Question for Ibram X. Kendi & Keisha N. Blain
What about Black centrality in forcing emancipation?
Posted from near Point Comfort, Virginia, October 18, 2023. 1275 words.
When New York Times Magazine deployed the 1619 Project to the history wars in 2019, the blurb on the cover began, “In August of 1619, a ship appeared … near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the British colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists.” The blurb celebrated “the four hundredth anniversary of this fateful moment.”
Soon, so did the anthology Four Hundred Souls, with essays, articles, and poems by 90 Black authors including coeditors Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain. The book’s subtitle is A Community History of African America, 1619-2019. In mid-February 2021, the New York Times listed it as the No. 1 nonfiction best seller.
Both history efforts address national memory of slavery—the 1619 Project directly, the book extensively. Leaving aside old controversies about the project and the current controversy about Professor Kendi—noted below in a caption—both taught me a lot.
But both almost entirely ignore freedom-striving Black self-agency’s centrality in emancipation—the centrality that the slavery historian Ira Berlin emphasized in The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States. Like other historians, he placed Black Americans “at the center of the movement for universal freedom.”
Four Hundred Souls coeditor Ibram X. Kendi, a MacArthur fellow, leads Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research. His leadership is being criticized. His widely adopted antiracism ideas were already controversial. This Self-Emancipator posting addresses none of that.
Professor Kendi also cofounded a new incarnation of the antebellum abolitionist publication The Emancipator. It seeks to “reframe the national conversation on racial equity and hasten a more racially just society.” The Self-Emancipator presses a reframing too. It monitors and advocates national memory’s unfolding awareness of freedom-striving Black self-agency’s centrality in emancipation’s evolution. As awareness grows about the hundreds of thousands of Civil War slavery escapees some call self-emancipators, so will appreciation by all sides in the history wars.
More about the 1619 Project in a future posting, but at least it got Africans’ arrival place right. It was Point Comfort—not Jamestown, as mistakenly implied by Four Hundred Souls in Professor Kendi’s Introduction and Professor Blain’s Conclusion.
The arrival place matters. Point Comfort lends gravity to this fundamental question: What about Black Americans’ emancipation leadership, oddly almost entirely ignored in this book that calls August 20, 1619, “the symbolic birthdate of African America”?
Point Comfort, known as Fort Monroe when the Civil War began a quarter-millennium after 1619, grounds that leadership’s story. On that sand spit guarding the lower Chesapeake, slavery both began in 1619 and began to crumble in 1861, as told in the Self-Emancipator posting “Rereading ‘How Slavery Really Ended in America.’”
Fort Monroe at Point Comfort, Virginia—for centuries, the Chesapeake Bay’s flat, commanding Gibraltar—contains the majestic, moated stone citadel that Civil War slavery escapees called Freedom’s Fortress. As the place where slavery both began and began to crumble, Point Comfort can claim preeminence among historic landscapes for national memory of emancipation. My 2022 History News Network essay calls for making it a national emancipation memorial.
It’s crucial to stipulate that except for the weird exclusion of emancipation’s story, Four Hundred Souls teems with appreciation of Black self-agency and Black freedom striving. Professor Blain’s Conclusion declares “with certainty” that her enslaved ancestors “wanted a life of freedom.” Another of the book’s writers invokes Exodus when explaining that “enslaved Africans nurtured the hope of emancipation, too.” Another tells of a white businessman who “could not help but notice enslaved people’s ‘continual aspiring after their forbidden Liberty.’”
Another recalls that during the Revolution, “the British expressly tapped into enslaved people’s ever-present pursuit of liberty.” Yet another calls Black resistance “one of the longest-running plotlines in African American history.”
The book’s essay “Maroons and marronage,” about slavery escapees living in long-term hiding, says “maroons’ autonomy shattered the racist view of Black people as incapable of taking care of themselves.” It defines “the essence of marronage” as “self-determination and freedom.” Another contribution observes that conspiracies among the enslaved showed that African Americans “would fight for their right to live and die as free people.” Still another says, “Since Black people first arrived in what would become the United States, freedom was without question their greatest desire.”
Yet the book’s 90 writers and poets almost completely ignore what enterprising slavery escapees Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend started in 1861, a few weeks after Fort Sumter. Henry Louis Gates Jr. has declared that by seeking sanctuary at Fort Monroe, the Union’s Point Comfort stronghold in Confederate Virginia, they “unofficially ignited the movement of slaves emancipating themselves with their feet,” elevating a war for union into a war for union and freedom.
To describe that mass movement, some historians use the term self-emancipation.* To describe the momentous May 1861 events at Fort Monroe, National Humanities Medal holder Edward L. Ayers once used the phrase “the greatest moment in American history.” Not just “a great,” but “the greatest.”
But three contributors to Four Hundred Souls apparently either disagree with Professor Gates or don’t even know about those enslaved Americans emancipating themselves with their feet, starting mere weeks after the war began in 1861. Pamela Newkirk’s essay declares that it was the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment that “commenced the journey to an uncertain freedom.” The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer says that the Emancipation Proclamation meant Frederick Douglass “would get his abolition war,” though by then Douglass already had it. Pulitzer-holder Isabel Wilkerson presents the Twentieth Century’s Great Migration as Black Americans’ “first mass act of independence.” It was second.
It’s crucial to stipulate one more thing. Unlike other Four Hundred Souls contributions, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie’s essay at least comes close to robustly celebrating the Civil War’s high-consequence, foot-propelled Black mass movement.**
Bouie’s essay opens by reporting that by August 1864, “nearly 400,000 enslaved people had escaped to Union lines” and “had won themselves freedom in the process.” But he never places those Black Americans where Berlin placed them: “at the center of the movement for universal freedom.” Bouie recognizes and celebrates the Union army’s 180,000 Black soldiers—an important dimension of the emancipation history that Four Hundred Souls strangely scants. But he omits the mass movement when he writes that “Black soldiers … turned a war for union into a war for emancipation.”
National public memory’s mysterious lacuna
Question: In a book subtitled A Community History of African America, 1619-2019, coedited by antiracism’s MacArthur fellow, how could 90 authors ignore freedom-striving Black self-agency’s centrality in emancipation? Even beyond this book, what explains the pervasiveness of that mysterious omission, that gigantic lacuna?
In this book, anyway, the surprising inattention couldn’t be intentional. Maybe it’s an inadvertent leftover from past systemic racism—structural racism not consciously perpetrated, but inherited unnoticed. Or maybe it’s just unfortunate peripheral blindness accompanying a necessarily intense antiracism focus?
In any case, not long ago the unawareness was much worse. In 2005, when the Army announced it would leave Fort Monroe in 2011, Virginia began planning overdevelopment that would cripple the historic spirit of place. My family connections to Fort Monroe were decades old. I began publishing op-eds from Norfolk to Richmond to Washington. Yet at some future point I’ll be doing a posting here, recalling how completely ignorant most of us in Virginia were, back then, about Point Comfort’s and Fort Monroe’s place in the histories of slavery and emancipation.
Over the years I’ve seen the mysterious gigantic lacuna almost everywhere—not just in the history wars, but throughout discussions of national memory generally.
It’s why I finally started this Substack. More to come on the subject of this mystery.
Indeed, freedom is not something that can be conferred, but can only be seized.