A History of Betrayal
by Mumia Abu-Jamal
Column Written 10/29/98
© 1998 Mumia Abu-Jamal All Rights
Commitment to a labor regime under which non-European slaves did virtually all of the menial labor and subservient work had the effect of lessening the possibility of c1ass conflict among whites by elevating all of them to a relatively privileged social status.-G.M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy : A Comparative Study in American and South African History (Oxford:1981)
American history is a study in denial, for much of what is taught as history in the schools of the nations bears little relationship to the lives lived by millions of men, women and children on the land we now call, America.
Most schools teach that which is safe, and mostly false; so much so that shock and disbelief usually is the result of a telling of a history that reveals that many of the men called 'Founding Fathers' were slaveowners, visceral racists, and, in a word, creeps.
Dedicated to the erection of a 'white man's republic' (as supported in the Supreme Court opinion by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)) many of the nation's leaders, congressmen and Presidents were virulent racists who made every effort to deny any semblance of justice to Black freedmen in the hellish aftermath of the Civil War. In that bloody war that pitted the North against the South, how many Americans know that over 37,000 Black men died while serving in the Union Army ? The people who fought to preserve the union, who fought against Secessionists and Rebels, returned to a South where virtually every promise made to them was shattered and broken, often by the very government that they fought in defense of. While the War was raging, General Sherman assigned thousands of acres to freedmen, on the land that was vacated by slaveowners, or confiscated. These lands, on which over 40,000 freedmen and their families tussled with the earth to create a life, were summarily snatched away from them by the US Government. General Howard traveled to 'Sherman land' in October 1865, to revoke title to the lands confiscated by war, in order to return it to the planters and slaveowners.
His instructions to the so-called "freedmen"? "Put aside your bitter feelings", and "become reconciled" to your old masters. The people, who had suffered indignity and bondage for centuries, who worked to enrich the national economy, told the U.S General, "No, never"; and "can't do it."
Merrimon Howard, a former Mississippi slave, referring to the Great Betrayal of 1865-1866, described the condition of Black folk following so-called "freedom": no land, no house, not so much as place to lay our head.…Despised by the world, hated by the country that gives us birth, denied of all our writs as a people, we were friends on the march.…brothers on the battlefield, but in the peaceful pursuits of life it seems that we are strangers. [Foner, Eric, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877 (Harpers; 1988), p.164]
Abolitionist Wendell Phillips aptly noted that, without the vote, Blacks would be doomed to a "century of serfdom." (p.221) He wasn't far wrong.
Blacks fought and died for the Union, and after the War they were forsaken, and treated as if they were the enemy off the very nation that they fought and bled for. Here, in the aftermath off carnage, white supremacy was the law; and Blackness was a crime. That was the reality that leads to today; the history that created the days and nights of this very hour.
When the United States was formed, it was constituted by an act of compromise that left half of the nation slave, and the other half of the nation "free." A hundred years later, and even after the raging horrors of war ripped the nation apart, a new compromise was reached between the North and South. In the words of one supporter of President Andrew Johnson, that compromise was based on this central tenet: "Keeping the Nigger down" (Foner, p.251).
For a century after "emancipation," Black folks, in the main, were denied every substantive right of the citizen: voting, office, jury service, the right to travel, to free assembly, to collective bargaining, etc.
Condemned to a new (and 'improved') life where the state took the place of the slavemaster, and did everything in its power to control and restrain Black labor, in the interests of the landowner's class.
For most of American History, so-called 'law' was merely white whim. Black life, considered cheap in slavery, became "free" and worthless in 'freedom,' as Foner notes:
Sheriffs, justices of the peace, and other local officials proved extremely reluctant to prosecute whites accused of crimes against blacks. To do so, said a Georgia sheriff, would be "unpopular" and dangerous while an Arkansas counterpart told a [Freedman's] Bureau Agent that to take action against a planter who had defrauded freedmen "would defeat him in the coming fall election." [Foner, p.204]
That was the reality that leads to today. The roots of a repression that still block sunlight, and makes black life so hellish still.
MAJ©1998