Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

by Michael Harriot

I would later discover The Mis-Education of the Negro, in which Carter G. Woodson explains that in the American education system, the entirety of Black people’s existence “is studied only as a problem or dismissed as of little consequence.”2 Du Bois eloquently echoed this sentiment, asking, “Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. How does it feel to be a problem?”

That story of America is a fantastical, overwrought, and fictive tale.

History can never be objective or unbiased because, no matter how hard the storytellers may try, the perception of reality prejudices all stories. The academic field of history is dominated by white men handicapped by the inability to see whiteness’s impact on America’s biography.

the only difference between a burglar and a “settler” is who writes the police reports. In fact, the only difference between the Black AF version of history and the way America’s story is customarily recounted is that whiteness is not the center of the universe around which everything else revolves.

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. This book is a story about a strong-arm robbery. It is about family and friends trying to recover what was stolen. It is the testimony, and the verdict that a jury of our peers has never heard.

Yes, that’s right: researchers have found evidence that the few remaining Jamestonians survived the period known as the “starving time” by murdering pregnant women and eating their own children.7 The heralded “first Americans” were cannibals.

Nuno Tristão and Antão Gonçalves can go down in history as the first Europeans to purchase Africans from Black slave traders and resell them in Europe.

In pre-colonial Africa, enslaved people had legal rights, their status was not passed down to their children, and they did not serve as a major labor force. In fact, most of the previous iterations of human bondage around the world offered a path to freedom. To be fair, it is much easier to refer to America’s unique institution as “slavery” than it is to call it the “perpetual, race-based, constitutional, human trafficking enterprise that legally reduces human beings to chattel through the means of violence or the threat thereof.”

Juan Garrido was not the only free Black man on the North American continent. Another legendary African would prove to be more of an explorer than any of the handsome, rebellious Black Americans who came before him. And while Garrido was never a permanent resident of Florida, Puerto Rico, or California, Mustafa Azemmouri, who went by the street name Esteban, became a legend in places that wouldn’t be called “America” for at least two centuries. Not only did he explore more of the North American continent than Lewis or Clark, but he did it before most of the Jamestown settlers were even born.

From its inception, America was always a pyramid scheme where the wealthy benefited from the labor of the poor.

Notice, the Supreme Court said this about all Black people—not just slaves. White supremacy is a foundational principle of America.

The insatiable desire to get free by any means necessary included the option of death. Of course, “Give me liberty or give me death” sounds perfectly rational when it comes from the lips of a white person. But logic, common sense, and the narcissistic delusion of whiteness dictates that Black people who would rather die than be enslaved must be mentally ill.

There is a balm in Gilead To make the wounded whole There is a balm in Gilead To heal the sin-sick soul

I couldn’t hear nobody pray, Lord. I couldn’t hear nobody pray. See when I was way down yonder by myself I couldn’t hear nobody pray.3

Steal Away. Steal Away. Steal Away. Steal Away to Jesus. Steal Away. Steal Away home. I ain’t got long to stay here.

Perhaps the greatest legacy of this African American institution lies in the subtle difference in language that separates the Black church from all others. In medieval England, any sacred place or house of worship offered immunity to fugitives, which is partly why a church is considered a sanctuary, defined as “a consecrated place” or “a place of refuge and protection.” In America, that tradition did not apply to fugitive slaves or Black people in general. But the Black church is not a place, nor does it exist in the physical realm. It is a school with no address and a meeting space with no location. It is a political machine and a human rights organization. It is why, in sermons, songs of praise, and speaking among each other, Black people rarely refer to a church as “a sanctuary.” The Black church is “the sanctuary.”

But my dad says slavery wasn’t racist because things were different back then. Therein lies the problem. Even if your ancestors didn’t think of it as evil back then—we do now! Championing a bygone era that fought for human bondage is like sitting back and fondly remembering the good old days when a man could beat his wife for burning the pot roast.

The Confederate flag you’re talking about originated from a design by William Thompson in 1863. And for him, there was no confusion about the true meaning of the flag that has now come to represent “Southern heritage.” He said, “As a people, we are fighting to maintain the heaven ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race; a white flag would thus be emblematical of our cause.” He called that flag the “White Man’s Flag.”3 But that was revised into a third version. And the proliferation of that flag is all thanks to a group of white frat boys.

In fact, here’s a quote from Thomas J. Dixon speaking directly to the UDC:8 Every clubhouse of the United Daughters of the Confederacy should have a memorial tablet dedicated to the Ku Klux Klan; that would be a monument not to one man, but to five hundred and fifty thousand men, to whom all Southerners owe a debt of gratitude; for how our beloved Southland could have survived that reign of terror is a big question.

The UDC partially funded the “largest shrine to white supremacy in the history of the world,”13 a more than twelve-thousand-square-foot carving of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson located at a stone quarry just east of Atlanta. In 1915, at the place now known as Stone Mountain Park, landowner Samuel Venable granted perpetual rights to the Ku Klux Klan to hold meetings, formally kick-starting the modern era of the KKK. Helen Plane, the UDC charter member who conceived the Stone Mountain Memorial, initially intended for it to include the Klan, because, as she told the initial sculptor, “I feel it is due to the Klan which saved us from Negro domination and carpetbag rule,* that it be immortalized on Stone Mountain. Why not represent a small group of them in their knightly uniform approaching in the distance?”14

At the fourteenth annual meeting of the North Carolina Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy,16 one of the speakers extolled the organization’s virtues: You were the song of the Old South: you are the theme of the New South; and to-day in this high hour of peace and commercialism, when men are prone to forget, we find you banded together, United Daughters of the Confederacy, all still loyal to Southern rights, democracy, and, thank God, to white supremacy.

A 1957 UDC-sanctioned textbook claimed that Virginia’s enslaved Africans were “generally happy” and insisted that “Negroes went about in a cheerful manner making a living for themselves and for those for whom they worked.”20 A fourth-grade textbook suggested that students draw pictures of the Klan and make replicas of the Confederate flag.

There is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter. Mississippi’s constitutional convention of 1890 was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the nigger from politics. Not the “ignorant and vicious,” as some of the apologists would have you believe, but the nigger . . . Let the world know it just as it is . . . In Mississippi we have in our constitution legislated against the racial peculiarities of the Negro . . . When that device fails, we will resort to something else.

Their techniques varied so widely that the NAACP* eventually came up with four distinct qualities that defined lynching. SOMEONE HAD TO DIE FOR AN INCIDENT TO QUALIFY AS A LYNCHING. I know this seems obvious, but when around twenty-five masked men dragged Jo Reed out of a Nashville jail cell, put a rope around his neck, threw him over a suspension bridge, and shot at his body until the rope broke, he technically wasn’t a lynching victim because he survived. THREE OR MORE PEOPLE HAD TO TAKE PART IN THE KILLING.* The makeshift rules didn’t stipulate large crowds, like the one that appeared at sixteen-year-old Fred Rochelle’s lynching. When a deputy handed the teenager to vigilantes in Bartow, Florida, in 1901, the mob kindly arranged for a special train to transport onlookers to the “barbecue” before forcing Rochelle onto a barrel, chaining him to a stake, dousing him with kerosene, and burning him alive.11 ALL LYNCHINGS ARE ILLEGAL. For instance, after a crowd of more than a hundred pursued Fred Sullivan and his wife, Jane, after their arrest, the couple confessed to burning down a barn in Byhalia, Mississippi. But it hadn’t been legal for deputies to turn the pair over to “a committee of citizens.” Especially since the deputy came back to discover “twenty men had organized a Judge Lynch court and carried out the execution with little formality.”12 WHETHER THE MURDER WAS FOR JUSTICE OR TRADITION, THERE HAD TO BE A REASON FOR THE LYNCHING. David Walker was killed because he ...

And I know it might sound a little unpatriotic, but you’re probably one of those people who conflate being an “American” with being a citizen. It’s not the same thing. Americanism is an ephemeral, ever-evolving status that, historically, can only be bestowed by white people. He probably told you about how the Fourteenth Amendment established the legal definition of citizenship and explained how it gave Black people the same rights and privileges afforded white people. Now, that’s what the books will tell you. But that’s just a bunch of white nonsense. I tell you what—go buy yourself one of those officially licensed Lakers jerseys and see if they will let you play with LeBron. They’ll look at you the same way white people looked at Black folks when we demanded our rights way back in 1865. Or 1965. Or 2005. Nah, son. For most of this nation’s history, lemme tell you how this country defined American: “Not Black people.”

On the night of March 8, 1971, the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI removed files from the Media, Pennsylvania, office of the FBI. These files will now be studied to determine: one, the nature and extent of surveillance and intimidation carried on by this office of the FBI, particularly against groups and individuals working for a more just, humane and peaceful society. Two, to determine how much of the FBI’s efforts are spent on relatively minor crimes by the poor and the powerless against whom they can get a more glamorous conviction rate. Instead of investigating truly serious crimes by those with money and influence which cause great damage to the lives of many people—crimes such as war profiteering, monopolistic practices, institutional racism, organized crime, and the mass distribution of lethal drugs. Finally, three, the extent of illegal practices by the FBI, such as eavesdropping, entrapment, and the use of provocateurs and informers. As this study proceeds, the results obtained along with the FBI documents pertaining to them will be sent to people in public life who have demonstrated the integrity, courage and commitment to democratic values which are necessary to effectively challenge the repressive policies of the FBI. As long as the United States government wages war against Indochina in defiance of the vast majority who want all troops and weapons withdrawn this year, and extends that war and suffering under the guise of reducing it, as long as gre...

In the book The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI, Betty Medsger writes: More than anything, the Media files offered “the public and Congress an unprecedented glimpse of how the U.S. government watches its citizens—particularly black citizens,” wrote Washington Post journalist William Greider in an analysis of all the files the summer after the burglary. Despite the fact that the files had been removed from a very small bureau office in a predominantly white area, they revealed details of the bureau’s policies and actions that made it clear the FBI conducted massive spying on African Americans, most of it unjustified. The overall impression in the Media files of how the FBI regarded black people was that they were dangerous and must be watched continuously. To become targets of the FBI, it wasn’t necessary for African Americans to engage in violent behavior. It wasn’t necessary for them to be radical or subversive. Being black was enough.

the FBI noted that they assessed Daniels as a threat because they had discovered three things when they searched his home: He legally bought firearms. He was a founding member of the Huey P. Newton Gun Club. He owned a copy of Negroes with Guns—the book that is called the “single most important intellectual influence” on Black Panthers founder Huey P. Newton. It was written by Robert F. Williams. It is possible that Daniels just likes Black history. Or maybe he’s afraid of losing his civil rights. Oh, wait . . .

The Democrats’ main platform centered around the concept of “nullification”—the idea that states had the right to invalidate laws they deemed unconstitutional. Of course, the only law they wanted to nullify was the one about owning human beings. Democrats thought the federal government should leave those decisions up to the states.

It is true that the Republican Party was founded on the principles of anti-slavery. Founded in 1854, the GOP’s only real concern was stopping the expansion of owning men.* They were so in favor of ending America’s peculiar institution that members were often called “Black Republicans” as a slur. And trust me, they weren’t talking about Kanye West. Republicans also elected the first woman to Congress, supported Black suffrage, and pushed for civil rights legislation before Martin Luther King was born.

The Republican Party tried every imaginable tactic to lure Southern white voters to their side, even outlawing seasoned chicken at their conventions. A few whites joined the GOP when William Taft’s 1908 presidential campaign pushed his “Southern Policy” promise to not appoint African Americans to federal jobs in areas where it would lead to racial conflict.

Aside from Jimmy Carter in 1976, the Solid South would never vote for a Democratic president again.

Those good ol’ Republicans who never read a white lie they didn’t like would like you to believe that Republicans supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Democrats opposed it, which is only partially true. To understand the change in both parties’ ideology, all one has to do is count the votes.9 There were ninety-four Southern Democrats in the House of Representatives. Eight voted for the bill. There were eleven Southern Republicans in the House of Representatives. Zero voted for the bill. The Northern House Democrats voted in favor of the bill 145–9. The Northern House Republicans favored the bill 138–24. Of the twenty-one Southern senators (Democrat or Republican), only one voted in favor of the Civil Rights Act (a Texas Democrat).

“I believe in states’ rights,” explained the man who would become the Conservative Beyoncé. “And I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the Constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I’m looking for, I’m going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.”14 The “States’ Rights” speech would become part of political history. Three months later, that candidate, Ronald Reagan, enjoyed one of the biggest presidential landslides in American history, completing his party’s century-long switcheroo. In the 2020 presidential election, Republicans won 70 percent of white voters in the former Confederate states.15 The GOP is like a Black cookout: a whole lot of whiting.

And lest one think the Democrats have emerged as anti-racist heroes, they are not so much for Black people as they are the opposition party for the GOP.

It is entirely possible that Republican politicians aren’t racist. It is not reasonable to believe that most white people are not.

Two years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act—barely a year after the passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act—54 percent of white Americans said they thought the civil rights marches were “not justified,” according to an August 1966 Harris poll.1 In October, 85 percent of whites responded that the “demonstrations by negroes on civil rights” hurt the “advancement of negro rights.”2 By June 1969, only 32 percent of respondents felt Black protesters were “trying to be helpful.”3 Because of the civil rights movement, the country finally began to address the disparities, inequality, and terrorism that were the by-product of a quadruple century of racial oppression. But when all was said and done, the majority of white people in America had reached one conclusion: Something was wrong with Black people.

There is something wrong with America. Eight years, two months, and sixteen days after the election of Barack Obama, Donald J. Trump became president of the United States of America. If one were to create a sentient being out of America’s past and present, it would look like Donald Trump. It would hate anyone who is not white. It would believe itself to be an infallible “stable genius.” It would hide secrets. It would whitewash its past. It would lie incessantly. It would rip brown babies from their mothers’ arms. It would criminalize Muslims. It would mirror the intellect and sentiment of the vast majority of people who fill the country from sea to shining sea. Donald Trump is America.

They have forgotten how Trump excused a white supremacist murder in Charlottesville, Virginia, just like America excuses white supremacy as an institutional reality.

Like its history, this nation is a mirage. Its greatness is a figment of a collective white imagination that envisions a bright, shining star where there is only a dumpster fire. America is a con artist. It is a counterfeit farce of a white country convinced of its own supremacy. It is a boot on every Black throat and noose on every negro neck. Yet we remain. Like the perseverance that overcomes white supremacy. Like the love that conquers hate. Like the truth that outshines injustice. Like the backs and hands and muscles and minds of the beloved Black diaspora that will collectively build this imperfect union into a home. If this nation ever truly becomes a post-racial society with liberty and justice for all, let the history of Black people in America reflect: We were doing it first.