Black Americans: From Slavery to Black Lives Matter

By John Miller

United states. In a few days, "black lives matter" becomes a universal slogan, while inscribing its action in the long history of political struggles of black americans. The history of african-americans, John Miller reminds us, is branded by slavery, segregation and racial violence. Without forgetting the resistances, the victories won in pain and the artistic cultures of an incredible richness, in particular the spirituals, the gospel and the jazz. From nat turner's revolt in 1831 to the abolition of slavery in 1865, from laws imposing segregation and disenfranchisement in the american south to martin luther king's famous i have a dream, from the black power movement to the election of barack obama, the author analyzes the struggles.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gaman Khan
• Release date: Oct 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215022443

Book preview

Political History Of Black Americans

In the fall of 2016, a few months before leaving the White House, Barack Obama inaugurated the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, which offers a striking itinerary of black American history, from the origins of Africa until the contemporary period. Visitors can thus travel through four centuries of history, allowing them to take a renewed and crucial look at the history of the United States. In a similar register, the New York Times recently launched the 1619 project, in reference to the date of arrival of the first captive Africans in Virginia, which aims to rethink this history in depth, emphasizing its economic, social , political and cultural. More broadly, if we had to retain only one idea of the many works that have renewed this field of study, it would be their insistence on the capacities of African-Americans to act (their agency), including in the most oppressive situations, to make tangible the ideals of the American Revolution, the universality of which existed only on the Johner of the Constitution.

The chapters of this work come from articles for the most part published in the journal L'Histoire from 2003 to today, articles retouched, sometimes developed, for the occasion. Although released over the years without any particular continuity, they form, together, a coherent set of chapters from a thematic and chronological point of view. Their general problem is, on the one hand, that of the history of domination, violence, persecution suffered by black Americans, and on the other hand that of their resistance, their capacity for resilience, for collective mobilization to demand the right to live with dignity, from the 19th century to today. It is therefore a deeply political story, if we are willing to give this term a sufficiently broad meaning, which is not limited to the conquest and exercise of power, but also to the ability to act collectively on their living conditions, the possibility of having a say in the choice of government authorities, from the lowly sheriff to the president of the United States, and even, as the Black Lives Matter movement expresses today, to the expression of a very simple requirement: the right to life.

The first thread running through these texts relates to the staggering violence of black American history. This one was basically branded with a hot iron of the crime against humanity of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery. Along with the massacre of indigenous populations, slavery is the other shameful pillar, long kept in the shadows of memory, of the history of the United States. Added to this are modes of domination gradually put in place after the abolition of 1865: segregation, deprivation of the right to vote and lynchings, which entered the ordinary news of the country from the 1890s. Noted writer Claudia Rankine, the lives of millions of Americans have been marked by special mourning ceremonies, the inconsolable mourning of those who died because they were black. The black American experience is therefore also one of poignant forms of mourning – one of the reasons why the churches have mattered so much. In 1955, Emmett Till, a black teenager vacationing in Mississippi, was tortured to death for staring at a white woman. At his funeral in Chicago, his mother asked that the coffin be left open, exposing his horribly disfigured face, so, she said, the world could see what they did to my son.

And there was everything else: lower-level school and health services, the lowest-paid jobs most at risk in times of crisis, the biased legal system, unsanitary housing, the thousand and one insults of everyday life, the symbolic violence. The degradation of central black neighborhoods from the 1970s, under the triple blow of the economic crisis, the massive arrival of drugs and the departure of the middle classes, disrupted families and urban communities, at the same time as the control of the forces of order became more pressing.

This particular violence has two dimensions: one, structural, is that of the institutions, built by practice and by an important legal apparatus: slavery, segregation, were cemented by laws. But they are not everything: today, structural racism still exists in many institutions, primarily the police, although the laws are formally anti-racist. The vast majority of police officers are not racist as individuals, but their training, use-of-force doctrines, and professional socialization drive them to act harshly toward their black fellow citizens. The other dimension of the violence suffered by black Americans is due to the inexhaustible force of white supremacists, obsessed with the decline of the white race, generalized miscegenation, the decadence of morals, feminism, etc. The most enlightened take action by killing, like Dylan Roof, neo-Nazi assassin of nine black people in a Charleston church in 2015. The others chew on their annealed hatreds while applauding Donald Trump. With a white supremacist in the White House between 2017 and 2021, barely masking his contempt and misunderstanding of his fellow black citizens, racist violence has increased. Trump is the leader of the racist and xenophobic extreme right in the United States. Nevertheless, in historical perspective, the absolute level of violence has fallen: the violence of today is not equivalent to that of slavery, segregation, or even the urban violence of the 1960s when the deaths were counted in the hundreds.

The second thread concerns the arts of resistance, to use the title of a classic work by James C. Scott. It is essential, in fact, to underline the infinity and the interest of the strategies deployed by the dominated, in particular in the small daily acts, like the pace of work that the slaves slowed down as soon as the master turned on his heels. We will see, for example, how slaves could act on the sales that concerned them, how their agency was exercised despite the violence suffered to build a clean world. Culture, especially music, has also played an essential role, providing a sublimated mode of expression of resistance and resilience. Spirituals, gospel, blues and jazz, R&B and soul have not only accompanied, supported black American political life; they were one of its forms of expression, one of its languages. " We Shall Overcome ", sang civil rights activists in the 1960s: this gospel, performed in an unforgettable way by Mahalia Jackson, gave them energy, hope, and enraged white supremacists. African-American religious beliefs and practices have also been essential, in that they have strengthened communities, given birth to charismatic leaders like Martin Luther King for whom a better world was not just a vague promise for the Hereafter, but a goal to be achieved here and now. His speeches, in Montgomery, Atlanta, Washington and elsewhere, were political as well as religious, these two dimensions being intertwined.

These resistant cultures did not extinguish great collective designs and movements: on a local scale, with Nat Turner's revolt in 1831, on a regional scale, with the massive flight of slaves during the Civil War, or nationally, with Marcus Garvey's UNIA in the aftermath of World War I, which was arguably, despite its brief existence, the most popular black organization in the country's history. And, of course, the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, that mighty wave that bent the forces of hatred and arrogant repression to power in the South.

A third common thread is the dialectic between radicalism and moderation in black movements. The history of political radicalism, from Nat Turner in 1831 to Malcolm X in the 1960s, can certainly be judged by their results, in which case one could conclude that they have historically failed in the United States. The very unfavorable balance of power, the scarcity of resources, the mobilization of the forces of repression with all the means at their disposal, the impossibility, or the great difficulty, of reinforce with white allies, the absence of a credible political outlet: all this explains the political impasse of these radicalism. In contrast, moderate movements seem to have prevailed in the long term: their ability to establish compromises, even questionable ones, their ability to mobilize external resources (allies, funding, media) and to bring black worlds together more broadly. , this has historically been much more effective. Barack Obama, a shrewd strategist if ever there was one, knew how to make his way through the political life of Chicago, then of Illinois, and finally of the whole country, without allowing himself to be locked into community representation, and by tenaciously seeking to find the right balance, even if it means disappointing those who expected more, especially on racial issues, which he treated with tweezers.

But this too schematic opposition should be nuanced. For radicalities must also be considered on the right scale, in that they have spurred on more moderate political movements, more concerned with compromise, and in that they have politicized the most modest black worlds, those of the ghettos for example. . Nat Turner ended up hanged, but he dealt a heavy blow to slavery by promoting the rise of abolitionism. Less tragically, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, with their raised fists of Black Power on the Olympic podium in Mexico City, sacrificed their sports careers, infuriated the reactionary gerontes of the CIO, but aroused with enthusiasm and emotion millions of men and women throughout the world.

In fact, the history of radicalism and moderation is entangled, made up of strong tensions, but also of convergences, exchanges, back and forth between one and the other, depending on the moment. The debates also focused on the means – is violence legitimate? – only on the ends: to fight for freedom, but to what end? Integration into American society? community autonomy? secession? A Martin Luther King appeared moderate in comparison to Malcolm X or Stokely Carmichael; but he was a dangerous agitator for the caciques of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, preferring legal battles to popular mobilizations. But locally, the NAACP could be much more radical than the national leadership of this association... In short, probably more clearly than in other groups, the African-American world was politically structured by a dialectic between radicalism and moderation: two poles which have fed each other, and which have each found their place in the history of the country.

Finally, we must also recognize the positive developments. If only one example were needed, the election of Barack Obama in 2008 was a staggering moment and will remain as a great historical event, even giving, for a moment, the illusion that the United States was healed from their nagging racial wounds. On election night, civil rights veteran Jesse Jackson wept in Chicago's Grant Park, and everyone realized who he was thinking. King's shadow was present alongside Obama, and with him the countless cohort of those who had fought against injustice and had paid for it with their lives. Admittedly, Obama did his best in a politically constrained framework, in the face of often venomous opposition, without reformulating in depth the exercise of executive power, without touching on the urgent question of the phenomenal increase in inequalities in income and wealth. , which has undermined the United States for thirty years. Beyond Obama, there is a thriving black middle class today, much larger than fifty years ago, the result of affirmative policies actions that have allowed millions of young African-Americans to go to university or obtain federal government jobs. If Martin Luther King returned to our world, he would probably be amazed to see the existence of this middle class, to learn that a black man with a Kenyan father was elected and re-elected President of the United States. But at the same time, he would be appalled to see the isolation and misery of part of the African-American world, to observe the behavior of certain municipal police and the tenacious existence of white supremacy.

Faced with a contemptuous and hostile power, as during the Trump presidency, the black American world backs down by organizing to emerge at the right time, as Black Lives Matter has shown in 2020. In this, recent years are representative of the historical resilience of black Americans, accustomed to hard knocks and adversaries ferocious. This is perhaps the main legacy of Martin Luther King and of all those discussed in this book: to have given African-Americans the feeling of being the bearers of a great story, a story of misfortunes certainly, but also of creativity, tenacity and political intelligence.

I

The chained ones of the cotton king

From 1619 to 1865, slavery occupied a central position in American society, economy and politics. Labor laboring especially in the plantations of the South, the slaves underwent throughout the XIX E century of humiliating traffics and massive transfers of population. The transatlantic trade was banned in 1808, but another trade, internal to the United States, was in place until the Civil War (1861-1865). It is this little-known trade and the sales associated with it that are analyzed here.

No one could have imagined, in 1619, in view of twenty Africans sold on a wharf in Virginia by a Dutch captain, that black slavery would become a major institution in the New World. Indeed, the obstacles seemed numerous at first glance: the distance with the African continent, the cost of the slave trade, the acclimatization of the captives. But that did not prevent slavery from becoming widespread from the end of the 17th century , until it became the system of colonial America. Indeed, neither the European laborers nor the enslaved Indians were numerous enough, or willing enough, to provide for agricultural needs. The Africans, on the other hand, were transported en masse by the British navy, and their condition as slaves became permanent and transmitted to their descendants.

Of the approximately 12.5 million Africans deported to the Americas, the United States received only a small number: 450,000 people, or 3.2%, in contrast to Brazil and the Caribbean which received them 85% of the total captives. One of the explanations lies in the relative precociousness of the prohibition of the transatlantic slave trade in the United States. However, and this is a peculiarity of this country, the slave population there experienced a high natural increase: from 697,897 in 1790, the number of slaves rose to 1,538,000 in 1820 and to 3,953,760 in 1860. The owners of slaves compensated for the prohibition of the transatlantic trade by the internal trade and the birth rate of their slaves.

It was especially in the southern colonies, where commercial agriculture was well established, that slavery flourished. There were certainly, in the 18th century , slaves in the North, occupied with domestic and artisanal tasks, but nothing comparable with the South, where the cultivation of tobacco in Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, rice and indigo in South Carolina, Georgia, sugar cane and especially king cotton in the following century in the Mississippi Delta demanded enormous slave labor.

However, the American revolution and the creation of the United States, at the end of the XVIII E century, could have dealt a fatal blow to slavery. Was this not in flagrant contradiction with the declarations of principle on the natural rights of man and with a newly independent country which claimed freedom? In fact, slavery was challenged on all sides: philosophers, jurists, economists, evangelical Christians, politicians jostled to castigate it. However, the abolitionist party ultimately did not win the decision. The Fathers of the Constitution, which included some of the largest slave owners, as well as, later, eight of the first twelve presidents, acted cautiously in considering that the higher political and economic interests of the new Republic justified the maintenance of slavery, or more precisely, that it not be abolished: the Constitution therefore did not oppose slavery, and the decision of its possible abolition fell to the various States. The word slave is not present in the Constitution, which uses euphemisms by referring in a circumvented and embarrassed way to other people or persons required to serve or work. It recognizes owners' right to claim fugitives, and specifies that a slave is worth three-fifths of a free man, to increase the political weight of the South in the United States Congress.

In the years following independence, abolition took hold with some evidence in the northern states, which moreover no longer needed slavery from an economic point of view, but it remained intact. in the south. On a moral level, its defenders considered that blacks were not capable of being free, that they could in no way claim the rights and privileges of free men. The only concession granted to the abolitionists was the prohibition of slavery in the Western Territories and the end of the transatlantic slave trade . This was, hoped Thomas Jefferson, himself a slave owner, a first step towards the inevitable abolition of the particular institution, according to the euphemism commonly used to speak of slavery.

However, the