Black/Red View
March 2000

Freedom essence of Black history

by John Alan

Last February the nation observed African-American History Month. This event, like other celebrations, has cleansed its consciousness of major internal, national contradictions. Thus, this nation observed in the same month the birthday of a president who was a slave owner, the birthday of another who emancipated the slaves and the history of a people who are still engaged in a long, historic struggle to concretize the idea of freedom.

Jamming together the celebration of George Washington's birthday and Abraham Lincoln's birthday with the observation of African-American History Month figuratively brings together three great contending forces: slaveholding Southern planters vs. a new, growing class of industrial and finance capitalists, and the African-American masses opposing both of those dehumanizing forms of the social organization of labor.

FREEDOM UNDERLYING HISTORY

There were no public observations of African-American history that came near to revealing that the underlying essence of that history is the development of a consciousness of freedom in the minds of masses of African Americans. Instead the public got stories and documentaries on the tremendous, creative role African Americans played in the development of American culture, biographies of African Americans successful in the competitive world of American capitalism and the highly touted soap opera of President Thomas Jefferson's love affair with his slave Sally Hemings.

Americans read nothing in the large newspapers and saw nothing on television about those African Americans who rebelled against slavery, such as Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey. Neither did television nor the press pay any attention to David Walker's famous 1829 Appeal to end the abomination of slavery.

Walker's appeal reached the hands of hundreds of free and enslaved African Americans in the South and raised the specter of revolt in the minds of the white slave masters, causing them to make frantic appeals for arms from the U.S. Secretary of War, John Eaton. Southern slaveholders were well aware that the idea of freedom was the paramount idea in the minds of their slaves.

A significant section of David Walker's "One Continual Cry" is devoted to a sharp critique of Thomas Jefferson's philosophy of race. Walker called upon the brethren to take note that Jefferson defended slavery by projecting the concept "that Blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind. ...[W]ill not a lover of natural history, then, one who views the gradations in all races of animals with the eye of philosophy, excuse an effort to keep those in the department of Man as distinct as nature had formed them?"

Walker wrote that Jefferson's philosophy of racism, his claim that the social division between Blacks and whites was beyond human control, could only be overcome by Black mass action. Being a religious man, he saw this activity as the will of God. Walker's religious doctrine of salvation was a dialectic of self-emancipation through the absolute activity of enslaved African Americans.

Not only did Walker's Appeal challenge the racist nature of American democracy, it proposed the absolute negation of a society founded upon slavery by a second American revolution. He wrote: "My color will yet root some of you out of the faceof the earth! You may doubt it if you please. I know that thousands will doubt-they think that they have us so well secured in wretchedness...that it is impossible for such a thing to occur."

HISTORIANS AND MASS MIGRATION

What is African-American history? Should every recorded event in which an African American appears be considered? For example, can Thomas Jefferson's affair with a slave be seen as African-American history? A television network thought so. While the Jefferson-Hemings affair should not be hidden, it has nothing to do with the reason in African-American history.

Today's celebration of African-American history came out of the dramatic unity of African-American historians with the great migration of African-American masses to northern cities during World War I. This unity marked the birth of a new self-consciousness. As Alain Locke said, "A new Negro appeared, a new race consciousness asserted race pride and was digging into its past."

Arthur A. Schomburg said that "the American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future. Though it is orthodox to think of America as one country where it's unnecessary to have a past, what is a luxury for a nation as a whole becomes a prime social necessity for the Negro." Carter G. Woodson, the father of the idea that we should celebrate Negro history week, added that without the discovery of the African-American past we would become a "negligible factor in the thought of the world."

This desire to discover Black history was not just for history's sake, but to combat the idea, projected by white historians, that Blacks were a history-less people who were hardly more than children. This battle was fought up to the Civil Rights Movement which established Black studies programs in universities across this country. The whole struggle was to make African Americans a Subject of history, not just Substance of history.