Perspective: The danger of denying black Americans political rights
Huey P. Newton, Black Panther party minister of defense, raises his arm as he is surrounded by newsmen and others at Philadelphia’s International Airport on Sept. 4, 1970. By Kellie Carter Jackson Kellie Carter Jackson is an assistant professor in the department of Africana studies at Wellesley College and author of"Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence." March 26 at 6:00 AM Today, the Second Amendment has become synonymous with the NRA and white men.
During the antebellum period, many black abolitionists believed violence was required to overthrow slavery. Black abolitionist and physician James McCune Smith remarked, “Our white brethren cannot understand us unless we speak to them in their own language; they recognize only the philosophy of force.” The philosophy of force guided their principles all the way to the Civil War. In fact, black resistance, and in particular violent resistance, was central to emancipation.
Human bondage is warfare, and dismantling this system required war against it. That war took the form of threats, beatings, mob attacks and even murder. In 1861, former slave John Anderson gave a speech before an abolitionist audience in Canada. He spoke about being pursued by a slave catcher as he escaped bondage. Anderson had warned the slave catcher that if he continued to follow him, Anderson would kill him. The man would not relent and so Anderson made good on his word.
Black abolitionist Joshua Easton presciently declared that “abolitionists may attack slaveholding, but there is a danger still that the spirit of slavery will survive, in the form of prejudice, after the system is overturned.” Easton claimed that “our warfare ought not to be against slavery alone, but against the spirit which makes color a mark of degradation.” Unlike white abolitionists or most Northerners, black abolitionists were committed to the two-fold mission of emancipation and equality.
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