An African American and Latinx History of the United States

by Paul Ortiz

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION: “KILLED HELPING WORKERS TO ORGANIZE”

  1. “The Pan-American Commission,” Chicago Defender, June 19, 1915.

  2. Ibid.

  3. Charles Thompson, Border Odyssey: Travels Along the U.S./Mexico Divide (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015), 6.

  4. “Speech of Frederick Douglass on the War,” Douglass’ Monthly, February 1862.

  5. David B. Chesebrough, Frederick Douglass: Oratory from Slavery (London: Greenwood Press, 1998), 24.

  6. “Killed Helping Workers to Organize,” El Malcriado: The Voice of the Farm Worker 2, no. 4 (April 15, 1968).

  7. “The Man They Killed,” El Malcriado (April 15, 1968): 3.

  8. Ibid. For an amplification of the importance of organizing in creating social change, see César Chávez, “Huelga! Tales of the Delano Revolution: The Organizer’s Tale,” Ramparts (July 1966): 43–50. See also Dolores Huerta, interviewed by Paul Ortiz, April 16, 2016, Samuel Proctor Oral History Program, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida (henceforth cited as SPOHP); Lawrence Guyot, interviewed by Paul Ortiz, May 5, 2011, SPOHP, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida.

  9. “There Will Be No Boundary War,” Colored American, May 9, 1840.

  10. Francisco P. Ramírez, “Editorials,” in Herencia: The Anthology of Hispanic Literature of the United States, ed. Nicolás Kanellos (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 110.

  11. Coretta Scott King, foreword to Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, by Martin Luther King Jr. (1967; Boston: Beacon Press, 2010), xxiii. In developing this concept about connections between forms of oppression as well as liberation, I have been guided by Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (July 1991): 1241–99; Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: New Press, 2007); Fred Ho, Wicked Theory, Naked Practice: A Fred Ho Reader, ed. Diane C. Fujino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

  12. “Cuba,” Christian Recorder, March 20, 1869.

  13. Jeremy Lamont Austin, “Black Liberation in the African Diaspora,” paper presented at the University of California, Santa Cruz, April 24, 2006, in author’s collection.

  14. Elizabeth Martínez, De Colores Means All of Us: Latina Views for a Multi-Colored Century (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1998), 48.

  15. Danny Romero, “A Chicano in Philadelphia,” in Multicultural America: Essays on Cultural Wars and Cultural Peace, ed. Ishmael Reed (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 86.

  16. I generally use the term “Global South” to refer to the formerly colonized nations in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia, as well as the Middle East.

  17. “Telling Histories: A Conversation with Laurent Dubois and Greg Grandin,” Radical History Review 2013, no. 115 (Winter 2013): 19.

  18. Critical texts include John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss Jr., From Slavery to Freedom, 8th ed., vol. 1 (1947; New York: McGraw Hill, 1999); Rodolfo F. Acuña, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos (1972; New York: Pearson Longman, 2007); Vincent Harding, There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (1981; New York: Mariner Books, 1993); Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Vicki L. Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth Century America (1998; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (New York: Little, Brown, 1993).

  19. King, Where Do We Go from Here, 5.

  20. Oliver Cromwell Cox, Capitalism and American Leadership (New York: Philosophical Library, 1962), 228.

  21. Juan González, Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin, 2011).

  22. For the impact of US military interventions in Central America and the resulting flight of many of the region’s residents to the United States, see Gonzalez, Harvest of Empire, 129–48.

  23. Quoted in Harvest of Empire: The Untold Story of Latinos in America, dir. Peter Getzels and Eduardo López, Onyx Films, 2012, a film based on the book Harvest of Empire by Juan González.

  24. Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows, xii. For a brilliant historical study of Chicano identity, see George J. Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

  25. The pronunciation of this term is “Latin X.” “What Does ‘Latinx’ Mean?,” Latinx graduation ceremony brochure, University of Florida, April 19, 2017, in author’s collection. Roberto Rodriquez explains the rise of the term “Latinx” in “The X in LatinX,” Diverse Issues in Higher Education (June 7, 2017), http://diverseeducation.com/article/97500/.

  26. Martha Menchaca, Recovering History, Constructing Race: The Indian, Black, and White Roots of Mexican Americans (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001). See also Laura Gómez, Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race (New York: New York University Press, 2007).

  27. Marta E. Sánchez, “Shakin’ Up” Race and Gender: Intercultural Connections in Puerto Rican, African American, and Chicano Narratives and Culture (1965–1995) (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005).

  28. Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores, The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Kathryn J. McKnight and Leo J. Garofalo, Afro-Latino Voices: Narratives from the Early Modern Ibero-Atlantic World, 1550–1812 (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2009); Jack D. Forbes, Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993).

  29. Bobby Vaughn, “Mexico Negro: From the Shadows of Nationalist Mestizaje to New Possibilities in Afro-Mexican Identity,” Journal of Pan African Studies 6, no. 1 (July 2013): 227–40. This essay was part of a special issue of Pan African Studies titled “Africans in Mexico: History, Race and Place,” ed. Alva Moore Stevenson. See also Ann Shetterly, “Black in Mexico: The Complexion of Mexicanidad Along the Costa Chica,” Inside Mexico (April 2007): 14–21.

  30. Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 140, no. 1 (1989): 139–67.

  31. Manuel Pastor, Stewart Kwoh, and Angela Glover Blackwell, Searching for the Uncommon Common Ground: New Dimensions on Race in America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 81.

  32. “Programa para los niños,” El Malcriado, July 1, 1968.

  CHAPTER 1: THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION AND THE BIRTH OF EMANCIPATORY INTERNATIONALISM

  1. In the Spanish Empire, mestizos were mixed-race people. Libertos were generally defined as free Blacks. On the rebellion, see Elvia Duque Castillo, Aportes del Pueblo Afrodescendiente: La Historia Oculta de América Latina (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2013), 249; Charles F. Walker, The Tupac Amaru Rebellion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Nicholas A. Robins, Native Insurgencies and the Genocidal Impulse in the Americas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005); Jaime Ramón Olivares, “Tupac Amaru,” Encyclopedia of Slave Resistance and Rebellion, vol. 2: O-Z and Primary Documents, ed. Junius P. Rodriguez (London: Greenwood Press, 2007), 526–28; Matthew R. Lamothe, “While the English Colonies Fought for Independence, Tupac Amaru Wages a People’s War in Peru,” Military History 19, no. 4 (October 2002): 74.

  2. Simon Shama, Rough Crossings: The Slaves, the British, and the American Revolution (New York: HarperPerennial, 2007); Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Gerald Horne, The Counter Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America (New York: New York University Press, 2014); Alfred W. Blumrosen, Slave Nation: How Slavery United the Colonies and Spar
ked the American Revolution (New York: Sourcebooks, 2006).

  3. Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (1969; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 3–50.

  4. The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, authored by John Locke in 1669, is one example of this philosophy in action. See Robert Bernasconi and Anika Maaza Mann, “The Contradictions of Racism: Locke, Slavery, and the Two Treatises,” in Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy, ed. Andrew Valls (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 89–107. See also Theresa Richardson, “John Locke and the Myth of Race in America: Demythologizing the Parodoxes of the Enlightenment as Visited in the Present,” Philosophical Studies in Education 42 (January 2011): 101–12; Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 139. On class conflicts in the Revolutionary era, see Alfred F. Young, ed., The American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1976); Jesse Lemisch, Jack Tar vs. John Bull: The Role of New York’s Seamen in Precipitating the Revolution (New York: Garland, 1997); Alfred F. Young, Gary Nash, and Ray Raphael, eds., Revolutionary Founders: Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers in the Making of the Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011).

  5. C. L. R. James, “Black Studies and the Contemporary Student,” The C. L. R. James Reader, ed. Anna Grimshaw (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1992), 396. In a related sense, James argued, in Black Jacobins, that “the slave-trade and slavery were the economic basis of the French Revolution.” The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938; London: Vintage Books, 1989), 47. The relationship between slavery and capitalism has been explored more recently in Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jennifer Frank, Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (2006; New York: Ballantine Books, 2015); Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014); Andrew J. Torget, Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800–1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

  6. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1775, ed. with introduction and notes by Kathryn Sutherland (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998), 238–39.

  7. “Anyone Person,” South Carolina Gazette, November 25, 1777. See also “Brought to the Workhouse,” South Carolina Gazette, September 19, 1775; “Runaway,” South Carolina Gazette, September 26, 1775. Copies of the South Carolina Gazette and many of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century newspapers cited in the early chapters of this book may be found in the microfilm collections of Duke University Libraries.

  8. “Will Be Sold,” South Carolina Gazette, December 19, 1774.

  9. On the practice of breeding humans for profit, see Frederick Bancroft, Slave Trading in the Old South (1931; Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 67–87; Edward E. Baptist, “‘Cuffy,’ ‘Fancy Maids,’ and ‘One-Eyed Men’: Rape, Commodification, and the Domestic Slave Trade in the United States, American Historical Review 106, no. 5 (December 2001): 1619–50; Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 82–88; Ned Sublette and Constance Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2016).

  10. Advertisements in the South Carolina Gazette: “Runaway,” October 17, 1774; “Runaway,” October 31, 1774: “Absented Himself,” December 5, 1774; “Fifty Pounds Reward,” March 13, 1775; “Runaway,” June 16, 1777; “Ten Pounds Reward,” April 3, 1775. For additional examples of “artful” slaves, see Freddie L. Parker, Running for Freedom: Slave Runaways in North Carolina, 1775–1840 (New York: Garland, 1993); John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

  11. “Absented Himself,” South Carolina Gazette, December 5, 1774.

  12. Robinson, Black Marxism. Robinson’s work is a reminder that Black radical intellectuals have long studied the relationship between slavery, racial capitalism, and imperialism. His influence suffuses the pages of this book. For works that connect slavery, capitalism, and modern forms of racial and class oppression, see also T. Thomas Fortune, Black & White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the South (1884; New York: Washington Square Press, 2007); W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (1935; New York: Meridian Books, 1964); James, Black Jacobins; Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944); Oliver Cromwell Cox, Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (New York: Doubleday, 1948); Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Political Economy and Society (1983; Boston: South End Press, 2000); Michael O. West, William G. Martin, and Fanon Che Wilkins, eds., From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International Since the Age of Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Jeffrey B. Perry, Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883–1918 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Paul Ortiz and Derrick White, “C. L. R. James on Oliver Cox’s Caste, Class, and Race: An Introduction,” New Politics 15, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 43–47; and Samuel Proctor Oral History Program, eds., “C. L. R. James: The Class Basis of the Race Question in the United States,” New Politics 15, no. 5 (Winter 2006): 48–60.

  13. Cedric J. Robinson and Elizabeth P. Robinson, preface, Futures of Black Radicalism, ed. Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin (London: Verso, 2017), 3.

  14. Paul Ortiz, “‘Washington, Toussaint, and Bolívar, the Glorious Advocates of Liberty’: Black Internationalism and Reimagining Emancipation,” in Rethinking American Emancipation: Legacies of Slavery and the Quest for Black Freedom, ed. William A. Link and James J. Broomall (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 187–215; Paul Ortiz, “Anti-Imperialism as a Way of Life: Emancipatory Internationalism and the Black Radical Tradition in the Americas,” in Johnson and Alex Lubin, Futures of Black Radicalism.

  15. Staughton Lynd and David Waldstreicher, “Free Trade, Sovereignty, and Slavery: Toward an Economic Interpretation of American Independence,” William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 4 (October 2011): 597–630; Blumrosen, Slave Nation.

  16. Gerald Horne, The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America (New York: New York University Press, 2014). In the fall of 1774, an emergency meeting of Charleston’s General Committee was called to hear a report of the colony’s delegates to the Continental Congress. The delegates had argued for enhanced representation for “rice and indigo planters” in the Continental Congress. The local committee called for elections and stated “that the only Persons qualified to vote for such Deputies be, every white Freeholder and other free white Men” who possessed a substantial amount of property. See “Charles-Town,” South Carolina Gazette, November 21, 1774. See also Jerome Nadelhaft, “The Somerset Case and Slavery: Myth, Reality, and Repercussions,” Journal of Negro History 51 (1966): 193–201; David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 480–501.

  17. “Charles-Town.”

  18. “Extract of a Letter from London, February 10, 1775,” South Carolina Gazette, May 29, 1775.

  19. Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (1961; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 22.

  20. “Third Draft by Jefferson Before June 1776,” Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-01-02-0161-0002 (accessed May 9, 2017).

  21. The Writings of Thom
as Paine, ed. Moncure Daniel Conway (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1894), 7.

  22. Ibid.

  23. Staughton Lynd, Class Conflict, Slavery, and the United States Constitution (1967; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 180.

  24. “Taxation No Tyranny: An Answer to the Revolutions and Address of the American Congress, by Samuel Johnson,” 1775, http://www.samueljohnson.com/tnt.html (accessed January 26, 2016).

  25. Timothy Mather Cooley, Sketches of the Life and Character of the Rev. Lemuel Haynes, A.M. (New York: John S. Taylor, 1839), 45–48; Ruth Bogin, “The Battle of Lexington: A Patriotic Ballad by Lemuel Haynes,” William and Mary Quarterly 42, no. 4 (October 1985): 499–506; Rita Roberts, “Patriotism and Political Criticism: The Evolution of Political Consciousness in the Mind of a Black Revolutionary Soldier,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 27, no. 4 (Summer 1994): 569–88. For more information on Haynes, see also “The National Capital,” New York Globe, February 2, 1884; “Black History,” Greater Milwaukee Star, October 19, 1968.

  26. Ruth Bogin, “ ‘Liberty Further Extended’: A 1776 Antislavery Manuscript by Lemuel Haynes,” William and Mary Quarterly 40, no. 1 (January 1983): 85–105.

  27. Ibid., 94–95.

  28. Articles by Arthur A. Schomburg: “Free Negroes in the Formation of the American Republic,” New York Amsterdam News, February 12, 1930; “Crispus Attucks—Free Patriot,” New York Amsterdam News, August 24, 1935; “Jupiter Hammon Before the New York African Society,” New York Amsterdam News, January 22, 1930.

  29. Gail Buckley, American Patriots: The Story of Blacks in the Military from the Revolution to Desert Storm (New York: Random House, 2002), 4. See also J. A. Rogers, “Ruminations: Crispus Attucks, Revolutionary Martyr,” New York Amsterdam News, February 28, 1934.

  30. “Friends of Haiti to Send Funds to Restore Citadel of Christophe,” Negro Star (Wichita, KS), August 19, 1932; “Hayti’s Aid in 1779: How Eight Hundred of Her Freedmen Fought for America,” New York Tribune, July 6, 1921.