Looking back on the past four hundred years, this nation’s story of racism can seem almost inevitable. But it didn’t have to be this way. At critical turning points throughout history, people made deliberate choices to construct and reinforce a racist America. Our generation has the opportunity to make different choices, ones that lead to greater human dignity and justice, but only if we pay heed to our history and respond with the truth and courage that confronting racism requires.
* * *
—
In 1667 those Virginia lawmakers who insisted that baptism did not free an enslaved person also put themselves in bondage to a racialized corruption of Christianity. A recovery of the earthly and spiritual equality of all people, both in theory and in practice, is the only way to redeem religion from racism.
1669–1674
THE ROYAL AFRICAN COMPANY
David A. Love
In November 1998, I first visited Liverpool while working as a human rights campaigner and a spokesperson for Amnesty International UK. During my journeys to this English port city, I experienced the impact of the transatlantic slave trade in unexpected ways.
I encountered Black Brits whose ancestors had arrived in England hundreds of years earlier. They reminded me of the British role in the triangular trade of Black people and goods across West Africa, Europe, and the Americas, and of the Middle Passage, which served as an underwater resting place for millions of souls who succumbed to the hellish journey warehoused in slave ship dungeons.
What struck me most about Liverpool was the extent to which the city visibly and tangibly benefited from the slave trade. Evidence of the wealth amassed from human trafficking is found in much of the city’s architecture. African heads and figures are carved into buildings and adorn such structures as the town hall and the Cunard Building. The entrance to the Martins Bank (Barclays) Building—designed by architect Herbert Rowse—features a relief by sculptor George Herbert Tyson Smith of two African boys shackled at the neck and ankles and carrying bags of money. It is “a reminder that Liverpool was built by slavers’ money and that its bankers grew fat off the whipped backs of Africans when they were bankrolling cargoes of strange fruit bound for the Americas.”
The enslavement of human beings amounts to a grave violation of human rights. The institution of slavery is a sin, a form of genocide, and a system of racial oppression, exploitation, and intergenerational theft that robs people of their freedom of movement, expression, and self-determination. It endeavors to deny people their dignity and humanity, among other things. From the vantage point of the monarch, the oligarch, the slave trader, or the banker, however, human trafficking is first and foremost a for-profit endeavor, a business enterprise designed to enrich its partners and shareholders. Moreover, the profit motive justifies the abuses, and the attendant systems of racial oppression and white supremacy that certainly must follow.
Responsible for transporting more African people to the Americas than any other entity, the Royal African Company (RAC) of England was the most important institution involved in the transatlantic slave trade. Through this company, England developed its infrastructure of human trafficking and supplied Africans to meet the labor demands of the lucrative Caribbean sugar plantations. Between 1673 and 1683, England’s share of the slave trade increased from 33 percent to three-quarters of the market—rendering the nation the global leader of the slave trade at the expense of the Dutch and the French. A precursor to British imperialism and colonialism, the trading company expanded England’s role in the African continent, exploiting the gold and later the human resources on the West Coast in Gambia and Ghana.
The RAC was a business deal and a corporate monopoly designed to financially enrich the royal Stuart family—specifically King Charles II and his brother the Duke of York, who later became King James II—and to allow them independence from Parliament. Originally known as the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa, the company was granted a monopoly on the shipment of slaves to the Caribbean under the Navigation Act of 1660, which allowed only English-owned ships to enter colonial ports. Reorganized under a royal charter in 1672, the renamed Royal African Company was granted a legal monopoly on the British slave trade between the African continent and the West Indies and “had the whole, entire and only trade for buying and selling bartering and exchanging of for or with any Negroes, slaves, goods, wares, merchandise whatsoever.” It was a joint stock company; its investors purchased shares and received returns on those shares. These stockholders elected a governor who was a member of the royal family, a subgovernor, deputy governor, and twenty-four assistants.
In addition to exporting slaves, the company also monopolized the trade in gold, ivory, malagueta pepper, and redwood dye. The company was authorized to declare martial law and amass troops, to establish plantations, forts, and factories, and to wage war or make peace with any non-Christian nation. RAC military forts existed across five thousand miles of coastline from Cape Salé in Morocco to the Cape of Good Hope in present-day South Africa. West Africans transported to the Caribbean and Virginia were branded on their chest with the company’s initials.
A court on the West African coast was authorized to hear mercantile cases and matters involving the seizure of English interlopers who attempted to operate in violation of the company monopoly. In addition, the crown was entitled to claim two-thirds of the gold the company obtained, upon paying two-thirds of the mining expenses.
A royal proclamation addressed to John Leverett, governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1674, granted the RAC exclusive rights to travel from America to Africa for the purposes of trade, and it forbade others from carrying “Negro Servants, Gold, Elephants teeth, or any other goods and merchandise.”
Under the RAC, the slave trade brought considerable wealth to Britain and its cities, particularly the commercial center of London and the major trading ports of Liverpool and Bristol, where the slave ships originated. Ships from Liverpool carried 1.5 million enslaved Africans, or half of the human cargo kidnapped and transported by Britain.
While the RAC and the transatlantic slave trade are things of centuries past, the spirit they embody—of unbridled capitalism and monopolistic business schemes designed to monetize human suffering and reap corporate profits from a free and captive labor force—did not die with the slave trade. After all, section 1 of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution—“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction”—provides a loophole allowing for enslavement to continue.
After the Emancipation Proclamation, slavery ended in name only, as the convict lease system allowed states to lease inmates to planters and industrialists to work on plantations, railroads, and coal mines in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Like slavery, convict leasing was highly profitable and cheap, requiring little capital investment and no expenditures for the healthcare of convicts, who died off and were buried in secret graveyards. Like the slave trade and the Royal African Company, the Jim Crow system of economic exploitation was perfectly legal. The convict lease system was made possible by the Black Codes, which were like vagrancy laws that criminalized minor offenses such as loitering, allowing Black people to be swept up and thrown into chain gangs.
And today, three and a half centuries after the Royal African Company received its charter, capitalism has continued to find a way to profit from—and exploit—Black bodies. Mass incarceration and prison labor are big business, and corporate America continues to extract every penny possible from the trauma and suffering of African Americans, creating new profit centers and intergenerational wealth streams. Unjust laws—enacted through lobbying and legalized bribery on the part of corporate America, corrections officers, the Fraternal Order of Police, and other groups—promote these predatory practices. The immigration industrial complex
has criminalized undocumented immigration, and much as in the slave trade, private corporations profit from the detention of migrants and refugees as well as from the trafficking of babies and the separation of families. The Royal African Company may be long gone, but its spirit is very much alive.
1674–1679
BACON’S REBELLION
Heather C. McGhee
I found their names on a list that Virginia governor William Berkeley kept of the men executed for their part in a rebellion against his rule. My finger paused on “One Page,” and I underlined what came next: “a carpenter, formerly my servant.”
The description went on: “But for his violence used against the Royal Party, made a Colonel.” Five names later I found what I was looking for again: “One Darby, from a servant made a Captain.”
One Darby, one Page. Both were servants who became officers in Nathaniel Bacon’s rebel army in 1676, an army that included hundreds of white “bondsmen” and enslaved Africans. They nearly succeeded in overthrowing the colonial government, burning the capital of Jamestown to the ground before Bacon’s death. Governor Berkeley’s list was the first time I’d seen names and descriptions of the men who followed Bacon and changed history.
I let my imagination wander. Was Page a white indentured servant and Darby an enslaved African? Had these two men experienced, in the brief months of rebellion in 1676, something that has eluded Americans ever since: working-class solidarity across race?
I first discovered Bacon’s Rebellion while I was teaching myself American labor history. It’s a history that otherwise is full of stories of white workers fighting workers of color to maintain their place in the hierarchy of capitalism: from Irish dockworkers chasing Black longshoremen out of their jobs in the nineteenth century to white factory workers leading “hate strikes” to oppose Black promotions in the twentieth. I heard the same story when I traveled to Canton, Mississippi, in the wake of a failed union drive in 2017 and talked to autoworkers. “The whites [were] against it because the Blacks [were] for it,” one said. In the labor conflicts, the true victor was the boss, who used racial divisions as a wedge against organizing and kept employees competing for low wages.
In early colonial Virginia, work was brutal, often deadly, and for the large working class of Black, white, and Indigenous servants, it went unpaid and life was unfree. Even after servitude’s end (still a possibility under the law for some Africans at this time), common people had few opportunities to acquire land or gainful work. The colonial elite disdained and feared the mass of “idle” freedmen and fretted over the possibility of insurrection among the enslaved. The tempestuous young newcomer Nathaniel Bacon tapped into the widespread discontent in the colony and rallied more than a thousand men, waging what some historians have called America’s first revolution.
But as I read more about Bacon’s Rebellion, a fuller picture came into focus. Searching through the writings of Bacon himself (a wealthy Englishman from the same social class as his enemy, Governor Berkeley), I found few if any references to class, land, or bondage. What Bacon sought was all-out war with neighboring Indigenous tribes. He rebelled because Berkeley had made alliances with some tribes and preferred negotiation to war. Bacon’s anti-Native fervor was indiscriminate; his followers betrayed and massacred the group of Occaneechi people who helped them fight a group of Susquehannocks and relentlessly pursued a group of Pamunkey men, women, and children.
Knowing this, can we still think of Bacon’s Rebellion as a class-based, multiracial uprising against slavery, landlessness, and servitude, as some have described it? Or was it just an early example of the powerful making the powerless fight one another, this time with white and Black united, initially against Indigenous Americans?
And again we confront the problem of history: it’s usually the powerful who get to write it. Of the half-dozen or so remaining original documents about Bacon’s Rebellion, all were written by landowning white men. With only Page’s and Darby’s names and absent their stories, we may never know what drove them to war.
What we do know, however, is that the rebellion turned these captives into officers and set them free. The last men to surrender after Bacon’s death—not in battle but from dysentery—were a group of eighty Africans and twenty white men, who were tricked into surrendering with the promise of remaining free. Bacon had started his rebellion as an anti-Native crusade, but the multiracial alliance of landless freedmen, servants, and slaves who carried it on had their minds set on freedom.
But the governing white elite had their minds set on reinforcing slavery after putting down the rebellion. In 1680, four years after the rebellion, Virginia passed the Law for Preventing Negro Insurrections. It restricted the movement of enslaved people outside plantations; anyone found without a pass would be tortured with twenty lashes “well laid on” before being returned. At a time when white servants and African slaves often worked side by side, the hand of the law reached in to divide them. Prison time awaited “English, and other white men and women intermarrying with negros or mulattos.” Already any indentured white servant caught running away with an enslaved African person was liable for their entire lost term of service, meaning that the servant risked becoming permanently unfree.
The law separated the members of the lowest class by color and lifted one higher than the other. The goal, as it has been ever since, was to offer just enough racial privileges for white workers to identify with their color instead of their class. The Virginia legislature ended the penalties imposed on rebels for the insurrection of 1676, but only the white ones, removing a source of lingering solidarity among them. Post-Bacon reforms forbade Black people to carry anything that could be considered a weapon, but they made sure that every manumitted indentured servant was given a musket. Even a free Indian or Black person was forbidden to “lift up his hand in opposition against any Christian,” no matter the provocation.
A decade after Bacon, the governing class made a final decision to ensure the loyalty of white servants: simply have fewer of them. A critical mass of white working people threatened their racial slavery order, so Virginia plantation owners imported more Africans, whose rights they could drastically limit through legislation. By the end of the eighteenth century, the gentry were relying almost entirely on Africans for their labor. They stopped importing white servants from England, save to meet a Britain-imposed quota to ensure the presence of enough armed white people to defend against slave rebellions.
Why does Bacon—the myth and the reality—matter so much to those of us who care about justice today? I think we want to believe that there was once a time when people suffering from oppression together would stand up for one another, despite their color. We want to revel in the image of a Black person, perhaps like Darby, breaking his chains to become a captain in an army that brought a slaveholding colony to its knees. More desperately, now more than ever, we need to believe in the existence of a Page—a white man we’d call working-class today, refusing to settle for what W.E.B. Du Bois called the psychological wage of whiteness, and fighting instead for the freedom that can only be won in numbers.
Today, as in colonial Virginia, the wealthy and powerful maintain an unequal society with the complicity of white people who share color with them but class with almost everybody else. At the time of this writing, a man is in the White House who made promises to fight for white Americans by scapegoating immigrants and people of color, but his biggest policy accomplishment has been a massive tax handout for himself and other wealthy people.
Though my view of Bacon’s Rebellion has changed over the years, I keep coming back to it. There’s something vexingly American in the story, in the violence and in the hope—and in the lengths that the powerful will go to try to stop the most natural yearnings of all, for human connection and for freedom.
1679–1684
THE VIRGINIA LAW THAT FORBADE BEARING ARMS;
OR THE VIRGINIA LAW THA
T FORBADE ARMED SELF-DEFENSE
Kellie Carter Jackson
By now, Virginia was the ringleader of slavery. Laws created there tended to have a “Simon says” effect, as other slaveholding colonies followed suit politically, economically, and socially. Enslavement “happened one law at a time, one person at a time,” Frances Latimer explains.
Nearly 40 percent of North America’s slave population lived in Virginia. And it was growing, along with the enslavers’ fear of slave rebellions, especially after Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676. Virginia’s enslaved population grew from two thousand to three thousand in 1680 and to over sixteen thousand by 1700. The colony was becoming at risk of being an enslaved majority.
Virginia lawmakers responded by passing racist laws of control. They prohibited enslaved Africans from congregating in large numbers, even to bury their loved ones—and, notably, from bearing arms. They made it unlawful for an African American to own a gun, even for self-defense. The enslaved were not legally allowed to protect themselves from racist whites. If a white person struck an enslaved man or woman, striking back was a criminal offense.
If an enslaved person, in an effort to defend themselves, “lift[ed] up his hand in opposition against any Christian,” the punishment was thirty lashes on their bare back—that is, if the Christian saw fit not to kill them. The law offered no space for the enslaved to defend themselves, protect loved ones, or even procure food by hunting game.
The irony is that most slaveholders violated these laws in their own interests. In 1723 Virginia allowed enslaved people to bear arms when hunting in the frontier regions. The enslaved held or transported guns while their owners hunted. Some enslaved people were given guns to keep birds off rice fields. In Lowcountry plantations, slave watchmen usually carried guns, and one county in the Chesapeake fined several masters for selling arms to their slaves. By the American Revolution, “eighty Guns, some Bayonets, swords, etc.” were collected from the enslaved by their masters.
Four Hundred Souls Page 6