Four Hundred Souls

by Four Hundred Souls (retail) (epub)

  But teenagers like the Albany 3

  About whom you have to

  Worry

  Black Lives Matter!

  1819–1824

  DENMARK VESEY

  Robert Jones, Jr.

  Rapper Kanye West, who emerged an admirer of Donald Trump, once suggested that slavery was a choice. From his limited understanding of history, he attempted to convey the idea that Black people never resisted their enslavers. As such, the subjugation of enslaved people was the fault of the subjugated who failed to resist.

  Clearly, West was unfamiliar with the story of Denmark Vesey, who planned a powerful insurrection in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822.

  Enslaved until he purchased his freedom from lottery winnings (which did not, however, permit him to purchase the freedom of his wife and children), Vesey initially lived quietly as a carpenter around whom white people felt safe. So safe, in fact, that he rented or owned a house in the heart of Charleston only a few blocks away from the mayor and the governor. He gathered with other Blacks at his residence to plot the overthrow of slavery.

  In 1800 Vesey, at about thirty-three, must have noticed that Black people made up over 77 percent of the population of Charleston. It was the Blackest city in the country—and one of the most heavily policed. It seems that wherever the Black body is present, whether in solitary or in a multitude, whites feel threatened, perhaps by the ghosts of their own sins for which they have never atoned.

  Given the size of their majority, it is not difficult to determine why Vesey imagined that he, along with the rest of the Black population, could overthrow the city. He planned to raid the banks and artillery storages and leave almost every one of its white citizens, young and old, massacred in the streets, then escape to Haiti. The Haitian Revolution must have inspired Vesey’s plans since he had once been enslaved on the island to work the sugarcane fields. Smartly, he had faked an epileptic seizure to get out of doing such drudgery and had been brought to Charleston.

  For Vesey, Blackness was a unifier that superseded geography. Seeking a community of radical Black spirit, he joined the new African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, founded in 1817 in Charleston. But in 1818, the city shut it down because the whites feared Black people congregating and discovering that their lot was in fact neither ordained nor written in the sky. However, by then it was too late. Vesey had already found among its clergy and believers kindred spirits. For this was a moment when the Black church could be relied upon as a site of revolutionary, liberatory action rather than for what it has more recently been known: respectability, docility, anti-queerness, and greed—a shadow version of whiteness.

  A brutally anti-Black city, despite its Black majority, Charleston was home to the Work House, a former sugar factory that had been converted into a torture chamber for Black people. Charleston must have shown Vesey the same untold cruelties that all Black America would witness in 2015 when one Dylann Storm Roof, after being welcomed into the open arms of the congregation of Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, opened fire and murdered nine of them in the middle of prayer.

  Vesey made it clear to all his lieutenants that they were to recruit to his army only Black people who loved Black people, not those striving to be white. He was distrustful of Charleston’s biracial population, particularly the bourgeois class, whom he saw as having, at best, split loyalties. (However, he did recruit at least three biracial men into his army.) What he achieved in terms of organization is remarkable: he recruited as many as nine thousand Black people under the single banner of their own liberation, willing to risk life and limb to attain the dignity afforded to horseflies but denied to them.

  What must have stung no less acutely than a lash from the whip, however, was that Vesey’s meticulous strategies were undone by other Black people. As much as by the superior military strength and numbers of the white opposing force, the possibility of Black liberation is often undermined by Black people who have been so successfully indoctrinated by white supremacist principles that the idea of mass Black freedom is threatening or, worse, unimaginable. What motivated these men (alarmingly, there is no record of any women being recruited either to aid in the rebellion or to undermine it, though they must have certainly played a significant role) to act on behalf of white masters to determine the specifics of the uprising can only be guessed at, but chief among the likely causes are cowardice and pragmatism. That they were scared was obvious; of what, however, deserves more consideration.

  From these men, long dead, we will never have definitive answers. But perhaps answers can be found in questioning contemporary figures like Kanye West, U.S. Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, attorney Larry Elder, political commentator Candace Owens, or any other Black person whose actions are direct descendants of the same fealty to racist systems that undid Vesey and company’s chances at achieving humanity.

  Vesey’s strategy was gruesome by necessity, yet it paled in comparison to the infinite horrors enacted by all who participated in the capture, transport, enslavement, abuse, rape, disfigurement, and murder of Black people during the enterprise known as antebellum slavery. Upon being betrayed, in the summer of 1822 Vesey and thirty-nine of his followers were executed by hanging. All transcripts of the trials were ordered destroyed by the judges (though at least one copy, discovered accidentally, survived the purge) for fear that it might inspire Black people to engage heartily in their human right to self-defense.

  The Black people who attended the public executions to witness and give their respects were threatened with arrest and flogging if they dared to show any public sign of mourning. Their docility and acquiescence, however phony, were made mandatory so as to assure the white populace of Charleston, and the entire United States, that all the power still rested in white hands, and that despite the cruelties enacted upon them, Black people had nothing but boundless love in their hearts for white people. This myth of Black docility, alongside a gut-level fear of a Black uprising, is the American empire’s motivation for enforcing supplication through unjust laws, sealing a social contract that punishes the wretched for daring to recognize their own dignity, and rewarding them for conceding to the pretense of the empire’s innocence. The only peace to be had is through thorough capitulation and assimilation. These are the principles upon which bigotry is built.

  However, as Vesey surely understood, the enslaver’s morality should not be the morality of the enslaved. If it is wrong to enslave, then it is right to free oneself from enslavement. The means by which that freedom is achieved is above moral speculation, with one exception: once attained, one must remember: Wash the blood from the hands. Never turn the (t)error inward. Discontinue the abject failures of humanity that lead one to regard other people as property, lest the cycle begin again, this time with the blade pointed at one’s own throat.

  1824–1829

  FREEDOM’S JOURNAL

  Pamela Newkirk

  For a quarter of a century, I have taught a course that surveys media portrayals of marginalized groups, including racial, ethnic, and religious minorities and the LGBTQI population, in film, on television, and in the popular press. Each year the course begins with an examination of Freedom’s Journal (1827–1829). It was America’s first African American–owned and –operated newspaper and, from its New York City office, it unflinchingly challenged demeaning depictions of Black people in the press. “We wish to plead our own cause,” the editors proclaimed in their first editorial on March 16, 1827. “Too long have others spoken for us. Too long has the publick been deceived by misrepresentations, in things which concern us dearly. Our vices and our degradation are ever arrayed against us, but our Virtues are passed by unnoticed. From the press and the pulpit we have suffered much by being incorrectly represented.”

  This editorial was penned by founding editors John B. Russwurm, who a year earlier had become the fi
rst African American graduate of Bowdoin College, and Samuel E. Cornish, an abolitionist and freedman who organized New York City’s first Black Presbyterian congregation. Their critique came just fifteen weeks before New York State, on July 4, effectively emancipated enslaved Blacks, and nearly four decades before the Emancipation Proclamation, followed by the Thirteenth Amendment, commenced the journey to an uncertain freedom for others.

  In cataloging the derisive and destructive portrayals of Africans and their descendants, the editors extended their critique to progressive whites. “Men whom we equally love and admire have not hesitated to represent us disadvantageously, without becoming personally acquainted with the true state of things, nor discerning between virtue and vice among us.

  “And what is still more lamentable,” they added, “our friends, to whom we concede all the principles of humanity and religion, from these very causes seem to have fallen into the current of popular feeling and are imperceptibly floating on the stream—actually living in the practice of prejudice, while they abjure it in theory and feel it not in their hearts.” From their Lower Manhattan office at 236 Church Street, the editors hoped to “arrest the progress of prejudice” while shielding Africans and their descendants from its wrath.

  For two years the newspaper reached African Americans in eleven northern states and the District of Columbia, and it circulated as far away as Haiti, Europe, and Canada. It inspired the publication of two dozen other Black newspapers before the Civil War. Every year I hope my twenty-first-century New York University students will see the nearly two-hundred-year-old paper as little more than a significant relic of a dystopian past. However, the critique leveled in that first editorial still resonates for them. In their case studies of contemporary media portrayals, they continue to find glaring patterns of bias in the pervasive depictions of African Americans, which reserve extra scorn for Black men.

  Whether analyzing news coverage in some of the nation’s most respected newspapers and magazines, or depictions of Blacks in film and on television, my students find that African Americans are too often relegated to narratives related to crime, sports, and pathology. For far too many Americans, these depictions are more authentic renderings of African American life than are the daily strivings of the actual people who evade detection: the ordinary and extraordinary fathers, brothers, mothers, and sisters who languish on the margins. It’s unlikely that the average African American is cognizant of the extent to which these portrayals shape and misshape the contours of their own lives: how the preponderance of stereotypes in film, crime shows, news stories, and music videos reduces them to specters whose walking, driving, or standing can result in a store clerk’s surveillance or a fatal encounter with police. And these images have gone far to sustain a rigid racial caste system resulting in the overpolicing and the mass incarceration of Black and Brown men, as well as a culture of exclusion in many of the most influential fields.

  Despite the major strides African Americans have made since Russwurm and Cornish’s day, they remain disproportionately underrepresented in practically every influential field, including journalism: between 2002 and 2015, the number of Black journalists in mainstream newspapers actually declined from 2,951 to 1,560.

  In radio, people of color, while comprising roughly 39 percent of the population, held just 14.5 percent of newsroom jobs and were only 7.2 percent of general managers and 8.2 percent of news directors, according to the 2019 annual survey conducted by the Radio Television Digital News Association. In television, people of color held about 22.8 percent of newsroom jobs at network affiliates, and were just 7.4 percent of general managers and 13.4 percent of news directors. African Americans, at 12 percent of the news staff, had achieved near proportional representation but were only 5.4 percent of news directors, down from 6.7 percent in 2018.

  Meanwhile the Black press, once a staple of African American life, has become as marginalized as those it had sought to represent. As mainstream media prominently covered the civil rights movement, the reliance on Black newspapers waned. The circulation of leading newspapers including The Chicago Defender, The Pittsburgh Courier, and The Baltimore Afro-American peaked in 1945 at 257,000, 202,000, and 137,000, respectively, but by 1970 it stood at just 33,000, 20,000, and 33,000. While unfiltered Black voices can still be found offline and online in Essence, The Root, and the sprinkling of African American newspapers around the country, the centuries-long struggle to sustain a free Black press continues.

  In 2019 the iconic Ebony magazine was compelled to sell its historically significant archives in a bankruptcy auction. Black Entertainment Television, founded by Robert L. Johnson, once featured news and politically oriented programming along with music videos and entertainment. However, in 2002 it shifted its focus to entertainment, and in 2005, the year it was sold to Viacom, it canceled its nightly news show. Like a number of other Black-interest outlets, it is no longer Black-owned and has drawn criticism for its programming.

  Despite the fanfare over the occasional triumphs, Black voices—like those of other people of color—remain muted in film. Hollywood Diversity Report: Five Years of Progress and Missed Opportunities, a 2018 study conducted by UCLA, found that in the top two hundred theatrical releases in 2016, people of color comprised just 8 percent of screenwriters and 12.6 percent of directors.

  Moreover, the kind of stereotypes condemned in Freedom’s Journal persist. A study by the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering used artificial intelligence to analyze one thousand recent films and found that many continued to reinforce stereotypes of racial minorities, with African American characters more likely to curse.

  Given the critical issues facing African Americans—including a starkly unjust criminal justice system and persistent racial disparities detected on practically every social indicator—it is clear that Black people still need to plead our own cause. While in recent decades the luster of the Black press has faded, the legacy of Freedom’s Journal can be glimpsed in the unbridled voices found on social media; in some Black-owned or -operated outlets; and in the cracks and crevices of mass media. The continuing quest by Black journalists to depict the breadth of the African American experience and to combat injustice recalls the audaciousness and valor of the trailblazing founders of Freedom’s Journal.

  1829–1834

  MARIA STEWART

  Kathryn Sophia Belle

  I was first introduced to Maria W. Stewart (1803–79) as a student at Spelman College in a feminist theory course brilliantly taught by Beverly Guy-Sheftall. The primary text for the course—Sheftall’s classic edited collection, Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought (1995)—begins with Stewart. Perhaps for this reason, she has always stood out to me as a foundational Black feminist and philosophical figure. Stewart offers what I have termed proto-intersectionality—an early Black feminist articulation of intersecting identities and oppressions along the lines of race, gender, and class.

  Stewart was born free in Connecticut, orphaned at five years old, and worked as a servant for a minister in her youth. She later worked as a teacher in New York, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., where she also served as a matron of the Freeman’s Hospital. She became a prominent speaker and writer—though that was short-lived due to racism and sexism. Nevertheless, several of her essays and speeches were published in The Liberator, and she self-published two edited collections of her written works. She created her own legacy through her speeches, writings, and activism against race and gender oppression. But in the historical record, she is often presented through the lens of her relationships with prominent men: as the widow of James W. Stewart, a friend of David Walker, a correspondent of Alexander Crummell, and a friend and professional affiliate of William Lloyd Garrison.

  Stewart has been identified as the first woman in the United States to speak publicly to an audience composed of men and women, and also as America’s first Bla
ck woman political writer. Her speech in September 1832 was organized by the Afric-American Female Intelligence Society of Boston. It was a time when “women did not speak in public,” as Paula Giddings explains, “especially on serious issues like civil rights, and most especially, feminism.” And they especially did not speak publicly before a “promiscuous” audience of both men and women.

  Beyond the significance of this historic first, Marilyn Richardson argues, “Her original synthesis of religious, abolitionist, and feminist concerns places her squarely in the forefront of black female activist and literary tradition only now beginning to be acknowledged as of integral significance to the understanding of the history of black thought and culture in America.” Richardson also describes Stewart as offering a “triple consciousness, as she demonstrates the creative struggle of a woman attempting to establish both a literary voice and an historical mirror for her experience as ‘an American, a Negro,’ and a woman.”

  Stewart made her public appearances, speeches, and writings during the time of the Second Great Awakening, the Nat Turner Revolt, and intense debates about slavery—from more militant abolitionism (as expressed in William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator, for example) to concerted efforts for the colonization or repatriation of free Black people to Africa by the American Colonization Society. The Liberator published several of Stewart’s writings, including “Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality, The Sure Foundation on Which We Must Build” (October 8, 1831); “An Address Delivered Before the Afric-American Female Intelligence Society of America” (April 28, 1832); “Cause for Encouragement: Composed upon Hearing the Editors’ Account of the Late Convention in Philadelphia” (letter to the editor, July 14, 1832); “Lecture Delivered at the Franklin Hall” (speech delivered September 21, 1832); “An Address Delivered at the African Masonic Hall” (March 2, 1833; speech delivered February 27); and “Mrs. Stewart’s Farewell Address to Her Friends in the City of Boston” (September 21, 1833).