The African-Americans 16. Of the bond-laborers who escaped to become leaders of maroon settlements before 1700, four had been kings in Africa. Toussaint LOuverture was the son of an African chieftain, as was his general, Henri Christophe, subsequent ruler of Haiti.10 It is notable that the names of these representatives of African chieftaincy have endured only because they successfully revolted and threw off the social death of racial oppression that the European colonizers intended for them. One Moorish chief, Abdul Rahamah, was sold into bondage in Mississippi early in the nineteenth century. Abou Bekir Sadliki endured thirty years of bondage in Jamaica before being freed from the post-Emancipation apprenticeship in Jamaica.11 The daughter of an Ebo king and her daughter Christiana Gibbons were living in Philadelphia in 1833, having been freed from chattel bondage some time earlier by their Georgia mistress.12 We can never know how many more were stripped of all vestiges of the social distinction they had known in their African homelands by a social order predicated upon the subordination of the servile class to every free white person, however base.13 17. In taking note of the plight of Africans shipped as bond-laborers to Anglo-American plantations and deprived of their very names, Adam Smith in 1759 touched the essence of the matter of racial oppression. Fortune never exerted more cruelly her empire over mankind, he wrote, than when she subjected those nations of heroes to the refuse of Europe.14 A century later the United States Supreme Court affirmed the constitutional principle that any white man, however degraded, was the social superior of any African-American, however cultured and independent in means.15 18. This hallmark of racial oppression in the United States was no less tragically apparent even after the abolition of chattel bond-servitude. In 1867, the newly freed African-Americans bespoke the tragic indignation of generations yet to come: The virtuous aspirations of our children must be continually checked by the knowledge that no matter how upright their conduct, they will be looked upon as less worthy of respect than the lowest wretch on earth who wears a white skin.16 10 Richard Price, ed., Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (Garden City, New York, 1973), p. 20. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint LOuverture and the San Domingo Revolution (rev. ed., New York, 1963), pp. 17, 19. 11 Alfred H. Stone, The Mulatto Factor in the Race Problem, Atlantic Monthly, 91:658-62 (1903), p. 660. Stone pegged his thesis on a distinction between mulattoes and negroes. However, his awareness of social distinctions among Africans who were to be declassed in plantation America is worth noting. Terry Alford, Prince Among Slaves: The True Story of an African Prince Sold into Slavery (New York, 1977), the history of Ibrahim, who is identified (at p. 61) as Rahahma, in a context which makes it apparent that he is the same person to whom Alfred H. Stone referred as Rahamah. Stone also mentions Otman dan Fodio, the poet chief of the Fulahs, as among distinguished Africans brought slaves to plantation America. 12 E. S. Abdy, Journal of a Residence and Tour in the United States of North America, from April, 1833, to October, 1834, 3. vols., (London, 1835); 3:346-48. 13 H. M. Henry, Police Control of the Slave in South Carolina (Emory, 1914) p. 11, citing findings of the South Carolina Constitutional Court in 1818. 14 Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 6th edition, 2 vols. (London, 1790); loc. cit., 2:37. 15 U. S. Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford, March 1857. 16 Address of the Colored Convention to the People of Alabama, published in The Daily State Sentinel, 21 May 1867; cited in James S. Allen, Reconstruction: The Battle for Democracy, 1865-1876 (New York, 1937), pp. 236-242; loc. cit., pp. 237-38. Allen, Theodore. Summary of the Argument of The Invention of the White Race. clogic. Cultural Logic.1998. Web. 26 Dec 2014.
Posted on: Fri, 26 Dec 2014 13:50:01 +0000
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