During Black History, Remember the Resistance to White Supremacy
We should always remember the resistance to slavery and white supremacy during Black History Month. This is especially as we are being challenged again in this century by crazed racist lunatics who support Donald Trump’s rampage on America. Uprisings against slavery and white supremacy were common, though radicalized historians tend to ignore this. Most rebellions took place before sailing to America and some preferred death to bondage by throwing themselves overboard in the Atlantic.
Many of us are familiar with Nat Turner’s heroic action in 1831 by destroying slave plantations and killing the mad med of the slave owning class. There was also the Stono River Rebellion (1739), the Bahamas Rebellion (1734), Jamaica (1739), The New York City Conspiracy of 1741, Gabriels’s Revolt (1800), the German Coast Uprising in Louisiana (1811), and many others.
The Stono Rebellion: A Fight for Freedom
The Stono Rebellion was the largest slave revolt ever staged in the 13 colonies. On Sunday, Sept. 9, 1739, a day free of labor, about 20 slaves under the leadership of a man named Jemmy provided whites with a painful lesson on the African desire for liberty. Gabriel Prosser was born in 1776 on the Prosser plantation, just six miles north of Richmond, Va., which was the location of 53 enslaved people held by racist whites. Gabriel would hatch a plot, to kill slave owners with freedom as its goal, that was emblematic of the era in which he lived.
The New York City Conspiracy of 1741
The New York City Conspiracy of 1741 involved about 1,700 blacks living in a city of some 7,000 whites who were determined to grind every person of African descent under their heel, as some form of revenge seemed inevitable. In early 1741, Fort George in New York was burned to the ground. Fires erupted elsewhere in the city — four in one day — and in New Jersey and on Long Island. Black people was tired of being treated like animals by American slave owners. Several racist white people claimed they had heard slaves bragging about setting the fires and threatening worse.
The German Coast Uprising and Haitian Influence
The German Coast Uprising of 1811 was sparked by the victory of Black people in Haiti over Napolean. If the Haitian Revolution between 1791 and 1804 — spearheaded by Toussaint Louverture and fought and won by black slaves under the leadership of Jean-Jacques Dessalines — struck fear in the hearts of slave owners everywhere. Many slave owners escaped to Louisiana to reset up their horrid system of human suffering. About 40 miles north of New Orleans, Charles Deslondes, a mulatto on the Andry sugar plantation in Louisiana, took volatile inspiration from that victory seven years prior in Haiti. He would go on to lead what the young historian Daniel Rasmussen calls the largest and most sophisticated slave revolt in U.S. history in his book American Uprising.
The Necessity of Rebellion Against Oppression
When people got tired of oppression they rise up and deliver devastating blows to their exploiters. Also, one should remember that slavery was an act of war and every slave owner should have been executed during and after the Civil War. In this way, those who want to return to a racist past would not have a leg to stand. Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis should have been executed for their plots and schemes to drag the country into a civil war. The horrors of slavey required rebellion and the Civil War to rid the country of this madness. If you think slavery was not a declaration of war, remember this: babies were ripped away from a mother if the child was sick and simply hacked to death.
