Will of Fire

By Cynthia Hamilton

The title of this book, Will of Fire, came from my young physical therapist. We were talking about the events in Ferguson and the Black Lives Matter movement. I assured him that there was much that preceded this most recent movement. Many Blacks spoke out without any assurance of protection, particularly when they addressed unpopular subjects li

• Language: English
• Publisher: Book Films Media
• Release date: Oct 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9798989091669

Cynthia Hamilton

Cynthia Hamilton, Ph. D. is retired Professor Emeritus, University of Rhode Island where she was chair of African and African American Studies. She fancies herself a scholar/activist even though she has had multiple sclerosis for twenty years. She has had her Ph. D. for thirty years and has taught at several universities from California to Massachusetts. She studied and worked with C.L.R. James in the 1970’s, was a community organizer in the 1980’s, diagnosed with MS in the 1990’s. Her mother moved from California to Rhode Island to give her the last active years of her academic life. Her mother now has dementia and does not walk. They live together in Newport, Rhode Island, still working for change in their personal lives and the lives of others.

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WILL

OF

FIRE

__________________________________

Black Radicals

and

The Radical Tradition

__________________________________

Cynthia Hamilton, Ph. D.

Editor

WILL OF FIRE

Copyright © 2022 by Cynthia Hamilton

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher and author, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review.

This publication contains the opinions and ideas of its author. It is intended to provide helpful and informative material on the subjects addressed in the publication. The authors and publisher specially disclaim all responsibility for any liability, loss, or risk, personal or otherwise, which is incurred as a consequence, directly or indirectly, of the use and application of any of the contents of this book.

ISBN:

Paperback 979-8-9890916-5-2

Hardback 979-8-9890916-4-5

eBook 979-8-9890916-6-9

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

PART I – The Rise of the Black Radical Tradition

Revolt against Slavery . . . . 7

Civil War and Revolution . . . . 13

Reconstruction . . . . . 16

The Nadir . . . . . 19

The Black Press . . . . . 25

The New Negro . . . . . 28

Art as Political Expression . . . 32

Theoretical Contributions . . . 36

Continuity and Change in the 1960s . . 39

And So, We Continue . . . . 41

PART II – Readings in the Black Radical Tradition

1. Slave as a Citizen

Henry Highland Garnet, "An Address to the Slaves of the United

States," (1843) …. …. …. …. …. 53

Henry Highland Garnet, Let the Monster Perish, Speech

Before Congress (1865) …. …. .... …. 60

2. Women Have Always Stepped Forward

Maria Stewart, Why Sit You Here and Die (1832) …. 73

Charlotte Bass, "Acceptance Speech (1947) .… .… 78

Agitation as Virtue

T.T. Fortune, Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics

In the South …. …. …. …. …. …. 85

Ida B. Wells, The Reason Why (1883 WORLD’S FAIR) … 92

Lucy Parsons’ Speech to the IWW (1908) …. …. 131

Learning from History

W.E.B. DuBois, Let Us Reason Together …. …. 133

W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chapter 13) …. 137

Boisrond Tonnere, Memoirs to Serve as Materials for

Writing the History of Haiti …. …. …. …. 149

5. Race: Theory and Practice

C. L. R. James, Toussaint L’Ouverture to Fidel Castro …. 152

APPENDIX, Black Jacobins

Kimathi Mohammed, Beyond Measure …. …. 163

6. Applying the Theory of Peace

SNCC, On Vietnam (1966) .... .... …. .... 208

M. L. King, Beyond Vietnam (1967) …. …. …. 210

League of Revolutionary Workers/Dodge Revolutionary Movement,

Dare to Fight, Dare to Win …. …. …. …. 228

7. And So, We Continue

Cynthia Hamilton, Apartheid in an American City …. 232

Bibliography …. …. …. …. …. …. 248

Afterword …. …. …. …. …. …. 250

PREFACE

This manuscript started as an anthology to depict the history of the long road to citizenship of African Americans, who fought and bled for inclusion as a citizen and the right to vote. And then on January 6th, we witnessed an attack on democracy. This was not the first time there had been a fight to keep Blacks out The new actors thought they were following the methods laid out by old Confederates after the Civil War. Faced with new Constitutional law, the 13th and 14th Amendments, and Civil Rights legislation of 1865 and 1875, the representatives who sought to maintain the old face of American society, and to turn back Reconstruction, which is what the period of change was called.

It began with a contested Presidential election; Hayes v. Tilden. After much debate and counting, a negotiated settlement was agreed to. African Americans were the object of contention but not participants in the settlement. The South wanted no more participation of Blacks (all the Black Union soldiers, armed, to ensure the new legislation was followed). They wanted the federal government out of local/state, decision-making. All, in exchange for the Presidency.

Little has changed in terms of demands but Blacks have become major participants. We are more than voters; we have become key decision-makers. We have become the standard of the new democracy that America dreamed of and there is no turning back.

This manuscript is still an anthology but I hope to convey something of the spirit of consistency in the thought and behavior of those who sacrificed the most for the idea of inclusion in a democracy of all the people despite a lack of inclusion.

INTRODUCTION

The title of this book, Will of Fire, came from my young physical therapist. We were talking about the events in Ferguson and the Black Lives Matter movement. I assured him that there was much that preceded this most recent movement. Many Blacks spoke out without any assurance of protection, particularly when they addressed unpopular subjects like homosexuality, interracial relations, prostitution, promiscuity, and color prejudice.

These were the topics that a small group of young writers chose to address. Fire!! was the title of the literary magazine that this group established. The founding editors are among my favorites: Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Aaron Douglas (whose painting we have used as our cover); John Davis, Richard Bruce Nugent, Gwendolyn Bennet, Lewis Grandson Alexander, and Countee Cullen.

According to Hughes, the name of the magazine implied that it intended to dumb up a lot of old, dead, conventional Negro and white ideas of the past ... into a realization of the younger Negro Writers and artists (Hughes).

This was very different than the Talented Tenth, whose objective had been to point out the similarities between the Black and the White middle classes. What distinguished this group of young writers was their willingness to look for culture in all classes. They were, of course, denounced by the Talented Tenth, who viewed their effort as decadent and vulgar.

This was a modem group, but there were many who preceded them. We will begin with Maria Stewart. During slavery, she and her husband were active. They were both free Blacks. Her husband was an independent shipping agent. He was a friend of David Walker’s, the first Black man to call for a revolt. Walker was an independent shipping agent, who cleaned sailors’ uniforms. The APPEAL was circulated throughout the North by being distributed through his line of business. Both men, Walker and Stewart, were found dead within a year of each other. Maria was left alone to continue her work. Henry Highland Garnet, who became a fugitive along with his family at the age of eleven, and later one of the finest abolitionists of the day, reprinted the appeal and circulated it with his speech included in this anthology.

Ida B. Wells, one of our finest, a model of courage and determination, was the daughter of slave parents, both of whom died of yellow fever. When she had to leave Memphis because the KKK burned down the office of the Memphis Free Speech (and placed a death threat on Ida), she published an article on discrimination in T.T. Fortune’s Freeman, which subsequently became The New York Age. T.T. Fortune was the editor of Marcus Garvey’s UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association) newspaper, The Negro World, late in his career.

T. Thomas Fortune immediately gave Ida a job writing for his paper, The New York Freeman. Fortune and Wells were the children of slaves. He became the speechwriter for Booker T. Washington, and editor of Marcus Garvey’s newspaper, Negro World.

Lucy Parsons, like her husband Albert, was a labor organizer. Albert was hanged for his efforts at Haymarket. Lucy would continue to organize for the rest of her life.

C.L.R. James’ work was popular reading material among the auto workers who formed the League of Revolutionary Workers in Detroit. James worked closely with George Padmore. What’s most important is that we understand what made the views of these individuals so unique and radical.

A Way of Seeing

What characterizes all of these activists is their way of seeing from Henry Highland Garnet to the present, Black activists sought to distinguish themselves from whites while at the same time resisting traditional explanations that explained all phenomena involving black people as race-based. Additionally, we must learn, as we have these to understand ourselves and our history through an appreciation of the ordinary. We must see in everyday life the manifestations not simply of exploitation, but the struggle for authenticity among ordinary men and women. The culture of the masses of people can tell us much about historical events if we learn to see clearly that which surrounds us daily.

"The social sciences have not been able to present us with an adequate picture of everyday life and popular culture. They fall short because of assumptions and hypotheses that underscore research. These include assumptions about man and human motivation, as well as established definitions of culture and institutional structures. Because social scientists have traditionally been concerned with stability and continuity, they have missed— intentionally or unintentionally—the adaptive quality and resilience of the masses that manifest themselves in varying environments. Because social scientists have focused on elites and their organized efforts of for social transformation, they have failed to see the nameless multitudes whose creativity and imagination have been the source of all human history.

This is the starting point in the work of C.L.R James. There is no attempt to romanticize, but rather he points to ordinary people as the force in history, the tiny levers of change that normally go unnoticed. He thereby gives us new planes of analysis. We are not to bear witness to a great chain of triumphs; but by focusing on mass action generated at the bottom of society, we see history in a new light.

W.E.B. DuBois pioneered the recognition of the role of the Blacks in history, which began with the realization of the shortcomings of early sociological and historical analyses of Blacks in America. He expressed his concern in The Souls of Black Folk (1905/1965). He wrote:

We seldom study the condition of the Negro today honestly and carefully. It is so much easier to assume that we know it all. And yet how little we really know of these millions and of their daily lives and longings, of their homely joys and sorrows, of their shortcomings and the meaning of their crimes! All this we can only learn by intimate contact with the masses, and not by wholesale arguments covering millions separated in time and space and differ widely in training and culture. (Dubois, 1905-1965, p.302)

DuBois developed this alternative approach that placed the actions of ordinary people at the center stage of history. James concurred and wrote in recognition: All thinking about Black struggles today and some years past originates from him (DuBois) (1965, p. i) particular, James was referring to Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1888, which DuBois wrote in 1935. It was held that DuBois employed the recognition of the role of the masses as creators of history, in particular, he set out to document the role of slaves as central to the outcome of the Civil War. His chapter, The General Strike, has never been surpassed in this regard.

Although there may be great acceptance of the literary value of the ordinary today, it was not always so. James’s early fiction, his short story Triumph (1929), and his novel Minty Alley (1936/1971) presented a picture of West Indian life that the middle classes would have preferred to ignore. It was the same in the United States when writers like Zora Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Wallace Thurman published their magazine Fire!! Inspired by Black Street life and the folk, only to have it met by hostility from those who demanded more respectable images.

James emphasized that in order to understand the present, we had to understand the past; that is, the totality. For this type of understanding, he said, we needed a philosophical method—a method like empiricism, which recognizes only bits and pieces of a phenomenon by taking things as they come, but rather, a method that forged a unity of all separate parts. This totality of vision was no easy assignment; it required more than just fitting pieces together. To emphasize this, James read to us from Hegel and concluded:

It is this dialectic, and in the comprehension of the unity of opposites or of the positive in the negative, that speculative knowledge consists. This is the important aspect of the dialectic but for thought that is as yet unpracticed and unfree it is the most difficult. (James, 1972)

What James has awakened in me, he has aroused in no less a person than George Lamming (1906), that is, a responsibility to pay attention, to know and understand. The understanding that he imparts is expressed best by the words of Aime Cesaire, which James used to close Black Jacobins:

For it is not true that the work of man is finished that man has nothing more to do in the world but be a parasite in the world that all we need is to keep in step with the world but work of man is only just beginning and it remains to man to conquer all the violence entrenched in the recesses of his passion and no race possesses the monopoly on beauty, of intelligence, of force, and there is a place for all that the rendezvous of victory.

(James, 1938/1963, p. 401)

Wells and Fortune:

Materialist Analysis of Lynching

For both Ida B. Wells and T. Thomas Fortune, it was important that race not be allowed to explain or excuse lynching. In his book Black and White, Land Labor and Politics in the South, Fortune wrote:

My purpose is to show that poverty and misfortune make no distinctions, of race, color or previous condition, but that the labor elements of the whole US should sympathize with the same element in the South and in some favorable contingency effect some organization and action which shall serve the common interest of the class. (Fortune, Black, and White)

In the book’s first half, Fortune applied the theories of American economist Henry George and German political philosopher, Karl Marx to southern society, portraying Blacks as akin to pleasant and laboring classes throughout the world. He predicted that the region’s battles would not be racial or political, but labor-based, calling for organization and union between Northern and Southern laborers, Black and White; he concluded that the condition of black and white laborers is the same and ... consequently their cause is common.

Ida B. Wells wrote Southern Horrors in 1892, after her friends, Thomas Moss, Will Stewart, and Calvin McDowell were lynched in Memphis. They were upstanding businessmen in the Black community. Their murder obviously influenced the materialist analysis Wells would apply to lynch. She wrote, Black economic progress threatened white southern pocketbooks and disrupted their ideas about black inferiority.

Moreover, she wrote, A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home and should be used for that protection which law refuses to give.

What is a Radical?

Charles Hamilton Houston is a good place to start. Born in 1895— after slavery but also after Plessey V. Ferguson—the Supreme Court decision that formalized "Jim Crown. He was the son of a lawyer who had his own firm and his mother, a school teacher; he attended a school that prepared students for college; he volunteered for the military and served as a Lieutenant in the army. He served two years in a segregated military in France where one of his men was threatened with lynching by an enemy on all sides. This is where Houston outlined what would be his life’s work. He wrote:

The hate and scorn showed on us Negro officers by our fellow Americans convinced me that there was no sense in dying for a world ruled by them. I made up my mind that if I got through this war I would study law, and use my time fighting for men who could not strike back.

He enrolled at Harvard Law School, where he became the first Black editor of Harvard Law Review. After his illustrious term, he graduated and returned to Howard University to serve as Vice Dean and Dean of the Law from 1929-35. In this capacity, he would directly influence nearly a quarter of Black lawyers in the US. As special counsel to the NAACP, he argued nearly all the civil rights cases before Brown vs. Board of Education. Houston’s plan was always to attack Jim Crow by challenging Plessy v. Ferguson. This plan serves as a backdrop for Houston’s activist motto:

A lawyer’s either a social engineer or he’s a parasite on society. The Constitution of the United States and knew how to explore its uses in the solving of problems of...local communities."

All of the activists included in this volume share a way of seeing, viewing from the bottom-up, materialism — that is, viewing all of the matters surrounding a situation; they are the social engineers that Houston was talking about. They were the ones who could review services provided in society and make sure they were working for and not against people.

PART I

__________________________________

THE RISE

OF

THE BLACK RADICAL

TRADITION

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The Revolt Against Slavery

Most of us bring our understanding of the present to our reading of history. This is equally true for those who write history. It is not surprising, therefore, that social movements of the past might bear the reformist identity of more contemporary actions. This has certainly been the case for most of the analysis of abolition. But, in fact, the struggle against slavery was a daily activity for the majority, particularly the slave community in the South, whom those who managed society feared the most. The struggle against slavery for Blacks and Whites was a revolutionary enterprise.

First, it is important that we recognize how important the written word was for blacks during slavery despite the violence used to prevent reading and writing. Before we begin to talk about individual abolitionists, some of whom we will meet again in this anthology, it is important to emphasize why the written word, and the reading of it, was feared.

We see this concern expressed in 1802 in a letter from the Postmaster General to a Georgia Senator. He was concerned about Blacks serving as post riders. His fear was that ordinary workers could use their work to pass on the information and organize. He wrote:

An objection exists against employing Negroes, or people of color, in transporting the public mails, of nature too delicate to engraft into a report which may become public, yet too important to be omitted or passed over without full consideration. After the scenes that St. Domingo has exhibited to the world, we cannot be too cautious in attempting to prevent similar evils in the four Southern States, where there is so great a proportion of blacks as to hazard the tranquility and happiness of the free citizens. Indeed, in Virginia and South Carolina (as I have been informed) plans and conspiracies have already been concerted by them more than once, to rise in arms, and subjugate their masters.

Everything that tends to increase their knowledge of natural rights, of men and things, or that affords them an opportunity of associating, acquiring, and communicating sentiments, and of establishing a chain or line of intelligence, must increase your hazard because it increases their means of effecting their object.

The most active and intelligent are employed as post

riders. These are the readiest to learn, and the most able to execute. By traveling from day to day, and hourly mixing with people they must, they will acquire information. They will learn that a man’s rights do not depend on his color. They will, in time become teachers to their brethren. They become acquainted with each other on the line. Whenever the body or a portion of them wish to act, they are an organized corps, circulating our intelligence openly, their own privately.

Their traveling creates no suspicion; and excites no alarm. One able man among them, perceiving the value of this machine, might lay a plan which would be communicated by your post riders from town to town, and produce a general and united operation against you. It is easier to prevent evil than to cure it. The hazard may be small, and the prospect remote, but it does not follow that at some day the event would not be certain. (Weir, 1998)

The Postmaster’s concern was legitimate. It was the mass of Black workers who carried messages, information, and ideas. As the laws to defend slavery became more restrictive and repression increased, their opposition became more creative. South Carolina passed a law following the revolt of Denmark Vesey (1822) restricting the movement of Blacks. Specifically, the law threatened Black seamen with slavery if they disembarked from their ships at port. Vesey had worked as an interpreter and political assistant to his owner as traveled throughout the Caribbean.

The slave owners feared the free flow of information between Blacks traveling to different regions. Even though the Carolina statute was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1823 for interfering in interstate commerce, the movement of Black Seamen was still suspect. But even with restrictions, Black seamen helped circulate David Walker’s Appeal, the first written call to revolt. Walker’s friend, James Stewart, ran a clothing shop where sailors’ garments were cleaned and sold. It has been suggested that the documents were hidden in the lining of sailors’ clothes. (Richardson, 1987:7)

The relations between Black abolitionists helped to shape their work. David Walker had a tremendous impact on Maria Stewart, the first woman to speak publicly in the United States. The relationship was undoubtedly forged through her husband, James Stewart. Some have speculated that he collaborated with Walker to circulate the Appeal because he was the only Black ship tout fitter in Boston. (Richardson, 1987: 7) James Stewart and David Walker died within a year of each other, and Maria was left to carry on the work alone. After their deaths, Maria described her life as one "dedicated to service for the cause of God and my brethren. She wrote:

All the nations of the earth are crying out for liberty and equality. Away, away with tyranny and oppression; shall Africa’s sons be silent any longer? (Richardson, 1987:9)

Stewart remained an outspoken opponent of slavery and an advocate for the rights of Blacks and women throughout her life. Many states have passed legislation in an effort to discourage free Blacks from entering their territories. The planters, of course, had placed bounties on well-known opponents like Walker and Harriet Tubman. When Walker was found dead on the doorsill of his printing shop (he refused to move to Canada after it was printed), his friends assumed that his death was the work of slavery’s proponents. But, despite the repression, the struggle against slavery intensified.

In 1831 Nat Turner’s revolt shook the South. Planters passed more restrictive laws, both state and federal, and reinforced the 1793 fugitive slave law. Increased repression, both legal and physical, can only be understood in light of continued and escalating Black resistance.

The period from 1791 to 1820 was one of very intense opposition to slavery by Blacks. Thousands of fugitives have found their way to Canada and Florida. Millions of dollars’ worth of property was lost yearly. The Haitian Revolution was undoubtedly the source of inspiration. The revolts of Gabriel Prosser (1800) and Denmark Vesey (1822) and the formation of the Negro Convention Movement (1813) mark this period. The fugitive slave law was an effort to curb some of this action but the number of Blacks escaping to Florida and joining forces with the Creeks, who had been displaced from Georgia, continued to grow. Not until the massacre of 1816, conducted by U.S. forces under the direction of Andrew Jackson, and later the annexation of Florida, was the flight to Florida, halted.

Throughout the next period, which begins with Nat Turner’s revolt (1831) and culminates with the raid on Harper’s Ferry (1859) followed by the Civil War, the abolitionist struggle developed a radical character that characterized the changing conditions of Blacks. For Blacks in the Deep South, the slave revolt and escape would continue to be a form of resistance along with constant work sabotage. In urban areas, especially in the North, resistance took different forms. Garnet reissued David Walker’s along with his own call to revolt in 1843. But the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which threatened all Blacks, free and slave alike, as well as Whites who assisted fugitives, and finally, the Dred Scott decision of 1857, left few options for passive resistance. Violence could not be avoided.

Frederick Douglass is, without doubt, the best-known of the Black abolitionists. Less well-known are the people and events which influenced his life and work. While Douglass’ relationship with William Lloyd Garrison dominated his early work it might be suggested that the Negro Convention Movement, more specifically the Black radicals within the abolitionist movement, influenced his later life. Circumstances within the United States, in particular the growing support for slavery in judicial and legislative decisions, marked the real turning points: the Dred Scott decision (1857) the Fugitive Slave Law (1850), and the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854).

When Henry Highland Garnet presented his powerful address at the National Negro Convention meeting in Buffalo in 1843, it marked a radical departure from the methods of moral suasion and the principles of a negotiated political solution to the problem of slavery. Garnet’s work marks the continuity of the radical resistance to slavery established by David Walker’s Appeal, which Garnet reprinted along with his address.

Douglass acknowledged the insurrectionary tone of Garnet’s address and helped to persuade the membership at the Convention meeting to distance themselves from this persuasion. Garnet, like Walker, placed great emphasis on addressing his fellows as citizens while emphasizing the rights and responsibilities of that title. His words to the Convention were sharp and commanding:

Forget not that you are native-born American citizens, and as such, you are justly entitled to all the rights that are granted to the freest . . .

(Stuckey, 1972: 169)

Brethren, arise, arise! Strike for your lives and liberties. Now is the day and the hour. Let every slave throughout the land do this, and the days of slavery are numbered you cannot be more oppressed than you have been — you cannot suffer greater cruel ties than you have already. Rather die freemen than live to be slaves. (Stuckey, 1972: 172)

The Convention in its final actions, voted to endorse Douglass ‘proposal for the continued use of moral suasion to convince slave owners to release their slaves and rejected Carnet’s more militant appeal. That was in 1843. In 1849, a convention of African Americans in Ohio passed a resolution to accept Garnet’s proposal and to distribute it (Garnet had printed the speech in 1848 as a pamphlet which included David Walker’s appeal Five months later Douglass changed his own tone on the issue of moral suasion in a speech at Faneuil Hall in Boston. According to Benjamin Quarles:

Douglass continued saying that a state of war existed in the South and that Americans should welcome a successful slave uprising, just as they had recently hailed the news that French citizens had overthrown the monarchy. (He) closed a lengthy address with the remark that he would welcome the news that the slaves had risen and that the sable arms which had been engaged in beautifying and adorning the South were engaged in spreading death and devastation there. (Quarles, 1969: 228)

Douglass continued this tone in his speech The Meaning of the Fourth of July to the Negro given in Rochester (1852) where he proclaimed:

[It] is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced. (Foner, 1950: 192)

By 1857 the Supreme Court had ruled in the Dred Scott decision that Blacks, slave or free, had no rights which a white man was bound to respect. Chief Justice Taney wrote for the Court:

They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and