Every year, on this day, the country is asked to recall and celebrate an event that happened 244 years ago. 56 white men, 41 of whom were slave owners, committed an act of treason and rebelled against their lawful government because they felt they were being oppressed. According to Samuel Johnson’s seminal English Dictionary published at the time, the word "patriot" had a negative connotation and was used as a negative epithet for "a factious disturber of the government". The document that these slave owners signed was the Declaration of Independence and every year, American culture demands that everyone dismiss those facts for an alternative reading of history that glorifies these men and this moment.
At the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, my great, great, great, great, great grandfather was a slave in North Carolina. When the first federal census was taken in 1790, North Carolina reported 100,572 slaves and 288,204 whites. . . . Large Negro populations existed in Northampton, Halifax, and Warren counties, where on the eve of the American Revolution 40 to 60 percent of households owned slaves. Thus, in no sense whatsoever can the American flag or the Declaration of Independence be a symbol of “freedom” to me and any of the descendants of those 100,572 slaves in North Carolina. To claim that America at that time was a great achievement for the cause of freedom and democracy when one-third of the people were slaves is to LIE with the utmost in historical falsification.
My great, great, great, great, great grandfather was a Balanta living on the coast of modern-day Guinea Bissau. Historian Walter Rodney states in A History of The Upper Guinea Coast 1545 to 1800,
“the Portuguese realized that the Balantas were the chief agriculturalists and the suppliers of food to the neighboring peoples. . . . the Balanta refus[ed] to trade with the Europeans. . . . The Balantas did not allow foreigners in their midst. . . .”
At the time of my great, great, great, great, great grandfather, the Balanta people were renown for being the best farmers, especially of rice, having lots of cattle, and in particular, being one of the few groups of Africans that did not have chiefs or kings. Theirs was an egalitarian society – everyone worked the fields together and there was no concentration of power into any social caste. Each family had land and when children married, they were given their own piece of land and a house was built for them by all the family members. Theirs was the truest form of democracy, as all decisions were made by a council of family representatives, and each family was free to dissent from a group decision without punishment. Their way of life was sustainable and kept the natural balance of the environment.
The Balanta were also known for fiercely resisting the European slave traders. “Upon approaching a boat,” the Capuchins said,
“they attack with fury, they kill, rob, capture and make off with everything.” Another historian, Walter Hawthorne states, “In 1777, Portuguese commander Ignacio Bayao reported from Bissau that he was furious that Balanta had been adversely affecting the regional flow of slaves and other goods carried by boats along Guinea-Bissau’s rivers. It was ‘not possible,’ he wrote, ‘to navigate boats for those [Balanta] parts without some fear of the continuous robbing that they have done, making captive those who navigate in the aforementioned boats.’ In response, Bayao sent infantrymen in two vessels ‘armed for war’ into Balanta territories. After these men had anchored, disembarked, and ventured some distance inland, they ‘destroyed some men, burning nine villages’ and then made a hasty retreat back to the river. Finding their vessels rendered ‘disorderly,’ the infantrymen were quickly surrounded by well-armed Balanta. Bayao lamented that ‘twenty men from two infantry companies’ were taken captive or killed. Having sent out more patrols to subdue the ‘savage Balanta’ and having attempted a ‘war’ against this decentralized people, the Portuguese found that conditions on Guinea- Bissau’s rivers did not improve.’ Viewing the regional slave trade as a threat to their communities, the Balanta continued their raids on merchant vessels transporting captives and other goods. Such raids would tax Portuguese patience throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century . . . .”
Because of the reputation of my Balanta ancestors, the Europeans avoided them. They paid local Mandinka chiefs of the nearby Kaabu empire for slaves. The Bijago, Papel and Mandinka would wait for Balanta women, often carrying their children, to go to the market to trade their agricultural products and then seize them. This is how my great, great, great, great, great grandfather was captured as a young boy.
Who purchased him? The Blake family.
In 1663, soon after his restoration to the English throne, Charles II granted eight Lords Proprietors a huge tract of territory south of Virginia. The Lords Proprietors sought easy profits by renting lands and selling a wide variety of commodities. They recognized that a slave colony in Carolina held the greatest commercial promise. A group of colonists from Barbados wished to settle in Carolina and bring their slaves with them. They pressed the Lords Proprietors to establish a headright system under which the heads of all households would be allotted acreage on the basis of the number of people who accompanied them. The proprietors assented by granting ‘the Owner of every Negro-Man or Slave, brought thither to settle within the first year, twenty acres, and for every Woman Negro or Slave five acres. This is the founding of two of those 13 colonies - North and South Carolina.
Exactly 336 years ago, on July 5, 1683, Capt Benjamin Blake received an illegal land grant based on the concept of “conquest” from the British authorities for 1090 acres in the Carolinas. Benjamin Blake was a grandson of Robert Blake, a pirate who attacked a Spanish fleet at Santa Cruz in the Canary Islands just north of where my ancestors lived on the coast of Guinea. He seized slaves and cargo worth $14,000,0000 at that time. This is how the Blake family became wealthy. About the year 1685 he was appointed Lords Proprietors deputy and in October of that year signed the new constitution for the colony of North Carolina. His son, Joseph Blake, was twice Governor of South Carolina. Their descendants - Joseph Blake, Arthur Blake, and Daniel Blake were three of the top ten slave owners in the Carolinas owning a combined 1,646 slaves. One of their descendants, Dempsy Blake, lived in Wake Co North Carolina and another, Walter Blake, lived in Henderson Co, North Carolina and held 30 slaves, one of which was my great, great, great, great, great grandfather.
In 1715 North Carolina enacted its first slave code. “An Act Concerning Servants and Slaves” attempted for the first time to define the social, economic and even physical place of the Negro population. Blacks could not leave their ‘Plantations without a Ticket or White servant along with them….’ Whites were authorized to ‘apprehend all such servants & Slaves as they conceive to be runaways or travel without a Ticket or that shall be seen off his Master’s ground Arm’d with any Gun, Sword or any other Weapon of defense…’ Executions of slaves were to be held publicly “to the Terror of other Slaves.”
Janet Schaw, a Scottish visitor to the Lower Cape Fear, commented in 1775: “The rice too is whitening…. But there is not living near it with the putrid water that must lie on it, and the labor required for it is only fit for slaves, and I think the hardest work I have seen them engaged in.” Each slave was expected to produce four or five barrels of rice averaging 500 pounds each – roughly the produce of two acres.
When my great, great, great, great, great grandfather was captured as a young boy and enslaved in America, he was ripped from his free, democratic, egalitarian society that was prospering, and brought to South and North Carolina to do the hardest labor imaginable, from sun up until sun down, without pay, while being TERRORIZED by official state law. Because he was not allowed to use his name, speak his language, or practice any of his culture, he quickly forgot whatever he knew of his homeland and by the next generation, my family was nearly cut-off completely from its ancestry.
Finally, during the American Revolution, to raise white troops for the Continental Line, the North Carolina legislature in 1780 offered ‘one prime slave between the age of fifteen and thirty years’ to soldiers who signed up for three years….
So every year, on July 4th, when America asks everyone, including me, to recall and celebrate the accomplishments of those 41 slave-owning, treasonous terrorists, this is what I recall. All of it is fact. And this is what you ask people – ME - to glorify? Do you really expect me to set aside all that I have just recounted to say that because these men decided to create a new nation based on A NEW FORM OF slavery while hypocritically making platitudes about freedom and the rights of man, that they should be honored? Are you now starting to understand the deep, non-economic effects of AMERICAN slavery? That every year your flag waving resurrects the trauma that I and millions of people in America carry within us?
Do Americans even understand what Frederick Douglas meant when he said, “What, to the slave, is the 4th of July?”
Now that Americans know, now that they understand that America's 4th of July celebration is a trauma, a stumbling block to millions of Africans in America, will Americans do as the Christian verse Romans 14:13 exhorts – “Therefore let us not pass judgment on one another any longer, but rather DECIDE NEVER TO PUT A STUMBLING BLOCK OR HINDRANCE IN THE WAY OF A BROTHER” . . . .
Will they put aside their flag-waving one-sided nationalistic false propaganda and American myth because it is causing so much trauma? Will they make July 4 a one day protest against America's legacy until Reparations are made, a small sacrifice for the cause of justice or will Americans cling to their patriotic pride, and continue, not giving a damn, because Black Lives Really Don’t Matter?.....
For African Americans, and especially for my family, July 4, 1776 is the day my family was officially confirmed in slavery by the United States of America.