African American Archive
Introduction

Published in July 2001 by Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers
By Kai Wright It was February 1956, and the black community in Montgomery, Alabama, had sustained a boycott of the city buses for two months. White civic leaders and public officials were shocked at the community’s resolve, and they were getting anxious. The demonstration had to be stopped, and it had to be stopped without caving in to the boycotters’ demands—namely, that more African Americans be hired as drivers, and that black riders not be required to give up their seats to whites when the white-only section at the front of the bus was full. In an effort to intimidate the boycott organizers, a local court indicted 100 people identified as leaders of the protest. The goal was not to arrest all those indicted, but to reassert the power of the city’s white officials and civic leaders. The court action was meant to remind the cadre of black ministers—who, in mass meetings week after week, had championed their boycott as an example of non-cooperation with injustice—that, at the stroke of a pen, whites could still declare them fugitives and send out a posse to hunt them down.

The tactic failed. Rev. E.D. Nixon, one of the boycott’s chief architects, responded to his indictment by walking into Montgomery’s police station and declaring, “You are looking for me? Here I am.” One by one, each of the black leaders joined Nixon by turning themselves in, echoing his refusal to be scared back into the shadows. Their actions reinvigorated the boycott.

The proud defiance in Nixon’s declaration to white Montgomery rings throughout the documents in this collection. For four centuries, people of African descent in the United States have asserted our existence and our humanity in the face of systematic efforts to obscure both. That assertion has taken countless forms—from a 1773 petition circulated by the slaves of Thompson, Massachusetts, in which they asked the state legislature to grant them freedom, to the angry missive “Fuck tha’ Police” recorded by the 1980s Hip-hop group N.W.A. Through literature, poetry, music and politics, African Americans have transformed the captivity from which we were born and subhuman caste created for us into a proud community defined by its members rather than its oppressors. This collection illustrates the process through which that transformation has occurred.

At the same time, the documents presented here also reveal why Nixon’s insistence that society deal with him still remains necessary today. America has failed to genuinely wrestle with its dual legacy of freedom and oppression. Racial division has repeatedly driven this nation to the brink of chaos--from the colonial era’s slave uprisings to the Civil War to the southern unrest of the Civil Rights Movement to the urban rioting seen in the late 1960s and early 1990s. Yet, at each juncture, we have resolved the immediate conflict without addressing the divide that created it. We have passed laws outlawing discrimination in society, but failed to acknowledge the defining role racism has played in establishing social order. Rather than face the past, as a nation, Americans assumed that by simply dismantling the infrastructure of Jim Crow, we could wipe away the spirit that allowed it to exist in the first place. A generation later, we continue to stumble over race.

No two documents in our history better embody America’s conflicted past than those contributed by founding hero Thomas Jefferson. The great statesman penned one of the world’s most ringing cries for freedom in the Declaration of Independence, then offered one of the most viciously racist tracts ever added to the public record with his Notes on Virginia. As Abolitionist firebrand William Lloyd Garrison often complained, our nation blindly celebrates one half of this legacy without stopping to offer substantive consideration of the other. Black journalist and activist David Walker warned in his 1829 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the United States that, if America did not face the white supremacy so explicitly articulated by Jefferson, that ideology would ingrain itself in the national psyche forever. As we read the Congressional Black Caucus’s 2001 objection to the election of President George W. Bush, on the grounds that African Americans were systematically denied the right to vote in the Deep South, it is instructive to recall Walker’s prophecy.

African-American history must be said to have begun with the first Africans to permanently settle in the land that would become the United States of America. Exactly who they were is, unfortunately, left to historical speculation, but scholars by and large agree that those Africans arrived with Spanish conquerors in the early 16th century. Spain had begun shipping captured men and women from the West Coast of Africa to Europe and the Americas in 1481, when it established Fort Elmina on the Gold Coast—the first permanent European structure in sub-Saharan Africa. Half a century later, in 1526, an expedition of over 500 Spaniards, Native Americans and Africans set sail from the Spanish West Indies in search of a route to the Orient. They only made it as far as the southeastern tip of North America, settling just below today’s Savannah, Georgia, and establishing San Miguel de Gualdape.

Facing food shortages, disease, the desertion of its Native American translators and the death of its leader shortly after the settlers’ arrival, the colony floundered. A succession struggle erupted, and in the midst of the chaos, the Africans staged the first slave revolt on American soil. Although colonists quelled the uprising, historians speculate that a number of Africans escaped into the frontier to live within Native American communities. These renegades were the first Africans to become Americans.

While violence remains an all-too-common element of the black experience today, the early period of black history—from the first Africans’ arrival at Jamestown in 1619, through the end of the slave trade—was the setting for some of the worst. Horrific violence typified not only the Atlantic Slave Trade itself, but also the wars it sparked among African communities, the physical and psychological torture slave traders and holders employed, and, ultimately, the countless revolts planned and executed by slaves attempting to break free. These revolts began at San Miguel de Gualdape and stretched through Nat Turner’s 1830 insurrection, culminating in one led by a white abolitionist—John Brown’s 1858 raid on the federal armory in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia.

During the colonial period, Africans held captive in New York City and Stono, South Carolina, staged the era’s most famous revolts. White hysteria from these two events rippled throughout the 13 colonies and hastened the institutionalization of barbarities designed to cement slavery and the caste system that justified it. Among the slave holders’ most valued tools for preventing uprisings was illiteracy, and they erected elaborate barriers to block blacks from obtaining the knowledge necessary to navigate the new world in which they found themselves. As a result, most of the surviving accounts of how Africans held captive in the Americas dealt with their new realities come through white voices—transcripts of court proceedings, treatises supporting or objecting to slavery, diaries of slave traders. Not until the 19th century and the onset of the Abolition Movement did the nearly 6,000 slave narratives that have been published over the years begin to proliferate.

Through those narratives, and the speeches and writings of self-educated free blacks and escaped slaves, the African-American voice emerges. In these documents, we follow the post-Revolutionary War attempt of free blacks to reconcile themselves with the longevity of their subjugation. Many had believed the ethos of freedom articulated in Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence would extend to them. When the new Constitution made it clear it would not, free blacks began to consider everything from repatriation to Africa to sustained armed revolt. As southern slaves escaped to the North and told their stories, their writings and speeches revealed the depth of southern white cruelty. Reading these works, we can watch as their influence radicalizes the movement to end slavery.

Meanwhile, through the writings of black and white religious pioneers, we witness as the massive Methodist and Baptist conversion of Africans in the 18th century leads to the founding of Richard Allen’s and Absolom Jones’s African Methodist Episcopal Church and to the creation of mega-congregations of southern black Baptists such as Andrew Bryan’s First African Baptist Church. These institutions form the foundation of black religion today.

As the Abolitionist Movement builds steam, we can watch black literature, glimpses of which are first visible in the 18th century poetry of Phillis Wheatley, Jupiter Hammon and Lucy Terry Prince, blossom with the writings of George Moses Horten, Frances Harper and Harriet Wilson, among others. As the century progresses, we find black female writers proliferating with the work of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Ameila Johnson and Anna Julia Cooper. The Harlem Renaissance brings us the poetry of Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, the short stories of Zora Neale Hurston, Billie Holiday’s bitter-sweet jazz and Bessie Smith’s defiantly rambunctious blues. Even after this definitive period in black art passes, African American literature continues to expand with the works of Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Nikki Giovanni and Maya Angelou, to name just a few of those represented in this collection. Today, the black literary tradition goes on developing with Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Terry McMillan and the musical poets of the Hip-hop generation.

The Abolitionist Movement also gave birth to black America’s tradition of masterful political oratory. Frederick Douglass, Mary Stewart and Sojourner Truth begin a line of great orators that stretches to today’s Rev. Jesse L. Jackson and into the halls of Congress with legislators such as California Rep. Maxine Waters. The Abolitionists’ fiery speeches deliberately deepened the national division over slavery, until, in President Abraham Lincoln’s words, the divided house could no longer stand. Again, America’s racial stain drove it to violence.

As in the Revolutionary War, blacks, free and slave, fought in order to help achieve the Civil War’s promise of liberty. And, again, those hopes were dashed when the carnage ended and President Andrew Jackson’s Reconstruction led to the retrenchment of a southern caste system based on race. Slavery was gone, and the Constitution had been amended to embrace black citizenship, but the realities of share cropping, Jim Crow and anti-black violence meant that little had changed. From Booker T. Washington’s doctrine of self-help through the mastery of farming and artisanship, through the Civil Rights Movement and into today’s efforts to confront economic inequality, the central question of 20th century black politics has asked how we can reorder the world Reconstruction’s failures left behind.

At the same time, the ever-expanding realm of black culture has also wrestled with that question. Black arts and literature throughout the 20th century have been shaped by the community’s collective struggle to claim its equal place in American society, even as they have, in turn, shaped that same movement. During the Harlem Renaissance, political leaders presented the New Negro artists—W.E.B. DuBois’s “Talented Tenth”—as proof that the Jim Crow-legitimizing theory of black inferiority was bankrupt. Throughout the Civil Rights Movement, artists such as Paul Robeson and Miles Davis both contributed to and drew artistic inspiration from the era’s political battles. As Black Power emerged, the radical artists of Amiri Baraka’s Black Arts Movement considered their work cultural manifestations of the movement’s political philosophy. And Hip-hip culture today defiantly articulates the discontent of America’s neglected and sealed off black urban environments, a discontent that contemporary political leaders have themselves failed to harness.

Beyond politics, the artists that have driven these black cultural movements perhaps most vividly embody the resilience and indefatigable spirit of African America. Even as slavery raged in its most brutal form, Phillis Wheatley found and articulated beauty in her existence. Throughout history, our poets, novelists, musicians and performers have represented the most damning evidence of the ultimate impotence of American racism. Through their work, these artists prove that America’s systemic racism, despite its best efforts, has failed to convince black people of our supposed inferiority.

As with Rev. E.D. Nixon’s demonstration in Montgomery, each of the last four centuries’ black political and cultural movements have represented African Americans’ assertion of our existence on this continent as more than chattel. This assertion requires us to first ask who we are, to define ourselves beyond our original and all-encompassing status as forced migrants for labor. Through the documents presented in this collection, readers can walk through history with the activists, artists, political leaders, soldiers and everyday personalities that have contributed to that defining process.

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With the exception of grammatical errors that obscured meaning, the text of the documents in this collection are presented as originally published. In some cases, rare documents and oral texts never published by the author are reproduced as published in other volumes. Thus, as a collection of primary sources, The African American Archive allows readers to witness firsthand as generation after generation of black Americans stands resolutely against efforts to subjugate and erase them. It allows us to listen in on the centuries-long intra-community conversation about who African Americans are, as a group and as individuals. While no collection could claim to cover every significant document in black history, The African American Archive attempts to offer a comprehensive sampling of texts that illustrate black life throughout American history, as well as the issues we have confronted since that first group of Africans escaped San Miguel de Gualdape and fled into the North American interior. And, ultimately, it confronts readers of all races with America’s past, bringing us face-to-face with our nation’s history of racism and the injustice it has legitimized, and celebrating those who have overcome it.