Think Black

by Clyde W. Ford

  Anthony Walton, writing in the January 1999 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, lays out the case succinctly:

  The history of African-Americans during the past 400 years is traditionally narrated as an ongoing struggle against oppression and indifference on the part of the American mainstream, a struggle charted as an upward arc progressing toward ever more justice and opportunity. This description is accurate, but there is another, equally true way of narrating that history, and its implications are as frightening for the country as a whole as they are for blacks as a group. The history of African-Americans since the discovery of the New World is the story of their encounter with technology, an encounter that has proved perhaps irremediably devastating to their hopes, dreams, and possibilities.9

  A natural tendency to recoil at Walton’s assessment is to be expected. Technology, the common wisdom proposes, is value-neutral. What built-in evil lurks in the meshing of gears, the spinning of wheels, or the glow of a cell phone or computer screen? What inherently nefarious purpose is found in bits of silicon used for an electronic circuit, or in the electrons shuttling between those bits of silicon? How can technology ever be viewed as thwarting the aspirations of any one group, such as Blacks in America? Technology may be used in loathsome ways by certain individuals or groups, but technology itself is neither inherently good nor inherently bad. Here, the common wisdom is wrong, or at least tragically confused.

  Technology may be neither inherently good nor inherently evil, but it is not inherently value-free. Technology is exploitation of natural resources, both nonliving and living, for the benefit of a segment of humanity defined by the technology makers. Those meshing gears were once metal ore extracted from the earth; the rubber on spinning wheels once ran through the veins of trees; the fuel that turns the engines that spin those wheels once lay buried deep underground or under the sea; the glow from cell phone or computer screens comes from liquid crystals fabricated from natural resources or by technology that is itself fabricated from natural resources; those bits of silicon that power so much of modern high technology originate from composite minerals found in 90 percent of the earth’s crust before extraction; and our cell phones, computers, and other technology are manufactured by human beings, often working in harsh conditions in countries far removed from the technology’s consumers. Technology exploits human and natural resources for the benefit of some, but not all, segments of humanity.

  Along the shores of the Tagus River in Lisbon, Portugal, there stands a magnificent 170-foot steel and cement monument known as the Padrão dos Descobrimentos (Monument of the Discoveries). It was erected in 1960 to commemorate the death, five hundred years earlier, of Prince Henry the Navigator. Designed as the prow of a huge caravel, the principal ship construction of that age, the padrão features Henry standing at the bow pulpit. Behind him, along what would be the decks of this monumental ship, are thirty-three figures on the east and west sides, commemorating other significant explorers of the age. Ferdinand Magellan, the first European to circumnavigate the globe, is there. Vasco da Gama, the first to round Cape Horn and navigate a sea route to India, is there. So too is Gomes Eannes de Zurara, who chronicled the rape, pillage, and plunder of the West African coast by these early European explorers.10

  In his hands, Henry holds a replica of a caravel or carrack, a ship whose sailing technology allowed the Portuguese to round the westernmost tip of Africa and return safely. Older, shallower ships known as cogs plied the Mediterranean for centuries before caravels, but cogs were ill-equipped for the Atlantic. Trade winds made the voyage south from Portugal to West Africa relatively easy, but the return voyage was much more dangerous because cogs had to tack far out to sea—almost as far as the coast of South America—in order to catch prevailing winds affording them a way back to Europe.

  Caravels were designed from cogs but built deeper and had three or four masts and an enlarged cargo space. Caravels handled rough seas better, sailed closer to the wind, and made for shorter and safer return voyages from West Africa. Magellan, da Gama, Columbus—all of the early navigators sailed caravels.

  While the term Age of Discovery connotes high-mindedness, these early explorers sailed under no such beneficent prime directive. Dum Diversas (Until Different), the papal bull issued by Pope Nicholas V to King Alfonso V of Portugal in 1452, perhaps best represents the sweeping “prime directive” of that age:

  We weighing all and singular the premises with due meditation, and noting that since we had formerly by other letters of ours granted among other things free and ample faculty to the aforesaid King Alfonso—to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to apply and appropriate to himself and his successors the kingdoms, dukedoms, counties, principalities, dominions, possessions, and goods, and to convert them to his and their use and profit—by having secured the said faculty, the said King Alfonso, or, by his authority, the aforesaid infante, justly and lawfully has acquired and possessed, and doth possess, these islands, lands, harbors, and seas, and they do of right belong and pertain to the said King Alfonso and his successors.11

  Caravel technology, which enabled the Portuguese to reach West Africa, was designed to extract the human and natural resources of the continent. Little wonder, then, that caravels, with their large holds, carried gold and other precious metals but also enslaved Africans, first to work in Portuguese colonies and then for sale in far-flung ports, notably in the Americas. Caravels ruled the slave trade until replaced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by galleons, which were even better equipped for their mission as slavers.

  From cog to caravel to galleon, Western technology progressed in almost direct proportion to its devastation of progress in racial relations. Western technology in Africa stood at the forefront of slavery in other ways as well. Reporting on his travels in 1591 to Angola, Portuguese writer Duarte Lopez noted that “one cavalry soldier is equal to a hundred negroes, who are greatly afraid of horsemen, and, above all, of those who fire the guns and pieces of artillery.”12 A page later, Lopez observes with surprise that Angola “is peculiarly rich in mines of silver and copper, and there is a greater abundance of various metals than in any other country in the world.”13

  In a vicious cycle, African and Arab slavers traded captured human beings for the advanced Western technology of the day: textiles, metal products, and firearms. In turn, they used the superior firepower they obtained against other tribes they wished to vanquish and whose members they then captured as slaves.

  In the cotton gin lies a similar story of technological progress presaging retreat in racial relations. By the late eighteenth century, the agrarian economy of the southern United States, built on slave labor, the human technology of the age, lay faltering, and the economic wisdom of slavery lay in question. For reasons of geography and the economics of production, cotton, tobacco, sugar, indigo, and rice, the principal cash crops of the South, all required increasingly more money to produce and returned increasingly less profit to southern planters. In particular, cotton plantation owners found themselves paying more and more for the upkeep of their slaves, with less and less returned from the sale of their cotton. This economic equation changed dramatically with the introduction of a new technology—the cotton gin—in 1793, to which Eli Whitney lay patent claim.

  Whitney’s gin could process fifty pounds of cotton lint a day, separating cotton fibers from seed. What southern planters now needed was an inexpensive way to grow and pick cotton to feed the hungry, new machines, which would produce the raw materials for northern textile mills, which then exported their textiles worldwide. For that labor, the South turned once again to the sale and purchase of slaves. Suddenly, cotton became wildly profitable, and a technology some hoped would save labor and thereby
reduce the South’s reliance on slavery had just the opposite effect. The 1790 census recorded approximately 700,000 slaves in the South. By the 1860 census, that number had increased to nearly 4 million human beings held in perpetual bondage.14

  An advance in technology led to yet another retrenchment in race relations. But cotton’s techno-racial roller coaster did stop there. With Emancipation and the advent of automated cotton-picking machines in the later nineteenth century, the need for a huge cotton labor force dwindled. Blacks, eager now for new opportunities and an escape from the brutality, headed for northern cities en masse. Yet again, an advance in technology resulted in a decay in race relations as these internally displaced people often traded the overt racism of the South for the subtle, yet equally devastating, racism of the North: lack of housing, lack of educational opportunities, lack of health care, lack of jobs—the very same issues that plague race relations to this day.

  6

  To Speak of Rivers

  My grandfather John Baptist Ford died at home on March 2, 1947, four years before my birth. His body lay in the parlor room of the family home on 221st Street so family members and friends could pay their final respects prior to his funeral at Trinity Baptist Church on March 8. Before being called a “living room,” the parlor was known as the “death room” precisely because it received the body of deceased family members. As a child, I lived upstairs with my family, and hearing stories of my grandfather’s body lying downstairs terrified me. I believed his ghost haunted the first floor of our house, where my grandmother lived, and I cried whenever my parents left me downstairs in her care.

  But all paths in quest of my father lead through a better understanding of my grandfather. And to understand my grandfather, I need to speak of rivers, as the poet Langston Hughes so eloquently wrote.1

  “History is a great river,” said Vincent Harding.

  The late Vincent Harding—my mentor and longtime friend, Martin Luther King Jr.’s speechwriter, and an esteemed scholar of Black history—often pointed out that history, while bound by time, does not flow like time in a straight line from some long-ago source to the present and then forward into the future. Instead, like a river, history follows a serpentine course of twists and turns, bends and back channels. Tame and constrained at times, wild and free at others, it moves inexorably toward the sea.2

  Vincent explored many of the backwaters and unnamed places along the river of Black history to tell the stories of the people who lived along those shores and how their lives and strivings contributed to that mighty river’s unstoppable flow. The lives of Black men like Tommy Barnes, sage of the elevators, can be situated along the shores of those backwaters, so too the life of my grandfather John Baptist Ford. The impact of these unknown men, as Vincent never failed to point out, was as important as the lives of men whose names we know, such as Booker T. Washington or W. E. B. Du Bois, for the efforts of the lesser-known among us also altered the course of that mighty river forever.

  The flow of the stories of men like my grandfather and Tommy Barnes begins upstream from the present day—indeed, very far upstream. It goes at least as far back as the fifteenth century, when Black sailors were not an uncommon sight on European quays. From there, it passes on to the caravels that carried early Europeans around Cape Verde to plunder mineral and human wealth along the West African coast. The popular version of history then tells of millions of souls—some 60 million or more—ripped from Africa’s shores, transported across the Atlantic through the horrendous nightmare known as the Middle Passage, and sold into slavery to feed the unquenchable economic and social appetite of a growing American nation.

  This popular version of African American history is not wrong; it is just not complete.

  Even as European technology first met race—and gained the upper hand—from the eighteenth century until Emancipation, enslaved and free Blacks figured significantly in the Atlantic maritime industry. These “Black Jacks,” as they were known, helped shape the future course, and speed, of the river of Black history.3

  By the early 1800s, Black men worked at 18 percent of all American seafaring jobs,4 a remarkable number when the 1800 census also recorded Blacks as just over 18 percent of the total American population.5 Black Jacks endured the owners, the captains, the whips, the fears, and the general privations and hardships of being sailors, while also enduring the brutality and racism they encountered being Black and being at sea. In exchange, they enjoyed the adventure, the relative freedom, and the autonomy of a sailor’s life. Aboard ships, they worked as cooks and deckhands, as first mates, and, in some cases, even as captains.

  Many held tightly to their Seamen’s Protection Certificate, issued by the United States beginning in 1796, which identified them as citizens under the protection of America both abroad and at home, regardless of race. An anomaly to be sure, yet this was one of the first official documents declaring free Blacks to be citizens of this country. Black Jacks returned from sea not only with these documents, but with good news and good hope. Black seamen, slaves and free, saw a world of promise beyond slavery, and they returned to Black communities throughout the United States with just such news, helping to agitate and organize for change.

  “Worldly and often multilingual slave sailors regularly subverted plantation discipline,” notes nautical historian W. Jeffrey Bolster.6 A Black seafaring captain, Paul Cuffee, helped foment the largest slave rebellion in South Carolina history, led by Denmark Vesey. Frederick Douglass used his skill as an enslaved ship’s caulker, and his extensive maritime knowledge, to deck out in sailor’s garb and borrow a Seamen’s Protection Certificate from a free Black sailor. Then on September 3, 1838, he slipped away from Baltimore to Philadelphia by train, blending in unnoticed among other free Black Jacks. From Philadelphia he traveled to New York City and, ultimately as a free man, to the shipbuilding town of New Bedford, Massachusetts.7 Blacks also filled the ranks of pirates, led by men like Edward Teach, also known as Blackbeard, and William Lewis of the Flying Gang.8

  When they were paid, Black sailors made good money for their travails. They provided for families on land and helped build institutions such as churches, which became the pillars of Black communities across the nation. More than one Black sailor slipped effortlessly from the pulpit of a ship to the pulpit of a church, where they could preach and teach from real-world experience, planting seeds that would one day flower into a mighty river’s roar for freedom and justice.

  * * *

  The Triangular Trade, a euphemism for the Atlantic Slave Trade, is actually misleading. This trade was not three-sided: from West Africa with humans, to the Americas to sell humans for goods, to British ports to sell those goods. In fact, is was quadrilateral: from Africa to the West Indies, to North America, and then on to Britain. Black sailors, some slave, some free, went to sea on every leg of these transatlantic routes.

  Briton Hammon’s seafaring autobiography, A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, a Negro Man,9 is astonishing on many accounts. It stands among a half dozen Black autobiographies, all published in English before 1800, all written by Black mariners, as the first salvo in two genres of uniquely African American literature: slave narratives and Black maritime sagas, a genre to which several of my books, including this present one, directly trace their literary ancestry. Hammon’s work, while thin, reads like a short-form, thirteen-year, Odyssean epic.

  In 1747, Hammon negotiated with his slave master, General John Winslow of the British army, to leave the relative safety and security of Massachusetts “with an Intention to go a Voyage to Sea.” He signed on to a thirty-day journey from Plymouth to Jamaica to pick up a load of bloodwood and then return. But a poorly navigated ship left Hammon and his crewmates stranded on a reef off Cape Florida, where a band of Native Americans slaughtered all but him. They either sympathized with his plight or recognized his greater barter value alive. Hammon escaped on a Spanish schooner to Cuba, only to be captured by a pres
s-gang for service aboard a ship bound for Spain. But Hammon refused and instead was sentenced to five years in a Havana dungeon. Upon Hammon’s release from the dungeon, the Spanish governor of Havana claimed him as his slave. After two failed escape attempts from Cuba, Hammon managed to escape with the help of an English lieutenant aboard the Hercules, bound for London. Wounded in a battle with a French warship, in ill health, and destitute in London, Hammon signed aboard a slaver bound for West Africa. In 1759, just prior to the slaver’s departure, a chance meeting with General Winslow on a London street enabled Hammon to abort his voyage to West Africa in favor of a return journey to Massachusetts.

  Hammon’s tale, while it may have been the first of only a handful published by Black sailors, hewed closely to the lives of many Blacks who went to sea in the Age of Sail. From the West Indies to the Americas to Europe and even to Africa, these mariners, slave and free, sailed to every corner of the Black Atlantic community, where they met and interacted with all manner of individuals. They transported more than just the cargo in the holds of their ships. As newsmongers, Black seamen networked the Atlantic, conveying information to widely disparate points of the African diaspora. Their efforts helped knit together conglomerates of African people into cohesive communities of color. As world travelers, Black Jacks began the arduous task of forging a new identity for the people of these communities, one based neither on the Africa they had been ripped from nor the America that despised and enslaved them, creating a unique dual identity somewhere betwixt the two.

  Then Emancipation occurred.

  After 1863, steam had freed ships from the vicissitudes of the wind, and the Emancipation Proclamation had freed slaves, in theory, from the sting of the master’s whip. The dance of technology and race moved on yet again. And as before, with an advance in one came a decline in the other. Under steam, fewer ships were required, and those that did sail were larger, requiring fewer hands on deck. Under Jim Crow, a vicious new form of oppression arrived, and Blacks could no longer find work at sea as those dwindling positions became almost exclusively the prerogative of Whites. Besides, with the cotton gin, southern White planters desired more hands in their fields, rather than on decks. The era of the Black Jack had finally crossed the bar.