I won't delve deeply into Toussaint here, you can read my post about the history of Haiti for that, but long story short, Toussaint was a god among men. Defying Napoleon and the French empire, he led Haiti through the only successful slave revolution in the history of the world. This man will get the monuments he deserves someday.
Slaveowners eventually caught on to the fact that an educated mind breeds dissent. Southern states made it illegal to teach slaves how to read, and Nat Turner is why. It all started when a free black man in the north, David Walker, published his "Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World" in 1829. Here's an excerpt.
See your Declaration Americans!!! Do you understand your own language? Hear your language, proclaimed to the world, July 4th, 1776—“We hold these truths to be self evident—that ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL!! that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness!!” Compare your own language above, extracted from your Declaration of Independence, with your cruelties and murders inflicted by your cruel and unmerciful fathers and yourselves on our fathers and on us—men who have never given your fathers or you the least provocation!!!!!! …Now Americans! I ask you candidly, was your sufferings under Great Britain, one-hundredth part as cruel and tyrannical as you have rendered ours under you?
Yeah. Serious shit. Slaves got a hold of this, and it angered and empowered them. And it scared slaveowners shitless. The state of Georgia put out a $10,000 bounty for Walker's capture, and $1,000 for his death.
There's no hard evidence for this, but a slave named Nat Turner likely read Walker's words. Whites certainly believed he did. Like John Brown a few decades later, Turner believed he was acting on the will of God. He was often seen fasting, praying, and he claimed to have had visions. Believing two solar eclipses were a sign from God, he decided to act, and in August 1831, rose up in rebellion. His small band traveled from house to house, freeing all slaves they encountered, and killing all whites.
It's difficult to call Turner a hero. The killing of men and women might be understandable, because grown adults were obviously complicit in upholding the American slave society; but the rebels also murdered children. They didn't spare many. After his capture, Turner said that his goal was to spread "terror and alarm" in order to bring slavery's brutality to the attention of whites.
The rebellion was put down within two days. It included at least 70 blacks, who killed around 60 whites. In the aftermath, 56 additional blacks were accused to being a part of it and hanged, and hundreds were beaten and killed by white mobs. American slaveowners had always been wary of slave rebellions, but this put the fear of god into them. They would never forget it, and one of the main arguments they would use to support slavery afterwards, was that they feared retaliation and mass killings by former slaves. It would become a common talking point to accuse abolitionists of attempting to incite slave rebellions.
"The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle... If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."
When Douglass was twelve years old, his master's wife began teaching him to read, which was illegal by this time. When his master found out, he scolded his wife and forbid her from teaching him any further. In his memoirs, Douglass explained that this only fueled him. Once his master forbid it, he knew it was something he needed to pursue. And so over the years, he managed to sneak in lessons of his own, and he taught himself. For the rest of his life, he proclaimed the path towards any kind of freedom was knowledge. Once he tasted it, he could no longer stand being a slave. He decided that if he couldn't succeed in escaping, he would kill himself.
If you want to get an idea of what slavery was actually like, you need to read his memoirs. I never had a history class that had me read them, so I went and picked them up myself not too long ago.
"Master… was not a humane slaveholder… He was a cruel man, hardened by a long life of slaveholding. He would at times seem to take great pleasure in whipping a slave. I have often been awakened at the dawn of day by the most heartrending shrieks of an own aunt of mine, whom he used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back till she was literally covered with blood. No words, no tears, no prayers, from his gory victim, seemed to move his iron heart from its bloody purpose. He would whip her to make her scream, and whip her to make her hush; and not until overcome by fatigue, would he cease to swing the blood-clotted cowskin."
When Douglass published his memoirs, southerners didn't think that any black man could write so eloquently and thoughtfully, and so they convinced themselves that it was a fraud written by a white abolitionist. After his escape, Douglass threw his life into the abolitionist movement.
Douglass was asked to give a speech on the Fourth of July, 1852. He almost saw it as an insult:
Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us? [...] Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, lowering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrecoverable ruin! I can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people!
Once the war broke out, he became disillusioned at the reluctance of the north, even of Lincoln, to make it a war about slavery. We're taught in school that the Civil War was about slavery, but that's both right and wrong. It was obviously about slavery, but nobody, neither the north, nor the south, wanted to admit it. Most northerners were only fighting to unite the country, and were just as racist as southerners. Douglass considered Lincoln "our friend and liberator" and "great and good man," but he stressed that we should not forget how he treated slavery as a secondary issue. At the unveiling of the Lincoln Monument in 1876, Douglass said:
"He was preeminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men. He was ready and willing at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people of this country. In all his education and feeling he was an American of the Americans. He came into the Presidential chair upon one principle alone, namely, opposition to the extension of slavery. His arguments in furtherance of this policy had their motive and mainspring in his patriotic devotion to the interests of his own race. To protect, defend, and perpetuate slavery in the states where it existed Abraham Lincoln was not less ready than any other President to draw the sword of the nation. He was ready to execute all the supposed guarantees of the United States Constitution in favor of the slave system anywhere inside the slave states. He was willing to pursue, recapture, and send back the fugitive slave to his master, and to suppress a slave rising for liberty, though his guilty master were already in arms against the Government."
"When a person places the proper value on freedom, there is nothing under the sun that he will not do to acquire that freedom. Whenever you hear a man saying he wants freedom, but in the next breath he is going to tell you what he won’t do to get it, or what he doesn’t believe in doing in order to get it, he doesn’t believe in freedom."
Malcolm X's childhood is your typical tragic story of an extremely intelligent youth growing up without any kind of support. His father was brutally murdered by the Klan when he was a young boy. This drove down his mother's mental health, and put her into an institution. He was one of the best students in his junior high school, but he dropped out after a white teacher told him that his aspirations to become a lawyer was "no realistic goal for a nigger." Without parents and without an education, Malcolm went into crime. He was arrested for burglary at the age of 20 and thrown into prison. While incarcerated, he earned the nickname "Satan" for his hostility towards religion. But he soon met an educated inmate named John Elton Bembry, who Malcolm would later describe as "the first man I had ever seen command total respect ... with words." Bembry introduced Malcolm to the Nation of Islam.
The Nation is Islam is not "normal" Islam. It's actually considered heretical by conventional Muslims. And they're actually pretty insane. According to the Nation of Islam, all races are descended from the black race (which may possibly be true anyway). A black scientist named Yakub was able to develop a special method of birth control to produce the white race. They believe that the black race is genetically superior to whites, and they support the complete separation of the two races. I don't listen to a lot of speeches of Malcolm's during this period in his life, because, well, they're racist as shit.
But Malcolm evolved. There was a split within the Nation of Islam, between its leader Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X. Malcolm discovered that Elijah had fathered a number of illegitimate children, often with girls who were underage. Malcolm left the church, and it created a huge rift. The FBI had agents within the Nation during this time, and may have played a role in fueling the fire.
Malcolm X went on a pilgrimage to Mecca, and saw people of all races worshipping Islam. He had an epiphany, and calmed down a bit, at least in terms of the conflict between races. This is the period when his speeches are worth listening to. The Nation of Islam was a black separatist movement, just like how the Ku Klux Klan is a white separatist movement. As unbelievable as it may be, Elijah Muhammad actually reached out to the Klan at one point, and the Klan was on board. They felt they were after the same goal: total separation of the races. Malcolm didn't like this at all, and now that he was free of Elijah's leash, he spoke quite candidly about what he intended to do to these cowards. He sent this to George Lincoln Rockwell, leader of the American Nazi Party, in 1965.
"This is to warn you that I am no longer held in check from fighting white supremacists by Elijah Muhammad’s separatist Black Muslim movement, and that if your present racist agitation against our people there in Alabama causes physical harm to Reverend King or any other black Americans who are only attempting to enjoy their rights as free human beings, that you and your Ku Klux Klan friends will be met with maximum physical retaliation from those of us who are not hand-cuffed by the disarming philosophy of nonviolence, and who believe in asserting our right of self-defense — by any means necessary."
Fuckin' A. The Nation of Islam began making death threats against him. And soon enough, he was publicly assassinated right in front of his wife and children. Here's the scene from Spike Lee's movie in case you want to get an idea of what it may have been like.
One of the biggest tragedies of the Civil Rights movement was that he wasn't able to reach his full potential before he was murdered. The history books record that it was a hit by Elijah Muhammad, and that very well may be how it went down. But there's plausible speculation that the FBI may have had a hand in it. And if you think that sounds a bit too conspiratorial, wait 'til you get to Fred Hampton up next.
"You don’t fight fire with fire. You fight fire with water. We’re gonna fight racism with solidarity. We’re not gonna fight capitalism with Black capitalism. We’re gonna fight capitalism with socialism. Socialism is the people. If you’re afraid of socialism, you’re afraid of yourself."
Fred Hampton was the chairman of the Chicago chapter of the Black Panthers. The Black Panthers are an extremely misunderstood organization. Whereas the Nation of Islam used religion to empower blacks in America, the Panthers used marxism. They organized communes where they fed the homeless and educated children and dropouts. There were white members and asian members, it was not a black separatist movement. They were politically aware and they were sick of bullshit. And Fred Hampton was one of their greatest leaders.
The FBI had (and still do have) informants and agents inside activist groups. This included the Nation of Islam and the Black Panthers. On December 3, 1969, one of these agents slipped a sleep-inducing drug into Hampton's drink at a party, so he would not wake up when the Chicago police raided his apartment later on that night. When they broke in, they immediately fired on a Panther who was on guard duty, sitting in a chair with a shotgun across his lap. The shotgun fired, but it was later determined to have been caused by a reflex when he was shot. This was the only shot the Panthers fired.
They then converged into Hampton's bedroom, where he lay asleep with his pregnant girlfriend, unable to wake. They shot him. When they determined that he was still alive, they pulled him out and shot him in the head.
Wikipedia:
“That’s Fred Hampton.”
“Is he dead?… Bring him out.”
“He’s barely alive.
“He’ll make it.”
Two shots were heard, which it was later discovered were fired point blank in Hampton’s head. According to Deborah Johnson, one officer then said:
“He’s good and dead now.”
This was a planned assassination. He was never brought into a courtroom. He never committed any crime. They broke into his home and shot him in the head in his sleep. Tactics straight out of the Gestapo. This guy was younger than me.
This assassination was part of the FBI's COINTELPRO program, a series of illegal infiltrations, harassments, wrongful imprisonments, and assassinations throughout American activist groups. Terrorism. When COINTELPRO was leaked to the public, we were given an unapologetic "oops," and reassured that it would never happen again. But most evidence points to it still going on to this day. The name "Fred Hampton" remains a rallying cry for leftist movements around the country.
"Politics is the art of making the people believe that they are in power, when in fact, they have none."
With the mention of Nat Turner, I can actually say that Mumia Abu-Jamal is not the most controversial person on this list! In 1981, journalist and former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal was convicted of the murder of officer Daniel Faulkner and sentenced to death. He's been sitting on death row ever since.
On December 9, 1981, Officer David Faulkner pulled over Abu-Jamal's brother at a traffic stop. Abu-Jamal was sitting in his taxi across the street, and he got out and ran over. Then there was an exchange of gunfire. Both Faulkner and Abu-Jamal were wounded. A .38 revolver with five spent cartridges was found on Abu-Jamal's person.
If you ask me, I'd speculate that Faulkner got spooked when he saw the big scary black man approaching him, and fired on Abu-Jamal. If Abu-Jamal decided to fire back, then I honestly wouldn't hold it against him at all, since the Supreme Court case John Bad Elk vs. U.S. ruled that you can resist a police officer, even with deadly force if that officer is doing something unlawful towards you. I wouldn't recommend you try that out though.
In any case, we're likely never going to know exactly what happened, because it all depends on who you decide to believe. The good news is that just seven weeks ago, Abu-Jamal was taken off death row. He was just taken out of solitary, and transported to a medium security prison, where he will be allowed to hug his wife for the first time in 30 years. He will now serve a life sentence without the possibility of parole.
So why is he on this list? Well, I mentioned he was a journalist, and a Black Panther. Over the last thirty years, Mumia has been sitting in prison writing books and giving historical and political commentary over the phone to Prison Radio. And the guy is fucking brilliant. Here are his commentaries, click around and listen for a bit. It's also a podcast on iTunes. Abu-Jamal has acquired a huge mass of support over the years, including from commentators like Cornel West and Amy Goodman, and from artists like Immortal Technique and Rage Against the Machine.
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