Authors: Daniel Rasmussen
But Aptheker was more than an organizer; he was also an avid writer who, in 1943, published a book that would turn the scholarship of Gayarré, Phillips, and Kendall upside down. His book,
American Negro Slave Revolts
, with a title that consciously imitated Phillips’s, forever shattered the myth of the contented slave and forced a reevaluation of the nature of slave revolts. In his introduction, Aptheker attacked Phillips, laying down the gauntlet between Communists and white supremacists. “Ulrich B. Phillips, who is generally considered the outstanding authority on the institution of American Negro slavery, expressed it as his opinion that ‘slave revolts and plots very seldom occurred in the United States,’ ” wrote Aptheker. “This conclusion coincided with, indeed, was necessary for the maintenance of, Professor Phillips’s racialistic notions that led him to describe the Negro as suffering from ‘inherited ineptitude,’ and as being stupid, negligent, docile, inconstant, dilatory, and ‘by racial quality submissive.’ ” It was a bold move for a twenty-eight-year-old newly minted PhD to attack so openly the established leader in his field, a much-lauded Yale professor, but Aptheker did not refrain from labeling Phillips a racist. However, he devoted little time or attention to the German Coast. Aptheker devoted a short paragraph to the 1811 uprising, describing its size and location, but offered no more details than Phillips. Aptheker’s grand political and historical agenda overshadowed the details and the individuals involved.
Tossed from white supremacists to Marxist activists, the actual history of the 1811 uprising fell by the wayside among ideological battles over race and politics. More than fifty years since Aptheker’s book was published, the number of historians who have seriously examined the uprising can be counted on one hand. With the notable exception of Hamilton professor Robert Paquette and a few others, most have shied away from attempting to decipher or interpret this complex event—preferring instead to rely on the earlier biased accounts from writers with clear white supremacist or Marxist ideologies. With little attention from scholars, North America’s largest antebellum slave revolt has languished in the footnotes of history for 200 years. While historians jostled to write about Nat Turner, who had mobilized fewer than 100 slaves, this diverse band of Louisiana slaves has been remembered only by a few.
But despite its absence from textbooks, the story of the 1811 uprising is central to the history of this country. This is a story about American expansion and the foundations of American authority. Most important, however, this is the story of a revolution organized by enslaved men. These men saw violence as the means to ends they never realized. But their failure to achieve those goals does not mean they did not have goals, or that the sum total of this story was that of the quick and violent suppression of a horde of brigands. Rather, 200 years later, historians must reckon with the politics of the enslaved, with the world the slaves made, and with the humanity of those who fought against slave power. Only through understanding their stories can we begin to comprehend the true history of Louisiana, and with it, the nation.
I
n the summer of 1957, things were heating up in the small town of Monroe, North Carolina. The problem was simple: the only pool in the area was barred to blacks, and several black children had drowned swimming in unsafe swimming holes. The president of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a man named Robert F. Williams, decided that the best solution would be for the pool to desegregate in accordance with the recent
Brown v. Board of Education
Supreme Court decision.
Williams’s wife, Mabel, thought the plan was preposterous. “White folks don’t want you to sit beside them on the bus, Rob,” she said. “You really think they’re gonna let you jump in the water with them half-naked?”
Williams insisted that he was going to try. He showed up at the entrance to the pool with a group of eight black children with bathing suits and towels. Turned away, they returned the next day, and the day after, standing outside the gates in protest of an injustice both humiliating and life-threatening to the area’s black children.
But most white residents of Monroe did not see the situation the same way. With the recent closing of a textile mill and a growing backlash against the racial progress brought about by World War II, the Ku Klux Klan had made a powerful resurgence in the area. The evangelist and Klan leader James “Catfish” Cole barnstormed through the Carolina piedmont, inciting thousands of white supremacists to a series of rallies, cross burnings, and even dynamite attacks on black activists. Cole saw the pool protests as a perfect platform for his message.
Rallying the Klan on Highway 74 outside Monroe, Cole told 2,000 of his followers, “a nigger who wants to go to a white swimming pool is not looking for a bath. He is looking for a funeral.” After burning crosses, the Klan began a series of raids on the black neighborhoods of Monroe. They drove their cars, horns blaring, through the neighborhood, throwing bottles and firing pistols in the air. Cole and his henchmen didn’t expect what happened next.
Robert Williams, member of the NAACP and the National Rifle Association, strapped a pistol to his belt and took a stand. Along with a group of other military veterans, Williams dug foxholes and built a rifle range in his neighborhood. “We got our own M-1’s and got our own Mausers and German semi-automatic rifles, and steel helmets. We had everything,” he later recalled. The female members of the NAACP set up an emergency phone tree, and Williams and his men prepared for battle.
On October 5, 1957, Cole held a huge rally in Monroe. As the rally finished, the Klansmen leapt into their cars, shotguns in hand, ready to have a little fun in the black neighborhood. But as they drove along familiar roads, they saw an unusual site. Behind sandbag fortifications and earth entrenchments, Williams and his men kneeled with guns pointing outward. As the Klan neared, the black citizens let loose a volley of bullets.
What happened next was best described by one of the men behind the entrenchments that night. “When we started firing, they run. [The Klan] hauled it and never did come back.” Williams humiliated the Klan—and sent a powerful message to the white community of Monroe. Taken aback by this new turn of events, the largely white city council held an emergency session and passed legislation banning KKK motorcades. Williams and his men had won their first great victory.
So who was this man who dared to face down the Klan—and won? Six feet tall and 200 pounds, Williams was a military veteran, poet, radical activist, president of the local chapter of the NAACP, member of the NRA, and a college-educated member of the black middle class.
But more than anything else, Williams was a man who was not about to take the injustices of Jim Crow meekly. In an instantly infamous speech in 1959, Williams told a nervous nation just how he felt—and just how he planned to respond to lynchings and other racially motivated violence.
“We get no justice under the present system. If we feel that injustice is done, we must right then and there on the spot be prepared to inflict punishment on these people,” he said after a white jury decided after a forty-five-minute deliberation to acquit a man who had attempted to rape a pregnant black woman in the presence of her five children. “Since the federal government will not bring a halt to lynching in the South and since the so-called courts lynch our people legally, if it’s necessary to stop lynching with lynching, then we must be willing to resort to that method.”
Williams’s words set off an international firestorm, as newspapers around the world looked to the young leader of the Monroe NAACP as an omen of a new age of black militancy. And while his words were greeted with applause and support from many across the country—including Malcolm X—they also set Williams on a collision course with the mainstream civil rights movement, which was pushing nonviolence and attempting to win over white moderates.
In 1961, the two strategies came into sharp relief in a heated exchange between Williams and Martin Luther King Jr.
Seven blacks and six whites set out to ride buses from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans to test the Supreme Court’s recent decision prohibiting segregation by interstate travel operators. As they stopped in Alabama for gas, a white mob attacked, slashing the tires on the bus. The bus driver attempted to drive away, but a pack of fifty cars operated by Klansmen pursued the bus to a stop. There, on the side of the road, a white mob beat the nonviolent protesters to a pulp, only stopping when the Alabama National Guard showed up and fired warning shots in the air.
Martin Luther King Jr., the national spokesman for nonviolence in the civil rights movement, flew down to speak. When he arrived, students begged him to join the rides, to risk personal injury to show the nation just how bad racial problems were in the American South. King declined.
And Williams spoke out. “No sincere leader asks his followers to make sacrifices that he himself would not make. You are a phony,” he wrote in a telegram to King. “If you are the leader of this nonviolent movement, lead the way by example.”
* * *
Today, students across the country learn to recite speeches by Martin Luther King Jr. They learn about nonviolence and peaceful resistance. And they learn how white people and black people joined hands to end Jim Crow and bring about a new era of racial equality. They don’t learn about Robert Williams.
For while Williams’s armed self-defense movement—and Black Power generally—contributed greatly toward the struggle for civil rights, he was also a radical who lived for many years in exile in Cuba. He was hunted down by the FBI, jailed, harassed, and cast out by his own country.
While King’s approach toward civil rights embraced American ideals and appealed to the nation’s best self, Williams’s approach caustically pointed out the hypocrisies, evils, and injustices of the nation—often through alliances with America’s enemies in the cold war.
After the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban foreign minister read a telegram from Williams addressed to the American delegate to the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson. “Now that the United States has proclaimed support for people willing to rebel against oppression, oppressed Negroes of the South urgently request tanks, artillery, bombs, money and the use of American airfields and white mercenaries to crush the racist tyrants who have betrayed the American Revolution and the Civil War. We also request prayers for this undertaking.” Suffice it to say, America’s political establishment did not look fondly on such interventions into cold war policy.
Yet while Williams and King promoted vastly different strategies, their goals were the same: equal rights and African American freedom. Even 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, the United States still sanctioned and promoted racial inequality, and turned a blind eye toward the ways in which violence was used to enforce that inequality. Between 1882 and 1965, white Southerners lynched close to 4,000 African Americans—and the American government did little, if anything, to prevent this violent enforcement of Jim Crow rule.
Robert F. Williams, like Kook and Quamana, like Charles Deslondes, took up arms against the United States of America in the name of freedom. They fought against U.S. government agents, they supported the overthrow of legally sanctioned racism, and they were exiled or executed for their actions.
Through slave revolts, armed political organizations like the Union League or Marcus Garvey’s Universal African Legion, and through the Black Power movement of the post–World War II era, black Americans have had to fight every step of the way for their civil rights—from the right to eat in the same restaurant as whites to their right to not be sold into slavery.
Coming to terms with American history means addressing the 1811 uprising and the story of Robert F. Williams—not brushing these events under the rug because they upset safe understandings about who we are as a nation.
Their stories provide a different insight into history. These were men who stood for what they believed in and were willing to die for those beliefs. While today we see their beliefs as righteous, in their own time they were despised, exiled, even beheaded. These were people on the outside of traditional history—and the outside of the cultures they lived in. But their outsider status does not make them any less significant. Rather, their actions stand as a testament to the strength of the ideals of freedom and equality.
T
his book began as my senior thesis, and my first debt is to the teachers and professors who guided me on my academic career. Sam Schaffer first introduced me to Southern history. Walter Johnson honed my analytical and theoretical skills. Vincent Brown helped me put the South in proper context. Tim McCarthy helped me tone down my polemical tendencies and find my voice. Drew Faust taught me everything I know about the Civil War—and a lot about the historian’s craft. Dan Wewers applied a careful and skeptical eye to my writing. John Stauffer inspired me, encouraged me, and supported me at every turn, reading draft upon draft of first my thesis and then this book. I relied heavily on the trailblazing research of Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Robert Paquette, Albert Thrasher, and Leon Waters. But my greatest thanks go to Susan O’Donovan. In no small part, she taught me how to think and write about slavery and American history. More than that, she has been a caring and dedicated mentor and friend.
My freshman year, I was lucky enough to take a seminar from one of Harvard’s most brilliant and devoted professors, Philip Fisher. He gave me crucial encouragement and advice, and he was the first to suggest that my thesis could become a book. I will always owe Joe Flood for seeing the seeds of this book in my thesis and for introducing me to my agent, Larry Weissman. Larry has been a committed advocate, a patient advisor, and a sage guide through a complex process. Larry connected me with Tim Duggan at Harper. Tim is a phenomenal editor, and he has helped this book realize its full potential. Allison Lorentzen and the rest of the team at Harper have been a pleasure to work with. Philip Hodges took an afternoon to help me with the author photo.
I would also like to thank my friends. Working with Diana Kimball in our Southern history colloquium with Professor O’Donovan was provocative, exciting, and above all fun. Vince Eckert, Mark Pacult, and Simon Williams all edited drafts of the book and gave me insightful criticism. Lewis Bollard and Sam Kenary have provided ample proof of Saint Paul’s admonition to the Corinthians: as iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another. They both put up with three years of listening to me talk about this book, and their advice, support, and friendship have had a tremendous impact both on my writing and on me.
In addition, I want to thank Davis Kennedy, David Michaelis, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Brian Chingono, Glenda Gilmore, Charlie Young, Evan Thomas, Frank DeSimone, Emmet McDermott, Eric Foner, Nicki Bass, Adam Rothman, Amar Bakshi, Rebecca Scott, Mac Bartels, Peter Trombetta, Jeffrey Thornton, and Balmore Toro, all of whom helped shape this book in one way or another.
Finally, I would like to thank my family. Uncle Bill and Aunt Isabelle hosted me at their home in Little Compton when I was writing my thesis. I wrote this book with Rob, Lisa, and Tom in mind: if they enjoy reading this book, I know I will have succeeded. Willy has been an inspiration to me since I was little. He encouraged me to take up journalism, coached my writing, advised me at Harvard, and has edited probably five drafts of this book. Dad, similarly, has been a constant editor and advisor and I could not have done this without his help and formidable insight. I will always be grateful to my mom for sharing her love of reading with me, and, more important, for always believing in me. I hope that this book reflects well the contributions of all of these brilliant and generous professors, friends, and family members.