Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

by Michael Harriot

That story of America is a fantastical, overwrought, and fictive tale. It is a fantasy where Christopher Columbus discovered a land that he never set foot in. It is the story of the Pilgrims on the Mayflower building a new nation. It is George Washington’s cherry tree and Abraham Lincoln’s log cabin. It is the story of slaves who spontaneously teleported themselves here with nothing but strong backs and a brainful of negro spirituals. It is Betsy Ross’s sewing kit and Paul Revere’s horse and Thomas Jefferson’s pen and Benjamin Franklin’s eyeglasses and George Washington’s teeth and liberty and justice for all. And it is a history predicated on lies.

In this book, there is no America. In this book, the country we know as the United States is just a parcel of land that was stolen and repurposed as a settler state using European logic and the laws of white supremacy.

“Do not obtain your slaves from Britain,” wrote Roman consul Cicero. “Because they are so stupid and so utterly incapable of being taught that they are not fit to form part of the household of Athens.”

By the late sixteenth century, England and Spain were beefing over which version of Christianity was best when James I ascended to the throne of England in 1603. James, a Protestant, was intent on thwarting Catholic-aligned Spain’s global domination by getting in on the rapidly growing colonizing industry. In 1534, the English Parliament declared that the country had “no superior under God” other than the British king Henry VIII, who had split with the Catholic Church so he could marry his sidepiece.2 So, while the Catholic Church had served as an early investor for Spain, Portugal, and the other white empires, Britain didn’t have access to the church’s seed money. Without the colonizer’s version of Shark Tank, the arrogant members of the British elite did not fret. The other countries may have had a head start, but the English were not burdened by faith or religion. They were free to colonize in the name of a superior higher power: Cash Money.* When Queen Elizabeth I granted charters to colonize the North American territories “unclaimed by Christians,” the first four attempts failed. To be fair, the only reason they failed was because of disease, lack of food, lack of navigation skills, and the inability to convince the natives of English superiority. No one knows what happened to the fourth attempt, aptly named the Lost Colony of Roanoke. But the English kept trying. They truly believed they were going to find the Garden of Eden, with trees dripping diamonds and streams ...

In 1054, “the church” split into two factions (the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church), each controlling different parts of the European continent.

When explaining his rationale to the church, Prince Henry would argue that, technically, he wasn’t an “enslaver” because true Christians would never do that. Instead, he allowed Portuguese “missionaries” to “save” Africans by converting them to Christianity. The argument worked. By 1446, more than thirty Portuguese ships had filed applications with Prince Henry for people-stealing licenses. In 1455, Pope Nicholas V granted Henry a monopoly on the African human market—as long as they baptized their cargo.3

Three decades later, Gerardus Mercator’s influential map would name the North and South Continents after the charlatan Amerigo Vespucci. Even though he had done nothing, Vespucci’s name would be entrenched in history, making his namesake the perfect one for a country built on deception and lies.

By the early 1500s, the crown had profited dramatically from Columbus’s exploration. In 1503, Isabella created the Casa de Contratación—a trading corporation that was essentially the Spanish version of the Casa da Guiné. Isabella put Vespucci in charge of its maps, pilot training, and ship licensing in 1508. Spain was mining copper and gold and farming sugar in their new colonies in Hispaniola, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and throughout the Caribbean. The conquistadors forced the indigenous islanders into servitude and killed those who didn’t submit. But in 1512, Catholic priests convinced King Ferdinand to pass a set of regulations that officially forbade enslaving colonial natives. The Laws of Burgos originated from Catholic friars who disliked the inhumane treatment. The priests wrote damning letters and pleading sermons suggesting that the Spanish should convert the new Indians to Christianity instead of abusing them.

AFRICAN: People from the continent of Africa except for Egypt, Morocco, and any place that taught, conquered, or civilized a European country. Unlike their white counterparts, Africans are not separated into distinct cultural, geographical, or political groups unless they are from Egypt, Morocco, or a place that taught, conquered, or civilized.

CHRISTIAN: A follower of the European version of the teachings of Jesus Christ.

MOORS: Originally used to describe Africans who conquered parts of the Iberian Peninsula, later to mean anyone with dark skin, worshippers of Islam, or any group of Africans that was smarter than white people.

Calafia didn’t exist, but it’s worth noting that a Black man was on the mythical island of California nearly a century before the Mayflower left England.

In 1538, dead broke, with three kids to raise in Mexico, Garrido submitted his claim for a pension to the king of Spain, summarizing his credentials: I, Juan Garrido, Black resident of [Mexico City], appear before Your Mercy and state that I am in need of making a probanza to the perpetuity of the King, a report on how I served Your Majesty in the conquest and pacification of this New Spain, from the time when the Marqués del Valle [Cortés] entered it; and in his company I was present at all the invasions and conquests and pacifications which were carried out, always with the said Marqués, all of which I did at my own expense without being given either salary or allotment of natives or anything else. As I am married and a resident of this city, where I have always lived; and also as I went with the Marqués del Valle to discover the islands which are in that part of the southern sea [the Pacific] where there was much hunger and privation; and also as I went to discover and pacify the islands of San Juan de Buriquén de Puerto Rico; and also as I went on the pacification and conquest of the island of Cuba with the adelantado Diego Velázquez; in all these ways for thirty years have I served and continue to serve Your Majesty—for these reasons stated above do I petition Your Mercy. And also because I was the first to have the inspiration to sow wheat here in New Spain and to see if it took; I did this and experimented at my own expense.8 By the time Garrido died in 1550, other ...

Centuries after pharaohs, emperors, czars, sultans, khans, caliphs, and kings all took turns ruling the disparate, sometimes simultaneously existing regimes that historians then and now refer to as the “world-ruling empires,” a brand-new dynasty emerged, in South Carolina. Just as Rome, Egypt, Athens, or Carthage are considered by ancient historians as “world capitals,” for Black Americans, South Carolina stands as the capital of the known world. Understanding the history and legacy of Africans in America, and America itself, cannot begin with the tea-tossing frat boys of Boston or even the self-righteous constitution-writers of the North. America’s fortune, fame, and even its independence began in South Carolina.

Then, in 1662, Virginia’s legislature officially sealed the fate of its negro servants: WHEREAS some doubts have arrisen whether children got by any Englishman upon a negro woman should be slave or ffree, Be it therefore enacted and declared by this present grand assembly, that all children borne in this country shalbe held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother, And that if any christian shall committ ffornication with a negro man or woman, hee or shee soe offending shall pay double the ffines imposed by the former act.3 Unlike the poor English, Irish, and native indentured servants, the African imports and their children were now considered property.

By creating a legally binding, race-based, intergenerational, perpetually oppressed class of human beings, Virginia revealed that all that nonsense in the colony’s first charter about God, liberty, and the “true religion” was a farce.

From its inception, America was always a pyramid scheme where the wealthy benefited from the labor of the poor. And truly, there is only one term that befits Virginia’s codified system of racial peonage: white supremacy.

Locke enumerated the laws and rules for Carolina’s organizing document, including a clause that would come to forever be known as Article 110, which stated, “Every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves, of what opinion or religion soever.”

By 1776, South Carolina was the number one exporter of rice to England, the number one supplier of salted meat to the Caribbean, and had the highest per capita income in the British colonies.19 And the colony that had intended to recruit white people to grow citrus was now majority Black. In the five years before the American Revolution, South Carolina had imported more enslaved Africans than all the other ports in all the other American colonies combined.20 Over the life of America’s legalized transatlantic human trafficking system, 40 percent of this country’s human imports passed through Charleston Harbor, earning the South Carolina city the title of the “slave capital of the New World.”

On May 6, 1720, “the negroes in South Carolina” murdered plantation supervisor Benjamin Cattle along with an unnamed white woman.22 An armed rebellion occurred again in August 1730 when enslaved Africans armed themselves one Sunday morning and “conspired to destroy all the whites.”23 Three more took place on the South Carolina rice coast in 1739, the most famous of which occurred not far from where the Draytons’ son John had just purchased the first of more than a hundred properties with the intergenerational wealth built from African labor. South Carolina’s 1712 slave codes were based on the slave code of Barbados, which protected the enslaved from “the Cruelties and Insolences of themselves or other ill-tempered People or Owners.”

Researchers say Nzinga defied gender norms by deciding to “become a man.” Not only did she dress in traditional male attire, but she also required her stable of husbands to dress as women.

The murdered insurgents were decapitated and their heads affixed to posts entering the city—a practice that would become an American tradition.

The Stono Rebellion changed the face of slavery in the slave capital of the world and, by proxy, in America as a whole. As a result of it, whites temporarily paused the slave trade for a decade, blaming the violence on the fact that these rebels were born in Africa. In its wake, white entrepreneurs formed a new industry by creating American-born slaves. Masters encouraged reproduction among the slaves they already owned, while slave traders traveled the country buying human beings from estate sales, auctions, and indebted enslavers. When the transatlantic slave trade eventually reopened, they avoided the Congo-Angola region because, the geniuses concluded, it wasn’t the brutal idea of perpetual, intergenerational human bondage that had caused Jemmy and his friends to lash out. Apparently, it was geography.

The post-Stono legislation forbade slaves from growing their own food, earning money, learning to write, or gathering in groups of three or more. It prohibited Black males from traveling together in groups of seven or more without the presence of a white man. It also gave owners the right to kill any enslaved person who was rebellious, and went as far as to regulate which colors and fabrics an enslaved Black person could wear. It was a legal code of complete and total oppression. Because white people were the minority, South Carolina’s white population used cruelty as a tool to suppress their worst fears.

For most of human history, the term “race” didn’t exist. It emerged in the late sixteenth century to describe a type of thing, including a “race of wine,” or a “race of saints.” Before then, every culture on the planet had their own stratification. Europeans considered Asians to be “white.” Even when Enlightenment-era philosophers began categorizing species, they subdivided humans by geographic regions . . . Until white people needed slaves. That’s when, according to professor Gregory Jay, “Whiteness . . . emerged as what we now call a ‘pan-ethnic’ category, as a way of merging a variety of European ethnic populations into a single ‘race.’”

A year after ratification, the 1790 Naturalization Act further cemented the supremacy of whiteness by limiting American citizenship to any “free white person . . . of good character.” And if you think the concept was limited to Southern states or slaves, nope. This adoption of white supremacy was found up and down the coast. In 1821, New York changed its constitution to take away the right to vote from free Black citizens. Delegate Samuel Young justified the change with Enlightenment race theory, explaining, “The minds of the blacks are not competent to vote.”6 Delegate Peter Livingston asked if Black people “have intelligence to discern, or purity of principle to exercise, with safety, that important right.”7

Even the Supreme Court agreed. In the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford case, the court ruled that Black people “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution,” adding: They were at that time considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges . . . They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.8 Notice, the Supreme Court said this about all Black people—not just slaves. White supremacy is a foundational principle of America.

But what on earth is whiteness? Whiteness is fear.

To understand the story of the War of Independence from the perspective of an African in America, one must first realize that prior to this era, the idea of American patriotism was all but nonexistent, because there was no America. Remember, there was a South Carolina, a Virginia, and other British colonies, but each had its own unique laws and social structures. The only thing that bound these respective groups of white people together for this war was their increasing discontent with their privileged overlords overseas. Such was the case for Black people in this land far from any homelands: oppressed and disenfranchised, they had no allegiance to either set of white people in this quarrel.

King was one of an estimated one hundred thousand Africans who temporarily or permanently escaped enslavement during the Revolutionary War—as many as escaped on the Underground Railroad during its entire history of existence.12 Twenty-five thousand escapees were from South Carolina alone. This mass self-emancipation worked specifically because the slaves who freed themselves were not loyal to a team. As early Black historian George W. Williams wrote in 1883, when people spoke of Black patriotism in the American Revolution, “Negroes were rated as chattel property by both armies and both governments during the entire war. This is the cold fact of history, and it is not pleasing to contemplate. The Negro occupied the anomalous position of an American slave and an American soldier. He was a soldier in the hour of danger, but a chattel in time of peace.”13

After Louverture’s capture, Leclerc died, leaving Rochambeau in charge to release his white supremacist fury on the island. And his fury knew no bounds. He decapitated any Black people not wearing a French uniform, including women and children. The “Roach” imported fifteen thousand attack dogs from Jamaica that had been trained to kill anyone who was not white. He bound and gagged captives in sacks and drowned them. Perhaps Rochambeau’s most ruthless tactic was the “fumigational-sulfurous baths.”7 He marched the prisoners of war onto French ships, where he burned stockpiles of sulfur. The resulting sulfur dioxide eventually suffocated the prisoners.

Two decades after Haiti gained its independence in 1804, France demanded that Haiti compensate former French slaveowners for the value of all those slaves who set themselves free. Yes, France essentially demanded reverse slave reparations. In 1825, France sent warships to Haiti and demanded 150 million francs. Not only did the United States agree with this, but it backed up France’s demands for the debt on the international stage, imploring European countries to ignore Haiti’s existence until it paid this money.

In May 1803, a shipload of seventy-five captive Igbo people were purchased for $100 each to grow rice on forced labor plantations on St. Simons Island, Georgia. Apparently, the ship was infested with Cartwright’s disease, because the shackled passengers screamed all the way to America. When the captain would send members of the crew down into the belly of the ship to quiet them, the crew members were terrified to realize that the captives weren’t just screaming; they were saying one chant, over and over, in unison: “Orimiri Omambala bu anyi bia. Orimiri Omambala ka anyi ga ejina.”14 When the ship got close to the shore, the chants grew louder. “Orimiri Omambala bu anyi bia. Orimiri Omambala ka anyi ga ejina,” they prayed in unison. Then, somehow, they broke the chains, and threw the entire crew overboard. Led by a captured chieftain, the Africans then walked calmly into the sea, chanting, “Orimiri Omambala bu anyi bia. Orimiri Omambala ka anyi ga ejina,” drowning themselves rather than be slaves.

Fugitive slave catchers eventually discovered the family’s location and surrounded Uncle Kite’s house, hoping to return them to their owner. Twenty-two-year-old Margaret knew they were done for. Described as a mulatto who was always “cross tempered,”15 Margaret was likely the product of a slavemaster raping her mother. Historians say at least two of her own children had been conceived from the same rampant slavemaster’s sexual assaults. Knowing the horrors that would undoubtedly befall her daughters, rather than see them suffer the same fate, Margaret grabbed a butcher knife and slit her two-year-old daughter’s throat. To sacrifice the fruit born of one’s own womb as a gift of liberty is a decision that only the most desperate freedom-seeker can know. Garner’s story served as the basis for Toni Morrison’s award-winning novel Beloved.

To assuage the fears of the white faithful, the Anglican Church through the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (the church’s missionary arm) distributed ten thousand copies of two letters to the residents of the British colonies in 1727, assuring slaveowners that Christianity “does not make the least Alteration in Civil Property.”12 More relief came in 1794 when a group of well-meaning white liberals formed the Missionary Society for the Conversion of Negro Slaves. To further its prophetic cause, the group printed a Caucasian remix to the King James Bible that left out all the parts that might incite freedom in the hearts of the enslaved. The censored version removed 90 percent of the Old Testament and half of the New Testament,13 eliminating potentially seditious passages such as the story of the Israelites’ captivity and escape from Egypt, including Exodus 21:16 (King James Version), which reads, “And he that stealeth a man, and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death.” Naturally, the curators of the Slavery Bible kept all the parts necessary to curate a crop of compliant negroes, including Ephesians 6:5 (King James Version): “Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ.”

As Du Bois noted, “African religion, both fetish and Islam, was transformed . . . carried out secretly and at night; but more often in open celebration which gradually became transmuted into Catholic and Protestant Christian rites.”14 Yes, the first thing we remixed was “the gospel.”

The Black church that emerged after the Revolution was a wholly new creation. The First African Baptist Church of Savannah; Silver Bluff Baptist in Aiken County, South Carolina; and First Baptist Church in Petersburg, Virginia. All claim the title of the oldest Black congregation in the United States.

Shortly before fifty-five white men, including about twenty-five slaveowners,16 convened in Philadelphia in 1787 for the Constitutional Convention, two Black preachers—Richard Allen and Absalom Jones—founded the city’s first Black religious organization, the Free African Society (FAS).

Perhaps FAS’s most troublesome act was their insistence on educating Black Americans. Starting with a reading class developed as part of Sunday school curriculum in 1795, members began opening up schools in homes, tents, and even their barns to members of their congregation. In 1802, Jones became the first African American to be ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church, and his first move was to convince his church to open a school. Allen, however, wanted to continue worshipping in the Methodist tradition that focused on sacraments and the methodical practices of the faith without the dry services in the Quaker tradition. In 1816, he founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first independent Black religious denomination in America.

The First African Baptist Church of Savannah didn’t earn official recognition until 1788, but its core congregation had been meeting since 1773.

North Carolina, whose laws were lax compared to Virginia’s, disallowed its enslaved population from learning anything except how to count, even proscribing the ownership of books and pamphlets.

A literate Black person in America was considered a dangerous entity.

Perhaps Denmark Vesey’s story best illustrates the role of the Black church in resistance and education. Enslaved before the Revolution, Vesey was literate in three languages before winning $1,500 in the Charleston lottery in 1799 at the age of thirty-two. He paid $600 for his freedom, opened a carpentry business, married an enslaved woman, and attended Second Presbyterian Church before leaving to help start Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. When authorities briefly closed the church’s doors in 1818 for meeting after sunset, it was the second-largest AME congregation in the country, with 1,848 members.23 The church was shut down once again in 1821 when the Charleston City Council learned that the church was becoming a “school for slaves.”24 Vesey began preaching that enslaved Africans were the current-day manifestation of the Children of Israel who were enslaved in Egypt.

The government established a separate force to put down insurrections and built a facility to train slavecatchers and house weapons and ammunition. The South Carolina State Arsenal eventually became the Citadel, a private college that still trains soldiers for the U.S. military. But the worst fate was reserved for Mother Emanuel AME Church. The City Council razed the building and pastor Morris Brown was kicked out of the state. Charleston would not have an independent Black congregation until after the Civil War.

In 1706, Boston preacher Cotton Mather received a tremendous gift in the offering plate—a human being. When Mather opened his tithes envelope and saw the blessing, he said it was a “mighty smile of heaven upon my Family”1 and decided to name the newly arrived African “Onesimus,” after a biblical slave.** One would have to think that Onesimus found Mather to be a little dimwitted. After all, Mather wanted Onesimus to worship some white man named Jesus, who apparently hated witches and gave away slaves on his birthday. Mather disliked Onesimus because Onesimus also refused to convert from Islam to Christianity, and because Onesimus’s intelligence made him seem “wicked” and “thievish.”

Lincoln calmed fears of disunion by insisting that he had no plans to elevate Black Americans, free or enslaved, to the status of white men. “I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the black and white races,” he said in an 1858 speech. “I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”5

A few months later, Union major general David Hunter issued General Order No. 11, declaring: The three States of Georgia, Florida and South Carolina, comprising the military department of the South, having deliberately declared themselves no longer under the protection of the United States of America, and having taken up arms against the said United States, it becomes a military necessity to declare them under martial law. This was accordingly done on the 25th day of April, 1862. Slavery and martial law in a free country are altogether incompatible; the persons in these three States—Georgia, Florida and South Carolina—heretofore held as slaves, are therefore declared forever free.17

The Union army never intended to free the slaves. Lincoln didn’t want to free the slaves. The Emancipation Proclamation couldn’t free the slaves. Black people freed themselves. And in doing so, they defeated the Confederacy and freed America from its most undemocratic institution. They were less concerned with flags, taxation, or saving the Union than they were with saving their people. Still, the result of their actions was a victory for America. The freed slaves would come to literally define what it means to be an American. We are the ones who continually push this country toward its goal of becoming more perfect. We are the reason it is still a union.

As Lincoln was struggling to come up with a plan for how to discipline the unpatriotic white Southerners, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and General William Sherman met with twenty Black ministers in Savannah, Georgia, to discuss the fate of the emancipated Americans. The main spokesperson, sixty-seven-year-old Garrison Frazier, had one request: “To have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor.”9 Of the twenty Black leaders, all but one confessed that their deepest desire was to live separate from whites.

By 1868, Charleston, a city that had thrived on slave trading and slave labor, was now being controlled by its Black majority. Africans took their own produce to the market. Workers unionized. Generations were becoming educated. They had financial independence and social mobility, which angered white men even more. “And beyond that,” Du Bois explained of the white Southerners’ fears, “if a free, educated black citizen and voter could be brought upon the stage this would in itself be the worst conceivable thing on earth; worse than shiftless, unprofitable labor; worse than ignorance, worse than crime. It would lead inevitably to a mulatto South and the eventual ruin of all civilization.”20