“It is clear that from the time of Washington and Jefferson down to the Civil War, when the nation was asked if it was possible for free Negroes to become American citizens in the full sense of the word, it answered by a stern and determined ‘No!’ The persons who conceived of the Negroes as free and remaining in the United States were A SMALL MINORITY BEFORE 1861, AND CONFINED TO EDUCATED FREE NEGROES AND SOME OF THE ABOLITIONISTS”…..
- W E B DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880
This is part 2 of
LEARNING THE LESSONS OF HISTORY: SLAVE SONGS, REPATRIATION, INSURRECTION, INTEGRATION, NATIONALISM & THE ORIGINAL #ADOS MOVEMENT FROM 1792 TO 1861
When black people say, “your ancestors died so that you could vote,” that is one of the most ignorant, though well-meaning things, a black person in America could ever say. It assumes that one’s history and ancestors started with slavery. Such a myopic view of one’s heritage is exactly what the white supremacist desired when he made every attempt through terror and trauma to steal both the soul and the memory those who survived the middle passage and their descendants.. Their goal was to implant, imprint and program those ancestors (and YOU) to think with concepts that reinforced your history as only that of slavery, and to make you subservient so as to be effectively managed as nothing more than an input in their economic, social and political system. Thus, when the white supremacist decided it was in THEIR interest to let black people in America vote, African Americans were then allowed to vote. So it is within this context that they programmed black people to vote. But let’s look at this from the perspective of the ACTUAL history of people whose ancestors survived the middle passage.
THE MAJORITY OF OUR ANCESTORS DID NOT DIE SO THAT WE CAN VOTE. NEITHER DID THEY WANT TO STAY IN AMERICA NOR DID THEY SEE THEMSELVES AS BECOMING CITIZENS IN AMERICA.
Such a view is a distortion of African American history and is the result of the co-optation of the Black Liberation Movement in America. It started with the forced and targeted “Christianizing” of the Negro following the Nat Turner insurrection in 1831. It was decided by white Christian leaders, especially Reverend Colcock Jones, to teach the Negroes a version of Christianity based on the doctrine, “Slaves obey your masters” in order to pacify them. It was from these Christianized negroes that the idea of becoming citizens in America originated. For the masses of black people, their desire was only ESCAPE FROM AMERICA. This was the beginning of black opposition to the black liberation movement prior to 1861…..
One hundred years later, WILLIAM W. SALES, JR wrote in., FROM CIVIL RIGHTS TO BLACK LIBERATION: MALCOLM X AND THE ORGANIZATION OF AFRO AMERICAN UNITY
“OUR PRESENT OPPRESSION AS A PEOPLE IS TIED TO THE DEFEAT AND DESTRUCTION OF THE BLACK LIBERATION MOVEMENT. IT IS ALSO TIED TO THE SANCTIFICATION OF BLACK ELECTORAL POLITICS WITHIN THE CONFINES OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY, THE SAINTHOOD OF DR. KING, AND THE CANON OF NONVIOLENCE. . . . .THIS SANCTIFICATION STOOD AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO THE MOBILIZATION OF POOR AND DISPOSSESSED AFRICAN AMERICANS OUTSIDE OF THE INSTITUTIONS OF ELECTORAL, LEGISLATIVE, AND EXECUTIVE POLITICS WHICH ARE INSTITUTIONALLY STRUCTURED TO MAINTAIN POWERLESSNESS.
IMARI OBADELE adds in, WAR IN AMERICA: THE MALCOLM X DOCTRINE
MORE THAN ANY MAN IN RECENT YEARS MARTIN LUTHER KING IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS CRIMINAL CRIPPLING OF THE BLACK MAN IN HIS STRUGGLE. KING TOOK AN INCREDIBLY BEAUTIFUL, A MATCHLESSLY CHALLENGING DOCTRINE — REDEMPTION THROUGH LOVE AND SELF-SACRIFICE — AND CORRUPTED IT
Thus, voting, originally just a tactic in the pursuit of Black Liberation, was elevated to a SACRED DUTY by an elite class of Chistianized, and as Carter G. Woodson claimed, “Miseducated Negroes”. Today, people who claim that our ancestors died so that we could VOTE are the miseducated Negroes distorting history by limiting it to the Civil Rights struggle and ignoring what every African American must consider before voting in presidential elections.
Now let us look at the thinking of the major figures of Black History during this the first #ADOS movement from 1792 to 1861 .
VIEWPOINTS AMONG THE ORIGINAL AMERICAN DESCENDANTS OF SLAVES (ADOS)
Prince Hall (1735 - 1807) Historian Charles H. Wesley theorized that by age 11 Prince Hall was enslaved (or in service) to Boston tanner William Hall, and by 1770 was a free, literate man and had been always accounted as a free man. Hall joined the Congregational Church in 1762 at 27 years of age. He married an enslaved woman named Sarah Ritchie (or Ritchery) who died in 1769. Hall encouraged enslaved and freed blacks to serve the American colonial military. He believed that if blacks were involved in the founding of the new nation, it would aid in the attainment of freedom for all blacks. Hall proposed that the Massachusetts Committee of Safety allow blacks to join the military. He and fellow supporters petition compared Britain's colonial rule with the enslavement of blacks. Their proposal was declined. Hall worked within the state political arena to advance the rights of blacks, end slavery, and protect free blacks from being kidnapped by slave traders. He proposed a back-to-Africa movement, pressed for equal educational opportunities, and operated a school for African Americans in his home. He engaged in public speaking and debate, citing Christian scripture against slavery to a predominantly Christian legislative body. In January 1773, Prince Hall and seventy three other African-American delegates presented an emigration plea to the Massachusetts Senate. This plea, which included the contentions that African Americans are better suited to Africa's climate and lifestyle, failed. When a group of freed black men had begun a trip to Africa, they were captured and held, which reignited Hall's interest in the movement. He found that there was not sufficient momentum and support for the Back-to-Africa movement to make it a reality at the time.Said Hall,
“My brethren, let us pay all due respect to all who God had put in places of honor over us: do justly and be faithful to them that hire you, and treat them with the respect they may deserve; but worship no man. Worship God, this much is your duty as Christians and as masons.
In the Petition to the Massachusetts Legislature in 1777, Hall Pleaded:
“To the Honorable Council & House of Representatives for the State of Massachusetts-Bay . . . The Petition of a great number of Negroes, who are detained in a state of Slavery, in the Bowels of a free & Christian Country— Humbly Showing— That your Petitioners apprehend that they have, in common with all other Men, a natural & inalienable right to that freedom, which the great Parent of the Universe hath bestowed equally on all Mankind, & which they have never forfeited by any compact or agreement whatever—But they were unjustly dragged, by the cruel hand of Power, from their dearest friends, & some of them even torn from the Embraces of their tender Parents—From a populous, pleasant, & plentiful Country—& in Violation of the Laws of Nature & of Nations & in defiance of all the tender feelings of humanity, brought hither to be sold like Beasts of Burden, & like them condemned to slavery for Life—Among a People professing the mild religion of Jesus—A People not insensible of the sweets of rational freedom—nor without Spirit to resent the unjust endeavors of others, to reduce them to a State of Bondage & subjection—Your Honors need not to be informed that a Life of Slavery, like that of your petitioners, deprived of every social privilege, of everything requisite to render Life even tolerable, is far worse than Non-Existence—In imitation of the laudable example of the good People of these States, your Petitioners have long & patiently waited the event of Petition after Petition, by them presented to the Legislative Body of this State & cannot but with grief reflect that their success has been but too similar—They cannot but express their astonishment, that it has never been considered, that every principle from which America has acted in the course of her unhappy difficulties with Great-Britain, pleads stronger than a thousand arguments in favor of your Petitioners—They therefore humbly beseech your Honors ,to give this Petition its due weight & consideration, & cause an Act of the Legislature to be passed, whereby they may be restored to the enjoyment of that freedom which is the natural right of all Men—& their Children (who were born in this land of Liberty) may not be held as Slaves after they arrive at the age of twenty one Years—So may the Inhabitants of this State (no longer chargeable with the inconsistency of acting, themselves, the part which they condemn & oppose in others) be prospered in their present glorious struggles for Liberty; & have those blessings secured to them by Heaven, of which benevolent minds cannot wish to deprive their fellow-Men. “
Paul Cuffee (1754-1812)- Early in his life Cuffe—like most of his nine siblings, he used his father's African name as a surname—showed disdain for racial discrimination. Cuffe was the English version of the Asante word kofi, meaning“born on Friday.” In 1797, Cuffe decided to purchase farmland near Westport. The price tag of the farmland was about $3,500.00, a rather large sum in those days. Taxes on this property would lead to his active concern about the citizenship status of Massachusetts’ free blacks. In 1780 he and his brother John refused to pay taxes to protest a clause in the state constitution that forbade blacks suffrage. Their petition to the Massachusetts General Court alluded to the injustice of taxation without representation. The petition was dismissed. As a protest of the dismissal of the petition, Cuffe and his brother chose not to pay their taxes for the years 1778, 1779, and 1780. This action would lead to their arrest and imprisonment in the jail in Taunton, Massachusetts. Although Cuffe was again briefly imprisoned, this time by Massachusetts authorities for civil disobedience, the bold action successfully reduced the family's taxes. Said Cuffe,
“Do you not know that the land where you are is not your own? Your fathers were carried into that to increase strangers’ treasure, . . . Africa calls for men of character to fill stations in the Legislature.”
Richard Allen (1760 - 1831) - Born into slavery in 1760, Richard Allen later bought his freedom. In 1786, Allen became a preacher at St. George's Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania but was restricted to early-morning services. As he attracted more black congregants, the church vestry ordered them to be in a separate area for worship. Allen regularly preached on the commons near the church, slowly gaining a congregation of nearly 50 and supporting himself with a variety of odd jobs. Allen and Absalom Jones, also a Methodist preacher, resented the white congregants' segregation of blacks for worship and prayer. They decided to leave St. George's to create independent worship for African Americans. That brought some opposition from the white church as well as the more-established blacks of the community. In 1787, Allen and Jones led the black members out of St. George's Methodist Church. They formed the Free African Society (FAS), a non-denominational mutual aid society that assisted fugitive slaves and new migrants to the city. Understanding the power of an economic boycott, Allen went on to form the Free Produce Society, where members would only purchase products from non-slave labor, in 1830. Said Allen,
“This land, which we have watered with our tears and our blood, is now our mother country, and we are well satisfied to stay where wisdom abounds and the gospel is free. . . . Whereas our ancestors (not of choice) were the first successful cultivators of the wilds of America, we their descendants feel ourselves entitled to participate in the blessings of her luxuriant soil. . . . [W]e who have been born and nurtured on this soil, we, whose habits, manners, and customs are the same in common with other Americans, can never consent to . . . be the bearers of the redress offered by that [American Colonization] Society to that much afflicted.”
Denmark Vesey (1767 - 1822) - was a literate, skilled carpenter and leader of African Americans in Charleston, South Carolina. Likely born into slavery in St. Thomas, Vesey was enslaved to a man in Bermuda for some time before being brought to Charleston, where he gained his freedom. Vesey won a lottery and purchased his freedom around the age of 32. He had a good business and a family, but was unable to buy his first wife Beck and their children out of slavery. Vesey became active in the Second Presbyterian Church. In 1818 he was one of the founders of an independent African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. The AME Church in Charleston was supported by leading white clergy. In 1818 white authorities briefly ordered the church closed, for violating slave code rules that prohibited black congregations from holding worship services after sunset. The church attracted 1848 members by 1818, making it the second-largest AME church in the nation. City officials always worried about slaves in groups; they closed the church again for a time in 1821, as the City Council warned that its classes were becoming a "school for slaves" (under the slave code, slaves were prohibited from being taught to read). Vesey was reported as a leader in the congregation, drawing from the Bible to inspire hope for freedom.
In 1822, Vesey was alleged to be the leader of a planned slave revolt. Vesey and his followers were said to be planning to kill slaveholders in Charleston, liberate the slaves, and sail to the black republic of Haiti for refuge. By some accounts, the revolt would have involved thousands of slaves in the city as well as others who lived on plantations which were located miles away. City officials sent a militia to arrest the plot's leaders and many suspected followers on June 22 before the rising could begin, which was believed to be planned for July 14. No white people were killed or injured. Vesey and five slaves were among the first group of men to be rapidly judged guilty by the secret proceedings of a city-appointed Court and condemned to death. They were executed by hanging on July 2, 1822. Vesey was about 55 years old. In later proceedings, some 30 additional followers were executed. His son Sandy was also judged guilty of conspiracy and deported from the United States, along with many others. City authorities ordered the church razed and its minister was expelled from the city.
Said Vesey,
“We are free, but the white people here won't let us be so; and the only way is to raise up and fight the whites.”
Lott Cary (1780 - 1828) - Just four years after the signing of the American Declaration of Independence in 1780, Lott Carey was born into the chains of American slavery. Lott was born in Charles City County, Virginia, on the estate of William A. Christian. Lott was an only child whose father was a faithful member of the Baptist church, and his mother although not active, was also believed to be a Christian. It would be Lott’s grandmother, Mihala who would daily nurture him while his parents were working on the plantation. Lott’s grandmother was a passionate follower of Christ and a Baptist who would tell him many stories about the suffering of the African slaves, how they crossed a great ocean from Africa to journey to America. Mihala would regularly tell her grandson, Lott about the heritage of their people in Africa and how they did not know Christ. She would passionately express how she longed tell them about the love of Christ. Yet, Mihala knew that she was physically unable to return to her home land. She would tell Lott “Son, you will grow strong. You will lead many, and perhaps it may be you who will travel over the big seas to carry the great secret to my people.” Carey became a supervisor in a tobacco warehouse, as the city was a major port for the export of that commodity crop. He emigrated in 1821 with his family to the new colony of Liberia, founded by the American Colonization Society for the resettlement of free people of color and free blacks from the United States. Cary was one of the first black American missionaries, and the first American Baptist missionary to Africa. He established the colony's first church, founded schools for natives, and helped lead the colony. Said Carey,
“I am an African; and in this country (the United States), however meritorious my conduct and respectable my character, I cannot receive the credit due to either. I wish to go to a country where I shall be estimated by my merits and not by my complexion, and I feel bound to labour for my suffering races.”
However, Eric Michael Washington, Ph.D. states in Lott Cary: Ethiopian and Lover of Liberty
“Yet all of the re-telling of Cary‟s story in the 19th century and even into the 20th century fails to grapple with the complexities and even the contradictions in Cary‟s life, and the influences on his thought. One reason for this failure is the lack of these writers to situate Cary in the social and intellectual context of the free African-American community of the early 19th century. In attempting to situate Cary in his context, I argue that the theology of Ethiopianism and a related commitment to liberty in a non-racist context motivated Cary‟s mission to and in Africa. To support this, I will offer brief analysis of one famous statement by Cary in 1820, and an unpublished letter that he wrote to free African Americans in Richmond, Baltimore, and Philadelphia in 1827. . . . From Cary‟s story up to this point, the question regarding what is motivating Cary is clear: he wants to be a missionary; he is a Christian, and his motivation is to preach the gospel to Africans. The historiography throws a curve ball at this point in the narrative. All writers include a statement by Cary when someone asked him why is he leaving America to go to Africa. Cary responded: “I am an African, and in this country, however meritorious my conduct, and respectable my character, I cannot receive the credit due to either. I wish to go to a country where I shall be estimated by my merits, and not by my complexion; and I feel bound to labor for my suffering race.‟ The reason why this quote appears in all of the writings on Cary during the 19th century is two-fold: first, it represents Cary‟s tension as a free man of color in America (a sense of despair and hope); and second, it affirms the cynicism of supporters of colonizationism regarding the prospects of a bi- racial republic in America. Cary‟s articulation must be re-cast though. I believe it is an Ethiopian response.
As a distinct theology, Ethiopianism developed from the thought of Christian, English-speaking free persons of color in the Atlantic World during the late 18th century and matured throughout the 19th. As Christians, they naturally pondered about God‟s plan in both their former enslavement and their newfound freedom. From their musings, they argued that it was part of God’s sovereign plan for the enslavement of Africans in order for them to turn to Christ in the land of their captivity, and then being released from bondage would return to the land of their birth and preach the gospel for the redemption of their land. This was a theological attempt by Christian African Americans to comprehend both their place in the Kingdom of God, and their mission within the Church. The term derived from Psalm 68:31. Could this have been lost for a person such as Cary? Ethiopianism allowed its adherents to embrace a trans-national identity and purpose within a Christian framework . This is evident in Cary‟s exclamation and affirmation of his African identity though born in America. Analyzing this statement within its context reveals that Cary made a conscious link between himself and Africans who he would soon engage with through the Christian gospel. The assumption Cary operated from was that since he was an African he had a natural bridge for missions work (his labor); it was understood that owing to his African descent he could accomplish something that others would have difficulty accomplishing. Also in Ethiopianism was a sense of reclaimed dignity. This is apparent in Cary‟s statement also.
Cary viewed the opportunity to become a missionary to Africa dualistically: preach the gospel to Africans thereby planting and spreading indigenous Baptist churches in West Africa, but also build a free society for African Americans and would be Christian Africans based upon republic principles (the ACS was committed to this), which was the aim of colonization. The latter is implied in the statement regarding living in a place where he would be judged by his merit, not his skin color. This is a hope for freedom without racial disfranchisement, which is something he knew as a former slave and a free person of color in a slave state. Missions and colonization would mesh and inform each other producing a broadened sense, or holistic climate of freedom. Ethiopianism’s emphasis on redemption went beyond spiritual redemption; it also included redemption of society. It could also be labeled as a civilizing mission. African American objection to African colonization centered on its distrust of the ACS. Africans Americans in Baltimore and Philadelphia, for example had written that the ACS’s scheme was “forced.”This is an understandable concern. The ACS‟s point of reference, to re-iterate, was this cynical belief that free blacks and whites could never flourish together and in harmony has free citizens in a republic. The underlying assumption of the ACS was that free blacks were in a way unworthy or unqualified to be given full citizenship. Free African Americans believed this assumption to be the case. Rather than jettison the idea of emigration completely, African-American Philadelphians, Richard Allen included, touted the prospect of Haitian emigration throughout the 1820s. The conclusion for African Americans was that they wanted to control of their own destiny regarding colonization, and this would led to African-American controlled colonization societies during the 1830s and 1840s. Cary’s main concern in the letter was to argue that emigration to West Africa was a fruitful project, and would fulfill the need of African Americans to realize full citizenship. Cary addressed the argument that the ACS forced Liberian émigrés to remove there. Quite rightly, Cary wrote that “I do not consider that I was sent away, but came by my own free consent.” This is evident from the history. He had a desire to preach and to live in a free society. The ACS was a means to those ends, along with the Baptist General Convention. He challenged his audience, especially those of Baltimore: “You will never know whether you are men or monkies, if you remain in America.” The thrust of this statement underscores Cary’s belief that free African Americans by remaining in America will continue to endure life as second-class citizens without a real hope for obtaining first-class citizenship by the white majority that withholds those “manhood” rights such as voting. African-American Baltimorean concern about being “forced out” of the country by the ACS, according to Cary, fails to hold water because of the type treatment they receive in America.”
Lott Cary was among the second group of emigrants in LIberia, and played a versatile role as clegyman, doctor, militiaman, builder, and pioneer of agriculture. He and seven companions were fatally injured by an explosion while they were making bullets.
Daniel Coker (1780–1846) was an African American of mixed race from Baltimore, Maryland who gained freedom from slavery and became a Methodist minister. He was born enslaved as Isaac Wright, in 1780 in Baltimore, or Frederick County, Maryland, to Susan Coker, a white woman, and Daniel Wright, an enslaved African American. Under a 1664 Maryland slave law, Wright was considered a slave as his father was enslaved. He wrote one of the few pamphlets published in the South protesting slavery and supporting abolition. In 1816 he helped found the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first independent black denomination in the United States, at its first national convention in Philadelphia. In 1820, Coker took his family and immigrated to the British colony of Sierra Leone, where he was the first Methodist missionary from a Western nation. There Coker founded the West Africa Methodist Church. He and his descendants continued as leaders among what developed as the Creole people in Sierra Leone. In a letter to Jeremiah Watts, April 3, 1820, Coker wrote,
“I can say, that my soul cleaves to Africa . . . I expect to give my life to bleeding, groaning, dark, benighted Africa. . . . I should rejoice to see you in this land; it is a good land; it is a rich land, and I do believe it will be a great nation, and a powerful and worthy nation. . . .If you ask my opinion as to coming, I say, let all that can, sell out and come; come, and bring ventures, to trade, etc., and you may do much better than you can possibly do in America, and not work half so hard. I wish that thousands were here. . . “
David Walker (1796 - 1830) - was born in Wilmington, North Carolina. His mother was free and his father, who had died before his birth, had been enslaved. Since American law embraced the principle of partus sequitur ventrem, literally "that which is brought forth follows the womb," Walker inherited his mother's status as a free person of color. Despite his freedom, Walker found the oppression of fellow blacks unbearable. "If I remain in this bloody land," he later recalled thinking, "I will not live long...I cannot remain where I must hear slaves' chains continually and where I must encounter the insults of their hypocritical enslavers." Consequently, as a young adult, he moved to Charleston, South Carolina, a mecca for upwardly mobile free blacks. He became affiliated with a strong African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME Church) community of activists, members of the first black denomination in the United States. He later visited and likely lived in Philadelphia, a shipbuilding center and location of an active black community, where the AME Church was founded. Walker settled in Boston by 1825; slavery had been abolished in Massachusetts after the American Revolutionary War. He married February 23, 1826 Eliza Butler, the daughter of Jonas Butler. Her family was an established black family in Boston. He started a used clothing store in the City Market. He next owned a clothing store on Brattle Street near the wharfs. There were three used clothing merchants, including Walker, who went to trial in 1828 for selling stolen property. The results are unknown. He aided runaway slaves and helped the "poor and needy". Walker took part in civic and religious organizations in Boston. He was involved with Prince Hall Freemasonry, an organization formed in the 1780s that stood up the against discriminatory treatment of blacks; became a founder of the Massachusetts General Colored Association, which opposed colonization of free American Blacks to Africa. In September 1829, Walker published his appeal to African Americans entitled Walker's Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America, Written in Boston, State of Massachusetts, September 28, 1829. The purpose of the document was to encourage readers to take an active role in fighting their oppression, regardless of the risk, and to press white Americans to realize the moral and religious failure of slavery.
Richard Newman, Patrick Rael, and Phillip Lapsansky write in Pamphlets of Protest: An Anthonlogy of Early African Protest
“David Walker’s ‘Appeal’ reprinted a newspaper essay by Richard Allen with a strong anti-colonization stand. According to Walker, ‘Allen deserved a prominent place in the history of the debate over colonization every bit as much as ‘worthy’ whites such as Henry Clay. Colonization, Walker stated, was merely ‘a plan to get the colored free people away from those of our brethren unjustly held in bondage.’ For proof, he cited Clay’s address to a meeting of the American Colonization Society. A whitewashed history would end there., he maintains. Then Walker adds Allen to the mix, illustrating free blacks’ opinion of the ACS. ‘Respecting colonization,’ Walker continues, ‘I shall give an extract from the letter of the truly Rev. Allen’ from Freedom’s Journal. Like Walker, Allen claimed that colonization sought only to exile free blacks and thereby secure Southern slavery by eliminating black protest. ‘Can we not discern the project of sending the free people of color away from their country?’ Allen tersely stated. The plan intended to keep slaves away from ‘free men of color enjoying Liberty.’ For Allen, blacks had as much claim to American liberty as whites, for ‘the land which we have watered with our tears and our blood, is now our Mother country.’ For Walker, Allen’s words were part of a corrected historical record: ‘I have given you, my brethren, an extract verbatim from the letter of that good man, Richard Allen. For those ‘thousands, perhaps millions of my brethren’ who never heard of Allen, Walker announced they could now see his words in the ‘Appeal.’”
"America," Walker argued, "is more our country, than it is the whites — we have enriched it with our blood and tears."
Scholars such as historian Sterling Stuckey have remarked upon the connection between Walker's Appeal and black nationalism. In his 1972 study of The Ideological Origins of Black Nationalism, Stuckey suggested that Walker's Appeal "would become an ideological foundation... for Black Nationalist theory." Though some historians have said that Stuckey overstated the extent to which Walker contributed to the creation of a black nation, Thabiti Asukile, in a 1999 article on "The All-Embracing Black Nationalist Theories of David Walker's Appeal", defended Stuckey's interpretation. Asukile writes:
Though scholars may continue to debate this, it would seem hard to disprove that the later advocates of black nationalism in America, who advocated a separate nation-state based on geographical boundaries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, would not have been able to trace certain ideological concepts to Walker's writings. Stuckey's interpretation of the Appeal as a theoretical black nationalist document is a polemical crux for some scholars who aver that David Walker desired to live in a multicultural America. Those who share this view must consider that Stuckey does not limit his discourse on the Appeal to a black nationalism narrowly defined, but rather to a range of sentiments and concerns. Stuckey's concept of a black nationalist theory rooted in African slave folklore in America is an original and pioneering one, and his intellectual insights are valuable to a progressive rewriting of African-American history and culture.
John Russwurm (1799 - 1851) was an abolitionist, newspaper publisher, and colonizer of Liberia where he moved from the United States. He was born in Jamaica to an English father and enslaved mother. As a child he traveled to the United States with his father and received a formal education, becoming the first African American to graduate from Bowdoin College and one of the first two to graduate from an American college. As a young man, Russwurm moved from Portland, Maine, to New York City, where he was a founder with Samuel Cornish of the abolitionist newspaper, Freedom's Journal, the first paper owned and operated by African Americans. Russwurm became supportive of the American Colonization Society's efforts to develop a colony for African Americans in Africa, and he moved in 1829 to what became Liberia. In 1836 Russwurm was selected as governor of Maryland in Africa, a small colony set up nearby by the Maryland State Colonization Society. He served there until his death. The colony was annexed to Liberia in 1857.
Martin Delany (1812 - 1885) - After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Bill (1850), Delany despaired of American Negroes ever enjoying the full rights of citizenship in the United States. Delaney warned Negroes not to carry their religion to the point of hoping for a divine intervention on their behalf. “Submission does not gain for us an increase of friends nor respectability, as the white race will only respect those who oppose their usurpation, and acknowledge as equals those who will not submit to their rule. . . . We must make an issue, create an event and establish for ourselves a position. This is essentially necessary for our effective elevation as a people, in shaping our national development, directing our destiny and redeeming ourselves as a race.” Initially Delany devised a scheme based on a Negro empire in the Caribbean and South and Central America. Hollis Lynch writes in Pan-Negro Nationalism in the New World Before 1862 that, “His advocacy of a Negro empire in the Americas was partly for strategic reasons: by its proximity it would, either by moral or physical force, bring about the collapse of slavery in the United States. But he also believed that Negroes, as developers of the economic base of the New World, were entitled to their full share of its fruits. Still, he did not overlook Africa, . . . Yet he continued to regard the American Colonization Society as working to promote the interest of slaveholders and was, therefore, severely critical of Liberia’s dependence on it.”
Said Delany,
“Africa is our fatherland, we its legitimate descendants, and we will never agree or consent to see this . . . step that has been taken for her regeneration by her own descendants blasted. Our policy must be. . . Africa for the African race and black men to rule them. . . ”
Henry Highland Garnet (1815 - 1882) - Hollis Lynch writes in Pan Negro Nationalism In The New World Before 1862,
“In 1858, the African Civilization Society was formed with Henry Highland Garnet as president to support emigration to West Africa. Garnet was one of the most aggressive of the American Negro leaders. As early as 1843, he had called on slaves to ‘rise in their might and strike a blow for their lives and liberties.’ He had no sympathy for those Negro leaders who opposed free emigration to Africa simply because slaveholders promoted it, and he castigated Frederick Douglass and his associates as ‘humbugs who oppose everything they do not originate.’ The main object of Garnet’s society was ‘to establish a grand center of Negro nationality from which shall flow the streams of commercial, intellectual, and political power which shall make colored people respected everywhere.’ . . . ‘[the establishment of a vast commercial network between West Africa and Negro America'] he wrote ‘would do more for the overthrowing of slavery, in creating a respect for ourselves, than fifty thousand lectures of the most eloquent men of this land.’
In "An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America" (1843), Garnet says,
“Two hundred and twenty-seven years ago, the first of our injured race were brought to the shores of America. They came not with glad spirits to select their homes, in the New World. They came not with their own consent, to find an unmolested enjoyment of the blessings of this fruitful soil. The first dealings which they had with men calling themselves Christians, exhibited to them the worst features of corrupt and sordid hearts; and convinced them that no cruelty is too great, no villainy and no robbery too abhorrent for even enlightened men to perform, when influenced by avarice, and lust.
In every man's mind the good seeds of liberty are planted, and he who brings his fellow down so low, as to make him contented with a condition of slavery, commits the highest crime against God and man. Brethren, your oppressors aim to do this. They endeavor to make you as much like brutes as possible. When they have blinded the eyes of your mind-when they have embittered the sweet waters of life-then, and not till then, has American slavery done its perfect work.
Nearly three millions of your fellow-citizens are prohibited by law and public opinion (which in this country is stronger than law) from reading the Book of Life. Your intellect has been destroyed as much as possible, and every ray of light they have attempted to shut out from your minds. The oppressors themselves have become involved in the ruin. They have become weak, sensual, and rapacious-they have cursed you-they have cursed themselves-they have cursed the earth which they have trod.
You had better all die -- die immediately, than live slaves and entail your wretchedness upon your posterity. If you would be free in this generation, here is your only hope. However much you and all of us may desire it, there is not much hope of redemption without the shedding of blood. If you must bleed, let it all come at once rather die freemen, than live to be slaves.
Let your motto be resistance! resistance! RESISTANCE! No oppressed people have ever secured their liberty without resistance. What kind of resistance you had better make, you must decide by the circumstances that surround you, and according to the suggestion of expediency.”
Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) - After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York, gaining note for his oratory and incisive antislavery writings. In his time, he was described by abolitionists as a living counter-example to slaveholders' arguments that slaves lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. Douglass wrote several autobiographies. He described his experiences as a slave in his 1845 autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, which became a bestseller, and was influential in promoting the cause of abolition, as was his second book, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). The feeling of freedom from American racial discrimination amazed Douglass:
Eleven days and a half gone and I have crossed three thousand miles of the perilous deep. Instead of a democratic government, I am under a monarchical government. Instead of the bright, blue sky of America, I am covered with the soft, grey fog of the Emerald Isle [Ireland]. I breathe, and lo! the chattel [slave] becomes a man. I gaze around in vain for one who will question my equal humanity, claim me as his slave, or offer me an insult. I employ a cab—I am seated beside white people—I reach the hotel—I enter the same door—I am shown into the same parlour—I dine at the same table—and no one is offended ... I find myself regarded and treated at every turn with the kindness and deference paid to white people. When I go to church, I am met by no upturned nose and scornful lip to tell me, 'We don't allow niggers in here!'
Louis Mehlinger, in The Attitude of the Free Negro Toward African Colonization, writes,
“To carry out more effectively the work of ameliorating the condition of the colored people, a National Council composed of two members chosen by election at a poll in each State, was organized in 1853. As many as twenty State conventions were to be represented. Before these plans could be well matured, however, those who believed that emigration was the only solution of the race problem called another convention to consider merely that question. Only those would not introduce the question of African emigration but favored colonization in some other parts, were invited. Among the persons thus interested were Reverend William Webb and Martin R. Delaney of Pittsburgh, Doctor J. Gould Bias and Franklin Turner of Philadelphia, Reverend August R. Greene of Allegheny, Pennsylvania, James M. Whitfield of New York, William Lambert of Michigan, Henry Bibb, James Theodore Holly of Canada, and Henry M. Collins of California. Frederick Douglass criticized this step as uncalled for, unwise, unfortunate, and premature. . . . The greatest enemy of the Colonization Society among the freedmen . . . . was Frederick Douglass. At the National Convention of Free People of Color, held in Rochester, New York, in 1853, he was called upon to write the address to the colored people of the United States. A significant expression of this address was: ‘We ask that no appropriation whatever, State of national, be granted to the colonization scheme. ‘ . . . .[I]n writing to Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe in reply to her inquiry as to the best thing to be done for the elevation of the colored people, ‘The truth is,’ he said, ’we are here and here we are likely to remain. Individuals emigrate, nations never. We have grown up with this republic and I see nothing in her character or find in the character of the American people as yet, which compels the belief that we must leave the United States.’”
Hollis Lynch writes in Pan-Negro Nationalism in the New World Before 1862 that,
“Before Delany could act on his scheme, the largest Negro national conference up to that time was convened in Rochester, New York, in 1853, and the persistent division between emigrationists andanti-emigrationists was forced into the open. The anti-emigrationists, led by the Negro leader Frederick Douglass, persuaded the conference to go on record as opposing emigration. But as soon as the conference was over, the emigrationists, led by Delany, James M. Whitfield, a popular poet, and James T. Holly, an accomplished Episcopalian clergyman, called a conference for August 1854, from which anti-emigrationists were to be excluded. Douglass described this action as ‘marrow and illiberal,’ and he sparked the first public debate among American Negro leaders on the subject of emigration.
Here Douglass is betraying the expressed desire (through songs) of his enslaved brothers and sisters who wanted to leave the United States and return to Africa. This either/or rejection of emigration was a major mistake made by Douglass and the ADOS.
Alexander Crummell (1819–1898) - was the most prominent rationalist of the black American enlightenment thinkers in the nineteenth-century. He stands out among his contemporaries—Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, Booker T. Washington, most notably—for his robust defense of the central place of reason in moral agency. His attempts to work out the consequences of that view for the nature of language and history lends his philosophy a breadth and depth not matched by other enlightenment thinkers. The prominence of his protégé, W. E. B. Du Bois, helped ensure Crummell's continuing influence during the rise of pragmatism, but he eventually fell out of favor as such relativistic thinkers as Alain LeRoy Locke and Zora Neale Hurston emerged. His father, Boston Crummell was a Temne, a people of West Africa. Crummell began his formal education in the African Free School No. 2 and at home with private tutors and became friends with Henry Highland Garnet, who also graduated from the school. His prominence as a young intellectual earned him a spot as keynote speaker at the anti-slavery New York State Convention of Negroes when it met in Albany in 1840. Although Crummell had to take his finals twice to receive his degree, he became the first officially black student recorded in the Cambridge University records as graduated. During this period, Crummmell formulated the concept of Pan-Africanism, which became his central belief for the advancement of the African race. Crummell believed that in order to achieve their potential, the African race as a whole, including those in the Americas, the West Indies, and Africa, needed to unify under the banner of race. To Crummell, racial solidarity could solve slavery, discrimination, and continued attacks on the African race. He decided to move to Africa to spread his message. Crummell arrived in Liberia in 1853, at the point in that country's history when Americo-Liberians had begun to govern the former colony for free American blacks. Crummell's legacy can be seen not only in his personal achievements, but also in the influence he exerted on other black nationalists and Pan-Africanists, such as Marcus Garvey, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and W. E. B. Du Bois.
“Let our posterity know that we their ancestors, uncultured and unlearned, amid all trials and temptations, were men of integirty. . . .We should let our godliness exhale like the odour of flowers. We should live for the good of our kind and strive for the salvation of the world. . . . THE SPECIAL DUTY BEFORE US IS TO STRIVE FOR FOOTING AND FOR SUPERIORITY IN THIS LAND, ON THE LINE OF RACE, AS A TEMPORARY BUT NEEDED EXPEDIENT . . . . FOR IF WE DO NOT LOOK AFTER OUR OWN INTERESTS , AS A PEOPLE, AND STRIVE FOR ADVANTAGE, NO OTHER PEOPLE WILL.IT IS FOLLY FOR MERE IDEALISTS TO CONTENT THEMSELVES WITH THE NOTION THAT ‘WE ARE AMERICAN CITIZENS’; THAT, ‘AS AMERICAN CITIZENS OURS IS THE COMMON HERITAGE AND DESTINY OF THE NATION’; . . .THAT ‘THERE IS BUT ONE TIDE IN THIS LAND; AND WE SHALL FLOW WITH ALL OTHERS ON IT.’ ON THE CONTRARY, I ASSERT, WE ARE JUST NOW A ‘PECULIAR PEOPLE’ IN THIS LAND. . . . WHAT THIS RACE NEED IN THIS COUNTRY IS POWER - THE FORCES THAT MAY BE FELT.”
Edward Wilmot Blyden (1832- 1912) - was an educator, writer, diplomat, and politician. Born in the West Indies, Blyden was recognized in his youth for his talents and drive; he was educated and mentored by John Knox, an American Protestant minister in St Thomas, Danish West Indies, who encouraged him to continue his education in the United States. In 1850 Blyden was refused admission to three Northern theological seminaries because of his race. Knox encouraged him to go to Liberia, the colony set up for freedmen by the American Colonization Society; Blyden emigrated that year, in 1850, and made his career and life there. He married into a prominent family and soon started working as a journalist. His writings on pan-Africanism were influential in both colonies. Colonization in Africa, he contended, was “the only means of delivering the colored man from oppression and of raising him up to respectability.”
Hollis Lynch writes in Pan-Negro Nationalism in the New World Before 1862 that,
“With renewed support [for Liberia] from New World Negroes, however, the new nation could have retrieved itself. Such was the view of Edward Wilmot Blyden, probably the most articulate advocate of pan-Negro nationalism in the nineteenth century. He wanted to see ‘the young men of Liberia, like the youth among the ancient Spartans, exercise themselves vigorously in all things which pertain to the country’s welfare.’ An opportunity for him to act as a defender of Liberia came in 1852. . . . . Colonization in Africa, he contended, was ‘the only means of delivering the colored man from oppression and of raising him up to respectability.” Blyden would not accept the advice that free Negroes should retire to Canada to await the outcome of the issue of slavery. It is hardly surprising that Blyden and Delany came into conflict. Blyden defended the American Colonization Society and Liberia with some spirit. Delany’s plan was a diversion, he wrote, and doomed to failure in any case. Only in Africa could the Negro race rise to distinguished achievement.’
As the conflict between Delany and Blyden show, it was not merely a dispute between emigrationists and their opponents that was preventing a rapid flow of Negroes back to Africa. The emigrationsists were quarreling among themselves. Fortunately for those who wished emigration to Africa, Delany abandoned his scheme for an empire in the Americas, soon after the National Emigration Conference in Cleveland. . . .
During his two and a half months’ stay in Liberia, Delany moved even further toward Blyden’s views: his opposition to the Negro republic had been transformed into support. . . . .Although still wishing to see the Negro republic more self-reliant, hew was now able to recommend it to the ‘intelligent of the race.’”
Said Blyden,
“‘Let us do away with the sentiment of Race. Let us do away with out African personality and be lost, if possible, in another Race.' This is as wise or as philosophical as to say, let us do away with gravitation, with heat and cold and sunshine and rain. Of course, the Race in which these persons would be absorbed is the dominant race, before which, in cringing self-surrender and ignoble self-suppression they lie in prostrate admiration.”
Henry McNeil Turner (1834 -1915) - was a minister, politician, and the 12th elected and consecrated bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME). According to the family's oral tradition, his maternal grandfather, renamed David Greer, had been enslaved in Africa and imported to South Carolina. Traders subsequently noticed that he had royal Mandingo tribal marks, so they released him from slavery. Born free in South Carolina, Turner learned to read and write and became a Methodist preacher. He joined the AME Church in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1858, where he became a minister. Later he had pastorates in Baltimore, Maryland, and Washington, DC. In 1863 during the American Civil War, Turner was appointed as the first black chaplain in the United States Colored Troops. Afterward, he was appointed to the Freedmen's Bureau in Georgia. He settled in Macon and was elected to the state legislature in 1868 during Reconstruction. Angered by the Democrats' regaining power and instituting Jim Crow laws in the late nineteenth century South, Turner began to support black nationalism and emigration of blacks to Africa.
In 1883, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the Civil Rights Act of 1875, forbidding racial discrimination in hotels, trains, and other public places, was unconstitutional. Turner was incensed:
The world has never witnessed such barbarous laws entailed upon a free people as have grown out of the decision of the United States Supreme Court, issued October 15, 1883. For that decision alone authorized and now sustains all the unjust discriminations, proscriptions and robberies perpetrated by public carriers upon millions of the nation's most loyal defenders. It fathers all the 'Jim-Crow cars' into which colored people are huddled and compelled to pay as much as the whites, who are given the finest accommodations. It has made the ballot of the black man a parody, his citizenship a nullity and his freedom a burlesque. It has engendered the bitterest feeling between the whites and blacks, and resulted in the deaths of thousands, who would have been living and enjoying life today."
During the 1890s, Turner went four times to Liberia and Sierra Leone, United States and British colonies, respectively. As bishop, he organized four annual AME conferences in Africa to introduce more American blacks to the continent and organize missions in the colonies. He also worked to establish the AME Church in South Africa, where he negotiated a merger with the Ethiopian Church. Due to his efforts, African students from South Africa began coming to the United States to attend Wilberforce University in Ohio, which the AME church had operated since 1863. His efforts to combine missionary work with encouraging emigration to Africa were divisive in the AME Church. Turner crossed denominational lines in the United States, building connections with black Baptists, for instance. He was known as a fiery orator. He notably preached that God was black, scandalizing some but appealing to his colleagues at the first Black Baptist Convention when he said:
We have as much right biblically and otherwise to believe that God is a Negroe, as you buckra or white people have to believe that God is a fine looking, symmetrical and ornamented white man. For the bulk of you and all the fool Negroes of the country believe that God is white-skinned, blue eyed, straight-haired, projected nosed, compressed lipped and finely robed white gentleman, sitting upon a throne somewhere in the heavens. Every race of people who have attempted to describe their God by words, or by paintings, or by carvings, or any other form or figure, have conveyed the idea that the God who made them and shaped their destinies was symbolized in themselves, and why should not the Negroe believe that he resembles God.
— Voice of Missions, February 1898
Said Turner,
