Status Updates From Daring to Be Free: Rebellio...

"...the economist Thomas Piketty calculated in 2020 that the Haitians are owed $ 28 billion by the French government as restitution for the debts incurred for their independence payments. The authorities in Paris have so far responded with resounding silence."

"The first black students at Harvard faced intense hostility: one of them was Martin Delany. Before becoming the author of Blake, Delany had been a talented freshman at Harvard Medical School. He was expelled in 1850, less than two terms into his first semester, because white students refused to accept his presence."

"Harvard Law School was established with significant financial support from an Antigua-based enslaver family, and before 1865 enslaved Africans carried the books and bags of students attending classes."

"The last known survivor of the transatlantic slave trade in the United States was Matilda McCrear, who died in 1940. She was captured from Dahomey in west Africa and brought to Alabama in 1860; in 1931, when in her seventies, she unsuccessfully filed a claim for reparations at the Dallas County Courthouse."

"Drawing on French, Portuguese, Spanish, and English sources, Ana Lucia Araujo has shown that petitions for financial and material reparations have been consistently made by formerly enslaved people and their descendants for well over two centuries."

"...former French settlers from Saint-Domingue also received a settlement extorted from the Haitian government in 1825. It bears repeating that this was the only time in modern history when former captives directly compensated slave-owners."

"After a brief period until the late 1870s, which saw continued efforts to make post-Civil War America a more democratic and inclusive society, the so-called Reconstruction period came to an end, and was followed by a conservative turn across the United States. In the South, white supremacist visions re-emerged powerfully, celebrating the Confederacy as a ‘Lost Cause’..."

"In Texas the anniversary that took pride of place was June 19th, marking the date in 1865 when Union troops in Galveston Bay proclaimed the emancipation of 250,000 enslaved people from that state. These ‘Juneteenth’ commemorations, as they came to be known in the late nineteenth century, became a fixture until the Great War."

"Emancipation was celebrated on different days by communities in the North and South. Some chose dates to mark Lincoln’s original 1863 Proclamation on 22 September or his final one on 1 January, which came to be known as ‘Freedom Day’. Others picked 9 April, when Robert E. Lee had surrendered to the Northern commander, Ulysses Grant."

"Fermina, who had been held in shackles for her insurgent activities in the months preceding the November uprising, led the rebels to the homes of the estate owners and their managers. When she came across one of the most brutal overseers, she exclaimed to her comrades: ‘grab that fat white man and hit him with your machete, for he is the one who puts us in shackles’."

"The retreat of fugitive communities in advance of any incursion was facilitated by elaborate early-warning systems, including sentinels posted in strategic places. These were mostly operated by humans but in at least once instance included domesticated agoutis. The high-pitched squeaks of these carefully trained rodents would alert settlement residents to any approaching intruders."

Wait what 🐀

"Abolitionists like Wilberforce and pro-slavery white settlers had much else in common. They shared the belief that Africans were prone to ‘rebellions and suicides’, and colonization was the only way to protect them from degeneration."

"The philosopher David Hume had observed that negroes were ‘naturally inferior’ to white people, and they were incapable of any kind of ‘ingenuity’. Immanuel Kant agreed, adding that even free black people had failed to demonstrate ‘ any praiseworthy quality’."

"In these battles against abolition the West India lobby could count on allies at the highest level of British politics ... such as ... George Canning, who gave a speech in 1824 likening African captives to Frankenstein’s monster, a being ‘in the maturity of his physical passions, but in the infancy of uninstructed reason’."

"The slave-ship market was dominated by British vessels, and from 1640 to the early nineteenth century Lloyds of London was the global centre for insuring this industry. One insurance claim related to the slave ship Zong, whose crew, fearing that their supplies of drinking water had fallen too low, had deliberately thrown overboard more than 130 captives taken from the Gold Coast in 1781."

"...Boukman was both a religious and a political leader, just like Makandal, and like him he went from being a trusted member of the slave elite to a runaway and then revolutionary. Moreover, Boukman and his comrades followed Makandal’s lead in assembling a powerful underground movement that united rebels from maroon camps and plantations in the common pursuit of freedom."

"Makandal was accused of using his botanical knowledge to create lethal poisons, and of relying on a network of agents recruited from among hawkers and house domestics to introduce these toxic substances in their masters’ food, preferably when they hosted large dinners...."

"Obeah was a significant force in the struggle against Atlantic slavery. It helped maintain the captives’ material and spiritual connections to their African homeland, and offer them a space in which they could at least shield themselves from the oppression they faced, and seek remedies for their illnesses, injuries, and losses."

"But some Muslims in the New World organized themselves to hold group prayers in ‘makeshift mosques’–a hut, a room, the house of a free Muslim. In Jamaica many met in secret to recite and pass on verses of the Qu’ran by word of mouth. They engaged in the practice of almsgiving (zakat), and most remarkably fasted during Ramadan, even though the Qur’an allowed exemptions for those in their circumstances...."

"The captive Senegalese Muslim scholar Omar ibn Sayyid, who arrived in Charleston, South Carolina, in the early nineteenth century, was baptized in a presbyterian church in 1820. However, he continued to celebrate the Prophet in his prayers and his writings, and his 1831 memoir began with an invocation to ‘Lord Mohammad’."

"[Queen Nanny] was thought to rely on her spiritual and divination powers to anticipate the moves of her adversaries and render her invulnerable in battle. According to her legend, this allowed her to take them out in combat with a machete, also to catch bullets and cannonballs and throw them back to the British soldiers; in one version, she caught them between her buttocks and farted them back."

What

"[...] Obeah and Islam were also sources of dissent and rebellion. They empowered rebels to devise plots and foment insurrections, equipping them with practical and moral instruments to bind their fellow conspirators together and confront their enemies, while seeking to neutralize their superiority in material force and firepower...."

"In June 1695 a group of maroons (including at least one woman, Espérance) carefully planned an assault that destroyed Fort Frederick Hendryk in Grand Port. In 1706 a major conspiracy involving captives and fugitives was uncovered, in which they planned to assassinate the Dutch settlers and burn down their houses."

I love this book