Republicans of the 1970s were similar to the Florida Spaniards of the 1730s. President Richard Nixon’s administration provided the initial funding and support for the building of Soul City. At the time, Nixon was looking to entice more African Americans into the Republican fold through the embrace of “Black capitalism,” which he considered the only appropriate form for the popular new movement for Black Power. But slavery was capitalism. And it was capitalism that had lured rural and Southern Black workers to factories in cities, especially in the North and West in the mid-twentieth century, only to abandon many of those factories and cities by the century’s end in search of cheaper, less-regulated, less-unionized shores. Nixon promised Black capitalism would be a solvent to the woes that racial capitalism created for Black people who were willing to break from the plantation of antiracist activism. But Nixon’s motives were not genuine. It was a political ploy to siphon votes while hijacking the idea of Black Power for disempowering ends.
Similarly, in the 1730s the generosity that the Spanish Floridians extended to Africans who had escaped enslavement was less than authentic. They positioned Fort Mose close to the northern Florida border as a defensive buffer between St. Augustine and the potential encroachment of British enslavers in the Carolinas and the newly formed colony of Georgia in 1733.
Georgia’s proximity allowed British militias to base-camp closer to the Florida settlements. Spanish authorities needed Black laborers to fortify Spain’s economic investments throughout Florida, and they armed and weaponized formerly enslaved Black militias to fend off British invaders.
When Spain gave up Florida in 1763, it resettled some of its Black subjects in Matanzas, Cuba, where, as Landers writes, “Spanish support was never sufficient,” and the former Fort Mose inhabitants “suffered terrible privations.” When Spain took Florida back in 1784, it “made no effort to reestablish either Indian missions or the free black town of Mose.”
Similarly, for Soul City, when Nixon resigned under charges of corruption in 1974, the federal government bailed on Soul City, allowing it to collapse before it had a chance to flourish. The “Soul Tech” job training and business incubator center that was supposed to be the anchor institution of Soul City became a county jail—a symbol of the type of cities into which Black souls would be herded in the coming decades.
When Black conservatives urge their neighbors to flee the plantation, it’s not clear what or where they want Black people to flee to. Neither Republicans nor Democrats have offered somewhere safe. Certainly, African Americans have been creating sanctuaries in the United States throughout history, since the genesis of Fort Mose, but the United States has yet to honor any of them.
BEFORE REVOLUTION
Morgan Parker
Just crops. Just nooses. Wild
nerve. Soon as a hurricane gets
a name, it has breath, New lungs.
No use in looking back, only cost.
And so Man spat on the land, made her
take his name. Kingdom, Destiny, no other gods.
Before Jack Johnson. Before Malcolm. Before Nat Turner.
Before Bill Cosby. Before Cornel West.
Before Sly. Before Garvey. Before Stokely.
And Man say let freedom be a woman. Had to have her so
they took her. Just like a man
to name war lust
Before Colin Powell. Before Kanye West. Before Roc-a-
Fella. Before their heads were
cash, we were. Before Wall Street was a public
slave market on Wall Street. Feet and lemons
in the open. Before a flood, wickedness is
just another way to be almighty.
And there was
full moon, and there was half moon,
and there was new moon, solstice, harvest, waiting,
wading. Most of war
is waiting,
aftermath.
The Rapture was coming, all right.
Before freedom was something
else. Before this language. Before freedom of speech and freedom
of press and the anti-alien/inalienable right to shoot people,
before the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, labor unions, Oakland Panthers
serving breakfast, the Philadelphia MOVE bombing, Fred Hampton’s blood
on soaked mattress, there was war. There was always war. People always
got shot. Before African American but not before nigger, colored, Negro.
Before AAVE, before Black America. Before we voted
we won. Before New Orleans we invented jazz. Before this
revolution and that Revolution and this revelation.
Before California, before Rodney King, before Trayvon Martin, before justifiable
homicide, before manifest destiny, before they kept using this language.
Before Barack Obama, before Emmett Till, the crack epidemic,
the housing crash, opioids, ecstasy, before white flight.
Before Harriet Tubman before FloJo before Serena before Aretha.
Before Shirleys Chisholm and Bassey, before June Jordan and Juneteenth.
Before Roberta Flack sang “Go Up Moses.” Before Phillis Wheatley, before
the Black Happy Birthday Song, before we could call spades
spades, before we wrote us down. Before Roberta Flack said
“Pharaoh doesn’t want you, but he needs you.
My people.” Before Sojourner, Ruby Bridges.
Before Board of Education, before railroads and Hawaiian
Airlines and Alaska Airlines and the NFL. Before the wars
on homelessness and poverty and terror and security
and Black trans women and Black women driving cars and Black girls
at pool parties and Black kids on playgrounds and corners and Black
veterans Black single mothers Black schizophrenics Black
professors Black athletes. Before we wasted all the water.
Before Flint, Michigan, Watergate, thoughts and prayers,
before semiautomatics. “Without you there is no pharaoh.”
Before The Arsenio Hall Show. Before it was televised. Before Blaxploitation
and Lil’ Kim and Dennis Rodman and before NYPD surveillance footage and
dash-cam footage the Lorraine Hotel and before Tamir Rice and Oscar Grant.
Before the West, west coast rap, west coast wineries, Mexican immigrants.
Before Ellis Island, before Japanese internment camps, before the gold rush,
cop shows, award shows, westerns, chain restaurants, Asian fusion,
the temperance movement and the suffragette movement
Hillary Clinton and Eleanor Roosevelt and Sandra Bullock in The Blind Side.
Before Jonestown. Before Selma. Before we almost lost Detroit.
Before Presidents of the United States of America. Before a noose
was a figure of speech. Before unimaginable
tragedy. No one put their hands over their hearts.
1739–1744
THE STONO REBELLION
Wesley Lowery
I often think back to a balmy spring afternoon when I stood—my parents to my right and my two younger brothers to my left—beneath the rows of coffin-shaped pillars erected to chronicle a recent era of American terrorism.
We had traveled here, to Montgomery, Alabama, in early 2018, about one month after the grand opening of this exhibit: the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which is a fancy name for what is a gut-punch of a memorial. It features 804 slabs of stone, suspended in midair as if hanging from tree branches, that represent every American county where a man, woman, or child was lynched.
We had c
ome not only to see but to search. As we entered the walkway that snaked beneath the pillars, my father recited the names of four or five counties, primarily in rural North Carolina, and reminded us of various married names and divergent branches of his family tree. Our eyes searched the roster etched into each stone. We weren’t looking for a specific name or incident—there aren’t any known lynching victims in our lineage—but we knew it was possible, perhaps even likely, that at least one of those memorialized here would be recognizable as kin.
As my eyes interrogated each name of the slain, my ears drew me to a conversation just a few feet away, where another group stood, marveling, beneath a stone coffin. They appeared to be a family. They were all white. I can’t recall precisely what I overheard. But I can’t forget the realization, in that moment, that this family had no counties for which they’d been instructed to search.
This family was here to learn what my own had always known. While some nations vow never to forget, our American battle has always been over what we allow ourselves to remember.
Our historical record, we know, is subjective. Not every account is written down. The distinction between equity and injustice, riot and uprising, hinges on whose hand holds the pen. So often, it seems, our history is hiding from us, preventing the possibility that we dare look back and tell the truth—afraid of what doing so may require of us now.
Perhaps this is why we’ve been allowed to remember so little about the Stono Rebellion.
By the mid-eighteenth century, slavery had expanded so rapidly in the colony that would become the state of South Carolina that it was home to a Black majority. “Carolina looks more like a negro country than like a country settled by white people,” Swiss traveler Samuel Dyssli wrote in 1737. “In Charleston and that neighborhood there are calculated to be always 20 blacks, who are called negroes, to one white man, but they are all slaves.” The ratio wasn’t quite that lopsided, but it was significant nonetheless. By 1740, Carolina’s Black population was estimated at more than 39,100, while the white population stood at just 20,000.
But the booming population of enslaved people brought with it the same nightmare that has long tormented oppressive minorities: what happens when they realize that they have us outnumbered? Those fears were only exacerbated by a promise from the Spanish, eager to destabilize the British colonies, to free any enslaved person who made it to their territory in what is now Florida, specifically to St. Augustine. Soon the white slaveholders of Carolina would see their night terror come to life.
In the early hours of Sunday, September 9, 1739, about twenty Black rebels met on a bank of the Stono River, twenty miles southwest of Charleston, to carry out the plan that they had formed the night prior.
First, they marched to the Stono Bridge and broke into Hutchenson’s store, which they robbed of guns and ammunition. The two white storekeepers were beheaded. Then they continued south, breaking into homes, executing the white families they found, and adding dozens of additional enslaved people to their ranks. At least twenty-three white Carolinians were left dead. The rebels are said to have acquired at least two drums, hoisted a flag, and indulged in defiant shouts of “Liberty!”
“Having found rum in some houses and drunk freely of it, they halted in an open field, and began to sing and dance, by way of triumph,” wrote Alexander Hewatt, a white Charleston pastor, in his account of the uprising.
But the rebels would never make it to St. Augustine. In fact, most died in that very field—descended upon by an armed local militia.
The white residents vowed to never let this happen again. The colony’s House of Assembly took steps to curtail the growing Black majority, implementing a ten-year moratorium on the importation of Black people and passing the Negro Act of 1740, which restricted the rights of enslaved people to assemble and educate themselves—undercutting the chances that future generations would discover the promise of freedom made by the Spanish to the South. For decades, white residents feared that some of the rebels, who had fled into the forest, would come back and again terrorize their towns.
The history we’ve been given recalls Stono—one of the bloodiest uprisings of enslaved people in the history of the land that would become America—as a cautionary tale, the story of the dangers of allowing Black men and women to dream of liberty. There’s nothing to suggest that the rebels at Stono were political visionaries, that they aspired to overthrow the system of enslavement and plunder in which they lived each day as victims. They most likely just wanted to escape.
Generations of American storytellers have found that, when it comes to tales of uprising and rebellion, banishment digests easier than recollection. But what do we lose when we refuse to sit with the truth? What do we gain when we allow the rebels at Stono to tell their own story, when we see them not as rebels but as revolutionaries? What if the uprising, the riot, is not a story of disorder but one of a fearless fight for freedom?
History has left us just one known account of the rebellion from a nonwhite perspective, as part of the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s. This is an interview with George Cato, purportedly a direct descendant—the great-great-grandson—of the rebellion’s leader, whose family had orally preserved the details of the insurrection for nearly two hundred years.
“I sho’ does come from dat old stock who had de misfortune to be slaves but who decided to be men, at one and de same,” Cato told his interviewer. “De first Cato slave we knows ’bout was plum willin to lay down his life for de right, as he see it.”
1744–1749
LUCY TERRY PRINCE
Nafissa Thompson-Spires
A ninety-six-year-old Black woman massages her spine for a moment, kneads her Achilles, lifts her skirt slightly, secures her booted ankles into the stirrups, and starts on a long trek, “over the Green Mountains,” to place flowers on the grave of her husband.
She has made the painful ride annually since 1794, and when she waves, a wry smile in her eyes, passersby remark, “Luce Bijah is still at it.” Twenty years before, they shook their heads, incredulous, as Lucy Terry Prince rode home from making a successful stand before the Vermont supreme court. And since the eighteenth century, they sang her song with a knowing in their recitation.
Much of the extant research about Terry Prince focuses on the significance of her literary contributions. Born into slavery around 1730 and taken to Deerfield, Massachusetts, from Rhode Island, Terry Prince composed the first known poetry by an African American. She is customarily situated alongside Phillis Wheatley—the first African American with a published poetry book (1773)—and Jupiter Hammon, the first published African American poet, author of the 1761 broadside An Evening Thought; Salvation by Christ With Penitential Cries.
Terry Prince’s “Bars Fight” remains the only known poetic work by its author and was preserved orally until its 1854 front-page regional print publication in the Springfield Daily Republican and later in Josiah Holland’s 1855 History of Western Massachusetts. The ballad recounts the eponymous incident when “King George’s War between England and France broke out in 1745, with the Abenaki Indians, who had been displaced from Massachusetts to northern New England and Canada, allying with the French.”
What I’m most interested in here, however, is not the poem itself but the spirit and power structures that produced—and protected—Lucy Terry Prince. She stood before major government officials and is memorialized as an artist, but much of her life—including whether she actually “wrote” the poem—is shrouded in mystique and urban legends.
Baptized in 1735, Lucy was possibly born on the African continent and brought to Rhode Island, where she was purchased by Ebenezer Wells and subsequently moved to Deerfield. Church records confirm that in 1756 she married Abijah Prince, a free man who had secured his freedom after his master’s death in 1749 and somehow purchased Lucy’s freedom as well. They settled in Northfield, where Prince held “some real estate
rights” to “three divisions of the undivided land.” It is clear that the Terry Prince family, which soon included six children, was well known in their community. Neighbors called the brook bubbling through their property “Bijah’s Brook,” and their house “a place of resort for the young people of the ‘Street,’ ” their front porch a pulpit, a site “where folks were entertained and enlightened by recitations, music, and poetry.” Even if much of her mobility came through her husband, Terry Prince’s rhetorical cunning made her a respected and noted figure in her own right.
Terry Prince’s emancipation, freedom, and property already marked her as somewhat remarkable, and she made waves that could have ended in disaster in two different legal incidents. When in 1762 Bijah stood to inherit a hundred acres from a grantee in what is now Guilford, Vermont, Lucy and Bijah became entangled in an ongoing legal battle over this land with a white man who tried to claim it. As the case escalated through the 1790s, Lucy litigated before the Vermont supreme court, making her the first woman—and Black woman—to argue before the court and to win her case at that.
When liberal arts institution Williams College refused to admit her son Festus because of his race, Terry Prince advocated on his behalf during a three-hour argument. Her son was not admitted to the school, but we cannot understate the magnitude of Terry Prince’s argumentation and willingness to take on white individuals and institutions in the eighteenth-century United States. Although race was not yet the fixed construct that it is today, Terry Prince’s actions certainly could have compromised her and her family’s safety.
When she died in 1821 at age ninety-seven, the Massachusetts paper The Franklin Herald published an obituary calling her “a woman of colour” and noting that “in this remarkable woman there was an assemblage of qualities rarely to be found among her sex. Her volubility was exceeded by none, and in general the fluency of her speech was not destitute of instruction and education. She was much respected among her acquaintance.”
Four Hundred Souls Page 11