EPISODE #11: September 11, 1851: Black Folk Unite and Fight Off Slavehunters. Why Don't We Learn about Our Collective Resistance to Oppression?

On September 11, 1851, in Christiana, Pennsylvania (u.s. a.), a mutual defense network of Black abolitionists led by William Parker confronted a posse of u.s. marshals and slave catchers pursuing 4 Black men who escaped from the plantation of Maryland slaveholder Edward Gorsuch. After surrounding and repelling the marshals, they killed the slaveholder Gorsuch, wounded his son, and helped the 4 escapees flee to a community of free Black people in Canada. DID YOU LEARN ABOUT THIS IN SCHOOL?

Today's episode of the AllThoughtIsBlackThought podcast is a tribute to these little-known Black freedom fighters. Click HERE to listen!

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William Parker was a 29-year-old Black man who had escaped slavery in Maryland. He was a leader in a Black mutual defense and resistance network in southern Pennsylvania.

"[We] had formed an organization for mutual protection against slaveholders and kidnappers," Parker told the Atlantic Monthly in 1866, "and had resolved to prevent any of our brethren being taken back into slavery, at the risk of our own lives…Whether the kidnappers were clothed in legal authority or not, I did not care to inquire, as I never had faith nor respect for the Fugitive Slave Law."

The law that Parker was talking about had been passed in 1850. It was written by slaveholders in Congress. It deputized all white people as slavehunters of all Black people anywhere in the u.s.a. Even if the Black people were legally free, the law basically allowed white people to easily get away with kidnapping and selling us into slavery in the south before our loved ones even knew we were missing. Some local white people in border states like Pennsylvania even pretended to befriend escapees, gaining information that they would turn around and sell to slavehunters, allowing their Black "friends" to be returned to slavery.

Realizing the law was not protecting us, Black people (and some white people) organized to defend ourselves. Members of Parker's network stood ready to fight off kidnappers at all times and with any tools or weapons they had if a community member needed help. The network did not work alone. They worked with a network of spies headed by Black abolitionist William Still who tracked the movements of slave kidnappers and helped escapees safely reach freedom in Canada.

Parker recounted an incident when his network learned that a group of slavehunters had kidnapped a young Black woman:

"[A Black man] sounded the alarm, that 'the kidnappers were at Whitson's, and were taking away his girl.' The news soon reached me, and with six or seven others, I followed them. We proceeded with all speed to a place called the Gap-Hill, where we overtook them, and took the girl away. Then we beat the kidnappers, and let them go. We learned afterwards that they were all wounded badly, and that two of them died in Lancaster, and the other did not get home for some time. Only one of our men was hurt, and he had only a slight injury in the hand.”

In 1849, four Black men escaped from Maryland slaveholder Edward Gorsuch's plantation and made it to Parker's safehouse in Christiana, Pennsylvania. In 1851, Gorsuch paid a white informant who claimed to have knowledge of the escaped men's whereabouts and led Gorsuch and a posse of u.s. marshals and slavehunters to Parker’s house. They arrived at dawn on September 11.

A Black member of William Till’s spy network, Samuel Williams, had followed the slavehunter posse for days. He informed William Parker and his wife, Eliza, that the kidnappers were coming. When Gorsuch arrived, Eliza Parker blew a horn to alert the Black self-defense network to come together. The kidnappers shot at her but missed.

The kidnappers tried quoting law and biblical scripture to get the men to surrender themselves, all to no avail. They almost succeeded when one of the escaped men (Alexander Pinckney) got shook and offered to surrender. Eliza grabbed her corn knife and threatened to cut his throat if he tried. (Several of Eliza's close relatives living nearby were escapees, too, and she knew she had too much "skin in the game" to go out without a fight.)

Gorsuch, the slaveholder, tried to convince the men that he would not punish them if they surrendered. The Parkers pretended to consider his offer, delaying the kidnappers until the members of the self-defense network had them surrounded.

At that point, the u.s. marshals gave up and began to run away. They advised Gorsuch to do the same, but the slaveholder persisted: "My property I will have, or I'll breakfast in hell."

The escapees and the mutual defense network obliged him: They beat and shot him to death. They also severely injured his son with shotgun blast in his side.

William Parker and the 4 men escaped to Canada by the time the marshals returned in force. Frederick Douglass assisted the escape, and even gave William Parker the pistol Gorsuch drew during the fight. Eliza Parker and the children later joined William in Canada.

Oh, and remember Alexander Pinckney, the escapee who had tried to surrender? He went on to join the famous the Massachusetts 54th regiment, fighting against slavery in the u.s. civil war.

DID YOU EVER LEARN ABOUT THIS IN SCHOOL? IF NOT, WHY NOT? WHAT DO YOU THINK IT WILL TAKE FOR REAL-LIFE STORIES OF BLACK RESISTANCE TO BE TAUGHT? AND WHAT ARE WE DOING TO CREATE NEW REAL-LIFE STORIES OF RESISTANCE TO OPPRESSION TODAY?

SOURCES:

Thomas P. Slaughter, Bloody Dawn: The Christiana Riot and Racial Violence in the Antebellum North (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)

William Parker, "The Freedman’s Story"
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1866/02/the-freedmans-story/308737/

John Anderson, "The Christiana Riot of 1851"
https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/christiana-riot-1851/

New Podcast Episode: Black August: Why Understanding George Jackson Is Essential to Our Survival Today

 

Episode #10: Black August: Why Understanding George Jackson Is Essential to Our Survival Today

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE

Revolutionary prison abolition activist George Lester Jackson (1941-1971) is central to why many Black people commemorate Black August. In this special episode, G talks about his work studying this great Black freedom fighter. The brothers discuss how the movement Jackson sparked behind bars faced conditions similar to those that Black people (and others) face today. Whether we're incarcerated or not, Jackson's books, Soledad Brother and Blood In My Eye, can teach us a lot about how our freedom struggle can survive and even grow under the harsh, repressive conditions of the present neo-fascist times.

https://anchor.fm/allthoughtisblackthought/episodes/Episode-10-Black-August-Why-Understanding-George-Jackson-Is-Essential-to-Our-Survival-Today-eivn3j/

Podcast Episode #7: Comparing Two Films: Django Unchained (2012) and 12 Years a Slave (2013) [PART 1 of 3]

In the first of 3 episodes, G & O begin a discussion of the films Django Unchained (2012) and 12 Years a Slave (2013). G explains how fantasies of freedom can be constructed by film, and that his first impression of Django focused on its potential to construct a fantasy of violent resistance to slavery that could be useful for Black liberation. "People's imagination is shaped," G explains. "It's not just that you imagine yourself as being free even if there's no representation of your freedom... Look at how long there's been a representation of Black people being unfree and that being normal." But O begins to ask whose fantasies filmmaker Quentin Tarantino really cares about and serves. 

PART 2 OF THE CONVERSATION IS HERE

PART 3 OF THE CONVERSATION IS HERE

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN

Podcast Episode #6: This Lynching Victim Shot Back: Honoring Robert Charles

Episode #6: This Lynching Victim Shot Back: Honoring Robert Charles

Today, July 27, 2020, makes 120 years since the valiant four-day shootout that a Black laborer named Robert Charles had with a police-led lynch mob in New Orleans. G & O recount Charles' story, which Ida B. Wells preserved, and its importance for Black freedom struggle today.

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST EPISODE HERE and read the Black Thought of the Day below.

This Lynching Victim Shot Back

Few people today remember the massacres of scores of Black people in New Orleans in the year 1900, but even fewer have even heard of the Black man whose bold and defiant actions those massacres were in response to. Robert Charles, a Black man who worked as a laborer, a Black man who sold newspapers to help promote the cause of Black people escaping amerikkka and returning to Afrika, a Black man who believed Black people had a right to defend ourselves against the violence of both the state and civil society, a Black man who, in the end, took up arms in resistance to police abuse and the terror of white lynch mobs. The white people in and around New Orleans would have found an excuse— any excuse— to lynch Black people and burn us out of the communities we work so hard to build. But when Robert Charles smoked 7 white people and wounded 20 more, he taught the police and the lynch mob that he was hard to kill— that, as G says, it’s gonna take some ass to get some ass— and they couldn’t stand to be taught a lesson in violence— their native tongue— by a mere Black man.

I don’t know about you, but i never learned about Robert Charles until a friend hipped me to him. He was not among the Black freedom fighters i heard about in school— an i’ve had a lot of schooling and done a lot of reading specifically in Black history and radical Black thought. Obviously, his exclusion from our history books is a deliberate attempt to police the thought of Black people who might otherwise be inspired to stand up for ourselves against structural antiblackness.

Ida B. Wells began to research and write about him within days of his death, and noted that he was viciously maligned by the newspapers.

The press of the country has united in declaring that Robert Charles was a desperado. As usual, when dealing with a negro, he is assumed to be guilty because he is charged. … Because they failed to find any legal evidence that Charles was a lawbreaker and desperado his accusers gave full license to their imagination and distorted the facts that they had obtained, in every way possible, to prove a course of criminality, which the records absolutely refuse to show.
Charles had his first encounter with the police Monday night, in which he was shot in the street duel which was begun by the police after Officer Mora had beaten Charles three or four times over the head with his billy in an attempt to make an illegal arrest. In defending himself against the combined attack of two officers with a billy and their guns upon him, Charles shot Officer Mora and escaped.
Early Tuesday morning Charles was traced to Dryades Street by officers who were instructed to kill him on sight. There, again defending himself, he shot and killed two officers. This, of course, in the eyes of the American press, made him a desperado. (Wells, Mob Rule in New Orleans, 1900, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14976/14976-h/14976-h.htm) 

Even legendary New Orleans jazz composer Jelly Roll Morton, also a contemporary of Robert Charles, said that a local folk song was written about Charles, but quickly silenced by New Orleans authorities, suppressing the memory of the man and punishing those who sang the song:

They had a song out on Robert Charles, like many other songs and like many other, er, bad men that always had some kind of a song and somebody originated it on ‘em. But this song was squashed very easily by the department. And not only by the department, by any of the surrounding people that ever heard the song. Due to the fact that it was a trouble breeder and it never did get very far. I used to know the song, but I found it was best for me to forget it. And that I did, in order to go along with the world on the peaceful side. (Morton, "Library of Congress Narrative" http://www.doctorjazz.co.uk/locspeech1.html)

In the land of free speech, in the land supposedly based on the idea that “all men are created equal” and that “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it,” — Black people are not included in “the People,” Black people have no free speech, and cannot be allowed to have even a memory of the violence it takes to fight for anything even resembling our equal rights.

It is similar to the way that, in these times, declaring that Black Lives Matter is said to be terroristic.

Oh, sure, in the brief moment, we see a few statues coming down of those who, like J. Marion Sims, experimented sadistically on Black women to found the modern field of gynecology, those who, like Christopher Columbus, slaughtered and tortured Indigenous people and trafficked little girls— we still hear the overwhelming rejoinder that these statues commemorating the oppressive and racist people who “made amerikkka great” should be remembered and allowed to be displayed prominently. Such people might say, “You can remember Robert Charles as long as i can remember Nathan Bedford Forrest.”

So for people who resisted lynching, memory might be allowed as long as the memory of the people who lynched is also preserved. Such false, moral equivalencies obscure what’s really going on. The powerful oppressors— who dot the land with memorials rationalizing their racist genocide and enslavement of people —know that statues and other memorials perform ideological labor. They make white people feel proud of those very things of which they should feel ashamed. They know that whiteness — which, again, is not a racial or genetic category but some made up BS — is enforced by genocide and slavery, and so it is imperative to tidy up the memory of genociders so that people will normalize the violence they have done and continue to do through subsequent generations. They know that these memorials do violence to Indigenous and Black people — more violence than we could ever return, for their violence shaped the realities we live in, the realities the modern world must endure. There is no equivalency between the oppressed who can barely hear the names of our freedom fighters spoken or sung about and the ones who slaughtered us who have their faces on 20 dollar bills.

It’s like Walter Rodney said: "By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master?" (Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers, 2019, London: Verso, p. 16).

white people are not fighting for their very lives. We, Black people, are fighting for our very lives. When everywhere we walk, we see statues of our oppressors towering overhead, while on the streets below we see people who look like us forced to sleep on concrete—or being strangled to death—remembering those who fought back against the racist structure is ideological insurgency and life breath to a people who can’t breathe.

Take it from the expert. In The Wretched of the Earth, Black freedom fighter, psychiatrist, and revolutionary theorist Frantz Fanon remarked on something he observed about the attitude that oppressed people in the middle of a struggle take toward those who get branded as “criminals” when they fight back against the police.

In order to maintain their stamina and their revolutionary capabilities, the people also resort to retelling certain episodes in the life of the community. The outlaw, for example, who holds the countryside for days against the police, hot on his trail, or who succumbs after killing four or five police officers in single- handed combat or who commits suicide rather than "give up" his accomplices, all constitute for the people role models, action schemas, and "heroes." And there is no point, obviously, in saying that such a hero is a thief, a thug, or a degenerate. [Fanon (Richard Philcox trans.), 2004, NY: Grove, p. 30]

In these coronavirus times, in these times of protests seeking justice for Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd — among countless others — it is very important that we maintain or develop our stamina and our revolutionary capabilities, as Fanon said, by re-telling the stories that many of us are just hearing for the first time. It is part of our healing. It is good news that isn’t even new— that is only new because we never knew that we have resisted our oppression at every stage.

Today is July 27, 2020. It has been 120 years since the valiant 4-day shootout that a Black laborer named Robert Charles had with a police-led lynch mob in New Orleans in the year 1900. Ida B. Wells fought to preserve the good memories of those who knew him in her book “Mob Rule in New Orleans”:

Men who knew him say that he was a law-abiding, quiet, industrious, peaceable man. So he lived.

So he lived and so he would have died had not he raised his hand to resent unprovoked assault and unlawful arrest that fateful Monday night. That made him an outlaw, and being a man of courage he decided to die with his face to the foe. The white people of this country may charge that he was a desperado, but to the people of his own race Robert Charles will always be regarded as the hero of New Orleans.

PODCAST EPISODE #5: Danger: Workers Idle

On today’s episode of the All Thought Is Black Thought podcast, brother G called brother O to see how he’s holding up in the out-of-work Covid times. The brothers talked about how so-called idle time carries unique anxieties for workers and holds up unique possibilities for organizing new possibilities.

CLICK HERE to listen

PODCAST EPISODE #4: Why Karens Keep Losing Their Minds: The Antiblack Fantasy

NEW ALL THOUGHT IS BLACK THOUGHT PODCAST EPISODE #4: Why Karens Keep Losing Their Minds: The Antiblack Fantasy

What does it mean when white people just irrupt against Black people and it's caught on video?

What would we have seen if 14-year-old Emmett Till had had a smartphone and Instagram to record his interaction with Carolyn Bryant, the woman who had him murdered?

Today, G & O discuss the videos of "karens" and "chads" losing their minds and policing Black and brown people's public appearances and behaviors when they ought to mind their own business. The "karen" and "chad" videos are little documentaries exposing the violent antiblack fantasies of individual people that reflect a broader collective antiblack fantasy. This fantasy shapes the antiblack social structure we live in, including things like the urban geography and disposal of environmental toxins. G & O also go into how the same structure of antiblack fantasies that created the modern world 500 years ago is still visible in the "karen" and *chad" videos.

Check out the new All Thought Is  Black Thought podcast Episode #4 (7-10-20) - Why Karens Keep Losing Their Minds: The Antiblack Fantasy

NEW ALL THOUGHT IS BLACK THOUGHT Podcast Episode #3: White People Are Smoking Crack: The Fantasy of July 4 from the Perspective of Black Thought

For July 4th, All Thought Is Black Thought podcast hosts G & O talk about the ways white people are still hitting the crackpipe of antiblackness in the fantasies they have about what life is like for Black folks. Because the power dynamic of slavery is still present in Black lives, Black people's knowledge of how slavery has continued to define  our lives can empower us to effect radical change. That's why, in a time when the lens of slavery is among the sanest ways to look at the contradictions of modern Black life, many forces are trying to suppress Black folks' acknowledgement of how slavery remains present in our lives. When it comes to Black thought, policing isn't just done by the "boys in blue," but by other parties-- including educators, colleagues, neighbors, friends, and karens-- who are unofficially deputized to police Black bodies and Black thought. 

Check out the latest episode HERE.