A Historical Perspective of African Americans Second Edition Edited by Bridget R. Cooks, Ph.D. and Karen Kim, Ph. D. University of California, Irvine Bassim Hamadeh, CEO and Publisher Michael Simpson, Vice President of Sales and Acquisitions Jamie Giganti, Senior Managing Editor Miguel Macias, Graphic Designer David Miano, Senior Specialist Acquisitions Editor Natalie Lakosil, Licensing Manager Kat Ragudos, Interior Designer Copyright © 2016 by Cognella, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be re- printed, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information retrieval system without the written permission of Cognella, Inc. First published in the United States of America in 2016 by Cognella, Inc. 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Cover image copyright © Sheila Pree Bright Printed in the United States of America ISBN: 978-1-63189-106-9 (pbk) / 978-1-63189-107-6 (br) Contents INTRODUCTION 1 KAREN KIM SLAVERY AND THE ORIGINS OF RACISM EUROPEANS AND THE RISE AND FALL OF AFRICAN SLAVERY IN THE AMERICAS: AN INTERPRETATION 9 DAVID ELTIS SLAVERY AND RESISTANCE REFLECTIONS ON THE BLACK WOMAN’S ROLE IN THE COMMUNITY OF SLAVES 27 ANGELA DAVIS INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL 47 HARRIET JACOBS SEDUCTION AND THE RUSES OF POWER 53 SAIDIYA HARTMAN ABOLITIONISM AND SELF FASHIONING THE LIGHT BROKE IN UPON ME BY DEGREES 63 FREDERICK DOUGLASS FREDERICK DOUGLASS CHOOSES HIS MOMENT 69 COLIN WESTERBECK “I DON’T KNOW HOW YOU WILL FEEL WHEN I GET THROUGH”: RACIAL DIFFERENCE, SYMBOLIC VALUE, AND SOJOURNER TRUTH 89 THERESA ZACKODNIK RECONSTRUCTION AND THE CHALLENGE OF A NEW AFRICAN AMERICAN IDENTITY ON OUR SPIRITUAL STRIVINGS 123 W.E.B. DUBOIS THE STUDY OF THE NEGRO 131 CARTER GODWIN WOODSON SPECTACLES OF WHITENESS: THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF LYNCHING 135 SHAWN SMITH STRUGGLES FOR DEMOCRACY: 1930S TO 1950S EIGHT WHO MUST NOT DIE 165 DOROTHY VAN DOREN EXILE 173 NICOLE A. WALIGORA-DAVIS HERE’S A PICTURE OF EMMETT TILL PAINTED BY THOSE WHO KNEW HIM 187 JOHN BARROW MRS. BRADLEY ACCUSES SHERIFF: KEY TILL WITNESS KEPT FROM TALKING 191 CHICAGO DEFENDER TILL’S MOM, DIGGS BOTH DISAPPOINTED 193 MATTIE SMITH COLIN JURY REFUSED TO INDICT WHITE MEN IN KILLING 195 CHICAGO DEFENDER THE PERSISTENCE OF RACISM AND RACIAL INJUSTICE THE POLITICS OF BLACK WOMEN’S STUDIES 199 GLORIA T. HULL AND BARBARA SMITH WHITE SKINS, BLACK MASKS: MINSTRESLSY AND THE WHITE WORKING CLASS FORMATION BETWEEN THE CIVIL WAR 215 DAVID ROEDIGER ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTOR 233 Introduction Karen Kim his collection came together in the late summer of 2014 as the people of Ferguson, Missouri, took to the streets in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown by Officer Darren Wilson. Today, the people of Baltimore, Maryland, Thave taken to the streets after the killing of Freddie Gray by six Baltimore police officers. In the nine months between Ferguson and Baltimore, the police have gone about business as usual, adding exponentially to the roster of the dead at a dizzying speed (according to the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, a black man, woman, or child is killed once every 28 hours by the state). In the last nine months, the slogan “Black Lives Matter” has gone viral, and its inscription on posters has become ubiquitous at protests in and beyond the United States. In the days after Michael Brown’s murder, Melissa Harris-Perry read on her MSNBC show the names of some of the hundreds of unarmed black men killed by police in the last decade, stating “From 2006 to 2012, a white police officer [has] killed a black person at least twice a week in this country.” Recently, President Obama has acknowledged a “new aware- ness” of “instances” between police and black civilians raising “troubling questions,” “com[ing] up, it seems like, once a week now.”1 The images of state violence against black people captured by cell phone cameras and disseminated across social media “com[ing] up, it seems like, once a week now” offer evidence about the significance of race and the persistence of racial inequality in the post–civil rights era. The simple fact that those killed at the hands of the police are overwhelmingly black challenges the reigning narrative of progress about race rela- tions heralded by the election of our first black president. According to this narrative of progress, racism is a relic from a bygone era, and the civil rights movement marks the arrival of an enlightened post-racial present. Persistent racial inequality finds no 1 place in this dominant narrative, which instead insists on its remoteness and irrel- evance. In this view, any stark racial differences in education, housing, employment, health, wealth, and incarceration must be the result of something other than racism. “New awareness” of the police killings of black men, women, and children across the United States challenges America’s liberal narrative of racial progress, yet no consensus over the role of race has emerged. Responses to questions about the sig- nificance of race in police killings of civilians appear to have split starkly along racial lines. According to the Pew Research Center, eight out of ten blacks say the “shooting in Ferguson raises important issues about race that merit discussion;” while five out of ten whites say the “issue of race is getting more attention than it deserves.”2 The 50 percent of whites who remain persuaded by our dominant progress narrative consider the gross racial disproportionality among victims of police violence a function of something other than racism. The issue, it turns out, is black behavior. The media coverage of the protests in Ferguson is a case in point. As protests over Michael Brown’s murder increased and intensified, news of Ferguson’s modern debtors’ prison scheme broke. Local officials had long targeted the black residents of Ferguson with arrests and fines and jail time for those who could not pay. Issuing on average nearly three warrants per household, Ferguson officials, in 2014, drew the county’s second-largest source of income from fines and fees paid disproportionately by its poor, black residents. These broader antiblack conditions structuring everyday life for Ferguson’s black residents barely came into view when they were eclipsed by media attention on the “violence” and “irrationality” of the black demonstrators. The media committed what Saidiya Hartman calls a “second order of violence” (“Venus,” 5) when it collectively focused on the “criminality” of black protest and effectively displaced both the spectacle of state violence, as well as Ferguson’s quotidian antiblack conditions indexed by the impunity Officer Wilson enjoyed. The implication of the media’s shift in focus is that the state violence meted out on black populations in the first instance is understandable, if not justifiable. That this held sway in popular discourse attests to the dominance of the liberal narra- tive of progress. The adage “adding insult to injury” captures the spirit—though not the scope, scale, and nature of this “second order of violence.” A Historical Perspective on African Americans seeks to address contradictory un- derstandings of race and racism that give rise to these divergent perspectives over the significance of race. Displacing questions of individual behaviors at the center of our reigning narrative of progress is one of the commitments of A Historical Perspective. Chapters in the course book such as David Eltis’s chapter demonstrate how “struc- tures, systems, and institutions” (Sexton, 3) produce and reinforce racial inequality, starting with New World racial slavery. Chapters by Angela Davis, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Colin L. Westerbeck, Kevin Gaines, Gloria T. Hull, and Barbara 2 A Historical Perspective of African Americans Smith—“those willing to respond timelessly to the moving target of democracy and freedom” (Willoughby-Herard, 1)—examine the historic and ongoing struggles for black liberation forged in response to the material contexts of racial oppression. The decentering of individual frames of reference cannot happen without focus on such matters as a history of the present. The collection thus pursues two interrelated questions: (1) the political question: what are the relations of power today? and (2) the historical question: how did they come to pass? The purpose of this collection is to assist the student interested in an analysis that explains contemporary US society in terms that resist the dominant narrative of progress. As historian and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in his 1935 groundbreaking book, Black Reconstruction: “What we have got to know, so far as possible, are the things that actually happened in the world” (722). To that end, the readings that follow consider the present in what Saidiya Hartman calls the “time of slavery” (Hartman, “Time,” 759). In an “effort to reckon with the breach and rupture induced by the [transatlantic] slave trade” (Hartman, “Time,” 771), chapters such as Nicole Waligora-Davis’s resist the teleological arc of a narrative of progress and instead track the “still-unfolding narrative of captivity and disposses- sion” (Hartman, “Time,” 772). The chapter by Shawn M. Smith interacts productively with the Nation’s special issue (September 15, 2014) on racial justice, for instance (see Paula Giddings’s “It’s Time for a 21st-Century Anti-Lynching Movement”; Mychal Denzel Smith’s “Strange Fruit in Ferguson”), contributing centrally to the “historical counternarrative” (763), or “counter-history” (Hartman, “Venus,” 4), the collection offers. Readers will follow the centuries-long development of discourses that “obfus- cate the primacy and extremity of violence in master-slave relations” (Hartman, “Seduction,” 538).