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NEWS & LETTERS,
AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 2003
Black/Red View
Reading, writing, revolt
by John Alan A recently published book by Elizabeth McHenry, FORGOTTEN
READERS: RECOVERING THE LOST HISOTORY OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN LITERARY SOCIETIES,
recounts how African Americans in northern states, during the early decades of
the 19th century, organized literary societies and began to read and write. In
McHenry’s words: “[Those] individuals were vividly aware of the general
perception, especially among white slaveholders in the South, that black
literacy and education posed a significant threat to the future of the slave
system and to maintaining black subordination generally.” DAVID WALKER'S 'APPEAL' McHenry’s thesis is that northern literary societies,
where African Americans met to write, read, discuss and publish issues relevant
to slavery and freedom, were the spiritual engines for African-American slaves’
rebellion during the first three decades of the 19th century. She could have
been thinking about the 1831 Nat Turner revolt or the 1822 Denmark Vesey
conspiracy. However, McHenry’s focus is on David Walker’s 1829 APPEAL TO THE
COLOURED CITIZENS OF THE WORLD. Walker, a Black minister living in Boston, published this
76-page pamphlet on the wretchedness of Black life during a period when slave
revolts were causing fear and panic among slaveholders. Eventually, anti-slavery
activity brought on the Civil War and ended slavery in America. African
Americans, free and enslaved, were clearly in the vanguard of that historic
movement to universalize freedom in the U.S. Walker’s critique upset not only
Southern whites, but also some whites in the north who were abolitionist but
thought that the Appeal was too inflammatory and vengeful. McHenry claims that: “Throughout the APPEAL, Walker
contrasted the sense of allegiance black Americans feel toward their ‘mother
country’ with their perceived distance or separation from it: rather than
deserving citizens they are treated by white Americans as ‘brutes,’ ‘talking
apes’ and ‘orang outangs’ who ‘ought to be SLAVES to the American people
their children forever’” (p. 29). Walker’s APPEAL is the foundation for this exploration
into literary societies because for African Americans literacy was a dimension
of the struggle to be free. Walker knew the great power of words. In his
critical onslaught against slavery he showed no mercy. He opened the preamble of
his APPEAL by saying: “we (coloured people of these United States) are the
most degraded, wretched, and abject set of beings that ever lived since the
world began; and I pray God that none like us ever may live again until time
shall be no more.” U.S. SLAVERY WORSE THAN ROMAN He went on say that slavery in the Christian U.S. was worse
than ancient slavery in Egypt, Rome and Sparta. He felt it would take a Josephus
or Plutarch to explain it. Karl Marx, living in the age of nascent capitalism,
was able to show that the African-American slaves were living in “barbaric
horror” because cotton, the commodity they labored to produce, returned a
tremendous amount of wealth for slaveholders when sold on the world market.
Hence the slaveholders over-worked their slaves, often consuming their lives in
seven years. Although Walker didn’t know why slavery in the U.S., in
comparison to ancient Roman slavery, was more brutal, he was certain that as
long as slavery existed there would be no peace. As he stated: “And yet, those
avaricious wretches are calling for Peace!!! I declare, it does appear to me, as
those same nations think God is asleep, or that he made the Africans for nothing
else but to dig their mines and work their farms, or they cannot believe
history, sacred or profane.” LITERACY AND FREEDOM On Aug. 28, 1963, 134 years later, Martin Luther King Jr.,
another Black minister, stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington
D.C. and said: “100 years later, the Negro still is not free; 100 years later,
the life of the Negro is still badly crippled by the manacles of segregation and
the chains of discrimination; 100 years later, the Negro lives on a lonely
island of poverty, in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity; 100
years later, the Negro is still languished in corners of American society and
finds himself in exile in his own land.” The “wretched” African-American condition that Walker described has been an historic constant, even though some social and economic changes are made after militant protest movements. This reveals that the revolutions over two centuries have remained unfinished, even as it also reveals the permanence of the African-American struggle to be whole, which includes seeing literacy as a way to amplify the power of the idea of freedom. |
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