|
Revolts of enslaved Africans took place throughout the Western hemisphere within the briefest of time periods following their disembarkment. In the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, major rebellions occurred in places such as Brazil, Santiago, Lina, Barbados, Puebla, Jamaica, Haiti, Lima and Suriname outside the borders of what would become the United States. The most famous rebellions were the uprisings in Brazil which led to the creation of the independent African "quilombos" and the African state of Palmares in 1630, the revolts of the Jamaican "maroons" (Spanish for "runaways") and the Haitian Revolution, a sustained anti-colonial war which culminated in the declaration of the first free republic of African people in the modern Western hemisphere in 1804.
In the colonial North America, the frequency and extent of acts of African resistance frequently provoked expressions of alarm and concern by colonial governments and militias. The greatest fear during this period was of armed African rebellion, a fear played upon in the early stages of the colonies war with Great Britain by Lord Dunmore, a British colonial governor who promised freedom to any African-American who would join the British in armed struggle against the colonies . A number of ordinances restricting the movement of both enslaved and nominally "free" Africans were passed in the 17th and 18th centuries, including statutes which prohibited African-American women from using cooking fires while indoors due to the propensity of arson .
Historian Vincent Franklin has noted that a central element of African-American resistance to oppression has been the advocacy for self-determination. He quotes an elderly African-American woman as responding to an ethnographic field study question posed to her in the early 1970s with the statement "Well, from the start, it should be said that we are a nation. The best of us have said it and everybody feels it. " This sentiment informed the struggle for African resistance in the United States, a struggle which drew upon examples of African resistance and the study and understanding of the importance of African history to African-American identity.
By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, African Americans had established complex social and cultural structures through which to view the larger U.S. society and their places in it. African-Americans had successfully incorporated "Old World" pre-enslavement artistic, cultural and spiritual traditions into new traditions grounded in the experience of enslavement. The mastery of speaking and, particularly for African Americans in the northern U.S, reading and writing in non-African languages such as English and French was a central component of this process.
In South and Central America, the Caribbean and the southern U.S., African religious traditions combined with Christianity to produce "theologies of resistance" such as Vodun and Santeria. In places such as Haiti, these theologies served as the spiritual basis for political revolutions . In the U.S., nominally free African Americans in the north pointed to the successful Haitian Revolution of 1804 as evidence of excellent African resistance to oppression. At the same time, these largely-Christian African Americans found in the Christian Bible a symbol of spiritual and cultural resistance that became the first major Pan-African signifier: "Ethiopianism."
African-American ministers and thinkers such as Philadelphia's Richard Allen and Absalom Jones and Boston's Prince Hall, David Walker and Maria Stewart found support for the eventual triumph of Africans (Ethiopians) in the Biblical passage of Psalms 68:31: "Princes shall come out of Egypt, Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God. " Religious Historian Gayraud Wilmore writes that:
This great prophecy of Psalm 68:31 became a forecast of the ultimate fulfillment of the people's spiritual yearning. It is impossible to say how many sermons were preached from this text during the nineteenth century, but we know that Richard Allen, Prince Hall, Lott Carey, Henry Highland Garnet, Alexander Crummell, Edward W. Blyden, James T. Holly and Bishop Henry McNeil Turner were all eloquent expositors of Psalm 68:31. They made it the cornerstone of missionary emigrationism both in the United States and in Africa .
The Ethiopianist movement was more than the simple adaptation of a Biblical-historical narrative to the uses of African American resistance. It represented an attempt by African-Americans to reconnect themselves to an African past from which they had been violently disassociated.
Simultaneously, enslaved African-Americans Denmak Vesey, Gabriel Prosser and Nat Turner, who combined Christianity with African spiritual traditions, led rebellions aimed at sparking nation-wide revolts of enslaved Africans. In 1850, the United States passed the Fugitive Slave Act, insuring the inevitability of a clash between pro and anti-enslavement forces. Among the most prominent African-American abolitionists of the antebellum period were Frederick Douglass, Martin Robison Delany, Sojourner Truth and Henry Highland Garnet. Philadelphia's Robert Campbell, a Jamaican by birth, explored the Niger valley of West Africa along with Delany in a search for a place where African Americans might relocate .
African Americans organized resistance to enslavement in a number of ways prior to the Civil War. In addition to engaging in abolitionist organizing, speaking and lobbying, they produced newspapers, books, pamphlets and other anti-enslavement documents and organized literary societies such as Philadelphia's Library Company of Colored Persons and Reading Room Society and Boston's all-female Afric-American Female Intelligence Society of America .
Although the importation of enslaved Africans was outlawed after 1808, enslavement continued as the cornerstone of southern United States. production and a significant element in northern United States business investment and the federal gross national product. Production of cotton, the staple crop in the agrarian South, was expanded greatly by the introduction of the "cotton engine" ('gin) in the late 18th century. Enslavement as both an economic and cultural foundation of the United States South was intractably interwoven into the fabric of Southern life.
In the Northern United States, the first full ruminations of the Industrial Revolution presented the possibility of expanding their already solid commercial grip on the manufacturing and trade of the cash crops grown in the South. Politically, Southerners and their economic allies (merchants, bankers) had held control over the federal government since the beginning of the republic. Of the first sixteen presidents, many of the most significant, such as Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Jackson were Southerners, and the political and intellectual template of the young republic bore the stamp of the so-called "middle south," particularly Virginia (the "birthplace of presidents") as much as any other region in the country.
The Civil War began essentially a conflict between elements of the southern agrarian bourgeoisie and its middle class, controllers of a thriving southern "slaveocracy," and an emerging northern industrial bourgeoisie who favored a nationally-regulated-and heavily northern influenced-political, economic and trade system. Calling upon the culture of oppression and exclusion, southern ruling-class elements galvanized the general white population to lay down their lives for what eventually became known as "The Lost Cause." This same appeal to white supremacist cultural perspectives would galvanize working class and poor whites behind the Ku Klux Klan, segregated labor unions, and resistance to the Civil Rights Movement, Affirmative Action and other legal and social movements designed to remedy past discrimination.
No one in the United States expected the Civil War to become the greatest conflict in United States history before or since in terms of human capital and national resources. In the North, lukewarm popular support of the war erupted into wholesale violent resistance to the idea in places like New York and Cincinnati when the thought of fighting to win the freedom of Africans took root in the popular imagination as a reason for the war besides preserving the national union. In fact, a popular slogan of the day summed up the attitude of the majority of white northerners: "To the flag we are pledged, all its foes we abhor, And we ain't for the ******, be we are for the war. " Meanwhile, African-Americans argued passionately and widely to be allowed to fight on their own behalf. Insurgents like those who escaped northward on the Underground Railroad and their leaders, such as Harriet Tubman, had not waited for the declaration of war to decide the issue of their self-determination.
When sectional conflict finally bloomed in the blaze of cannon fire at Fort Sumter, African-American combatants found themselves taking up arms on both sides, as had been the case in the American Revolutionary War less than a hundred years before. Their primary purpose continued to be one of securing freedom for themselves and their families, superceding any notions of undying loyalty to either the Union or the Confederacy . After two more large wars, the Spanish-American War at the close of the 19th century and World War I at the turn of the 20th, African-Americans resolutely declared that their patriotism would be defined as much by how the United States treated them as by the success of the U.S. military against foreign powers. This sentiment found its greatest national African-American voice in the "Double V(ictory)" (at home and abroad) campaign spearheaded by the national African-American press during World War II and contributed to the desegregation of the U.S. military the approaching Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s.
During the Civil War, more than 175,000 African-Americans served in the Union Army, from the first actions along the Mississippi River to the celebrated attack on Fort Wagner immortalized in the motion picture "Glory" to the final skirmishes of the war . Enslaved Africans abandoned the plantations of their enslavement in the thousands, creating what W.E.B. DuBois called "the general strike" which helped break the back of the Confederate South .
The years between the end of the Civil War and the end of Reconstruction (1865-1877) saw African-Americans focus their energies on securing the legal, political and economic guarantees which would lead to equality of opportunity in an increasingly industrial U.S. political economy. The years immediately following the war saw the passage of the "Civil War Amendments" to the United States Constitution. The 13th Amendment abolished enslavement; the 14th Amendment guaranteed full citizenship and extended the protection of the federal law to all citizens, an "equal protection clause" which has been evoked by a wide variety of Americans over the years; the 15th Amendment addressed voting rights. Securing the protection of the "Civil War Amendments" took African-Americans leading a "second reconstruction" a century later to more substantially secure.
During the years of federally-supervised "Reconstruction," African-American legislators participated in, and in places like South Carolina, led initiatives such as the drive to institutionalize free public education for all Americans . African-Americans paid particular attention to education and economic development in the years of Reconstruction, using the schools set up by organizations such as the American Missionary Society and the Freedmen's Bureau to expand antebellum efforts to gain education. Bureau schools served over 25,000 formerly enslaved Africans; institutions of higher education, often named for Freedmen's Bureau officials such as Oliver O. Howard and Clinton B. Fisk or prominent whites such as Abraham Lincoln or the Abolitionist William Wilberforce opened their doors as well. In Atlanta, African-Americans opened Morris Brown College, the only African-American-founded college in the Atlanta University System, named for the second Bishop of the A.M.E. Church. African-American mutual aid societies, fraternal and sororal orders expanded their efforts at African-American self-help.
By the end of the 1870s, however, the North and South had succeeded in striking an uneasy political truce, with many ex-Confederates resuming their posts in the national legislature. The resolution of the hotly contested presidential election of 1876 by Rutherford Hayes's removal of the last federal troops from the South sealed the political fate of African Americans in the region and would converge by the end of the century with the pull of economic opportunity and political access to spur an exodus of millions of African-Americans northward.
With the "great compromise" of 1876-77, political Reconstruction came to an end. By the end of the century, the southern states had rewritten their constitutions to exclude African Americans from legal entitlements; a companion white cultural perspectives, nurtured in the folk music and theater traditions popularized by writers such as Stephen Foster and entertainment forms such as blackface minstrelsy, lent the name of a character from its tradition to the era's politics of disfranchisement, legal exclusion and violent repression. "Jim Crow" was the title character in a popular minstrel song of the era, and soon came to represent both the politics and culture of white supremacy .
Simultaneously, Europeans were moving to consolidate their colonial interests on the African continent. Brenda Gayle Plummer notes that, while the end of the 19th century was a placid period for Europeans that still evokes fond nostalgia of Europe and North America, it was an era of profound and disruptive change for Africans on the African continent and in the Diaspora. German Chancellor Otto von Bismark called a conference for Berlin in 1885, where the United States agreed to the division of African territories among fourteen European states without the consultation of Africans .
Culturally, the last quarter of the 19th century witnessed the rising expression of the most unique cultural forms to be produced on American soil: the cultural production of Africans in the U.S. In music, the spirituals, blues and ragtime informed the steady rise of American popular music, particularly in its folk and country forms. In literature, the work of Paul Lawrence Dunbar and Charles Chestnutt became known to white audiences, even as the African-American literary community held up figures such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and others. The ironic African-American comedic tradition gave birth to the early days of "vaudeville," which by the middle of the next century had triggered the first and second generations of nationally-popular white comedians.
|