The Big Isms

How One Man's Story Offers a New Way to Understand Slave Insurrection
by Vincent Brown
Wager, also known by his African name, Apongo, was a leader of the largest slave rebellion in the 18th century British Empire. But long before taking his part in the great Jamaican insurrection of 1760– 1761, commonly called Tacky’s Revolt, he had been on a remarkable odyssey.
Apongo had been a military leader in West Africa during a period of imperial expansion and intensive warfare there. During this time, he had even been a notable guest of John Cope, a chief agent of Cape Coast Castle, Britain’s principal fort on the Gold Coast. Captured and sold at some point in the 1740s, Apongo became the property of Captain Arthur Forrest of HMS Wager, who renamed him for the Royal Navy warship. Wager came in bondage to Forrest’s plantation in Westmoreland Parish, Jamaica, where he again encountered John Cope, who had retired to his own Jamaican estate. Occasionally, Cope would entertain his…

It was high noon on Easter 1873 when the white mob came riding into Colfax.
Five months earlier, Louisiana had held its second election since the end of the Civil War and the beginning of Black male suffrage. But some whites had refused to recognize the result, and former Confederate soldiers had committed acts of racial violence across the state.
When a former slave was fatally shot near Colfax, around 150 Black men holed up inside the river town’s courthouse to wait for federal troops.
Instead, they were met by the mob.“Boys, this is a struggle for white supremacy,” one Ku Klux Klan leader told the mob, according to Charles Lane’s “The Day Freedom Died.”
Armed with superior weaponry — including a small cannon — the mob set the courthouse on fire and shot anyone who emerged. When some Blacks tried to surrender by waving handkerchiefs, they were mowed down and their remains were desecrated. 
Anywhere from 62 to 81 African Americans were killed, according to Lane, a Washington Post editoria…

The Long War Against Slavery
Casey Cep, January 27, 2020, The New Yorker

Casey Cep reviews Vincent Brown's Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War

“Here’s to the next insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies,” Samuel Johnson once toasted at an Oxford dinner party, or so James Boswell claims. The veracity of Boswell’s biography—including its representation of Johnson’s position on slavery—has long been contested. In the course of more than a thousand pages, little mention is made of Johnson’s long-term servant, Francis Barber, who came into the writer’s house as a child after being taken to London from the Jamaican sugar plantation where he was born into slavery. Some of the surviving pages of Johnson’s notes for his famous dictionary have Barber’s handwriting on the back; there are scraps on which a twelve-year-old Barber practiced his own name while learning to write. Thirty years later, Johnson died and left Barber a sizable inheritance. But Boswell …

This is a real big issue here in the US. The dumbing down of history has always been an issue.

Nowhere in the United States is a museum controversy so heated as at New York City’s venerable American Museum of Natural History. Its 5 million annual visitors have included, for four years now, hundreds of demonstrators who have trooped through the museum on an Anti–Columbus Day Tour. They chant, drum, dance, and unfurl banners: rename the day. respect the ancestors. decolonize! reclaim! imagine! They deliver speeches demanding changes, a few of which the museum is slowly making.
The battles to decolonize museums.
Elsewhere in the United States, the Museum of Man, in San Diego, recently hired a Navajo educator as its “director of decolonization” and announced that it would no longer display human remains without tribal consent.
Many of the signs on exhibits are now apologetic. Colonialism “remains a very controversial period,” one says gingerly.LINK

A new report is proposing sweeping changes in the way Maine’s tribes interact with state government. The findings come from a task force charged with reviewing the landmark 1980 Indian land claims act.
The nearly 300-page report details conflicts that have arisen over competing interpretations of the settlement act. It also lays out how the act has resulted in Maine tribes being treated differently than most of the nation’s native Americans, with limited powers of self determination.
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The exhibition Making Mammy: A Caricature of Black Womanhood, 1840–1940 at the California African American Museum (CAAM) looks at this phenomenon through films, photographs, and articles of material culture, showing just how widespread and insidious this manufactured caricature became. In conjunction with the exhibition, assistant curator Taylor Bythewood-Porter and African-American memorabilia collector Gail Deculus-Johnson will host a discussion on collecting Black Americana. The pair will talk about the value of these important, but difficult pieces of American history, as well as address the ethical questions that accompany collecting them.

READ: Learn About the History and Value of Black Americana Collectibles

1619?
Sasha Turner , January 14, 2020, Black Perspectives



We are living in a “memory boom” he says. From Charleston to New York, the national mall and university halls, on land and at sea, we’ve been busy. Taking down and putting up. And taking down and putting up. Again. Monuments and memorials. Remember they say. Remember. The accomplishments, the foundings, the triumphs (abolition not slavery). Remember they say. Remember. The founding fathers (neverfounding mothers). But whose memory? “They ask me to remember
But they want me to remember their memories
And I keep on remembering
Mine” Remember we say. Remember. The genocides. The wars. The crimes against humanity. Remember we say. “You stole us. You sold us. You owe us.” Remember we say. Remember. What do I remember about 1619? “I remember on the slave ship how they brutalize the very soul.”
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'A Doubtful Freedom’
David W. Blight, January 16, 2020, The New York Review



David Blight reviews The War Before the War: Fugitive Sl…