Daily Archives: January 18, 2020

The phrase slavery was ended on the North American continent conflates the Emancipation Proclamation and the passing of the 13th Amendment. There is no mention of the exception to the 13th Amendment: slavery exists as punishment for crime.

The 13th protects for-profit prisons where inmates are forcibly moved across state lines and work for less than minimum wage, or even no wage at all.

The letter laments the division of our country, quotes Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and wishes to return to a mysterious time when the U.S. had more agreeable standards. Which year has the polite order that we should return to?

Our country has systematically divided and oppressed certain groups of people since inception and hasnt stopped. Disorder is a consequence of this system.

Fighting this system, not lamenting disorder or division, requires MLKs radical view of justice.

I recommend a different MLK quote: The Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice.

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Letter to the Editor: No polite time in U.S. history - Tulsa World

The muse for this story is a humble piece of stone, no more than an inch square. Sometime in the mid-19th century, it had been fashioned into a gunflintan object that, when triggered to strike a piece of steel, could spark a small explosion of black powder and propel a lead ball from the muzzle of a gun with mortal velocity.

Archaeologists often come across gunflints. Thats because during the 19th century, firearms were considered mundane items, owned by rich and poor alike. Gunflints, like shell casings now, were their disposable remnants.

But this gunflint is special.

In 2008, my students and I, working with nearby residents, unearthed this unassuming little artifact during an archaeological dig in a little Pennsylvania village known as Christiana. We found it located in what today is a nondescript corn field, where a small stone house once stood.

For a few hours in 1851, that modest residence served as a flashpoint in Americas struggle over slavery. There, an African American tenant farmer named William Parker led a skirmish that became a crucial flareup in the nations long-smoldering conflict over slavery.

Its been 160 years since the uprising, which for most of its history was known as the Christiana Riot, but is now more often referred to as the Christiana Resistance, Christiana Tragedy, or Christiana Incident. In taking up arms, Parker and the small band of men and women he led proved that African Americans were willing to fight for their liberation and challenge the federal governments position on slavery. Finding a broken and discarded flint offers a tangible piece of evidence of their struggle, evoking memories of a time when the end of slavery was still but a hope, and the guarantee of individual liberty for all people merely a dream.

The events at Christiana were a consequence of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, federal legislation passed in the wake of the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848. California, a key part of territory seized by the U.S. following that conflict, had rejected slavery in its constitutional convention in 1849 and sought entry to the Union as a free state. To placate white Southerners who wanted to establish a slave state in Southern California, Congress forged the Compromise of 1850. The Fugitive Slave Act, its cornerstone legislation, forced all citizens to assist in the capture of anyone accused of being a fugitive in any state or territory. A person could be arrested merely on the strength of a signed affidavit and could not even testify in their own defense. Any person found guilty of harboring or supporting an accused fugitive could be imprisoned for up to six months and fined $1,000, nearly 100 times the average monthly wage of a Pennsylvania farm hand in 1850.

In some places, alarmed citizens began pushing back against what they perceived to be an overreach of federal power. In Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, however, the new law began fanning racial tension. Many whites in the area resented the movement of formerly enslaved people across the southern border, perceiving it as an invasion of destitute illegals that would depress wages in factory and field. Others were simply negro haters, as William Parker himself put it, all too happy to assist federal agents in sending African Americans back across the border. Some unscrupulous Pennsylvanians profited from illegally trafficking free African American men, women, and children south into slavery. A new and insidious slave trade blossomed in the border states. The price of an enslaved person in nearby Maryland, for instance, jumped an estimated 35 percent following the passage of the law, which made kidnapping free people increasingly profitable and common. One infamous Philadelphia kidnapper named George Alberti was indicted twice for selling free people into slavery, and eventually admitted to kidnapping some 100 people over the course of his notorious career. The governor of Pennsylvania would pardon Alberti after he served less than a year of a 10-year sentence for kidnapping an infant.

With white Pennsylvania ambivalent at best about the fate of African Americans, it wasnt shocking that someone decided to tell Maryland farmer Edward Gorsuch that two men who had escaped from his land two years before, Samuel Thompson and Joshua Kite, were hiding in William Parkers rented house near Christiana.

William Parker, a 30-year-old tenant farmer born in Maryland, had escaped slavery just a few years prior, and had found refuge, if not full acceptance, in this quiet corner of Pennsylvania. Despite encountering sympathy from the Quaker community, Parker still feared for his safety. He joined other African Americans in the area to form mutual aid societies to defend against kidnapping, and established networks of lookouts to keep track of the movements of known kidnappers and their allies. One such network tipped off Parker that Gorsuch and a small band of relatives and supporters, accompanied by a notorious Philadelphia constable named Henry Kline who had been deputized as a U.S. marshal for the occasion, were hunting for Thompson and Kite. The black community of Christiana was on high alert.

Gorsuchs armed posse crept through the rising mist at dawn on the morning of September 11, 1851, as Parker and his men waited at the house. Informed that kidnappers were about, but not knowing where they would strike, black neighbors for several miles around nervously waited for a distress signal calling out for help against the intruders.

Not knowing they had lost the element of surprise, Gorsuch and Kline attempted to storm the Parkers small stone house, only to be driven back down a narrow, winding stairway by armed defenders. Next they tried to reason with Parker, who, barricaded in on the second floor, spoke for the group. Parker refused to acknowledge Klines right to apprehend the men, dismissing his federal warrant as a meaningless piece of paper. As tensions mounted, Eliza Parker, Williams wife, took up a trumpet-like horn, and blasted a note out of an upstairs window. Startled by the piercing sound, the Gorsuch party opened fire at the window, hoping either to incapacitate Eliza with a bullet wound or frighten her into silence. Despite the danger, she continued sounding the alarm, which reportedly could be heard for several miles around.

Within half an hour, at least two dozen African American men and women, armed with pistols, shotguns, corn cutters and scythes, arrived to assist the Parkers. Several white Quaker neighbors also appeared at the scene, hoping to prevent a violent confrontation. Favored now by the strength of numbers, Parker, Kite, and Thompson emerged from the house to convince Gorsuch and Kline to withdraw. Kline, recognizing the futility of the situation, quickly abandoned his comrades and retreated. But an enraged Gorsuch confronted Thompsonwho struck Gorsuch over the head with the butt of his gun. Shots rang out. Within minutes, Gorsuch lay dead on the ground, his body riddled with bullets and lacerated by corn knives. His posse did their best to flee. Son Dickinson Gorsuch had taken a shotgun blast to the chest at close range, barely had the strength to crawl from the scene, and was coughing up blood. Thomas Pearce, a nephew, was shot at least five times. Joshua Gorsuch, an aging cousin, had been beaten on the head, and stumbled away, dazed. Gorsuchs body was carried to a local tavern, where it became the object of a coroners inquest. Despite their serious wounds, the rest of his party survived.

Retribution was swift. In the days that followed, every black man in the environs of Christiana was arrested on treason charges, as were the three white bystanders who had tried to convince Gorsuch to withdraw. The subsequent treason trial of Castner Hanway, one of the white bystanders, resulted in an acquittal. Despite the fury of both pro-slavery and compromise-favoring politicians, the prosecution, led by U.S. Attorney John Ashmead, moved to dismiss all charges against the other defendants, who were soon released. No one was ever arrested or tried on murder charges for the death of Edward Gorsuch, including the known principles at the Parker HouseKite, Thompson, Parker, Eliza and their familywho fled north to Canada and remained free men.

Over time, the black community of Lancaster County grew to remember the Christiana Riot as a tragic victory. The events significance was more complicated for the white community. In the short term, many Lancastrians followed the pro-slavery lead of James Buchanan, who lived in the community and was elected U.S. president in 1856. Thaddeus Stevens, an abolitionist politician who represented Lancaster in the U.S. House of Representatives and had assisted in the defense of the accused, lost his seat to a member of his own Whig party in 1852, spurned by constituents who could not tolerate his liberal views on racial justice. But after Buchanans election, Stevens was soon buoyed by growing anti-slavery sentiment and returned to Congress, and with the outbreak of the Civil War, Lancastrians both black and white rallied fully to the Union cause.

The Parker House, abandoned after the family fled for Canada, became a place of pilgrimage after the Union victory. Curious visitors from around the region sought out the abandoned Riot House and took pieces of it away with them as souvenirs. By the late 1890s the farmer who owned the land perceived the Parker House as a dangerous nuisance, and had it knocked down and plowed over. In the years to come, it became hidden in time, presenting as nothing more than a scatter of stone and debris in an otherwise unremarkable field.

That was how we found it when we visited the cornfield at the invitation of a group of community volunteers who were interested in rebuilding the house as a memorial to William Parkers struggle. Black and white descendants of the participants in the uprising joined us at the excavation, spellbound when we uncovered the first fragment of foundation wall, a remnant of a place that resonated with the power of ancestors who had risked their lives to prevent neighbors from being kidnapped into slavery.

Archaeologists know that communities create and preserve deep knowledge of their local history. Often, stories of the past help communities create an identity of which they can be proud. This was certainly the case at Christiana.

We can say with some confidence that the small, square piece of stone recovered during the excavation is an artifact of the famous conflict. The gunflint was discovered nestled into the cellar stairs, right below the window where Eliza Parker sounded her alarm. We know that Gorsuchs men fired at her from virtually this same spot, and that men in the house returned fire. By 1851, flintlocks were old-fashioned weapons, widely replaced by more modern and efficient firearms, but we know from records of the treason trial that the weapons William Parker and his associates wielded were old muskets. That suggests the flint we found may have fallen from one of their outdated guns.

The artifact gives us pause. The gunflint reminds us of the progress we have made in overcoming racial injustice in the United States, but also that the work to reconcile with the violent legacies of slavery is far from over. It reminds us that the cost of liberty is often steep, and that the events that have secured that liberty are often quickly forgotten. American stories like this one lie everywhere around us. They wait, mute, to be reconsidered, pointing to the past, and prodding us to tackle what yet is left to do.

James Delle is an archaeologist at Millersville University, in Millersville, Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Archaeology of Northern Slavery and Freedom.

This story was originally published on Zocalo Public Square.

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In 1851, a Maryland Farmer Tried to Kidnap Free Blacks in Pennsylvania. He Wasn't Expecting the Neighborhood to Fight Back - Smithsonian.com

The New York Times' 1619 Project is forcing a rethinking of accepted U.S. history, placing the experience of slavery at the center of our story as a country. Here, a diagram of a slave ship shows the confined torture experienced by Africans on the Middle Passage, overlain by the flag of 1776. | Graphics public domain / Illustration PW

For generations, American schoolchildren have been taught tales of the heroic revolutionaries of 1776. The Founding Fathers, motivated by the ideals of freedom and independence, stood up to British colonialism and established a system premised on the principle that all men are created equal. The 1619 Project, initiated by the New York Times Magazine last August, is challenging this traditional origin story.

Instead of 1776, the projects contributors argue we must look to 1619 to really understand the history of the United States. Thats the year 20 African slaves were brought ashore in Virginia, initiating centuries of forced labor, oppression, and racism for Black people on this continent.

The project, which was launched and anchored by Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, upends the longstanding narrative that has portrayed slavery and the socioeconomic oppression and exploitation of Black people as merely regrettable episodes in an otherwise positive story of progress.

It consists of a series of essays, articles, and podcasts on a range of topicsfrom the myths surrounding U.S. independence and the slave plantation roots of modern American capitalism to theories about pseudo-scientific racial differences that still infect medical practice today and how the legacy of segregation continues to clog the streets of our cities with traffic jams, and more.

The common thread running through the contributions, which by design are written mostly by African Americans, is that they each place the Black experienceparticularly of slaveryas the core around which the story of the United States really unfolded. As the projects introduction states, No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed.

Since its launch in August, the project has set off a tidal wave of public discussion and debate, forcing millions to reconsider what they thought they knew about American history. With educational materials based on the essays of the 1619 Project being prepared and distributed to schools for use in their K-12 curricula, there is the potential that it could radically transform the way that the pastand presentis taught and understood in this country. Washington, D.C., Chicago, Newark, N.J., Brooklyn, and Buffalo, N.Y., are among the districts that have already signed on.

Many educators, journalists, and public figures have praised the project and its authors for prompting a mass re-thinking of not just the events of old, but the racial injustices of today, such as mass incarceration, unequal prosecution rates, poverty, health discrimination, and the still widening wealth and wage gap.

But the 1619 Project has not been without its detractors. From conservative quarters came charges that Hannah-Jones and others were out to delegitimize America, as argued by Benjamin Weingarten of the The Federalist magazine. The Wall Street Journal published an essay by conservative Black commentator Robert Woodson that claimed the Times series actually hurt Blacks because it wallows in victimhood and ignores success. A group of five white historians wrote a joint letter to the Times complaining about what they portrayed as an attempt to offer a new version of American history in which slavery and white supremacy become the dominant organizing themes.

The latter have been joined and supported by writers at an outfit that calls itself the World Socialist Web Site, an ultra-left page that has long peddled in sectarianism and proclaims itself the organ of the Trotskyist International Committee of the Fourth International. The WSWS, employing a crude, pseudo-Marxist lens, argues that the 1619 Project is a racialist morality tale that leaves out the history of the working class.

From this class reductionist viewpoint, to place the experience of slavery at the center of U.S. history amounts to toxic identity politics, an unwitting advocacy of race war, and a distraction from the struggle of wage labor against capital. Minimized to the point of non-existence are any notions of multiple layers and forms of exploitation beyond (and in conjunction with) the labor-capital relation. No attention is given to the concept of super-exploitation that has been pioneered by other, less dogmatic, Marxists.

Cynically, the whole project is denounced as one component of a deliberate effort by the Democratic Party to inject racial politics into the heart of the 2020 elections and foment divisions among the working class. In this shallow and absurd analysis, the viewpoints of 1619 Project contributors are even said to bear a disturbing resemblance to the race-based world view of the Nazis.

Conservative ideologues, establishment historians, and ultra-left sectariansit seems criticism of the 1619 Project has made for some strange bedfellows. Theyve coalesced to trash the project as a whole, but one statement by reporter Hannah-Jones seemed to galvanize all of them. In the introductory Times essay, she wrote:

Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.

For all the critics, challenging the accepted notion of why the American Revolution happenedand to argue that preserving slavery was a key factor for the establishment of the United Stateswas too much.

But one radical historian saw it coming. Dr. Gerald Horne says he was unsurprised that the Wall Street Journal, certain Ivy League scholars, and certain ultra-leftists seemingly burst a blood vessel in their brains when the 1619 Project was unveiled.Horne is the Moores Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston.

He says the re-examination of the American Revolution is part of a trend of second looks being given to past social transformations, starting with the Russian Revolution of just over a century ago.

It was inevitable, Horne says, that the sharp reappraisals of revolutionary processes, most notably in the USA and focusing particularly on October 1917, would lead to a reappraisal of 1776.

With a marked increase in the oppression of a range of peoples of color in the Western Hemisphere in the aftermath of the U.S. break from Britain, Horne says its difficult not to question the motivations of the founders of the new country. The dispossession of indigenes and the enslavement of Africans increased after the formation of the USA, he points out. Indeed, as an example, Horne draws attention to the fact that as early as the 1790s the U.S. had replaced Spain as the major carrier of enslaved labor to Cuba. Within 50 years, it was ditto for the largest market [for slave labor] of all:Brazil.

In fact, Horne has for some time been advocating a re-appraisal of the American Revolution not too dissimilar from that now being pursued by the 1619 Project. In one of his books published a few years ago, The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America, Horne makes the argument that in the years before the Declaration of Independence, Americas founders feared the clock was already ticking for slavery. Talk of abolition was advancing rapidly among policymakers in London, the imperial capital, but the even greater threat to the slaveholding colonial ruling elite was the danger of slave rebellion. It had already happened elsewhere in North America and the Caribbean.

Horne says that the widely feared possibility of a revolt by African slaves, coupled with external invasion, was the primary motivation for the colonial desire to break from Britain. Thus, in his viewpoint, 1776 amounted to a counter-revolution to preserve the right to enslave others.

If we want to understand how that conservative impulse to save slavery affects U.S. society today, Horne convincingly argues that we only need look at the legacy of white supremacy and anti-black racism that still persistson the job, in the courts, in the jails, in the schools, at the cashiers desk, on the streets, and everywhere else.

The debate over the nature of 1776 is thus not simply a matter of historians squabbling over what motivated George Washington or Thomas Jefferson to start a new country. It is a struggle to comprehendand changethe present by understanding how our society today is a product of those events and struggles of the past.

The 1619 Project is not just a story of how slavery shaped America; it is also the story of how the resistance and fights for liberation by Black Americans helped push the whole of U.S. society down freedom road. Reconstruction; fighting for desegregation in the armed forces, schools, businesses, and trade unions of the nation; the victories of the Civil Rights Movement, the protection of voting rightsjust a few moments among many.

The truth is, Hannah-Jones wrote, that as much democracy as this nation has today, it has been borne on the backs of black resistance. The Founding Fathers may not have actually believed in the ideals they espoused, she says, but black people did.

This key takeaway from the 1619 Projectthat the Black freedom struggle has been a driving force for the expansion of U.S. democracyis the one that its critics cannot accept. The reaction of the conservative guardians of the status quo is predictable. Any suggestion that there is something illegitimate about the prevailing capitalist and racist power structures is beyond the pale for them.

The attacks of the ultra-left writers of the World Socialist Web Site, formulated on the grounds of a faulty and narrow version of Marxism, are perhaps more regrettableespecially because they distort an analytical approach that holds the potential for better understanding and changing the world in which we live. The legacy of Black advocates of socialism whose work was characterized by an understanding of how the dynamics of race oppression were central to the functioning of capitalismfigures like W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Robeson, Claudia Jones, William L. Patterson, Angela Davis, and many moreis lost or twisted in these sectarian screeds.

Its indeed true that the 1619 Project is not a fully formed socialist analysis of U.S. history or the political economy of chattel slavery. The projects value is found in the way it has forcefully reminded millions of Americans of (or, more likely, introduced many of us to) the reality that the past we share is not necessarily what we thought it was.

It is time to stop hiding from our sins and confront them, Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote. And then in confronting them, it is time to make them right. The new understanding of our story as a country being pushed along by the Times series will now become a shaper of future struggles and of the history that is yet to be written.

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Rewriting the United States' past (and future): The 1619 Project and its critics - People's World