Black HIstory Month

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Lots of programs and things going on in my area. I've got a few things I plan to watch on PBS. Other stuff going on around town.

Anybody got plans- or seen any good shows?

 

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the one I saw was called "Slavery and the Making of America" excellent program.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/slavery/

***or I should say, I saw the first 2 episodes.

 

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Transcript

SLAVERY AND THE MAKING OF AMERICA
Episode 1: "The Downward Spiral"

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: They were from Africa and Europe. Some were enslaved. Some were indentured servants. All of them were poor and exploited. Their status as workers was confusing and complex. Their lives were controlled by the Dutch West India Company. Day after day, they struggled to survive the harsh world of Dutch New Amsterdam in the 1620s. Evening after evening they gathered in taverns.

Jim Horton: Taverns were places where you gathered to talk about your problems. And slaves would complain about their masters and indentured servants would complain about their masters and you had a lot of interracial bonding in these taverns.

Leslie Harris: You also have people who indenture themselves. They promise their labor to a wealthy person for seven years in order to pay off the price of coming to the New World.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: The Dutch West India Company had established a fur trading post in 1624 on a hilly island called Manahattes. The area would become New York City. Less than 200 people lived in the settlement. Most were men from Northern Europe who worked for the Company. To make larger profits the Dutch West India Company wanted free labor.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: Free Africans had come to the new world with European explorers in the 1530's. English settlers in Jamestown, Virginia purchased twenty Africans from Dutch traders in 1619. Seven years later the first enslaved Africans arrived in Dutch New Amsterdam. Their bondage began approximately two hundred years of slavery in what would become America's Northern states.

Leslie Harris: The first 11 enslaved people, all male, who came to New Amsterdam, were brought by the Dutch West Indian Company. They were owned by the company, not by individuals. So they're company slaves. And they're bought by the company for the purpose of building the colony.

Graham Russell Hodges: It was quite common for the Dutch and for the English to raid the wealthier Spanish and the Portuguese shipping to get people and to get property. So these people are really prisoners of war.

Ira Berlin: These people come out of a larger Atlantic world. In the 14th and 15th century as Africa and Europe and the Americas meet for the first time. We call them Atlantic Creoles.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: Atlantic Creoles had cultural roots in both Africa and Europe. Some were the offspring of European men and African women. Some traveled the seas with Europeans. Some may have been literate. Many spoke multiple languages.

Leslie Harris: The names of the first 11 indicate some of that mixture. The name Simon Congo or Anthony Portuguese or John D'angola -- these names are European names. Simon, Anthony, John -- they're Christian names. And then the last name's Portuguese indicating a connection with Portugal perhaps with a Portuguese explorer or Congo indicating this is a Christian African who came from the Congo.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: The enslaved did not know if or when freedom would come. In the settlements of Virginia, Massachusetts and New Amsterdam slavery was undefined. There were no laws, no rules, no regulations.

Jim Horton: It was a difficult, harsh life. They are expected to work regardless of the weather, regardless of the temperature because their work is what was valuable not their person.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: Work began at sunrise. The company forced the first eleven to clear land, construct roads and unload ships. They were both manual and skilled workers. Their labor helped build the Dutch New Amsterdam economy.

Leslie Harris: The first 11 slaves were there really to provide the infrastructure. So they were really the backbone of this early colony and really were integral to the survival of Europeans.

Graham Russell Hodges: Because the Dutch did fear racial mixture, they were not interested in marriages between Creoles and Dutch women or Belgian women. Therefore by the late 1620s they brought in Creole or African women into the colony.

Jennifer Morgan: The women are ostensibly brought -- as the company says -- for the comfort of our Negro men. They will need to perform at least two jobs -- which is to be sexual partners for the men but to be hard workers as well. The men are going to be very important then in helping these women navigate since the men have been there for slightly longer than the women and understand the terrain.

Leslie Harris: Slaves in New Amsterdam during this time have rights that we think of as unusual for enslaved people. They have the right to earn wages. They have the right to keep those wages. Europeans are dependent on enslaved people and so they need to in a sense appease them.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: Because slavery had no legal structure, the Atlantic Creoles were able to negotiate for greater autonomy. In 1635, several of them petitioned the Dutch West India Company for wages they believed the company owed them. Anthony Portuguese sued a white merchant in 1638. A year later Pedro Negretto and Manuel D. Rues successfully sued Europeans for wages due. Court records indicate that Atlantic Creoles made the system work for them when they could.

Leslie Harris: In some African slavery there is a greater sense of the rights of the enslaved people. There is a greater sense of obligation on the part of the community. And I think that these enslaved people bring that idea of slavery with them.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: In 1641, Anthony Van Angola, one of the first eleven, married Lucie D'Angola. It was the first recorded marriage between black people in Dutch New Amsterdam.

Jennifer Morgan: The enslaved understand legitimating a marriage is a way to claim ground. They are sophisticated interpreters of the landscape.

Leslie Harris: In Europeans' religious beliefs you were not supposed to enslave another Christian and African people knew this and attempted to convert to Christianity. So, Christianity was this space that Africans tried to build onto a space of negotiations for greater freedom. Now in reality many enslaved people were Christian and the fact that they were baptized and were practicing Christians meant nothing in terms of their status as a free people.

Graham Russell Hodges: The Dutch West India company has a very problematic relationship with the area Native Americans. By 1639 relations had deteriorated into war. At that point a number of the Creoles are put into the military force against the Indians.

Leslie Harris: There is a fear among Europeans during this time that African Americans may join with Native Americans. And the first eleven in fact use this fear to negotiate.

Graham Russell Hodges: They had been part of the reform church. They had served in the military. They had built the fort. They had done all of the critical labor that was necessary to make New Amsterdam into a viable town. Now it was their time to be free.

Leslie Harris: The company responded with what has become known as half freedom these men and their wives could live on what became known as the free negro lots. They could farm their own land and they paid a kind of tribute in return to the company. The company also had the right to call them up if they needed their labor.

Jim Horton: Don't get the idea that these were just nice people and wanted to allow these Africans an opportunity. They calculated they could make more money with half freedom and therefore they used that system. But even under those conditions work in the Dutch colony for a slave was slavery.

Jennifer Morgan: The members of this community of half free people had to be very profoundly struck with the tentative and tenuous nature of their freedom. The evidence of that is that their children who are not half free who remain enslaved. And therefore in a very profound way speak to the fact that the community itself is, is vulnerable.

Leslie Harris: Half free blacks don't separate themselves from enslaved blacks. In fact they work... um at times try to negotiate freedom for other enslaved people. Over the years these 11 men and their wives continue to bargain, petition for freedom for their children.

Peter Wood: New Amsterdam is now becoming a good-sized town. At least 20 percent of the people are black. Some of them are slaves, some are half free some are free but wherever you are in that spectrum you can see the possibilities.

Leslie Harris: Half freedom is this moment where a group of slaves is moved to a new status. And there's probably a belief among the slave community that they too can achieve a new status. Not perfect -- not full freedom but something better, more autonomous than what had existed before.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: Freedom was also the goal of black and white indentured servants in Chesapeake tobacco country. Since the early 1600s Black people had trickled into the area. Most were enslaved, others indentured servants. A few were free. John Punch was a black indentured servant. James Gregory a Scotsman and Victor from the Netherlands served with him on a small tobacco farm.

Peter Wood: In the New World, every European colony needed to provide a profit. In the Chesapeake Bay, Virginia, Maryland, the more tobacco you could plant the more profits you could reap. The more pleased the investors back in England would be. And there is tremendous pressure for labor.

Jim Horton: They hoped to use Native Americans that they found in Virginia as a labor supply. They were disappointed because Native Americans in Virginia were powerful enough to frustrate the attempts to use them as forced laborers. It was at that point that the British turned to British laborers under the indentured servitude system.

Marvin Dulaney: The status of indentured white servants and indentured Africans was very similar. They were both of course hired for a period of time. And, and both could become free. And let's also say that both were treated real bad. To be an indentured servant in this country meant that you literally didn't have any rights.

Ira Berlin: In this world there's not much practical difference in terms of the oppression that they face. In some measure that equality is an equality because these people can't be treated worse.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: By 1640 indentured servants were essential to the profits of Virginia tobacco farmers. Their labor made tobacco the colony's most profitable export.

Norrece Jones: Three men on the same farm, doing the same labor, being harassed and oppressed on a comparable level to the point that these three men chose to flee their owner.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: John Punch, Victor, and James Gregory crossed the Virginia border into Southern Maryland. Days later they were captured and returned. In the colony's highest court it was said that Hugh Gwyn's servants caused him considerable "loss and prejudice."

Norrece Jones: The two white men are sentenced to simply a number of years added to their indentures. For John Punch -- the one black among these three men -- his fate is infinitely worse, it's servitude for life.

Marvin Dulaney: Now there's no law that says that John Punch had to have been enslaved for life but it was clear that 1640 is sort of the turning point. The beginning of the point where Africans are gonna be treated differently as opposed to whites who are indentured servants.

Norrece Jones: Rather than distinguishing people because they are un-free people are being distinguished now because they're black or white. And that whiteness is privileging in ever increasing and beneficial ways.

Douglas Deal: Emanuel Driggus first appears in the records of the eastern shore of Virginia in about 1645 as the slave of Captain Francis Pott. Emanuel Driggus fits nicely into the category of people that we are coming to call Atlantic Creoles. He had this European name -- Portuguese really. Driggus is just an anglicization, a shortened form of Rodridges.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: As part of Emanuel's servitude Captain Pott provided him with a cow and a calf. When Emmanuel began his service, his wife, Frances, and daughters, ages eight and one, were bound to Captain Pott as well. Captain Pott informed the court: "[I have] taken to service two daughters of my Negro, Emanuel Driggus to serve and be with me." The terms of Emanuel's enslavement guaranteed that these children would attain their freedom after a specified number of years. However, no such provision was made for their brothers and sisters.

Douglas Deal: Captain Pott ran into some financial difficulties. He instructed his nephew to try to arrange things to get him out of debt and told him particularly that he would rather part with anything other than his Negroes.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: Yet, in 1657, after twelve years of service, Emanuel's family became Captain Pott's way to "arrange things."

Jennifer Morgan: Their family is completely disrupted, um in fact destroyed by Potts's economic insecurities. So that when Pott accrues debt their younger child is sold and later their oldest daughter Ann is sold for about 5,000 pounds of tobacco.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: When Captain Pott died his widow inherited a farm, farm animals, and Emanuel. However, by 1661 court records show that Emanuel had attained his freedom, leased 145 acres and expanded his livestock holdings.

Jim Horton: Even if you get your freedom as a black person your life is not going to be like that of a free white person. Emanuel Driggus gets his freedom. He leases land he's got to pay many times what a white person would have paid to lease that land. He is not treated like your average free person. Race is really by now a factor and becoming a more and more significant factor.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: By 1665 Maryland and New York had legalized slavery. Three years earlier Virginia law makers decreed, "all children born in Virginia shall be held bond or free according to the condition of the mother."

Deborah Gray White : Even children of say a white master and a slave woman it makes those children not free it makes them a slave. It makes them chattel, it makes them valuable, it makes the white father a slave owner of his own children.

Norrece Jones: Black men and black women raised thousands of mulatto children as families. That love of children transcended the pain and the horror of how that child was created. Unlike some Europeans who created these children and saw their lives so meaningless and insignificant that they sold them no differently than any other slave.

Douglas Deal: Emanuel Driggus continued to see to the needs of his enslaved children. He transferred title to livestock to them -- ah -- later on hoping against hope that the livestock might be a source for some route to freedom for them.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: The court records of September 29, 1673 state "I Emanuel ..grant unto my said two daughters one bay mare." The same day he granted another mare to his free children. Despite his efforts, Emanuel could not free Thomas and Anne, the son and daughter sold by Captain Pott. However, because Thomas married a free black woman, his children were born free.

Douglas Deal: One of those children was named Frances, born in about 1677. Though she was free, she was bound out to serve a local blacksmith planter named John Brewer.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: Frances entered the service of the blacksmith in 1694. Later that year she found herself in court charged by John Brewer with the sin of fornication. No partner was named. Seventeen-year-old Frances was sentenced to thirty lashes. In addition her servitude to Brewer was extended for two years. Months later Frances was back in court this time charged with having a child out of wedlock.

Jim Horton: It becomes increasingly difficult for free blacks to make their case before a court of law. Frances Driggus accuses her master of fathering her child. Now the court won't hear of this. They will not take the word of a black woman against that of a white man and especially a white man who is a planter.

Douglas Deal: This throws the court into an uproar. The justices decide to send the case on to a higher level. However, they do sentence her to yet another whipping.

Douglas Deal: Her master, John Brewer, decides he's had enough of Frances and assigns her to another man. Frances brings a court case against this move.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: Judges were still unlikely to accept the testimony of a black woman against a white man. Un-deterred, Frances argued that Brewer was conspiring to place her in a community where her status as a free woman would not be recognized. The letter binding Frances to Brewer was ruled invalid.

Jennifer Morgan: Frances actually wins her suit and she's released from the terms of her indenture. Frances is really extraordinary because there are very few black women who are able to use the courts in the way that she does. Unfortunately her father has died. Her mother is sick and by 1700 Frances is improvised and destitute. She reappears in the courts because, um, in a desperate act she steals food to try to ah feed herself and her child.

Douglas Deal: She decides that ah she'd better link up to another household, again become a servant, have some steady kind of support. So she binds over herself and her child to Isaac and Bridgett Foxcroft. She promises to serve them for 10 years and any children that she has are to serve for 25 years.

Deborah Gray White : Now if you were a free black woman what are you going to do? There were very few means of making money for any woman in the colony. To be free ironically meant that you were going to be impoverished. And in fact you could find yourself worse off than someone who was enslaved.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: Isaac Foxcroft had promised Frances freedom upon his death. However, when he died his widow assigned Frances and her children to another master. Again, Frances sought justice. Without a document and only her word for evidence, the court ruled against her. After 1704 she disappeared from the public record.

Douglas Deal: In Virginia and a number of other colonies the Atlantic Creoles knew how to negotiate their way through this system and, and win gains and advantages for themselves. Limited gains sometimes but gains nonetheless. It had gone from a situation where they could do that to a situation where there was no space left to do that.

Peter Wood: A small group of elite Virginia planters have committed to the use of race slavery to expand their tobacco holdings. In 1691 they forbid free blacks from living in certain counties. If you're African-American you cannot have an educatio, ah, you cannot move about freely. You cannot hold property. All of these constraints are falling in on one generation.

Deborah Gray White : It's a link in a chain of slavery whereby people cannot become free. Before this there were ways of becoming free.

Jim Horton: Slavery is replacing indentured servitude as the labor system of choice. And by the beginning of the 18th century it is clear that through law in the Chesapeake slavery is being made a racially based institution and people are being considered property.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: New Amsterdam was renamed New York in 1664 after the British took over the colony. New York and other British colonies including Massachusetts, New Jersey and Maryland, were societies with slaves. Of the original thirteen colonies Carolina was the first in which slavery was the center of economic production, making it the first slave society. Racial slavery was sanctioned by Carolinas' 1669 constitution.

Peter Wood: The Carolina colony, which was originally South Carolina and North Carolina -- founded in about 1670. It's one of these gifts from Charles the second to his friend. Here's a place to exploit fellows -- go to it.

Edward Ball: Many South Carolinian whites came initially from Barbados where the British had established a giant sugar economy with some 50 thousand Afro-Caribbean slaves. The plantation system was merely transplanted like a kind of virus from the Caribbean to the American coast.

Marvin Dulaney: The more slaves that you brought gave you more land. You got 50 acres of land for every person that you brought into the Carolina colony. And so slavery was encouraged, ah, from the outset here. And of course the key was to find ah the, the type of work that slaves could do to make the colony profitable.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: As the enslaved cleared land the planters searched for a way to exploit the Carolina low country. They tried growing cotton and indigo and raising livestock. The more they tried the more they failed to find a lucrative cash crop. The enslaved were growing something they called oryza (or rice) for themselves. They had grown it for hundreds of years in West Africa.

Peter Wood: Now it's not knowledge that they hold to themselves. Once they have shown other people how to plant this crop they've lost control of the knowledge. And an entire economy based on exploitation of Africans is in place within a generation. And the shipment of Africans to South Carolina skyrockets.

John K. Thornton: So many of the Africans who were enslaved during the 17th and 18th century were ex-soldiers some of them would be captured through wars or civil wars. And these victors would sell the captives off to the Europeans. This had the advantage from their point of view of reducing their numerical strength, especially the solider population, of the opponents.

Jim Horton: They're marched to the coast. Many of them had not been to the coast before -- they had not seen the ocean. They see white people for the first time. Who are these people? There was this folklore about cannibalism. Lots of slaves who were brought to the coast really were so afraid that these people were gonna eat them.

Peter Wood: Some of the people owning South Carolina are also invested in the Royal Africa Company, in the slave trade themselves. They're getting a profit at both ends out of this.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: The major profit came from the "human cargo" of enslaved Africans. Slave trading had become the basis of an international economy.

Ira Berlin: There are a variety of auxiliary industries, that is -- ship building, insuring, ah, those ships, ah making sails for those ships. So the expansion of slavery is an essential part of the expansion of capitalism.

Edward Ball: As the ships came from West Africa and people were dying, their bodies would be thrown overboard usually in the middle of the Atlantic. But once in a while the captains would wait until they arrived Charleston Harbor. So one of these captains threw several dozen over board and their bodies including children began to wash ashore. So the governor became very upset. And it wasn't because this was a crime against humanity. It was because the smell was irritating to the white population.

Norrece Jones: In many African communities there's this reverence for the ancestors and this reverence for those who are now in the spirit world -- a belief that they're watching over. And I think that that is what sustained so many people at their, their weakest and their lowest moment.

Peter: On Sullivan's Island the English established a pest house where they could quarantine people off of incoming ships.

Jim Horton: These people were thought of as goods, as cargo. And in the language of the slave trader this was a place where goods were held until they could reach full market value. This is the perfect example of the inhumanity of the slave system.

Edward Ball: The most valuable workers were men younger than 20. And the second most valuable were women younger than 20. Children were young and inexpensive and they would grow up and live a long time and produce a lot of rice.

Jim Horton: For a person just arriving, you know, you've been aboard this ship for a long time but you probably don't know exactly how long. You don't know where you have gone. Of course the number one thing on your mind is how do I get out of here? How do I get myself free?

Edward Ball: Those who died were probably buried in mass graves. The people who had died en route were probably one quarter to one third of those who had actually boarded the ship. Those who finally survived were taken to Charleston where they were waxed down with oil, fed a good meal, and put on the auction block.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: For the enslaved, survival took many forms. Some pretended to be ignorant or represented their masters' interests. However, many refused to conform. They maintained their dignity by drawing strength from their spirituality and culture.

Norrece Jones: Even though people may not have spoken the same language and even though people may have been rivals traditionally in their homelands there would've been a certain spiritual bonding that took place -- that people came together and fused themselves together in this new world.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: By the 1720s enslaved black people outnumbered whites by more than two to one in the Carolina low country.

Edward Ball: Slavery was probably unique in every region where it flourished -- in Massachusetts, New York, Virginia and Barbados. But in South Carolina, it was probably the most industrial form of slavery. Because the scale was so, so great. The task system was something that was unique to South Carolina whereby enslaved people had a given assignment on each day. So they usually went to work in the morning at sunrise and a day's task in the field would be to hoe a quarter of an acre, which was 105 feet square. And people spent most of the year up to their knees in mud bent over tilling away at the soil under the sun. Rice was a very demanding master.

Deborah Gray White : In South Carolina slaves are worked almost to death. And then they go back to Africa and they go get some more and they're continually replenished.

John K. Thornton: In Central Africa, men generally don't do agricultural work. There's even a proverb: if you want to humiliate another man you say, "you're no man take up a hoe." Um, indicating that only women would do this kind of work and yet here in South Carolina men were being forced to work, right along side of women.

Peter Wood: In West Africa, the mother would pound a little bit of rice everyday to prepare the evening meal. It was a -- it was an art form -- it was a skill you could be proud of it. You then found yourself doing the same thing. You're growing rice, but now it's completely different.

Daniel C. Littlefield: The sound of the pounding of rice in Africa was the sound of domesticity. Ah -- but the sound of pounding rice in South Carolina was the sound of exploitation.

Edward Ball: Well the more money that the white elites made, the more it was in their interests to make the slave system a kind of invincible fortress that would perpetuate the -- ah -- comforts of the few. And so the incentive was for those who ran the society to set up extensive policing systems.

Jim Horton: A slave, a slave especially under these circumstances wants to survive, wants to be free. And it also doesn't take much imagination to understand the anger of being enslaved of being held against your will of seeing your loved ones subjected to treatment that no human begins ought to experience.

Edward Ball: The first time your punishment was whipping. If you ran away a second time there would be an "R" branded on your right cheek. The third time one of your ears would be severed and another "R" would be burned onto your left cheek for runaway. And if you ran away a fourth time -- if you were a man the punishment was castration.

Peter Wood: Gruesome punishments that had been familiar in England were exaggerated in the slave society. The planter had to calculate that I can punish this person even if they die I can import new people from West Africa. And I'm making so much money in this process that I can afford to do it.

Marvin Dulaney: The inhumane treatment says a lot -- that indeed they're resisting their enslavement. That -- like any other human being whose rights and opportunities are being taken away that they are going to resist and fight back.

Peter Wood: Burning down barns was something that occurred regularly and increased during harvest time when the workload was heaviest. Poisoning could not be caught readily. And it was often something that was feared by whites even when it didn't exist.

Edward Ball: One symptom of their fear was that there was a law that white men had to carry guns when they went to church. Sunday was the only day off for enslaved people. And so people the white folks feared that the uprising, if it ever came, would happen on Sunday when all the whites were gathered in church. Therefore the white men were required to carry their guns to church.

Peter Wood: It was on a Saturday night September 1739. It was a work crew. Many of them are Angolans, including a man named Jemmy who becomes the leader.

Edward Ball: The fated Sunday finally came on the Stono River southwest of Charleston. And they got to a store and broke in and they killed a Mr. Hutchinson. Decapitated him and put his head on a pole and cleared out his store of guns.

Peter Wood: It happens at harvest time, which is the time when blacks are being worked the hardest. It also happens in malaria time and there is an epidemic going on in Charleston which has virtually shut down the town.

John K. Thornton: They must have realized that they couldn't possibly take over the area and drive out the, the Europeans, but they did recognize the possibility that if they took common action as soldiers they might be able to escape.

Marvin Dulaney: The government of Florida had already issued a decree that any African who was a slave who made it to Florida would be free. And there was indeed a colony there of ex-slaves.

Jim Horton: There is this African manned fortification. And when the Stono rebellion breaks out it becomes clear that what these people are trying to do is to reach Fort Mose.

Peter Wood: People begin to join them. They burn successive plantations. Kill some of the white people living there. Draw some of the blacks with them. Others are afraid to join in and refuse to go. But unfortunately for them they meet the lieutenant governor riding north.

Marvin Dulaney: They gave chase to him but he was able to sound the alarm. And then of course sort of a -- a posse is formed and they set out after this group of Africans.

Peter Wood: It's an amazing moment. If they had been able to take him hostage who knows what the dynamics would have been. These people are pursued south for a day or two. If they had been able to go another 24 or 48 hours so -- that more people could have joined them their strength would have been greater and who knows what the prospects would have been.

Edward Ball: And the whites came on them, they surrounded these men and they fired on them. A lot of them were scattered, many of them were killed.

Marvin Dulaney: Some of them escape into the swamp, but those that they did capture they chopped their heads off. Put their heads on poles leading out, down what is today US 17 out of Charleston -- to send a message to the other Africans this is what will happen to you if you rebel.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: After the Stono Rebellion, all of the separate laws governing slavery were consolidated into a single code. This "black code" restricted the movement of black people and regulated almost every aspect of the lives of the enslaved.

Peter Wood: The crushing of the Stono Rebellion was a tragedy. To me, these people were freedom fighters. Someone like Jemmy, newly arrived from Angola, is able to show others around him that this is not the only way to live, this can change -- it may not change this time but it will change in the future.

Jim Horton: Under the most inhumane conditions that you can possibly imagine, people were able to maintain their human dignity. It gives you some insight into the resilience of the human spirit. That it is possible for human beings to make the decision: I will not be defeated.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/slavery/about/index.html

There was a bit in here that I didn't know. I wasn't suprised, but was enlightened.

 

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SLAVERY AND THE MAKING OF AMERICA
Episode 2: "Liberty in the Air"

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: New York City, 1741. Quack, enslaved to a house painter, approached Fort George -- the seat of British colonial rule in New York and home to the governor.

Thomas Davis: Quack was also married to the governor's cook, a slave. The governor did not like Quack's behavior and did not like when Quack came visiting and the governor gave orders to the fort's centuries that if Quack should appear he should not be allowed entry. Quack uttered certain imprecations that he would burn the place down but he would be with his wife. And when the fort did subsequently burn down Quack was a prime suspect.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: When fires erupted in a number of other buildings, warehouses, and stores, it was clear that this was more than romance thwarted.

Thomas Davis: The cry went up, "the negroes are rising, the negroes are rising."

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: Rumors of slaves organizing rebellions traveled the Atlantic seaboard. Two years earlier in an uprising of slaves in Stono, South Carolina some whites were murdered. Now, white New Yorkers panicked.

Thomas Davis: Almost every adult black male who was over 14 years of age was picked up by the city constables, by the militia, and placed in jail.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: As the inquiries began, Caesar, slave of a baker, was the first to be marched to the gallows. His body would hang in a public space while a conspiracy trial accused dozens of slaves and a few whites of plotting to burn down New York City and foment slave rebellion.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: The trial revealed bitter details about the lives of the enslaved in New York, home to the second largest slave population after Charleston, South Carolina.

Graham Russell Hodges: There was a sense among all of these slaves that they were trapped into a system that offered no yield at all. That there was nothing that they could do if they wanted to be free except to revolt.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: Slaves complained about being overworked and that they weren't supplied with enough clothing or fuel to keep warm. They lashed out at the laws that prohibited them from gathering together. But their most common complaint was not being allowed to visit their loved ones.

Graham Russell Hodges: In the mid 18th century African Americans in New York knew that liberty existed for others. They knew it was denied to them.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: As slaves faced the court they were confronted by all the laws that had accumulated over the past one hundred years restricting and degrading their lives.

Thomas Davis: The law of slavery deemed that persons who were patently human beings were not in fact persons. They were not persons at law rather they were deemed property. Well that is a patent fiction. Anyone can look at Caesar , at Quack ... and say well yes these are persons. And much of slaves' existence was geared to the fact of demonstrating their humanity.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: Early in the proceedings, Quack was accused of burning down Fort George. He and twelve other black men were burned at the stake, seventeen were hanged. Four whites were also hanged.

Thomas Davis: After each rebellion, what the society seeks to do is pass a more repressive set of laws. And so we have a continually upward cycling of violence because the violence of slaveholder repression produces the violence of slave reaction.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: By the 1750s some five thousand Africans a year were brought to American docks in crowded filthy, stinking ships ...

Jim Horton: And for weeks they are confined to these places, people being chained together. People dying and being chained to dead people for periods of time until somebody decides to take the dead people above decks and throw them into the ocean.

Peter Wood: Some people it didn't last two weeks but for other people they began mustering the human resources that it would take to figure out the predicament they had been thrown into.

Peter Wood: The planters, the exploiters have rationalized what they're doing. They've worked it out with the law. They've worked it out with their god one way or another. And they've begun the long trek into American racism. That is to say they've reduced these people to less than human beings. And that's the way they're gonna make it work.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: A hundred years after the first Africans arrived -- most colonies were heavily dependent upon slave labor. By 1750 a quarter million enslaved blacks now made vast wealth possible for their masters.

Peter Wood: Slavery it seems to me was an extraordinary goose that laid the golden egg ... .You had workers that you didn't have to pay and you owned their children as soon as they were born. It's a preposterous system . All you have to do is visit one of the huge plantations in Virginia or South Carolina to see the wealth that flowed ...

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: At Shadwell -- a tobacco plantation in the Piedmont region of Virginia -- two young boys are growing up together. Jupiter was born a slave. The other, Thomas Jefferson, would one day be president of a new republic. Jupiter was one of more than sixty slaves who sustained Jefferson's family.

Ira Berlin: A new generation of black people -- of slaves is coming of age. These are people who are born on this side of the Atlantic. These are people who know how to operate within the society.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: When Thomas Jefferson went off to study the classics, Jupiter was trained to be Jefferson's personal valet. That training would include sophisticated lessons in psychology and power.

Jennifer Morgan: Certainly as he grew up one of the things that he was gonna have to learn is that a boy who is his same age, Thomas Jefferson's, is going to grow up to be his owner, is gonna grow up to be his master.

Ira Berlin: He came to understand something about the politics of that world... The word liberty of course would come to be used much in the years that followed. And his own owner, Thomas Jefferson became a great merchant of the language of liberty. Jupiter understood that as well.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: Jupiter's status and work conditions were privileged compared to most other slaves at Shadwell. But for all of them -- including Jupiter -- it would be endless work, from sun-up to sundown and beyond.

Norrece Jones: And all of them also would have experienced a punishment. The severity of the lashings, the cutting off of ears, the kind of contraptions that are placed around people to prevent running away. All of these tortuous weapons are realities that enslaved people everywhere would have experienced.

Jennifer Morgan: Jupiter, like any child, would also have to deal with the fact that while his parents have authority over him their authority is secondary to the authority of the slave owner. He might have to witness his mother being schooled by her owner. He would have to watch his mother being punished, being whipped or being raped.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: In this lopsided balance of power slaves found ingenious ways to resist the master. Some subtle, some overt, some suicidal.

Peter Wood: Arson was one of the primary forms of resistance because it was hard to track. Poisoning was another. Running away was another because you were literally stealing property from the master if you ran away.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: A runaway ad in 1746 describes sixteen-year-old Stephen Thusly. He has been "much whipped, which his back will show..." Another ad describes Peter, as Virginia born, running away with iron shackles on his legs...

Thomas Davis: ... Day after day slaves are refusing to obey. They are saying listen we have our own lives. We will not go that far. We will not submit totally.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: Slave and master knew each other well. Using this familiarity slaves constantly tested the boundaries. They negotiated with their masters for more time to work on their own gardens or to sell and trade produce they cultivated.

Ira Berlin: It would seem that somebody who's a slave would have no power and would have nothing to negotiate. But slaves found that they could negotiate. They danced the dance of domination and subordination.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: One of the most profound forms of resistance was the preservation of African religions, values, and beliefs.

Sylvia R. Frey: What it did is create an internal universe, which is separate and apart from and beyond the control of a white master.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: Yet something else was emerging.

Jennifer Morgan: The first generation of American born descendants of Africans are really in the process of creating something that has a very strong link to Africa but which is really quite new.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: On plantations new African arrivals mixed with American born slaves to shape a new culture.

Peter Wood: The Jefferson family may have a violin from Europe. And someone plays that fiddle. ... Jupiter's family from Africa knows how to make banjos. In fact Thomas Jefferson himself writes about how the banjo is an African instrument. Originally in Africa they often made it using a big gourd...so this is complicated coming together of different cultures not just Europe and Africa but varieties of West African cultures. On any given plantation any given young person like Jupiter is experiencing all these forces.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: For Jupiter growing to adulthood it was a double life. When Jefferson went off to college in Williamsburg, Jupiter accompanied him as his valet. When Jefferson went to court his future wife at her father's plantation, Jupiter would find his future wife enslaved there. They would all end up at Monticello, Jefferson's mansion in rural Virginia.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: As slaves began forming extended families the slave quarter became the center of family life.

Norrece Jones: They, like any other human beings free or un-free, a thousand years ago or today, have the emotions of any other people. They fall in love, they hate others, they develop friendships and how to do this within the milieu of slavery simply made those very human realities more difficult and more challenging, but they existed.

Jennifer Morgan: ... Networks of love and affection and connection between the enslaved have got to be really crucial to surviving the experience of slavery ... to surviving it on an emotional level as well as a physical level.

Norrece Jones: But in the creation of those families it gave their owners yet another weapon to force them to behave in ways that they wanted.

Jennifer Morgan: What this community then becomes is the foundation for an internal slave trade where these children a ... these families will be separated in the future.

Peter Wood: ... It's almost unimaginable the tragedy of seeing next of kin simply removed, disappeared, shipped somewhere else. The sheer mind boggling excruciating situation of dealing with arbitrary power on a daily basis not knowing when you wake up in the morning whether the family will be complete when you go to bed at night.

Peter Wood: If you look at the runaway advertisements in the colonial newspapers what's striking is that roughly half of the people are running away to see kinfolk, to see loved ones.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: Slave sales and cross-plantation marriages meant that families were strewn across the landscape. A web of well-worn footpaths soon connected plantations and farms creating a kinship map of a region. Those paths also functioned as trading and news networks. The complex waterways of the Atlantic seaboard extended these contacts. They would become key for a young slave, named Titus, coming of age on the eve of the American Revolution. During the early 1770s in Monmouth County, New Jersey Titus worked alongside his quick-tempered owner, John Corlies. It was a time when some colonists were beginning to protest British restrictions on their freedom. Titus was alert to the gathering storm. He knew that one protestant group -- the Quakers -- had begun to free their slaves . John Corlies was a Quaker.

Graham Russell Hodges: When Titus turns 21 he knows this is the age in which other Quakers free their enslaved people. Corlies refuses to do so.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: Unlike other Quakers, Corlies also refused to teach Titus to read and write -- but he did send his young slave to market alone. Titus would take advantage of this practical education. He had a wide range of survival skills. He earned cash by selling animal skins and produce he had grown. He also owned a mental map of the area and its extensive waterways. As Titus turned 21 it was 1775. The American Revolution had begun. He now saw the mounting political conflict as an opportunity. He made a dangerous and risky move.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: When Titus ran some half million, or one in five people in the colonies were of African descent. Most were enslaved. Some were free. A few even owned slaves themselves. As the relationship between the colonists and the British deteriorated, black people in America faced a new challenge -- how to make their demands for freedom heard in the growing cacophony for liberty. In rural Massachusetts a domestic slave by the name of Mum Bett was paying close attention to this unfolding crisis. She worked alongside her sister, Lizzie, in the home of John and Hannah Ashley.

John Sedgewick: Colonel John Ashley was probably the most important man in town. The Ashleys owned just about everything there was to own. Including as it turned out Mum Bett herself.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: One day an incident occurred that would strengthen Mum Bett's resolve

John Sedgewick: Lizzie was making for herself some wheat cakes from the scraps that were left over...and Mum Bett is watching from the other side of the room. When Mrs. Ashley sees this and gets furious. She takes a coal pan from the fireplace, a red-hot device that she's ready to bring down on little Lizzie's head. Well Mum Bett of course would never sit for that. She gets the coal pan on her own forearm and it burns her severely and leaves a nasty scar. Well for years afterwards Mum Bett made a point of rolling up her sleeves whenever she was in public so that she would reveal the scar. So that when people would ask her "why Betty what happened?" she would say "Ask Madam!"

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: Mum Bett would soon take her destiny into her own hands. Deprived of an opportunity to learn how to read and write Mum Bett was listening in on the growing resentment of the colonists against British taxation and control. She was present during crucial meetings in the Ashley house when a position paper was written demanding rights for the colonists.

John Sedgewick : In it they used the phrase or something very close to "every citizen is entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." These words that come down from the philosopher John Locke and become part of the scriptural language of the Declaration of Independence. She would have been right there. She would have heard it.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: Revolution and the rhetoric of liberty were in the air. Mum Bett and others like her would soon begin to exhale this new language.

Voice Over: The natural liberty of man is to be free.

Thomas Davis: Beginning in 1765 with the Stamp Act crisis, the language the rhetoric, of natural rights flows throughout the American colonies

Voice Over: The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time.

Thomas Davis: There are continual pamphlets that are coming forward to express views of natural rights Slaves hear that conversation. Slaves some of them read those pamphlets .

Voice Over: All men are by nature equally free and have certain inherent rights in which when they enter.

Jim Horton: You know when you listen to the patriots.

Voice Over: Reducing us to slavery.

Jim Horton: They say we will not be the slaves of England. They don't say we will not be the second-class citizens. They will, they don't say we won't be the oppressed people they say we will not be the slaves. Well when people who hold slaves say we will not be slaves you know that they know what they're talking about. Well slaves were saying exactly the same thing. And African Americans were quick to say we will not be the slaves of England nor will we be the slaves of America.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: In early 1773 a petition arrived on the desk of governor Thomas Hutchinson, the British crown's representative in Massachusetts. At a time when most slaves were illiterate, this petition was signed by a slave.

Voice Over: "The humble Petition of many slaves: we shall never be able to possess and enjoy any thing, not even life itself, but in a manner as the beasts that perish. We have no Property! We have no City! No Country! ... Signed Felix.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: Three months later another petition was written and signed by four enslaved men, Peter Bestes, Sambo Freeman, Chester Joie, and Felix Holbrook.

Voice Over: We expect great things from men who have made such a noble stand against the designs of their fellow men to enslave them.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: The petitioners demanded answers.

Thomas Davis: How is it that you can talk about liberty as a fundamental right of human beings when in fact you keep us as slaves? How is it that you treat us as beasts when we are human beings? More than that -- how can you call yourselves Christian people?

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: A year later, yet another petition reached the new Massachusetts governor. Crafted by slaves, the words again would sound like a document that had yet to be written -- the Declaration of Independence.

Voice Over: We have in common with all other men a natural right to our freedoms without being deprived of them by our fellow men.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: All the petitions were dismissed. Slaves could see the paradox. Thomas Jefferson -- still in his early thirties, spoke of slavery as a moral evil yet he was a prominent member of the Virginia slave holding class. Now he was at work on a document about equality and liberty.

Voice Over: We hold these truths to be...

Peter Wood: If I were Jupiter looking at my childhood friend Thomas Jefferson knowing the world we both grew up in I wouldn't be surprised by the contradictions that emerge in his thinking.

Voice Over: Among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Jim Horton: In some ways you know Thomas Jefferson is so like America itself. Thomas Jefferson expresses opinions in the Declaration of Independence that are wonderful examples of fairness, of a belief in human dignity and human freedom yet Thomas Jefferson is so contradictory because the man who writes the Declaration of Independence is the man that holds at one point almost 250 slaves or more. The country that says to the world we bring ourselves into existence on the principle of human freedom is the country that is, in many ways, founded on the principle of human slavery -- supported by that principle. That's a pretty substantial contradiction.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: April 1775. Open warfare broke out. Black people began choosing sides. In the North some 5,000 black men joined in mixed and all black regiments to fight on the side of the patriots some fought as minutemen in the earliest battles of the war. Black soldiers were badly needed because some white colonists were reluctant to serve. Initially, General Washington resisted arming black men.

Sylvia R. Frey: For white Americans everywhere the image of a black soldier toting a gun evokes a totally disordered society -- complete disordering of the old society.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: Washington relented when he heard what was happening further south. Word was spreading that the British were going to offer freedom to slaves who joined their side.

Sylvia R. Frey: In November of 1775 Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, issued a proclamation offering freedom to enslaved people who fled to the British who joined his Ethiopian corp.

Peter Wood: It has a tremendous effect and word spreads to other colonies.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: It was the rumor of Lord Dunmore's proclamation that probably inspired Titus to run away. After a stint in Dunmore's Ethiopian regiment Titus returned to the Monmouth New Jersey countryside. This time, he was leading a guerilla band of black and white raiders fighting for the British. Only now he was known as Colonel Tye. Colonel Tye and his band knew the landscape and the farmers in the region. They raided property and carried off cattle and clothing to deliver to British troops. They terrorized their former owners and kidnapped key patriot farmers most importantly they liberated their enslaved families and friends.

Russell Hodges: New York was the cockpit of the revolution. Colonel Tye was somebody who was acting on a local level but his actions had continental importance.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: During a battle in September, 1780, Colonel Tye took a bullet in his wrist. Within days he died. Only 26 years old, he had fought in the revolution for five years.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: Dunmore's offer of freedom coupled with the chaos of war led to a mass exodus from Southern plantations. Tens of thousands of slaves responded with their feet. The risks were huge.

Peter Wood: There are tragic stories in Chesapeake Bay. Word is out that you can get on board a British ship. So you gather your family eight or ten people in a small boat you row out to the boat that's flying a British flag only to find out that it's a hoax that the patriots have run up a British flag in order to lure you on board arrest you punish you and send you back to the plantation. It's stories like that that break your heart.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: Those slaves that reached the British forces were assigned the most arduous tasks -- building fortifications, hauling heavy equipment, digging ditches. They lived in miserable conditions in military camps and died by the thousands of smallpox.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: At the end of the war, thousands of former slaves were transported to freedom by the British. Many others were freed by fighting for the patriots. No other event until the civil war would liberate so many slaves.

Jim Horton: The point in all this is that whether African Americans fought for the American cause or whether they fought for the British cause they were fighting for the central cause of freedom. That's what African Americans were fighting for. For them the revolution really was a freedom struggle.

Voice Over: All men are born free and equal and have certain natural, essential and unalienable rights, among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: As the war was coming to an end, colonies began to write new constitutions. In 1780 the Massachusetts constitution was read aloud in every village including Sheffield where Mum Bett did errands. Soon after, Mum Bett knocked on the door of attorney Theodore Sedgwick. She knew him from the meetings at the Ashley house.

Thomas Davis: She overheard Ashley and his colleagues talking about the rhetoric of independence. Talking about natural rights.

Thomas Davis: Mum Bett essentially says we have this constitution that appears to announce a principle of each person being free. If that is the case then I am free.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: Her meeting with Sedgwick led to a court suit in which Mum Bett and another slave of the household sued Colonel Ashley for their freedom.

John Sedgwick: It wasn't just Theodore John Sedgwick going against Colonel Ashley, he hired (Theodore did) some of the best legal talent that could be found in the whole Southern New England.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: In 1781 Mum Bett won her case and announced that she would thereafter be known as Elizabeth Freeman. Her victory helped pave the way for the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts two years later.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: During the long hot summer of 1787 enslaved coachmen waited outside independence hall in Philadelphia -- inside their owners forged a constitution for the new republic.

Peter Wood: The issue that was hardest for them to address was the issue of slavery and they simply postponed it all through that hot summer 'til the very end of their debates. And they finally brought it up and addressed it.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: Most delegates -- north and south -- never considered eliminating slavery. It was clear any attempt at abolition would have ended the effort to create the United States. While the deals around slavery would shape the national debate for the next seventy years the words slave or slavery never appear in this founding document.

Jim Horton: Now they do refer to the institution in several indirect ways. There is the notion that the slave trade will not be abolished for at least 20 years. There is the notion that a person who owes service to a master in one state cannot escape that service by removing himself to another state. Now that's kind of a Fugitive Slave clause but they don't use the word slave or slavery.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: The most politically significant deal embraced by the constitution was the three fifths-clause. It allowed states to count their enslaved population as three fifths of a person in determining representation in congress.

Jim Horton: So the fact is that from the south's point of view they are getting additional political power as a result of their slave population. Except for the three-fifths compromise Jefferson would have lost that election in 1800. But the slaves are not being represented. The slaves get nothing from this.

Peter Wood: And the republic that's created pays the price for that over the next many, many generations.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: Black people were betrayed by the new constitution. But if doors were shutting, they now looked for windows to open. Ninety percent of blacks were still enslaved. But in Northern cities freed black communities were organizing themselves. In Southern cities black artisans were buying their freedom. Both groups ignited an emancipation movement. It began with the founding of the first black Christian churches.

Sylvia R. Frey: It reinforced family and community. It provided the opportunity for men and women to exercise leadership roles.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: Blacks had been slow to accept a religion that they associated with slavery and their masters, but in the mid-18th century a protestant revival movement called the great awakening introduced a more democratic and expressive form of Christianity and some blacks caught the spirit.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: Some slave owners -- inspired by the values of the great awakening and the principles of the new nation -- began to free their slaves. Not Thomas Jefferson. In the 1780's Jefferson published his only book -- NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA. In it he argued against this "great political and moral evil" of slavery yet at the same time he wrote that blacks were mentally inferior to whites.

Jefferson quote from NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA:
"... It appears to me in memory they are equal; to whites, In reason much inferior."

Thomas Davis: He suggests that they're not as bright as smart, as intellectually gifted.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: Jefferson's theories fueled both sides of the slavery debate. And while he wrote that black people should be free, he never used his power to free them, including during his presidency. Instead he supported shipping former slaves to Africa.

Thomas Davis: Jefferson apparently believed that you cannot have emancipation without having colonization. Which is to say that we can't just let them be free here. That won't work. So if we are going to emancipate them we have to send them somewhere else.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: While some blacks supported colonization most leaders in the freed black communities of the north denounced the idea.

Jim Horton: You know one of the things that these free blacks said is "I'm a citizen of the United States. My father my grandfather fought in the American Revolution to bring this nation into existence. I have as much right to be in America, to live in America as anybody here."

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: The generation of blacks born in the late 18th century were raised on the promises of the revolution and the frustrations of its aftermath. Among them was David Walker. Brought up in the south, Walker would move north to take the emerging abolitionist movement to another level. Walker was born free in the 1790s in Wilmington, North Carolina. He probably learned to read and write in one of Wilmington's first black Christian churches.

Jim Horton: These are places, which are not only religious places. These are places where political decisions are made, political meetings are held.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: By roughly 1820 David Walker made his way to Charleston. There he was exposed to the ideas of Denmark Vesey. A freed carpenter, Vesey was a leader in the new African Methodist Episcopal church.

Peter Hinks: David Walker learns from Denmark Vesey that the bible could be a very, very important tool in giving blacks a strength to resist their enslavement. And he sees how the church in Charleston could be a center for organizing blacks just in terms of numbers and also ideologically rallying them.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: Vesey like many blacks -- enslaved and free -- had also digested the news about the Haitian revolution -- the slave rebellion which created the first black republic. By 1822 -- while David Walker was in Charleston -- Vesey was organizing a massive rebellion. But someone leaked it. And Vesey -- along with more than 30 others -- was executed.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: After that failed rebellion, Walker made his way to Boston. There he would discover not only a virulent racism against black men and women, but a growing political consciousness in the freed black community. In 1820s Boston, Walker became a leading voice in local black churches and organizations...

Jim Horton: He is a member of the Massachusetts Colored Association. ...a black society specifically focused on abolition.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: In 1829 Walker sat down to distill his experiences, his analysis of slavery and his rage. He wrote what came to be known as the most important abolitionist document of the nineteenth century. He called it AN APPEAL TO THE COLORED CITIZENS OF THE WORLD, but in particular, and very expressly, to those of the United States of America.

Carla Peterson: This is an amazing document and we can take it as the first maybe expression of Black Nationalism in this country. And basically this is a verbal call to arms asking the African-American community to come together and empower itself.

Walker's voice: America is more our country than it is the whites. We have enriched it with our blood and tears.

Thomas Davis: The appeal itself lays out the full history of argument against slavery, against slaveholding.

Walker's voice: Oh, my colored brethren -- all over the world! When shall we arise from this death-like apathy? And be Men!!

Thomas Davis: More than that it is addressed to the colored people of America saying to them that they have a single aspiration and that single aspiration is freedom.

Walker's voice: We must and shall be free.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: Walker modeled the appeal on the constitution and he drew from the Declaration of Independence and the bible.

Jim Horton: He says Jefferson and America are hypocrites.

Walker's voice: See your Declaration Americans! Do you understand your own language?

Jim Horton: He says that America is not doing what it professes to do. It is not expressing the values that it says it believes in.

Walker's voice: "We hold these truths to be self-evident. That all men are created equal" -- compare your own language above extracted from your Declaration of Independence, with your cruelties and murders.

Jim Horton: He says Christians are not living up to the values of Christianity.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: In the appeal Walker directly confronts Jefferson's arguments about black people in his notes on the state of Virginia.

Walker's voice: Has Mr. Jefferson declared to the world that we are inferior to the whites?

Peter Hinks: He believed that racism had become so insidious that it was profoundly demoralizing blacks making them incapable of acting against the terrible oppression which weighed on them. ...and his hope was that the APPEAL would serve to motivate African Americans to fight that.

Walker's voice: We can help ourselves

Thomas Davis: One of the tremendous elements of David Walker's APPEAL is his reach into the psyche of blacks. To say first and foremost that we need to think together as a people, but also to focus on the individual. And in as sense to say change begins with you. And you must begin to think differently. Not only to think of us collectively as a single people sharing an ultimate aim of freedom but to think of yourself differently -- to think of yourself as an agent of freedom.

Thomas Davis: And what Walker does in his APPEAL in 1829 is to say "listen if emancipation is not forthcoming blood will flow, oceans and oceans of blood."

Walker's voice: I call God! I call Angels! I call men! To witness that your destruction is at hand!

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: Walker distributed his APPEAL up and down the Atlantic seaboard. He mailed copies to ministers who would read it to the illiterate. The APPEAL was even discovered in the hands of runaways in North Carolina.

Peter Hinks: Black activists in the 1830s talk of gathering with others in their communities to have the APPEAL read to them, to fire them , to give them increased inspiration to continue on with their struggle and to help them understand what it was they were fighting.

Jim Horton: As you might well imagine this is shocking and frightening to slave holders. Immediately many Southern states put out bounties on David Walker' head. They want David Walker delivered from Massachusetts to a variety of places in the south.

Jim Horton: 'Course Southern slaveholders were well aware that there had been many slave rebellions and attempted rebellions all along but this was particularly frightening because it was an appeal issued by a free black man outside of the south. In other words -- outside of the direct control of slaveholders.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: One of the people who responded to Walker's charge was the young Maria Stewart who in 1826 married a free and successful Boston shipping agent. Born free, Maria was orphaned at age five and immediately sent into domestic service. She probably learned to read and write in a black church.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: Three years after her wedding to James Stewart, he died.

Carla Peterson: And although he had been fairly prosperous it turns out that upon his death he had been defrauded by some white businessmen who were his colleagues. And so Maria Stewart was not only widowed but also left destitute.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: A year later she received more devastating news. Her mentor, David Walker, was found dead in his Boston doorway.

Jim Horton: There is reason to believe that he may have been assassinated by someone operating on behalf of those people who were felt directly threatened by his appeal for slave rebellion.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: His compounding losses sparked a religious conversion with political implications.

Carla Peterson: She sees herself as picking up the torch from David Walker and carrying his work forward.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: Stewart began to write -- and speak in public.

Marilyn Richardson: You see her speaking things such as "I committed myself to a life of virtue and piety and I understood that I might be a warrior and a martyr for the cause of God and my brethren." Well virtue and piety are perfectly reasonable. It was a woman's sphere it was not a radical position at all. But then in the same sentence the same sentence here come the words warrior and martyr and God and my brethren. And then she goes right on to say all of the nations of the world are crying out for freedom and independence. And can the sons of Africa, remain silent under the heal of tyranny. . And it's unprecedented in African-American intellectual history.

Stewart's voice: Why should man any longer deprive his fellow man of equal rights and privileges?

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: Maria Stewart was the first American woman to address a mixed audience of men and women about political issues. In it's time, it was a bold and controversial act.

Stewart's voice: Stewart's voice -- Possess the spirit of independence. The Americans do, and why should not you? Marilyn Richardson for Maria Stewart the highest form of obedience to god was political protest.

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: Drawing inspiration from the bible to oppose slavery, Stewart's special concern was the condition of black women.

Stewart's voice: How long shall the fair daughters of Africa be compelled to bury their minds and talents beneath a load of iron pots and kettles?

Morgan Freeman, Narrator: In the early 1830s Maria Stewart made a number of speeches to black organizations in Boston. In her passion to challenge her audiences to become leaders, she seemed to offend both the men and the women.

Stewart: Throw off your fearfulness.

Carla Peterson: She's very, very hard on black men and accuses them of being servile, faithless, frivolous, passive.

Stewart's voice: And make yourselves useful and active members in society.

Carla Peterson: And she's telling them to get up off their duffs and be active and to be men. So what man wants to be told to be a man?

Stewart's voice: Have the sons of Africa no souls? Feel they no ambitious desires?

Jim Horton: But her words are very important -- and that is African Americans must depend foremost on themselves. They must take the lead themselves. They must uplift the race. That's the way they put it in the 19th century. They must uplift the race. And she was critical of anyone in African-American community who was not working in every way possible to uplift the race.

Carla Peterson: David Walker and Maria Stewart are so important for African-American history in a sense we could think of them as our founding father and mother because they are really our first black nationalists. They are the first to have a sense of African-American people as constituting almost a nation within a nation. We are a nation within a nation and we need to figure out where we go from here.

Jim Horton: They really foreshadow a coming more militant generation. That generation will use the words, the sentiments, the strategies of Walker and Maria Stewart.

Marilyn Richardson: What David Walker and what Maria Stewart understood was that slavery in the south and discrimination would not die as a result of moral persuasion or political activity. Because they understood that the first abolitionist in America was the first black person brought off of a ship in chains. They understood only war would bring about the possibility of emancipation of blacks in America.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/slavery/about/index.html

 

[Goldie Munro]

Read Beloved by Toni Morrison - you will all get it!

 

[sweetnpetite]

Read Beloved by Toni Morrison - you will all get it!

I read Sulu- wasn't that by Toni Morrison. I didn't care to much for it (that's an understatement) but I'd be willing to try Beloved or the Bluest Eye.

 

[sweetnpetite]

from: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs


After a brief period of suspense, the will of my mistress was read, and we learned that she had bequeathed me to her sister's daughter, a child of five years old. So vanished our hopes. My mistress had taught me the precepts of God's Word: "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." "Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them." But I was her slave, and I suppose she did not recognize me as her neighbor. I would give much to blot out from my memory that one great wrong. As a child, I loved my mistress; and, looking back on the happy days I spent with her, I try to think with less bitterness of this act of injustice. While I was with her, she taught me to read and spell; and for this privilege, which so rarely falls to the lot of a slave, I bless her memory.

She possessed but few slaves; and at her death those were all distributed among her relatives. Five of them were my grandmother's children, and had shared the same milk that nourished her mother's children. Notwithstanding my grandmother's long and faithful service to her owners, not one of her children escaped the auction block. These God-breathing machines are no more, in the sight of their masters, than the cotton they plant, or the horses they tend.

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/JACOBS/hj-preface.htm

 

[sweetnpetite]

I would like to add- that I do not think of Black History only in terms of slavery. But I do think it's an important chapter- and also I find myself continually suprised by 'what I don't know I don't know' on the topic. I was tought in school that it was a horrible terrible thing and all of that, but it seems the picture I got from what many would term a liberal education was something like this- primative africans were kidnapped and sold into slavery by white men, they were mistreated, abused, ect. The north knew this was wrong, but the south did not agree so they had a big war and being as the north won, Abraham Lincoln (a white man) set the slaves free. Some slaves escaped w/ the help of other escaped slaves and some free black me spoke out against slavery.

the moral of the story- blacks were enslaved by whites and then freed by whites- they were acted upon and were not actors in history.

Thank god we can educate *ourselves*

I've been learning about my ignorance of First Nations (Native American) History lately too.