Enslavers welcomed ministers preaching the gospel of eternal Black enslavement, derived from the fraught reading of the Bible where all Black people were the cursed descendants of Ham. A fifty-one-year-old free Black carpenter had to first teach away these racist ideas in 1818 as he began recruiting thousands of enslaved Black people around Charleston, South Carolina, to join his freedom revolt. Denmark Vesey set the date of the revolt for July 14, 1822, the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille during the French Revolution. The aim of the revolt was to take down slavery, as in the
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