The Historian T H E B L A C K H I S T O R Y E D I T I O N T E R M 1 - 2 0 2 0 / 2 0 2 1 A C A D E M I C Y E A R U N I V E R S I T Y O F E X E T E R H I S T O R Y S O C I E T Y Editorial Welcome to the first digital edition of The Historian for the 2020/21 academic year. This term’s edition is themed around Black History and showcases several excellent essays by Exeter’s undergraduate history students, which cover a wide range of Black history at the local, national and global level. We are also delighted to introduce a dedicated section on Black Women’s history in this edition, featuring two essays discussing the role of women in the Civil Rights and the Black Power movements. Particularly in the wake of the George Floyd protests during this summer and renewed focus on Britain’s history of slavery and colonialism, studying and learning about Black History has never been so important. Exeter itself it has a rich history, exemplified by stories such as abolitionist Frederick Douglass’ visit in 1841 to protest against slavery in the US, the experience of Black US Army battalions stationed in the city during the Second World War, and the painting ‘Portrait of an African’ hanging at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum. If you would like to do your own research on Black History in Exeter, sites such as Telling Our Stories, Hannah Murray’s African American abolitionist mapping project (http://frederickdouglassinbritain.com/Map:Ab olitionists/), and the UCL Legacies of British Slave-Ownership database are all excellent places to start. Finally, we would like to thank our junior editors, Joe, Chloe, Elliot, Alice and Sophie for their hard work in helping to put this edition together. Tommy Maddinson and Evie Tonks, Senior Editors, 2020/1 1 Contents Abstracts 1. African American Resistance to Slavery in Tom Spargo analyses the multiple ways in which enslaved and free African Americans resisted the United States - By Tom Spargo and helped dismantle the institution of slavery 2. Exeter’s Forgotten Slave Owners - By in the United States. Tommy Maddinson Tommy Maddinson examines the history of Black Women’s History section Exeter’s forgotten slave-owners and their physical legacy today. 3. African American Women and the Civil Rights Movement – By Chloe Mabberley Chloe Mabberley explores the role of African 4. Black Women and the Black Power American women in the Civil Rights movement and their influence on its outcome. She Movement– By Kate Brown (alumni) challenges the traditional view of their role as “bridge-leaders”, noting the range of skills Black History today performed by women in the movement and the importance of an intersectional approach. 5. Racism in Twentieth Century Britain and Midwestern America: Comparisons, Legacies and Steps Forward – By William Kate Brown (alumni) discusses the influence of black women and the issue of women’s rights Mirza on the Black Power movement. She argues that women’s activism was vital in expanding the movement’s political, social, and economic The Editorial Team reach. (2020/2021) William Mirza highlights the historical similarities between racism in Midwestern Senior Editors: America and the United Kingdom during the twentieth century. He also discusses the transnational legacies of racism and suggests Tommy Maddinson, Evie Tonks the measures needed to remedy the inequalities of the past. Junior Editors: Elliot Gibbons, Alice Gustinetti, Chloe Mabberley, Joe Newell, and Sophie Porteous 2 resistance. The Civil War fundamentally altered African American these power relations, creating conditions where not only did these fears materialise, but slaveholders became powerless to deal with Resistance to them. In this new context, everyday and radical resistance by African-Americans became central Slavery in the to the collapse of slavery. Instances of everyday resistance clearly show United States how enslaved people were active agents navigating a complex web of conflicting desires - By Tom Spargo and constraints. This experience, however, was entirely misunderstood and distorted by traditional white supremacist histories, African-Americans resisted slavery in a myriad epitomised by Ulrich Philips, who portrayed of ways. For those in bondage, to resist was to slavery as a benign, paternalistic institution and navigate a complex web of desires for survival, constructed an image of slaves as content, improvement of personal circumstances, and docile and stupid, reaping the rewards of white the wellbeing of their community. No simple civilisation.2 Stanley Elkins’ Slavery shows how binary opposition between cooperation and such racism – in this case masked in elaborate resistance is thus observable. Acts of resistance psychoanalysis – persisted in academic circles were a blend of both, by which enslaved despite increasing pressure from the Civil Rights African-Americans worked the system to their movement. According to Elkins’ ‘Sambo thesis’, 1 ‘minimum disadvantage’. Therefore, the typical slave was a ‘perpetual child antebellum slave resistance in itself had a incapable of maturity’, psychologically negligible effect on the institution; instead, the traumatised by the Middle Passage and the biggest effects can be found in the way ‘closedness’ of plantation life, and rendered representations of this resistance shaped the ‘docile but irresponsible, loyal but lazy’ and ‘full collective memory of Southern slaveholders. of infantile silliness’.3 Racist histories did not, Everyday resistance, radical resistance, and however, go totally unchallenged. Herbert external pressure from abolitionists Aptheker and Kenneth Stampp were crucial in accumulated in the memory of Southern deconstructing this a priori racism and analysing society. From restrictive legislation to racist and slave testimonies as credible sources of slave paternalist ideologies, all aspects were part of a resistance.4 Historians in the 1970s began to dynamic institution constantly pre-empting and use the Gramscian theory of cultural responding to fears of African-American ‘hegemony’, an extrapolation of Marxist ‘false 1 Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Peasants and Politics’, The Journal of Chicago Press, 1959), pp. 82-84; p. 128. Nazi of Peasant Studies, 1:1 (1973), p. 13. concentration camp psychologists, Bruno Bettelheim 2 Ulrich B. Philips, American Negro Slavery: A Survey and Elie Cohen, are referenced extensively. of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro 4 Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts Labor as Determined by the Plantation Régime (New (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), p. 17; York: D. Appleton & Company, 1918), pp. 3-4. Kenneth Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in 3 Stanley Elkins, Slavery: A Problem In American the Ante-Bellum South (New York: Knopf, 1956), pp. Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago: University xii-ix. 3 consciousness’ and material class relations, to Resistance to working conditions exemplifies argue enslaved African-Americans were entirely this. Slave labour was a web of temporal claims imprisoned by the ideologies of the white made by masters, dictating working day length, slaveholders.5 James Scott’s widely-respected crop cycles, holidays, and working ages. Slaves critique of Gramsci, however, convincingly resisted such temporal restrictions, through argues that oppressed classes had the ability to working slowly, feigning illness, privately penetrate and subvert ruling ideologies.6 producing outside of working hours, and Enslaved African-Americans were not passive pretending ignorance.9 Often this was informed victims of ideological domination, but were by gender: women capitalised on their master’s constantly aware of the severe punishment to ignorance of the female body, including one themselves or others if this opposition was instance of a ‘protracted pseudo pregnancy’, acted upon too overtly. whilst a punch-up with an overseer was often re-affirmation of manhood.10 However, Subordinate classes never stand in diametric individual microhistories should not obscure the opposition to ruling institutions, but rather bigger picture. Recently, Edward Baptist has work it to their ‘minimum disadvantage’.7 Both dismantled misleading preconceptions – Aptheker’s picture of total opposition and perpetuated by both racist and neo-abolitionist Philips’ picture of total docility fail to recognise schools – of the institution as essentially this. As punishments – including whipping, unprofitable, pre-modern and static. Slavery chains, confinement, stocks, sale to the deep was dynamic and modern, a ‘world in motion’, south or separation from family – were so ever more effective at quashing resistance and severe, it is unsurprising that radical resistance extracting labour.11 Resistance to working was rare. A more complex relationship between conditions happened within these broader cooperation and resistance existed. Enslaved macro-economic changes, so this resistance African-Americans should therefore be seen as placed heavier burdens on others, but did not ‘powerfully conditioned’ by slavery, but not weaken the institution itself. reducible to it, and therefore it is essential that historians disentangle the often confused Theft was also a common occurrence. ‘Stealing meanings of ‘agency’ and ‘resistance’.8 is common to all negro slaves’ wrote one North Carolinian slaveholder, encapsulating the 5 Antonio Gramsci, Selections From The Prison Slavery’, in A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660-1840, 1971), pp. 245-247. This Marxist philosophy ed. by Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge underpins Eugene Genovese, ‘The Hegemonic University Press, 2004), pp. 205-207. Function of The Law’, Roll, Jordan, Roll (New York: 10 Stampp, The Peculiar Institution, p. 104; Frederick Pantheon Books, 1974), pp. 25-49. This is applied to Douglass, ‘Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass’, directly to resistance p. 587 and p. 658. in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An 6 James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms American Slave, Written by Himself: A Norton Critical of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Edition (New York: W.