Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

Chapter 5 introduces Dr. Samuel Cartwright, who proposed a new mental illness he called “drapetomania.” He defined drapetomania as a disease that compelled enslaved people to try to run away. For white America, “property rights were as important as individual freedom” (105). This justified their constant oppression of enslaved Black people. However, contrary to the traditional narrative of enslaved people as passive, tragic figures, Harriot describes how enslaved people baked resistance into their daily lives. Things like sabotaging farming equipment, slowing down production, and playing sick were regular methods of resistance. Since enslaved people were governed by property laws, running away constituted theft in enslaving states. This did not dissuade enslaved Black people from running. Some went to free states, others to Canada, but many simply absconded to the southern wilderness.

Harriot notes that, during the 1770s, fugitives from slavery controlled Bas du Fleuve, an area between the Mississippi River and New Orleans. Fort Mose, a Spanish-controlled area in Florida, also sheltered runaways since Spain had abolished slavery. The Great Dismal Swamp, a huge area of southeast Virginia and northeast North Carolina, most likely sheltered thousands of runaways. Referred to as “maroons” in most regions, the runaways kept themselves alive through hunting, fishing, and farming, as well as surreptitious support from enslaved people on plantations. Some of the runaways had fought for the British during the American Revolution, and so had weapons and military training. “Maroon hunters” often tried to recapture the runaways, but the maroons would fight them off, then destroy their settlement and move on to another area.

The “most famous and most belligerent” drapetomaniac was called Forest Joe (113). A South Carolinian enslaved runaway, Forest Joe was an outsized character known for bravery and the ability to escape from anywhere. Most enslaved people in his area helped him in his exploits, aiding him with food and intelligence about their plantations and enslavers. Forest Joe became more and more reckless with his ventures into dangerous territory. The white residents of Pineville, South Carolina were so desperate to find Forest Joe that they formed a militia and offered freedom to any enslaved person who helped them locate him. An enslaved man took them up on their offer, and Forest Joe was captured and killed. Harriot adds that what is extraordinary about the militia that captured Forest Joe is that it was the very first example of a police assassination in America.

Supplement: “To Kill Whites”

This supplement covers the history of the enslaved men known to white people as Kook and Quamana. Bought by enslaver James Brown in 1806 and brought to New Orleans, the two enslaved men befriended a Black enslaved supervisor named Charles Deslondes on a neighboring plantation. Deslondes, Kook, and Quamana together plotted a revolt that would change New Orleans forever. They recruited local leaders from enslaved populations at surrounding plantations, building up a network of allies. In 1811, Deslondes attacked his enslaver, Colonel Andry. Andry escaped, but the enslaved rebels raided his weapons locker, distributing muskets among the rebels. Other enslaved people quickly joined the revolution, bringing horses and guns. Andry, however, escaped across the Mississippi and recruited other enslavers to form a makeshift militia. Using this rebellion as an example, New Orleans successfully lobbied for statehood, arguing that without the backing of the federal military, revolts by enslaved people would only continue. The rebellion led enslavers to take their militia duties more seriously, turning New Orleans into a viable military threat.

Chapter 5 Unit Review

The quiz covers the “most resistant” category of enslaved persons, the worst part of being enslaved, and the uniqueness of America’s form of slavery. The activity asks the reader to create a “humane” system of slavery that would not cause enslaved people to resist or run away. It asks the reader to describe this system in a million words or less.

Chapter 6 covers the Black American experience with religion. Harriot defines the Black American tradition of Christianity as a combination of “Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, and African traditions.” African American enslaved people are traditionally believed to have been converted to Christianity by their white enslavers (132). In reality, however, Christianity and other traditions morphed to accommodate the Black American experience, getting imbued with the precepts of survival and resistance in the process.

Christianity, in the beginning, was a major factor in philosophically justifying the human trafficking industry of the 1600s. The Jamestown colony was a moneymaking scheme, but it was disguised as a religious endeavor. At that time, however, it was expressly illegal to enslave a fellow Christian in Massachusetts, so the white Christians were reluctant to share their faith with enslaved people. In 1667, Virginia declared that converting an enslaved person to Christianity did not free them, so enslavers then made Christianity mandatory. White Christians released a heavily edited version of the Bible that omitted parts that might incite a desire for freedom. This left only a small percentage of the Old Testament and less than half of the New. After the Revolutionary War, the Black church became a “wholly new creation” (138), with Baptist churches founded by Black British loyalists who, though ultimately denied freedom, still held it as a goal for their Black communities. Black churches did not only function as places of worship, but also as gathering places for self-emancipated people, Black immigrants, and free Black Americans to find work and build community.

In 1787, before the First Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, two Black preachers founded the city’s first Black religious organization, called the Free African Society (FAS). Aided by abolitionists, the FAS focused on providing medical care, education, and wealth-building resources to free Africans. Harriot notes that white people in Pennsylvania felt threatened by the FAS, particularly in light of their emphasis on education. With financial support from Quakers, who had recently converted to abolitionism, the FAS ran 10 private schools for Black people, eventually starting many historically Black colleges that still exist today.

Meanwhile, in the South, the Black church played an enormous role in education and resistance movements among the enslaved population. Churches operated as shelters for the Underground Railroad. In response, white enslavers banned meetings between free or enslaved Black people, especially to teach reading or writing. Literate Black preachers, however, were often overlooked as vectors for resistance and could travel relatively freely among enslaved people to spread the Gospel. Du Bois estimated that about 10% of the enslaved population secretly learned to read after the Revolutionary War.

Literacy amongst enslaved people threatened the enslavers for two reasons: It allowed enslaved people to communicate with one another more effectively, and it allowed them to forge freedom papers for themselves. Enslaved people used both methods to escape to free states. Literacy also empowered Black Americans to publish and circulate pamphlets decrying slavery and challenging the assumption that white people were intellectually superior by nature. In order to combat enslaved people’s newfound ability to organize and protest, the federal government pacified the enslaving states by establishing the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. This act required all Americans to help enslavers catch runaways, making the act of sheltering a runaway, even in a free state, illegal. This act did not stop abolitionists, both white and Black, from finding ways to spirit runaways away from their enslavers. Black churches not only helped to shelter and relocate escapees, but they also served as centers for revolution.

Although the Black church was not a physical place, it functioned as a protection for its members, a “school with no address and a meeting place with no location” (148). Though a medieval church was considered a sanctuary, the Black American church is referred to, instead, as “the sanctuary” (emphasis Harriot’s).

Food Stop: “The Top-Secret Recipe to Aunt Phyllis’s Fried Chicken”

This supplement details the specific recipe for South Carolinian West African fried chicken. This recipe involves seasoning chicken by shaking it in a plastic grocery bag with flour and spices while considering the chickens that enslaved people raised themselves, chickens they stole from their enslavers, and the parts of the chicken, like gizzards and feet, that enslaved people ate in order to survive.

Chapter 6 Unit Review

Chapter 6’s quiz concerns the location of the first Black church in America, the difference between “Black religion” and mainstream Christianity, and the purpose of Negro spirituals. The activity directs the reader to rate the Blackness of their church by assigning points based on a list of attributes of Black churches as opposed to white Christianity.

Supplement 1: “Onesimus Saves the World”

This supplement covers Cotton Mather, the Puritan Boston preacher, and his enslaved captive Onesimus. In 1706, smallpox ravaged all the colonies. Onesimus informed Mather that he had been inoculated against smallpox in Constantinople. Mather, at first skeptical, later found evidence from a white European philosopher that Muslims in Constantinople had used pus from smallpox sores to inoculate people against the virus. Mather used Onesimus’s method of inoculation on 280 people in Boston. In 1721, when smallpox came back, only six of the inoculated Bostonians died. Massachusetts became the first state to promote public vaccination. Onesimus asked to purchase his freedom from Mather in return for saving hundreds of people, but Mather refused to release him since Onesimus would not convert to Christianity.