BLACKS IN AMERICAN REVOLUTION

From PBS http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part2/2narr4.html

"While the Patriots were ultimately victorious in the American Revolution, choosing sides and deciding whether to fight in the war was far from an easy choice for American colonists. The great majority were neutral or Loyalist. For black people, what mattered most was freedom. As the Revolutionary War spread through every region, those in bondage sided with whichever army promised them personal liberty. The British actively recruited slaves belonging to Patriot masters and, consequently, more blacks fought for the Crown. An estimated 100,000 African Americans escaped, died or were killed during the American Revolution."

FREEDOM IN AMERICA: MAROON SOCIETIES

Maroon societies are a reminder that Blacks were able to survive and thrive in the New World despite being harassed, hunted, and attacked.

FROM: http://www.nps.gov/subjects/ugrr/discover_history/maroon-slave-societies.htm

In many ways, the colonial era presented enslaved Africans with more opportunities to escape than did the more settled and legally restrictive American society of the nineteenth century.  More runaways before the American Revolution than afterward may have tried to form maroon societies.  Large sections of all the colonies were uninhabited by whites.  Vast tracks of forests and swamps, not yet claimed and settles, offered deep cover for runaways.  Colonies were only just beginning to develop laws to protect slaveholders.  Maroon societies were bands of communities or fugitive slaves who had succeeded in establishing a society of their own in some remote areas, where they could not easily be surprised by soldiers or slave catchers.  Maroon societies had several degrees of stability.  At the least stable end would be gangs of runaway men who wandered within a region, hiding together, and who sustained themselves by raids.  Other, more stable societies included men and women and might have developed trade with outsiders.  Some maroon societies felt safe enough to plant crops and maintain some semblance of permanency. By the time of the American Republic, such refuges were fewer.  Native Americans, themselves retreating in the face of Anglo settlement into their homelands, already inhabited the North American backcountry.  Florida and the Texas-Mexico border had several active communities, as did Louisiana, before its acquisition by the United States.  In 1783, the Spanish governor of Florida offered freedom to slaves who escaped from the British colonies.  Spain, fearful of British land claims, made this appeal to try and destabilize British colonies.  After this edit, slaves ran away in groups to St. Augustine and nearby Florida villages.  In response, slave-owners organized slave patrols over land and water.  Many of the Florida village’s slaves escaped to also contained remnants of Southeastern Indian tribes, gathered together for survival.  This group later became known as the Seminoles.

The Great Dismal Swamp, Okefenokee, and other sites were also briefly home to bands of runaways, some of whom left after a period and other who planned to stay on and out of sight. Perhaps the most famous fugitive outpost was Fort Negro, occupied by the British until the end of the War of 1812.  Freedom seekers occupied the fort after the British departure had used it as a base to harass slave owners.  This threat to slavery did not last long.  American troops led by General Andrew Jackson destroyed the outpost in 1816, killing or enslaving all inhabitants. There are some books on the subject reviews at: http://www.richandsally.net/maroon_societies___rebel_slave_communities_in_the_americas_8363.htm

AFRICANS DISCOVER IMMUNIZATION PROCEDURE

Picture from: http://www.niica.on.ca/ghana/CapitalCity.aspx

"In May of 1771, Dr. Zabdiel Boylston successfully used small-pox inoculations to treat a smallpox epidemic responsible for 844 deaths in the Boston area. Boylston was encouraged to experiment with the inoculation by Reverend Cotton Mather, who had learned of immunization from Onesimus, his slave. Onesimus had described to Mather the manner in which his people would deliberately infect themselves to establish immunity to the virus. Boyleston used Onesimus' method of inoculation on his son, Thomas, and two slaves. He later inoculated as many as 240 others, of whom 6 actually contracted the disease." -- From Black Saga: The African American Experience by Charles M. Christian 

FIRST PUBLIC ABOLITIONIST-SAMUEL SEWALL IN 1700

On June 24, 1700, Judge Samuel Sewall of Massachusetts became one of the first public officials to denounce slavery when he published a three page statement, entitled The Selling of Joseph (available at  http://www.masshist.org/objects/2004september.cfm). Here he compares slavery in the colonies to the Old Testament story of Joseph who was sold into slavery by his own brothers because of jealousy. 

What shows this a true act of bravery is that at the same time laws in all colonies regarding slaves were getting  more and more restrictive. 

From The Massachusetts Historical Society:

Sewall noted in his diary that the slave trade had long troubled him, but The Selling of Joseph appears, at least in part, to have been inspired by a petition circulated in Boston in 1700 "for the freeing of a Negro [Adam] and his wife, who were unjustly held in Bondage." Adam was the slave of John Saffin, a prominent Boston merchant and magistrate. Saffin hired out Adam for a term of seven years and promised him freedom upon his good behavior. Saffin denied Adam his freedom, leading to several years of legal proceedings and a public war of words between Saffin and Sewall. In 1701, Saffin published A Brief and Candid Answer to a late Printed Sheet Entitled the Selling of Joseph, in which he refuted Sewall's objections to slavery and defended his actions in Adam's case. In 1703, after a long legal struggle, Adam finally gained his freedom, but Sewall did not reply directly to Saffin's A Brief and Candid Answer until 1705 when he reprinted an English condemnation of the slave trade that had originally appeared in The Athenian Oracle. 

SUCCESS AT OVERCOMING GREAT ODDS

It was all a set up to make all Black males appear to be criminals. There must be something wrong with us. The fact is that there is nothing wrong with Black men. Everyone needs more money, more education, better health, deeper understanding. Khalil Gibran Muhammed argues in his book, The Condemnation of Blackness, that African-Americans were systematically condemned as criminal and inferior without being allowed the opportunity to prove otherwise. The amazing thing is the degree of success many African-Americans have enjoyed despite being vilified.  

Photo: http://mycrains.crainsnewyork.com/40under40/profiles/2011/khalil-gibran-muhammad

Interview with the author: Khalil Gibran Muhammad
http://billmoyers.com/episode/full-show-confronting-the-contradictions-of-america%E2%80%99s-past/


From: Harvard University Press Blog
 http://harvardpress.typepad.com/hup_publicity/2010/01/whites-commit-crimes-but-black-males-are-criminals.html

"In The Condemnation of Blackness, Muhammad shows how “the racial data revolution” was made to work against blacks even as social scientists, journalists, and reformers created pathways to rehabilitation for Irish, Italian, and other foreign-born immigrants once tagged with a similar stigma of criminality. Where white criminals enjoyed the privilege of “racial anonymity” and were afforded an understanding of the structural roots of poverty and crime, black criminals, whose crimes, we can now see, differed little in form and function from those committed by whites, were made to stand in for the imagined deficiencies of the race as a whole, so that in evaluations of black fitness for modern life, the innocent came to be tarred along with the actually guilty. “Whites commit crimes, but black males are criminals”—in exposing the roots of this persistent refrain, one that has justified not only racial violence but the kind of benign neglect that has relegated blacks to the margins of an American social sphere that has historically expanded to incorporate new and different groups, Muhammad shows how this particular mismeasure of man has become foundational to our thinking about modern urban America, and how its insidious logic remains with us to this day."

QUAKERS FIRST WHITES TO TAKE A STAND AGAINST SLAVERY

From Swarthmore and Haverford College library: Quakers & Slavery

http://trilogy.brynmawr.edu/speccoll/quakersandslavery/

"The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) was the first corporate body in Britain and North America to fully condemn slavery as both ethically and religiously wrong in all circumstances. It is in Quaker records that we have some of the earliest manifestations of anti-slavery sentiment, dating from the 1600s. After the 1750s, Quakers actively engaged in attempting to sway public opinion in Britain and America against the slave trade and slavery in general. At the same time, Quakers became actively involved in the economic, educational and political well being of the formerly enslaved.

The earliest anti-slavery organizations in America and Britain consisted primarily of members of the Society of Friends. Thus much of the record of the development of anti-slavery thought and actions is embedded in Quaker-produced records and documents. Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore College and the Quaker Collection at Haverford College are jointly the custodians of Quaker meeting records of the Mid-Atlantic region, including Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, New York and Vermont and these records illuminate the origins of the anti-slavery movement as well as the continued Quaker involvement, often behind the scenes, in the leadership and direction of the abolitionist movement from the 1770s to the abolition of slavery in the United States in 1865, and beyond."

FIRST SLAVE REVOLT IN COLONIES

There are many kinds of revolt. One lesson we can take from American slave revolts is that no matter how dire the situation and no matter how high the cost, freedom is worth fighting for. On September 13, 1663, the first recorded major conspiracy of persons in servitude in colonial America occurred in Gloucester County, Virginia. White and Black slaves tried to escape from their masters. However, the plot was betrayed.

The other lesson: WHEN YOU ARE TRYING TO SECURE FREEDOM, TRUST WITH SUSPICION!


A Wikipedia history of slave revolts:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_rebellion

A PBS timeline of slave revolts and a movie about Nat Turner:
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/natturner/slave_rebellions.html

From a pdf. essay on slave revolts by Dr. Sujan Dass at www.TwoHorizonsPress:
http://supremedesignonline.com/2012/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/blackrebellionexcerpts.pdf

"A cursory glance of our traditional history curriculum suggests that slave revolts, like the one led by Nat Turner, were few and far in between. Further, the uprisings themselves are typically thought of as disorganized clashes between angry slaves and local whites in the South. Instead, the historical record reveals that uprisings, and revolt plots were common and widespread, that it was often free Blacks and those enslaved under the least repressive conditions that led insurrections, that these insurrections were often highly organized and required months of planning and thousands of committed participants, and that enslaved Africans and their descendants rebelled against captivity from its very onset." 

FIRST ORGANIZED BLACK PROTEST

In 1644, eleven Blacks petitioned for freedom in New Netherland (later called New York). The Blacks were freed by the Council of New Netherland because they had completed their seventeen to eighteen years of servitude. Each received a parcel of land in what is presently Greenwich Village. 

Adapted from:

FIRST BLACK LEGISLATOR

http://www.blackpast.org/?q=aah/de-souza-matthias-circa-1642

Matthias de Souza, an indentured servant, was the only black person to serve in the colonial Maryland legislature.  As such he is the first African American to sit in any legislative body in what would become the United States. From www,BlackPast.org

First African Settlers Reach North America

"On August 20, 1619, a Dutch ship arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, carrying Captain Jope and a cargo of twenty Africans.... Although they were not the first Africans to arrive in North America, they were the first African settlers." 

from Black Saga: The African American Experience by Charles M. Christian

These are the first African Americans.

http://www.blacksaga.org/

"All of us are interracial"

DNA study seeks origin of Appalachia’s Melungeons

Check out this article:

http://news.yahoo.com/dna-study-seeks-origin-appalachias-melungeons-201144041.html

First Slave Revolt in Hispaniola

The first slave revolt in Hispaniola (the island of Haiti and Dominican Republic) occurred in 1522. Reports noted that approximately forty African slaves, apparently reacting to harsh laws passed to control them, killed their masters and escaped to the hills. Later, new legislation was passed to ensure that slaves were treated with more consideration." - Black Saga by Charles M. Christian

Lesson: Sometimes you have to fight for freedom.

Moors, Slavery and Exploration

From Black Saga: The African American Experience by Charles M. Christian


1492 Black Explorer Nino joins Columbus - Blacks were among the first explorers of the Western Hemisphere
1501 Spain permits African slaves in the Americas
1502 Spain begins slave trade
1512 John Garrido, a slave, initiated the cultivation of wheat in the Americas
1512-13 Africans accompany Spanish explorers

Below is a youtube video called, "When Moors Ruled Europe."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PM8HnvuKbAo&feature=related

 As you know Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492. What you may not know is African Muslims, known as Moors, had dominated Spain and other parts of Europe from the early 700's until 1492, yes more than 700 years.  After 1492, the Moors who chose stay in Spain were forced to convert to Catholicism, the Jews were kicked out of Spain, and we see the beginnings of the Spanish Inquisition. Just ten years later, Spain begins slave trade in the New World. Connections? More to follow.

1492 Black Explorer Nino Joins Columbus

"Blacks were among the first explorers of the Western Hemisphere. Pedro (Peter) Alonzo Nino, a pilot on Christopher Columbus' ship the Santa Maria, was identified as a Black Man." from Black Saga: The African American Experience by Charles M. Christian.