For hundreds of years Black people, Brown people, Red People, Asian people and hundreds of others fought to make a more just and equal society. Many became martyrs in their fight to obtain justice. All of what we can do today is the result of the sacrifice of people that changed a very exploitative capitalist system that was once ruled by white men with property. If it were not for the efforts of people like Nat Turner (1831) we might still be controlled by a system that allowed chattel slavery to exist. Others in the distant past gave their all, and it is best we not forget them or think what we are doing is solely our own effort. Without their sacrifices we would not be able to go to good schools, start businesses, ride on any seat in public transportation, vote, eat in any restaurant, go to any theater, become professionals, and many other things that are not looked at through historic lenses.
Thousands of Black men died in the American Revolution, fighting against slavery and the slave trade in America and the Caribbean, for the British and not the Americans. Gabriel Prosser, who planned a slave revolt, was hanged in 1800. Denmark Vesey, who led a planned insurrection against the slave owners was found guilty and hanged in 1822. At least five of the men who fought with John Brown (1859) in the attack at Harpers Ferry, Virginia escaped enslaved Black men. The first to die for freedom in that revolt was a Black man named Dangerfield Newby. The dedicated people who sacrificed much, in their work with liberating slaves to Canada and the North, in the Underground Railroad, freed over 100,000 escaped men, women and children, while Harriet Tubman risked it all to save over 300 of that number herself.
During the Civil War, nearly 200,000 free black men and escaped slaves joined the Union Army to fight for freedom and defeat Robert E. Lee and his racist goal of expanding slavery. However, a cowardly government prejudiced by white supremacy in the general public, initially denied them the right to fight. Thanks to the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, Black soldiers were finally allowed to fight for equality. After Douglas pressured Abraham Lincoln, the president finally issued the Emancipation Proclamation which became the process of the war being viewed as a war to end slavery. However, these Black troops were almost always led by white officers and placed in infantry, artillery, and cavalry regiments that were racially segregated.
One of the first black people in Humphreys County, Mississippi to register and vote was Rev. George Lee (1955), who used his church to inspire the community to register and vote. Lee was murdered after refusing White officials’ offer of protection in exchange for quitting his struggle to register Black voters. In more modern times, in June of 1964, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman were tortured and murdered by the KKK with help from a racist sheriff near Neshoba County, Mississippi. Rosa Parks gave it all as did Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, and hundreds of others. In June of 1964, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman were tortured and murdered in Neshoba County, Mississippi. Fred Hampton (Chicago) and Mark Clarke, Alprentice Carter, John Huggins, Carl Hampton (Houston), and other Black Panthers were murdered by rival organizations, the police, or racist rogue elements. So, next time you imagine that you succeeded all by yourself, think of the ones who made that possible.
