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February: Celebrating Black History
Posted by: | CommentsFebruary – the shortest month of the year – marks the beginning of black history month in the U.S. Today marks the 50th anniversary of the Greensboro, N.C. lunch counter sit-ins at the Woolworth’s lunch counter. If you’re not familiar with this important history, this short (6:11) video clip from the History Channel provides a basic review of the facts:
Today is also significant for the opening of a Civil Rights Museum on the site of the sit-ins in Greensboro. While the courage of people like the four young, African-American men that sat at that segregated lunch counter helped change the system of Jim Crow segregation, we should not let the civil rights struggle become ossified in memorials and museums. The truest celebration of black history month is to continue the struggle for racial equality now.
We Need a Revolution! The Weakened State of Black Solidarity
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This past weekend, I was in need of some invigorating stimulus that did not include research, reading, writing, or any other academic venue that I normally enjoy to partake in as a form of higher enlightenment. I needed an escape from the term “seriousness.” Therefore, I took my best friend up on a one hour drive for a meat and potato dinner and then some fun at a riverboat casino. I am not a real gambler. This fact is easily surmised when one discovers that I have always had a $50 dollar limit when gambling. But I needed something different this particular weekend. Observing the array of people always seems to be more enjoyable to me then the thrill of decide to either hit or stay as I play Blackjack or allow my silly side to indulge and attempt to do my best Passenger 57 (Wesley Snipes, 1992) imitation and “Always bet on black” at the roulette table.
This particular night I was down to my last $5 bucks after losing the rest on a game I had no idea what I was doing. So I decided to finish the night by blowing the remaining $5 dollars at Blackjack. As I looked around, I noticed all the tables were full except one. It was a table consumed with one Black male and three Black females who seemed to be within my age range. Before walking over, I noticed there were actually two seats open. My visual observations noticed onlookers who were constantly maneuvering their chips within their hands nervously. It was apparent to me that they all seemed to have a desire to play at the only open table in the busy casino, but their eyes signaled to me a caution to avoid the loud, laughing, and at times cursing gamblers already present. I had no fear and had seen worse public behavior, so I sat down next to one of the females. My first and possibly only hand had been dealt 13 and the dealer had a 3 face card. I was about to ask the overly heaving busty woman within a ridiculously tight outfit to “hit” me. But just before my shaky hand was about to signal the dealer, the woman next to me said, “Honey don’t do that. Just stay.” I could tell in her eyes she was serious and quite concerned, so I then told the dealer I was staying at 13. Soon the dealer had busted. I won! I was excited and thanked my chair coach graciously. She later went on to advice me for the next 30 minutes. Due to her efforts it was possible for me to win all of my money back plus $40 dollars. I knew I was lucky, and decided it was time to do my best Kenny Rogers, by walking away and counting my money. Just before I left the table, I gave my new buddy a hug and then proceeded to say, “Thank you sista.” The others at the table began to laugh and in a way mocked me and kept repeating, “Your sista”?
Later in the car on the way home, the event made me think. Why was that gesture so foreign and funny? Was I somehow socially disconnected from them? As I pondered today, I came to the conclusion that possibly there were the ones disconnected. Why? Well, I argue that there has been a steady bleeding of the Black collective identity within the U.S. since the Black Power and Black is Beautiful era ended.
I am conscious of the fact that Blacks in America have never had total and mutual solidarity across all avenues of possible social and economic differences throughout history. But what was present at the height of solidarity within the late 50s, 60s, and 70s has declined. The muscle of solidarity that was once bulging has begun to undergo uremic myopathy. Mabogo More argues in Black Solidarity: A Philosophical Defense (2009) that Black solidarity and identity has been the response and “rallying call” for liberation against racial injustice.
In fact, Kevin Cokley and Collette Chapman note that the marginalization and oppressive measures that have targeted Blacks in the past resulted in periodic bolstering of Black collective racial identity and solidarity . Simply, Blacks have not had an opportunity to rejuvenate our collective bond as a historically oppressed people due to the fact that there seems to be no viable issue to bring us together. If this is true, the argument is conceivable. I argue that the covert manner in which the White racial frame operates today, has pulled the biggest trick on the on looking crowd as it has made what was so concretely seen disappear into thin air.
The French poet Baudelaire noted that “la plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu’il n’existe pas!” Simply translated, he was saying that “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” The illusion of people of color in prestigious positions in government, major corporations, medical fields have shown us that the chains that once stopped out feet from moving toward the brace ring of success have been cracked.
The media has helped to convince us as well that racism and oppression no longer loom their ugly heads to the country. When people do speak out against oppression or racism, cable television stations such as Fox and CNN bring on other people of color to discard these social anarchists. A day later, the topic has then faded into the night to never be revisited. Raphael Cohen-Almagor in The Limits of Objective Reporting (2008) concluded that in many cases the media does not display objective reporting either because they choose to be or are being manipulated by their sources.
The sense of “we” that was once present can only occur again once we as Blacks again align ourselves by pulling the blinds that have been placed upon our eyes in order to see the exclusion that is occurring within our public schools, universities, public policies, government, and etc. And once this occurs, we must promise each other to never forget the collective identity and shared pains that allows me to feel engulfed with joy when I call another my brother or sister.
A Belated Pardon for John Brown, Heroic Abolitionist
Posted by: | CommentsDavid Reynolds, the author of an important biography of the white antislavery activist and abolitionist John Brown, did a NYT op-ed piece a few days back noting that this month marks the 150 anniversary of his hanging for organizing an insurrection against slavery. He gives historical background and calls for an official pardon for Brown. In October 1859,
With a small band of abolitionists, Brown had seized the federal arsenal there and freed slaves in the area. His plan was to flee with them to nearby mountains and provoke rebellions in the South. But he stalled too long in the arsenal and was captured.
Brown’s group of antislavery band of attackers included whites, including relatives and three Jewish immigrants, and a number of blacks. (Photo: Wikipedia) Radical 
abolitionists constituted one of the first multiracial groups to struggle aggressively against systemic racism in US history.
A state court in Virginia convicted him of treason and insurrection, and the state hanged him on December 2, 1859. Reynolds argues we should revere Brown’s raid and this date as a key milestone in the history of anti-oppression movements. Brown was not the “wild and crazy” man of much historical and textbook writing:
Brown reasonably saw the Appalachians, which stretch deep into the South, as an ideal base for a guerrilla war. He had studied the Maroon rebels of the West Indies, black fugitives who had used mountain camps to battle colonial powers on their islands. His plan was to create panic by arousing fears of a slave rebellion, leading Southerners to view slavery as dangerous and impractical.
We forget today just how extensively revered John Brown was in his day:
Ralph Waldo Emerson compared him to Jesus, declaring that Brown would “make the gallows as glorious as the cross.” Henry David Thoreau placed Brown above the freedom fighters of the American Revolution. Frederick Douglass said that while he had lived for black people, John Brown had died for them. A later black reformer, W. E. B. Du Bois, called Brown the white American who had “come nearest to touching the real souls of black folk.” . . . . By the time of his hanging, John Brown was so respected in the North that bells tolled in many cities and towns in his honor.
And then there were the Union troops singing his praises for years in the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Brown’s comments to reporters at his trial and hanging suggest how sharp his antiracist commitment was. For example, Brown’s lucid comment on his sentence of death indicates his commitment to racial justice: “Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments,—I submit, so let it be done!”
Reynolds notes that Brown was not a perfect hero, but one with “blotches on his record,” yet none of the heroes of this era is without major blotches. Indeed,
Lincoln was the Great Emancipator, but he shared the era’s racial prejudices, and even after the war started thought that blacks should be shipped out of the country once they were freed. Andrew Jackson was the man of his age, but in addition to being a slaveholder, he has the extra infamy of his callous treatment of Native Americans, for which some hold him guilty of genocide.
Given his brave strike against slavery, Reynolds argues, he should be officially pardoned, first of course by the current governor of Virginia (Kaine). But
A presidential pardon, however, would be more meaningful. Posthumous pardons are by definition symbolic. They’re intended to remove stigma or correct injustice. While the president cannot grant pardons for state crimes, a strong argument can be made for a symbolic exception in Brown’s case. . . . Justice would be served, belatedly, if President Obama and Governor Kaine found a way to pardon a man whose heroic effort to free four million enslaved blacks helped start the war that ended slavery.
Brown did more than lead a raid against slavery. We should remember too that in May 1858, Brown and the great black abolitionist and intellectual Martin Delaney had already gathered together a group of black and white abolitionists for a revolutionary anti-slavery meeting just outside the United States, in the safer area of Chatham, Canada. Nearly four dozen black and white Americans met and formulated a new Declaration of Independence and Constitution (the first truly freedom-oriented one in North America) to govern what they hoped would be a growing band of armed revolutionaries drawn from the enslaved population; these revolutionaries would fight aggressively as guerillas for an end to the U.S. slavery system and to create a new constitutional system where justice and freedom were truly central. (For more, see here)
Today, one needed step in the antiracist cause is for all levels of U.S. education to offer courses that discuss the brave actions of antiracist activists like John Brown and Martin Delaney, and those many other, now nameless heroes who marched with them. And how about a major monument in Washington, DC to celebrate them and all the other abolitionist heroes? We have major monuments there to slaveholders, why not to those who died in trying to overthrow slavery?
Fighting Racial Oppression with Humor and Wit
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In a report, “Native Americans and the Public,” prepared by Patricia R. Powers of the Friends Committee on National Legislation from several sources, there is much important overview information on the conditions faced by Native Americans today.
After much discussion throughout the report of white-imposed oppression and the harsh conditions faced by Native Americans (see other sources in chapter 6 here), as well as resistance strategies, one section argues thus:
Many stories from Indian Country in the past 50 years have been about desolation and misery on reservations and awful problems resulting from alcohol… creating a weariness for some. This focus may cause journalists and the public to run from the narrative. So much is serious about indigenous history, about current communication challenges, about critically important bills in Congress, that dialogues between indigenous and non-indigenous people can grow grave. Sharing humor can help create understanding, openness to change, and real bonds. And humor is a genuine facet of Indian life.
The risks are enormous when generalizing about people from hundreds of tribes, from different regions of the country and language groups, and from widely varying families. However, “outsiders” – including writers, photographers, philosophers, and anthropologists– frequently generalize, as they explore the spiritual dimension of Native Americans. Less frequently have they paid attention to the playful dimension of the culture. An ironical stance and wryness appear to be the norm rather than guffawing or thigh-slapping jokes. Of course, as in any group, a good number are quiet but others are quick to hug and laugh and tease. Depictions by “outsiders” omit the light-heartedness, fun, and desire to connect that is a staple of family and tribal life.
Then there is discussion of using joking and wit as part of resistance:
Native people share jokes, including political jokes, between themselves and also with non-Natives who are viewed as part of the extended community. Sometimes a joke is used as a way of keeping going a chat or conversation that seems to have ended. The director of a Native business association whispers “illegals.” He continues, more loudly, “Illegals, illegals, illegals…. Everyone is always talking about illegal immigrants. Well, the only people in the country who aren’t illegals are Native Americans.” He smiles broadly and taps his chest.
And indeed he is right. I was listening tonight to a “blue dog” Democrat talking in an interview about keeping “illegal immigrants” from getting any health care coverage under the health care “reform” bill in Congress, and I was wondering if he meant everyone but indigenous Americans?
Then this section of the report has this great story from Sherman Alexie, the famous novelist and filmmaker, who
told Bill Moyers in a television interview: “I was walking in downtown Seattle when this pick-up truck pulls up in front of me. Guy leans out the window and yells, `Go back to your own country,’ and I was laughing so hard because it wasn’t so much a hate crime as a crime of irony.”
Antiracist Organizations: Resources for Fighting White Racism
Posted by: | CommentsThough they get little attention, antiracist organizations are very important today in struggles against white-generated systemic racism. (Photo Source: National Resource Center for Healing of Racism)
Typical of the range of current antiracist organizations are the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond (PI) and Antiracist Action (ARA). Located in New Orleans and created by African American activists, PI is a community-oriented group that sets up “Undoing Racism” workshops mostly to train people in community and nonprofit organizations. These multiracial workshops have now trained thousands of people, including many whites, since the 1980s. They are designed to help officials in various organizations and community activists to better understand white racism, to understand and value cultural diversity, and to show people how they can “undo racism” in their own lives and organizations.
Taking a somewhat different tack, the substantially white ARA groups, about 200 as of now, have worked aggressively against racism in numerous cities in the United States and Canada. Originally established to combat neo-Nazi and Klan-type organizations, ARA groups have developed other antiracist programs. For example, their Copwatch program has attempted to reduce police brutality by having members take video devices into the streets to record police actions in their dealings with citizens of color. Eileen O’Brien has a very useful book, Whites Confront Racism, in which she compares members of these two important antiracist groups, from field research interviews.
In addition, dozens of groups called the “Institutes for the Healing of Racism” regularly hold seminars and dialogues on issues of racism in numerous U.S. and some overseas cities. These multiracial groups work locally to heighten the awareness of racism, educate citizens about how to fight racial hostility and discrimination, and provide dialogue across racial group boundaries. These groups have dealt openly with racist framing and institutional racism in their own lives and areas. Check out the National Resource Center for the Healing of Racism.
While their objectives have varied, yet other antiracist organizations have also pressed for changes in systemic racism over the last few decades. A brief sampling includes the Dismantling Racism Program of the National Conference (St. Louis), the Anti-Racism Institute of Clergy and Laity Concerned (Chicago), the Northwest Coalition Against Malicious Harassment, the Southern Empowerment Project, and the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence.
Note that a number of these antiracist organizations, as well as established civil rights groups like the NAACP and Urban League, have played important roles in openly countering the racist accusations and racist attacks that have been made against President Barack Obama and in helping to secure his election as president in 2008.
Banning César Chavez: Whites “Sanitizing” US History Again
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The July 10, 2009 issue of the Austin American-Statesman’s online edition features an article titled “Education ‘Experts’ slam César Chavez.”
It reports that the often controversial Texas State Board of Education appointed a six-member panel of experts to help “guide the revision of social studies curriculum standards.” At a recent panel’s meeting, three of the members called for sanitizing various discussions of racial matters in textbooks and thus for the removal discussion of the iconic César Chavez from the textbook standards. The main “reason” was Chávez’s association with Saul Alinsky, a major political activist trained as a sociologist/criminologist.
In his lifetime Alinsky provoked the anger of many conservatives because of his work in community organizing in many cities against injustice. Now these conservative Texas panel members take their turn. They seem to ignore that Alinsky advocated peaceful resistance and that in 1969 was the recipient of an award given by the Catholic Interracial Council, the same award given to Mother Teresa and Senator Harold Hughes.
photo credit: Scani – Salina Canizales
Nevertheless, César Chavez, a key organizer for U.S. farmworkers for much of his adult life and highly regarded in Mexican American communities and many other communities, is guilty by association and all of the achievements and selfless work of this internationally renowned labor and human rights activist are ignored because of his association with another experienced community activist. It’s a baseless excuse, I guess, as good as any such notions.
By the way, I personally witnessed anti-Latino racism in Texas up close in the early 1970s, first as a soldier and later as a sociology graduate student. Sadly, anti-Latino racism is alive and well in Texas.
Note on Saul Alinsky, from a book by Joe and Hernán Vera (Liberation Sociology):
Saul Alinsky (1909-1972) was a practicing sociologist, an intellectual activist who worked for and tried to understand the experiences of the oppressed. He founded the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) in 1940. Alinsky’s IAF has fostered much community organization across the U.S., currently with about 57 affiliates operating on behalf of the poor in more than twenty U.S. states, Canada, the UK, and Germany. With 150 or field organizers, the IAF serves numerous coalition organizations linking hundreds of local citizens’ groups and at least a million families. A recent IAF statement summarizes the organization’s current efforts: “IAF leaders and organizers first create independent organizations, made up of people from all races and all classes, focused on productive improvements in the public arena. IAF members then use those new political realities to invent and establish new social realities.” The statement continues with a clear example of contemporary efforts: “One new reality is the living wage movement in the United States. The first living wage bill was conceived, designed, and implemented by the IAF affiliate in Baltimore in 1994. The second bill was the work of the IAF affiliates in New York City in 1996. Since then, IAF affiliates in Texas, Arizona, and elsewhere have passed living wage legislation.”
“Speaking Truth to Power”: John Legend
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Words of wisdom are commonplace, yet we seldom actually listen to them ( photo credit: christopherharte). I have just read the probing and wise commencement address given by Grammy-winning songwriter and singer, John Legend, to University of Pennsylvania’s College of Arts & Sciences graduates on May 17th. (h/t: Huffingtonpost).
He first talks about the impact some books and some people at the university, his alma mater, had on him:
That comforting dichotomy of right and wrong was replaced by what professors here would call inquiry, methodology, and praxis. Or in layperson’s terms, a never-ending series of questions, discussions, analyses, and options. There was James Joyce telling me “a man’s errors are his portals of discovery.” Toni Morrison telling me that “”If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.” Or even my sociology professor repeating his mantra that “correlation does not always equal causation.” With each course I took, my mind was challenged to be more critical, more flexible, more fluid, more supple.
This later passage really caught my eye:
As a nation — and as a world — we need more truth. Let me repeat that. We need more truth. When you look at the list of crises we face, there is a common thread that ties many of them together. The people who created these crises or allowed them to happen either didn’t look hard enough for the truth, or didn’t listen to those voices that could tell them where the truth lived.
We lost thousands of lives and spent billions (possibly trillions) of dollars fighting in and rebuilding Iraq, all based on the false premise that there were weapons of mass destruction or that Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with Al Qaeda and caused 9/11. . .
We’ve spent trillions of dollars bailing out banks with phantom profits that were selling financial products whose values had no grounding in reality. . . .
From the war in Iraq to credit-default swaps to the internet bubble to the real estate bubble, too often we got caught up in the hype and failed to see the real truth.
Too often we become apathetic. We see the lies, we see the obfuscation, the deception. But we fail to point it out. We’re afraid to rain on the parade. Afraid to rock the boat. Afraid to pursue the truth.
He might well have added that it is also way past time for our whitewashed mass media, our leading academics at schools like Penn, and our leading politicians (of all backgrounds) to speak the hard truth about our still-systemic racism, whose everyday exploitation and discrimination in employment, banking, housing, health, and educational institutions are still quite pervasive. Very few people anywhere are now willing to speak the truth about everyday racism. To talk about the dozens of research studies demonstrating it. That truth seems much harder to speak even than speaking the truths from this list above. Why is it nearly impossible to get anywhere in our mass media, including most of the “liberal” and “left” media, a serious sustained discussion of systemic racism–like the research-based discussions of many on this blog? Denial of that racism will get a pundit or academic an op-ed piece in major media most any day.
Like every good commencement speaker, Legend last calls the Penn students to take personal and collective action:
To be witnesses of today and for tomorrow. To speak truth to power. And to speak the truth on behalf of the powerless. Sometimes there isn’t a single answer. But there is always the truth. Now, I don’t assume that the word “truth” is commonly found. Like its bedfellows of “democracy” and “justice,” I believe it is quite rare to find. It is born through process. It is gained through questioning. It is found in listening. It’s about accepting that complex problems often require complicated solutions. A commitment to truth also requires what Patricia Hill-Collins calls a “politics of empathy.” I would say that a commitment to truth requires a commitment to social justice.
He goes yet deeper:
Searching for truth is in many ways the same as searching for your soul. Since I am touted as a soul singer, I’m often asked to define what soul is. Well, it’s hard to define, but I’m sure that soulfulness and truth are very closely related. . . . Soul is about authenticity. Soul is about finding the things in your life that are real and pure.
A powerful address putting to shame the typical commencement speakers–and it is nice to see the current president of the American Sociological Association, the brilliant critical-racism analyst Patricia Hill Collins, was thus influential in this young man’s life.
MALDEF Combats Racist Attacks on Immigrants
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The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF)–created in Texas in 1960s and now a leading Latino civil rights and educational organization–operates a “Truth in Immigration” website with useful information and research data on how the media are portraying Latino immigrants, with an accent on errors. One of their productions is this short video (2:29) (see here) , which does a good job of highlighting some recent media distortions:
Media Matters has also challenged the conservative blaming of undocumented immigrants for our current (Bush) economic depression as having no solid evidence for their claims. Conservative
media figures have baselessly claimed that according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), 5 million mortgages taken out by undocumented immigrants are in default, or close to it. In fact, according to an October 9, 2008, Phoenix Business Journal article, HUD “says there is no basis to news reports that more than 5 million bad mortgages are held by illegal immigrants. A HUD spokesman said … his agency has no data showing the number of illegal immigrants holding foreclosed or bad mortgages.” Nevertheless, conservative media figures continued to baselessly attribute the financial crisis in part to excessive lending to illegal immigrants, including:
* San Diego radio host Roger Hedgcock and radio host Joe Madison, during the October 9, 2008, edition of Lou Dobbs Tonight; * Phoenix radio station KFYI, in an article on its website; * The Drudge Report in an October 9, 2008, link to the KFYI article; * Syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin in a September 24, 2008, column; * Limbaugh, during the October 10, 2008, broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show* Radio host Lee Rodgers, during the October, 10, 2008, broadcast of KSFO’s The Lee Rodgers Show; * Radio host Jim Quinn, during the October 10, 2008, broadcast of Clear Channel’s The War Room with Quinn & Rose
As we have discussed here numerous times, this type of fear-mongering accounts for some/much of the rise in hate crimes against US Latinos, including many attacks on undocumented and other immigrants. Recent FBI data indicate that “hate crimes” against Latinos increased in the most recent data year; some 4,956 people were reported as victims of racially motivated crimes. About seven in ten of those victimized (3,434) were targeted because of an anti-black bias, and 830 Latinos were also victims of racial hate crimes. These numbers are very serious underestimates, because most (nearly 15,500) of the 17,500 police jurisdicitions do not report their hate crimes or report zero hate crimes.
Indeed, a 2009 report by the Southern Poverty Law Center calculated from various data that at least “210,000 people a year are victimized by hate crimes, the vast majority of them motivated by race or ethnicity.” According to this report much of the recent increase in hate crimes has involved immigrants from Latin America. In addition, they report that the number of racist hate groups, such as Klan and neo-Nazi groups, has grown by nearly 50 percent over the last decade (up to 926 groups now!). They suggest that much of that growth is connected to nativistic agitation against Latino immigrants in the media and by white politicians.
John Brown’s 209th Birthday: Whites against Systemic Racism
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(Source: Wikipedia)
John Brown, the fiery white abolitionist and anti-racist was born on this day, in 1800. Virtually all historians and analysts who have dealt seriously with Brown have accented his militant actions against U.S. slavery. Yet Brown was also a man of ideas–in the long tradition of thinkers who have articulated the great ideals of freedom, justice, equality, and human rights.
In the West one of the first major thinkers in this freedom-loving tradition was the English figure, John Locke, who had an influence on the thought of North America’s influential philosopher of freedom, Thomas Jefferson. Yet both Locke and Jefferson were heavilyg involved in and supportive of the anti-freedom slavery system. While white Europeans like Jean-Jacques Rousseau articulated strong critiques of slavery, before Brown no other white Americans had lent their pens, in a major way, to the effort for the destruction of slavery. Brown presented his ideas in letters, circulars, agreements, and interviews. There he often uses phrases like “struggle for liberty,” “friends of freedom,” and “lovers of liberty and human rights,” placing himself squarely in the tradition of radical theorists of democracy. Brown goes well beyond the ideas of virtually all the white thinkers of his day by extending the ideas of freedom and human rights to enslaved African Americans.
Brown drew in part on the European and American tradition of freedom and equality. Mostly self-taught, he was an avid reader and visited many northern and border state areas and traveled to Europe to study revolutionary movements. In his “Words of Advice, Branch of the United States League of Gileadites” (1851), a statement in support of an underground self-defense organization of African Americans in Massachusetts, he shows his knowledge of struggles of the Greeks against the Turks, the Poles against the Russians, and the Hungarians against Russia. Some years later, while waiting to attack Harper’s Ferry, Brown and his men would discuss philosophy and religion, including the works of Tom Paine. (For details, documents, and photos, see this important book edited and prepared by Jean Libby.)
Brown was not a loner isolated in his thoughts and actions. He was very much in contact with other white and black abolitionists. He did not act in private. He contributed articles and letters to newspapers, wrote constitutions and declarations on freedom and liberty, and gave many articulate speeches on these topics. In the late 1840s Brown even funded the republication of free African American David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, as well as the formerly enslaved African American Henry H. Garnet’s “Call to Rebellion.”
These were likely the first two U.S. manifestos systematically and in detail articulating the extreme oppression of slavery and calling for the liberation of enslaved African Americans. Unlike other white abolitionists, Brown had close social interactions with numerous African Americans, inviting them to his home and going to theirs. In his pioneering biography of Brown, the great scholar W. E. B. Du Bois gave him this epitaph: “John Brown worked not simply for Black Men – he worked with them; he was a companion of their daily life, knew their faults and virtues, and felt, as few white Americans have felt, the bitter tragedy of their lot. . . . the man who of all Americans has perhaps come the nearest to touching the real souls of black folk.”
In May 1858, Brown and some black and white allies convened in Chatham, Canada, to adopt a new constitution to govern the revolutionaries fighting against slavery. The preamble to the Constitution, drafted by Brown, read as follows: “Whereas slavery, throughout its entire existence in the United States, is none other than a most barbarous, unprovoked and unjustifiable War of one portion of its citizens upon another portion; the only conditions of which are perpetual imprisonment and hopeless servitude or absolute extermination; in utter disregard and violation of those eternal and self-evident truths set forth in our Declaration of Independence; Therefore, we, citizens of the United States, and the oppressed people . . . do, for the time being, ordain and establish ourselves the following provisional constitution and ordinances, the better to protect our persons, property, lives, and liberties, and to govern our actions.”
Human rights are central to Brown’s thinking. In his writings he often mentions the “natural and inalienable rights” necessary for all Americans. In 1858 he seems to have drafted, possibly with the help of an associate, a “Declaration of Liberty by the Representatives of the Slave Population of the United States of America,” on behalf of enslaved African Americans. He had this Declaration and his Constitution on his person when he was captured at Harper’s Ferry. It was intended to be distributed to the white South. (See here on the Chatham convention)
Brown saw beyond the moral and political strategies of the abolitionists to the need for more aggressive, armed actions against the brutal system of slavery and the governments that upheld it. Thus, he organized a major raid on the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, with the goal of arming enslaved African Americans to pursue guerilla warfare against the totalitarian slavery system on which this country was founded. Once caught, he continued to assert his ideas on freedom and liberty.
At his November 2, 1859 address to the court that sentenced him to death for the Harper’s Ferry raid, Brown spoke of the golden rule guiding him to speak and work for the “despised poor” and of his commitment to “forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice” and to mingle his blood with “the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments.” Does this sound like the “wild” and “crazy” man that we are taught about in school?
And where is his big monument in DC? Where is that monument to all those, black and white, who fought bravely against the 246-year-old slavery system?
