The revolutionary origins of Memorial Day and its political hi-jacking

A day celebrating Black liberation utilized for white supremacy

By Ben Becker

May 26, 2012

The way the Civil War became officially remembered — through Memorial Day celebrations— was based on the erasure of the Black veteran and the liberated slave.

What we now know as Memorial Day began as “Decoration Day” in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. Civil War. It was a tradition initiated by former slaves to celebrate emancipation and commemorate those who died for that cause.

These days, Memorial Day is arranged as a day “without politics”—a general patriotic celebration of all soldiers and veterans, regardless of the nature of the wars in which they participated. This is the opposite of how the day emerged, with explicitly partisan motivations, to celebrate those who fought for justice and liberation.

The concept that the population must “remember the sacrifice” of U.S. service members, without a critical reflection on the wars themselves, did not emerge by accident. It came about in the Jim Crow period as the Northern and Southern ruling classes sought to reunite the country around apolitical mourning, which required erasing the “divisive” issues of slavery and Black citizenship. These issues had been at the heart of the struggles of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

To truly honor Memorial Day means putting the politics back in. It means reviving the visions of emancipation and liberation that animated the first Decoration Days. It means celebrating those who have fought for justice, while exposing the cruel manipulation of hundreds of thousands of U.S. service members who have been sent to fight and die in wars for conquest and empire.

The first Decoration Day

As the U.S. Civil War came to a close in April 1865, Union troops entered the city of Charleston, S.C., where four years prior the war had begun. While white residents had largely fled the city, Black residents of Charleston remained to celebrate and welcome the troops, who included the TwentyFirst Colored Infantry. Their celebration on May 1, 1865, the first “Decoration Day,” later became Memorial Day.

Historian David Blight retold the story:

During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the planters’ horse track, the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club, into an outdoor prison. Union soldiers were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of exposure and disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand. Some 28 black workmen went to the site, re-buried the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.”

Then, black Charlestonians in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged an unforgettable parade of 10,000 people on the slaveholders’ race course. The symbolic power of the low-country planter aristocracy’s horse track (where they had displayed their wealth, leisure, and influence) was not lost on the freed people. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event, describing “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.”

At 9 a.m. on May 1, the procession stepped off led by 3,000 black schoolchildren carrying armloads of roses and singing “John Brown’s Body.” The children were followed by several hundred black women with baskets of flowers, wreaths and crosses.

Then came black men marching in cadence, followed by contingents of Union infantry and other black and white citizens. As many as possible gathered in the cemetery enclosure; a childrens’ choir sang “We’ll Rally around the Flag,” the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and several spirituals before several black ministers read from scripture. (“The First Decoration Day,” Newark Star Ledger)

The battle over the ‘memory’ of the Civil War

Blight’s award-winning “Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory” (2001) explained how three “overall visions of Civil War memory collided” in the decades after the war.

The first was the emancipationist vision, embodied in African Americans’ remembrances and the politics of Radical Reconstruction, in which the Civil War was understood principally as a war for the destruction of slavery and the liberation of African Americans to achieve full citizenship.

The spirit of the first Decoration Day—the struggle for Black liberation and the fight against racism—has unfortunately been whitewashed from the modern Memorial Day.

The second was the reconciliationist vision, ostensibly less political, which focused on honoring the dead on both sides, respecting their sacrifice, and the reunion of the country.

The third was the white supremacist vision, which was either openly pro-Confederate or at least despising of Reconstruction as “Black rule” in the South.

Over the late 1800s and the early 1900s, in the context of Jim Crow and the complete subordination of Black political participation, the second and third visions largely combined. The emancipationist version of the Civil War, and the heroic participation of African Americans in their own liberation, was erased from popular culture, the history books and official commemoration.

In 1877, the Northern capitalist establishment decisively turned their backs on Reconstruction, striking a deal with the old slaveocracy to return the South to white supremacist rule in exchange for the South’s acceptance of capitalist expansion. This political and economic deal was reflected in how the war was commemorated. Just as the reunion of the Northern and Southern ruling classes was based on the elimination of Black political participation, the way the Civil War became officially remembered—through the invention of Memorial Day—was based on the erasure of the Black veteran and the liberated slave.

As Blight explains, “With time, in the North, the war’s two great results—black freedom and the preservation of the Union—were rarely accorded equal space. In the South, a uniquely Confederate version of the war’s meaning, rooted in resistance to Reconstruction, coalesced around Memorial Day practice.” (“Race and Reunion,” p. 65)

The Civil War whitewashed

In the statues, anniversary parades and popular magazines, the Civil War was portrayed as an all-white affair, a tragic conflict between brothers. To the extent the role of slavery was allowed in these remembrances, Lincoln was typically portrayed as the beneficent liberator standing above the kneeling slave.

The mere image of the fighting Black soldier pierced through this particular “memory,” which in reality was a collective and forced “forgetting” of the real past. Portraying the rebellious slave or Black soldier would unmask the Civil War as a life-and-death struggle against slavery, a true social revolution, and a reminder of the political promises that had been betrayed.

While African Americans and white radicals continued to uphold the emancipationist remembrance of the Civil War during the following decades—as exemplified by W.E.B. DuBois’ landmark “Black Reconstruction”—this interpretation was effectively silenced in the “respectable” circles of academia, mainstream politics and popular culture. The white supremacist and reconciliationist retelling of the war and Reconstruction was only overthrown in official academic circles in the 1950s and 1960s as the Civil Rights movement shook the country to its core, and more African Americans fought their way into the country’s universities.

While historians have gone a long way to expose the white supremacist history of the Civil War and uncover its revolutionary content, the spirit of the first Decoration Day—the struggle for Black liberation and the fight against racism—has unfortunately been whitewashed from the modern Memorial Day.

So let’s use Memorial Day weekend to honor the fallen fighters for justice worldwide, to speak plainly about this country’s historic crimes, and rededicate ourselves to take on those of the present.

Content may be reprinted with credit to LiberationNews.org.

George Jackson: Black Revolutionary

 

By Walter Rodney, November 1971

To most readers in this continent, starved of authentic information by the imperialist news agencies, the name of George Jackson is either unfamiliar or just a name. The powers that be in the United States put forward the official version that George Jackson was a dangerous criminal kept in maximum security in Americas toughest jails and still capable of killing a guard at Soledad Prison. They say that he himself was killed attempting escape this year in August. Official versions given by the United States of everything from the Bay of Pigs in Cuba to the Bay of Tonkin in Vietnam have the common characteristic of standing truth on its head. George Jackson was jailed ostensibly for stealing 70 dollars. He was given a sentence of one year to life because he was black, and he was kept incarcerated for years under the most dehumanizing conditions because he discovered that blackness need not be a badge of servility but rather could be a banner for uncompromising revolutionary struggle. He was murdered because he was doing too much to pass this attitude on to fellow prisoners. George Jackson was political prisoner and a black freedom fighter. He died at the hands of the enemy.

Once it is made known that George Jackson was a black revolutionary in the white mans jails, at least one point is established, since we are familiar with the fact that a significant proportion of African nationalist leaders graduated from colonialist prisons, and right now the jails of South Africa hold captive some of the best of our brothers in that part of the continent. Furthermore, there is some considerable awareness that ever since the days of slavery the U.S.A. is nothing but a vast prison as far as African descendants are concerned. Within this prison, black life is cheap, so it should be no surprise that George Jackson was murdered by the San Quentin prison authorities who are responsible to Americas chief prison warder, Richard Nixon. What remains is to go beyond the generalities and to understand the most significant elements attaching to George Jacksons life and death.

When he was killed in August this year, George Jackson was twenty nine years of age and had spent the last fifteen [correction: 11 years] behind bars—seven of these in special isolation. As he himself put it, he was from the lumpen. He was not part of the regular producer force of workers and peasants. Being cut off from the system of production, lumpen elements in the past rarely understood the society which victimized them and were not to be counted upon to take organized revolutionary steps within capitalist society. Indeed, the very term lumpen proletariat was originally intended to convey the inferiority of this sector as compared with the authentic working class.

Yet George Jackson, like Malcolm X before him, educated himself painfully behind prison bars to the point where his clear vision of historical and contemporary reality and his ability to communicate his perspective frightened the U.S. power structure into physically liquidating him. Jacksons survival for so many years in vicious jails, his self-education, and his publication of Soledad Brother were tremendous personal achievements, and in addition they offer on interesting insight into the revolutionary potential of the black mass in the U.S.A., so many of whom have been reduced to the status of lumpen.

Under capitalism, the worker is exploited through the alienation of part of the product of his labour. For the African peasant, the exploitation is effected through manipulation of the price of the crops which he laboured to produce. Yet, work has always been rated higher than unemployment, for the obvious reason that survival depends upon the ability to obtain work. Thus, early in the history of industrialization, workers coined the slogan the right to work. Masses of black people in the U.S.A. are deprived of this basic right. At best they live in a limbo of uncertainty as casual workers, last to be hired and first to be fired. The line between the unemployed or criminals cannot be dismissed as white lumpen in capitalist Europe were usually dismissed.

The latter were considered as misfits and regular toilers served as the vanguard. The thirty-odd million black people in the U.S.A. are not misfits. They are the most oppressed and the most threatened as far as survival is concerned. The greatness of George Jackson is that he served as a dynamic spokesman for the most wretched among the oppressed, and he was in the vanguard of the most dangerous front of struggle.

Jail is hardly an arena in which one would imagine that guerrilla warfare would take place. Yet, it is on this most disadvantaged of terrains that blacks have displayed the guts to wage a war for dignity and freedom. In Soledad Brother, George Jackson movingly reveals the nature of this struggle as it has evolved over the last few years. Some of the more recent episodes in the struggle at San Quentin prison are worth recording. On February 27th this year, black and brown (Mexican) prisoners announced the formation of a Third World Coalition. This came in the wake of such organizations as a Black Panther Branch at San Quentin and the establishment of SATE (Self-Advancement Through Education). This level of mobilisation of the nonwhite prisoners was resented and feared by white guards and some racist white prisoners. The latter formed themselves into a self-declared Nazi group, and months of violent incidents followed. Needless to say, with white authority on the side of the Nazis, Afro and Mexican brothers had a very hard time. George Jackson is not the only casualty on the side of the blacks. But their unity was maintained, and a majority of white prisoners either refused to support the Nazis or denounced them. So, even within prison walls the first principle to be observed was unity in struggle. Once the most oppressed had taken the initiative, then they could win allies.

The struggle within the jails is having wider and wider repercussions every day. Firstly, it is creating true revolutionary cadres out of more and more lumpen. This is particularly true in the jails of California, but the movement is making its impact felt everywhere from Baltimore to Texas. Brothers inside are writing poetry, essays and letters which strip white capitalist America naked. Like the Soledad Brothers, they have come to learn that sociology books call us antisocial and brand us criminals, when actually the criminals are in the social register. The names of those who rule America are all in the social register.

Secondly, it is solidifying the black community in a remarkable way. Petty bourgeois blacks also feel threatened by the manic police, judges and prison officers. Black intellectuals who used to be completely alienated from any form of struggle except their personal hustle now recognize the need to ally with and take their bearings from the street forces of the black unemployed, ghetto dwellers and prison inmates.

Thirdly, the courage of black prisoners has elicited a response from white America. The small band of white revolutionaries has taken a positive stand. The Weathermen decried Jacksons murder by placing a few bombs in given places and the Communist Party supported the demand by the black prisoners and the Black Panther Party that the murder was to be investigated. On a more general note, white liberal America has been disturbed. The white liberals never like to be told that white capitalist society is too rotten to be reformed. Even the established capitalist press has come out with esposes of prison conditions, and the fascist massacres of black prisoners at Attica prison recently brought Senator Muskie out with a cry of enough.

Fourthly (and for our purposes most significantly) the efforts of black prisoners and blacks in America as a whole have had international repercussions. The framed charges brought against Black Panther leaders and against Angela Davis have been denounced in many parts of the world. Committees of defense and solidarity have been formed in places as far as Havana and Leipzig. OPAAL declared August 18th as the day of international solidarity with Afro-Americans; and significantly most of their propaganda for this purpose ended with a call to Free All Political Prisoners.

For more than a decade now, peoples liberation movements in Vietnam, Cuba, Southern Africa, etc., have held conversations with militants and progressives in the U.S.A. pointing to the duality and respective responsibilities of struggle within the imperialist camp. The revolution in the exploited colonies and neo-colonies has as its objective the expulsion of the imperialists: the revolution in the metropolis is to transform the capitalist relations of production in the countries of their origin. Since the U.S.A. is the overlord of world imperialism, it has been common to portray any progressive movement there as operating within the belly of the beast. Inside an isolation block in Soledad or San Quentin prisons, this was not merely a figurative expression. George Jackson knew well what it meant to seek for heightened socialist and humanist consciousness inside the belly of the white imperialist beast.

International solidarity grows out of struggle in different localities. This is the truth so profoundly and simply expressed by Che Guevara when he called for the creation of one, two, three – many Vietnams. It has long been recognized that the white working class in the U.S.A is historically incapable of participating (as a class) in anti-imperialist struggle. White racism and Americas leading role in world imperialism transformed organized labour in the U.S. into a reactionary force. Conversely, the black struggle is internationally significant because it unmasks the barbarous social relations of capitalism and places the enemy on the defensive on his own home ground. This is amply illustrated in the political process which involved the three Soledad Brothers—George Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo and John Clutchette—as well as Angela Davis and a host of other blacks now behind prison bars in the U.S.A.

NOTE: George Jackson also authored Blood In My Eye which was published posthumously, or after this article was written.

Women’s History Month Sojourner Truth Ain’t I A Woman? Delivered 1851 Women’s Convention, Akron, Ohio

Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that ‘twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what’s all this here talking about?

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?

Then they talk about this thing in the head; what’s this they call it? [member of audience whispers, "intellect"] That’s it, honey. What’s that got to do with women’s rights or negroes’ rights? If my cup won’t hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn’t you be mean not to let me have my little half measure full?

Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, ’cause Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.

If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.

Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner ain’t got nothing more to say.

This text is part of the Internet Modern History Sourcebook. The Sourcebook is a collection of public domain and copy-permitted texts for introductory level classes in modern European and World history.

Sojourner Truth (1797 – November 26, 1883) was the self-given name, from 1843 onward, of Isabella Baumfree, an African-American abolitionist and women’s rights activist. She wrote an autobiography, with the help of Olive Gilbert, titled Narrative of Sojourner Truth.

Our Racist Judicial System Wishes a Happy Birthday to Dred Scott

Michael Coard

The story of a man determined to free his family

Yesterday (March 6th) was the 155th anniversary of the blatantly racist, but patently honest, 1857 Dred Scott decision—and the American legal system threw a birthday bash. Our legal system provided the venue. Judges served as the hosts, and the blind-eye-turning members of the American political majority worked the room as the guests. Guess who wasn’t invited: black people! As a wise man once said about political inclusion, “If you’re not sitting at the table, you’ll be eaten on the menu.” And this country has been feasting on us since 1857, actually 1788 when the Constitution with its slavery-promoting clauses was ratified, or certainly 1776 when independence was declared by 56 white male land owners—one-third of whom were slaveholders—or surely 1619 when Africans were first enslaved on this land.

Dred Scott was born in Virginia sometime between 1795 and 1800. No one knows the precise date because, like all enslaved blacks, he was not worthy of an official birth certificate. We do know that he was eventually “purchased” by Peter Blow, who took him to Missouri in 1820. Blow died in 1832, and Scott was “bought” shortly thereafter by Dr. John Emerson, an army surgeon. By the way, I’m compelled to put words like “purchased” and “bought” in quotes when I refer to human beings because the idea of legally owning one must be highlighted as the outrageously racist insanity that it is.

Emerson’s military tours took him to Rock Island’s Fort Armstrong, Illinois in 1833. What’s important about this is that Illinois was a free state, meaning slavery was outlawed there. Emerson lived in that state with Scott until 1836 when he was assigned to Fort Snelling, which was in an area of the Wisconsin Territory that had also banned slavery. While there with Emerson, 40-year-old Scott met Harriet Robinson, and in 1836, he married the beautiful 17-year-old. Her “owner,” Major Lawrence Taliaferro, “sold” her to Emerson. Although Scott and his wife remained at Fort Snelling, Emerson was transferred to the Jefferson Barracks Military Post in Missouri in 1838. He didn’t leave the married couple to enjoy a honeymoon. No way. Quite the contrary, during his absence, he “rented them out.”

Think about that for a second. He “rented them out,” like they were tools or wagons or mules. Is that effed up or what?

A few months later, Emerson was dispatched to Fort Jessup, Louisiana, where he soon married Eliza Sanford. The Emersons sent for the Scotts to come labor for them in Louisiana. During the trek, while in a free area between the Iowa Territory and Iowa state, Mrs. Scott gave birth to a daughter, who therefore technically was born free under both federal and state law. When Emerson died in 1843, Eliza Sanford Emerson inherited his estate and, for three years, continued to “rent out” the Scotts.

By 1846, after about a decade and a half of saving the little money he was sometimes permitted to earn when he wasn’t slaving for white folks, Dred Scott tried to buy his family’s freedom. Mrs. Emerson said “hell no, y’all can’t go.” In response, Dred, unable to tolerate another day of slavery for himself and his family, gave her the finger in disgust, and then gave her a lawsuit in Missouri. The legal theory was remarkably simple and was based on nearly three decades of state precedent, which held that there can be no slavery, a priori, no slaves in free territories or free states, as mandated by not only state law but also federal law. And since the Scotts had lived in a free territory as well as in a free state, they were no longer enslaved persons. Plainly stated, they forever wore the cloak of freedom after attaining that freedom. As an aside, Mrs. Scott gave birth to their second child, another daughter, while the case was pending.

When the case was finally heard in court in mid-1847, a Missouri judge dismissed it. Check out why: He dismissed it because he said Mr. Scott had failed to present a witness to testify that he and his family had been enslaved. Now what kinda bullshit is that? What the hell did the judge think the lawsuit was about—international copyright infringement? Scott petitioned for and was granted a new trial. But Mrs. Emerson appealed that ruling to the state Supreme Court. This was followed by good news and bad news. The good news is she lost, so a new trial was scheduled. And the bad news is that while awaiting that new trial, the Scott family was held in the custody of the St. Louis County Sheriff—who “rented out” the Scotts in the interim.

Fortunately, a jury of six white men in 1850 found in favor of the Scott family. What? Six good non-Northern white men in mid-19th century America? Yessssss! But the celebration didn’t last too long because Mrs. Emerson appealed once again to the Missouri Supreme Court. In 1852, the Missouri Supreme Court reversed the Scott victory, thereby unabashedly contradicting its own 28-year precedent of “once free, always free.” The court went on to say, with a straight face, “Times now are not as they were when the previous decisions on this subject were made.” Let me translate that legal jargon for those who are not lawyers or judges: “We are racist bastards who have no shame. And we will make up shit as we go along whenever we choose.”

Scott’s only option was to appeal to federal court, which he did in 1853. But the judge forced the jury to apply the law as the state Supreme Court had recently and fraudulently interpreted it. Scott then took his case to the highest court in the land, the U.S. Supreme Court, which reviewed it in 1856. The decision, handed down on March 6, 1857, was threefold.

1) Scott had no right to sue because he was a descendant of Africans and such people were not—and could never be—citizens in 1857 because they were never intended to be such in the 1776 Declaration of Independence or in the 1788 U.S. Constitution.
2) Slaves are property, and to allow property to be taken from slave-owners would violate those slave-owners’ Fifth Amendment due process rights. Seriously. The Court actually said that.
3) The Missouri Compromise is unconstitutional.

As unconscionable and repulsive as this threefold ruling was, did you know that it has never been explicitly overruled by the Supreme Court? Never. And it’s now 2012.

In the racist words of the Court’s Chief Justice, Roger Taney, who wrote the leading opinion in the Dred Scott case, blacks are to be treated as subhuman because they are of “an inferior order” and accordingly are people “altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations …” But here’s the part where he was candidly honest—and absolutely right—about: “[Blacks] … had (and have) no rights which the white man was (or is) bound to respect.” Just ask Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, Eleanor Bumpurs, Donta Dawson, Delbert Africa, Rodney King, and the many other African-Americans who’ve been thuggishly murdered or brutally beaten first by cops and then by courts.

There was a happy ending for the four-member Scott family. The enlightened sons of Peter Blow, Mr. Scott’s first “owner,” used their wealth to free him and his family on May 26, 1857.

 

Slavery and Prison – Understanding the Connections

by Kim Gilmore

“I’M BEGINNING TO BELIEVE THAT `U.S.A.’ STANDS FOR THE UNDERPRIVILEGED Slaves of America” (Esposito and Wood, 1982: 149), wrote a 20th-century prisoner from Mississippi in a letter detailing the daily violence he witnessed behind prison walls. His statement resounds with a long tradition of prisoners, particularly African-American prisoners, who have used the language and narrative of slavery to describe the conditions of their imprisonment. In the year 2000, as the punishment industry becomes a leading employer and producer for the U.S. “state,” and as private prison and “security” corporations bargain to control the profits of this traffic in human unfreedom, the analogies between slavery and prison abound. This year the U.S. prison population cascaded past 2,000,000, ¹ with millions more under the jurisdiction of the criminal justice system in local jails awaiting trial, in INS prisons awaiting deportation, or in their homes linked with criminal justice authorities through ankle bracelets that track their every move. Recent studies of the prison boom stress the persistent disparities in sentencing according to race — prison populations continue to be disproportionately African American and Latino. With longer sentences being imposed for nonviolent drug offenses, with aggressive campaigns aimed at criminalizing young people, and with the growing number of children left orphaned by the criminal justice system, the carceral reach of the state and private corporations resonates with the history of slavery and marks a level of human bondage unparalleled in the 20th century.

Scholars and activists have plunged into an examination of the historical origins of racialized slavery as a coercive labor form and social system in an attempt to explain the huge increase in mass incarceration in the U.S. since the end of World War II. Drawing these links has been important in explaining the relationship between racism and criminalization after emancipation, and in connecting the rise of industrial and mechanized labor to the destructive effects of deindustrialization and globalization. The point of retracing this history is not to argue that prisons have been a direct outgrowth of slavery, but to interrogate the persistent connections between racism and the global economy. Mass imprisonment on the level seen in the U.S. in the 20th century occupies a phase along the spectrum of unfree labor related to, yet distinct from, chattel slavery. As many scholars of the punishment industry have shown, regardless of the labor prisoners do to service the larger economy (either private or public), prisons increasingly function in the U.S. economy as answers to the devastation unleashed by the dual forces of Reaganomics and the globalization of capital (Parenti, 1999; Gilmore, 1997; Manning, 1983). The immediate post-emancipation period is a key place to start in outlining the investment of the U.S. state in this trade in humanity.

Related to the above is the growth of new abolitionist movements whose goals are the elimination of mass imprisonment as a method of treatment for addiction and mental illness, as an economic ameliorative, and as a method of social control — what one scholar has termed “the carceral management of poverty” (Wacquant, 1999: 349). The connections between slavery and imprisonment have been used by abolitionists as an historical explanation and as part of a radical political strategy that questions the feasibility of “reform” as an appropriate response to prison expansion. As a leader in the creation of this new abolitionist movement, Angela Davis (1996: 26) has written, “I choose the word `abolitionist’ deliberately. The 13th Amendment, when it abolished slavery, did so except for convicts. Through the prison system, the vestiges of slavery have persisted. It thus makes sense to use a word that has this historical resonance.” Though some 20th-century abolitionist movements connect themselves expressly with the tradition of 19th-century abolitionists and antislavery advocates, abolitionism as defined here is the conglomerate of many local movements that express abolitionist aims indirectly through challenging the fundamental methods of the prison-industrial complex — mandatory minimum sentences, harsh penalties for nonviolent drug offenses, and the continuous construction of prisons that goes on regardless of crime rates. Although a fully conceptualized abolitionism is starting to emerge, it may be useful to outline some of the historical antecedents to current anti-prison and antiracist movements.

As prison construction and the crime frenzy continue around the U.S. (and indeed, the world) at such a dizzying pace, calls for prison abolition risk being perceived as utopian. The state, as it is currently configured in the U.S., has a primary investment in making the world safe for free trade, with domestic “stability” through state violence and brutality a key method of achieving the temporary façade of stability. In rural and urban areas crippled by the slow decline in manufacturing and skilled jobs, the punishment industry has emerged as the new jobs program, a role it plays with the military.² In this moment, it may seem more difficult than ever to envision a state that supports humanity rather than eviscerates the possibility of freedom and health for so many of its people. Yet it is precisely now, when prisons crowd the physical and psychic landscape, that imagining abolition is most critical. Thus, the new abolitionism has arisen out of the communities most affected by the prison state — those least able to conceptualize anything other than a transformation of the state as it is currently configured.

Studies of the relationship between slavery and mass imprisonment have a long history in the United States and internationally.³ This article will discuss some of the connections activist groups have made between the legacy of slavery and the prison expansion of the last several decades, starting with a brief outline of some of the historical scholarship on the convict lease program, the Black Codes, and later, Jim Crow. Tracing this history and the relationship between slavery and prison expansion can help inform current efforts toward prison abolition and provide a context for moving beyond reforms that have usually boosted the carceral state through a rejuvenation of the prison system, rather than clearing a path for true liberation and transformation.

From the vantage point of post-slavery emancipation, it seemed like the possibility of genuine freedom and democracy for freed slaves was a reality in the making. Although the roots of 19th-century abolitionism were varied, the popular understanding is that it was a middle-class movement led by whites and a few ex-slaves. In reality, much of the scholarship on abolitionism conflicts with this limited conception of the coalitions that powered the move to end slavery (Aptheker, 1941; Robinson, 1997). Whether rushing over Union lines to fight against the Confederacy, planning slave revolts, or resisting slavery through countless individual acts, freed blacks and slaves challenged the foundations of a labor and social system based on racialized slavery. Anti-slavery efforts spearheaded by slaves pushed emancipation as they refused to accept the terms of gradual emancipation. African-American slaves and anti-slavery activists sought not only the abolition of slavery as a labor form, but also a broader realization of slaves’ dreams of freedom, alive despite hundreds of years of violence and coerced labor (Du Bois, 1935; Foner, 1988; McKelvey, 1935). These visions of freedom rarely conformed to the narrowly articulated parameters defined in the Constitution; yet to make their ideas plausible to the state, freed slaves often had to frame their arguments for freedom in the language and categories constructed by the formal state. Although the creation of African-American free communities and institutions during Reconstruction were almost immediately threatened by new configurations of white power and supremacy, freed slaves continued to exercise their right to vote and hold office in order to enact their own plans for education, land ownership, and self-determination. This incomplete transformation was cut short by vigilante justice and racialized violence, as well as by the state-sponsored criminalization of African Americans.

In the past decade, several influential studies of this period have revealed the relationship between emancipation, the 13th Amendment, and the convict lease program (Lichtenstein, 1996a; Mancini, 1996; Davis, 1999). Built into the 13th Amendment was state authorization to use prison labor as a bridge between slavery and paid work. Slavery was abolished “except as a punishment for crime.” This stipulation provided the intellectual and legal mechanisms to enable the state to use “unfree” labor by leasing prisoners to local businesses and corporations desperate to rebuild the South’s infrastructure. During this period, white “Redeemers” — white planters, small farmers, and political leaders — set out to rebuild the pre-emancipation racial order by enacting laws that restricted black access to political representation and by creating Black Codes that, among other things, increased the penalties for crimes such as vagrancy, loitering, and public drunkenness (Davis, 2000). As African Americans continued the process of building schools, churches, and social organizations, and vigorously fought for political participation, a broad coalition of Redeemers used informal and state-sponsored forms of violence and repression to roll back the gains made during Reconstruction. Thus, mass imprisonment was employed as a means of coercing resistant freed slaves into becoming wage laborers. Prison populations soared during this period, enabling the state to play a critical role in mediating the brutal terms of negotiation between capitalism and the spectrum of unfree labor. The transition from slave-based agriculture to industrial economies thrust ex-slaves and “unskilled” laborers into new labor arrangements that left them vulnerable to depressed, resistant white workers or pushed them outside the labor market completely.

The transfer of power to the state signaled by the 13th Amendment profoundly reshaped the political landscape along with emancipation. By empowering the state to regulate relationships between private individuals, the state also gained the ability to determine the contours of freedom and unfreedom. The expansion of state jurisdiction thus had the dual effect of establishing legal rights for African Americans while paving the way for new, state-maintained structures of racism. Convict labor became increasingly racialized: it was assumed that blacks were more suitable for hard physical labor on Southern prison farms and on corporate railroad and construction company projects (Lichtenstein, 1996b). Contrary to popular representations of chain gang labor, not only black men, but also black women were forced to work on the lines and on hard labor projects, revealing how the slave order was being mirrored in the emerging punishment system. This mimicking of the slave system structure in the post-emancipation prison system, particularly in the South, suggested a belief that the performance of antebellum culture could bring the slave system back to life (Jackson, 1999). In Northern prisons, which had historically been structured around industrial rather than agricultural labor, racially based divisions were sharpened after emancipation as well. African Americans were criminalized for committing Black Code-type crimes and often were subject to tougher sentences than those imposed upon whites convicted of similar crimes (Du Bois, 1935).

Even though the efforts of ex-slaves and other abolitionists made it impossible to reinstall legalized chattel slavery, racialized labor arrangements persisted in the form of convict labor. Convict labor built the post-Civil War infrastructure in the U.S., not just in the South but also throughout the U.S., and the struggle to determine how free unfree labor would be continued. Labor unions, which had always been skeptical about prison labor, aggressively lobbied against the leasing of convicts to private corporations. Throughout the Depression years, unionists made it clear that an expanded use of prison labor would further imperil an already overfull work force and intervene in “free markets” in ways that threatened the stability of capitalism and laid bare its most excessive failures. Slowly, prisons and jails solved this problem by developing a “state-use” system in which prison labor was used solely for state projects. This solution eliminated the competition between convict labor and union labor, while still enabling convicts to offset their cost to the state (McGinn, 1993). The Prison Industries Reorganization Administration (PIRA), a New Deal project, conducted a massive study of prison labor in all 50 states and concluded by outlining this new state-use system. Citing overcrowding and inadequate facilities, the PIRA recommended the expansion of the prison system and the construction of new prisons in almost every state (Fraser and Gerstle, 1989). No clear statistics demonstrate that “crime,” particularly violent crime, had increased during this period. Moreover, many of those who ended up in prison were criminalized for crimes stemming from unemployment, suggesting that if the state had had a handle on unemployment, there may not have been a need for more prisons. Thus, the PIRA embodied one of the many contradictions embedded in the “New Deal state” — its inability (or unwillingness) to deal with its overabundance of labor. Thus, the PIRA, together with a racialized labor system that had roots in the slave system, cleared the path for the prison-industrial complex that has flourished in the post-World War II period.

Given the links between the legacy of slavery and mass imprisonment of people of color in the U.S., it might be useful to examine how a few previous prison abolition movements positioned themselves in relation to this history. These groups were often led by Quakers or inspired by the Quaker abolitionists of the 19th century. One such group, the Committee to Abolish Prison Slavery (CAPS), was active in the late 1970s and early 1980s and saw the abolition of mass imprisonment as the key to completing the partial emancipation signaled by the 13th Amendment. According to CAPS, which produced Prison Slavery, their collaboratively authored book, the triumph of emancipation was not a total victory since the 13th Amendment legalized penal servitude as punishment for particular crimes, a stipulation that was incorporated into many state constitutions. Prison Slavery (Esposito and Wood, 1982:114) cites the significant 1871 court ruling from Ruffin v. Commonwealth. This landmark Virginia case–revealingly argued using the language of slavery — set a precedent for state control of inmate bodies and labor:

[1] For the time, during his term of service in the penitentiary, he is in a state of penal servitude to the State. He has, as a consequence of his crime, not only forfeited his liberty, but all his personal rights except those which the law in its humanity accords to him. He is for the time being a slave of the State. He is civiliter mortus; and his estate, if he has any, is administered like that of a dead man.

CAPS found much to admire in the 19th-century slave abolition movement, but viewed penal servitude as a new incarnation of slavery. The group critiqued the failure of abolitionists, particularly Quakers, who worked to overthrow the Southern slave regime but stopped short of eliminating the broader inequalities that were reflected in the prison system. CAPS was, essentially, struggling to define the continuing nature of unfree labor and was critical of the Quakers who preceded them for participating in class oppression.

When Prison Slavery was published in 1982, many states still had clauses in their constitutions that deemed slavery and indentured servitude legal punishments or had no proviso about the legality or illegality of prison enslavement (some states eliminated any reference to slavery in the middle decades of this century). Since this 13th Amendment provision was, for CAPS, the legal cornerstone codifying prison slavery, they proposed a “new abolitionism” that would make the elimination of these clauses from all constitutions its goal. Their abolitionist strategies also included education campaigns to inform the public about prison conditions, an issue typically relegated to the sidelines of an individual’s physical and psychic landscapes. The group also advocated boycotting consumer products made by prison labor, supporting alternatives to imprisonment, and working toward an acknowledgement of the class-based exploitation inherent in mass imprisonment. By circulating petitions that would amend state punishment clauses, CAPS created alliances between prisoners on the inside and activists on the outside. They learned of the brutalities that often occurred behind prison walls through testimonies from inmates who had developed their own analyses of prison system injustices, but frequently found themselves confined by the limited resources available to them, or constrained by criminal justice administrators and guards who threatened prisoners with violence for expressing their views and working for change.

Like CAPS, the Prison Research Education Action Project (PREAP) saw the abolition of prisons as the only avenue for real change, for reform movements generally succeeded only in temporarily improving prison conditions rather than questioning the very efficacy of long-term punishment. In their handbook for change, Instead of Prisons, PREAP catalogued the general sentiment of the prison abolition movement of the 1970s — espoused by elected officials, inmates, ex-cons, former prison administrators, and inmate advocates — that evidence revealed that incarceration was hardly a deterrent to crime and that it actually tended to exacerbate crime. The early 1970s marked the onset of new drug laws and sentencing guidelines, such as the Rockefeller drug laws in New York that provided the legal justification for prison expansion throughout the U.S. During the first half of the 1970s, however, a prisoners’ rights revolution was going on, in which prisoners all over the U.S. were filing individual and class action lawsuits that challenged the constitutionality of the conditions existing within U.S. prisons, including unchecked violence and inhumane working situations (Chilton, 1991; Natale and Rosenberg, 1974; Cohen, 1972). Legal theorists — using evidence that attempts of reform movements to improve conditions inside prisons continually fell short and failed to protect inmates from cruel and unusual punishment — argued that the state’s goal should be the gradual elimination of long-term sentences for drug offenders and other nonviolent prisoners. While these lawsuits brought abolitionist views into the courts, groups like PREAP were learning to balance legal strategies for change with other tactics. Such tactics included gathering acknowledgements from different arenas that mass imprisonment was falling — falling to address the problems of violence, falling to rehabilitate, and failing to provide anything but a destructive response to issues of racism, unemployment, and deindustrialization.

The working group that assembled Instead of Prisons put forward compelling arguments that illustrated the limits of reform. They argued that although prison reform movements could change the material existences of people in prison in real and important ways at particular moments, at the core reformers accept the premise that there is value in mass punishment. The activists writing this volume thus faced the very difficult task of trying to conceptualize abolition while acknowledging the importance of creating short-term strategies for change. They called for an immediate moratorium on prison construction and illustrated the ways in which the state was funneling money into incarceration rather than education. The authors pointed to the importance of creating and supporting innovative alternatives to incarceration, which then (as now) were not given a chance to succeed. More fundamentally, they interrogated the mythologies of deterrence and turned definitions of crime inside out by asking how the state produces criminalization rather than how people produce crime. Without underplaying the very real tragedies resulting from violence, both within and outside prisons, PREAP tried to envision responses to these issues that would limit violence rather than increase it.

From the late 1960s to the mid- 1970s, the prisoners’ rights movement helped to bring the violence and disorder that prevailed in U.S. prisons to the forefront of public consciousness. Previous to the landmark prisoners’ rights cases of the 1960s and 1970s, a “hands-off” policy had left the administration of prisons to criminal justice officials. Yet, as prisoners filed cases that slowly revealed the human rights abuses that were common throughout the criminal justice system, the tide began to turn. Cases like Holt v. Sarver in Arkansas drew attention to issues of prison violence. The Arkansas court ruled that the entire prison system constituted cruel and unusual punishment after investigators discovered that inmates were routinely beaten, packed into unlivable living quarters, and forced to work excruciating shifts on the prison farms while being undernourished and constantly threatened with violence. This case, and others, led to a vast federal assessment of state prison systems. By the early 1980s, dozens of prisons were under federal court supervision for violating the rights of inmates. Despite all this, prisons already had started to operate as industries and the abolitionist expressions of anti-incarceration advocates were lost amid the “law and order” rhetoric that eventually helped elect Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Groups like CAPS and PREAP suffered because they did not understand the processes of globalization and deindustrialization taking place concurrently with prison expansion. Just as the aftermath of 19th-century emancipation reproduced the racial hierarchies of slavery in the structures of the criminal justice system, during the post-World War II period new economic and social configurations provided fresh impetus to the acceleration of prison building. Ruth Wilson Gilmore (1997) traces how these transformations — globalization, reindustrialization, imperialism, and racism — converged in the 1960s and 1970s. Unfortunately, activists inside and outside prisons refused to see these changes as “forces,” but instead as choices that emerged from state reconciliation with capital. Prisons were the physical structures called upon to help respond to the chaos unleashed by the globalization of capital and they were supposed to (at least in theory) contain the array of struggles waged against these processes by people of color, immigrants, and the poor.

Although new prison construction was propelled by state officials, corrections administrators, and politicians, it was also endorsed by populations who have benefited from deindustrialization and globalization. A new and growing body of scholarship has shown how racist ideologies of exclusion generated by white property owners and voters, among others, have underpinned the social and political fields in the U.S. after World War II. Ideologies of white privilege, though perhaps not always articulated as such, were put in motion through red-lining projects, discriminatory union practices, and the privatization of public spaces, all of which hastened the exclusion of people of color from the realm of state protections (Roediger, 1991; Goldfield, 1999; Lipsitz, 1998; Oliver and Shapiro, 1995). These forms of welfare — suburbanization and privatization — were often administered by the state through the same people who were active on neighborhood association boards, school boards, and corrections and police boards. Whiteness, just as it functioned in the 19th century to pave over class differences in the interest of racial solidarity, also has contributed to structuring urban poverty and to building the fear of criminal populations (nonwhites) that has fueled the construction of the prison-industrial complex.

Previous prison abolition movements seem to have understood mass incarceration as a class-based injustice perpetrated against the working classes and the poor. Yet as Angela Davis has pointed out, prison abolitionists have much to gain from building coalitions with those who focus on the abolition of “whiteness” as a way to approach the effects of racism embodied in the prison-industrial complex (Gordon, 1998). Because racism has played such a central role in the proliferation of prisons and the irrational fear of crime (helping to assure passage of legislation like California’s Proposition 21), imagining abolitionism requires us to envision the elimination of the privileges of whiteness, as well as a divestment of public resources from prison building. Because the uneven distribution of state resources that has contributed to the prison-industrial complex has been driven by racism, movements that challenge the terms of mass imprisonment will necessarily be joined with antiracist movements, which acknowledge the continued racialization of state resource distribution.

The echoes of slavery still reverberate throughout the prison state; earlier this year, the Wackenhut corporation announced a new contract to build a federal prison on the site of a former slave plantation in North Carolina. This brings us back to the question of the feasibility of anti-incarceration movements. In the age of Proposition 21, the Super-Max, the rapid reinvigoration of the death penalty, globalization, and the convergence of the two political parties in the U.S. around punishment as a corrective to unemployment and race problems, can prison abolitionism be heard? The answer is “yes,” for the very starkness of this moment breathes new life into abolitionism as a counter to reforms that accept the terms of human destruction and devastation inherent in contemporary prisons. Throughout the U.S., and increasingly throughout the world, prison abolitionism is finding new life as local movements against prison construction, mandatory minimum sentences, and the criminalization of youth are created out of the very communities they decimate. This year, as Western European nations and corporations finally have been forced to accept their complicity in the use of slave labor under Nazism, perhaps the issue of reparations for slavery in the U.S. will at last gain legitimacy in a country that has institutionalized new forms of slavery rather than vanquish bondage completely.

NOTES

1. For the most recent statistics, see reports from the Justice Policy Institute released in 2000.

2. Though research on prison employment has shown that these jobs are opening up in far smaller numbers than those predicted by prison boosters, it remains the case that the new jobs produced by the prison-industrial complex and local police are often filled by poor and working-class people.

3. Though space does not permit an analysis of global movements for prison abolition, see the materials published by the International Committee on Prison Abolition. This year’s May conference features perspectives on prison abolition from international scholars, including those from Nigeria, Costa Rica, Canada, and Finland. See also the connections made between South African apartheid and American prisons.

REFERENCES

Aptheker, Herbert

1941 “Militant Abolitionism.” Journal of Negro History 26,4: 438-484.

Chilton, Bradley Stewart

1991 Prisons Under the Gavel: The Federal Court Takeover of Georgia Prisons. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

Cohen, Fred

1972 “The Discovery of Prison Reform.” Buffalo Law Review 21,3: 855-887.

Davis, Angela Y.

2000 “From the Convict Lease System to the Super-Max Prison.” States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prison. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

1999 “From the Prison of Slavery to the Slavery of Prison: Frederick Douglass and the Convict Lease System.” Frederick Douglass: A Critical Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers: 339-363.

1996 “Incarcerated Women: Transformative Strategies.” Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noir 1,1: 26.

Du Bois, W.E.B.

1935 Black Reconstruction in America. New York: Hartcourt, Brace and Company.

Esposito, Barbara and Joe Wood (eds.)

1982 Prison Slavery. Washington, D.C.: Committee to Abolish Prison Slavery.

Foner, Eric

1988 Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. New York: Harper and Row.

Fraser, Steve and Gary Gerstle

1989 The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Gilmore, Ruth Wilson

1997 “Globalisation and U.S. Prison Growth: From Military Keynesianism to Post-Keynesian Militarism.” Race and Class 40,2/3: 171-188.

Goldfield, Michael

1997 The Color of Politics: Race and the Mainsprings of American Politics. New York: New Press.

Gordon, Avery F.

1998 “Globalism and the Prison-Industrial Complex: An Interview with Angela Davis.” Race and Class 40,2/3: 145-157.

Holt, Thomas

1982 “An Emancipation over the Mind.” Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward. New York: Oxford University Press.

Jackson, Bruce

1999 Wake Up Dead Man: Afro-American Work Songs from Texas Prisons. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Lichtenstein, Alex

1996a Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South. London: Verso.

1996b “Good Roads and Chain Gangs in the Progressive South: `The Negro Convict Is a Slave.’” Journal of Southern History 59,1: 85-110.

Lipsitz, George

1998 The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Mancini, Michael

1996 One Dies, Get Another: Convict Leasing in the American South. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press.

Marable, Manning

1983 How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Political Economy, and Society. Boston: South End.

McGinn, Elinor Myers

1993 At Hard Labor: Inmate Labor at the Colorado State Penitentiary, 1871-1940. New York: P. Lang.

McKelvey, Blake

1935 “Penal Slavery and Southern Reconstruction.” Journal of Negro History 20,2: 153-179.

Natale, Eugene V. and Cecilia Rosenberg

1974 “And the Walls Come Tumbling Down: An Analysis of Social and Legal Pressures Bearing on the American Prison System.” New York Law Forum 19,3.

Oliver, Melvin L. and Thomas M. Shapiro

1995 Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality. New York: Routledge.

Parenti, Christian

1999 Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis. London: Verso.

Robinson, Cedric

1997 Black Movements in America. New York: Routledge.

Roediger, David

1991 The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. London: Verso.

Wacquant, Loic

1999 “How Penal Common Sense Comes to Europeans: Notes on the Transatlantic Diffusion of Neoliberal Doxa.” European Societies 1,3 (Fall): 319-352.

February 15, 2012

by Sanyika Shakur, s/n Kody Scott
Robert Williams, who first came to prominence as president of the Monroe, N.C., NAACP, later wrote “Negroes with Guns” and advocated Black self-defense. Friends of both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, Robert and his wife Mabel lived in exile for many years, traveling the world and befriending Castro, Mao and Ho Chi Minh. His book inspired Huey Newton and the Black Panthers.
We are the ones who refused to be captured in Afrika without a fight, who staged daring raids on enemy supply lines and brought our nationals back to freedom. We are the ones who made longer, sharper spears, thicker shields and turned our backs on collaborating kings.

We are the ones who, on the high seas enroute to the “New World,” brought new forms of combat to bear on our oppressors. We are the ones who couldn’t be broken, who kept our languages in circulation, our spirits alive and our minds free of foreign gods and hostile demons. We are those who, on a move, became Maroons, who settled the Geechi Islands, fought alongside the indigenous nations, until we, too, became indigenous.
We are the ones who couldn’t be broken, who kept our languages in circulation, our spirits alive and our minds free of foreign gods and hostile demons.

We are the ones who, in the midst of the first Two Thousand Seasons (a thousand dry, a thousand wet), birthed new ideas of national existence and national continuity.

We are the ones that whispered, “Strike now!” to Nat Turner, who plotted and planned with Denmark Vesey and Gabriel Prosser. We are of the same blood as General Harriet Tubman.

We are the ones who didn’t need to be freed by the 13th Amendment because we had never been anyone’s slave. We are the same ones who laughingly rejected the 14th Amendment to make us citizens of the oppressor nation. And, when the so-called Negroes fell for the farce of “Reconstruction,” we had long been organized and waiting for the Klan.

When bourgeois Negroes formed the NAACP, we formed the African Blood Brotherhood and Universal Negro Improvement Association. When the White Citizens Councils attacked the Civil Rights Movement, we struck back as the Deacons for Defense. We are the ones who left the right wing reactionary Nation of Islam with Malcolm X.
When the White Citizens Councils attacked the Civil Rights Movement, we struck back as the Deacons for Defense.

We are the ones who organized the ghettos, from California to Philly, as the Revolutionary Action Movement. We were in Monroe with Robert and Mable Williams. We sat at the feet of Queen Mother Moore, Ella Baker and Dara Abubakari. We are the ones who adopted the attacking Black Panther as our symbol, those who stared down pigs, created Black Student Unions and fed free breakfast to children. We sharpened the contradiction.

We are the ones who, realizing the neo-colonial nature of the term “Negro,” changed our national identity to Black. When that term, too, had been co-opted by opportunists and counter revolutionaries, we are the ones who converged on Detroit 500 deep and brought into existence the New Afrikan national identity. We are the ones who said Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and South Carolina is the national territory.

We are the ones who breathed life into the Black Liberation Army, who proceeded to combat our historical enemies from coast to coast and all areas in between. We were on the roof in New Orleans with Mark Essex, in South Central L.A. with Geronimo ji Jaga, in El-Malik at the Capitol with the RNA-II. We are the ones who were in Chicago with Santa Bear and Spurgeon Jake Winters; in Attica with L.D. and Sam Melville. We were in Soledad with George, Fleeta and John; in the Marin County Courthouse with Jonathan, William, James and Ruchell. We are the ones who were with George, Hugo and Bato in San Quentin.
We were in Soledad with George, Fleeta and John; in the Marin County Courthouse with Jonathan, William, James and Ruchell. We are the ones who were with George, Hugo and Bato in San Quentin.

We are the ones from the George L. Jackson Assault Squad of the BLA in San Francisco. We are the ones in both Olugbala and Amistad Collectives of the BLA. And that was us in the Five Percenter-BLA units, too. We invaded the tombs to free our comrades and went underwater to assault Riker’s Island as well. We are the ones who made Nicky Barnes run to the Italian mob for protection.

We are the ones who were in support of the United Freedom Front, the May 19th Communists Organization, the George Jackson Brigade, the Sam Melville-Jonathan Jackson Unit, and the Prairie Fire/John Brown Anti-Klan Committee. We are the ones who introduced comrade-sista Assata Shakur to Fidel and Raul. We hooked Robert Williams up with Mao and Chou En Lai.

We are the ones who defended the people in a raging gun battle against pigs at Aretha Franklin’s father’s church in Detroit. We are the ones who brought you Kuwasi Balagoon, Dr. Mutulu Shakur, Nehanda Abioudun, Fulani Sunni Ali, Safiya Bhukari, Yassmyn Fula, Afeni Shakur, Sundiata Acoli, Maliki Shakur Latine, Sekou Odinga, Jalil Muntaqim, Herman Bell and all the other stalwart standard bearers of liberation.

We are the ones who speak truth to power, who practice our theories, who are the messages we bring. We are the ones in the Provisional Government Republic of New Afrika, Peoples Center Council, The Peoples Revolutionary Leadership Council, New Afrikan Peoples Organization, New Afrikan Panthers, New Afrikan Scouts, Spear and Shield Collective, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, August Third Collective, New Afrikan Security Forces, Revolutionary Armed Task Force, New Afrikan Peoples Liberation Army and New Afrikan Women for Self-Determination. And we’ll be in many more to come.

We are the ones who support Puerto Rican Independence, the Mexicano/Chicano Movement, the American Indian Movement and all other revolutionary struggles for freedom against capitalist imperialism. We are those who stand firm against patriarchy, heterosexualism and liberalism. We are those that study Butch Lee, J. Sakai, Owusu, Yaki Yakubu, Chokwe Lumumba, Makungu Akinyele, Che, Cabral, Fanon and Dr. John Henrik Clarke. We are the ones who know that “revolution without women ain’t happenin’”!

We are the ones the enemy calls, “criminals,” “terrorists,” “gangs,” “militants,” “leftists,” “separatists,” “radicals,” “feminists,” “worst of the worst,” “America’s Most Wanted” and enemy combatants. Whatever.

We call ourselves Humans. We are New Afrikan revolutionaries. Those who weren’t afraid.

Who are you?

Free the Land!

Send our brother some love and light: Sanyika Shakur s/n Kody Scott, D-07829, PBSP-SHU C-7-112, P.O. Box 7500, Crescent City, CA 95532.

‘Slavery by Another Name’ Relays the Forgotten Stories of Post-Civil War Slavery

‘Slavery by Another Name’ Relays the Forgotten Stories of Post-Civil War Slavery

A new PBS documentary called “Slavery by Another Name” tells the story of the adapted forced labor practices that helped extend slavery long after the end of the Civil War. Gwen Ifill speaks with Douglas Blackmon, the film’s co-executive producer, about this largely forgotten piece of history and the forces that propelled it.

A Plea for Free Speech

by Frederick Douglass
(1817?-1895)

---

Douglass, Frederick. “A Plea for Free Speech in Boston,” 1860.

Boston is a great city – and Music Hall has a fame almost as extensive as that of Boston. Nowhere more than here have the principles of human freedom been expounded. But for the circumstances already mentioned, it would seem almost presumption for me to say anything here about those principles. And yet, even here, in Boston, the moral atmosphere is dark and heavy. The principles of human liberty, even I correctly apprehended, find but limited support in this hour a trial. The world moves slowly, and Boston is much like the world. We thought the principle of free speech was an accomplished fact. Here, if nowhere else, we thought the right of the people to assemble and to express their opinion was secure. Dr. Channing had defended the right, Mr. Garrison had practically asserted the right, and Theodore Parker had maintained it with steadiness and fidelity to the last.

But here we are to-day contending for what we thought we gained years ago. The mortifying and disgraceful fact stares us in the face, that though Faneuil Hall and Bunker Hill Monument stand, freedom of speech is struck down. No lengthy detail of facts is needed. They are already notorious; far more so than will be wished ten years hence.

 The world knows that last Monday a meeting assembled to discuss the question: “How Shall Slavery Be Abolished?” The world also knows that that meeting was invaded, insulted, captured by a mob of gentlemen, and thereafter broken up and dispersed by the order of the mayor, who refused to protect it, though called upon to do so. If this had been a mere outbreak of passion and prejudice among the baser sort, maddened by rum and hounded on by some wily politician to serve some immediate purpose, – a mere exceptional affair, – it might be allowed to rest with what has already been said. But the leaders of the mob were gentlemen. They were men who pride themselves upon their respect for law and order.

These gentlemen brought their respect for the law with them and proclaimed it loudly while in the very act of breaking the law. Theirs was the law of slavery. The law of free speech and the law for the protection of public meetings they trampled under foot, while they greatly magnified the law of slavery.

The scene was an instructive one. Men seldom see such a blending of the gentleman with the rowdy, as was shown on that occasion. It proved that human nature is very much the same, whether in tarpaulin or broadcloth. Nevertheless, when gentlemen approach us in the character of lawless and abandoned loafers, – assuming for the moment their manners and tempers, – they have themselves to blame if they are estimated below their quality.

No right was deemed by the fathers of the Government more sacred than the right of speech. It was in their eyes, as in the eyes of all thoughtful men, the great moral renovator of society and government. Daniel Webster called it a homebred right, a fireside privilege. Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. They know its power. Thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers, founded in injustice and wrong, are sure to tremble, if men are allowed to reason of righteousness, temperance, and of a judgment to come in their presence. Slavery cannot tolerate free speech. Five years of its exercise would banish the auction block and break every chain in the South. They will have none of it there, for they have the power. But shall it be so here?

Even here in Boston, and among the friends of freedom, we hear two voices: one denouncing the mob that broke up our meeting on Monday as a base and cowardly outrage; and another, deprecating and regretting the holding of such a meeting, by such men, at such a time. We are told that the meeting was ill-timed, and the parties to it unwise.

Why, what is the matter with us? Are we going to palliate and excuse a palpable and flagrant outrage on the right of speech, by implying that only a particular description of persons should exercise that right? Are we, at such a time, when a great principle has been struck down, to quench the moral indignation which the deed excites, by casting reflections upon those on whose persons the outrage has been committed? After all the arguments for liberty to which Boston has listened for more than a quarter of a century, has she yet to learn that the time to assert a right is the time when the right itself is called in question, and that the men of all others to assert it are the men to whom the right has been denied?

 It would be no vindication of the right of speech to prove that certain gentlemen of great distinction, eminent for their learning and ability, are allowed to freely express their opinions on all subjects – including the subject of slavery. Such a vindication would need, itself, to be vindicated. It would add insult to injury. Not even an old-fashioned abolition meeting could vindicate that right in Boston just now. There can be no right of speech where any man, however lifted up, or however humble, however young, or however old, is overawed by force, and compelled to suppress his honest sentiments.

Equally clear is the right to hear. To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker. It is just as criminal to rob a man of his right to speak and hear as it would be to rob him of his money. I have no doubt that Boston will vindicate this right. But in order to do so, there must be no concessions to the enemy. When a man is allowed to speak because he is rich and powerful, it aggravates the crime of denying the right to the poor and humble.

The principle must rest upon its own proper basis. And until the right is accorded to the humblest as freely as to the most exalted citizen, the government of Boston is but an empty name, and its freedom a mockery. A man’s right to speak does not depend upon where he was born or upon his color. The simple quality of manhood is the solid basis of the right – and there let it rest forever.

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Capitalism and the death penalty

Capitalism and the death penalty

Tool of racism and repression maintains the rule of property

Megan Cornish

December 2011

By the time they murdered him, the whole world knew who Troy Davis was — a Black man framed for the killing of a cop 20 years ago. Despite an international campaign that exposed powerful evidence of his innocence, Davis was executed by the state of Georgia on Sept. 21, 2011 with explicit approval of the U.S. Supreme Court. His callous killing has added tremendous momentum to the fight against the death penalty in the U.S.A.

Most countries have abolished capital punishment. Why does the U.S., still the center of world capitalism, cling to this barbaric practice? Because the handful of super-rich who rule this country need state terror to keep their grip on power.

Racist history. The origin of the death penalty in the United States is rooted in slavery. Life-and-death control over slaves was fundamental to Black bondage. After the brief post-Civil War period of Reconstruction, when federal troops enforced the civil rights of freed slaves, lynching became rampant throughout the former Confederacy.

Only when decades of civil rights militancy finally weakened the power of the Ku Klux Klan and lynching became widely condemned did capital punishment increase dramatically. Says David Jacobs, lead author of a study at Ohio State University, the death penalty is “a sort of legal replacement” for lynching. Since 1976, 88 percent of state executions have been in the South — the same states with a history of lynching.

Further facts speak volumes. Today, there are nearly 3,500 death-row prisoners. Of them 42 percent are Black, even though African Americans are just 13 percent of the total population. Death sentences against people of color are far more likely if the alleged victim is white.

The death penalty and state repression. Nothing shows the repulsive core of capitalism so well as its use of capital punishment and the whole prison system, both indispensable to the rule of wealth. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels defined the state as “a body of armed men.” Its job under capitalism is to disarm the have-nots and tyrannize those most likely to revolt. As journalist and innocent death-row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal puts it, prisons serve to inculcate “terror in the minds of the working class, as a tool of class and racial discipline.”

Historically, especially in times of political ferment, the death penalty has been used against labor militants, anarchists and socialists. Among the most famous executions were Joe Hill, Industrial Workers of the World organizer and troubadour; the Haymarket Square martyrs who led the Chicago movement for the eight-hour day; anarchist agitators Sacco and Vanzetti; and Communist Party members Julius and Ethel Rosenburg. All were flagrant, politically motivated executions. Countless frame-ups and death sentences of Black Panthers and American Indian Movement members in the ’70s and ’80s are still being fought, in the streets and in the courtroom.

But under pressure from the civil rights struggle of the ’60s, the Supreme Court ruled in 1972 that two death penalty cases constituted cruel and unusual punishment because of racist and arbitrary application. But a conservative backlash was unleashed against the gains of the tumultuous ’60s and early ’70s. A relentless corporate media campaign for “law and order” led to the “war on drugs,” “three-strikes” life sentences, and to the revival of capital punishment. The Supreme Court reversed its moratorium in 1976. Polls in the ’80s and ’90s showed support for executions around 75 percent.

President Clinton gave the death penalty a big boost with his 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which bars federal courts from reconsidering legal and factual issues ruled on by state courts. In effect, “Innocence is no defense.” Not coincidentally, the Act passed soon after exonerations based on DNA evidence began to mount.

A growing movement. Today the tide is turning against capital punishment, partly due to publicized, flagrant cases of injustice. In Missouri, the case of Reggie Clemons, like Troy Davis’, contains no physical evidence linking him to the crime, police coercion of witnesses, two highly questionable witnesses who were themselves suspects, and racist dismissals of Blacks from the jury. Texas had scheduled the execution of Hank Skinner on Nov. 9, 2011, refusing to conduct DNA tests on all of the evidence from his trial, despite a decade of legal requests. At the last minute an appeals court temporarily stayed the Nov. 9 killing.

The Obama administration is seeking the death penalty at one of its infamous Guantánamo military tribunals. The defendant, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri — under prolonged and severe torture — confessed to a role in the bombing of the USS Cole in 2002.

The number of those sentenced to death and later proven innocent has had a powerful impact on public opinion. Since 1973, 138 prisoners have been exonerated, mainly with DNA evidence unavailable at the time of their convictions. The Innocence Project is a national organization dedicated to clearing the wrongfully convicted and reforming the criminal law system. Sixteen states and the District of Columbia have at last ended capital punishment.

Overall, dogged organizing by the Left and other long-time opponents of the death penalty is connecting with a rising mass awareness of the inequality of our economic system — one that relies on the power of life and death over human beings to maintain its rule. As Mumia recently wrote, “The Troy Davis movement amassed almost a million signatures on petitions. Remarkable. But signatures … aren’t people in the streets. If a million people were on the march, maybe, maybe — he would be alive.” The task ahead is to mobilize those millions.

Send feedback to Megan Cornish at fsnews@mindspring.com.

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Note: The photograph accompanying this story is part of the Death Penalty Photography Documentary Project .

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Haiti: The Slave Army of Toussaint L’Ouverture

Posted by Mike E on November 20, 2010

Haiti’s slave army in combat

“When the slave revolt broke out, Toussaint was already 45–old for a slave in Haiti. He simply took over the plantation–and waited to see what would happen. After several weeks, he decided that there was a chance of something really lasting. He sent his own family into safety across the border in the Spanish colony, and rode into the surrounding rebel camps. Step by step, he set out to build a disciplined fighting force….

‘Toussaint set about forming a disciplined core and deliberately started small. He recruited a few hundred men and launched offensive actions against the advancing counterrevolutionary troops….

“Toussaint’s force fought with a conquering spirit that soared among the clouds and rainbows. When they ran out of food, they fought hungry. When they ran out of ammunition they fought with stones. When the British troops spread splintered glass on the battlefield, Toussaint’s fighters advanced on bloody, lacerated feet.”

This historical piece is, in its own way, about fusion.

by Mike Ely

It has been over 200 years since Haiti’s slave armies defeated the invading armies of French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. News of this soul-stirring victory traveled from plantation to plantation in the whole surrounding region, including the slave owning states of the U.S. South — terrifying the exploiters of slave laborers and giving the captured Africans great hope.

It was the first successful conquest of power by the oppressed and laboring classes in modern times.

Haiti was the richest colony in the world in the 1700s. Then called San Domingo, it was the pride of the French empire–coveted by rivals like Britain and Spain. Over two thousand plantations on the western part of the lush island produced sugar, indigo, cotton, cocoa and tobacco. The source of this wealth was the brutal exploitation of half a million captive African people.

But then, in August 1791, the slaves of San Domingo rose up with bare hands and farm implements. They overthrew their oppressors. In 12 years of armed struggle, under the leadership of their great general Toussaint L’Ouverture, they defeated all the armed forces their local slaveowners could rally, then a Spanish invasion, a British expedition of 60,000 men, and finally a massive French expedition sent by Napoleon Bonaparte. And having defeated all the great colonial powers of their times, they created an independent state of self-emancipated slaves. With the daring of nothing to lose, they made themselves masters of society. This is the story of how Haiti’s slaves started their great revolutionary war.

A Hell on Earth

“The slaves received the whip with more certainty and regularity than they received their food.”

C.L.R. James, author of Black Jacobins,
a history of Haiti’s slave revolution

San Domingo was a chain of gruesome prison camps where half a million captive Africans slaved under tropical sun and the eyes of armed guards. The slaves were literally treated like animals–forced to live in long houses that were little more than stalls. They were so overworked that they commonly chewed their starvation rations raw, before falling into an exhausted sleep.

At the other extreme of this hateful society were the elite sons of France’s bankrupt aristocracy–exported by their fathers to rebuild family fortunes. They formed a population of only about 20,000 planters and hangers-on. Unwilling to shave or dress themselves without slaves, they usually left the administration of the plantations to others–and lived parasitic lives of extreme decadence and inactivity.

For slave women, rape was a constant part of their lives. Over decades the children of this brutality gave rise to a thin stratum of Mulattoes–roughly equal in number to the whites. Some Mulattoes themselves became slaveowners–but they were viciously suppressed by the ruling whites. Meanwhile, by 1751, at least 3,000 runaway slaves lived in fierce armed farming communities of “maroons” deep in Haiti’s backcountry.

click to enlarge

This society was deeply marked by the constant violence of enforced slavery. The people were whipped for the smallest infractions. Those caught eating sugar cane were forced to wear tin masks in the heat of the fields. Women slaves suspected of aborting pregnancies were half strangled by tight metal collars until they finally gave birth. It was common to chop off limbs, ears or genitals. One observer described sitting at a dinner table and hearing the lady of the house casually order that the cook be thrown into the oven–death for an unsatisfactory meal.

Planters calculated that it was often cheaper to buy a new slave off the boat than raise a young slave from birth. They deliberately worked the slaves to death and then joked, “The Ivory Coast is a good mother.” In 1789, still more than two-thirds of the slaves had been born free in Africa–and, despite the efforts of their masters, they were far from broken.

Revolution in the Mother Country

“Materialist dialectics holds that external causes are the condition of change and internal causes are the basis of change and that external causes become operative through internal causes.”

Mao Zedong, On Contradiction

On July 14, 1789–far from Haiti’s plantations–the masses of Paris stormed the Bastille prison. The French revolution had started–and it would lead to the overthrow of feudalism. This revolution was embraced by the slaveowning class of Haiti. The old government of France had loaded Haiti with taxes and restrictions–infuriating the French planters on the island. Like their Anglo-American counterparts George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, many Haitian planters dreamed of independence. Haiti’s Mulatto slaveowners dreamed of equality with the whites. The talk of liberty and equality made them want a closer union with the French mother country and its revolution.

None of these forces — not the white or Mulatto slaveowners of Haiti, not the bourgeois revolutionaries of France — seriously thought that “the rights of man” meant an end to slavery. The slave trade was a backbone of the French merchant capitalist class. The French revolution upheld the right to property–and African slaves were considered property. In the colony of Haiti, intense and complex fighting broke out –between royalists and “patriots,” between whites and Mulattoes. It raged for two years, while the slaves watched closely.

When the Night Skies Turn Bright With Flame

“Eh! Eh! Bomba! Heu! Heu!
Cango, bafio té!
Canga, mouné de lé!
Canga, do ki la! Canga li!

Song of Haiti’s slave quarters [translation: We swear to destroy the whites and all they possess; let us die rather than fail to keep this vow.]

“To put it bluntly, it is necessary to create terror for a while in every rural area, or otherwise it would be impossible to suppress the activities of the counter- revolutionaries in the countryside or overthrow the authority of the gentry. Proper limits have to be exceeded in order to right a wrong, or else the wrong cannot be righted.”

Mao Zedong’s report on a violent peasant uprising in China, 1927

The heart of Haiti’s slave country was the northern plain–about 50 miles long and 15 miles from the sea to the mountains. The main harbor, Le Cap, was just a village of docks, warehouses and slave pens. But the plantations were large, and within easy sight of each other.

In 1791, a vast conspiracy bound the slaves together — spreading wherever the slaves gathered for their Voodoo ceremonies. The central organizer was the high priest Boukman. The plan was breathtakingly simple: On a central signal, slaves outside Le Cap would set their plantations on fire. Fire in the skies would signal slaves everywhere to kill their masters and join the revolt. The uprising would continue until all the whites were dead, and the island was in the hands of the slaves.

The rightwing  preacher Pat Robertson recently claimed that these slaves of Haiti made a pact with the Devil, and this would be the spiritual cause of both their victory and Haiti’s subsequent pains.

August 22, slave leaders met in the thick forests of Morne Rouge overlooking Le Cap and launched the uprising. On plantation after plantation, the slaves rose up, killed their masters and burned everything to the ground. Their weapons were whatever they could find or seize — farming tools, sharpened sticks, a few swords, pistols and fire. The rebels formed in large crowds and simply swarmed over any opponents — dying in large numbers as they swept their enemies away.

The slaves destroyed everything that fell into their hands — like prisoners burning their cell blocks. They hated the plantations and wanted to leave no trace of these hellholes or their masters. For three weeks it was difficult to tell day from night. The skies were a continual wall of flame and black smoke, white ashes fell like snow, burning embers forced ships far out to sea.

The slaves had gotten nothing but the most extreme brutality, rape, killing, and torture from the French–and they answered with a harsh justice. In the beginning they killed all whites–with very few exceptions, like respected doctors.

After a few weeks, the movement paused. There had never been a strong central organization–and Boukman himself died in battle. The slaves formed scattered groupings, and started to clash with each other. And there, this rebellion might have peaked–like so many other slave revolts in history.

The slaveowners were regrouping their forces. Boukman’s head was displayed in Le Cap, and dozens of captive rebels were publicly tortured to death in the town’s main square every day. Sections of the ruling class offered the Mulatto population eventual equality with whites, if they would help suppress the slaves. A formidable counterrevolutionary force took shape for the bloody work of retaking the plantation lands. The arrogant slavemasters saw their own victory as inevitable.

A Black Spartacus

In fact, this revolt was not crushed. There were many positive factors in play: The colonial mother country itself was gripped by revolution. This slave society was isolated on an island where the slaves formed an overwhelming majority. The local ruling class there was deeply divided and incapable of agreeing on Mulatto equality. And, perhaps most decisive of all, a disciplined leadership emerged among the slaves with a plan and a vision for actually carrying through the revolution.

Toussaint L’Ouverture was born in slavery, the son of a captured African. He caught a glimpse of the outside world working as a coachman. He got the job (rare for a slave) of overseeing the plantation’s livestock. A man of great self-discipline, Toussaint trained himself relentlessly–both physically and mentally. He spoke only Creole, but taught himself to read French and Latin–and studied Caesar’s military writings and illegal revolutionary writings from France. When the slave revolt broke out, Toussaint was already 45–old for a slave in Haiti. He simply took over the plantation–and waited to see what would happen. After several weeks, he decided that there was a chance of something really lasting. He sent his own family into safety across the border in the Spanish colony, and rode into the surrounding rebel camps. Step by step, he set out to build a disciplined fighting force.

Toussaint arrived at the most dangerous moment of all. The rebel camps faced starvation. Their leaders had no plan for facing (or defeating) the regular troops. By November, the counterrevolutionary soldiers had started driving the rebel slaves off the plain, into the mountains. Key slave commanders lost heart, and secretly offered to surrender their forces to the slavemasters–asking amnesty for themselves. The slaveowners rudely rejected this–they were determined to punish the slaves with cold steel. Toussaint watched these negotiations closely and, from that moment on, understood that only the armed defeat of the slave system and its ruling class would liberate the slave. Throughout a life filled with flexible alliances and complex choices, he maintained a bulldog grip on that key contradiction of his time.

Toussaint set about forming a disciplined core and deliberately started small. He recruited a few hundred men and launched offensive actions against the advancing counterrevolutionary troops.

Early in 1793, the French commander suddenly received orders to return his troops to France to defend the revolution there against invading monarchists. The slave forces advanced back onto the North Plain–and among them was the new-born unit led by Toussaint. A new governor arrived from France, triggering new infighting among the whites. In that confusion, 10,000 slaves swept down from the hills into Le Cap, driving the French soldiers and planters into the sea. It was the end of centralized French domination on the island. Haiti was now a chaotic checkerboard of warring factions–flying many different flags.

From Rebellion to Revolution

Toussaint developed a distinctive military and political policy.

First, his units did not rush at regular troops like a mob. They lay in wait in dense woods and ambushed small groups by rushing in from the sides and overwhelmingly them quickly in hand-to-hand combat. Their method required a disciplined system of command. It enabled the fighters to win victories, arm themselves–and then attract new fighters from the surrounding rebel bands.

Second, Toussaint announced the startling slogan “No reprisals.” He killed those who opposed the slaves with arms, but insisted on mercy for any who gave up the fight. Toussaint’s slave army could win victories without suffering casualties–as cornered opponents became willing to surrender.

Toussaint linked his command closely with the rank-and-file fighters–he lived among them and repeatedly led them in key charges. He was wounded 17 times during the years of constant warfare.

Toussaint fought passivity among his commanders–urging them onto the offensive, and sharply criticizing them when they settled in or allowed the enemy peace. There was no hint of liberalism about him–he was stern, calculated, self-contained, sharp-tongued, and deeply trusted by his fighters.

Toussaint initiated a series of alliances with forces capable of providing him arms–starting with the Spanish colonialists. He insisted that such allies acknowledge the freedom of Haiti’s slaves. But he understood that all outside forces–the Spanish, French or English ruling classes–were scheming to seize the wealth of Haiti. They all expected, sooner or later, to force Haiti’s slaves back under the whip. At every point, Toussaint insisted on the independent command of his troops.

With Spanish support–his troops moved from fort to fort on Haiti’s north shore. As the French and planter resistance crumbled, the British invaded–landing with an army of 7,000 in 1794 on the Central Coast of Haiti, and taking Port au Prince with the backing of the white Haitian planters.

By then the revolution in Paris was in its most radical days, and the new rulers hoped to keep Haiti by supporting the abolition of slavery (which had already been accomplished). They could provide no arms or aid, but Toussaint announced a new alliance with France–not the monarchist France of the old order, but the new Republic of the guillotine. With his small disciplined core in the lead, he drove the Spanish forces from the North and isolated those slave commanders who remained allied with them. He then turned south to face the British. Officially Toussaint was still a minor officer in the armies of others–but in reality, he headed an army of 4,000 slave fighters–the most disciplined force in the field. His army had a reputation for victory, flexibility and unwavering dedication to slave emancipation.

The Struggle for Production and A New Mode of Production

“Grasp revolution, promote production.”

Mao Zedong, during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution

The revolution started with the utter destruction of plantations. Yet, the revolution itself would collapse from famine unless some way was found for leading the free slaves back into the fields. Wherever his army held power, the slave soldiers enforced a new mode of production. Forced labor and whipping were strictly forbidden and punished. Nighttime work was abolished. The plantation lands were not broken up, but wages were paid for all labor–usually in the form of food, lodging and a quarter of the production.

While the revolution waged its armed struggle with the organized troops of counterrevolution–it also fought an internal struggle, in the liberated areas, against the restoration of slavery. Sometimes the new order started to look like the old order. Former slaveowners or new leaders sometimes treated the people as slaves. There were cases of whippings imposed by commanders within the slave army. And there were repeated work stoppages in the liberated areas–as former slaves protested the work discipline or demanded the promised wages.

The minority of former slavemasters who survived and stayed were protected–but strictly forbidden to act as the owners of human beings. They were needed–since the slaves had very little experience with the organization of production or trade.

Revolution had radically changed life for the freed slaves. Meanwhile all those willing to accept the abolition of slavery were offered a place in the new society.

Toussaint maintained a network of horses and shelters so he could ride rapidly back and forth across the countryside, throughout those war years–investigating incidents, campaigning for production, learning from the masses, enforcing the revolutionary changes, and uncovering cases where disturbances were instigated by British agents. His statements became folk sayings that guided the freed slaves. “Toussaint says that unless we slaves plant, slavery will return.” And he backed it all up with the armed force of the slave army. At large gatherings he would hold a rifle high and proclaim, “Here is your liberty!”

Unthinkable Victories Shake the World

“We have known how to face dangers to obtain our liberty, we shall know how to brave death to maintain it.”

Toussaint L’Ouverture, to the Directory ruling France, 1797

The British invaders expected to defeat a demoralized French force, but found themselves facing an army of freedom fighters.

Toussaint’s force fought with a conquering spirit that soared among the clouds and rainbows. When they ran out of food, they fought hungry. When they ran out of ammunition they fought with stones. When the British troops spread splintered glass on the battlefield, Toussaint’s fighters advanced on bloody, lacerated feet. In January 1798, the slaves beat the British in seven battles over seven days and forced them from the island.

In 1800, his army defeated the Spanish army on the eastern half of the island. By then, Toussaint commanded an army of 55,000 veteran fighters. (George Washington never commanded more than 20,000.) In 1801, Haiti declared independence–a republic of self-emancipated slaves.

In France, Napoleon Bonaparte seized power, reversed many revolutionary verdicts and tried to build a French empire through war. He restored slavery in colonies under his command. Fresh from military victories in Italy, he sent huge armies to retake Haiti under his brother-in-law General Leclerc.

Toussaint boarded a French ship to negotiate and was treacherously taken captive. Toussaint L’Ouverture, one of history’s greatest revolutionary leaders, died far from Haiti in a cold cell high in the French Alps. The revolution continued under his lieutenants, Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe. They delivered the first military defeat to Napoleon in 1804 and forced the French to accept Haitian independence.

One by one, armies of oppressors had stepped forward, hoping to re-enslave Haiti’s people. The slave army, forged by former coachman Toussaint L’Ouverture, defeated them one by one.

This Haitian revolution was an earthquake that triggered aftershocks throughout the slave colonies of the Americas. The slaveowners of the U.S. tried to suppress news from Haiti–and of course it did not work. The Haitians inspired the conspiracy of Denmark Vesey in 1822, the slave revolt of Nat Turner in 1831 and the militant abolitionists like John Brown.

In the victory of Haiti–in the brilliance of its revolution and the endurance of its independence–slaves everywhere took heart, and the oppressors saw a foreshadowing of their defeat.

This article originally appeared in Revolutionary Worker #996, Feb. 28, 1999.

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