be nice about how they do it. These skeletons exist because the local value of children as slave labor is less than the foreign value of their bones.”
A student who is now a doctor then asked; “So how do I become a doctor and study medicine in a just way?”
Here is my answer to her and to us all; “Become a doctor in honor of the people who bought that privilege for you with their lives, and change the evil we inherit into something good.”
For the past and the dead we can do nothing but remember and bear witness; it is the future and the living who must be redeemed.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power. Do something beautiful with yours.
Here is the Secretary-General’s Message on the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery; “As we commemorate the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery, we need to recognize that the legacy of the transatlantic trade of enslaved Africans reverberates to this day, scarring our societies and impeding equitable development.
We must also identify and eradicate contemporary forms of slavery, such as trafficking in persons, sexual exploitation, child labour, forced marriage and the use of children in armed conflict. The latest Global Estimates of Modern Slavery on forced labour and forced marriage reveal that, in 2021, some 50 million persons were thus enslaved, and this number has been growing.
The most marginalized groups remain particularly vulnerable, including ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities, migrants, children and persons with diverse gender identities and sexual orientations. The majority of these vulnerable persons are women.
On this International Day, I call on Governments and societies to recommit to eradicating slavery. Increased action needs to be taken with full participation of all stakeholders, including the private sector, trade unions, civil society and human rights institutions. I also urge all countries to protect and uphold the rights of victims and survivors of slavery.”
What is to be done?, as Lenin asked in his essay which launched the Russian Revolution. As it happens, history provides us with guidance in this cause of liberation struggle.
This is also the anniversary of the execution of John Brown in 1859 for the Harper’s Ferry raid, in which he forever taught us how to reply to those who would enslave us with his historic attempt to arm the slaves that they might seize for themselves the lands they worked and the wealth they created, much as the people of Haiti had done in the Revolution of 1791-1804.
As Frederick Douglass said of him, “If John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, he did at least begin the war that ended slavery. . . . Until this blow was struck, the prospect for freedom was dim, shadowy and uncertain. The irrepressible conflict was one of words, votes and compromises. When John Brown stretched forth his arm, the sky was cleared. The time for compromises was gone–the armed hosts of freedom stood face to face over the chasm of a broken Union–and the clash of arms was at hand. The South staked all upon getting possession of the Federal Government, and failing to do that, drew the sword of rebellion and thus made her own, and not Brown’s, the lost cause of the century.”
How very like the moment of decision we face now, in the wake of the January 6 Insurrection and all that has come after in the Trump regime. Our glorious heroes and champions of the past, Frederick Douglass and John Brown among countless others, have given answer to those who would enslave us; now its our turn.
How answer we, for the suffering of the fifty million people who are slaves now? How bring we a Reckoning to the elite hegemons responsible for this vast and timeless crime against humanity, and bring change to the systems of unequal power by which those who would enslave us enforce their tyranny?
Who do we want to become, we humans; a world of masters and slaves, or a free society of equals?
As written in Jacobin in an article entitled Eugene Debs’s Stirring, Never-Before-Published Eulogy to John Brown at Harpers Ferry; “In a previously unpublished eulogy to John Brown from 1908, Eugene Debs proclaimed Brown the “greatest liberator this country has known” and declared that ”the Socialist Party is carrying on the work begun by John Brown.” We publish it here in full.
Eugene Debs revered John Brown as “history’s greatest hero,” a man who saw an unspeakable horror and tried to dash it from the world. In October 1908, while campaigning for president, Debs decided to make a brief stop at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, the site of Brown’s doomed anti-slavery crusade.
After disembarking from the “Red Special,” his campaign train, Debs delivered a brief eulogy. His remarks, though stirring, were largely lost to history. A labor paper published a transcript in November 1908, but otherwise Debs’s remarks, as far as we know, have never been digitized or reprinted.
Jacobin’s Shawn Gude was able to obtain a copy of Debs’s speech — courtesy of the wonderful librarians at Indiana State University — while conducting research for his forthcoming biography of Eugene Debs. So here it is: Debs’s never-before-published eulogy to John Brown.
“It is fitting that the Red Special should stop here and that we should do honor to John Brown. He was the greatest liberator this country has known. He dared the whole world and gave up his life for freedom. What more can a man do?
A few years I came and followed his steps from this spot all the way to Charles Town, where he was hanged. All the way he was the only calm person. Kindly, sweetly, and not even hating those who hounded him, he went his way.
Even members of the poor despised race for which he had done so much were taught to despise him and look upon him as something vile. On that bright, sunny morning when he was led upon the gallows, he smiled. “This is a beautiful country,” he said. “I had not seen it before.” He went to his death without fear, knowing his work was done.
As I stand here on this spot where he stood, I can see him as he stood here with a rifle in his hand, and his sons on the ground, one dead and the other dying. What a heroic figure he is as I see him.
Even today he is not appreciated. But as time goes on the fog that obscures the acts of great heroic men will be swept away, and he will stand as one of the most heroic figures in the world. Emerson has said: “The time will come when John Brown will have made the gallows as glorious as Jesus Christ made the cross.” The Socialist Party is carrying on the work begun by John Brown.”
There is another aspect of the execution of John Brown which has consequences for us today, in the shadows of the January 6 Insurrection and the capture of the state by the Fourth Reich through the Stolen Elections of 2016 and 2024 and the bogus and fictive Presidencies of the most successful foreign agent ever sent against our nation, the fascist and Russian agent Traitor Trump.
As written by Heather Cox Richardson in her newsletter; “On the clear, windy morning of December 2, 1859, just before 11:00, the doors of the jail in Charles Town, Virginia, opened, and guards moved John Brown to his funeral procession. Three companies of soldiers escorted the prisoner, who sat on his own coffin in a wagon drawn by two white horses, for the trip to the gallows.
Once there, Brown mounted the steep steps. The sheriff put a white hood on the prisoner’s head and adjusted a noose around his neck. After a delay of about fifteen minutes while officers arranged the troops that had escorted the wagon, the sheriff swung a hatchet at the rope supporting the trap door below Brown’s feet. The door snapped open and the man who had tried to launch a slave rebellion at Harpers Ferry two months before dangled, as one observer said, “between heaven and earth.”
That same observer, John T. L. Preston of the Virginia Military Institute, went on to explain that the “grand point” of the spectacle was its moral: that it was fatal to take up arms against the government.
John Brown was the first American to be executed for treason.
Before 1859 the punishment for treason in America had not been clear. In the early years of independence, as colonies tried to stamp out loyalty to the King, some colonies had broadened the definition of treason to include “preaching, teaching, speaking, writing, or printing,” and by the time of the ratification of the Constitution in 1788, twelve of the thirteen states had written their own laws against treason.
The Framers of the Constitution recognized the danger that leaders in the new nation might expand the definition of treason to sweep in political opposition, and after all, they had been “traitors” themselves just eleven years before. So the Framers specified in the Constitution a very limited definition of treason against the United States, saying that only levying war against the United States or “adhering to their enemies” or giving “aid and comfort” to an enemy could be considered treason. But they did not define a penalty for treason, leaving that to be determined by Congress.
They also voted to leave open the possibility for states to define treason as they wished. In the years after the ratification of the Constitution in 1788, most state constitutional conventions defined treason as a crime in their fundamental state law.
As men jockeyed for control of the government in the chaotic early years of the Republic, several men ran afoul of the federal and state treason clauses, but they did not pay the ultimate price for their missteps. Two men were convicted of treason against the federal government during the Whiskey Rebellion in the 1790s; President Washington pardoned them both. In 1838, Joseph Smith and five other Mormon leaders were charged with treason against Missouri for their part in the violent struggle between Mormons and non-Mormons in the state; they escaped before trial. Thomas Wilson Dorr was convicted of treason against Rhode Island for his part in the Dorr Rebellion of the 1840s and was sentenced to hard labor for life, but a popular protest won him amnesty after he had served a year.
Then, on October 16, 1859, abolitionist John Brown led 18 men to attack the federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia—it became West Virginia in 1863—in order to seize guns from the armory, distribute them to local enslaved men, and lead them to freedom and self-government. As they cut the telegraph wires in the town in the dead of night, a free Black man, a baggage handler, stumbled upon them and they shot him. The sound attracted the attention of a local physician, who roused his neighbors. As they started to come awake, Brown’s men took the armory, which was defended by a single watchman who turned over the keys to the raiders.
At dawn the next day, a train came through the town, and its operators alerted authorities to the trouble in Harpers Ferry as soon as they got to a working telegraph. Meanwhile, Brown’s people captured Armory employees coming to work, and as news of the hostages spread, local militia converged on the site. As firing from the militia pinned Brown’s men down, they moved to a small brick building near the armory’s door. Intermittent shooting over the course of the day killed a number of Brown’s men as well as local militia before federal troops arrived on the morning of the next day, October 18.
Officers, commanded by Colonel Robert E. Lee, promised to spare the lives of Brown and his men if they surrendered, but Brown refused. Within minutes, soldiers had broken down the doors to their shelter and taken prisoner Brown and the seven of his men still alive.
On October 27 the state of Virginia began the trial of the still-wounded Brown for murder, inciting a slave insurrection, and treason against the state of Virginia. His lawyers argued that he could not have committed treason because he was not a resident of the state and so owed it no allegiance.
But the Virginia jury deliberated for only 45 minutes before they convicted John Brown of treason, agreeing with the prosecution that one did not have to reside in a state to be guilty of taking up arms against its government. On November 2 the judge sentenced Brown to death by hanging, a sentence that would be carried out after a legally required one-month delay.
Virginians like Preston applauded the decision. “Law had been violated by actual murder and attempted treason,” Preston wrote to his wife in a letter reprinted in the local newspaper, “and that gibbet was erected by law, and to uphold law was this military force assembled…. So perish all such enemies of Virginia! All such enemies of the Union! All such foes of the human race!”
The execution of John Brown for treason set a precedent.
And in just over a year, Virginians themselves would take up arms against the federal government. Men like Preston, who became an aide-de-camp to Stonewall Jackson, had to wonder if the precedent of hanging John Brown for treason might come back to haunt them.
Notes:
J. Taylor McConkie, “State Treason: The History and Validity of Treason Against Individual States,” Kentucky Law Journal Vol. 101: Iss. 2, Article 3.”
Will this precedent of which Heather Cox Richardson has reminded us come back to haunt Traitor Trump and other conspirators in the January 6 Insurrection, the ICE white supremacist terror force and its criminal programme of ethnic cleansing, the racialization of our universities and the institutions of the state, the kleptocracy of a government for sale, the subveersions of our democracy and the violations of our ideals and values?
The idea of capital punishment as absolute power of the state over its citizens is anathema to me; I prefer instead the ancient Roman custom of damnatio memorae or public forgetting and erasure from history, and in accord with the principle of minimum use of social force I believe the natural consequence of treason is loss of citizenship and exile.
But if we are to become fulcrums and change the balance of power in the world, we must also dismantle unequal power and its systems of oppression.
Let us bring a Reckoning to those who would enslave us.
History, memory, identity, the stories we tell about ourselves and those told about us by others including those who would enslave us, who are and can become and who decides; all of this is a ground of struggle against systems of oppression, falsification, commodification, and dehumanization, and often a shifting ground, constructed of relative truths as a Rashomon Gate of human being, meaning, and value.
As I write these words Brazil is reeling from the worst incident of police terror and mass murder in its history; even in Brazil of Lula, socialist and champion of the people and of worker solidarity regardless of race, the system of state racist terror and systems of oppression perpetuates itself as police brutality and a rigged justice system enforce racialized elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege. Only love can free us from the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, from hierarchies of belonging and otherness, and from systems of white supremacist terror, subjugation, and dehumanization. Disarming and abolishing police as a caste of overseers and slavecatchers would also be useful.
In 1974 I fought police bounty hunters and death squads in the streets of Sao Paulo, the summer before I began high school, and despite the glorious victory oner Bolsonaro’s fascist regime little has changed on the ground for the poor and the nonwhite. Over fifty years of liberation struggle, and what have we achieved?
Herein the history and heroes authorized by the state and valorized as exemplars of the human ideal become important; representation matters, symbols bear power, and the ownership of our own stories as witness, remembrance, and aspiration all confer transformative force as seizures of power.
Brazil’s embrace of a national holiday on the date of the great slave revolt leader Zumbi’s death in glorious battle at the hands of colonialist forces is a case study of what I term the Narrative Theory of Identity, in which self construal is a form of revolution and the primary defining act of becoming human.
Celebrate with us the great warrior, King, and figure of liberation Zumbi and his defiance unto death of those who would enslave us, and the free republic of Palmares he led in anticolonialst revolution and a century long war of independence against vast forces of imperial conquest and dominion and systems of white supremacist oppression and terror, whoever he may have been and whatever rebel kingdom he championed, for all that truly matters is that he holds an imaginal space we each of us may step into and become, no matter the wretchedness of our initial conditions.
That a man lived and was real who refused to submit is enough for us to remember and dream into being, for each of us may become that man who we dream.
As written by Tiago Rogero in The Guardian, in an article entitled Brazil celebrates Black Consciousness Day as national holiday for first time: Legacy of African Brazilians honored on 329th anniversary of resistance leader Zumbi’s death by Portuguese forces; “During the more than 350 years during which slavery was legal in Brazil, harsh conditions prompted a string of uprisings, often resulting in the establishment of quilombos – independent communities formed by escaped Africans who were formerly enslaved, and their descendants.
None were more prominent than the one known as Palmares, where, in the 17th century, as many as 11,000 people lived in a string of communities across parts of the north-eastern states of Alagoas and Pernambuco.
But the roughly 100-year history of what historians regard as the most significant resistance movement against slavery in Brazil began to unravel on 20 November 1695, when its most famous leader, Zumbi, was captured by Portuguese colonial forces and killed.
Three hundred and twenty-nine years later, the date will for the first time be marked as a national public holiday: Black Consciousness Day, which has been a longstanding demand of Black movements that still face attacks from the far right.
A series of events – including at least 38 in São Paulo alone – will mark the date nationwide, celebrating Zumbi, Palmares and the ongoing fight for racial equality.
“Palmares was the largest quilombo in the Americas, both in terms of its longevity and population,” said Danilo Luiz Marques, a historian and professor at the Federal University of Alagoas.
Some researchers have described Palmares – whose first records date back to 1590 – as the earliest form of a republic to emerge on Brazilian soil. Marques, however, argues that it was a Bantu kingdom, reflecting the central-African language family to which most Africans brought to Brazil belonged.
Black movements in Brazil have celebrated the names of Zumbi and Palmares since the early 20th century at the earliest, but it was only in 1971 that 20 November became a key date.
Activists had sought a date to contrast with another historically associated with Black people: 13 May, the day slavery was abolished in 1888.
Rather than celebrating Black individuals, however, 13 May had traditionally been used to exalt the white princess who signed the abolition decree: Isabel, then the regent of the Brazilian empire.
“The princess was glorified as if she had granted a favour to the enslaved people; as if she were a heroine,” said Deivison Campos, a historian and professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul.
“The Palmares group sought to counter this narrative, proposing 20 November as a way to honour the collective struggle for the inclusion of Black people in Brazilian society,” he said.
Today, 13 May is still celebrated, with Black activists arguing it cannot be ignored since abolition was primarily the result of Black resistance. However, 20 November has become so popular that November is now informally known as Brazil’s Black Consciousness Month.
The law to make Black Consciousness Day Brazil’s 10th national holiday – signed by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in December 2023 – was passed amid significant resistance from conservatives.
During the presidency of far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro, Sérgio Camargo, the then head of the Palmares Foundation – a federal body established in 1988 to promote African-Brazilian culture – harshly criticised the 20 November holiday, labelling it the Day of Black Victimisation, the Day of the Black Mind Enslaved by the Left or the Day of Resentment for the Past.
Some within the far-right even doubt the existence of Palmares or its most famous leader despite extensive historical evidence. “Falsehoods have always been used to attack Black history,” said Marques.
Brazil’s largest television network, Rede Globo, will mark the date with a 50-minute primetime special focusing on the wrongful imprisonment of Black individuals based on photographic identification – a widespread issue in the country.
“In Brazil, Black people continue to be imprisoned, deprived of freedom, a healthy life and the chance to realise their dreams simply because they are Black,” said the special’s creator and presenter, Clayton Nascimento.
“It’s important that 20 November is, for the first time, a public holiday because it allows us to pause and reflect on Brazil’s Black history. We were the ones who built this nation,” he added.”
As written in 2019 by Laurence Blair in The Guardian, in an article entitled History of free African strongholds fires Brazilian resistance to Bolsonaro: Quilombo dos Palmares – founded by Africans who escaped slavery – maintained its independence for 100 years and has become a touchstone for a new generation; “Apalm-fringed ridge rises above the plains of Alagoas in north-east Brazil. Just a few replica thatched huts and a wall of wooden stakes now stand at its summit, but this was once the capital of the Quilombo dos Palmares – a sprawling, powerful nation of Africans who escaped slavery, and their descendants who held out here in the forest for 100 years.
Its population was at least 11,000 – at the time, more than that of Rio de Janeiro – across dozens of villages with elected leaders and a hybrid language and culture.
Palmares allied with indigenous peoples, traded for gunpowder, launched guerrilla raids on coastal sugar plantations to free other captives, and withstood more than 20 assaults before falling to Portuguese cannons in 1695.
“Hundreds threw themselves to their deaths rather than surrender,” said local guide Thais “Dandara” Thaty at the historical site in Serra da Barriga. In her telling, those killed included Dandara – her adoptive namesake – captain of a band of warrior women, whose husband Zumbi is similarly shrouded in myth as a fearless Palmarian commander.
About 5 million enslaved Africans were brought across the Atlantic to Brazil between 1501 and 1888. Many escaped, forming quilombos, or free communities.
Three centuries later, the remarkable saga of Palmares is being seized on once more as a symbol of resistance against Brazil’s rightwing president and the country’s pervasive racism towards its black and mixed-race majority.
A pair of new television and Netflix documentaries, screened in late 2018 and this June, have examined the legacy of Palmares. In March, the victorious carnival parade of Mangueira samba school highlighted Dandara among a lineup of overlooked black and indigenous heroes. Later that month, Brazil’s senate voted to inscribe Dandara in the Book of Heroes in the Pantheon of the Fatherland, a soaring, modernist cenotaph in Brasília.
Angola Janga, a graphic novel charting the rise and fall of Palmares, has won a string of awards. “Many people want an alternative view, to try to escape the one-sided, one-dimensional vision of our history imposed by the Portuguese and Brazilian elite,” said author Marcelo D’Salete, whose painstakingly researched book, including maps and timelines alongside striking monochrome illustrations, has been widely used in classrooms.
“Quilombos in general are very big right now,” said Ana Carolina Lourenço, a sociologist and adviser to one recent documentary on Palmares. Young Afro-Brazilians have even coined a verb, she added – to quilombar – meaning to meet up to debate politics or simply celebrate black music, culture and identity.
This renewed prominence coincides with a sharp rightward turn in Brazilian politics. Jair Bolsonaro has denied that Portuguese slavers set foot in Africa, and vilified the roughly 3,000 quilombos dotted across Brazil today – poor and marginalised Afro-Brazilian communities, often descended from fugitive slaves – branding their residents “not even fit for procreation”.
The president has sought to erode the landholding rights of quilombo communities in favour, critics argue, of the powerful agribusiness sector. Police killings, mainly of Afro-Brazilians, in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo have also risen sharply in 2019 with Bolsonaro’s encouragement.
Earlier this month, footage of supermarket security guards whipping a bound and gagged black teenager for allegedly shoplifting, prompted reflections on the lasting legacy of slavery.
For centuries, writers portrayed Palmarians merely “as runaway blacks and outlaws who rebelled against the crown”, said the Alagoas historian Geraldo de Majella.
It was only in the mid-20th century that historians began to reconstruct its story via Portuguese archives, often in Marxist terms. Meanwhile, “black militant movements took up the flag of Palmares as a movement of national liberation,” De Majella explained. The largest guerrilla group during the 1964-85 military dictatorship – the Palmares Armed Revolutionary Vanguard – counted former president Dilma Rousseff among its members.
Lula, the former president, simultaneously bolstered recognition of Palmares and the legal rights of present-day quilombos. 20 November – the date the Palmarian leader was killed – was officially adopted as the National Day of Zumbi and Black Consciousness in 2003.
In the same year, public schools were legally required to teach Afro-Brazilian history.
But limited archaeological evidence and the absence of Palmarian sources has encouraged freewheeling interpretations. Today, perhaps drawing on the historical presence of advanced metalworking at the site, some compare Palmares with Wakanda, the hi-tech, Afrofuturist utopia of Marvel’s Black Panther.
But the inclusion of Dandara – whose first written mention occurs in a 1962 novel – in the Pantheon divided opinion. “I absolutely defend creative freedom in the way people look at our history,” said D’Salete. “But we need to take care to differentiate between fact and fiction.”
Fernando Holiday, an Afro-Brazilian YouTuber and conservative activist, has noted that Palmarian society had monarchical elements and also kept captives. “I’m sorry to disappoint leftist and black leaders, but today we’re commemorating a farce,” Holiday said in a video. “Zumbi wasn’t a hero of abolition.”
But Palmares and other examples of revolt and resistance, D’Salete argued, “are important as other ways of understanding our history … so people can imagine and build another kind of society that is very different to one just based on violence and oppression”.
That legacy of violence is apparent in Tiningu, a remote quilombo in Pará state. The community has battled to receive legal recognition, threatened by the ranchers and landowners who have cut down much of the surrounding rainforest. One resident was murdered by a rival soybean farmer on the eve of Bolsonaro’s election. Here, Palmares is not merely history but a source of hope.
“Zumbi was the beginning of everything,” said local teacher Joanice Mata de Oliveira, whose school is daubed with the names of African nations. “He was the one who began our fight.”
As I wrote in my post of January 12 2023, A History of the Revolution in Brazil and Fascist Counter-Revolution: Liberty Versus Tyranny, Lula Versus Bolsonaro; In the wake of the collapse of Bolsonaro’s fascist counter-revolution and coup attempt in Brazil, Lula’s swift reaction in the mass arrests of the treasonous brownshirts who stormed the offices of the government in imitation of Trump’s failed January 6 Insurrection, itself modeled on Trump’s idol Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch, and the stunning nationwide repudiation of Bolsonaro and his failed capture of the state by the victorious peoples of Brazil, has now begun a new phase of struggle with the manhunt for those who fund and organize fascist tyranny, much like that ongoing now in America for two years.
An insidious and far reaching conspiracy against democracy linking the Trump and Bolsonaro crime families and the forces of reaction in America and Brazil begins to emerge, mixing familiar malefactors and Fourth Reich apologists like Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson with unknown freaks of nature like Luiz Philippe de Orléans e Braganza, who seeks a return to the throne of Brazil through Trump and Bolsonaro as proxies and is now scuttling from beneath his rock like the ravenous and vile crawling thing all aristocrats are beneath their gold paint, conspiracies which widen to engulf whole networks of white supremacist terror, theocratic patriarchal sexual terror, plutocratic and oligarchic theft of public wealth as terminal stage capitalism seeks to free itself from its host political system, and the xenophobic and self-righteous carceral states of force and control which they spawn as instruments of elite wealth, power, and privilege.
Our great enemy is the global Fourth Reich, which transforms itself ceaselessly and adapts to the conditions of whatever nation it targets for subversion and capture, and the interconnections between regimes of fascist tyranny are manifold and subtle. Fascism wears many masks, and like an ambush predator in nature moves among us behind mirages of lies and illusions, rewritten histories and stolen voices, images which capture and distort. Here is a ground of struggle in which we all of us must fight, if we are to seize control of our own identity under falsification and division as imposed conditions of struggle.
As written in the Netflix series Wednesday, episode three Friend Or Woe:
“Principal Weems, bracing Wednesday in her office for sabotaging the celebration of the Pilgrim leader who burned the original Outcasts alive and built the town on their stolen land and graves, a story repeated endlessly in our all too real history; “You’re a trouble magnet.”
Wednesday: “If trouble means standing up to lies, decades of discrimination, centuries of treating outcasts like second-class citizens or worse…”
Principal: “What are you talking about?”
Wednesday: “Jericho. Why does this town even have an Outreach Day?
Don’t you know its real history with outcasts? The actual story of Joseph Crackstone?”
Principal: “I do. To an extent.”
Wednesday: “Then why be complicit in its cover up? Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.”
Principal: “That’s where you and I differ. Where you see doom, I see opportunity. Maybe this is a chance to rewrite the wrongs, to start a new chapter in the normie-outcast relations.”
Wednesday: “Nothing has changed since Crackstone. They still hate us. Only now they sugarcoat it with platitudes and smiles. If you’re unwilling to fight for truth…”
Principal: “You don’t think I want the truth? Of course I do. But the world isn’t always black and white. There are shades of gray.”
Wednesday: “Maybe for you. But it’s either they write our story or we do. You can’t have it both ways.”
Here is a History of the Revolution in Brazil as I have lived it;
As I wrote in my post of October 30 2022, Victory in Brazil: “We are going to live new times of peace, love and hope” vows Brazil’s New President Lula as He Begins the Restoration of Democracy; We celebrate a Forlorn Hope vindicated and become glorious in the victory of the peoples of Brazil and their champion Lula, with dancing in the streets and running Amok beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden.
A monster and tyrant has been driven from his castle, and this is always cause for celebration. We will always have this moment of triumph, and the hope it holds for our future, regardless of the trials to follow. Whether such hope is a gift or a curse is up to each of us to live and make real; but things are now possible which yesterday were not, and this I call victory.
With the words of Glinda to Oz I congratulate Lula and the peoples of Brazil; ‘We’ve waited a long time for you, Wizard.” And we really need you to be the Wizard we hope you are.
A great work now begins, as like we once hoped Biden would in America before our recapture by the Fourth Reich, Lula in Brazil leads the Restoration of Democracy in a nation whose systems, structures, institutions, values, and ideals have been damaged by fascist subversion, disruption, and fracture, but whose people emerge from the crucible of their forging unconquered and renewed.
One day we will be a United Humankind and a free society of equals, and Lula like Biden and all our flawed and failed champions of liberty will be remembered for as long as there are human beings as among the founders of a new humanity and civilization or who could have been, whose vision will or can yet shape our being, meaning, and value, inform our choices about how to be human together for millennia, and motivate our discover of the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Let us each do what we can to make the dream of democracy real.
As I wrote in my post of June 3 2021, Brazilians Seize the Streets to Demand the Resignation of Bolsonaro; The horrific death toll of Bolsonaro’s inept and corrupt handling of the Pandemic, the campaign of ethnic cleansing of indigenous peoples, the plunder of public wealth and natural resources by a plutocratic elite, the vast precariat of a nation poised on the edge of collapse; all these and one thing more have brought the people of Brazil into the streets this week to demand the resignation of the tyrant Bolsonaro; the brutal repression of a kleptocratic fascist regime of force and violence.
The use of force and violence fails at the point of resistance and refusal to submit, and power is a fragile and hollow illusion which may be dispelled by exposure and challenge of authority, for who cannot be controlled is free. Regardless of the death squads and sexual terror, of the enormous military might of the government of Brazil as a host structure of racist elite hegemony, a people who do not recognize the authority of the state and who meet repression with disobedience cannot be subjugated.
Every Brazilian in the streets today who challenge and defy state terror has won their freedom, for they cannot be enslaved by those who would be our masters. So begins the end of tyranny in Brazil; we can help the people of Brazil liberate themselves and establish a true democracy as a free society of equals by shaping our policy to such ends.
The people of Brazil have spoken; how shall we answer them?
As I wrote in my post of March 11 2021, Brazil Reclaims Its Heart: the Return of Lula da Silva, Champion of the People; Lula da Silva, Champion of the People, has had the false corruption charges against him overturned and is now free to challenge Bolsonaro for the Presidency of Brazil once again.
This is a historic example of class war, which pits labor leader da Silva directly against capitalist kingpin Bolsonaro, whose regime creates wealth for elites by the de facto enslavement of Blacks and the precariat and the plunder of resources from indigenous peoples, and whose government is controlled from within by a network of some six thousand military officers who enforce his kleptocracy with brutal repression.
Racism, patriarchy, oligarchic and plutocratic wealth, de facto military rule; Brazil today meets all the criteria of fascist tyranny. I look now to Lula to change the balance of power and restore democracy in Brazil.
Of my connection with Brazil and her peoples, stamped into my soul by the trauma of my near-execution by police while rescuing abandoned street children whom they were bounty hunting for the wealthy aristocratic elite, who like America’s homeless are terrorized by the carceral state and the hegemonic elites its serves not merely because they are unsightly but because their existence gives the lie to capitalism as a system of oppression, I have written in my post of July 15 2022, Let Hope Overcome Fear: Lula 2022; Among my personal role models in antifascism and revolution is the fictional character of Harry Tuttle played by Robert de Niro in the film Brazil, whose line “we’re all in this together,” echoes through forty some years of my life and adventures.
Let me place this in context; Brazil was my first solo foreign travel experience, flying to Sao Paulo when I was fourteen, in the summer of 1974, to train with some fellow fencers for the Pan American Games which were planned to be held there, though later the venue was moved to Mexico. I had some newly learned conversational Portuguese, an invitation to stay at the home of a boy my age I knew from the fencing tournament circuit with whom I could discover the local mischief, and visions of beach parties.
So it was that I entered a world of courtly manners and white-gloved servants, gracious and brilliant hosts who were local luminaries and threw a magnificent formal ball to introduce me, and a friend with whom I shared a mad passion for martial and equestrian sports, but also a world of high walls and armed guards.
My first view beyond this illusion came with the sounds of rifle fire from the guards; when I looked from my balcony to see who was attacking the front gate I discovered the guards were firing into a crowd of beggars, mostly children, who had mobbed a truck carrying the weekly food supplies. That day I made my first secret excursion beyond the walls.
What truths are hidden by the walls of our palaces, beyond which it is Forbidden to look? It is easy to believe the lies of authority when one is a member of the elite in whose interest they claim to wield power, and to fail to question one’s own motives and position of privilege. Terrifyingly easy to believe lies when we are the beneficiaries of hierarchies of exclusionary otherness, of wealth and power disparity and inequalities systemically manufactured and weaponized in service to power, and of genocide, slavery, conquest, and imperialism.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. For there is no just authority, and as Dorothy says in the Wizard of Oz, he’s “just an old humbug”, and his lies and illusions, force and control, serve no interests but his own.
Being a naïve American boy, I felt it was my duty to report the incident; but at the police station I had difficulty making myself understood. They thought I was there to place a bet on my guard in an ongoing monthly contest for which police officer bagged the most street children; there was a chalkboard on the station wall for this, like for horse racing. This was how the elites of Brazil had chosen to solve the problem of abandoned street children, fully ten per cent of the national population. Another betting game called “the Big One”, was for which policeman kicked the most pregnant girls in the stomach and ranked among the top ten causes of death in Brazil for teenage girls, invariably living within slum zones containing the most impoverished and most Black of citizens; this in a city founded by escaped African slaves as a free republic.
I learned much in the weeks that followed; above all I learned who is responsible for these inequalities; we are, if we do not challenge and defy tyranny and unjust systems.
During the nights of my adventures beyond the walls and actions to help the bands of child beggars and obstruct the police bounty hunts I had a traumatic near death experience, similar to the mock executions of Maurice Blanchot by the Nazis in 1944 as written in The Instant of My Death and Fyodor Dostoevsky by the Czar’s secret police in 1849 as written in The Idiot; fleeing pursuit through a warren of tunnels with an injured child among others and trapped in the open by two police riflemen who took flanking positions and aimed at us while the leader called for surrender beyond the curve of a tunnel. I stood in front of a boy with a twisted leg who could not run while the others scattered and escaped or found hiding places, and refused to stand aside when ordered to do so. This was reflexive and a decision of instinct beneath the level of conscious thought or volition, where the truths our ourselves written in our flesh are forged and revealed. Asked to let someone die to save myself, I simply said no. When thought returned me from this moment of panic or transcendence of myself, I asked how much to let us walk away, whereupon he ordered his men to fire. But there was only one shot instead of a demonstration of crossfire, and that a wide miss; he had time to ask “What?” before falling to the ground.
And then our rescuers revealed themselves, having crept up on the police from behind; the Matadors, who might be described as vigilantes, a criminal gang, a revolutionary group, or all three, founded by Brazil’s notorious vigilante and criminal Pedro Rodrigues Filho, infamous for avenging his mother’s savage murder by killing his father and eating his heart, who had been arrested the previous year after a spectacular series of one hundred or more revenge killings of the most fiendish and monstrous of criminals, powerful men beyond the reach of the law or who were the law who had perpetrated atrocities on women and children. Into this fearsome brotherhood I was welcomed, with the words; “You are one of us, come with us” and in the streets of Sao Paulo that summer I never again stood alone.
“We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge”; so they described themselves to me, and this definition of solidarity as praxis or the action of values remains with me and shadows my use of the battle cry Never Again! As Shakespeare wrote in The Merchant of Venice, Act III, scene I; “If you wrong us, shall we not avenge?”
From the moment I saw the guards of the aristocratic family with whom I was a guest firing on the crowd of homeless children and beggars swarming the food supply truck at the manor gate, naked and skeletal in starvation, scarred and crippled and misshapen with diseases unknown to any people for whom healthcare and basic nutrition are free and guaranteed preconditions of the universal right to life, desperate for a handful of food which could mean one more day of survival; in that moment I chose my side, and my people are the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased; all those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth.
Join us, for a United Humankind cannot be enslaved, conquered, dehumanized, falsified, or commodified, nor can tyranny stand against liberty when the people refuse to submit.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
Brazil celebrates Black Consciousness Day as national holiday for first time
Legacy of African Brazilians honored on 329th anniversary of resistance leader Zumbi’s death by Portuguese forces
History of free African strongholds fires Brazilian resistance to Bolsonaro:
Quilombo dos Palmares – founded by Africans who escaped slavery – maintained its independence for 100 years and has become a touchstone for a new generation
20 de novembro de 2025 O Brasil celebra sua herança de resistência negra, revoltas de escravos, repúblicas negras livres e luta de libertação
História, memória, identidade, as histórias que contamos sobre nós mesmos e aquelas contadas sobre nós por outros, incluindo aqueles que nos escravizariam, que são e podem se tornar e que decidem; tudo isso é um terreno de luta contra sistemas de opressão, falsificação, mercantilização e desumanização, e muitas vezes um terreno mutável, construído de verdades relativas como um Portão Rashomon do ser humano, significado e valor.
A adoção pelo Brasil de um feriado nacional na data da morte do grande líder da revolta de escravos Zumbi em uma batalha gloriosa nas mãos das forças colonialistas é um estudo de caso do que chamo de Teoria Narrativa da Identidade, na qual a autoconstrução é uma forma de revolução e o principal ato definidor de se tornar humano.
Celebre conosco o grande guerreiro, rei e figura da libertação Zumbi e seu desafio até a morte daqueles que nos escravizariam, e a república livre de Palmares que ele liderou na revolução anticolonial e uma guerra de independência de um século contra vastas forças de conquista e domínio imperial e sistemas de opressão e terror da supremacia branca, quem quer que ele tenha sido e qualquer reino rebelde que ele defendeu, pois tudo o que realmente importa é que ele detém um espaço imaginário em que cada um de nós pode entrar e se tornar, não importa a miséria de nossas condições iniciais.
Que um homem viveu e foi real que se recusou a se submeter é o suficiente para nos lembrarmos e sonharmos em ser, pois cada um de nós pode se tornar aquele homem que sonhamos
12 de janeiro de 2023 Uma História da Revolução no Brasil e da Contra-Revolução Fascista: Liberdade Versus Tirania, Lula Versus Bolsonaro
Na esteira do colapso da contra-revolução fascista de Bolsonaro e da tentativa de golpe no Brasil, a rápida reação de Lula nas prisões em massa dos camisas marrons traidoras que invadiram os escritórios do governo em imitação da fracassada Insurreição de 6 de janeiro de Trump, ela mesma modelada em seu ídolo O Golpe da Cervejaria de Hitler e o repúdio nacional impressionante a Bolsonaro e sua captura fracassada do estado pelos povos vitoriosos do Brasil, agora começou uma nova fase de luta com a caçada para aqueles que financiam e organizam a tirania fascista, muito parecido com o que está em andamento agora na América por dois anos.
Uma conspiração insidiosa e de longo alcance contra a democracia, ligando as famílias criminosas de Trump e Bolsonaro e as forças da reação na América e no Brasil, começa a emergir, misturando malfeitores familiares e apologistas do Quarto Reich como Steve Bannon e Tucker Carlson com aberrações desconhecidas da natureza como Luiz Philippe de Orléans e Braganza, que busca um retorno ao trono do Brasil através de Trump e Bolsonaro como procuradores e agora está fugindo de debaixo de sua rocha como a coisa rastejante voraz e vil que todos os aristocratas são sob sua tinta dourada, conspirações que se ampliam para engolir redes inteiras de terror supremacista branco, terror sexual patriarcal teocrático, roubo plutocrático e oligárquico da riqueza pública e os estados carcerários xenófobos e hipócritas de força e controle que eles geram como instrumentos de riqueza, poder e privilégio da elite.
Nosso grande inimigo é o Quarto Reich global, que se transforma incessantemente e se adapta às condições de qualquer nação que vise para subversão e captura, e as interconexões entre regimes de tirania fascista são múltiplas e sutis. O fascismo usa muitas máscaras e, como um predador de emboscada na natureza, move-se entre nós por trás de miragens de mentiras e ilusões, histórias reescritas e vozes roubadas, imagens que capturam e distorcem. Aqui está um terreno de luta no qual todos nós devemos lutar, se quisermos assumir o controle de nossa própria identidade sob falsificação e divisão como condições de luta impostas.
Conforme escrito na série da Netflix quarta-feira, episódio três Friend Or Woe:
A Diretora Weems, preparando-se na quarta-feira em seu escritório por sabotar a celebração do líder peregrino que queimou vivos os Párias originais e construiu a cidade em suas terras e túmulos roubados, uma história repetida infinitamente em nossa história real; “Você é um imã de problemas.”
Quarta-feira: “Se problemas significam enfrentar mentiras, décadas de discriminação, séculos tratando párias como cidadãos de segunda classe ou pior…”
Diretora: “Do que você está falando?”
Quarta-feira: “Jericó. Por que esta cidade ainda tem um Dia de Divulgação?
Você não conhece sua história real com párias? A verdadeira história de Joseph Crackstone?
Diretora: “Sim. Até certo ponto.”
Quarta-feira: “Então por que ser cúmplice em seu encobrimento? Aqueles que esquecem a história estão fadados a repeti-la.”
Principal: “É aí que você e eu diferimos. Onde você vê desgraça, eu vejo oportunidade.
Talvez esta seja uma chance de reescrever os erros, de começar um novo capítulo nas relações normie-párias.
Quarta-feira: “Nada mudou desde Crackstone. Eles ainda nos odeiam. Só que agora eles adoçam com platitudes e sorrisos. Se você não está disposto a lutar pela verdade…”
Diretor: “Você não acha que eu quero a verdade? Claro que eu faço. Mas o mundo nem sempre é preto e branco. Existem tons de cinza.”
Quarta-feira: “Talvez para você. Mas ou eles escrevem nossa história ou nós. Você não pode ter as duas coisas.
30 de outubro de 2022 Vitória no Brasil: “Vamos viver novos tempos de paz, amor e esperança” promete o novo presidente Lula ao iniciar a restauração da democracia
Celebramos uma Esperança Desamparada vindicada e nos tornamos gloriosos na vitória dos povos do Brasil e de seu campeão Lula, dançando nas ruas e correndo descontroladamente além dos limites do Proibido.
Um monstro e tirano foi expulso de seu castelo, e isso é sempre motivo de comemoração. Sempre teremos esse momento de triunfo e a esperança que ele reserva para o nosso futuro, independentemente das provações que virão. Se tal esperança é uma dádiva ou uma maldição, cabe a cada um de nós viver e tornar real; mas agora são possíveis coisas que ontem não eram, e isso eu chamo de vitória.
Com as palavras de Glinda a Oz felicito Lula e os povos do Brasil; ‘Esperamos muito tempo por você, feiticeiro. E nós realmente precisamos que você seja o Mago que esperamos que você seja.
Um grande trabalho começa agora, como Biden na América, Lula no Brasil lidera a Restauração da Democracia em uma nação cujos sistemas, estruturas, instituições, valores e ideais foram danificados pela subversão, ruptura e fratura fascistas, mas cujo povo emerge do cadinho de seu forjamento invicto e renovado.
Um dia seremos uma Humanidade Unida e uma sociedade livre de iguais, e Lula como Biden será lembrado enquanto houver seres humanos entre os fundadores de uma nova humanidade e civilização, cuja visão moldará nosso ser, ou seja, e valor, informar nossas escolhas sobre como sermos humanos juntos por milênios e motivar nossa descoberta das possibilidades ilimitadas de nos tornarmos humanos.
Vamos cada um fazer o que pudermos para tornar o sonho da democracia real.
7 de setembro de 2022 Brasil comemora seu bicentenário de independência, e Bolsonaro o usa para armar o patriotismo a serviço de seu regime em um comício Trump-Nuremberg
Nesta gloriosa e jubilosa celebração de dois séculos de Independência do Brasil, que significam a libertação do colonialismo imperial e da aristocracia feudal, as sombras de nossa história ameaçam ressurgir e nos tomar mais uma vez em uma tirania de poder desigual sistêmico e hegemonias elitistas de riqueza e privilégio.
E a isso devemos resistir. Demos à tirania fascista a única resposta que ela merece; Nunca mais.
Bolsonaro citou Richard Nixon em seu comício Trump-Nuremberg; “Eu não sou bandido.”
Como em todas as grandes mentiras, um criminoso é exatamente o que é.
Da minha ligação com o Brasil e seus povos, estampada em minha alma pelo trauma de minha quase execução pela polícia ao resgatar meninos de rua abandonados que estavam caçando recompensas para a rica elite aristocrática, escrevi em meu post de 15 de julho de 2022, Deixe a esperança vencer o medo: Lula 2022; Entre meus modelos pessoais no antifascismo e na revolução está o personagem fictício de Harry Tuttle interpretado por Robert de Niro no filme Brasil, cuja frase “estamos todos juntos nisso”, ecoa por quarenta e poucos anos de minha vida e aventuras.
Deixe-me colocar isso no contexto; O Brasil foi minha primeira viagem solo ao exterior, voando para São Paulo quando eu tinha quatorze anos, no verão de 1974, para treinar com alguns colegas esgrimistas para os Jogos Pan-Americanos que estavam planejados para lá, embora mais tarde o local tenha sido transferido para México. Eu tinha um pouco de português de conversação recém-aprendido, um convite para ficar na casa de um menino da minha idade que eu conhecia do circuito de torneios de esgrima com quem eu poderia descobrir as travessuras locais e visões de festas na praia.
Foi assim que entrei em um mundo de maneiras corteses e criados de luvas brancas, anfitriões graciosos e brilhantes que eram luminares locais e deram um magnífico baile formal para me apresentar, e um amigo com quem eu compartilhava uma paixão louca por esportes marciais e equestres , mas também um mundo de muros altos e guardas armados.
Minha primeira visão além dessa ilusão veio com os sons de tiros de fuzil dos guardas; quando olhei da minha sacada para ver quem estava atacando o portão da frente, descobri que os guardas estavam atirando em uma multidão de mendigos, a maioria crianças, que assaltaram um caminhão que transportava os mantimentos semanais. Naquele dia fiz minha primeira excursão secreta além das muralhas.
Que verdades estão escondidas pelas paredes de nossos palácios, além das quais é proibido olhar? É fácil acreditar nas mentiras da autoridade quando alguém é membro da elite em cujo interesse eles alegam exercer poder e deixar de questionar seus próprios motivos e posição de privilégio. Mentiras terrivelmente fáceis de acreditar quando somos beneficiários de hierarquias de alteridade excludente, de riqueza e disparidade de poder e desigualdades sistematicamente fabricadas e armadas a serviço do poder, e de genocídio, escravidão, conquista e imperialismo.
Sempre preste atenção no homem atrás da cortina. Pois não existe autoridade justa, e como Dorothy diz no Mágico de Oz, ele é “apenas um velho farsante”, e suas mentiras e ilusões, força e controle, não servem a nenhum interesse além dos seus.
Sendo um menino americano ingênuo, senti que era meu dever relatar o incidente; mas na delegacia tive dificuldade em me fazer entender. Eles achavam que eu estava ali para apostar na minha guarda em um concurso mensal em andamento para o qual policial pegasse o maior número de crianças de rua; havia um quadro-negro na parede da estação para isso. Foi assim que as elites do Brasil escolheram resolver o problema das crianças de rua abandonadas, dez por cento da população nacional. Outro jogo de apostas chamado “o Grande”, foi aquele em que o policial chutou a barriga das mais grávidas e ficou entre as dez maiores causas de morte no Brasil para adolescentes, invariavelmente vivendo em zonas de favelas que abrigam as mais pobres e negras do mundo. cidadãos; isso em uma cidade fundada por escravos africanos fugidos como uma república livre.
Aprendi muito nas semanas que se seguiram; sobretudo aprendi quem é o responsável por essas desigualdades; somos, se não desafiarmos e desafiarmos a tirania e os sistemas injustos.
Durante as noites de minhas aventuras além dos muros e ações para ajudar os bandos de mendigos infantis e obstruir as caças de recompensas da polícia, tive uma experiência traumática de quase morte, semelhante às execuções simuladas de Maurice Blanchot pelos nazistas em 1944, conforme escrito em The Instant de Minha Morte e Fiódor Dostoiévski pela polícia secreta do Czar em 1849, conforme escrito em O Idiota; fugindo da perseguição por um labirinto de túneis com uma criança ferida entre outros e presos a céu aberto por dois fuzileiros da polícia que tomaram posições de flanco e apontaram para nós enquanto o líder pedia rendição além da curva de um túnel. Fiquei na frente de um menino com uma perna torcida que não podia correr enquanto os outros espalhavam uma e escapou ou encontrou esconderijos, e se recusou a ficar de lado quando ordenado a fazê-lo. Isso foi reflexivo e uma decisão do instinto abaixo do nível do pensamento consciente ou volição, onde as verdades que nós mesmos escrevemos em nossa carne são forjadas e reveladas. Pediram para deixar alguém morrer para me salvar, eu simplesmente disse não. Quando o pensamento me fez sair desse momento de pânico ou transcendência de mim mesmo, perguntei quanto nos deixaria ir embora, e então ele ordenou que seus homens atirassem. Mas houve apenas um tiro em vez de uma demonstração de fogo cruzado, e isso foi um grande erro; ele teve tempo de perguntar “O quê?” antes de cair no chão.
E então nossos socorristas se revelaram, tendo se aproximado da polícia por trás; os Matadors, que podem ser descritos como vigilantes, uma gangue criminosa, um grupo revolucionário, ou todos os três, fundados pelo notório vigilante e criminoso brasileiro Pedro Rodrigues Filho, famoso por vingar o assassinato selvagem de sua mãe matando seu pai e comendo seu coração, que havia sido preso no ano anterior após uma série espetacular de cem ou mais assassinatos por vingança dos criminosos mais diabólicos e monstruosos, homens poderosos fora do alcance da lei que haviam perpetrado atrocidades contra mulheres e crianças. Nessa temível irmandade fui acolhido, com as palavras; “Você é um de nós”, e nas ruas de São Paulo naquele verão nunca mais fiquei sozinho.
“Não podemos salvar a todos, mas podemos vingar”; assim eles se descreveram para mim, e essa definição de solidariedade como práxis ou ação de valores permanece comigo e obscurece meu uso do grito de guerra Nunca Mais! Como Shakespeare escreveu em O Mercador de Veneza, Ato III, cena I; “Se você nos ofender, não devemos nos vingar?”
A partir do momento em que vi os guardas da família aristocrática com quem eu era hóspede atirando contra a multidão de crianças sem-teto e mendigos que fervilhavam o caminhão de alimentos no portão da mansão, nus e esqueléticos de fome, cheios de cicatrizes, aleijados e deformados com doenças desconhecidas a qualquer povo para quem os cuidados de saúde e a alimentação básica sejam gratuitos e pré-condições garantidas do direito universal à vida, desesperados por um punhado de alimentos que possam significar mais um dia de sobrevivência; naquele momento eu escolhi o meu lado, e meu povo são os impotentes e os despossuídos, os silenciados e os apagados; todos aqueles a quem Frantz Fanon chamava de miseráveis da terra.
Junte-se a nós, pois a Humanidade Unida não pode ser escravizada, conquistada, desumanizada, falsificada ou mercantilizada, nem a tirania pode se opor à liberdade quando o povo se recusa a se submeter.
Pois somos muitos, estamos observando e somos o futuro.
Brazil, a reading list
History
Brazil: A Biography, Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, Heloisa Murgel Starling
On this day in 1619 over four centuries of slavery and Resistance began in America with the first slave auction, and no human being has been truly free or equal here since, for we are all possessed by the legacies of our history as shared national trauma.
We must bring a Reckoning for this pervasive evil, central to the Original Lie which founded America as a free society of equals on paper while remaining one of masters and slaves in fact, in the reimagination and transformation of humankind through changing the systems of unequal power that have shaped us to things of fear, power, and force, in the centralization of power to authority and to elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and patriarchal white privilege through divisions and hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness, and through seizures of power in revolutionary struggle and the solidarity of The Wretched of the Earth from the carceral states of force and control which create and are created by elites as instruments of power.
Let us bring, after four centuries of inequality and the state as embodied violence and systemic white supremacist terror, an American Revolution.
As I wrote in my post of August 31 2021, 401 Years of Slavery and Resistance in America, and Counting; One of the most important Reckonings we must have with ourselves and our history is the four hundred and one years of slavery and resistance in America which this August marks.
Both the content and context of this issue and its discussion has and will continue to shift and realign for as long as there are humans to interrogate the meaning and consequences of inequality and racism; I propose merely that we must make this central question of American identity and values a national priority in politics and education, and in the practice of our daily lives.
To quote the ACLU newsletter of last year for August; “Four hundred years ago this month, more than 20 enslaved Africans arrived in what was then the British colony of Virginia. To mark the anniversary of the beginning of slavery in America, The New York Times launched a major initiative called The 1619 Project. Through a special issue of the New York Times Magazine, along with a slew of other resources, the project centers slavery in our national narrative, tracking how the legacy of that brutal institution continues to manifest in every aspect of American life.”
As I wrote in my post of December 5 2020, Whose Story Is This? Prologue to My Revised Modern Canon of Literature for 2020; We are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and one another. So it becomes important to ask of our stories and representations, whose story is this?
I call this the Narrative Theory of Identity, and my intention is that it serves as a lever for changing the balance of power in the world. Our idea of self derives from the persona, the ancient Greek theatrical mask through which characters speak, and the possibilities of becoming human are a function of the struggle between authorized identities and the self- ownership of autonomous individuals.
We have one problem in common as we grow up and create ourselves; each of us must reinvent how to be human. Our informing, motivating, and shaping forces, modeled and communicated to us by others, are necessary to our processes of growth and individuation, but also integral to the dialectics of self and others.
The struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves is the first revolution in which we all must fight.
As I wrote in my post of June 19 2021, Liberation, Memory, History, and Human Being: a Narrative Theory of Identity; On this Juneteenth we celebrate the final Emancipation of the Black peoples of America from slavery, and also the Liberation of Humankind from all forms of ownership by others. The first kind of freedom was won in the Civil War and is particular to our unique history; the second kind of freedom is universal and is yet to the achieved.
There has been much insightful and relevant discussion of our history of slavery and racial inequality and violence during the Black Lives Matter protests in the weeks before this holiday, of the silencing and erasure of people of color from our historical memory and of the divisions of exclusionary otherness and defense of unequal power in our society through state control of our identity and relations with others at every level of human interaction.
Beyond the state terror of racist police violence, this is the primary means of repression and power asymmetry perpetrated against us by the ruling class; not the secret prisons and assassinations, not the racist death squads or the dehumanization and commodification of the working class by the cabal of plutocratic capitalists, Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, and white supremacist terrorists who together comprise the fascist Republican conspiracy of atavistic barbarism, but their theft of the possibilities of human meaning and being through control of our educational system and rewritten history.
Why are we taught to revere Independence Day on the Fourth of July, but not Emancipation Day on June 19?
Much of our history has been stolen from us. Its time to take it back.
Why is this of vital importance? How is our liberty determined by our history and the quality of our humanity by our memory?
Whose stories shall we teach to future generations? Will it be songs of resistance and survival, of the unconquered freedom and glory of our humanity and the triumph of our seizures of power over who we are and may become? Or will it be elegies of our dehumanization and enslavement, or submission to tyrannical authorities and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil?
America is a free society of equals, wherein no one is better than any other by reason of birth or condition, in which we are co-owners of our government. This new American humanity was intended to be a society of autonomous individuals, in which we are free from the ideas of other people and from the force and control of the state.
Free to dream new possibilities of becoming human, to create ourselves as we choose with a free will and conscience in which no government stands between us and the limits of our imagination, and in which relations between persons are unmediated by the state so long as none are harmed, and no other boundaries are authorized by law; a society which renounces the social use of force in the performance of our identities and in which we send no armies to enforce virtue.
To be a true American patriot is to be a liberator, not a conqueror.
We must seize our stories as informing and motivating sources through which we shape ourselves, authorize identities, and create Others for whom we are negative spaces and through whom we define ourselves.
Always there remains the creative dynamism and revolutionary struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle to create ourselves.
Which future will we choose, America? Resistance or submission?”
As I wrote in my post of September 21 2020, History, Memory, Identity: Whose Story Is This?; Whose story is this? This question must be the beginning of a new pedagogy of education in history and literature, and remain central to the project of its study. True education in the discipline of history asks Socratic questions and teaches methods of research, analysis, interpretation, and the publishing and presentation of insights and discoveries; education in general teaches us to interrogate and test claims of truth.
Trump has proclaimed the triumph of propaganda in authorizing an official state version of historical truth, whose purpose is to institutionalize the Mayflower Puritan/Pilgrim mythos as a competing narrative of national origins to the 1619 hypothesis. This seems to me an excellent idea, if we ignore the authorization of identity and government disinformation facets and instead make this dialectical interrogation of competing narratives itself the heart of our national story and curriculum.
Myths of colonialism, fictive inventions of national origin, and the roots of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil combine in our triumphalist narratives of Pilgrim and Puritan founders of America. Though the Mayflower Compact was signed November 21, celebrations of the 400th anniversary of the voyage began last week with its departure for America, which are being promoted by our government as a reply to the 1619 Project. This I cannot abide, so say I in paraphrase of the hero in the film Inglorious Basterds; can you abide it?
As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
We must ask ourselves as we raise our children to become citizens and as we ourselves continue to learn throughout our lives, Whose story is this?
The Underground Railroad retells slavery’s horrors with a dreamlike twist, review of the Amazon Prime series by CBS News
Nikole Hannah-Jones, a New York Times Magazine staff writer, and the driving force behind The 1619 Project — joins At Liberty host Emerson Sykes (@emersonsjsykes) to discuss the initiative.
Nikole Hannah-Jones on the 1619 Project’s reframing of American history (EP. 61) August 22, 2019”
Text of the historic interview:
“Four hundred years ago this month, more than 20 enslaved Africans arrived in what was then the British colony of Virginia. To mark the anniversary of the beginning of slavery in America, The New York Times launched a major initiative called The 1619 Project. Through a special issue of the New York Times Magazine, along with a slew of other resources, the project centers slavery in our national narrative, tracking how the legacy of that brutal institution continues to manifest in every aspect of American life. Nikole Hannah-Jones — an award winning investigative journalist, a New York Times Magazine staff writer, and the driving force behind The 1619 Project — joins At Liberty host Emerson Sykes (@emersonsjsykes) to discuss the initiative
[00:00:04] From the ACLU, this is At Liberty. I’m Emerson Sykes, a staff attorney here at the ACLU and your host.
Four hundred years ago this month, more than 20 enslaved Africans arrived in what was then the British colony of Virginia. To mark the anniversary of the beginning of slavery in America, the New York Times has launched the “1619 Project” with a special edition of the Sunday paper and a slew of other related resources. The goal of the project is ambitious.It aims to reframe the country’s history to center slavery in our national narrative, emphasizing how the legacy of that brutal institution continues to manifest in every aspect of American life. The project has been enthusiastically received, selling out multiple print runs in the last few days. Here to discuss the project is Nikole Hannah-Jones, an award-winning investigative journalist, a New York Times Magazine staff writer and the driving force behind the 1619 Project.
Nikole Hannah Jones, it’s a great pleasure to have you with us on the show today. Welcome to the podcast.
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES
Thank you for having me.
EMERSON
So this project is quite astonishing for its ambition and scope. The 1619 Project includes several long essays, including one by yourself, shorter vignettes, works of poetry, photography, and even a curriculum for schools, and I understand a podcast series is also about to drop. But your introductory essay, I think, frames the project and introduces its core thesis. Can I ask you to start by reading a passage from your essay which is entitled, “The Idea of America”?
NIKOLE
[00:01:38] Sure: “The United States is a nation founded both on an ideal and a lie. Our Declaration of Independence, approved on July 4th, 1776, proclaimed that ‘All men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.’ But the white men who drafted those words did not believe them to be true for the hundreds of thousands of Black people in their midst. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness did not apply to fully one-fifth of the country. Yet despite being violently denied the freedom and justice promised to all, Black Americans believe fervently in the American creed. Through centuries of Black resistance and protest, we have helped this country live up to its founding ideals and not only for ourselves. Black rights struggles paved the way for every other rights struggle, including women’s and gay rights, immigrant and disability rights. Without the idealistic, strenuous, and patriotic efforts of Black Americans, our democracy today would most likely look very different. It might not be a democracy at all.”
EMERSON
Thank you very much for sharing that reading and also for the 1619 Project’s existence. As I understand it, the project was very much your brainchild. Can you tell us about how the idea came about in what you hope it will accomplish?
NIKOLE
Sure. I first came across the year 1619 as a high school student, and I was reading a book that my Black Studies teacher gave me by Lerone Bennett called Before the Mayflower. And in coming across that date, I just was struck. I remember being very struck by the fact that I had never seen that date before, that I had never been taught that enslaved Africans had been here that long, that enslaved Africans had arrived even before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. And that date, therefore, that year, has always stuck with me, my entire life. And so as the 400th anniversary was approaching, I really was thinking about how for most Americans, this month, this year, was going to pass and they weren’t going to know that this was the anniversary; they weren’t going to know this was a four hundredth year of slavery being introduced into what would become America, and it would just pass without notice. And that really bothered me.
[00:03:52] So, I pitched this project to the New York Times because I feel that the year 1619 is as foundational to the American story as the year 1776, and that we clearly, as a country, have not grappled with the legacy of one of our oldest institutions and one that I would argue, has impacted most aspects of modern American life. And this seems like a great opportunity to use the platform of The Times to force a reckoning with that.
EMERSON
Well, it’s a powerful idea, and you were worried that the anniversary would pass without notice, and you’ve certainly accomplished making sure that that has not happened. The-the response has been overwhelming, and mostly positive, but also, of course, with predictable backlash from people on the right. Can you say a bit about the responses that you’ve received?
NIKOLE
I am completely overwhelmed by the response. If you’re listening to this and you’ve sent me an e-mail or left me a voicemail or DM-ed me on Twitter, and I haven’t responded, I’m getting to it. Of everything I’ve ever done, I’ve never received this many responses. It’s been, in that way, very unexpected. I had no idea how this would land in the world. I knew what we were trying to do was evocative. I believed it was powerful, but I just didn’t expect the reaction that we’ve received. As you mentioned, we have sold out of copies, people are posting their stories of driving miles and miles and going to several stores just trying to get a copy of the print product. And that’s been very gratifying because the reason I wanted to do this was to get us talking about something that we all think we know, and we really don’t, and hoping to really reframe the narrative particularly of Black Americans but also the nation itself. So the–the response has been amazing.
EMERSON
[00:05:46] Well I’m–I’m lucky. Our producer Noa Yachot is the only reason I actually have a physical copy, and I’m very happy to have one. It’s such a beautiful document and artifact that I think people will return to over time. And as you said, the messages are very powerful in reframing our national narrative. But also, it’s not a reported news document, right? This information is not exactly new, but it’s presented in an extraordinarily powerful way. And I’m curious about the impact that you were hoping to have on individual readers.
NIKOLE
So, the entire project is making an argument. It’s definitely reported. I wouldn’t call it “news,” but it’s very rigorously researched and very heavily reported. But the conceit of the magazine, so there’s–there’s two parts of the print product. There’s a special section of the newspaper, and that’s really a corrective on the way that we’ve been taught slavery. That special section of the newspaper is a history, and we did that in partnership with the National Museum of African-American History and Culture.
But the magazine’s conceit is that you can take all of these modern aspects of American life, all these institutions and phenomenon in modern American life and contemporary American life, and things that you think have nothing to do with slavery, and we were going to take– start in the present and trace those institutions back and show that all of these interlinking aspects of our society have a commonality. And that’s that they developed out of slavery or the anti- Black racism that came about to justify slavery. So there are, in the magazine, there are stories about why Americans consume so much sugar. Why were the only Western industrialized country without universal health care. Why traffic is so terrible in Atlanta. Our very geography as cities. Why our politics are so dysfunctional. And then, of course, my essay speaks about our democracy itself. It really was my attempt to make this institution and its legacy real, and to really answer that claim that I get all the time, which is, “Slavery ended a long time ago. It’s in the past. It has nothing to do with modern society.”
[00:08:02] And that’s simply not true. If we believe that the Constitution still matters, if we believe the Declaration still matters, every year we celebrate the Fourth of July, if those things matter, then 1619 and slavery mattered as well. You cannot pick and choose which parts of our society are important and that we will remember the history in which we don’t. And I think we make a very powerful argument about the ongoing legacy of slavery.
EMERSON
Well, indeed, it is a very powerful argument, and it’s striking and in the expansive scope that you’ve taken, as you mentioned, all the different aspects and the threads that you pull through in terms of slavery’s legacy in our modern society, but being from the ACLU, I wanted to focus a bit on the prevalence of law in facilitating oppression as a part of the slavery and its legacy but also, in creating some progress in freedom that we’ve seen since.
I mean, you talk in your piece, but also in other pieces, about the Reconstruction Amendments that granted citizenship and equal protection under the law, that was originally targeted at Blacks but then as you mentioned applied then to many other marginalized groups, the Civil Rights Acts, are all highlighted as well in terms of landmark laws that helped protect the rights of African-Americans, and by extension other marginalized folks. But one feature that stood out, in the New York Times Magazine edition, was a photo essay on Howard Law School students, and I guess the– the premise was basically that Howard is one of the oldest black law schools and has played an important role in forming society as we have it today. But, I’m interested in your perspective about the role of law in changing society and either enforcing or challenging these types of norms that we know are deeply in our DNA as a country.
NIKOLE
[00:09:56] Yeah, I think clearly law has played an indelible role. Laws played the role of ensuring the caste system, of ensuring the institution of slavery, and the kind of systematized racial oppression of Black Americans and other marginalized groups. And so the law’s also been the means of trying to undo them. The 14th Amendment is, as you know, “Equal Protection Before the Law”; it is understanding that, yes, of course, it is important to change quote unquote “hearts and minds” but whether “hearts and minds” change or not, people who are citizens of this country, and I would argue who are noncitizens, who may not even have legal status here, should still be protected equally by the law and treated as equal members of society by the law. And so the law, of course, has been critical in moving the country and the rights of Black Americans and other groups, and protecting those rights, even when the majority of society has not wanted to.
EMERSON
Well, and there’s this interplay also between law and culture, but also in the issue you–you, sort of, juxtapose law, policy, as well as artistic expression and literary expression. I was also drawn to a piece by Reginald Dwayne Betts. He has a poem. I was drawn to it in part because he’s a previous guest on the podcast but also because he’s an attorney as well as a poet. And so, he redacted parts of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 which is signed by George Washington. His overall redaction project is about flipping the tools that are used by the government to obscure the truth, to create clarity. And I know he did that with writs of habeas corpus in a recent recent exhibition as well. But it seems like it’s analogous to what you’re doing, in some ways: where you’re sort of taking a platform, like the New York Times, which like all American institutions has its own checkered history, but then flipping that tool and using it to provide clarity and correct the American meta-narrative.
NIKOLE
[00:11:59] Yeah, for sure. I have been extremely aware of the history of white-run media in propagating and promulgating white supremacy in this country. I mean, enslavers ran ads for their property in newspapers and in media. And when I think particularly about the New York Times, the longer part of our legacy has been that Black people have been very mistreated in the stories that have been published. And this was, in a way, an opportunity to use the paper of record as a corrective, and I have thought about that a lot: that as a lay historian, when I’m going back to do historical research like many historians, you turn again and again to the New York Times to see, how was the New York Times covering whatever was happening that you’re that you’re trying to research. And when I think that 50 years from now, 100 years from now, when people are coming back and trying to understand our times, that there will be this massive project in the paper of record that they will go back, and to try to view the American experience and the Black experience through that, is very powerful to me. And, of course, any one project, any one institution, cannot correct all of these wrongs that were done, but it certainly is a way to put into the record, and into the paper of record, a counternarrative to a very long and–and torrid legacy of the mistreatment of Black Americans.
EMERSON
This is clearly a project about meta-narrative and our sort of national narrative, and it’s noteworthy that we do start with 1619. You know, you talked about, it’s about the American experience and the Black experience. And I’m someone who’s been deeply influenced, I think, not only by all of the the the history that you tell in America but also by the Pan Africanist movement, and in my previous job I spent a lot of time working in Africa with activists and political leaders.
[00:13:59] And so, I did want to just touch on the idea of the African-American story in relation to Africa and in a global context. Obviously, I understand that the the project is about American history, but I think it’s controversial in some ways to start our history with slavery. And, you know, you in your article referred several times to Africa as quote, “A place we’ve never been,” which, of course, is true for the vast majority of African-Americans, and the fact that our–our links with Africa were systematically broken. This was not a mistake. This was a part of our story.
But to the extent that the project is about sort of reclaiming African-American identity, I’m curious about how you think about the implications of starting the story where you did. It makes sense to start there, but for me it’s also not really the beginning of our story.
NIKOLE
Well, so, it’s not, clearly. We know that we descend from the continent of Africa and most likely from the western central region of the continent of Africa, but I very intentionally started a 1619. I very intentionally argue that we are a new people born on these shores, because I think in the reframing of America, I’m also trying to reframe the way that we have been treated and how we have thought about ourselves: that we are never treated as full citizens in this country, that we have always been taught that somehow, our story beginning with our enslavement here is something that we should be ashamed of, that we have to find this connection which is always going to be a vague connection to a continent, or to a region of the second largest continent in the world, because we can’t go and look up our specific nations, or our specific languages. That is where we have to try to find our identity. I think it’s been very harmful.
[00:15:47] So it’s not eschewing that connection and I say in there, “We have echoes of Africa, but we are not African.” And we are not. We are fully American. We are an amalgamated people. We are a mixed race of people. We speak English, for the most part. Our cultural institutions we created here. The original American music we created here. We have created original American names. We have created original American culture. And I want us to be proud of that. As Black Freedom Fighters said during slavery, “Our ancestors bones and blood is in this soil.” And it is great to have a sense of Pan Africanism; I definitely feel that connection to the Diaspora is very critical, but I also think that it is fine for us– We have as much claim on this country, where the only ancestors that we can trace are on these shores. And why should we not feel pride in that? Why should we not claim the full citizenship and full identity of the country for which some of us have been here for 400 years?
EMERSON
I totally hear that; that makes a lot of sense. I think from my– my personal journey, I think, feeling alienated as an African-America from my home country and having spent a lot of time in Africa, actually did give me that sense of ownership of America: it sort of solidified the fact that I am definitely an American, and I have every right to claim that story. So, I think it’s interesting that people are coming to these stories with all different sorts of backgrounds.
You know, I am someone who I think it’s, without being too braggadocious, I think I have an above average familiarity with a lot of African-American history and culture, and sometimes I find myself being impatient with people who are, sort of, smacking their heads and saying, “I had no idea America was so racist.” But at the same time this knowledge that I gained was from my parents, it was from my family. It was not in my public elementary or middle school. So–
NIKOLE
Right.
EMERSON
I think it’s–it’s it’s fascinating to think about these stories that some of us have heard, some of us haven’t heard, but we’re all coming to them with our own with our own baggage, so to speak.
NIKOLE
[00:17:57] Black Americans don’t have the luxury of not knowing that our country is racist. We’re the most legislated against group of people in the history of this country, and from the moment we landed here, our lives have been constrained by white racism. We have never even been able to live fully as individuals because our membership in this race, that white people made, that we call Black, has meant that no matter what we do personally as individuals, we are lumped in and treated as a group. So we don’t have that luxury, but what I will say is my patience for people who are surprised is better than it used to be because when you really understand, and part of what we do with the project in the special section is examine the way we are taught slavery in school, the way we are taught slavery in society.
And, if you’re like most Americans, where you learn history from what you’re taught in school, you’re not, kind of, a history nerd like me, obsessively reading history books, then what you know is what you’ve been taught. And I’m not going to blame, you know, entire population because, frankly, a lot of Black Americans know very little about this history, as well. I think what I’ve learned, I’ve been studying African-American history since I took my first Black Studies class in high school. I majored in African-American history in college, and I still learn things every single day. Reporting my essay, I learned a ton of things that I didn’t know, and I’ve been studying for two decades. So, I think there is a kind of unending amount of history that we can unearth. This project is just, clearly, the tip of the iceberg. But even knowing that if you read that 100 pages of this magazine, shoot, if you read one article in the magazine, I think for most Americans, it is already going to give them a perspective and information that they haven’t had.
EMERSON
[00:19:50] Well certainly, it’s all there for people to get that information, and it’s presented in such a compelling way that it’s clearly been attractive to people, and– and I think the message is really sinking in. I’m interested in, sort of, a bigger picture thought about if there’s any particular action. Changing the national narrative is no small feat. I mean, I don’t mean to minimize that, but I’m also wondering if you also see some piece of action that you were hoping that readers might take. Is it just about deeper reflection or understanding, or is there something more tangible that you’re hoping to achieve as well?
NIKOLE
Well, you know, I’m a journalist, so I just point out the problems and that other people like y’all worry about the solutions.
[LAUGHS]
But no, I think, first, if you look at, let’s just take the conversation, or lack thereof, around reparations. How do you even gain traction and have a real legitimate conversation if we can’t even grapple with the truth of what slavery was and what its legacy remains?
So, I think having that information, in some ways, you could look at this entire project as an argument that makes the case that something is owed. I don’t know how you read the entire issue of the magazine, where we point out again and again the modern day legacy of slavery and not see that as a whole as asking the question of, “What do we then owe?” I mean, all my work is about, you know, the most deeply entrenched societal issues. I never have an expectation that people are going to read something I produce, or anyone produces, and we’re just gonna get–
Oh I almost cussed, sorry.
EMERSON
That’s all right. No, that’s alright.
NIKOLE
Right.
EMERSON
We’re–We’re not on– we’re not out on the network news.
NIKOLE
[00:21:40] Right, that we’re gonna get our shit together and suddenly, you know, have a kumbaya moment and make amends for what we’ve done. But we certainly are not going to take the steps to rectify and remedy this legacy, if we can’t even tell the truth about it. So, I see this truth in bringing this to a large mass of American citizens who have never had it as the first step. My hope then, would be that there can be a real conversation about what is ultimately owed to the descendants of the enslaved for this history. And how do we come to a place where we can actually be the society that our founders laid out at our most idealistic place?
And I guess, the last thing I would add because if people actually read the issue with an open mind, white Americans in particular, but also other non-Black Americans, I think what they will see is that we have not been able to contain the harms of the legacy of slavery only to Black people. That everyone in our society has been hurt by this. When we’re the only country, Western industrialized country that doesn’t offer universal healthcare, because white Americans, surveys and polling show, are the least likely to support social programs if they think Black Americans are going to benefit from them. There are a bunch of white Americans who are suffering for that. There are millions of white Americans who have not been able to get insured, proper insurance, who have not been able to get their health care needs met, who have died because of this anti-Black racism.
So when people sit in traffic in Atlanta for four hours, wasting their lives away that is universally affecting Americans, even though the highway system was built to hurt Black people. So if you sit with this, there is a reckoning that will need to be had to understand that Black people are fully American. Black people have been those that driving force to make the ideals of our Constitution real. And if we want to be a better country as a whole, if we as Americans want to have the greatest benefits of our country as a whole, we’ve got to purge ourselves of what is one of our original sins.
EMERSON
[00:23:54] The thing that jumps out to me about the current reparations debate is that people are not just talking about, you know, “This happened in the 19th century, and therefore, we need to update for inflation and figure out a payment mechanism,” but that the legacy of slavery survives to today and that the harms are still recognizable and identifiable. And so I think, the work that you’ve done in terms of pulling these threads, as I said, is really is really important, but it also kind of jumps out to me that, unless I missed it, I think that this there is no explicit call for reparations, or at least that’s not a central focus in terms of reparations in and of themselves, of the project. So, you’re hoping that it leads people there but, you made the call not to include it as an explicit call within the project.
NIKOLE
So, there is no explicit call for anything in this project. There is an assessment of the legacy. I did assign initially a piece that asked that very question, “What is owed,” and it ended up uh being a piece about the wealth gap. So I think we will still have a piece that ask that question and that speaks to scholars who have been studying this and maybe comes up with a figure, but definitely talks to scholars about what is owed. But even that is going to be a question and an assessment. I don’t think that it is the role of this project to call for any one thing: that’s for activists to do, and that’s for activists to work on, but we are certainly assessing that legacy which again I think culminates in a powerful argument that we need to figure out what is owed.
EMERSON
That makes a lot of sense, and I guess, you sort of led me into my next question, which was about how you cover so many different topics, and I’m curious if there are any that you wish had made it in?
NIKOLE
[00:25:41] Oh, God. Of course. I mean, even as comprehensive as we tried to be, and this magazine is twice as many pages as our typical New York Times Magazine, there’s a ton that was left out. And some of this, I think you’ll see in other sections of the magazine in the future. There’s nothing on food. I think food is critical. There’s not really a story on culture. I think you could do more around a lot of the subjects that are already in there. Probably what some people may see as the most glaring omission, considering what I report on most of the time, is there’s nothing on schools or education. I think that could be some great work on college debt and college attendance.
So, I mean, there’s really an unlimited number of stories that could go in, and we certainly plan on publishing more stories through the end of the year. And one other thing that is definitely going to come, if you go to the magazine, at the very end of the magazine, there is a very haunting picture of the site of the largest auction of human beings in the history of our country that was called “The Weeping Time.” And the picture is of the modern American landscape, what is there now. And we wanted to get that entire photo essay into the magazine. We went to various sites of auction spots where uh human beings were bought and sold and took pictures of what those sites look like now, kind of as a metaphor for how we have–slavery is all around us, the ghosts are there but we have allowed it to just fade into the background. And so, we’re going to be publishing that photo essay in the magazine later as well.
We worked with a lot of historians. We had a big brainstorming session here at the Times before we even picked what stories we were going to put in the issue and asked historians, you know, “What should we be writing about, what do we need to make sure to cover?” Several those historians ended up writing for the issue. But I’m sure, I’ve heard from a number of historians since the issue published who have ideas about stories that they would like to write or other areas that they think we should cover and we welcome those pitches as well.
EMERSON
[00:27:52] Well that’s great to hear that the drumbeat will continue. So, you’ve talked about a few of the articles that may be released between now and the end of the year, and we know there’s the curriculum for students and teachers, and there’s also the podcast series that’s coming out. Is there anything else that you want to highlight about what’s coming next for the project? And I’m also very interested in what you’re excited about working on next.
NIKOLE
I guess the only other thing we didn’t talk about is we are doing an all day symposium at the National Museum of African-American History and Culture.
EMERSON
Wow.
NIKOLE
October 30th, in Washington D.C., and it is going to be both somber and celebratory and very much looking forward to that, so listeners should look out for announcements about that, and how to get tickets as well. As for what’s next with me, you sound like an editor.
EMERSON
No deadlines.
NIKOLE
I’m trying to to to survive, you know, this project, it has consumed me since January. It has not let up yet, and I have no idea what’s next day. My book editor hopes that me finishing my book is next, so maybe I’ll say that.
EMERSON
Well, we look forward to whatever you put out next. I’ve found all of your reporting on education fascinating and illuminating and of course the 1619 Project is already a triumph, and the legend of this project will only grow in the years to come, so Nikole Hannah-Jones, thanks so much for taking the time out of your very busy schedule to speak with us and thanks for all your great work.
NIKOLE
Thank you, I really appreciate it.
EMERSON
Thanks very much for listening. If you valued this conversation, please be sure to subscribe to At Liberty wherever you get your podcasts and rate and review the show. We really appreciate the feedback.
On this Juneteenth we celebrate the final Emancipation of the Black peoples of America from slavery, and also the Liberation of Humankind from all forms of ownership by others. The first kind of freedom was won in the Civil War and is particular to our unique history; the second kind of freedom is universal and is yet to the achieved.
In this time of darkness, when ICE terror forces abduct and disappear nonwhite people without cause or trial, without badges or warrants, as institutionalized white supremacist ethnic cleansing, are any of us in America truly safe, or truly free?
There has been much insightful and relevant discussion of our history of slavery and racial inequality and violence during and since the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 and in the weeks before this holiday, of the silencing and erasure of people of color from our historical memory and of the divisions of exclusionary otherness and defense of unequal power in our society through state control of our identity and relations with others at every level of human interaction.
Beyond the state terror of racist police violence, this is the primary means of repression and power asymmetry perpetrated against us by the ruling class; not the secret prisons and assassinations, not the racist death squads or the dehumanization and commodification of the working class by the cabal of plutocratic capitalists, Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, and white supremacist terrorists who together comprise the fascist Republican conspiracy of atavistic barbarism and theocratic tyranny, but their theft of the possibilities of human meaning, being, and value through control of our educational system, far too much of our media, and rewritten history.
Why are we taught to revere Independence Day on the Fourth of July, but not Emancipation Day on June 19?
Much of our history has been stolen from us. Its time to take it back.
Why is this of vital importance? How is our liberty determined by our history and the quality of our humanity by our memory?
We are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and one another. Our stories live within us, and we also live within them. Who owns these stories also owns ourselves.
Shall we tip our hats and say “yowza” to those who would enslave us, or shall we defy and challenge them unto their destruction?
Whose stories shall we teach to future generations? Will it be songs of resistance and survival, of the unconquered freedom and glory of our humanity and the triumph of our seizures of power over who we are and may become? Or will it be elegies of our dehumanization and enslavement, of submission to tyrannical authorities and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil?
America is a free society of equals, wherein no one is better than any other by reason of birth, identity, or condition of being, in which we are co-owners of our government. This new American humanity was intended to be a society of autonomous individuals, in which we are free from the ideas of other people and from the force and control of the state.
Free to dream new possibilities of becoming human, to create ourselves as we choose with a free will and conscience in which no government stands between us and the limits of our imagination, and in which relations between persons are unmediated by the state so long as none are harmed and no other boundaries are authorized by law; a society which renounces the social use of force in the performance of our identities and in which we send no armies to enforce virtue.
We must seize our stories as informing and motivating sources through which we shape ourselves, authorize identities, and create Others for whom we are negative spaces and through whom we define ourselves.
Always there remains the creative dynamism and revolutionary struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle to create ourselves and for ownership of ourselves.
Which future will we choose, America? Resistance or submission?
As written by Dale Kretz in Jacobin, in an article entitled Juneteenth Is About Freedom; “Today, as we celebrate Juneteenth, we should remember not only the struggle against chattel slavery but the struggle for radical freedom during Reconstruction — snuffed out by the reactionary forces of property and white supremacy.
“It’s a funny thing how folks always want to know about the War,” mused Felix Haywood about that central fixation of American memory. Haywood had been born in slavery some fifteen years before the Civil War near San Antonio, Texas. “The war weren’t so great as folks suppose,” he told his interviewer, a member of the Federal Writer’s Project collecting testimony from surviving ex-slaves in the late 1930s. “Sometimes you didn’t knowed it was goin’ on. It was the endin’ of it that made the difference.”
Juneteenth marks the day — June 19, 1865 — that the enslaved people of East Texas at long last received word of their freedom as well as the freedom of a quarter million others in the state. Two months had passed since the surrender of Robert E. Lee’s forces at Appomattox and two and a half years since President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, declaring all slaves still held in Confederate-controlled areas “forever free” and pledging the federal government to the recognition and maintenance of their freedom.
Juneteenth has been widely celebrated every year since US general Gordon Granger first made the announcement to a crowd of black and white onlookers in Galveston in June 1865. It remains one of the most powerful currents of emancipationist memory in the United States — a counterdemonstration to the noxious propaganda of the Lost Cause.
By their very nature, commemorations tend to simplify events, to strip away the freighted complexities of the past in search of one more usable, if not celebratory. Juneteenth deserves celebration. But the circumstances of the original Juneteenth also deserve our fullest appreciation, for in that confounding history of emancipation in Texas we might glimpse prophetic outlines of the very meaning of freedom in the post-slave — but far from post-racial — United States.
“Hallelujah Broke Out”
Felix Haywood’s account of isolated south-central Texas reveals less about the Civil War itself than the war that was American slavery. He and others on the ranch found that life “went on jus’ like it always had before the war.” Work, worship, whippings — all meted out as usual.
But the flurry of wartime activity in the trans-Mississippi East infiltrated Texas in other, subtler ways. From time to time, Haywood recalled, “someone would come ’long and try to get us to run up North and be free. We used to laugh at that,” he chuckled, for “there wasn’t no reason to run up North. All we had to do was to walk, but walk South, and we’d be free as soon as we crossed the Rio Grande. In Mexico you could be free” no matter your color. Though Haywood and his family never fled southward, they knew of hundreds who did.
Texas served as a very different sort of beacon. From the 1860 census to June 19, 1865, the enslaved population of Texas nearly doubled. During the war, more than 150,000 enslaved people had been forcibly relocated to the relative safety of Texas, the frontier of the slaveholding Confederacy. Torn from nearby Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, among other states, those enslaved men and women were the rearguard of the massive forced migration enacted in the six decades before the Civil War, a commercial riptide that pulled over a million enslaved men, women, and children toward the cotton kingdom of the lower Mississippi Valley.
As the war unfolded across the South, those fugitive slaveholders who stole themselves and their human chattel westward to Texas merely delayed what was becoming the inevitable, as the concerted actions of enslaved peoples and the United States Army weakened slavery at every turn. Historians estimate that half a million enslaved people absconded from their plantation labor camps during the war; those who remained engaged in what W. E. B. Du Bois famously termed the “general strike.”
Having heard Haywood’s rather unexciting account of the war in remote San Antonio, his interviewer felt pressed to inquire how the former slave knew “the end of the war had come.”
“How did we know it?” the freedman asked incredulously, “Hallelujah broke out. . . . Soldiers, all of a sudden, was everywhere — comin’ in bunches, crossin’ and walkin’ and ridin’. Everyone was a-singin’. We was all walkin’ on golden clouds.” Haywood recited one of the anthems heard that day:
Union forever,
Hurrah, boys, hurrah!
Although I may be poor,
I’ll never be a slave —
Shoutin’ the battle cry of freedom.
Up to that point in his interview, Haywood’s account of the Civil War was distant, even dismissive. But the announcement of freedom — of Juneteenth — forever punctuated his memory. “Everybody went wild,” he suddenly exclaimed. “We all felt like heroes and nobody had made us that way but ourselves. We was free. Just like that.” Right away, the erstwhile slaves of Texas “started on the move. They seemed to want to get closer to freedom, so they’d know what it was — like it was a place or a city.”
The landing of US forces at the port of Galveston in June 1865 underscored what the formerly enslaved already knew — and what historians are only beginning to fully appreciate: freedom relied not simply on declarations, laws, and amendments in distant Washington, but on the force of arms. The Juneteenth announcement required enforcement by the 1,800 federal soldiers assigned to the state to make freedom meaningful for the freedpeople of Texas.
The Meaning of Freedom
Though black people had long nurtured their own understandings of what freedom might entail, in June 1865 the very legality and defensibility of their newfound status was anything but certain. Scarcely two weeks had passed since the surrender of Confederate general Edmund Kirby Smith’s division in Galveston, though the fighting did not so much disappear as devolve into rampant guerilla warfare and anti-black terrorism.
Lincoln had fallen to an assassin’s bullet two months prior to the Juneteenth announcement, succeeded by the embodiment of racist and reactionary Unionism, Andrew Johnson. The Thirteenth Amendment, which formally abolished involuntary servitude, had passed both houses of Congress in January but was still in the process of state ratification. Newspapers in Texas were predicting that slavery would survive in the state at least another ten years thanks to northern industrialists’ rapacious desire for cotton.
Entering the fray, the official announcement on June 19 might not have settled the matter of emancipation, but it did contain the outlines of a new order. General Granger’s declaration informed “the people of Texas that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves.”
But as the army of liberation turned into an army of occupation — and one imperfectly dedicated to protecting the rights and lives of black Southerners — commanders like Granger stressed that freedom came with many strings attached. “The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.” In other words: work for your old masters, and don’t gather together, especially at places, to borrow Haywood’s phrase, “closer to freedom.”
Making good on the implied threat of the June 19 proclamation, the Galveston mayor, with the tacit approval of the provost marshal, rounded up black refugees and runaways and returned them to their owners. Others were dragooned into working for the army.
“With the proclamation of freedom came a practical lesson in its duties,” the Galveston Daily News reported on June 22. “On Monday morning, a guard of Federal soldiers scoured the streets,” rounding up every “loose” freedman “they could lay their hands on, to go to the country and cut wood, man steamboats, or assist in such labor as was necessary for the army. A panic soon seized the new class thus conscripted,” the reporter jeered, “but the quick feet of the white soldiers and the persuasive and pointed argument of the bayonet brought them to a sense of their obligation to support the government which had given them their freedom.”
The new order was to be based on wage labor. But because of the severe cash shortage throughout the post–Civil War South, many planters were unable to pay wages; sharecropping thus emerged as a compromise between wage slavery and actual slavery. Black farmers would rent their land from white planters and pay for it using a portion of their crop come harvest time, usually a quarter to a half.
Employers were free to void the contracts for virtually any “offense,” seizing thereafter the entire harvest and evicting the black sharecropping family from their land, exposing them to vagrancy laws and the dragnet of the convict lease system, what has aptly been called “slavery by another name.” Such was the vaunted ideal of contract freedom.
Sharecropping emerged as a compromise between wage slavery and actual slavery.
It took a while for news of emancipation to reach black Texans in the most remote parts of the state — and even longer for it to register with their enslavers. Susan Merritt, enslaved in northeast Texas, reckoned it must have been September when she heard the news. As Merritt recalled in her own Depression-era interview, one day while she and others were picking cotton a stranger rode up to the house — “a government man,” with a “big book and a bunch of papers” — and demanded to know why the planter hadn’t surrendered ownership of his workers. It was from this man — likely an official of the Freedmen’s Bureau, a federal agency designed to oversee the transition to freedom and market relations — that Merritt first learned she was free.
Yet she and others were still compelled to work for their old enslaver for “several months after that.” Oft-enacted threats of gunning down deserters doubtless kept many on the plantation. The relative impotency of the US Army and Freedmen’s Bureau emboldened planters. Freedpeople found themselves as precarious tenants, locked into labor contracts that looked more like debt peonage than the freedom they had long envisioned.
As the Freedmen’s Bureau began to establish itself in Texas that fall, reports circulated that its officials were planning to consult with local planters trained in the “management” of black workers — a far cry from the agency’s founding mission. The original charter had included provisions to distribute hundreds of thousands of acres of land that had been abandoned by or confiscated from rebel planters over the course of the war.
By the spring of 1865, the Freedmen’s Bureau controlled roughly 900,000 acres of “government land,” enough for nearly twenty-three thousand black homesteads. General William Tecumseh Sherman, moreover, had issued Field Order No. 15 back in January, arranging for the parceling out of some 485,000 acres to freedpeople in the South Carolina Sea Islands and Lowcountry in 40-acre plots, land on which the general had ordered “no white person whatever . . . will be permitted to reside.”
But the counterrevolution came in October 1865. President Johnson unceremoniously revoked Sherman’s order and commanded the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau to denationalize the government’s lands — returning it to the rebel planters Johnson had recently pardoned en masse.
In the emancipated South, then, black dispossession went fist in glove with the coerced imposition of “free” labor. At the same time, Northern capitalists and federal officials conspired to prevent widespread black landownership — the very thing freedpeople almost universally regarded as the precondition for freedom in a post-slave society. One sixty-year-old freedman of the Mississippi Valley commented to a Northern journalist shortly after the war, “What’s de use of being free if you don’t own land enough to be buried in?”
From Reconstruction to Jim Crow
Black-led protests during the final months of 1865 were widespread, though on small scales and usually in response to specific inciting confrontations. One ex–slaveholding planter complained to the Waco Register that although several of his fellow planters deigned to sign contracts with their new black employees, he estimated that three-fourths of the freedpeople in his area “look forward to Christmas as the dawn of the millennium, when meat and bread will come as a matter of course.”
Many black families indeed refused to sign the loathsome contracts for the coming season, waiting on the promise of land redistribution. Among white Southerners, especially of the planter class, fevered rumors spread of an impending Haitian-style revolution. The pervasive fear in the winter of 1865–66 was soon given a label: the Christmas Insurrection Scare. But in the end, it proved to be just that. Promises broken, freedpeople reluctantly entered into labor contracts.
The freedpeople of Texas had plenty of reason to be fearful, however, as some thirty-eight thousand Confederate parolees returned with a vengeance. In addition to raiding the treasury in Austin, the rebels of the failed Confederate state harassed, brutalized, and killed freedpeople at will. As Du Bois noted in Black Reconstruction, the pervasive anti-government, anti-black terrorism so widespread across the South was perhaps the worst in Texas. Simply acting free was grounds for white retaliation. The occupying US Army, meanwhile, lacked either the capacity or will to make black freedom meaningful. In any event, the return to peacetime in 1871 and the swift demobilization of the army spelled disaster for the formerly enslaved.
At the twilight of slavery, then, a new system of dependency and precarity greeted freedpeople in Texas and across the emancipated South — vastly different from the freedom dreams of the formerly enslaved. For their part, the enslavers-turned-employers routinely griped about perceived obstinacy of their black workers — that is, their resistance to being rendered docile vectors of their employers’ will. They complained that “labor is incompatible with their ideas of freedom.” Threats and orders from on high appeared to register little with them. One planter, in a letter to the Dallas Daily Herald, sneered that “they do not believe anything that we tell them or which we may read from papers that is at variance with their ideas of freedom.” It was partly a matter of trust, but even more so a matter of political struggle and conviction that kept them at odds with their exploiters.
After the fall of Reconstruction, that great experiment in biracial democracy, black workers channeled their organizing efforts into various associations such as the Colored Farmers’ Alliance, formed in Houston County, Texas, in 1886. Then came the ascent of the Populist Party in the early 1890s, which depended — especially in the former slaveholding states — on the mobilization of black voters. Texas in particular witnessed a surge of black support for the Populist Party and soon became a Populist stronghold.
The Populist Party was the only meaningfully biracial political party that existed. It was also the only party that spoke to the needs of hundreds of thousands of black sharecroppers in the benighted South.
In the words of C. Vann Woodward, Populism offered to working-class blacks and whites “an equalitarianism of want and poverty, the kinship of common grievance and a common oppressor.” Under unprecedented threat, the two established parties conspired to race-bait and red-bait the Populist Party to death. They succeeded. By the mid-1890s the Democratic Party had cynically adopted a few planks of the Populist platform, coopted some of its leaders, and cast black voters into the electoral oblivion of the increasingly disenfranchised South.
What Juneteenth Means Today
“We knowed freedom was on us,” Felix Haywood recalled in the late 1930s, “but we didn’t know what was to come with it. We thought we was goin’ to get rich like the white folks. We thought we was goin’ to be richer than the white folks, ’cause we was stronger and knowed how to work. . . . But it didn’t turn out that way. We soon found out that freedom could make folks proud but it didn’t make ’em rich.”
Juneteenth is worth celebrating for its promised end to human bondage, but its history also reminds us of the “counterrevolution of property” waged against the revolution that was the American Civil War — a conflict that ultimately freed four million black people once legally held as property, a conflict wherein more than 140,000 formerly enslaved men enlisted and countless other black men and women lent their fullest devotion.
It’s common to say nowadays that the Civil War is unfinished. We can, after all, readily point to the ubiquitous battles over so-called Civil War monuments (better understood as monuments to Jim Crow that merely adopt the iconography of the war). But the most enduring legacy of the Civil War is not symbolic or cultural but substantive and economic. Not only did sharecropping prevail into the 1960s, but the particular formulation of freedom exacted upon black people in the emancipated South can be said to weigh like a nightmare on the living, to borrow Marx’s phrase.
Over the past year of the pandemic, political leaders on both sides of the aisle spoke and acted like modern-day Gordon Grangers, brandishing the freedom to work and the threat that we “will not be supported in idleness.” The meager stimulus checks, barely a few weeks’ worth of subsistence for most families, made good on this threat.
So did conservatives’ shameless assaults on unemployment benefits, which they roundly denounced as disincentives to work. Like the ex-slaveholding planters of old, they betrayed a bone-deep belief in the natural laziness of the working class and an unstinting opposition to a different vision of freedom. To that end, too, they devoted themselves to austerity and anti-distributive economics, to incapacitating the welfare state while ramping up the punitive one — and setting it against black-led protests for something closer to approximating the promise of “absolute equality.”
“It was the endin’ of it that made the difference,” Felix Haywood said of the war. This Juneteenth, let’s remember how slavery ended, and how freedom remained — and remains — elusive. And that nobody can make us free but ourselves.”
As written by Heather Cox Richardson in her journal Letters From An America; “On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant of the U.S. Army, but it was not until June 2 that General Edmund Kirby Smith surrendered the Trans-Mississippi Department, the last major army of the Confederacy, to the United States, in Galveston, Texas. Smith then fled to Mexico.
Seventeen days later, Major General Gordon Granger of the U.S. Army arrived to take charge of the soldiers stationed there. On June 19, he issued General Order Number 3. It read:
“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.”
The order went on: “The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”
While the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution abolishing enslavement except as punishment for a crime had passed through Congress on January 31, 1865, and Lincoln had signed it on February 1, the states were still in the process of ratifying it.
So Granger’s order referred not to the Thirteenth Amendment, but to the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, which declared that Americans enslaved in states that were in rebellion against the United States “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and that the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons.” Granger was informing the people of Galveston that, Texas having been in rebellion on January 1, 1863, their world had changed. The federal government would see to it that, going forward, white people and Black people would be equal.
Black people in Galveston met the news Order No. 3 brought with celebrations in the streets, but emancipation was not a gift from white Americans. Black Americans had fought for the United States and worked in the fields to grow cotton the government could sell. Those unable to leave their homes had hidden U.S. soldiers, while those who could leave indicated their hatred of the Confederacy and enslavement with their feet. They had demonstrated their equality and their importance to the postwar United States.
The next year, after the Thirteenth Amendment had been added to the Constitution, Texas freedpeople gathered on June 19, 1866, to celebrate with prayers, speeches, food, and socializing the coming of their freedom. By the following year, the federal government encouraged “Juneteenth” celebrations, eager to explain to Black citizens the voting rights that had been put in place by the Military Reconstruction Act in early March 1867, and the tradition of Juneteenth began to spread to Black communities across the nation.
But white former Confederates in Texas were demoralized and angered by the changes in their circumstances. “It looked like everything worth living for was gone,” Texas cattleman Charles Goodnight later recalled.
In summer 1865, as white legislators in the states of the former Confederacy grudgingly ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, they also passed laws to keep freedpeople subservient to their white neighbors. These laws, known as the Black Codes, varied by state, but they generally bound Black Americans to yearlong contracts working in the fields owned by white men; prohibited Black people from meeting in groups, owning guns or property, or testifying in court; outlawed interracial marriage; and permitted white men to buy out the jail terms of Black people convicted of a wide swath of petty crimes, and then to force those former prisoners into labor to pay off their debt.
In 1865, Congress refused to readmit the Southern states under the Black Codes, and in 1866, congressmen wrote and passed the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Its first section established that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” It went on: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
That was the whole ball game. The federal government had declared that a state could not discriminate against any of its citizens or arbitrarily take away any of a citizen’s rights. Then, like the Thirteenth Amendment before it, the Fourteenth declared that “Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article,” strengthening the federal government.
The addition of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1868 remade the United States. But those determined to preserve a world that discriminated between Americans according to race, gender, ability, and so on, continued to find workarounds.
On Friday, June 16, 2023, the Department of Justice—created in 1870 to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment—released the report of its investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) and the City of Minneapolis in the wake of the May 2020 murder of George Floyd by a police officer. The 19-page document found systemic “conduct that deprives people of their rights under the Constitution and federal law,” discriminating against Black and Native American people, people with behavioral health disabilities, and protesters. Those systemic problems in the MPD’s institutional culture enabled Floyd’s killing.
Minneapolis police performed 22% more searches, 27% more vehicle searches, and 24% more uses of force on Black people than on white residents behaving in similar ways. They conducted 23% more searches and used force 20% more on Indigenous Americans.
The Justice Department’s press release specified that the city and the police department “cooperated fully.” The two parties have “agreed in principle” to fix the problem with sweeping reforms based on community input, with an independent monitor rather than litigation.
While the Senate unanimously approved the measure creating the Juneteenth holiday last year, fourteen far-right Republicans voted against it, many of them complaining that such a holiday would be divisive.
How we remember our history matters.”
As written by Vann R. Newkirk II in The Atlantic, in an article entitled Balancing the Ledger on Juneteenth: The debate over reparations highlights the dual purpose of the holiday: celebrating emancipation but also demanding accountability for historical and present wrongs; “In 2019, Juneteenth will be celebrated as emancipation was in the old days: with calls for reparations. As the country marks 154 years since news of the end of slavery belatedly came to Texas, the House Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on the subject of reparations for black Americans. It is a watershed moment in the larger debate over American policy and memory with regard to an enduring sin.
The hearing marks a return to the early black-American celebrations and jubilees, which were staged even as formerly enslaved people beseeched the Freedmen’s Bureau or the Union Army for land. And that’s for good reason. Juneteenth has always had a contradiction at its core: It is a second Independence Day braided together with reminders of ongoing oppression. Its spread from Texas to the rest of the United States accelerated in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., as a sort of home-going for King and other victims of white-supremacist violence, fusing sorrow and jubilation.
For decades, the successes of the civil-rights movement elevated the jubilation. But in recent years, the tenor of Juneteenth has changed. Black Americans see more clearly just how deep white supremacy rests in the country’s bones. The sorrow now predominates, and with it comes an urgency to hold power to account, and to remember who and what is owed.
Amid the wreckage of Reconstruction, the sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois wrote Black Reconstruction in America, a celebration of freedom demanded and claimed, and a lamentation of the collapse of an era in which the country could have truly made good on its promises to the enslaved. In it, he made a prediction. “This the American black man knows: his fight here is a fight to the finish,” Du Bois wrote. “Either he dies or wins. If he wins it will be by no subterfuge or evasion of amalgamation. He will enter modern civilization here in America as a black man on terms of perfect and unlimited equality with any white man, or he will enter not at all. Either extermination root and branch, or absolute equality. There can be no compromise. This is the last great battle of the West.”
For Du Bois, the path to a full liberation included restitution, land redistribution, the guarantee of a quality education, and positive and proactive protections for civil rights for the formerly enslaved and their descendants. Until those goals were achieved, he predicted, black Americans would be consigned to an unsteady state of second-class citizenship that would always tend toward oblivion. To Du Bois, if true material equality could not be enforced and racial hegemony smashed even by might of victorious arms, then it was proof that white supremacy would always have the power to escape any cage placed around it. Securing reparations, and a companion package of reforms that actually siphoned power from white elites and gave it to black laborers, was not just a practical necessity, but a moral test.
Of course, America failed that examination. None of Du Bois’s aims were accomplished in full. Redemption destroyed Reconstruction, and Jim Crow enacted another century of formalized and state-enforced theft from black people by white people. Even the end of Jim Crow was marked by an incomplete reconstruction. Black civil-rights leaders were assassinated in waves, and the economic and housing reforms pushed at the end of the civil-rights movement were never realized. Affirmative action was diminished by white resistance, and, against the wishes of Justice Thurgood Marshall, the Supreme Court eliminated racial quotas. Black farmers never received anything near full compensation for land stolen with the assistance of the federal government, and the proactive protections of the Voting Rights Act were largely dismantled by the Court in 2013.
Du Bois’s prediction now seems prophetic. The rejection of labor protections gave rise to sharecropping and reified a racial wealth hierarchy that has never been overturned. The failure to redistribute land from the enslavers to the enslaved that Du Bois chronicled led directly to the Great Migration, as black families fled their homes in search of genuine opportunity. Arriving in cities such as Chicago, they were met instead with a new round of dispossession. Discriminatory contract buying of homes in Chicago cost them between $3 billion and $4 billion. The absence of proactive protections for the black vote paved the way for disenfranchisement, and for the unsteady state of voting rights. The civil-rights-era efforts by the federal government to enforce equality were abandoned in many places, restoring a segregated health-care system and segregated schools.
Now, however, a growing body of research and reporting has tied those rejections of pro-equality policies to visible racial disparities in health and wealth. These linkages in many cases have provided data to back concerns within black communities that have long been dismissed as conspiratorial ravings. Yes, police really are stealing from black communities by way of discriminatory tickets. Yes, much of the conservative push to enact more restrictive voting laws is intended to dilute black voting power. Those linkages are empowering in a way, cutting through decades of gaslighting and disbelief. And they all point to the potential utility of reparations, not just as a way to address the legacy of slavery, but as the only way to reckon with the caste system that America allowed to be built as it looked the other way after slavery’s end.
The idea of reparations is somehow both avant-garde and extraordinarily old. Its reemergence stems from a broad reassessment of the trajectory of black America’s material conditions, and a realization that even with the extraordinary efforts of individual black people and some political and economic protections, true equality always appears just out of reach.
The reparations debate now necessarily extends beyond slavery, drawing from Jim Crow and more recent discriminatory practices in the North and West. Scholars are producing estimates of exactly how much wealth was stolen by tools such as restrictive covenants and mass incarceration. And, critically, researchers have also clearly outlined exactly how state power helped produce the wealth of those who have it: through favorable tax policy, social insurance, powerful institutions, and massive land and wealth transfers. America has pursued most of the programs Du Bois desperately wanted to create during Reconstruction. But the country has enacted them mostly for white people instead of the scions of the enslaved.
There is a ledger, and more and more black Americans believe it must be balanced. Resistance to that notion is perhaps best encapsulated by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who said on Tuesday: “I don’t want reparations for something that happened 150 years ago … We’ve tried to deal with the original sin of slavery by passing civil-rights legislation and electing an African American president.” Conveniently, McConnell did not mention Jim Crow, the reason it took 100 years for civil-rights legislation to be passed after the Civil War. And if he does view the election of President Barack Obama as a duly appointed form of reparations, then McConnell’s own resistance to, and repeated stonewalling of, Obama’s presidency deserve some probing.
In American politics, as President Donald Trump’s career suggests, time and inertia confer legitimacy. The national celebration of emancipation has reverted to a purely historic endeavor, one stripped of the demand for full equality. Slavery has been relegated to a hazily indistinct past, and the ways in which it obviously influenced modern law are elided. Among those who wish to share in the font of white political power, this mythology is purposeful and empowering.
Memory, however, is powerful enough to expose myth. And memory is the purpose of Juneteenth. The testimonies of people who were enslaved, as well as their children, grandchildren, and distant descendants, are integral parts of the holiday. In predicting that the black community would either attain equality or be eliminated “root and branch,” Du Bois underestimated the strength of memory, which has allowed the black community to endure.
On Juneteenth, it seizes the narrative, reminding the country of its original debt, and the debts it has since accrued. And this Juneteenth, that reminder will be delivered in the seat of American power. This is, and has always been, the highest purpose of jubilee: to deliver a moral accounting.”
A Life in Chains: The Juneteenth Edition: Novels, Memoirs, Interviews, Testimonies, Studies, Official Records on Slavery and Abolitionism, Frederick Douglass, Harriet E. Wilson, Harriet Ann Jacobs, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Lydia Maria Child, William Wells Brown, Charles W. Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, Booker T. Washington
On April 9 in 1865 Confederate General Lee raised the white flag and surrendered to Union General Grant at Appomattox, though the fighting continued until other rebel forces surrendered and President Johnson declared the end of the Civil War on Aug. 20th, 1866. It was the end of the most terrible conflict and the most shameful age in American history, and it is a conflict we have not yet won and an original sin we have not yet expiated and redeemed.
Nor is the enemy of our humanity and of all humankind yet defeated in final Reckoning, for its figurehead Traitor Trump has recaptured the state to enact vengeance on his enemies, evade responsibility for his many crimes, and complete his mission of the subversion of our democracy, the re-enslavement of Black Americans and authorization of white supremacist terror, and the dehumanization and commodification of women as chattel slaves and authorization of patriarchal-theocratic sexual terror.
This we must resist to the last, as Chamberlain held the line at Gettysburg and Sherman demonstrated how to answer white supremacist terror on his March Through Georgia.
We must not wait for the moment of our destruction; we must bring the fight to the enemy, and purge them from among us.
Of this epochal event I wrote in my post of two years ago:
In joyous echo of this historic triumph we also celebrate the return to the legislature of Tennessee by acclamation of the people of the magnificent Justin Jones, who with his fellow Representative Pearson placed their lives in the balance with those of the victims and survivors of gun violence and white supremacist terror in challenging the plutocratic gun lobby which provides the preconditions of mass murder as an organization of racist terror.
That the people stood with them in return and brought the machine of death and elite hegemony to a standstill is the most hopeful thing I have witnessed in electoral American politics in a long time.
The tide may have just turned in America from tyranny to democracy.
There is now a possibility, fractional and delicate as a candle in the darkness, bearing our hope of liberty and equality into an unknown future, of avoiding a second Civil War.
This too I celebrate, in fear and loathing as Hunter S. Thompson unforgettably described America’s inversion of our founding ideals by the powerful.
At one hundred fifty eight years remove, the meaning of the Civil War as the Second American Revolution is clear, as is the necessity of ceaseless and ongoing revolutionary struggle to achieve and maintain a free society of equals.
We celebrate the victory of equality over slavery and solidarity over division, of liberty over the tyranny of aristocratic and capitalist elites and of love over hate. On this day we the people, created equal and endowed with inalienable human rights, triumphed over the most terrible obscenity and injustice to ever rear its monstrous head in our nation; a human trafficking syndicate which declared itself a nation.
We must never cease to search out and destroy the legacies of slavery, racism, and hierarchies and ideologies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness. To be an American is to believe that no one is better than any other by condition of birth. Those who cannot affirm this principle merit only exile and revocation of citizenship, for they have chosen to deny membership in our society.
The Black Lives Matter protests and George Floyd trial electrified the world in part because an endemic and pervasive evil is finally being called to a reckoning. Police must be stripped of their immunity from prosecution for racial violence, but this is only the beginning. We must eradicate and enact restitution for the legacy of slavery and white supremacist terror, of systemic and structural racism in our society, of inequalities and injustices which create and maintain hierarchies of belonging and otherness and hegemonies of elite wealth, power, and privilege.
From the iconography of our public spaces in the place names and monuments to the stories we tell about ourselves in our history, whose stories are told and who owns the narratives of our identities, to the equal share of decision making power which defines democracy and the equal share in the benefits of membership in our society to which we must aspire, America is emerging from the shadows of a past which we drag behind us like an invisible reptilian tail to discover the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
This is only the beginning of our story; let us dream great dreams into which we can grow.
Chamberlain’s Charge on Little Round Top – “Gettysburg”
Chamberlain’s Speech “In the end, we’re fighting for each other”
Why the Civil War Actually Ended 16 Months After Lee Surrendered
On this day the Black town of Rosewood was put to the torch, erased utterly as the final atrocity and crime against humanity of an orgiastic episode of rape, murder, and white supremacist terror.
It was not an isolated incident, though it bears similarities to the total destruction of the Black Wall Street of Tulsa; it is important to remember the names and the particulars of this national trauma and shame, but also important to realize that it was not unique, but merely one episode among countless others, erased and silenced as the witness of history.
Here is the world the Republicans and Donald Trump would resurrect and consign us all to as a Fourth Reich, on a national and global scale.
This is an invisible reptilian tail which we drag behind ourselves, we Americans: and as Ta-Nehisi Coates teaches us we will not emerge from the legacies of our history until we bring a Reckoning for slavery and its myriad covert forms, and until we have made reparations as a nation to the victims of our depravity and evil.
“Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it” as George Santayana teaches us; and in Rosewood we have a horrific example of the world which the Freedom Caucus intends to damn us to.
Our history in the annihilation of Rosewood and the January 6 Insurrection has today reached out from the bottomless chasms of the abyss to seize and shake us with a reminder of the stakes in this game called America, both for us here and now and for all humankind in whatever future we may choose.
May it shake us all awake.
As written by Jessica Glenza in The Guardian, in an article entitled Rosewood massacre a harrowing tale of racism and the road toward reparations: On New Year’s Day 1923 a white woman was beaten and residents of Sumner, Florida, claimed her assailant was black – which sparked race riots where the casualties were mostly black and hate wiped out a prosperous town; “Four black schoolchildren raced home along a dirt road in Archer, Florida, in 1944, kicking up a dust cloud wake as they ran. They were under strict orders from their mother to run – not lollygag or walk or jog, but run – directly home after hitting the road’s curve.
The littlest, six-year-old Lizzie Robinson (now Jenkins), led the pack with a brother on each side and her sister behind carrying her books.
“And I would be [running], my feet barely touching the ground,” Jenkins, now 77, said at her home in Archer.
Despite strict adherence to their mother’s orders, the siblings weren’t told why they should race home. To the children, it was one of several mysterious dictates issued during childhood in the Jim Crow south.
As Jenkins tells it, the children didn’t know why Amos ’n’ Andy was often interrupted by revving engines and calls from her father to “Go upstairs now!”, or why aunt Mahulda Carrier, a schoolteacher, fled to the bedroom each time a car drove down their rural road.
Explanations for demands to hide came later, when Jenkins’s mother, Theresa Brown Robinson, whispered to her daughter the story of violence that befell the settlement of Rosewood in 1923.
The town was 37 miles south-west of Archer on the main road to the Gulf. Carrier worked there as the schoolteacher, while living with her husband Aaron Carrier. On New Year’s Day 1923, a white woman told her husband “a nigger” assaulted her, a false claim that precipitated a week of mob violence that wiped the prosperous black hamlet off the map, and led to the near lynching of Aaron Carrier.
Jenkins now believes that all of it – the running, calls to go upstairs, her aunt fleeing to the bedroom – was a reaction to a message her parents received loud and clear: don’t talk about Rosewood, ever, to anyone.
But after Jim Crow laws lifted, and lynch mob justice was no longer a mortal threat, survivors did begin to talk. So egregious were the stories of rape, murder, looting, arson and neglect by elected officials, that Florida investigated the claims in a 1993 report.
That led to a law that eventually compensated then elderly victims $150,000 each, and created a scholarship fund. The law, which provided $2.1m total for the survivors, improbably made Florida one of the only states to create a reparations program for the survivors of racialized violence, placing it among federal programs that provided payments to Holocaust survivors and interned Japanese Americans.
News of Florida’s reparations program ran nationwide when it was passed in 1994, on the front page of the Wall Street Journal among others. Hollywood picked up the tale. Don Cheadle starred in a 1997 film about the pogrom. Several books were written about Rosewood.
Though the legislation was never called such, the program now represents one of just a handful of reparations cases in the United States, as calls to compensate victims of racialized violence have grown louder in the last two years.
2015 brought renewed calls to compensate victims of race-related violence from college students, theologians and criminal justice advocates. The city of Chicago started a $5.5m reparations fund for the more than 100 victims tortured at the hands of police commander Jon Burge.
Last month, students at Georgetown University demanded that the administration set aside an endowment to recruit black professors equal to the profit from an 1838 slave sale that paid off university debt. The 272 slaves were sold for $400 each, the equivalent of about $2.7m today. One day after protests began, students successfully renamed a residence hall named after Thomas Mulledy, the university president who oversaw the sale (it was renamed Freedom Hall).
At least one progressive Christian theologian is pushing Protestants to reckon their own history with slavery with reparations. In 2014, Atlantic writer Ta-Nehisi Coates breathed fresh life into the debate in his widely lauded article The Case for Reparations.
Rosewood burning
Where Rosewood once stood is now little more than a rural scrubland along state road 24, a lonely highway in central Florida bordered by swamp, slash pine and palmetto. A placard on the side of the road describes the horror visited upon the hamlet.
But in 1923, the settlement was a small and prosperous predominantly black town, with its own baseball team, a masonic temple and a few hundred residents. It was just three miles from the predominantly white town of Sumner, and 48 miles from Gainesville.
On New Year’s Day 1923, white Sumner resident Fannie Taylor was bruised and beaten when her husband returned home. The Taylors were white, and the residents of Sumner were in near universal agreement that Fannie’s assailant was black.
A crowd swelled in Sumner to find the “fugitive”, some from as far away as Gainesville, where the same day the Klu Klux Klan held a high-profile parade. Over the next seven days gangs of hundreds delivered lynch mob justice to the once-affluent town of Rosewood.
“I blame the deputy sheriff,” Robie Mortin, a Rosewood survivor, told the Seminole Tribune in 1999. “Because that lady never dropped a name as to who did what to her. Just said a negro, black man. But when the sheriff came along with his posse and everything, he put a name to the person: Jesse Hunter.”
Mortin died in 2010 at age 94 in Riviera Beach, Florida. She was believed to be one of the last survivors of the New Year’s riots in 1923. After years of silence she became one of the most vocal. Though Florida completed an investigation into the events that took place in Rosewood, some narratives remain disputed.
“They didn’t find Jesse Hunter, but noticed that here’s a bunch of niggers living better than us white folks. That disturbed these people,” Mortin said. Her uncle, Sam Carter, is believed to have taken the man who beat Taylor, a fellow Mason, to safety in Gulf Hammock, a few miles away. When Carter returned he was tortured, shot and lynched by the mob looking for Taylor’s assailant.
“My grandma didn’t know what my uncle Sammy had done to anybody to cause him to be lynched like that,” Mortin told the Tribune. “They took his fingers and his ears, and they just cut souvenirs away from him. That was the type of people they were.”
Carter is believed to be the first of eight documented deaths associated with the riots that would worsen over the next three days.
The settlement itself was wiped off the map. Several buildings were set on fire just a few days after New Year’s, and the mob wiped out the remainder of the town a few days later, torching 12 houses one by one. At the time, the Gainesvile Sun reported a crowd of up to 150 people watched the dozen homes and a church set ablaze. Even the dogs were burned.
“The burning of the houses was carried out deliberately and although the crowd was present all the time, no one could be found who would say he saw the houses fired,” a Sun report said, describing the scene.
At least two white men died, including CP “Poly” Wilkerson of Sumner and Henry Andrews of Otter Creek, when they attempted to storm a house Rosewood residents had barricaded themselves in.
A state report on the violence identifies murdered black Rosewood residents as Sam Carter, matriarch Sarah Carrier, James Carrier, Sylvester Carrier and Lexie Gordon. Mingo Williams, a black man who lived nearby, was also killed by the mob.
Aaron Carrier, Mahulda’s husband and Jenkins’s uncle, was nearly killed when he was dragged behind a truck and tortured on the first night of the riots. At death’s door, Carrier was spirited away by the Levy county sheriff, Bob Walker, she said, and placed in jail in Bronson as a favor to the lawman.
Mahulda was captured later the same night by the mob, Jenkins said, and tortured before Walker eventually found her.
“They got Gussie, that was my aunt’s name, they tied a rope around her neck, however they didn’t drag her, they put her in the car and took her to Sumner. Don’t know if you know – a southern tradition is to build a fire … and to stand around the fire and drink liquor and talk trash,” Jenkins said.
“So they had her there, like she was the [accused], and they were the jury, and they were trying to force her into admitting a lie. ‘Where was your husband last night?’ ‘He was at home in bed with me.’ They asked her that so many times so she got indignant with them … And they said, ‘She’s a bold bitch – let’s rape the bitch.’ And they did. Gang style.”
Another Rosewood resident, James Carrier, was shot over the fresh graves of his brother and mother after several men captured and interrogated him. He was first told to dig his own grave, but couldn’t because two strokes had paralyzed one arm. The men left his body splayed over the graves of his family members.
But despite widespread coverage of the incident – the governor was even notified via telegram – the state did nothing.
Not for one month, when it appears a feeble attempt to indict locals was made by a grand jury, after all the residents of Rosewood had long fled into the nearby swamps and settlements of central Florida.
The oral history of Rosewood was a secret, passed through several families with each recipient sworn to silence, as black Americans endured decades of terror in Florida. When Jenkins was six her parents would have had fresh memories of lynchings.
From 1877 to 1950, the county where the Robinsons lived, Alachua, had among the largest sheer volume of lynchings of any community in the nation, according to the Equal Justice Initiative. Per capita, Florida lynched more people than any other state. And counties surrounding Alachua were not friendlier.
Hernando, Citrus, Lafayette and Taylor counties had some of the highest per capita rates of lynchings in the country. By volume, nearby Marion and Polk counties had among the most in the US.
Legislation, reparations and state reckons with ugly past
The story only came to light in 1982, after a reporter at the then St Petersburg Times exposed the forgotten riot. The reporter, Gary Moore, had traveled to Cedar Key, 10 miles south-west of Rosewood on the coast, to explore a Sunday feature on the rural Gulf town.
“Like the public at large, I personally had never heard of Rosewood,” Moore wrote in a synopsis of research published in the 1993 report that was submitted to the Florida Board of Regents. “I held dim assumptions that any such incident would long ago have been thoroughly researched and publicized by historians, sociologists, anthropologists, advocacy organizations, or others.”
“There were many things thought better left unquestioned,” Moore reasoned.
By 1993, before the report was issued, Moore’s story had made a wide impact, becoming a 60 Minutes documentary and earning follow-ups by other news outlets. Moore, however, recounted in detail his struggle for academic and political acceptance of the narrative, and said even 11 years after his story appeared many attempted to deny the massacre occurred.
One of Moore’s sources, Arnett Doctor, would later devote much of his life to lobbying for Rosewood reparations. Doctor, a descendant of survivors, spent untold hours eliciting detailed narratives of the event from survivors. He is often cited as the “driving force” behind the reparations bill, as the man who brought his findings to high-powered attorneys at Holland & Knight, who helped lobby the legislature for reparations.
Doctor died at the age of 72 in March 2015, in Spring Hill, Florida, a few hours south of Rosewood.
“We deliberately avoided anything but compensation for the losses they incurred,” said Martha Barnett, an attorney at Holland & Knight who helped lobby the Florida legislature on behalf of the survivors of Rosewood. Barnett said the term “reparations” can’t be found in the law passed in Florida.
Instead, attorneys focused on private property rights. She said she and other attorneys needed “to make it something legislators could find palatable in the deep south some 20-some years ago”.
Barnett said the then Democratic governor, Lawton Chiles, promised his support from the beginning. By April 1994, the House passed a bill to compensate victims of the attack with a 71-40 vote. Four days later, on 9 April 1994, the Senate passed a matching bill with a vote of 26-14, to cries of “Praise the lord!” from those Rosewood descendants present.
“It’s time for us to send an example, a shining example, that we’re going to do what’s right – for once,” Democratic senator Matthew Meadows said at the time. Chiles died less than four years after signing the bill.
Now, near Rosewood, Rebel flags are common. Businesses bear the name, and some locals would be as happy to again forget the incident.
Information on the pogrom is notably muted in some local historical societies.
“What it takes to make someone whole, what it takes to repair the past, is probably different for every person, and some things are more effective than others,” said Barnett.
Many of the survivors invested the money they received into their homes. Willie Evans, 87 when he received the $150,000 payment in 1995, put a new roof, windows and doors on his home. Mortin considered traveling to Greece. Jenkins’s mother, who received $3,333.33 from the fund, placed ledgers on the graves of her sister, three brothers and parents.
“The thing that mattered most to [survivors] was that the state of Florida said, ‘We had an obligation to you as our citizens, we failed to live up to it then, we are going to live up to it today, and we are sorry,’” Barnett said.
For Doctor, whose own identity seemed wrapped up in the Rosewood story (the license plate on his truck read “ROSEWOOD”), even the unique success of the legislation was not enough. He dreamed of rebuilding the town.
“The last leg of the [healing process] is the redevelopment and revitalization of a township called Rosewood,” Doctor told the Tampa Bay Times in 2004, as the plaque along State Road 24 was dedicated by then governor Jeb Bush. “If we could get $2bn, $3bn of that we could effect some major changes in Levy County.”
As written by Ta-Nehisi Coates in an article entitled THE CASE FOR REPARATIONS: Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole; “
And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today. — deuteronomy 15: 12–15
Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation. — john locke, “second treatise”
By our unpaid labor and suffering, we have earned the right to the soil, many times over and over, and now we are determined to have it. — anonymous, 1861
I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”
Clyde ross was born in 1923, the seventh of 13 children, near Clarksdale, Mississippi, the home of the blues. Ross’s parents owned and farmed a 40-acre tract of land, flush with cows, hogs, and mules. Ross’s mother would drive to Clarksdale to do her shopping in a horse and buggy, in which she invested all the pride one might place in a Cadillac. The family owned another horse, with a red coat, which they gave to Clyde. The Ross family wanted for little, save that which all black families in the Deep South then desperately desired—the protection of the law.
Clyde Ross, photographed in November 2013 in his home in the North Lawndale neighborhood of Chicago, where he has lived for more than 50 years. When he first tried to get a legitimate mortgage, he was denied; mortgages were effectively not available to black people. (Carlos Javier Ortiz)
In the 1920s, Jim Crow Mississippi was, in all facets of society, a kleptocracy. The majority of the people in the state were perpetually robbed of the vote—a hijacking engineered through the trickery of the poll tax and the muscle of the lynch mob. Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in Mississippi than in any other state. “You and I know what’s the best way to keep the nigger from voting,” blustered Theodore Bilbo, a Mississippi senator and a proud Klansman. “You do it the night before the election.”
The state’s regime partnered robbery of the franchise with robbery of the purse. Many of Mississippi’s black farmers lived in debt peonage, under the sway of cotton kings who were at once their landlords, their employers, and their primary merchants. Tools and necessities were advanced against the return on the crop, which was determined by the employer. When farmers were deemed to be in debt—and they often were—the negative balance was then carried over to the next season. A man or woman who protested this arrangement did so at the risk of grave injury or death. Refusing to work meant arrest under vagrancy laws and forced labor under the state’s penal system.
Well into the 20th century, black people spoke of their flight from Mississippi in much the same manner as their runagate ancestors had. In her 2010 book, The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson tells the story of Eddie Earvin, a spinach picker who fled Mississippi in 1963, after being made to work at gunpoint. “You didn’t talk about it or tell nobody,” Earvin said. “You had to sneak away.”
“Some of the land taken from black families has become a country club in Virginia,” the AP reported.
When Clyde Ross was still a child, Mississippi authorities claimed his father owed $3,000 in back taxes. The elder Ross could not read. He did not have a lawyer. He did not know anyone at the local courthouse. He could not expect the police to be impartial. Effectively, the Ross family had no way to contest the claim and no protection under the law. The authorities seized the land. They seized the buggy. They took the cows, hogs, and mules. And so for the upkeep of separate but equal, the entire Ross family was reduced to sharecropping.
This was hardly unusual. In 2001, the Associated Press published a three-part investigation into the theft of black-owned land stretching back to the antebellum period. The series documented some 406 victims and 24,000 acres of land valued at tens of millions of dollars. The land was taken through means ranging from legal chicanery to terrorism. “Some of the land taken from black families has become a country club in Virginia,” the AP reported, as well as “oil fields in Mississippi” and “a baseball spring training facility in Florida.”
Clyde Ross was a smart child. His teacher thought he should attend a more challenging school. There was very little support for educating black people in Mississippi. But Julius Rosenwald, a part owner of Sears, Roebuck, had begun an ambitious effort to build schools for black children throughout the South. Ross’s teacher believed he should attend the local Rosenwald school. It was too far for Ross to walk and get back in time to work in the fields. Local white children had a school bus. Clyde Ross did not, and thus lost the chance to better his education.
Then, when Ross was 10 years old, a group of white men demanded his only childhood possession—the horse with the red coat. “You can’t have this horse. We want it,” one of the white men said. They gave Ross’s father $17.
“I did everything for that horse,” Ross told me. “Everything. And they took him. Put him on the racetrack. I never did know what happened to him after that, but I know they didn’t bring him back. So that’s just one of my losses.”
The losses mounted. As sharecroppers, the Ross family saw their wages treated as the landlord’s slush fund. Landowners were supposed to split the profits from the cotton fields with sharecroppers. But bales would often disappear during the count, or the split might be altered on a whim. If cotton was selling for 50 cents a pound, the Ross family might get 15 cents, or only five. One year Ross’s mother promised to buy him a $7 suit for a summer program at their church. She ordered the suit by mail. But that year Ross’s family was paid only five cents a pound for cotton. The mailman arrived with the suit. The Rosses could not pay. The suit was sent back. Clyde Ross did not go to the church program.
It was in these early years that Ross began to understand himself as an American—he did not live under the blind decree of justice, but under the heel of a regime that elevated armed robbery to a governing principle. He thought about fighting. “Just be quiet,” his father told him. “Because they’ll come and kill us all.”
Clyde Ross grew. He was drafted into the Army. The draft officials offered him an exemption if he stayed home and worked. He preferred to take his chances with war. He was stationed in California. He found that he could go into stores without being bothered. He could walk the streets without being harassed. He could go into a restaurant and receive service.
Ross was shipped off to Guam. He fought in World War II to save the world from tyranny. But when he returned to Clarksdale, he found that tyranny had followed him home. This was 1947, eight years before Mississippi lynched Emmett Till and tossed his broken body into the Tallahatchie River. The Great Migration, a mass exodus of 6 million African Americans that spanned most of the 20th century, was now in its second wave. The black pilgrims did not journey north simply seeking better wages and work, or bright lights and big adventures. They were fleeing the acquisitive warlords of the South. They were seeking the protection of the law.
Clyde Ross was among them. He came to Chicago in 1947 and took a job as a taster at Campbell’s Soup. He made a stable wage. He married. He had children. His paycheck was his own. No Klansmen stripped him of the vote. When he walked down the street, he did not have to move because a white man was walking past. He did not have to take off his hat or avert his gaze. His journey from peonage to full citizenship seemed near-complete. Only one item was missing—a home, that final badge of entry into the sacred order of the American middle class of the Eisenhower years.
In 1961, Ross and his wife bought a house in North Lawndale, a bustling community on Chicago’s West Side. North Lawndale had long been a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, but a handful of middle-class African Americans had lived there starting in the ’40s. The community was anchored by the sprawling Sears, Roebuck headquarters. North Lawndale’s Jewish People’s Institute actively encouraged blacks to move into the neighborhood, seeking to make it a “pilot community for interracial living.” In the battle for integration then being fought around the country, North Lawndale seemed to offer promising terrain. But out in the tall grass, highwaymen, nefarious as any Clarksdale kleptocrat, were lying in wait.
From the 1930s through the 1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market.
Three months after Clyde Ross moved into his house, the boiler blew out. This would normally be a homeowner’s responsibility, but in fact, Ross was not really a homeowner. His payments were made to the seller, not the bank. And Ross had not signed a normal mortgage. He’d bought “on contract”: a predatory agreement that combined all the responsibilities of homeownership with all the disadvantages of renting—while offering the benefits of neither. Ross had bought his house for $27,500. The seller, not the previous homeowner but a new kind of middleman, had bought it for only $12,000 six months before selling it to Ross. In a contract sale, the seller kept the deed until the contract was paid in full—and, unlike with a normal mortgage, Ross would acquire no equity in the meantime. If he missed a single payment, he would immediately forfeit his $1,000 down payment, all his monthly payments, and the property itself.
The men who peddled contracts in North Lawndale would sell homes at inflated prices and then evict families who could not pay—taking their down payment and their monthly installments as profit. Then they’d bring in another black family, rinse, and repeat. “He loads them up with payments they can’t meet,” an office secretary told The Chicago Daily News of her boss, the speculator Lou Fushanis, in 1963. “Then he takes the property away from them. He’s sold some of the buildings three or four times.”
Ross had tried to get a legitimate mortgage in another neighborhood, but was told by a loan officer that there was no financing available. The truth was that there was no financing for people like Clyde Ross. From the 1930s through the 1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market through means both legal and extralegal. Chicago whites employed every measure, from “restrictive covenants” to bombings, to keep their neighborhoods segregated.
Their efforts were buttressed by the federal government. In 1934, Congress created the Federal Housing Administration. The FHA insured private mortgages, causing a drop in interest rates and a decline in the size of the down payment required to buy a house. But an insured mortgage was not a possibility for Clyde Ross. The FHA had adopted a system of maps that rated neighborhoods according to their perceived stability. On the maps, green areas, rated “A,” indicated “in demand” neighborhoods that, as one appraiser put it, lacked “a single foreigner or Negro.” These neighborhoods were considered excellent prospects for insurance. Neighborhoods where black people lived were rated “D” and were usually considered ineligible for FHA backing. They were colored in red. Neither the percentage of black people living there nor their social class mattered. Black people were viewed as a contagion. Redlining went beyond FHA-backed loans and spread to the entire mortgage industry, which was already rife with racism, excluding black people from most legitimate means of obtaining a mortgage.
Explore Redlining in Chicago
A 1939 Home Owners’ Loan Corporation “Residential Security Map” of Chicago shows discrimination against low-income and minority neighborhoods. The residents of the areas marked in red (representing “hazardous” real-estate markets) were denied FHA-backed mortgages. (Map development by Frankie Dintino)
“A government offering such bounty to builders and lenders could have required compliance with a nondiscrimination policy,” Charles Abrams, the urban-studies expert who helped create the New York City Housing Authority, wrote in 1955. “Instead, the FHA adopted a racial policy that could well have been culled from the Nuremberg laws.”
The devastating effects are cogently outlined by Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro in their 1995 book, Black Wealth/White Wealth:
Locked out of the greatest mass-based opportunity for wealth accumulation in American history, African Americans who desired and were able to afford home ownership found themselves consigned to central-city communities where their investments were affected by the “self-fulfilling prophecies” of the FHA appraisers: cut off from sources of new investment[,] their homes and communities deteriorated and lost value in comparison to those homes and communities that FHA appraisers deemed desirable.
In Chicago and across the country, whites looking to achieve the American dream could rely on a legitimate credit system backed by the government. Blacks were herded into the sights of unscrupulous lenders who took them for money and for sport. “It was like people who like to go out and shoot lions in Africa. It was the same thrill,” a housing attorney told the historian Beryl Satter in her 2009 book, Family Properties. “The thrill of the chase and the kill.”
The kill was profitable. At the time of his death, Lou Fushanis owned more than 600 properties, many of them in North Lawndale, and his estate was estimated to be worth $3 million. He’d made much of this money by exploiting the frustrated hopes of black migrants like Clyde Ross. During this period, according to one estimate, 85 percent of all black home buyers who bought in Chicago bought on contract. “If anybody who is well established in this business in Chicago doesn’t earn $100,000 a year,” a contract seller told The Saturday Evening Post in 1962, “he is loafing.”
Contract sellers became rich. North Lawndale became a ghetto.
Clyde Ross still lives there. He still owns his home. He is 91, and the emblems of survival are all around him—awards for service in his community, pictures of his children in cap and gown. But when I asked him about his home in North Lawndale, I heard only anarchy.
“We were ashamed. We did not want anyone to know that we were that ignorant,” Ross told me. He was sitting at his dining-room table. His glasses were as thick as his Clarksdale drawl. “I’d come out of Mississippi where there was one mess, and come up here and got in another mess. So how dumb am I? I didn’t want anyone to know how dumb I was.
“When I found myself caught up in it, I said, ‘How? I just left this mess. I just left no laws. And no regard. And then I come here and get cheated wide open.’ I would probably want to do some harm to some people, you know, if I had been violent like some of us. I thought, ‘Man, I got caught up in this stuff. I can’t even take care of my kids.’ I didn’t have enough for my kids. You could fall through the cracks easy fighting these white people. And no law.”
Blacks were herded into the sights of unscrupulous lenders who took them for money and for sport.
But fight Clyde Ross did. In 1968 he joined the newly formed Contract Buyers League—a collection of black homeowners on Chicago’s South and West Sides, all of whom had been locked into the same system of predation. There was Howell Collins, whose contract called for him to pay $25,500 for a house that a speculator had bought for $14,500. There was Ruth Wells, who’d managed to pay out half her contract, expecting a mortgage, only to suddenly see an insurance bill materialize out of thin air—a requirement the seller had added without Wells’s knowledge. Contract sellers used every tool at their disposal to pilfer from their clients. They scared white residents into selling low. They lied about properties’ compliance with building codes, then left the buyer responsible when city inspectors arrived. They presented themselves as real-estate brokers, when in fact they were the owners. They guided their clients to lawyers who were in on the scheme.
The Contract Buyers League fought back. Members—who would eventually number more than 500—went out to the posh suburbs where the speculators lived and embarrassed them by knocking on their neighbors’ doors and informing them of the details of the contract-lending trade. They refused to pay their installments, instead holding monthly payments in an escrow account. Then they brought a suit against the contract sellers, accusing them of buying properties and reselling in such a manner “to reap from members of the Negro race large and unjust profits.”
In return for the “deprivations of their rights and privileges under the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments,” the league demanded “prayers for relief”—payback of all moneys paid on contracts and all moneys paid for structural improvement of properties, at 6 percent interest minus a “fair, non-discriminatory” rental price for time of occupation. Moreover, the league asked the court to adjudge that the defendants had “acted willfully and maliciously and that malice is the gist of this action.”
Ross and the Contract Buyers League were no longer appealing to the government simply for equality. They were no longer fleeing in hopes of a better deal elsewhere. They were charging society with a crime against their community. They wanted the crime publicly ruled as such. They wanted the crime’s executors declared to be offensive to society. And they wanted restitution for the great injury brought upon them by said offenders. In 1968, Clyde Ross and the Contract Buyers League were no longer simply seeking the protection of the law. They were seeking reparations.
II. “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”
According to the most-recent statistics, North Lawndale is now on the wrong end of virtually every socioeconomic indicator. In 1930 its population was 112,000. Today it is 36,000. The halcyon talk of “interracial living” is dead. The neighborhood is 92 percent black. Its homicide rate is 45 per 100,000—triple the rate of the city as a whole. The infant-mortality rate is 14 per 1,000—more than twice the national average. Forty-three percent of the people in North Lawndale live below the poverty line—double Chicago’s overall rate. Forty-five percent of all households are on food stamps—nearly three times the rate of the city at large. Sears, Roebuck left the neighborhood in 1987, taking 1,800 jobs with it. Kids in North Lawndale need not be confused about their prospects: Cook County’s Juvenile Temporary Detention Center sits directly adjacent to the neighborhood.
North Lawndale is an extreme portrait of the trends that ail black Chicago. Such is the magnitude of these ailments that it can be said that blacks and whites do not inhabit the same city. The average per capita income of Chicago’s white neighborhoods is almost three times that of its black neighborhoods. When the Harvard sociologist Robert J. Sampson examined incarceration rates in Chicago in his 2012 book, Great American City, he found that a black neighborhood with one of the highest incarceration rates (West Garfield Park) had a rate more than 40 times as high as the white neighborhood with the highest rate (Clearing). “This is a staggering differential, even for community-level comparisons,” Sampson writes. “A difference of kind, not degree.”
In other words, Chicago’s impoverished black neighborhoods—characterized by high unemployment and households headed by single parents—are not simply poor; they are “ecologically distinct.” This “is not simply the same thing as low economic status,” writes Sampson. “In this pattern Chicago is not alone.”
The lives of black Americans are better than they were half a century ago. The humiliation of whites only signs are gone. Rates of black poverty have decreased. Black teen-pregnancy rates are at record lows—and the gap between black and white teen-pregnancy rates has shrunk significantly. But such progress rests on a shaky foundation, and fault lines are everywhere. The income gap between black and white households is roughly the same today as it was in 1970. Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at New York University, studied children born from 1955 through 1970 and found that 4 percent of whites and 62 percent of blacks across America had been raised in poor neighborhoods. A generation later, the same study showed, virtually nothing had changed. And whereas whites born into affluent neighborhoods tended to remain in affluent neighborhoods, blacks tended to fall out of them.
This is not surprising. Black families, regardless of income, are significantly less wealthy than white families. The Pew Research Center estimates that white households are worth roughly 20 times as much as black households, and that whereas only 15 percent of whites have zero or negative wealth, more than a third of blacks do. Effectively, the black family in America is working without a safety net. When financial calamity strikes—a medical emergency, divorce, job loss—the fall is precipitous.
And just as black families of all incomes remain handicapped by a lack of wealth, so too do they remain handicapped by their restricted choice of neighborhood. Black people with upper-middle-class incomes do not generally live in upper-middle-class neighborhoods. Sharkey’s research shows that black families making $100,000 typically live in the kinds of neighborhoods inhabited by white families making $30,000. “Blacks and whites inhabit such different neighborhoods,” Sharkey writes, “that it is not possible to compare the economic outcomes of black and white children.”
A national real-estate association advised not to sell to “a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education.”
The implications are chilling. As a rule, poor black people do not work their way out of the ghetto—and those who do often face the horror of watching their children and grandchildren tumble back.
Even seeming evidence of progress withers under harsh light. In 2012, the Manhattan Institute cheerily noted that segregation had declined since the 1960s. And yet African Americans still remained—by far—the most segregated ethnic group in the country.
With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage. An unsegregated America might see poverty, and all its effects, spread across the country with no particular bias toward skin color. Instead, the concentration of poverty has been paired with a concentration of melanin. The resulting conflagration has been devastating.
One thread of thinking in the African American community holds that these depressing numbers partially stem from cultural pathologies that can be altered through individual grit and exceptionally good behavior. (In 2011, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, responding to violence among young black males, put the blame on the family: “Too many men making too many babies they don’t want to take care of, and then we end up dealing with your children.” Nutter turned to those presumably fatherless babies: “Pull your pants up and buy a belt, because no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt.”) The thread is as old as black politics itself. It is also wrong. The kind of trenchant racism to which black people have persistently been subjected can never be defeated by making its victims more respectable. The essence of American racism is disrespect. And in the wake of the grim numbers, we see the grim inheritance.
The Contract Buyers League’s suit brought by Clyde Ross and his allies took direct aim at this inheritance. The suit was rooted in Chicago’s long history of segregation, which had created two housing markets—one legitimate and backed by the government, the other lawless and patrolled by predators. The suit dragged on until 1976, when the league lost a jury trial. Securing the equal protection of the law proved hard; securing reparations proved impossible. If there were any doubts about the mood of the jury, the foreman removed them by saying, when asked about the verdict, that he hoped it would help end “the mess Earl Warren made with Brown v. Board of Education and all that nonsense.”
The Supreme Court seems to share that sentiment. The past two decades have witnessed a rollback of the progressive legislation of the 1960s. Liberals have found themselves on the defensive. In 2008, when Barack Obama was a candidate for president, he was asked whether his daughters—Malia and Sasha—should benefit from affirmative action. He answered in the negative.
The exchange rested upon an erroneous comparison of the average American white family and the exceptional first family. In the contest of upward mobility, Barack and Michelle Obama have won. But they’ve won by being twice as good—and enduring twice as much. Malia and Sasha Obama enjoy privileges beyond the average white child’s dreams. But that comparison is incomplete. The more telling question is how they compare with Jenna and Barbara Bush—the products of many generations of privilege, not just one. Whatever the Obama children achieve, it will be evidence of their family’s singular perseverance, not of broad equality.
III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”
In 1783, the freedwoman Belinda Royall petitioned the commonwealth of Massachusetts for reparations. Belinda had been born in modern-day Ghana. She was kidnapped as a child and sold into slavery. She endured the Middle Passage and 50 years of enslavement at the hands of Isaac Royall and his son. But the junior Royall, a British loyalist, fled the country during the Revolution. Belinda, now free after half a century of labor, beseeched the nascent Massachusetts legislature:
The face of your Petitioner, is now marked with the furrows of time, and her frame bending under the oppression of years, while she, by the Laws of the Land, is denied the employment of one morsel of that immense wealth, apart whereof hath been accumilated by her own industry, and the whole augmented by her servitude.
WHEREFORE, casting herself at your feet if your honours, as to a body of men, formed for the extirpation of vassalage, for the reward of Virtue, and the just return of honest industry—she prays, that such allowance may be made her out of the Estate of Colonel Royall, as will prevent her, and her more infirm daughter, from misery in the greatest extreme, and scatter comfort over the short and downward path of their lives.
Belinda Royall was granted a pension of 15 pounds and 12 shillings, to be paid out of the estate of Isaac Royall—one of the earliest successful attempts to petition for reparations. At the time, black people in America had endured more than 150 years of enslavement, and the idea that they might be owed something in return was, if not the national consensus, at least not outrageous.
“A heavy account lies against us as a civil society for oppressions committed against people who did not injure us,” wrote the Quaker John Woolman in 1769, “and that if the particular case of many individuals were fairly stated, it would appear that there was considerable due to them.”
As the historian Roy E. Finkenbine has documented, at the dawn of this country, black reparations were actively considered and often effected. Quakers in New York, New England, and Baltimore went so far as to make “membership contingent upon compensating one’s former slaves.” In 1782, the Quaker Robert Pleasants emancipated his 78 slaves, granted them 350 acres, and later built a school on their property and provided for their education. “The doing of this justice to the injured Africans,” wrote Pleasants, “would be an acceptable offering to him who ‘Rules in the kingdom of men.’ ”
Edward Coles, a protégé of Thomas Jefferson who became a slaveholder through inheritance, took many of his slaves north and granted them a plot of land in Illinois. John Randolph, a cousin of Jefferson’s, willed that all his slaves be emancipated upon his death, and that all those older than 40 be given 10 acres of land. “I give and bequeath to all my slaves their freedom,” Randolph wrote, “heartily regretting that I have been the owner of one.”
In his book Forever Free, Eric Foner recounts the story of a disgruntled planter reprimanding a freedman loafing on the job:
Planter: “You lazy nigger, I am losing a whole day’s labor by you.”
Freedman: “Massa, how many days’ labor have I lost by you?”
In the 20th century, the cause of reparations was taken up by a diverse cast that included the Confederate veteran Walter R. Vaughan, who believed that reparations would be a stimulus for the South; the black activist Callie House; black-nationalist leaders like “Queen Mother” Audley Moore; and the civil-rights activist James Forman. The movement coalesced in 1987 under an umbrella organization called the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (n’cobra). The NAACP endorsed reparations in 1993. Charles J. Ogletree Jr., a professor at Harvard Law School, has pursued reparations claims in court.
But while the people advocating reparations have changed over time, the response from the country has remained virtually the same. “They have been taught to labor,” the Chicago Tribune editorialized in 1891. “They have been taught Christian civilization, and to speak the noble English language instead of some African gibberish. The account is square with the ex‑slaves.”
Not exactly. Having been enslaved for 250 years, black people were not left to their own devices. They were terrorized. In the Deep South, a second slavery ruled. In the North, legislatures, mayors, civic associations, banks, and citizens all colluded to pin black people into ghettos, where they were overcrowded, overcharged, and undereducated. Businesses discriminated against them, awarding them the worst jobs and the worst wages. Police brutalized them in the streets. And the notion that black lives, black bodies, and black wealth were rightful targets remained deeply rooted in the broader society. Now we have half-stepped away from our long centuries of despoilment, promising, “Never again.” But still we are haunted. It is as though we have run up a credit-card bill and, having pledged to charge no more, remain befuddled that the balance does not disappear. The effects of that balance, interest accruing daily, are all around us.
Broach the topic of reparations today and a barrage of questions inevitably follows: Who will be paid? How much will they be paid? Who will pay? But if the practicalities, not the justice, of reparations are the true sticking point, there has for some time been the beginnings of a solution. For the past 25 years, Congressman John Conyers Jr., who represents the Detroit area, has marked every session of Congress by introducing a bill calling for a congressional study of slavery and its lingering effects as well as recommendations for “appropriate remedies.”
A country curious about how reparations might actually work has an easy solution in Conyers’s bill, now called HR 40, the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act. We would support this bill, submit the question to study, and then assess the possible solutions. But we are not interested.
What We Should Be Asking About Reparations
“Any contemplation of compensated emancipation must grapple with how several counties, and some states in the South, would react to finding themselves suddenly outnumbered by free black people.”
“It’s because it’s black folks making the claim,” Nkechi Taifa, who helped found n’cobra, says. “People who talk about reparations are considered left lunatics. But all we are talking about is studying [reparations]. As John Conyers has said, we study everything. We study the water, the air. We can’t even study the issue? This bill does not authorize one red cent to anyone.”
That HR 40 has never—under either Democrats or Republicans—made it to the House floor suggests our concerns are rooted not in the impracticality of reparations but in something more existential. If we conclude that the conditions in North Lawndale and black America are not inexplicable but are instead precisely what you’d expect of a community that for centuries has lived in America’s crosshairs, then what are we to make of the world’s oldest democracy?
One cannot escape the question by hand-waving at the past, disavowing the acts of one’s ancestors, nor by citing a recent date of ancestral immigration. The last slaveholder has been dead for a very long time. The last soldier to endure Valley Forge has been dead much longer. To proudly claim the veteran and disown the slaveholder is patriotism à la carte. A nation outlives its generations. We were not there when Washington crossed the Delaware, but Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s rendering has meaning to us. We were not there when Woodrow Wilson took us into World War I, but we are still paying out the pensions. If Thomas Jefferson’s genius matters, then so does his taking of Sally Hemings’s body. If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge.
Black families making $100,000 typically live in the kinds of neighborhoods inhabited by white families making $30,000.
In 1909, President William Howard Taft told the country that “intelligent” white southerners were ready to see blacks as “useful members of the community.” A week later Joseph Gordon, a black man, was lynched outside Greenwood, Mississippi. The high point of the lynching era has passed. But the memories of those robbed of their lives still live on in the lingering effects. Indeed, in America there is a strange and powerful belief that if you stab a black person 10 times, the bleeding stops and the healing begins the moment the assailant drops the knife. We believe white dominance to be a fact of the inert past, a delinquent debt that can be made to disappear if only we don’t look.
There has always been another way. “It is in vain to alledge, that our ancestors brought them hither, and not we,” Yale President Timothy Dwight said in 1810.
We inherit our ample patrimony with all its incumbrances; and are bound to pay the debts of our ancestors. This debt, particularly, we are bound to discharge: and, when the righteous Judge of the Universe comes to reckon with his servants, he will rigidly exact the payment at our hands. To give them liberty, and stop here, is to entail upon them a curse.
IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”
America begins in black plunder and white democracy, two features that are not contradictory but complementary. “The men who came together to found the independent United States, dedicated to freedom and equality, either held slaves or were willing to join hands with those who did,” the historian Edmund S. Morgan wrote. “None of them felt entirely comfortable about the fact, but neither did they feel responsible for it. Most of them had inherited both their slaves and their attachment to freedom from an earlier generation, and they knew the two were not unconnected.”
When enslaved Africans, plundered of their bodies, plundered of their families, and plundered of their labor, were brought to the colony of Virginia in 1619, they did not initially endure the naked racism that would engulf their progeny. Some of them were freed. Some of them intermarried. Still others escaped with the white indentured servants who had suffered as they had. Some even rebelled together, allying under Nathaniel Bacon to torch Jamestown in 1676.
One hundred years later, the idea of slaves and poor whites joining forces would shock the senses, but in the early days of the English colonies, the two groups had much in common. English visitors to Virginia found that its masters “abuse their servantes with intollerable oppression and hard usage.” White servants were flogged, tricked into serving beyond their contracts, and traded in much the same manner as slaves.
This “hard usage” originated in a simple fact of the New World—land was boundless but cheap labor was limited. As life spans increased in the colony, the Virginia planters found in the enslaved Africans an even more efficient source of cheap labor. Whereas indentured servants were still legal subjects of the English crown and thus entitled to certain protections, African slaves entered the colonies as aliens. Exempted from the protections of the crown, they became early America’s indispensable working class—fit for maximum exploitation, capable of only minimal resistance.
For the next 250 years, American law worked to reduce black people to a class of untouchables and raise all white men to the level of citizens. In 1650, Virginia mandated that “all persons except Negroes” were to carry arms. In 1664, Maryland mandated that any Englishwoman who married a slave must live as a slave of her husband’s master. In 1705, the Virginia assembly passed a law allowing for the dismemberment of unruly slaves—but forbidding masters from whipping “a Christian white servant naked, without an order from a justice of the peace.” In that same law, the colony mandated that “all horses, cattle, and hogs, now belonging, or that hereafter shall belong to any slave” be seized and sold off by the local church, the profits used to support “the poor of the said parish.” At that time, there would have still been people alive who could remember blacks and whites joining to burn down Jamestown only 29 years before. But at the beginning of the 18th century, two primary classes were enshrined in America.
“The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black,” John C. Calhoun, South Carolina’s senior senator, declared on the Senate floor in 1848. “And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.”
In 1860, the majority of people living in South Carolina and Mississippi, almost half of those living in Georgia, and about one-third of all Southerners were on the wrong side of Calhoun’s line. The state with the largest number of enslaved Americans was Virginia, where in certain counties some 70 percent of all people labored in chains. Nearly one-fourth of all white Southerners owned slaves, and upon their backs the economic basis of America—and much of the Atlantic world—was erected. In the seven cotton states, one-third of all white income was derived from slavery. By 1840, cotton produced by slave labor constituted 59 percent of the country’s exports. The web of this slave society extended north to the looms of New England, and across the Atlantic to Great Britain, where it powered a great economic transformation and altered the trajectory of world history. “Whoever says Industrial Revolution,” wrote the historian Eric J. Hobsbawm, “says cotton.”
The wealth accorded America by slavery was not just in what the slaves pulled from the land but in the slaves themselves. “In 1860, slaves as an asset were worth more than all of America’s manufacturing, all of the railroads, all of the productive capacity of the United States put together,” the Yale historian David W. Blight has noted. “Slaves were the single largest, by far, financial asset of property in the entire American economy.” The sale of these slaves—“in whose bodies that money congealed,” writes Walter Johnson, a Harvard historian—generated even more ancillary wealth. Loans were taken out for purchase, to be repaid with interest. Insurance policies were drafted against the untimely death of a slave and the loss of potential profits. Slave sales were taxed and notarized. The vending of the black body and the sundering of the black family became an economy unto themselves, estimated to have brought in tens of millions of dollars to antebellum America. In 1860 there were more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi Valley than anywhere else in the country.
Beneath the cold numbers lay lives divided. “I had a constant dread that Mrs. Moore, her mistress, would be in want of money and sell my dear wife,” a freedman wrote, reflecting on his time in slavery. “We constantly dreaded a final separation. Our affection for each was very strong, and this made us always apprehensive of a cruel parting.”
Forced partings were common in the antebellum South. A slave in some parts of the region stood a 30 percent chance of being sold in his or her lifetime. Twenty-five percent of interstate trades destroyed a first marriage and half of them destroyed a nuclear family.
When the wife and children of Henry Brown, a slave in Richmond, Virginia, were to be sold away, Brown searched for a white master who might buy his wife and children to keep the family together. He failed:
The next day, I stationed myself by the side of the road, along which the slaves, amounting to three hundred and fifty, were to pass. The purchaser of my wife was a Methodist minister, who was about starting for North Carolina. Pretty soon five waggon-loads of little children passed, and looking at the foremost one, what should I see but a little child, pointing its tiny hand towards me, exclaiming, “There’s my father; I knew he would come and bid me good-bye.” It was my eldest child! Soon the gang approached in which my wife was chained. I looked, and beheld her familiar face; but O, reader, that glance of agony! may God spare me ever again enduring the excruciating horror of that moment! She passed, and came near to where I stood. I seized hold of her hand, intending to bid her farewell; but words failed me; the gift of utterance had fled, and I remained speechless. I followed her for some distance, with her hand grasped in mine, as if to save her from her fate, but I could not speak, and I was obliged to turn away in silence.
In a time when telecommunications were primitive and blacks lacked freedom of movement, the parting of black families was a kind of murder. Here we find the roots of American wealth and democracy—in the for-profit destruction of the most important asset available to any people, the family. The destruction was not incidental to America’s rise; it facilitated that rise. By erecting a slave society, America created the economic foundation for its great experiment in democracy. The labor strife that seeded Bacon’s rebellion was suppressed. America’s indispensable working class existed as property beyond the realm of politics, leaving white Americans free to trumpet their love of freedom and democratic values. Assessing antebellum democracy in Virginia, a visitor from England observed that the state’s natives “can profess an unbounded love of liberty and of democracy in consequence of the mass of the people, who in other countries might become mobs, being there nearly altogether composed of their own Negro slaves.”
V. The Quiet Plunder
The consequences of 250 years of enslavement, of war upon black families and black people, were profound. Like homeownership today, slave ownership was aspirational, attracting not just those who owned slaves but those who wished to. Much as homeowners today might discuss the addition of a patio or the painting of a living room, slaveholders traded tips on the best methods for breeding workers, exacting labor, and doling out punishment. Just as a homeowner today might subscribe to a magazine like This Old House, slaveholders had journals such as De Bow’s Review, which recommended the best practices for wringing profits from slaves. By the dawn of the Civil War, the enslavement of black America was thought to be so foundational to the country that those who sought to end it were branded heretics worthy of death. Imagine what would happen if a president today came out in favor of taking all American homes from their owners: the reaction might well be violent.
“This country was formed for the white, not for the black man,” John Wilkes Booth wrote, before killing Abraham Lincoln. “And looking upon African slavery from the same standpoint held by those noble framers of our Constitution, I for one have ever considered it one of the greatest blessings (both for themselves and us) that God ever bestowed upon a favored nation.”
In the aftermath of the Civil War, Radical Republicans attempted to reconstruct the country upon something resembling universal equality—but they were beaten back by a campaign of “Redemption,” led by White Liners, Red Shirts, and Klansmen bent on upholding a society “formed for the white, not for the black man.” A wave of terrorism roiled the South. In his massive history Reconstruction, Eric Foner recounts incidents of black people being attacked for not removing their hats; for refusing to hand over a whiskey flask; for disobeying church procedures; for “using insolent language”; for disputing labor contracts; for refusing to be “tied like a slave.” Sometimes the attacks were intended simply to “thin out the niggers a little.”
Terrorism carried the day. Federal troops withdrew from the South in 1877. The dream of Reconstruction died. For the next century, political violence was visited upon blacks wantonly, with special treatment meted out toward black people of ambition. Black schools and churches were burned to the ground. Black voters and the political candidates who attempted to rally them were intimidated, and some were murdered. At the end of World War I, black veterans returning to their homes were assaulted for daring to wear the American uniform. The demobilization of soldiers after the war, which put white and black veterans into competition for scarce jobs, produced the Red Summer of 1919: a succession of racist pogroms against dozens of cities ranging from Longview, Texas, to Chicago to Washington, D.C. Organized white violence against blacks continued into the 1920s—in 1921 a white mob leveled Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street,” and in 1923 another one razed the black town of Rosewood, Florida—and virtually no one was punished.
A postcard dated August 3, 1920, depicts the aftermath of a lynching in Center, Texas, near the Louisiana border. According to the text on the other side, the victim was a 16-year-old boy.
The work of mobs was a rabid and violent rendition of prejudices that extended even into the upper reaches of American government. The New Deal is today remembered as a model for what progressive government should do—cast a broad social safety net that protects the poor and the afflicted while building the middle class. When progressives wish to express their disappointment with Barack Obama, they point to the accomplishments of Franklin Roosevelt. But these progressives rarely note that Roosevelt’s New Deal, much like the democracy that produced it, rested on the foundation of Jim Crow.
“The Jim Crow South,” writes Ira Katznelson, a history and political-science professor at Columbia, “was the one collaborator America’s democracy could not do without.” The marks of that collaboration are all over the New Deal. The omnibus programs passed under the Social Security Act in 1935 were crafted in such a way as to protect the southern way of life. Old-age insurance (Social Security proper) and unemployment insurance excluded farmworkers and domestics—jobs heavily occupied by blacks. When President Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, 65 percent of African Americans nationally and between 70 and 80 percent in the South were ineligible. The NAACP protested, calling the new American safety net “a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through.”
The oft-celebrated G.I. Bill similarly failed black Americans, by mirroring the broader country’s insistence on a racist housing policy. Though ostensibly color-blind, Title III of the bill, which aimed to give veterans access to low-interest home loans, left black veterans to tangle with white officials at their local Veterans Administration as well as with the same banks that had, for years, refused to grant mortgages to blacks. The historian Kathleen J. Frydl observes in her 2009 book, The GI Bill, that so many blacks were disqualified from receiving Title III benefits “that it is more accurate simply to say that blacks could not use this particular title.”
In Cold War America, homeownership was seen as a means of instilling patriotism, and as a civilizing and anti-radical force. “No man who owns his own house and lot can be a Communist,” claimed William Levitt, who pioneered the modern suburb with the development of the various Levittowns, his famous planned communities. “He has too much to do.”
But the Levittowns were, with Levitt’s willing acquiescence, segregated throughout their early years. Daisy and Bill Myers, the first black family to move into Levittown, Pennsylvania, were greeted with protests and a burning cross. A neighbor who opposed the family said that Bill Myers was “probably a nice guy, but every time I look at him I see $2,000 drop off the value of my house.”
The neighbor had good reason to be afraid. Bill and Daisy Myers were from the other side of John C. Calhoun’s dual society. If they moved next door, housing policy almost guaranteed that their neighbors’ property values would decline.
Whereas shortly before the New Deal, a typical mortgage required a large down payment and full repayment within about 10 years, the creation of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation in 1933 and then the Federal Housing Administration the following year allowed banks to offer loans requiring no more than 10 percent down, amortized over 20 to 30 years. “Without federal intervention in the housing market, massive suburbanization would have been impossible,” writes Thomas J. Sugrue, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania. “In 1930, only 30 percent of Americans owned their own homes; by 1960, more than 60 percent were home owners. Home ownership became an emblem of American citizenship.”
That emblem was not to be awarded to blacks. The American real-estate industry believed segregation to be a moral principle. As late as 1950, the National Association of Real Estate Boards’ code of ethics warned that “a Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood … any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values.” A 1943 brochure specified that such potential undesirables might include madams, bootleggers, gangsters—and “a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education and thought they were entitled to live among whites.”
The federal government concurred. It was the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, not a private trade association, that pioneered the practice of redlining, selectively granting loans and insisting that any property it insured be covered by a restrictive covenant—a clause in the deed forbidding the sale of the property to anyone other than whites. Millions of dollars flowed from tax coffers into segregated white neighborhoods.
One man said his black neighbor was “probably a nice guy, but every time I look at him I see $2,000 drop off the value of my house.”
“For perhaps the first time, the federal government embraced the discriminatory attitudes of the marketplace,” the historian Kenneth T. Jackson wrote in his 1985 book, Crabgrass Frontier, a history of suburbanization. “Previously, prejudices were personalized and individualized; FHA exhorted segregation and enshrined it as public policy. Whole areas of cities were declared ineligible for loan guarantees.” Redlining was not officially outlawed until 1968, by the Fair Housing Act. By then the damage was done—and reports of redlining by banks have continued.
The federal government is premised on equal fealty from all its citizens, who in return are to receive equal treatment. But as late as the mid-20th century, this bargain was not granted to black people, who repeatedly paid a higher price for citizenship and received less in return. Plunder had been the essential feature of slavery, of the society described by Calhoun. But practically a full century after the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, the plunder—quiet, systemic, submerged—continued even amidst the aims and achievements of New Deal liberals.
VI. Making The Second Ghetto
Today chicago is one of the most segregated cities in the country, a fact that reflects assiduous planning. In the effort to uphold white supremacy at every level down to the neighborhood, Chicago—a city founded by the black fur trader Jean Baptiste Point du Sable—has long been a pioneer. The efforts began in earnest in 1917, when the Chicago Real Estate Board, horrified by the influx of southern blacks, lobbied to zone the entire city by race. But after the Supreme Court ruled against explicit racial zoning that year, the city was forced to pursue its agenda by more-discreet means.
Like the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, the Federal Housing Administration initially insisted on restrictive covenants, which helped bar blacks and other ethnic undesirables from receiving federally backed home loans. By the 1940s, Chicago led the nation in the use of these restrictive covenants, and about half of all residential neighborhoods in the city were effectively off-limits to blacks.
It is common today to become misty-eyed about the old black ghetto, where doctors and lawyers lived next door to meatpackers and steelworkers, who themselves lived next door to prostitutes and the unemployed. This segregationist nostalgia ignores the actual conditions endured by the people living there—vermin and arson, for instance—and ignores the fact that the old ghetto was premised on denying black people privileges enjoyed by white Americans.
In 1948, when the Supreme Court ruled that restrictive covenants, while permissible, were not enforceable by judicial action, Chicago had other weapons at the ready. The Illinois state legislature had already given Chicago’s city council the right to approve—and thus to veto—any public housing in the city’s wards. This came in handy in 1949, when a new federal housing act sent millions of tax dollars into Chicago and other cities around the country. Beginning in 1950, site selection for public housing proceeded entirely on the grounds of segregation. By the 1960s, the city had created with its vast housing projects what the historian Arnold R. Hirsch calls a “second ghetto,” one larger than the old Black Belt but just as impermeable. More than 98 percent of all the family public-housing units built in Chicago between 1950 and the mid‑1960s were built in all-black neighborhoods.
Governmental embrace of segregation was driven by the virulent racism of Chicago’s white citizens. White neighborhoods vulnerable to black encroachment formed block associations for the sole purpose of enforcing segregation. They lobbied fellow whites not to sell. They lobbied those blacks who did manage to buy to sell back. In 1949, a group of Englewood Catholics formed block associations intended to “keep up the neighborhood.” Translation: keep black people out. And when civic engagement was not enough, when government failed, when private banks could no longer hold the line, Chicago turned to an old tool in the American repertoire—racial violence. “The pattern of terrorism is easily discernible,” concluded a Chicago civic group in the 1940s.
“It is at the seams of the black ghetto in all directions.” On July 1 and 2 of 1946, a mob of thousands assembled in Chicago’s Park Manor neighborhood, hoping to eject a black doctor who’d recently moved in. The mob pelted the house with rocks and set the garage on fire. The doctor moved away.
In 1947, after a few black veterans moved into the Fernwood section of Chicago, three nights of rioting broke out; gangs of whites yanked blacks off streetcars and beat them. Two years later, when a union meeting attended by blacks in Englewood triggered rumors that a home was being “sold to niggers,” blacks (and whites thought to be sympathetic to them) were beaten in the streets. In 1951, thousands of whites in Cicero, 20 minutes or so west of downtown Chicago, attacked an apartment building that housed a single black family, throwing bricks and firebombs through the windows and setting the apartment on fire. A Cook County grand jury declined to charge the rioters—and instead indicted the family’s NAACP attorney, the apartment’s white owner, and the owner’s attorney and rental agent, charging them with conspiring to lower property values. Two years after that, whites picketed and planted explosives in South Deering, about 30 minutes from downtown Chicago, to force blacks out.
When terrorism ultimately failed, white homeowners simply fled the neighborhood. The traditional terminology, white flight, implies a kind of natural expression of preference. In fact, white flight was a triumph of social engineering, orchestrated by the shared racist presumptions of America’s public and private sectors. For should any nonracist white families decide that integration might not be so bad as a matter of principle or practicality, they still had to contend with the hard facts of American housing policy: When the mid-20th-century white homeowner claimed that the presence of a Bill and Daisy Myers decreased his property value, he was not merely engaging in racist dogma—he was accurately observing the impact of federal policy on market prices. Redlining destroyed the possibility of investment wherever black people lived.
VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”
Speculators in north lawndale, and at the edge of the black ghettos, knew there was money to be made off white panic. They resorted to “block-busting”—spooking whites into selling cheap before the neighborhood became black. They would hire a black woman to walk up and down the street with a stroller. Or they’d hire someone to call a number in the neighborhood looking for “Johnny Mae.” Then they’d cajole whites into selling at low prices, informing them that the more blacks who moved in, the more the value of their homes would decline, so better to sell now. With these white-fled homes in hand, speculators then turned to the masses of black people who had streamed northward as part of the Great Migration, or who were desperate to escape the ghettos: the speculators would take the houses they’d just bought cheap through block-busting and sell them to blacks on contract.
To keep up with his payments and keep his heat on, Clyde Ross took a second job at the post office and then a third job delivering pizza. His wife took a job working at Marshall Field. He had to take some of his children out of private school. He was not able to be at home to supervise his children or help them with their homework. Money and time that Ross wanted to give his children went instead to enrich white speculators.
“The problem was the money,” Ross told me. “Without the money, you can’t move. You can’t educate your kids. You can’t give them the right kind of food. Can’t make the house look good. They think this neighborhood is where they supposed to be. It changes their outlook. My kids were going to the best schools in this neighborhood, and I couldn’t keep them in there.”
Mattie Lewis came to Chicago from her native Alabama in the mid-’40s, when she was 21, persuaded by a friend who told her she could get a job as a hairdresser. Instead she was hired by Western Electric, where she worked for 41 years. I met Lewis in the home of her neighbor Ethel Weatherspoon. Both had owned homes in North Lawndale for more than 50 years. Both had bought their houses on contract. Both had been active with Clyde Ross in the Contract Buyers League’s effort to garner restitution from contract sellers who’d operated in North Lawndale, banks who’d backed the scheme, and even the Federal Housing Administration. We were joined by Jack Macnamara, who’d been an organizing force in the Contract Buyers League when it was founded, in 1968. Our gathering had the feel of a reunion, because the writer James Alan McPherson had profiled the Contract Buyers League for The Atlantic back in 1972.
Weatherspoon bought her home in 1957. “Most of the whites started moving out,” she told me. “‘The blacks are coming. The blacks are coming.’ They actually said that. They had signs up: don’t sell to blacks.”
Before moving to North Lawndale, Lewis and her husband tried moving to Cicero after seeing a house advertised for sale there. “Sorry, I just sold it today,” the Realtor told Lewis’s husband. “I told him, ‘You know they don’t want you in Cicero,’ ” Lewis recalls. “ ‘They ain’t going to let nobody black in Cicero.’ ”
In 1958, the couple bought a home in North Lawndale on contract. They were not blind to the unfairness. But Lewis, born in the teeth of Jim Crow, considered American piracy—black people keep on making it, white people keep on taking it—a fact of nature. “All I wanted was a house. And that was the only way I could get it. They weren’t giving black people loans at that time,” she said. “We thought, ‘This is the way it is. We going to do it till we die, and they ain’t never going to accept us. That’s just the way it is.’
“The only way you were going to buy a home was to do it the way they wanted,” she continued. “And I was determined to get me a house. If everybody else can have one, I want one too. I had worked for white people in the South. And I saw how these white people were living in the North and I thought, ‘One day I’m going to live just like them.’ I wanted cabinets and all these things these other people have.”
White flight was not an accident—it was a triumph of racist social engineering.
Whenever she visited white co-workers at their homes, she saw the difference. “I could see we were just getting ripped off,” she said. “I would see things and I would say, ‘I’d like to do this at my house.’ And they would say, ‘Do it,’ but I would think, ‘I can’t, because it costs us so much more.’ ”
I asked Lewis and Weatherspoon how they kept up on payments.
“You paid it and kept working,” Lewis said of the contract. “When that payment came up, you knew you had to pay it.”
“You cut down on the light bill. Cut down on your food bill,” Weatherspoon interjected.
Ethel Weatherspoon at her home in North Lawndale. After she bought it in 1957, she says, “most of the whites started moving out.” (Carlos Javier Ortiz)
“You cut down on things for your child, that was the main thing,” said Lewis. “My oldest wanted to be an artist and my other wanted to be a dancer and my other wanted to take music.”
Lewis and Weatherspoon, like Ross, were able to keep their homes. The suit did not win them any remuneration. But it forced contract sellers to the table, where they allowed some members of the Contract Buyers League to move into regular mortgages or simply take over their houses outright. By then they’d been bilked for thousands. In talking with Lewis and Weatherspoon, I was seeing only part of the picture—the tiny minority who’d managed to hold on to their homes. But for all our exceptional ones, for every Barack and Michelle Obama, for every Ethel Weatherspoon or Clyde Ross, for every black survivor, there are so many thousands gone.
“A lot of people fell by the way,” Lewis told me. “One woman asked me if I would keep all her china. She said, ‘They ain’t going to set you out.’ ”
VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”
On a recent spring afternoon in North Lawndale, I visited Billy Lamar Brooks Sr. Brooks has been an activist since his youth in the Black Panther Party, when he aided the Contract Buyers League. I met him in his office at the Better Boys Foundation, a staple of North Lawndale whose mission is to direct local kids off the streets and into jobs and college. Brooks’s work is personal. On June 14, 1991, his 19-year-old son, Billy Jr., was shot and killed. “These guys tried to stick him up,” Brooks told me. “I suspect he could have been involved in some things … He’s always on my mind. Every day.”
Brooks was not raised in the streets, though in such a neighborhood it is impossible to avoid the influence. “I was in church three or four times a week. That’s where the girls were,” he said, laughing. “The stark reality is still there. There’s no shield from life. You got to go to school. I lived here. I went to Marshall High School. Over here were the Egyptian Cobras. Over there were the Vice Lords.”
Brooks has since moved away from Chicago’s West Side. But he is still working in North Lawndale. If “you got a nice house, you live in a nice neighborhood, then you are less prone to violence, because your space is not deprived,” Brooks said. “You got a security point. You don’t need no protection.” But if “you grow up in a place like this, housing sucks. When they tore down the projects here, they left the high-rises and came to the neighborhood with that gang mentality. You don’t have nothing, so you going to take something, even if it’s not real. You don’t have no street, but in your mind it’s yours.”
We walked over to a window behind his desk. A group of young black men were hanging out in front of a giant mural memorializing two black men: in lovin memory quentin aka “q,” july 18, 1974 ❤ march 2, 2012. The name and face of the other man had been spray-painted over by a rival group. The men drank beer. Occasionally a car would cruise past, slow to a crawl, then stop. One of the men would approach the car and make an exchange, then the car would drive off. Brooks had known all of these young men as boys.
“That’s their corner,” he said.
We watched another car roll through, pause briefly, then drive off. “No respect, no shame,” Brooks said. “That’s what they do. From that alley to that corner. They don’t go no farther than that. See the big brother there? He almost died a couple of years ago. The one drinking the beer back there … I know all of them. And the reason they feel safe here is cause of this building, and because they too chickenshit to go anywhere. But that’s their mentality. That’s their block.”
Brooks showed me a picture of a Little League team he had coached. He went down the row of kids, pointing out which ones were in jail, which ones were dead, and which ones were doing all right. And then he pointed out his son—“That’s my boy, Billy,” Brooks said. Then he wondered aloud if keeping his son with him while working in North Lawndale had hastened his death. “It’s a definite connection, because he was part of what I did here. And I think maybe I shouldn’t have exposed him. But then, I had to,” he said, “because I wanted him with me.”
From the White House on down, the myth holds that fatherhood is the great antidote to all that ails black people. But Billy Brooks Jr. had a father. Trayvon Martin had a father. Jordan Davis had a father. Adhering to middle-class norms has never shielded black people from plunder. Adhering to middle-class norms is what made Ethel Weatherspoon a lucrative target for rapacious speculators. Contract sellers did not target the very poor. They targeted black people who had worked hard enough to save a down payment and dreamed of the emblem of American citizenship—homeownership. It was not a tangle of pathology that put a target on Clyde Ross’s back. It was not a culture of poverty that singled out Mattie Lewis for “the thrill of the chase and the kill.” Some black people always will be twice as good. But they generally find white predation to be thrice as fast.
Is affirmative action meant to increase “diversity”? If so, it only tangentially relates to the specific problems of black people.
Liberals today mostly view racism not as an active, distinct evil but as a relative of white poverty and inequality. They ignore the long tradition of this country actively punishing black success—and the elevation of that punishment, in the mid-20th century, to federal policy. President Lyndon Johnson may have noted in his historic civil-rights speech at Howard University in 1965 that “Negro poverty is not white poverty.” But his advisers and their successors were, and still are, loath to craft any policy that recognizes the difference.
After his speech, Johnson convened a group of civil-rights leaders, including the esteemed A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, to address the “ancient brutality.” In a strategy paper, they agreed with the president that “Negro poverty is a special, and particularly destructive, form of American poverty.” But when it came to specifically addressing the “particularly destructive,” Rustin’s group demurred, preferring to advance programs that addressed “all the poor, black and white.”
The urge to use the moral force of the black struggle to address broader inequalities originates in both compassion and pragmatism. But it makes for ambiguous policy. Affirmative action’s precise aims, for instance, have always proved elusive. Is it meant to make amends for the crimes heaped upon black people? Not according to the Supreme Court. In its 1978 ruling in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Court rejected “societal discrimination” as “an amorphous concept of injury that may be ageless in its reach into the past.” Is affirmative action meant to increase “diversity”? If so, it only tangentially relates to the specific problems of black people—the problem of what America has taken from them over several centuries.
This confusion about affirmative action’s aims, along with our inability to face up to the particular history of white-imposed black disadvantage, dates back to the policy’s origins. “There is no fixed and firm definition of affirmative action,” an appointee in Johnson’s Department of Labor declared. “Affirmative action is anything that you have to do to get results. But this does not necessarily include preferential treatment.”
Yet America was built on the preferential treatment of white people—395 years of it. Vaguely endorsing a cuddly, feel-good diversity does very little to redress this.
Today, progressives are loath to invoke white supremacy as an explanation for anything. On a practical level, the hesitation comes from the dim view the Supreme Court has taken of the reforms of the 1960s. The Voting Rights Act has been gutted. The Fair Housing Act might well be next. Affirmative action is on its last legs. In substituting a broad class struggle for an anti-racist struggle, progressives hope to assemble a coalition by changing the subject.
The politics of racial evasion are seductive. But the record is mixed. Aid to Families With Dependent Children was originally written largely to exclude blacks—yet by the 1990s it was perceived as a giveaway to blacks. The Affordable Care Act makes no mention of race, but this did not keep Rush Limbaugh from denouncing it as reparations. Moreover, the act’s expansion of Medicaid was effectively made optional, meaning that many poor blacks in the former Confederate states do not benefit from it. The Affordable Care Act, like Social Security, will eventually expand its reach to those left out; in the meantime, black people will be injured.
Billy Brooks, who assisted the Contract Buyers League, still works in the neighborhood, helping kids escape poverty and violence.
“All that it would take to sink a new WPA program would be some skillfully packaged footage of black men leaning on shovels smoking cigarettes,” the sociologist Douglas S. Massey writes. “Papering over the issue of race makes for bad social theory, bad research, and bad public policy.” To ignore the fact that one of the oldest republics in the world was erected on a foundation of white supremacy, to pretend that the problems of a dual society are the same as the problems of unregulated capitalism, is to cover the sin of national plunder with the sin of national lying. The lie ignores the fact that reducing American poverty and ending white supremacy are not the same. The lie ignores the fact that closing the “achievement gap” will do nothing to close the “injury gap,” in which black college graduates still suffer higher unemployment rates than white college graduates, and black job applicants without criminal records enjoy roughly the same chance of getting hired as white applicants with criminal records.
Chicago, like the country at large, embraced policies that placed black America’s most energetic, ambitious, and thrifty countrymen beyond the pale of society and marked them as rightful targets for legal theft. The effects reverberate beyond the families who were robbed to the community that beholds the spectacle. Don’t just picture Clyde Ross working three jobs so he could hold on to his home. Think of his North Lawndale neighbors—their children, their nephews and nieces—and consider how watching this affects them. Imagine yourself as a young black child watching your elders play by all the rules only to have their possessions tossed out in the street and to have their most sacred possession—their home—taken from them.
The message the young black boy receives from his country, Billy Brooks says, is “ ‘You ain’t shit. You not no good. The only thing you are worth is working for us. You will never own anything. You not going to get an education. We are sending your ass to the penitentiary.’ They’re telling you no matter how hard you struggle, no matter what you put down, you ain’t shit. ‘We’re going to take what you got. You will never own anything, nigger.’ ”
IX. Toward A New Country
When Clyde Ross was a child, his older brother Winter had a seizure. He was picked up by the authorities and delivered to Parchman Farm, a 20,000-acre state prison in the Mississippi Delta region.
“He was a gentle person,” Clyde Ross says of his brother. “You know, he was good to everybody. And he started having spells, and he couldn’t control himself. And they had him picked up, because they thought he was dangerous.”
Built at the turn of the century, Parchman was supposed to be a progressive and reformist response to the problem of “Negro crime.” In fact it was the gulag of Mississippi, an object of terror to African Americans in the Delta. In the early years of the 20th century, Mississippi Governor James K. Vardaman used to amuse himself by releasing black convicts into the surrounding wilderness and hunting them down with bloodhounds. “Throughout the American South,” writes David M. Oshinsky in his book Worse Than Slavery, “Parchman Farm is synonymous with punishment and brutality, as well it should be … Parchman is the quintessential penal farm, the closest thing to slavery that survived the Civil War.”
When the Ross family went to retrieve Winter, the authorities told them that Winter had died. When the Ross family asked for his body, the authorities at Parchman said they had buried him. The family never saw Winter’s body.
And this was just one of their losses.
Scholars have long discussed methods by which America might make reparations to those on whose labor and exclusion the country was built. In the 1970s, the Yale Law professor Boris Bittker argued in The Case for Black Reparations that a rough price tag for reparations could be determined by multiplying the number of African Americans in the population by the difference in white and black per capita income. That number—$34 billion in 1973, when Bittker wrote his book—could be added to a reparations program each year for a decade or two. Today Charles Ogletree, the Harvard Law School professor, argues for something broader: a program of job training and public works that takes racial justice as its mission but includes the poor of all races.
To celebrate freedom and democracy while forgetting America’s origins in a slavery economy is patriotism à la carte.
Perhaps no statistic better illustrates the enduring legacy of our country’s shameful history of treating black people as sub-citizens, sub-Americans, and sub-humans than the wealth gap. Reparations would seek to close this chasm. But as surely as the creation of the wealth gap required the cooperation of every aspect of the society, bridging it will require the same.
When we think of white supremacy, we picture Colored Only signs, but we should picture pirate flags.
Perhaps after a serious discussion and debate—the kind that HR 40 proposes—we may find that the country can never fully repay African Americans. But we stand to discover much about ourselves in such a discussion—and that is perhaps what scares us. The idea of reparations is frightening not simply because we might lack the ability to pay. The idea of reparations threatens something much deeper—America’s heritage, history, and standing in the world.
The early American economy was built on slave labor. The Capitol and the White House were built by slaves. President James K. Polk traded slaves from the Oval Office. The laments about “black pathology,” the criticism of black family structures by pundits and intellectuals, ring hollow in a country whose existence was predicated on the torture of black fathers, on the rape of black mothers, on the sale of black children. An honest assessment of America’s relationship to the black family reveals the country to be not its nurturer but its destroyer.
And this destruction did not end with slavery. Discriminatory laws joined the equal burden of citizenship to unequal distribution of its bounty. These laws reached their apex in the mid-20th century, when the federal government—through housing policies—engineered the wealth gap, which remains with us to this day. When we think of white supremacy, we picture colored only signs, but we should picture pirate flags.
On some level, we have always grasped this.
“Negro poverty is not white poverty,” President Johnson said in his historic civil-rights speech.
Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences—deep, corrosive, obstinate differences—radiating painful roots into the community and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice.
We invoke the words of Jefferson and Lincoln because they say something about our legacy and our traditions. We do this because we recognize our links to the past—at least when they flatter us. But black history does not flatter American democracy; it chastens it. The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter. Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge—that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it.
And so we must imagine a new country. Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie. Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans.
Won’t reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say—that American prosperity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.
What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.
X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”
We are not the first to be summoned to such a challenge.
In 1952, when West Germany began the process of making amends for the Holocaust, it did so under conditions that should be instructive to us. Resistance was violent. Very few Germans believed that Jews were entitled to anything. Only 5 percent of West Germans surveyed reported feeling guilty about the Holocaust, and only 29 percent believed that Jews were owed restitution from the German people.
The Auschwitz All Around Us
“It’s very hard to accept white supremacy as a structure erected by actual people, as a choice, as an interest, as opposed to a momentary bout of insanity.”
“The rest,” the historian Tony Judt wrote in his 2005 book, Postwar, “were divided between those (some two-fifths of respondents) who thought that only people ‘who really committed something’ were responsible and should pay, and those (21 percent) who thought ‘that the Jews themselves were partly responsible for what happened to them during the Third Reich.’ ”
Germany’s unwillingness to squarely face its history went beyond polls. Movies that suggested a societal responsibility for the Holocaust beyond Hitler were banned. “The German soldier fought bravely and honorably for his homeland,” claimed President Eisenhower, endorsing the Teutonic national myth. Judt wrote, “Throughout the fifties West German officialdom encouraged a comfortable view of the German past in which the Wehrmacht was heroic, while Nazis were in a minority and properly punished.”
Konrad Adenauer, the postwar German chancellor, was in favor of reparations, but his own party was divided, and he was able to get an agreement passed only with the votes of the Social Democratic opposition.
“If I could take German property without sitting down with them for even a minute but go in with jeeps and machine guns,” said David Ben-Gurion, “I would do that.”
Among the Jews of Israel, reparations provoked violent and venomous reactions ranging from denunciation to assassination plots. On January 7, 1952, as the Knesset—the Israeli parliament—convened to discuss the prospect of a reparations agreement with West Germany, Menachem Begin, the future prime minister of Israel, stood in front of a large crowd, inveighing against the country that had plundered the lives, labor, and property of his people. Begin claimed that all Germans were Nazis and guilty of murder. His condemnations then spread to his own young state. He urged the crowd to stop paying taxes and claimed that the nascent Israeli nation characterized the fight over whether or not to accept reparations as a “war to the death.” When alerted that the police watching the gathering were carrying tear gas, allegedly of German manufacture, Begin yelled, “The same gases that asphyxiated our parents!”
Begin then led the crowd in an oath to never forget the victims of the Shoah, lest “my right hand lose its cunning” and “my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.” He took the crowd through the streets toward the Knesset. From the rooftops, police repelled the crowd with tear gas and smoke bombs. But the wind shifted, and the gas blew back toward the Knesset, billowing through windows shattered by rocks. In the chaos, Begin and Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion exchanged insults. Two hundred civilians and 140 police officers were wounded. Nearly 400 people were arrested. Knesset business was halted.
Begin then addressed the chamber with a fiery speech condemning the actions the legislature was about to take. “Today you arrested hundreds,” he said. “Tomorrow you may arrest thousands. No matter, they will go, they will sit in prison. We will sit there with them. If necessary, we will be killed with them. But there will be no ‘reparations’ from Germany.”
Survivors of the Holocaust feared laundering the reputation of Germany with money, and mortgaging the memory of their dead. Beyond that, there was a taste for revenge. “My soul would be at rest if I knew there would be 6 million German dead to match the 6 million Jews,” said Meir Dworzecki, who’d survived the concentration camps of Estonia.
Ben-Gurion countered this sentiment, not by repudiating vengeance but with cold calculation: “If I could take German property without sitting down with them for even a minute but go in with jeeps and machine guns to the warehouses and take it, I would do that—if, for instance, we had the ability to send a hundred divisions and tell them, ‘Take it.’ But we can’t do that.”
The reparations conversation set off a wave of bomb attempts by Israeli militants. One was aimed at the foreign ministry in Tel Aviv. Another was aimed at Chancellor Adenauer himself. And one was aimed at the port of Haifa, where the goods bought with reparations money were arriving. West Germany ultimately agreed to pay Israel 3.45 billion deutsche marks, or more than $7 billion in today’s dollars. Individual reparations claims followed—for psychological trauma, for offense to Jewish honor, for halting law careers, for life insurance, for time spent in concentration camps. Seventeen percent of funds went toward purchasing ships. “By the end of 1961, these reparations vessels constituted two-thirds of the Israeli merchant fleet,” writes the Israeli historian Tom Segev in his book The Seventh Million. “From 1953 to 1963, the reparations money funded about a third of the total investment in Israel’s electrical system, which tripled its capacity, and nearly half the total investment in the railways.”
Israel’s GNP tripled during the 12 years of the agreement. The Bank of Israel attributed 15 percent of this growth, along with 45,000 jobs, to investments made with reparations money. But Segev argues that the impact went far beyond that. Reparations “had indisputable psychological and political importance,” he writes.
Reparations could not make up for the murder perpetrated by the Nazis. But they did launch Germany’s reckoning with itself, and perhaps provided a road map for how a great civilization might make itself worthy of the name.
Assessing the reparations agreement, David Ben-Gurion said:
For the first time in the history of relations between people, a precedent has been created by which a great State, as a result of moral pressure alone, takes it upon itself to pay compensation to the victims of the government that preceded it. For the first time in the history of a people that has been persecuted, oppressed, plundered and despoiled for hundreds of years in the countries of Europe, a persecutor and despoiler has been obliged to return part of his spoils and has even undertaken to make collective reparation as partial compensation for material losses.
Something more than moral pressure calls America to reparations. We cannot escape our history. All of our solutions to the great problems of health care, education, housing, and economic inequality are troubled by what must go unspoken. “The reason black people are so far behind now is not because of now,” Clyde Ross told me. “It’s because of then.” In the early 2000s, Charles Ogletree went to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to meet with the survivors of the 1921 race riot that had devastated “Black Wall Street.” The past was not the past to them. “It was amazing seeing these black women and men who were crippled, blind, in wheelchairs,” Ogletree told me. “I had no idea who they were and why they wanted to see me. They said, ‘We want you to represent us in this lawsuit.’ ”
A commission authorized by the Oklahoma legislature produced a report affirming that the riot, the knowledge of which had been suppressed for years, had happened. But the lawsuit ultimately failed, in 2004. Similar suits pushed against corporations such as Aetna (which insured slaves) and Lehman Brothers (whose co-founding partner owned them) also have thus far failed. These results are dispiriting, but the crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that implicates the entire American people deserves its hearing in the legislative body that represents them.
John Conyers’s HR 40 is the vehicle for that hearing. No one can know what would come out of such a debate. Perhaps no number can fully capture the multi-century plunder of black people in America. Perhaps the number is so large that it can’t be imagined, let alone calculated and dispensed. But I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as—if not more than—the specific answers that might be produced. An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders.
In 2010, jacob s. rugh, then a doctoral candidate at Princeton, and the sociologist Douglas S. Massey published a study of the recent foreclosure crisis. Among its drivers, they found an old foe: segregation. Black home buyers—even after controlling for factors like creditworthiness—were still more likely than white home buyers to be steered toward subprime loans. Decades of racist housing policies by the American government, along with decades of racist housing practices by American businesses, had conspired to concentrate African Americans in the same neighborhoods. As in North Lawndale half a century earlier, these neighborhoods were filled with people who had been cut off from mainstream financial institutions. When subprime lenders went looking for prey, they found black people waiting like ducks in a pen.
“High levels of segregation create a natural market for subprime lending,” Rugh and Massey write, “and cause riskier mortgages, and thus foreclosures, to accumulate disproportionately in racially segregated cities’ minority neighborhoods.”
Plunder in the past made plunder in the present efficient. The banks of America understood this. In 2005, Wells Fargo promoted a series of Wealth Building Strategies seminars. Dubbing itself “the nation’s leading originator of home loans to ethnic minority customers,” the bank enrolled black public figures in an ostensible effort to educate blacks on building “generational wealth.” But the “wealth building” seminars were a front for wealth theft. In 2010, the Justice Department filed a discrimination suit against Wells Fargo alleging that the bank had shunted blacks into predatory loans regardless of their creditworthiness. This was not magic or coincidence or misfortune. It was racism reifying itself. According to The New York Times, affidavits found loan officers referring to their black customers as “mud people” and to their subprime products as “ghetto loans.”
“We just went right after them,” Beth Jacobson, a former Wells Fargo loan officer, told The Times. “Wells Fargo mortgage had an emerging-markets unit that specifically targeted black churches because it figured church leaders had a lot of influence and could convince congregants to take out subprime loans.”
In 2011, Bank of America agreed to pay $355 million to settle charges of discrimination against its Countrywide unit. The following year, Wells Fargo settled its discrimination suit for more than $175 million. But the damage had been done. In 2009, half the properties in Baltimore whose owners had been granted loans by Wells Fargo between 2005 and 2008 were vacant; 71 percent of these properties were in predominantly black neighborhoods.”
On this day we meet in solidarity with our comrades and bearers of the Torch of Liberty, to swear our oaths and make our plans for the upcoming year of liberation struggle throughout the world; to make mischief for tyrants and bring a Reckoning to those who would enslave us.
Among the legacies of our history we must escape if we are to create a free society of equals and a United Humankind, slavery is a horror of depravity and terror which defines the limits of the human. The Abolition of slavery and its epigenetic consequences must always be a first priority mission for anyone who places their lives in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, because it is a canary in the coal mine of unequal power, a symptom of the tyranny of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and a clearly evil example of a general condition of dehumanization and commodification as a casus belli for democracy.
In America we fought the Civil War against a Confederacy which was nothing more grand than a human trafficking syndicate which had declared itself a nation to evade morality and the rule of law; here the African slave stood in as a figure for all the exploited labor of the time, which included all women, many children, and whole sectors of our economy; what was a sailor, a miner, or any worker forced to sell his time in brutal and dehumanizing conditions but a slave? With the crusade of liberty which began as Abolition and became a second American revolution in the Civil War, all of the exploited classes united in solidarity to seize power and cast their owners down from their thrones. This is how we freed the slaves in America, and its how we must unite to free the slaves now.
Among its greatest horrors is that slavery today is not a marginal crime but one central to the internal contradictions of our civilization; it is omnipresent and touches our lives everywhere, like the violations of invisible hands which seek to shape us to their own purposes as commodities and labor which creates wealth and power for others who own us. Slavery is a pervasive and endemic harm, and an inherent evil of capitalism; nearly everything we own and use is an artifact of slavery in some form.
The United Nations figures there are fifty million slaves now living; including “28 million in forced labour and 22 million in forced marriage. Almost one in eight of all those in forced labour are children. More than half of these children are in commercial sexual exploitation.”
Here is the Secretary-General’s Message on the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery; “As we commemorate the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery, we need to recognize that the legacy of the transatlantic trade of enslaved Africans reverberates to this day, scarring our societies and impeding equitable development.
We must also identify and eradicate contemporary forms of slavery, such as trafficking in persons, sexual exploitation, child labour, forced marriage and the use of children in armed conflict. The latest Global Estimates of Modern Slavery on forced labour and forced marriage reveal that, in 2021, some 50 million persons were thus enslaved, and this number has been growing.
The most marginalized groups remain particularly vulnerable, including ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities, migrants, children and persons with diverse gender identities and sexual orientations. The majority of these vulnerable persons are women.
On this International Day, I call on Governments and societies to recommit to eradicating slavery. Increased action needs to be taken with full participation of all stakeholders, including the private sector, trade unions, civil society and human rights institutions. I also urge all countries to protect and uphold the rights of victims and survivors of slavery.”
What is to be done?, as Lenin asked in his essay which launched the Russian Revolution. As it happens, history provides us with guidance in this cause of liberation struggle.
This is also the anniversary of the execution of John Brown in 1859 for the Harper’s Ferry raid, in which he forever taught us how to reply to those who would enslave us with his historic attempt to arm the slaves that they might seize for themselves the lands they worked and the wealth they created, much as the people of Haiti had done in the Revolution of 1791-1804.
As Frederick Douglass said of him, “If John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, he did at least begin the war that ended slavery. . . . Until this blow was struck, the prospect for freedom was dim, shadowy and uncertain. The irrepressible conflict was one of words, votes and compromises. When John Brown stretched forth his arm, the sky was cleared. The time for compromises was gone–the armed hosts of freedom stood face to face over the chasm of a broken Union–and the clash of arms was at hand. The South staked all upon getting possession of the Federal Government, and failing to do that, drew the sword of rebellion and thus made her own, and not Brown’s, the lost cause of the century.”
How very like the moment of decision we face now, in the wake of the January 6 Insurrection. Our glorious heroes and champions of the past, Frederick Douglass and John Brown among countless others, have given answer to those who would enslave us; now its our turn.
How answer we, for the suffering of the fifty million people who are slaves now? How bring we a Reckoning to the elite hegemons responsible for this vast and timeless crime against humanity, and bring change to the systems of unequal power by which those who would enslave us enforce their tyranny?
Who do we want to become, we humans; a world of masters and slaves, or a free society of equals?
As written in Jacobin in an article entitled Eugene Debs’s Stirring, Never-Before-Published Eulogy to John Brown at Harpers Ferry; “In a previously unpublished eulogy to John Brown from 1908, Eugene Debs proclaimed Brown the “greatest liberator this country has known” and declared that ”the Socialist Party is carrying on the work begun by John Brown.” We publish it here in full.
Eugene Debs revered John Brown as “history’s greatest hero,” a man who saw an unspeakable horror and tried to dash it from the world. In October 1908, while campaigning for president, Debs decided to make a brief stop at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, the site of Brown’s doomed anti-slavery crusade.
After disembarking from the “Red Special,” his campaign train, Debs delivered a brief eulogy. His remarks, though stirring, were largely lost to history. A labor paper published a transcript in November 1908, but otherwise Debs’s remarks, as far as we know, have never been digitized or reprinted.
Jacobin’s Shawn Gude was able to obtain a copy of Debs’s speech — courtesy of the wonderful librarians at Indiana State University — while conducting research for his forthcoming biography of Eugene Debs. So here it is: Debs’s never-before-published eulogy to John Brown.
“It is fitting that the Red Special should stop here and that we should do honor to John Brown. He was the greatest liberator this country has known. He dared the whole world and gave up his life for freedom. What more can a man do?
A few years I came and followed his steps from this spot all the way to Charles Town, where he was hanged. All the way he was the only calm person. Kindly, sweetly, and not even hating those who hounded him, he went his way.
Even members of the poor despised race for which he had done so much were taught to despise him and look upon him as something vile. On that bright, sunny morning when he was led upon the gallows, he smiled. “This is a beautiful country,” he said. “I had not seen it before.” He went to his death without fear, knowing his work was done.
As I stand here on this spot where he stood, I can see him as he stood here with a rifle in his hand, and his sons on the ground, one dead and the other dying. What a heroic figure he is as I see him.
Even today he is not appreciated. But as time goes on the fog that obscures the acts of great heroic men will be swept away, and he will stand as one of the most heroic figures in the world. Emerson has said: “The time will come when John Brown will have made the gallows as glorious as Jesus Christ made the cross.” The Socialist Party is carrying on the work begun by John Brown.”
There is another aspect of the execution of John Brown which has consequences for us today, in the shadows of the January 6 Insurrection and the capture of the state by the Fourth Reich through the Stolen Elections of 2016 and 2024 and the Presidencies of the most successful foreign agent ever sent against our nation, the fascist and Russian agent Traitor Trump.
As written by Heather Cox Richardson in her newsletter; “On the clear, windy morning of December 2, 1859, just before 11:00, the doors of the jail in Charles Town, Virginia, opened, and guards moved John Brown to his funeral procession. Three companies of soldiers escorted the prisoner, who sat on his own coffin in a wagon drawn by two white horses, for the trip to the gallows.
Once there, Brown mounted the steep steps. The sheriff put a white hood on the prisoner’s head and adjusted a noose around his neck. After a delay of about fifteen minutes while officers arranged the troops that had escorted the wagon, the sheriff swung a hatchet at the rope supporting the trap door below Brown’s feet. The door snapped open and the man who had tried to launch a slave rebellion at Harpers Ferry two months before dangled, as one observer said, “between heaven and earth.”
That same observer, John T. L. Preston of the Virginia Military Institute, went on to explain that the “grand point” of the spectacle was its moral: that it was fatal to take up arms against the government.
John Brown was the first American to be executed for treason.
Before 1859 the punishment for treason in America had not been clear. In the early years of independence, as colonies tried to stamp out loyalty to the King, some colonies had broadened the definition of treason to include “preaching, teaching, speaking, writing, or printing,” and by the time of the ratification of the Constitution in 1788, twelve of the thirteen states had written their own laws against treason.
The Framers of the Constitution recognized the danger that leaders in the new nation might expand the definition of treason to sweep in political opposition, and after all, they had been “traitors” themselves just eleven years before. So the Framers specified in the Constitution a very limited definition of treason against the United States, saying that only levying war against the United States or “adhering to their enemies” or giving “aid and comfort” to an enemy could be considered treason. But they did not define a penalty for treason, leaving that to be determined by Congress.
They also voted to leave open the possibility for states to define treason as they wished. In the years after the ratification of the Constitution in 1788, most state constitutional conventions defined treason as a crime in their fundamental state law.
As men jockeyed for control of the government in the chaotic early years of the Republic, several men ran afoul of the federal and state treason clauses, but they did not pay the ultimate price for their missteps. Two men were convicted of treason against the federal government during the Whiskey Rebellion in the 1790s; President Washington pardoned them both. In 1838, Joseph Smith and five other Mormon leaders were charged with treason against Missouri for their part in the violent struggle between Mormons and non-Mormons in the state; they escaped before trial. Thomas Wilson Dorr was convicted of treason against Rhode Island for his part in the Dorr Rebellion of the 1840s and was sentenced to hard labor for life, but a popular protest won him amnesty after he had served a year.
Then, on October 16, 1859, abolitionist John Brown led 18 men to attack the federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia—it became West Virginia in 1863—in order to seize guns from the armory, distribute them to local enslaved men, and lead them to freedom and self-government. As they cut the telegraph wires in the town in the dead of night, a free Black man, a baggage handler, stumbled upon them and they shot him. The sound attracted the attention of a local physician, who roused his neighbors. As they started to come awake, Brown’s men took the armory, which was defended by a single watchman who turned over the keys to the raiders.
At dawn the next day, a train came through the town, and its operators alerted authorities to the trouble in Harpers Ferry as soon as they got to a working telegraph. Meanwhile, Brown’s people captured Armory employees coming to work, and as news of the hostages spread, local militia converged on the site. As firing from the militia pinned Brown’s men down, they moved to a small brick building near the armory’s door. Intermittent shooting over the course of the day killed a number of Brown’s men as well as local militia before federal troops arrived on the morning of the next day, October 18.
Officers, commanded by Colonel Robert E. Lee, promised to spare the lives of Brown and his men if they surrendered, but Brown refused. Within minutes, soldiers had broken down the doors to their shelter and taken prisoner Brown and the seven of his men still alive.
On October 27 the state of Virginia began the trial of the still-wounded Brown for murder, inciting a slave insurrection, and treason against the state of Virginia. His lawyers argued that he could not have committed treason because he was not a resident of the state and so owed it no allegiance.
But the Virginia jury deliberated for only 45 minutes before they convicted John Brown of treason, agreeing with the prosecution that one did not have to reside in a state to be guilty of taking up arms against its government. On November 2 the judge sentenced Brown to death by hanging, a sentence that would be carried out after a legally required one-month delay.
Virginians like Preston applauded the decision. “Law had been violated by actual murder and attempted treason,” Preston wrote to his wife in a letter reprinted in the local newspaper, “and that gibbet was erected by law, and to uphold law was this military force assembled…. So perish all such enemies of Virginia! All such enemies of the Union! All such foes of the human race!”
The execution of John Brown for treason set a precedent.
And in just over a year, Virginians themselves would take up arms against the federal government. Men like Preston, who became an aide-de-camp to Stonewall Jackson, had to wonder if the precedent of hanging John Brown for treason might come back to haunt them.
Notes:
J. Taylor McConkie, “State Treason: The History and Validity of Treason Against Individual States,” Kentucky Law Journal Vol. 101: Iss. 2, Article 3.”
Will this precedent of which Heather Cox Richardson has reminded us come back to haunt Traitor Trump and other conspirators in the January 6 Insurrection?
The idea of capital punishment as absolute power of the state over its citizens is anathema to me; I prefer instead the ancient Roman custom of damnatio memorae or public forgetting and erasure from history, and in accord with the principle of minimum use of social force I believe the natural consequence of treason is loss of citizenship and exile.
Let us bring a Reckoning to those who would enslave us.
History, memory, identity, the stories we tell about ourselves and those told about us by others including those who would enslave us, who are and can become and who decides; all of this is a ground of struggle against systems of oppression, falsification, commodification, and dehumanization, and often a shifting ground, constructed of relative truths as a Rashomon Gate of human being, meaning, and value.
Brazil’s embrace of a national holiday on the date of the great slave revolt leader Zumbi’s death in glorious battle at the hands of colonialist forces is a case study of what I term the Narrative Theory of Identity, in which self construal is a form of revolution and the primary defining act of becoming human.
Celebrate with us the great warrior, King, and figure of liberation Zumbi and his defiance unto death of those who would enslave us, and the free republic of Palmares he led in anticolonialst revolution and a century long war of independence against vast forces of imperial conquest and dominion and systems of white supremacist oppression and terror, whoever he may have been and whatever rebel kingdom he championed, for all that truly matters is that he holds an imaginal space we each of us may step into and become, no matter the wretchedness of our initial conditions.
That a man lived and was real who refused to submit is enough for us to remember and dream into being, for each of us may become that man who we dream.
As written by Tiago Rogero in The Guardian, in an article entitled Brazil celebrates Black Consciousness Day as national holiday for first time: Legacy of African Brazilians honored on 329th anniversary of resistance leader Zumbi’s death by Portuguese forces; “During the more than 350 years during which slavery was legal in Brazil, harsh conditions prompted a string of uprisings, often resulting in the establishment of quilombos – independent communities formed by escaped Africans who were formerly enslaved, and their descendants.
None were more prominent than the one known as Palmares, where, in the 17th century, as many as 11,000 people lived in a string of communities across parts of the north-eastern states of Alagoas and Pernambuco.
But the roughly 100-year history of what historians regard as the most significant resistance movement against slavery in Brazil began to unravel on 20 November 1695, when its most famous leader, Zumbi, was captured by Portuguese colonial forces and killed.
Three hundred and twenty-nine years later, the date will for the first time be marked as a national public holiday: Black Consciousness Day, which has been a longstanding demand of Black movements that still face attacks from the far right.
A series of events – including at least 38 in São Paulo alone – will mark the date nationwide, celebrating Zumbi, Palmares and the ongoing fight for racial equality.
“Palmares was the largest quilombo in the Americas, both in terms of its longevity and population,” said Danilo Luiz Marques, a historian and professor at the Federal University of Alagoas.
Some researchers have described Palmares – whose first records date back to 1590 – as the earliest form of a republic to emerge on Brazilian soil. Marques, however, argues that it was a Bantu kingdom, reflecting the central-African language family to which most Africans brought to Brazil belonged.
Black movements in Brazil have celebrated the names of Zumbi and Palmares since the early 20th century at the earliest, but it was only in 1971 that 20 November became a key date.
Activists had sought a date to contrast with another historically associated with Black people: 13 May, the day slavery was abolished in 1888.
Rather than celebrating Black individuals, however, 13 May had traditionally been used to exalt the white princess who signed the abolition decree: Isabel, then the regent of the Brazilian empire.
“The princess was glorified as if she had granted a favour to the enslaved people; as if she were a heroine,” said Deivison Campos, a historian and professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul.
“The Palmares group sought to counter this narrative, proposing 20 November as a way to honour the collective struggle for the inclusion of Black people in Brazilian society,” he said.
Today, 13 May is still celebrated, with Black activists arguing it cannot be ignored since abolition was primarily the result of Black resistance. However, 20 November has become so popular that November is now informally known as Brazil’s Black Consciousness Month.
The law to make Black Consciousness Day Brazil’s 10th national holiday – signed by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in December 2023 – was passed amid significant resistance from conservatives.
During the presidency of far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro, Sérgio Camargo, the then head of the Palmares Foundation – a federal body established in 1988 to promote African-Brazilian culture – harshly criticised the 20 November holiday, labelling it the Day of Black Victimisation, the Day of the Black Mind Enslaved by the Left or the Day of Resentment for the Past.
Some within the far-right even doubt the existence of Palmares or its most famous leader despite extensive historical evidence. “Falsehoods have always been used to attack Black history,” said Marques.
Brazil’s largest television network, Rede Globo, will mark the date with a 50-minute primetime special focusing on the wrongful imprisonment of Black individuals based on photographic identification – a widespread issue in the country.
“In Brazil, Black people continue to be imprisoned, deprived of freedom, a healthy life and the chance to realise their dreams simply because they are Black,” said the special’s creator and presenter, Clayton Nascimento.
“It’s important that 20 November is, for the first time, a public holiday because it allows us to pause and reflect on Brazil’s Black history. We were the ones who built this nation,” he added.”
As written in 2019 by Laurence Blair in The Guardian, in an article entitled History of free African strongholds fires Brazilian resistance to Bolsonaro: Quilombo dos Palmares – founded by Africans who escaped slavery – maintained its independence for 100 years and has become a touchstone for a new generation; “Apalm-fringed ridge rises above the plains of Alagoas in north-east Brazil. Just a few replica thatched huts and a wall of wooden stakes now stand at its summit, but this was once the capital of the Quilombo dos Palmares – a sprawling, powerful nation of Africans who escaped slavery, and their descendants who held out here in the forest for 100 years.
Its population was at least 11,000 – at the time, more than that of Rio de Janeiro – across dozens of villages with elected leaders and a hybrid language and culture.
Palmares allied with indigenous peoples, traded for gunpowder, launched guerrilla raids on coastal sugar plantations to free other captives, and withstood more than 20 assaults before falling to Portuguese cannons in 1695.
“Hundreds threw themselves to their deaths rather than surrender,” said local guide Thais “Dandara” Thaty at the historical site in Serra da Barriga. In her telling, those killed included Dandara – her adoptive namesake – captain of a band of warrior women, whose husband Zumbi is similarly shrouded in myth as a fearless Palmarian commander.
About 5 million enslaved Africans were brought across the Atlantic to Brazil between 1501 and 1888. Many escaped, forming quilombos, or free communities.
Three centuries later, the remarkable saga of Palmares is being seized on once more as a symbol of resistance against Brazil’s rightwing president and the country’s pervasive racism towards its black and mixed-race majority.
A pair of new television and Netflix documentaries, screened in late 2018 and this June, have examined the legacy of Palmares. In March, the victorious carnival parade of Mangueira samba school highlighted Dandara among a lineup of overlooked black and indigenous heroes. Later that month, Brazil’s senate voted to inscribe Dandara in the Book of Heroes in the Pantheon of the Fatherland, a soaring, modernist cenotaph in Brasília.
Angola Janga, a graphic novel charting the rise and fall of Palmares, has won a string of awards. “Many people want an alternative view, to try to escape the one-sided, one-dimensional vision of our history imposed by the Portuguese and Brazilian elite,” said author Marcelo D’Salete, whose painstakingly researched book, including maps and timelines alongside striking monochrome illustrations, has been widely used in classrooms.
“Quilombos in general are very big right now,” said Ana Carolina Lourenço, a sociologist and adviser to one recent documentary on Palmares. Young Afro-Brazilians have even coined a verb, she added – to quilombar – meaning to meet up to debate politics or simply celebrate black music, culture and identity.
This renewed prominence coincides with a sharp rightward turn in Brazilian politics. Jair Bolsonaro has denied that Portuguese slavers set foot in Africa, and vilified the roughly 3,000 quilombos dotted across Brazil today – poor and marginalised Afro-Brazilian communities, often descended from fugitive slaves – branding their residents “not even fit for procreation”.
The president has sought to erode the landholding rights of quilombo communities in favour, critics argue, of the powerful agribusiness sector. Police killings, mainly of Afro-Brazilians, in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo have also risen sharply in 2019 with Bolsonaro’s encouragement.
Earlier this month, footage of supermarket security guards whipping a bound and gagged black teenager for allegedly shoplifting, prompted reflections on the lasting legacy of slavery.
For centuries, writers portrayed Palmarians merely “as runaway blacks and outlaws who rebelled against the crown”, said the Alagoas historian Geraldo de Majella.
It was only in the mid-20th century that historians began to reconstruct its story via Portuguese archives, often in Marxist terms. Meanwhile, “black militant movements took up the flag of Palmares as a movement of national liberation,” De Majella explained. The largest guerrilla group during the 1964-85 military dictatorship – the Palmares Armed Revolutionary Vanguard – counted former president Dilma Rousseff among its members.
Lula, the former president, simultaneously bolstered recognition of Palmares and the legal rights of present-day quilombos. 20 November – the date the Palmarian leader was killed – was officially adopted as the National Day of Zumbi and Black Consciousness in 2003.
In the same year, public schools were legally required to teach Afro-Brazilian history.
But limited archaeological evidence and the absence of Palmarian sources has encouraged freewheeling interpretations. Today, perhaps drawing on the historical presence of advanced metalworking at the site, some compare Palmares with Wakanda, the hi-tech, Afrofuturist utopia of Marvel’s Black Panther.
But the inclusion of Dandara – whose first written mention occurs in a 1962 novel – in the Pantheon divided opinion. “I absolutely defend creative freedom in the way people look at our history,” said D’Salete. “But we need to take care to differentiate between fact and fiction.”
Fernando Holiday, an Afro-Brazilian YouTuber and conservative activist, has noted that Palmarian society had monarchical elements and also kept captives. “I’m sorry to disappoint leftist and black leaders, but today we’re commemorating a farce,” Holiday said in a video. “Zumbi wasn’t a hero of abolition.”
But Palmares and other examples of revolt and resistance, D’Salete argued, “are important as other ways of understanding our history … so people can imagine and build another kind of society that is very different to one just based on violence and oppression”.
That legacy of violence is apparent in Tiningu, a remote quilombo in Pará state. The community has battled to receive legal recognition, threatened by the ranchers and landowners who have cut down much of the surrounding rainforest. One resident was murdered by a rival soybean farmer on the eve of Bolsonaro’s election. Here, Palmares is not merely history but a source of hope.
“Zumbi was the beginning of everything,” said local teacher Joanice Mata de Oliveira, whose school is daubed with the names of African nations. “He was the one who began our fight.”
As I wrote in my post of January 12 2023, A History of the Revolution in Brazil and Fascist Counter-Revolution: Liberty Versus Tyranny, Lula Versus Bolsonaro; In the wake of the collapse of Bolsonaro’s fascist counter-revolution and coup attempt in Brazil, Lula’s swift reaction in the mass arrests of the treasonous brownshirts who stormed the offices of the government in imitation of Trump’s failed January 6 Insurrection, itself modeled on his idol Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch, and the stunning nationwide repudiation of Bolsonaro and his failed capture of the state by the victorious peoples of Brazil, has now begun a new phase of struggle with the manhunt for those who fund and organize fascist tyranny, much like that ongoing now in America for two years.
An insidious and far reaching conspiracy against democracy linking the Trump and Bolsonaro crime families and the forces of reaction in America and Brazil begins to emerge, mixing familiar malefactors and Fourth Reich apologists like Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson with unknown freaks of nature like Luiz Philippe de Orléans e Braganza, who seeks a return to the throne of Brazil through Trump and Bolsonaro as proxies and is now scuttling from beneath his rock like the ravenous and vile crawling thing all aristocrats are beneath their gold paint, conspiracies which widen to engulf whole networks of white supremacist terror, theocratic patriarchal sexual terror, plutocratic and oligarchic theft of public wealth as terminal stage capitalism seeks to free itself from its host political system, and the xenophobic and self-righteous carceral states of force and control which they spawn as instruments of elite wealth, power, and privilege.
Our great enemy is the global Fourth Reich, which transforms itself ceaselessly and adapts to the conditions of whatever nation it targets for subversion and capture, and the interconnections between regimes of fascist tyranny are manifold and subtle. Fascism wears many masks, and like an ambush predator in nature moves among us behind mirages of lies and illusions, rewritten histories and stolen voices, images which capture and distort. Here is a ground of struggle in which we all of us must fight, if we are to seize control of our own identity under falsification and division as imposed conditions of struggle.
As written in the Netflix series Wednesday, episode three Friend Or Woe:
“Principal Weems, bracing Wednesday in her office for sabotaging the celebration of the Pilgrim leader who burned the original Outcasts alive and built the town on their stolen land and graves, a story repeated endlessly in our all too real history; “You’re a trouble magnet.”
Wednesday: “If trouble means standing up to lies, decades of discrimination, centuries of treating outcasts like second-class citizens or worse…”
Principal: “What are you talking about?”
Wednesday: “Jericho. Why does this town even have an Outreach Day?
Don’t you know its real history with outcasts? The actual story of Joseph Crackstone?”
Principal: “I do. To an extent.”
Wednesday: “Then why be complicit in its cover up? Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.”
Principal: “That’s where you and I differ. Where you see doom, I see opportunity. Maybe this is a chance to rewrite the wrongs, to start a new chapter in the normie-outcast relations.”
Wednesday: “Nothing has changed since Crackstone. They still hate us. Only now they sugarcoat it with platitudes and smiles. If you’re unwilling to fight for truth…”
Principal: “You don’t think I want the truth? Of course I do. But the world isn’t always black and white. There are shades of gray.”
Wednesday: “Maybe for you. But it’s either they write our story or we do. You can’t have it both ways.”
Here is a History of the Revolution in Brazil as I have lived it;
As I wrote in my post of October 30 2022, Victory in Brazil: “We are going to live new times of peace, love and hope” vows Brazil’s New President Lula as He Begins the Restoration of Democracy; We celebrate a Forlorn Hope vindicated and become glorious in the victory of the peoples of Brazil and their champion Lula, with dancing in the streets and running Amok beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden.
A monster and tyrant has been driven from his castle, and this is always cause for celebration. We will always have this moment of triumph, and the hope it holds for our future, regardless of the trials to follow. Whether such hope is a gift or a curse is up to each of us to live and make real; but things are now possible which yesterday were not, and this I call victory.
With the words of Glinda to Oz I congratulate Lula and the peoples of Brazil; ‘We’ve waited a long time for you, Wizard.” And we really need you to be the Wizard we hope you are.
A great work now begins, as like Biden in America, Lula in Brazil leads the Restoration of Democracy in a nation whose systems, structures, institutions, values, and ideals have been damaged by fascist subversion, disruption, and fracture, but whose people emerge from the crucible of their forging unconquered and renewed.
One day we will be a United Humankind and a free society of equals, and Lula like Biden will be remembered for as long as there are human beings as among the founders of a new humanity and civilization, whose vision will shape our being, meaning, and value, inform our choices about how to be human together for millennia, and motivate our discover of the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Let us each do what we can to make the dream of democracy real.
As I wrote in my post of June 3 2021, Brazilians Seize the Streets to Demand the Resignation of Bolsonaro; The horrific death toll of Bolsonaro’s inept and corrupt handling of the Pandemic, the campaign of ethnic cleansing of indigenous peoples, the plunder of public wealth and natural resources by a plutocratic elite, the vast precariat of a nation poised on the edge of collapse; all these and one thing more have brought the people of Brazil into the streets this week to demand the resignation of the tyrant Bolsonaro; the brutal repression of a kleptocratic fascist regime of force and violence.
The use of force and violence fails at the point of resistance and refusal to submit, and power is a fragile and hollow illusion which may be dispelled by exposure and challenge of authority, for who cannot be controlled is free. Regardless of the death squads and sexual terror, of the enormous military might of the government of Brazil as a host structure of racist elite hegemony, a people who do not recognize the authority of the state and who meet repression with disobedience cannot be subjugated.
Every Brazilian in the streets today who challenge and defy state terror has won their freedom, for they cannot be enslaved by those who would be our masters. So begins the end of tyranny in Brazil; we can help the people of Brazil liberate themselves and establish a true democracy as a free society of equals by shaping our policy to such ends.
The people of Brazil have spoken; how shall we answer them?
As I wrote in my post of March 11 2021, Brazil Reclaims Its Heart: the Return of Lula da Silva, Champion of the People; Lula da Silva, Champion of the People, has had the false corruption charges against him overturned and is now free to challenge Bolsonaro for the Presidency of Brazil once again.
This is a historic example of class war, which pits labor leader da Silva directly against capitalist kingpin Bolsonaro, whose regime creates wealth for elites by the de facto enslavement of Blacks and the precariat and the plunder of resources from indigenous peoples, and whose government is controlled from within by a network of some six thousand military officers who enforce his kleptocracy with brutal repression.
Racism, patriarchy, oligarchic and plutocratic wealth, de facto military rule; Brazil today meets all the criteria of fascist tyranny. I look now to Lula to change the balance of power and restore democracy in Brazil.
Of my connection with Brazil and her peoples, stamped into my soul by the trauma of my near-execution by police while rescuing abandoned street children whom they were bounty hunting for the wealthy aristocratic elite, I have written in my post of July 15 2022, Let Hope Overcome Fear: Lula 2022; Among my personal role models in antifascism and revolution is the fictional character of Harry Tuttle played by Robert de Niro in the film Brazil, whose line “we’re all in this together,” echoes through forty some years of my life and adventures.
Let me place this in context; Brazil was my first solo foreign travel experience, flying to Sao Paulo when I was fourteen, in the summer of 1974, to train with some fellow fencers for the Pan American Games which were planned to be held there, though later the venue was moved to Mexico. I had some newly learned conversational Portuguese, an invitation to stay at the home of a boy my age I knew from the fencing tournament circuit with whom I could discover the local mischief, and visions of beach parties.
So it was that I entered a world of courtly manners and white-gloved servants, gracious and brilliant hosts who were local luminaries and threw a magnificent formal ball to introduce me, and a friend with whom I shared a mad passion for martial and equestrian sports, but also a world of high walls and armed guards.
My first view beyond this illusion came with the sounds of rifle fire from the guards; when I looked from my balcony to see who was attacking the front gate I discovered the guards were firing into a crowd of beggars, mostly children, who had mobbed a truck carrying the weekly food supplies. That day I made my first secret excursion beyond the walls.
What truths are hidden by the walls of our palaces, beyond which it is Forbidden to look? It is easy to believe the lies of authority when one is a member of the elite in whose interest they claim to wield power, and to fail to question one’s own motives and position of privilege. Terrifyingly easy to believe lies when we are the beneficiaries of hierarchies of exclusionary otherness, of wealth and power disparity and inequalities systemically manufactured and weaponized in service to power, and of genocide, slavery, conquest, and imperialism.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. For there is no just authority, and as Dorothy says in the Wizard of Oz, he’s “just an old humbug”, and his lies and illusions, force and control, serve no interests but his own.
Being a naïve American boy, I felt it was my duty to report the incident; but at the police station I had difficulty making myself understood. They thought I was there to place a bet on my guard in an ongoing monthly contest for which police officer bagged the most street children; there was a chalkboard on the station wall for this. This was how the elites of Brazil had chosen to solve the problem of abandoned street children, fully ten per cent of the national population. Another betting game called “the Big One”, was for which policeman kicked the most pregnant girls in the stomach and ranked among the top ten causes of death in Brazil for teenage girls, invariably living within slum zones containing the most impoverished and most Black of citizens; this in a city founded by escaped African slaves as a free republic.
I learned much in the weeks that followed; above all I learned who is responsible for these inequalities; we are, if we do not challenge and defy tyranny and unjust systems.
During the nights of my adventures beyond the walls and actions to help the bands of child beggars and obstruct the police bounty hunts I had a traumatic near death experience, similar to the mock executions of Maurice Blanchot by the Nazis in 1944 as written in The Instant of My Death and Fyodor Dostoevsky by the Czar’s secret police in 1849 as written in The Idiot; fleeing pursuit through a warren of tunnels with an injured child among others and trapped in the open by two police riflemen who took flanking positions and aimed at us while the leader called for surrender beyond the curve of a tunnel. I stood in front of a boy with a twisted leg who could not run while the others scattered and escaped or found hiding places, and refused to stand aside when ordered to do so. This was reflexive and a decision of instinct beneath the level of conscious thought or volition, where the truths our ourselves written in our flesh are forged and revealed. Asked to let someone die to save myself, I simply said no. When thought returned me from this moment of panic or transcendence of myself, I asked how much to let us walk away, whereupon he ordered his men to fire. But there was only one shot instead of a demonstration of crossfire, and that a wide miss; he had time to ask “What?” before falling to the ground.
And then our rescuers revealed themselves, having crept up on the police from behind; the Matadors, who might be described as vigilantes, a criminal gang, a revolutionary group, or all three, founded by Brazil’s notorious vigilante and criminal Pedro Rodrigues Filho, infamous for avenging his mother’s savage murder by killing his father and eating his heart, who had been arrested the previous year after a spectacular series of one hundred or more revenge killings of the most fiendish and monstrous of criminals, powerful men beyond the reach of the law who had perpetrated atrocities on women and children. Into this fearsome brotherhood I was welcomed, with the words; “You are one of us,” and in the streets of Sao Paulo that summer I never again stood alone.
“We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge”; so they described themselves to me, and this definition of solidarity as praxis or the action of values remains with me and shadows my use of the battle cry Never Again! As Shakespeare wrote in The Merchant of Venice, Act III, scene I; “If you wrong us, shall we not avenge?”
From the moment I saw the guards of the aristocratic family with whom I was a guest firing on the crowd of homeless children and beggars swarming the food supply truck at the manor gate, naked and skeletal in starvation, scarred and crippled and misshapen with diseases unknown to any people for whom healthcare and basic nutrition are free and guaranteed preconditions of the universal right to life, desperate for a handful of food which could mean one more day of survival; in that moment I chose my side, and my people are the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased; all those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth.
Join us, for a United Humankind cannot be enslaved, conquered, dehumanized, falsified, or commodified, nor can tyranny stand against liberty when the people refuse to submit.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
Brazil celebrates Black Consciousness Day as national holiday for first time
Legacy of African Brazilians honored on 329th anniversary of resistance leader Zumbi’s death by Portuguese forces
History of free African strongholds fires Brazilian resistance to Bolsonaro:
Quilombo dos Palmares – founded by Africans who escaped slavery – maintained its independence for 100 years and has become a touchstone for a new generation
20 de novembro de 2024 O Brasil celebra sua herança de resistência negra, revoltas de escravos, repúblicas negras livres e luta de libertação
História, memória, identidade, as histórias que contamos sobre nós mesmos e aquelas contadas sobre nós por outros, incluindo aqueles que nos escravizariam, que são e podem se tornar e que decidem; tudo isso é um terreno de luta contra sistemas de opressão, falsificação, mercantilização e desumanização, e muitas vezes um terreno mutável, construído de verdades relativas como um Portão Rashomon do ser humano, significado e valor.
A adoção pelo Brasil de um feriado nacional na data da morte do grande líder da revolta de escravos Zumbi em uma batalha gloriosa nas mãos das forças colonialistas é um estudo de caso do que chamo de Teoria Narrativa da Identidade, na qual a autoconstrução é uma forma de revolução e o principal ato definidor de se tornar humano.
Celebre conosco o grande guerreiro, rei e figura da libertação Zumbi e seu desafio até a morte daqueles que nos escravizariam, e a república livre de Palmares que ele liderou na revolução anticolonial e uma guerra de independência de um século contra vastas forças de conquista e domínio imperial e sistemas de opressão e terror da supremacia branca, quem quer que ele tenha sido e qualquer reino rebelde que ele defendeu, pois tudo o que realmente importa é que ele detém um espaço imaginário em que cada um de nós pode entrar e se tornar, não importa a miséria de nossas condições iniciais.
Que um homem viveu e foi real que se recusou a se submeter é o suficiente para nos lembrarmos e sonharmos em ser, pois cada um de nós pode se tornar aquele homem que sonhamos
12 de janeiro de 2023 Uma História da Revolução no Brasil e da Contra-Revolução Fascista: Liberdade Versus Tirania, Lula Versus Bolsonaro
Na esteira do colapso da contra-revolução fascista de Bolsonaro e da tentativa de golpe no Brasil, a rápida reação de Lula nas prisões em massa dos camisas marrons traidoras que invadiram os escritórios do governo em imitação da fracassada Insurreição de 6 de janeiro de Trump, ela mesma modelada em seu ídolo O Golpe da Cervejaria de Hitler e o repúdio nacional impressionante a Bolsonaro e sua captura fracassada do estado pelos povos vitoriosos do Brasil, agora começou uma nova fase de luta com a caçada para aqueles que financiam e organizam a tirania fascista, muito parecido com o que está em andamento agora na América por dois anos.
Uma conspiração insidiosa e de longo alcance contra a democracia, ligando as famílias criminosas de Trump e Bolsonaro e as forças da reação na América e no Brasil, começa a emergir, misturando malfeitores familiares e apologistas do Quarto Reich como Steve Bannon e Tucker Carlson com aberrações desconhecidas da natureza como Luiz Philippe de Orléans e Braganza, que busca um retorno ao trono do Brasil através de Trump e Bolsonaro como procuradores e agora está fugindo de debaixo de sua rocha como a coisa rastejante voraz e vil que todos os aristocratas são sob sua tinta dourada, conspirações que se ampliam para engolir redes inteiras de terror supremacista branco, terror sexual patriarcal teocrático, roubo plutocrático e oligárquico da riqueza pública e os estados carcerários xenófobos e hipócritas de força e controle que eles geram como instrumentos de riqueza, poder e privilégio da elite.
Nosso grande inimigo é o Quarto Reich global, que se transforma incessantemente e se adapta às condições de qualquer nação que vise para subversão e captura, e as interconexões entre regimes de tirania fascista são múltiplas e sutis. O fascismo usa muitas máscaras e, como um predador de emboscada na natureza, move-se entre nós por trás de miragens de mentiras e ilusões, histórias reescritas e vozes roubadas, imagens que capturam e distorcem. Aqui está um terreno de luta no qual todos nós devemos lutar, se quisermos assumir o controle de nossa própria identidade sob falsificação e divisão como condições de luta impostas.
Conforme escrito na série da Netflix quarta-feira, episódio três Friend Or Woe:
A Diretora Weems, preparando-se na quarta-feira em seu escritório por sabotar a celebração do líder peregrino que queimou vivos os Párias originais e construiu a cidade em suas terras e túmulos roubados, uma história repetida infinitamente em nossa história real; “Você é um imã de problemas.”
Quarta-feira: “Se problemas significam enfrentar mentiras, décadas de discriminação, séculos tratando párias como cidadãos de segunda classe ou pior…”
Diretora: “Do que você está falando?”
Quarta-feira: “Jericó. Por que esta cidade ainda tem um Dia de Divulgação?
Você não conhece sua história real com párias? A verdadeira história de Joseph Crackstone?
Diretora: “Sim. Até certo ponto.”
Quarta-feira: “Então por que ser cúmplice em seu encobrimento? Aqueles que esquecem a história estão fadados a repeti-la.”
Principal: “É aí que você e eu diferimos. Onde você vê desgraça, eu vejo oportunidade.
Talvez esta seja uma chance de reescrever os erros, de começar um novo capítulo nas relações normie-párias.
Quarta-feira: “Nada mudou desde Crackstone. Eles ainda nos odeiam. Só que agora eles adoçam com platitudes e sorrisos. Se você não está disposto a lutar pela verdade…”
Diretor: “Você não acha que eu quero a verdade? Claro que eu faço. Mas o mundo nem sempre é preto e branco. Existem tons de cinza.”
Quarta-feira: “Talvez para você. Mas ou eles escrevem nossa história ou nós. Você não pode ter as duas coisas.
30 de outubro de 2022 Vitória no Brasil: “Vamos viver novos tempos de paz, amor e esperança” promete o novo presidente Lula ao iniciar a restauração da democracia
Celebramos uma Esperança Desamparada vindicada e nos tornamos gloriosos na vitória dos povos do Brasil e de seu campeão Lula, dançando nas ruas e correndo descontroladamente além dos limites do Proibido.
Um monstro e tirano foi expulso de seu castelo, e isso é sempre motivo de comemoração. Sempre teremos esse momento de triunfo e a esperança que ele reserva para o nosso futuro, independentemente das provações que virão. Se tal esperança é uma dádiva ou uma maldição, cabe a cada um de nós viver e tornar real; mas agora são possíveis coisas que ontem não eram, e isso eu chamo de vitória.
Com as palavras de Glinda a Oz felicito Lula e os povos do Brasil; ‘Esperamos muito tempo por você, feiticeiro. E nós realmente precisamos que você seja o Mago que esperamos que você seja.
Um grande trabalho começa agora, como Biden na América, Lula no Brasil lidera a Restauração da Democracia em uma nação cujos sistemas, estruturas, instituições, valores e ideais foram danificados pela subversão, ruptura e fratura fascistas, mas cujo povo emerge do cadinho de seu forjamento invicto e renovado.
Um dia seremos uma Humanidade Unida e uma sociedade livre de iguais, e Lula como Biden será lembrado enquanto houver seres humanos entre os fundadores de uma nova humanidade e civilização, cuja visão moldará nosso ser, ou seja, e valor, informar nossas escolhas sobre como sermos humanos juntos por milênios e motivar nossa descoberta das possibilidades ilimitadas de nos tornarmos humanos.
Vamos cada um fazer o que pudermos para tornar o sonho da democracia real.
7 de setembro de 2022 Brasil comemora seu bicentenário de independência, e Bolsonaro o usa para armar o patriotismo a serviço de seu regime em um comício Trump-Nuremberg
Nesta gloriosa e jubilosa celebração de dois séculos de Independência do Brasil, que significam a libertação do colonialismo imperial e da aristocracia feudal, as sombras de nossa história ameaçam ressurgir e nos tomar mais uma vez em uma tirania de poder desigual sistêmico e hegemonias elitistas de riqueza e privilégio.
E a isso devemos resistir. Demos à tirania fascista a única resposta que ela merece; Nunca mais.
Bolsonaro citou Richard Nixon em seu comício Trump-Nuremberg; “Eu não sou bandido.”
Como em todas as grandes mentiras, um criminoso é exatamente o que é.
Da minha ligação com o Brasil e seus povos, estampada em minha alma pelo trauma de minha quase execução pela polícia ao resgatar meninos de rua abandonados que estavam caçando recompensas para a rica elite aristocrática, escrevi em meu post de 15 de julho de 2022, Deixe a esperança vencer o medo: Lula 2022; Entre meus modelos pessoais no antifascismo e na revolução está o personagem fictício de Harry Tuttle interpretado por Robert de Niro no filme Brasil, cuja frase “estamos todos juntos nisso”, ecoa por quarenta e poucos anos de minha vida e aventuras.
Deixe-me colocar isso no contexto; O Brasil foi minha primeira viagem solo ao exterior, voando para São Paulo quando eu tinha quatorze anos, no verão de 1974, para treinar com alguns colegas esgrimistas para os Jogos Pan-Americanos que estavam planejados para lá, embora mais tarde o local tenha sido transferido para México. Eu tinha um pouco de português de conversação recém-aprendido, um convite para ficar na casa de um menino da minha idade que eu conhecia do circuito de torneios de esgrima com quem eu poderia descobrir as travessuras locais e visões de festas na praia.
Foi assim que entrei em um mundo de maneiras corteses e criados de luvas brancas, anfitriões graciosos e brilhantes que eram luminares locais e deram um magnífico baile formal para me apresentar, e um amigo com quem eu compartilhava uma paixão louca por esportes marciais e equestres , mas também um mundo de muros altos e guardas armados.
Minha primeira visão além dessa ilusão veio com os sons de tiros de fuzil dos guardas; quando olhei da minha sacada para ver quem estava atacando o portão da frente, descobri que os guardas estavam atirando em uma multidão de mendigos, a maioria crianças, que assaltaram um caminhão que transportava os mantimentos semanais. Naquele dia fiz minha primeira excursão secreta além das muralhas.
Que verdades estão escondidas pelas paredes de nossos palácios, além das quais é proibido olhar? É fácil acreditar nas mentiras da autoridade quando alguém é membro da elite em cujo interesse eles alegam exercer poder e deixar de questionar seus próprios motivos e posição de privilégio. Mentiras terrivelmente fáceis de acreditar quando somos beneficiários de hierarquias de alteridade excludente, de riqueza e disparidade de poder e desigualdades sistematicamente fabricadas e armadas a serviço do poder, e de genocídio, escravidão, conquista e imperialismo.
Sempre preste atenção no homem atrás da cortina. Pois não existe autoridade justa, e como Dorothy diz no Mágico de Oz, ele é “apenas um velho farsante”, e suas mentiras e ilusões, força e controle, não servem a nenhum interesse além dos seus.
Sendo um menino americano ingênuo, senti que era meu dever relatar o incidente; mas na delegacia tive dificuldade em me fazer entender. Eles achavam que eu estava ali para apostar na minha guarda em um concurso mensal em andamento para o qual policial pegasse o maior número de crianças de rua; havia um quadro-negro na parede da estação para isso. Foi assim que as elites do Brasil escolheram resolver o problema das crianças de rua abandonadas, dez por cento da população nacional. Outro jogo de apostas chamado “o Grande”, foi aquele em que o policial chutou a barriga das mais grávidas e ficou entre as dez maiores causas de morte no Brasil para adolescentes, invariavelmente vivendo em zonas de favelas que abrigam as mais pobres e negras do mundo. cidadãos; isso em uma cidade fundada por escravos africanos fugidos como uma república livre.
Aprendi muito nas semanas que se seguiram; sobretudo aprendi quem é o responsável por essas desigualdades; somos, se não desafiarmos e desafiarmos a tirania e os sistemas injustos.
Durante as noites de minhas aventuras além dos muros e ações para ajudar os bandos de mendigos infantis e obstruir as caças de recompensas da polícia, tive uma experiência traumática de quase morte, semelhante às execuções simuladas de Maurice Blanchot pelos nazistas em 1944, conforme escrito em The Instant de Minha Morte e Fiódor Dostoiévski pela polícia secreta do Czar em 1849, conforme escrito em O Idiota; fugindo da perseguição por um labirinto de túneis com uma criança ferida entre outros e presos a céu aberto por dois fuzileiros da polícia que tomaram posições de flanco e apontaram para nós enquanto o líder pedia rendição além da curva de um túnel. Fiquei na frente de um menino com uma perna torcida que não podia correr enquanto os outros espalhavam uma e escapou ou encontrou esconderijos, e se recusou a ficar de lado quando ordenado a fazê-lo. Isso foi reflexivo e uma decisão do instinto abaixo do nível do pensamento consciente ou volição, onde as verdades que nós mesmos escrevemos em nossa carne são forjadas e reveladas. Pediram para deixar alguém morrer para me salvar, eu simplesmente disse não. Quando o pensamento me fez sair desse momento de pânico ou transcendência de mim mesmo, perguntei quanto nos deixaria ir embora, e então ele ordenou que seus homens atirassem. Mas houve apenas um tiro em vez de uma demonstração de fogo cruzado, e isso foi um grande erro; ele teve tempo de perguntar “O quê?” antes de cair no chão.
E então nossos socorristas se revelaram, tendo se aproximado da polícia por trás; os Matadors, que podem ser descritos como vigilantes, uma gangue criminosa, um grupo revolucionário, ou todos os três, fundados pelo notório vigilante e criminoso brasileiro Pedro Rodrigues Filho, famoso por vingar o assassinato selvagem de sua mãe matando seu pai e comendo seu coração, que havia sido preso no ano anterior após uma série espetacular de cem ou mais assassinatos por vingança dos criminosos mais diabólicos e monstruosos, homens poderosos fora do alcance da lei que haviam perpetrado atrocidades contra mulheres e crianças. Nessa temível irmandade fui acolhido, com as palavras; “Você é um de nós”, e nas ruas de São Paulo naquele verão nunca mais fiquei sozinho.
“Não podemos salvar a todos, mas podemos vingar”; assim eles se descreveram para mim, e essa definição de solidariedade como práxis ou ação de valores permanece comigo e obscurece meu uso do grito de guerra Nunca Mais! Como Shakespeare escreveu em O Mercador de Veneza, Ato III, cena I; “Se você nos ofender, não devemos nos vingar?”
A partir do momento em que vi os guardas da família aristocrática com quem eu era hóspede atirando contra a multidão de crianças sem-teto e mendigos que fervilhavam o caminhão de alimentos no portão da mansão, nus e esqueléticos de fome, cheios de cicatrizes, aleijados e deformados com doenças desconhecidas a qualquer povo para quem os cuidados de saúde e a alimentação básica sejam gratuitos e pré-condições garantidas do direito universal à vida, desesperados por um punhado de alimentos que possam significar mais um dia de sobrevivência; naquele momento eu escolhi o meu lado, e meu povo são os impotentes e os despossuídos, os silenciados e os apagados; todos aqueles a quem Frantz Fanon chamava de miseráveis da terra.
Junte-se a nós, pois a Humanidade Unida não pode ser escravizada, conquistada, desumanizada, falsificada ou mercantilizada, nem a tirania pode se opor à liberdade quando o povo se recusa a se submeter.
Pois somos muitos, estamos observando e somos o futuro.
Brazil, a reading list
History
Brazil: A Biography, Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, Heloisa Murgel Starling
On this day fifty three years ago the prisoners of Attica rebelled against the dehumanizing and horrific conditions in which they were held, and against the authority of the carceral state to subjugate its citizens as an instrument of white supremacist terror.
The Rebellion was swiftly and with great brutality repressed by the government, but it will never be forgotten nor its spirit erased by the people of America for whom it remains a glorious symbol of liberty and the unconquered will to resist tyranny and terror.
What has changed in over fifty years of resistance to the systems and structures of racism and unequal power, our police and prisons? Only this; the methods of surveillance and thought control are now pervasive and endemic, and have achieved a level of sophistication which obviates the need for lynching and arson to enforce hegemonic monopolies of wealth, power, and privilege held by racial and patriarchal elites.
The Attica Rebellion was an iconic moment of triumph over tyranny, and recalls its historical parallels in the three principal Jewish revolts in death camps during the Second World War; the Sonderkommando Revolt of 7 October 1944 at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Sobibor Revolt of 14 October 1943, and the Treblinka Revolt of 2 August 1943; but Attica was not an affirmation of our universal humanity and those rights which proceed from it by prisoners of war or genocide held by a monstrous enemy, but by our fellow citizens held by the unjust authority of our own government. The true historical parallels of Attica are the 250 American slave revolts including Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 1836, the 1811 Revolt led by Charles Deslondes, the Amistad Rebellion, and Gabriel Prosser’s Rebellion of 1800. In terms of causes, scale, and the brutality of repression and number of deaths the American parallel among prison revolts is the New Mexico State Penitentiary Revolt of February 2 1980.
Prison revolts are slave revolts.
The Attica Rebellion exposes the lie at the heart of our Justice system and America; the claim to equality and impartial justice blind to race, gender, and other divisions and categories of exclusionary otherness. It is a system which originates in the collapse of Reconstruction and the political subversion of Abolitionist values as a strategy of racist and capitalist elites to re-enslave Black people as prison bond labor and has instrumentalized the American state as a machine for turning people into a resource for the profit of others; an engine of capitalist and racist dehumanization and commodification.
And today the carceral state reaches its apotheosis of depravity as a tyranny of totalitarian force and control, as absolute as any historical monarchy, empire, or dictatorship, having transformed itself through alignment and interdependence with the imperial militarism and counterinsurgency model of policing which seized America in its talons in the wake of the 9-11 terrorist attack on the Twin Towers, a national trauma and disruptive event which has challenged all our values.
The carceral state enforces an unjust system, and we are all its captives.
We have learned the wrong lessons from our enemies, from the Confederacy which was a human trafficking syndicate that declared itself a nation and from the Nazis whose atrocities define the limits of the human.
America has embraced policies of force and control which have shaped us to the purposes of terror and achieved for our enemies in the ambiguity of our victories the goals and objectives they have no power to force us to; the Fall of America as the primary guarantor of universal human rights and democracy, and a beacon of hope to the world.
The Torch of Liberty is shadowed by the fascist tyranny which seized us in the Stolen Election of 2016 and now threatens to do so again under the figurehead of Traitor Trump, and we must resist the darkness and its atavisms of fear and hate, rekindle and propagate the wildfires of freedom, and carry onward into the future our hope for a better humankind.
Shawn Gude offers a precis of the Attica Rebellion in Jacobin; “On the eve of what would become the US’s most famous prison uprising, the inmates of Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York endured deplorable conditions. Their infections went untreated, their teeth fell out due to negligible dental care — they even lacked adequate access to soap and toilet paper.
On September 9, 1971, these pent-up grievances simmered over when roughly 1,300 inmates took over the prison. For four days they were effectively in charge. They made demands on the state (better medical care, fewer limits on their freedom of expression, immunity from prosecution for rebelling), negotiated with mediators brought in at their behest (including, briefly, Black Panther leader Bobby Seale), and generally asserted their worth as human beings.
But whatever the prisoners gained in those few days was quickly pulverized by the brute force of the state. Seeking dignity, they instead unleashed the wrath of New York governor Nelson Rockefeller.
On the morning of September 13, state law enforcement streamed into the prison by the hundreds, and killed by the dozens. When they were finished, thirty-nine men (twenty-nine prisoners and ten state employees) lay dead. And for the inmates who survived (especially rebellion leaders like Frank “Big Black” Smith), ghastly torture and severe intimidation soon followed.
Top officials never faced legal reprisals for the atrocities at Attica. They shielded themselves from prosecution, and did their best to squirrel away evidence about what happened on that autumn morning.
Yet Attica lives. It’s still on the lips of anti-prison activists and striking inmates, still in the panicked nightmares of law-and-order types. The American carceral state, built up feverishly in the rebellion’s wake, rests in its shadow.”
The retaking of the prison ordered by New York Governor Rockefeller is described by University of Michigan historian Heather Ann Thompson in her interview; “So he unleashes nearly six hundred men, troopers and corrections officers who are armed to the teeth with their own personal weapons, and weapons that are being passed out at the supply truck without regard for serial numbers or identification of the specific officers. Then these guys rip off their identification badges, so that they can do whatever they want once they get inside.
And it is one of the most horrific assaults in US history. The doctors that go in later liken it to My Lai, to a Civil War painting, to Vietnam writ large, because it is nothing but carnage. And, by the way, this is after they had already doused the yard in CS gas (which is a powder that clings to your nasal passages). People were sick, they were retching, they were already disabled when the shooting began.”
Attica Prison Uprising Aftermath/ Richard Kaplan CBS & The History Channel
The Tragedy At Attica: Prison Riot/ CBS 1991 special report
Torch of Liberty 