For January 24, 2022
Interlude
March 5, 1770 — Crispus Attucks, a Boston dock worker who escaped from slavery, becomes the first person who gets killed in the American Revolution against the British.
“First to Rise” by Yusef Komunyakaa — about the death of Crispus Attucks, ending with the story of John Adams defending the British retaliation (which I had not heard about), with a quotation of the “motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes & mulattoes, Irish teagues & outlandish jacktars.”
1773 — Phillis Wheatley’s Poems are published while she is still enslaved; once freed, however, the “remainder of her life is marked by poverty and illness.”
“proof [dear Phillis]” by Eve L. Ewing — a reflection written by a speaker who gets a tour in the Boston cemetery where the Mathers are buried, but not Phillis Wheatley, imagining that there were a marked grave that would remind Wheatley’s readers of her poems, the process by which she had to “prove” that she had written them to a committee, and her later life. She imagines the epitaph: Phillis Wheatley: thirty-one. Had misery enough.
Chapter 4: Fear
by Michelle Alexander (of The New Jim Crow)
Begins with the many innocent dead Black men and women from Michael Brown 2014 to Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd in 2020, and discusses the many demonstrations all over the world, as well as the backlash, despite the fact that they were overwhelmingly peaceful. Discusses Rittenhouse (before the not guilty verdict); the use of National Guards, etc. and draws attention to the contrast with the lack of aggression against the January 6 insurrectionists: A “glaring double standard” in white perception that elevates white rebellion against unjust government and devalues and demonizes the same when it is instigated by Blacks (James Baldwin quote). This response is due to white fear of a Black rebellion–of Black freedom-and has historically always meant that Black resistance has been swiftly and brutally quashed.
Reminds us the Jefferson defended the rebellion as a “legitimate, rational response to an immoral and inhumane system” of government–while even in the 17th century, at the onset of slavery as an institution, “governmental surveillance and severe punishment of Black people” began–entailing slave codes and other laws that restricted Black people’s human rights. And of course, Blacks did rebel–during the colonial era, about 50 rebellions occurred on the mainland (and another 50 in the British-controlled Caribbean). Ex. April 6, 1712 in New York City, resulting in 22 executions. The result were militias and slave patrols (starting with a 1704 patrol in South Carolina; firmly established in the Carolinas by the 1720s. After each attempted or even just rumored rebellion, there tended to be more surveillance, patrolling, and harsh punitive measures. An 18c example is the Stono Rebellion in South Carolina, near Charleston in September 1739, again resulting in many arrests and executions, and in the Negro Act of 1740, which became a template for slave codes elsewhere into the 1850s, surviving way past the end of the British colonial rule and baked into early US [state] law.
The fear that triggered these laws rose dramatically after the successful Haitian (i.e. the then-French colony Saint-Domingue) Rebellion in August 1791, where the sugar plantations were running a particularly harsh slavery regime with brutal punishments. Leaders: Dutty Boukman, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines. Reminder: 12 years lie between the initial rebellion in 1791 and the actual declaration of victory / independence from France in 1803. As the first independent, sovereign nation established by formerly enslaved Africans, Haiti was a model for its advocates and a symbol for all that was to be feared from Blacks for many whites.
[Not in the chapter/ my aside: It takes until 1862 for the US to recognize Haiti’s national sovereignty; in 1869 the tradition of presidents appointing Black diplomats to Haiti begins with Ebenezer D. Bassett, appointed by Grant, and continued with many noted 19c Black activists and politicians, including John Mercer Langston and Frederick Douglass.]
Whites are terrified on both sides of the Atlantic, and in the US, Gov. Pinckney of S.C. warns George Washington about the dangers of an insurrection as the rumors of the rebellion spread and whites increasingly fear Black retaliation. The first fugitive slave law is passed (1793), which makes fleeing across state lines no longer safe. The brutal suppression of rebellions in 1811 (Louisiana–see Ch.3), 1822 (Denmark Vesey, South Carolina) and especially 1831 (Nat Turner, Virginia) were responses to the fear of another Haiti. Literacy laws were supposed to prevent Black people from communicating; all manner of “surveillance and terrorism” were enacted.
Even after the Civil War, when slavery in the South was abolished, the fear remained, as did the desire for “racial control” as whites feared that Blacks would retaliate for their mistreatment. They did not, but the desire to put Blacks “back in their place” was pronounced and post-Reconstruction, Black Codes were enacted all over the Southern states, often foreshadowing Jim Crow laws, for example regarding vagrancy, voter suppression, and of course segregation of all kinds of spaces. Alexander highlights the white coup in Wilmington, NC, in 1898, which led to the massacre that Chesnutt wrote about in his novel The Marrow of Tradition (1902). She also highlights the shocking number of lynchings between 1877 and 1950, and some of the most well-known atrocities: the St. Louis race riot in 1917, the destruction of Black Wall street in Greenwood, OK in 1921, and the murder of Emmett Till in 1955.
Note from my research: Alexander citation points to the excellent Lynching in America site built by the Equal Justice Initiative; like that site, does not, however, unpack the numbers over time or geographically. They peaked in the 1890s and declined steadily after that, but especially after 1922, to the single digits per year by the 1930s–for complicated historical and socioeconomic reasons, given that the antilynching activism of the 1910s and 1920s did not bear any immediate fruit, even though it was an important and necessary first step.
Alexander points out that the successes of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1940s to the 1970s brought new waves of anti-Black violence, directed at activists all over the nation, North and South. She points out that government surveillance, while now conducted in secret, was still a thing (FBI COINTELPRO infiltration of many civil rights organizations). There was now also a backlash, though: over 2,000 uprisings occurred between 1968 and 1972, a “sustained revolt” that the Kerner Commission’s report, against the wishes of President Johnson, recognized as being triggered by untenable social conditions. Many whites, especially conservative politicians like Nixon, rejected the commission’s conclusion and drew the public’s attention to crime and lawlessness as individual choice, demonizing Blacks as criminals and ultimately declaring the highly racialized “War on Drugs” and funding police and jails instead of social programs, education, health care, etc. (Here, she is obviously just summarizing her book; but she does point out, here and there, that many Black politicians, including the NAACP, initially endorsed the “tough on crime” approach and are often “selectively heard” (i.e. heard when they ask for crime reduction; not heard when they ask for better social programs).
The white fear/backlash mechanism is also, unsurprisingly, at play in the election of Trump and the “rise in white nationalism, hate crimes, and vigilante violence” after the election of Barack Obama as the first Black president–even as this also triggered “the largest racial-justice protests in history” in the summer of 2020. So she ends with a hopeful note. [However, many Black columnists and authors in the last months of 2021 have addressed feeling disappointed and discouraged by the lack of progress as they take stock.]