Post a minimum of 500 words analyzing all texts listed for the week on the syllabus as a reply to my weekly prompt. The below five questions require you to practice your analytical skills and ability to identify key aspects (argument, evidence, analysis, implications) of any writing or media. Your reflection should move beyond simply describing the reading or telling me what they are writing or saying. Rather this assignment requires you to analyze the reading and reflect on how it makes you think differently about Black history, life and culture.
1.) Why did the author write this essay or article?
2.) What are they trying to persuade the reader?
3.) What are the sources, evidence and methods used to develop their argument?
4.) Why is it compelling or persuasive? What is your assessment of the argument?
5.) What are the implications?
Message from instructor :
The thematic focus for this critical survey of Black history for Week 8 is 19th C Black Life in the U.S. & the Abolitionist Movement. You have two readings to complete by contemporary historian Sarah Haley and a primary source written by David Walker in 1829. This prompt will contextualize these two readings in relation to the weekly theme on Black life during the 1800s to prepare you for your critical reflection due by Friday, October 21st. You should read the Haley essay first for a general overview of abolition as a concept and history that David Walker is writing in the middle of during the 1800s. Remember, you only are required to read “the Preamble and Article I” from the Walker pamphlet.
It is important to understand the political, economic, legal and social shifts in U.S. society from the beginning of the 1800s in order to understand the rising tensions and power struggle leading to the bloodiest conflict on U.S. soil besides Native genocide, the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865) with roughly 750,000 killed. As slavery and democracy evolved from the formal founding of the U.S. in 1776 as a colonial offshoot from the British colonial empire which had far more profitable colonies in the Caribbean such as Barbados and Jamaica, so did the global market turning away from sugar as the dominant crop within the plantation economy of the Americas and toward cotton. Thus, the Mississippi Valley region of the Deep South became the center of a global economy dependent on the expansion of system of racial slavery generating massive profits for a white planter elite that also came to dominate politically in Congress shaping the legal culture and debate on whether slavery would exist in new states like Kansas and Missouri.
Significantly, during the nineteenth century the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade is abolished in the United Kingdom in 1807 and the United States follows in 1808. While this can be seen as a positive development now that the British Empire and U.S. would not longer participate formally, an illegal trade continued from Africa across the Atlantic to British colonies and the U.S. Further, the Trans-Atlantic Trade would not be abolished in Brazil and Cuba until 1888 & 1886. To make up for the end of the ability to purchase more enslaved Africans meant the plantation system in the U.S. focused increasingly on Black women as “incubators” for “future increase” in profits making the domestic trade in enslaved Africans even more profitable leading to cities like Montgomery and New Orleans.
Cotton and the profits derived from enslaved African free labor drove the rapid growth of what is often referred to as the “Black Belt” of the “Deep South” stretching from central Georgia through Northern Louisiana, referred to as such because of the rich dark soil fertile for crops and the racialized labor that cultivated the land. Frequently referred to as “King Cotton,” the influence and power of Southern planters cannot be overstated as both a political and economic force within the making of the antebellum South.
Enslaved Africans (note: referring to Black people as “slaves” or “the slaves” uses racist historical language to further objectify Black life whereas “enslaved” emphasizes slavery as a condition, Black humanity and agency), free people of color and communities racialized as Black always resisted slavery in a multitude of ways and in all places from the Caribbean maroon communities controlling the mountains to the “house slave” poisoning the master’s family. Abolition is an important historical concept first and an important historical global movement against racial slavery throughout the Americas.
Black historian and gender and sexualities scholar Sarah Haley analyzes abolition in all of its various meanings in the keyword essay for this week titled, “Abolition.” She redefines abolition as a useful concept in black studies as well as explains the complex historical context from which it emerges as a practice and way of thinking. Moving us from a narrow understanding of abolition as referring simply to the “end of slavery,” Haley explains that, “as a concept, abolition addresses the vexing entanglements of past, present, and future; it insists on necessary transformations yet to be actualized” (Haley 12).
In other words, the concept of abolition exceeds a convenient racial progress narrative of U.S. or Black history presuming abolition as a completed project important for understanding resistance to prisons as sites of racial-gender-sexual punishment and exploitation. As a keyword essay, the purpose of Haley’s analysis is to reference and briefly introduce you to many scholars, debates, and historical/social/political contexts that shape the conceptual use of abolition for a critical understanding of Black history. Your task is to follow the major arguments, analyses and evidence Haley uses to develop a more critical understanding of the history of abolition and its use as a concept beyond just Black history.
She argues that “from the perspective of he enslaved, abolition meant a reconstitution of relations of property.” This is significant to consider as property law used today in courts across the country is founded in debates during the 1800s about humans racialized as property which is a status (“having once been property or chattel”) that endures well after slavery is formally abolished in 1865 as Saidiya Hartman explains in her analysis of “slavery’s afterlife.” Not only did enslaved Africans construct property like the White House but one key function of race was the production of a racialized economic and legal value system of rendering humans as property (what Haley refers to on page 10 as “slavery’s grand alchemy”). The archives of slavery are full of ledgers for sale of enslaved children, humans identified as inventory, women only referred to as criminals, and other numbers that historians and scholars analyze to better understand Black life against the brutal mathematical calculations measuring the value of property.
While Haley covers a lot of different interpretations of abolition by historians and scholars, it is most important to pay attention to how she moves from the narrow definition (“end of slavery”) to the end of the essay on page 14 explaining how a more critical definition of abolition extends to contemporary activism among 21st C Black feminist campaigns defending Black women “punished for surviving” sexual assault by law (Marissa Alexander, Cyntoia Brown, Cece McDonald).
For further clarity of why Haley wrote this keyword essay and studies histories of Black women during slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow segregation listen to this podcast interview about her award winning 2013 book titled No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity available here.
Key Questions for Haley
1.) What two historical developments within the long abolition framework does Haley identify?
2.) What does she mean by the difference in abolition according to gradualism rather than immediacy?
3.) What is Haley’s analysis of gender and abolition? How does she explain the roles of Black women historically and conceptually through abolition as a framework for Black feminist analysis?
4.) Who are George Jackson and Angela Davis and how do they extend analyzing abolition in relation to carceral logics and the prison as a site of racial gender terror?
5.) Who are some other abolitionist writers besides Frederick Douglass or David Walker that Haley cites who are included among your primary sources for the midterm/final essay?
6.) What was the most “powerful political weapon” of the abolitionist movement according to Haley that has had lasting effects on scholarship today theorizing Black life and Blackness?
PRIMARY SOURCE PROMPT
David Walker is your second reading for this week and is a dynamic primary source writing from one end of the abolitionist spectrum. Whereas Harriet Beecher Stowe and William Lloyd Garrison are white abolitionists fighting to end slavery through literature that attempts to persuade white audiences that slavery is morally wrong, they accomplish this goal by also emphasizing Black inferiority and Black inhumanity (remember our discussion of Topsey’s representation). White conservative or liberal abolitionists like Stowe and Garrison often debated more progressive abolitionists like Frederick Douglass or Susan B. Anthony about how to achieve an end to slavery given how deeply entrenched it was in every institution in the U.S. and all of the Americas. Both white and Black abolitionist men and women occupied a range of political positions and so when a white abolitionists like John Brown decides to take up arms to violently free Black in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia in 1859 he was enacting a militant method of abolition that David Walker wrote about thirty years earlier in an 1829 pamphlet that was so compelling it struck fear in the minds of plantation owners throughout the U.S. South. Brown, like Walker were later assassinated for their militant abolitionist praxis.
Walker’s 1829 pamphlet, An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World is a call for Black unity and a forceful denunciation of the Christian justifications of slavery in the U.S. Walker was poisoned one year after the Appeal was published indicating the power of this writing and the fear it put in white plantation owners about the possibility of increased slave rebellions and adding pressure to the possibility of civil war which happened twenty years later. Walker’s audience appeals directly to Black readers in the U.S. and beyond its borders to incite rebellion. Whereas Frederick Douglass’ slave-narrative followed 19th C literary conventions expectations to appeal to whites through descriptions of gratuitous brutality and white saviors, Walker’s analysis of slavery emphasizes the cruelty of whiteness and how religion (Christianity) within U.S. society and democracy served to further justify white supremacist ideology about Black inferiority and subhumanity. It is a very important example of a Black militant abolitionist demand that critically analyzes race, religions, the institution of slavery, ancient Greek histories of slavery, the Bible, and much more your post should reflect upon critically.
Key Questions
1.) How does Walker use Christian religious moral writing, history and biblical imagery to analyze slavery and race?
2.) How does Sylvester Johnson’s analysis of Jefferson’s Enlightenment thinking show up in David Walker’s appeal?
3.)Why does Walker talk about slavery in Greece? In other words, what justifications for slavery in the U.S. did white plantation owners and politicians like Thomas Jefferson make about the Ancient Greek past to justify their racialized form of enslavement?
4.) What evidence does Walker use to analyze slavery in his own time against the founding father ideology of Jefferson?
5.) What makes Walker’s analysis of slavery compelling and a more progressive or radical abolitionist demand than others within the movement?
6.) How does Walker’s analysis serve as a primary source of a Black writer and orator through which we can better understand Haley’s framing of abolitionist struggle?
example from student:
David Walker was an outspoken black abolitionist and he put his thoughts into his work, one of his most important documents in the 19th century, the Appeal was written in 1829. This appeal was aimed at denouncing slavery and racism in the world for the colored citizens. He exposed the hypocrisies of American claims of freedom and Christianity, attacked the plan to colonize Black Americans in Africa and predicted that God’s justice promised violence for the enslaving United States. Although Walker’s pamphlet was primarily targeted at free black northerners and southern slaves, he also addressed northern whites and slave masters who would most likely read it out of curiosity. Instead of the simple approaches or colonization schemes of white anti-slavery groups such as the North Carolina Manumission Society, Walker advocated immediate emancipation. He urged slave to rebel by asking the question “had you not rather be killed than to be slave to a tyrant?” (p.30). The goal of the Appeal was to instill pride in its black readers and give hope that change would eventually come. It spoke against colonization, which was a popular movement that sought to move free blacks to a colony in Africa. Walker believed that American belonged to all who helped build it. Walker argued that slavery violated key tenets of Christianity and the Declaration of Independence’s promise of freedom and equality. Soon after his publication, Walker then pushed to distribute his pamphlet to both free African Americans and enslaved people. So, what was the result of this? As soon as Walker’s Appeal was published, blacks and whites alike began changing their opinions and actions. The Appeal also increased southern white paranoia about the potential for slave uprising, and was impetus for increased restrictions on both free and enslaved black.
Historically, abolition refers to the end of slavery, especially the institutional enslavement of Black people in the United States. According to Sarah Haley, abolition is defined as the end of slavery. Haley tries to reconnect the idea that abolition is not only just an end to slavery but it is also a struggle or obstacle to get over to get to the future. In the fight against slavery, abolition goes beyond white anit-slavery groups or undefined political or social standards. It gives you the chance to not only try to somehow understand slavery but the true purpose behind it or the “dark” history of it. As she discusses how the concept of gender was woven into slavery, she discusses how black women had domestic work and were employed by the plantations while also being enslaved. It can be interpreted that abolition highlights the resistance to state violence against black men and women and communities even more. Also, feminism spotlights resistance to which can be seen as most often male violence against women in everyday life. Lastly, the history of ideology underscored the unique forms of state violence against women of color. While each interpretation highlights a different aspect of the complex, Haley asserts that the three combine to create a nonviolent, transformative, visionary movement. She also finds it unique how the three concepts enrich each other rather than competing with each other and how they work together to create a whole that is greater than its parts.
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◀︎ Week 7 – The Middle Passage and Slavery in the United States (Hartman and Mustakeem podcast))
◀︎ Revised Syllabus (10.7.22)
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