Black AF History Quotes

“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 best historians try to approximate the truth by unbending the collection of funhouse mirrors through which the past has been viewed, but it isn’t simply a counterfeit version of history, it is a fable that erases the reflection of an entire people to ensure that the mythology of the heroes lives happily ever after.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“What we do know for sure is that both African and Native American populations had one thing in common: resistance.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“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.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“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.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“Through a complex combination of whitewashing, guilt, and an intentional recasting of history that absolves them of their hatred, our historical translators have painted a sanitized, impressionist portrait of a struggle for Black liberation that was eventually fulfilled by American’s unwavering commitment to justice and equality. Out of whole cloth, they managed to fabricate a fantastic ahistorical myth that somehow became truth. They remember a socially conservative, respectable campaign of racial reconciliation, not a movement of anti-establishment revolutionaries. And for their sake, the doctrine of nonviolent resistance was eventually reduced to simple ‘nonviolence.’ They never speak of the ‘resisting.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“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.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“In a soul food restaurant, you can order a thigh and a wing. I contend that the thigh is the most underrated and least talked-about piece of chicken, yet it is never separated from the leg in Caucasian cuisine. Legs are trash. If you’re over seven and you still eat legs, you need to grow up.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“I once saw a recipe that said “season to taste” and finally understood why white people’s chicken tastes like a crisp fall breeze blowing an American flag at a Toby Keith concert.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“they will deny that white supremacy is their ultimate goal. But their votes show it.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“She did not answer proudly, as if she wore her response as a badge of courage; she did it matter-of-factly, like doors and Black women sometimes will.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“CHRISTIAN: A follower of the European version of the teachings of Jesus Christ.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“the criminal enterprise called america is nothing but a self perpetuating white supremacy machine".”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“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.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“The indigenous people were dying anyway. The natives had no natural immunity to European illnesses, so entire Caribbean populations died from diseases. Hispaniola’s native Taíno population went from half a million to two hundred in less than fifty years because they were literally allergic to white people. It took forty years for 90 percent of Cuba’s population to disappear. Puerto Rico took thirty years.7”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“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?”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“Some people stay stuck in the past because the present and future don’t look so good.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“In October 1609, [John] Smith was asleep on a sack of gunpowder when it accidentally caught on fire, burning a ten-inch patch of skin on his groin area.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“Historians say more than one-third of the Africans brought to America practiced Islam, a fact that is still stamped on the identity and religion of Black America.9 However, very little has been recorded about Islam among enslaved Africans because many Muslims worshipped in secret, and non-Muslims often did not recognize the religion. “There was one man on this plantation, who prayed five times every day,” explained Ball, “always turning his face to the east, when in the performance of his devotion.” Ball was describing salah, the Muslim prayer. Among Sierra Leone’s Mandingo people, Islam was so prevalent that slave traders eventually began using “Mandingo” to describe Muslim slaves. Because enslaved Muslims were more likely to be literate, many of the interpretations and translations of the Christian Bible came from Muslims. The Muslim practice of circling the Kaaba is still prevalent in Black churches during the collecting of tithes and praise breaks for dancing a “ring shout.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“When Lorinda Goodwin and her family converted to her master’s faith on a Georgia plantation, she quickly realized the unspoken limitations of Catholic practices for the enslaved. “I’d tell the priest everything I did wicked,”7 she explained. “But I tell you, one time I had a cousin who told the priest he wanted to get free and asked him to pray to God to set him free, and bless your soul ma’am, the priest was about to have my cousin hung. The priest told my cousin’s marster about it and they was talking strong about hanging my cousin . . . From that day on, I could not follow my Catholic religion like I had.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“Joe was over six feet tall and light-skinned, with a scar on his cheek from when someone had bitten him during a fight and calves that were pockmarked from gunshot pellets he suffered during his encounters with fugitive slave hunters. To say that he was an intimidating presence would be an understatement. Joe had a variety of tactics to help bolster that badass image. Unlike the clothes of most maroons and enslaved Africans, Joe’s weren’t made of osnaburg, a coarse, often white fabric used for slave garments. He had found a way to dye or stain his clothing different shades of brown. This makeshift camouflage helped him blend into the background, but it wasn’t the most incredible part of Forest’s gear. Joe had also fashioned himself an upper garment out of some material “through which no ball could well pass,” or so it was said. That’s right: Joe, in 1821, had created a bulletproof vest. Joe ran with a tight gang of maroons that included women and children. One of Joe’s best homeboys was a man named Jack, who stole himself from his master and walked two hundred miles to join Joe’s crew. Joe’s second-best homey was also named Jack.* Together, Joe, Jack, and the other Jack would form a clique that terrified white people more than Critical Race Theory, absentee voting, and affirmative action combined. Like Freeway Ricky Ross, Frankie Beverly, and the concept of rhythm, most people in the Black community knew about Joe long before white people found out about him. An abundance of charisma, combined with his inability to give a damn about white people’s laws, created an inflated mythos that endeared him to his already enslaved brothers and sisters throughout Georgia and South Carolina. Accomplices would also carry out many of the late-night “raids” but attribute them to Joe, Jack, and the rest of the maroon gangstas on those plantations. This precursor to the “no snitching” rule enhanced Joe’s reputation as a master bandit of mythic proportions who could single-handedly steal livestock, crops, and hundreds of pounds of lead to melt for ammunition. Late on the night of May 21, 1821, Joe and the two Jacks were out killing cattle on George Ford’s plantation. One of Ford’s forty-nine enslaved Africans dry snitched on Joe, so Ford, “one or two of his negroes, and a white man, a carpenter employed by him,” set out to stop Joe’s raid.17 Joe and his merry band of thugs were ready and waiting. When George pulled up on his late-model horse, Joe’s gang ambushed George’s crew. Walking Jack opened fire, shooting Ford in the head and chest. With only one gun between them, George’s team ran for cover while Joe and the others were able to escape in a canoe they had hidden at the mouth of the Santee River. But of course, there’s always one guy who messes everything up. Ford’s killer would have remained a mystery, but apparently, Jack really liked oxtails. When he walked back to retrieve the cattle, one of Ford’s men was hiding behind the dead ox and captured him. Two weeks later, Jack was hanged, but not before confessing that Joe was the ringleader. To quell his constituents’ concerns, Governor Thomas Bennett offered a bounty of $168.62 for Joe’s head.18 A group of militiamen formed a formal Joe-hunting committee and raised another $300 in reward money, instigating a manhunt that would last for years.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“One of the worst incidents of drapetomania happened on January 28, 1856, when Margaret Garner, her husband, their four children, and eleven of their fellow enslaved freedom-seekers stole their master’s horse, sleigh, and gun and absconded from their Boone County, Kentucky, plantation owner, Archibald K. Gaines. The family crossed the frozen Ohio River and split up. The other escapees eventually made it to freedom via the Underground Railroad, while the Garners hid out at the house of their uncle Elijah Kite, a free Black man. 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.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“Although most Enlightenment-era thinkers agreed that freedom is the natural state of man, they somehow carved out an exception for their belligerent negroes because, in their white minds, property rights were as important as individual freedom. The race-based forced labor system that built America into an economic power could only exist through violence and the threat of violence. In places like South Carolina, where the captives outnumbered the free, this state-sanctioned institution of racial dehumanization required constant enforcement.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“So don’t believe the current narratives about Haiti’s instability being the result of poor governance or corruption. Haiti is poor because it was forced to pay 90 million francs, the contemporary equivalent of $21 billion as of 2020, including billions in interest to the City Bank of New York. You probably know the bank by its current name: Citibank. Of course, Citibank isn’t the sole culprit. One corporation alone couldn’t condemn a country to two centuries of poverty in opposition to the richest and most powerful nations in the world. The white world was not just complicit in the economic destruction of Haiti, they piled on. Despite repaying the independence debt in 1947, Haiti still owed billions to other countries and the World Bank until after the 2010 Haitian earthquake, when France’s president forgave Haiti’s non-independence debt. In Black America, the legacy of the Haitian Revolution would outweigh any of the country’s economic or political struggles. Haiti would serve as the gold standard for Black resistance until the day America finally decided to end the constitutional erasure of its African residents’ humanity. It would be whispered in slave revolts and bellowed in speeches. Free Black communities would adopt its name and enslaved communities would embrace its tactics. Through the eyes of the enslaved, the people of Haiti undertook vengeance, and liberty and equality reigned in Saint-Domingue. Haiti won. They are free.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“So don’t believe the current narratives about Haiti’s instability being the result of poor governance or corruption. Haiti is poor because it was forced to pay 90 million francs, the contemporary equivalent of $21 billion as of 2020, including billions in interest to the City Bank of New York. You probably know the bank by its current name: Citibank. Of course, Citibank isn’t the sole culprit. One corporation alone couldn’t condemn a country to two centuries of poverty in opposition to the richest and most powerful nations in the world. The white world was not just complicit in the economic destruction of Haiti, they piled on. Despite repaying the independence debt in 1947, Haiti still owed billions to other countries and the World Bank until after the 2010 Haitian earthquake, when France’s president forgave Haiti’s non-independence debt.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“And if a land grab didn’t work, the next best thing that America could do was to economically destroy the nation. Yes: the most egregious part of the story is that the decline of Haiti’s wealth was an entirely American proposition, beginning in America’s greatest superstore—the slave market. On December 7, 1711, New York City’s Common Council passed one of its earliest zoning laws. It ruled that the city’s official place for selling and renting humans would be at a wooden structure near the edge of the city under a buttonwood tree. The area was protected by a rampart built by Dutch settlers, who called it “De Waal Straat.” By the end of the Haitian Revolution, George Washington had been inaugurated there, and the Bill of Rights had been passed at the very same spot. Alexander Hamilton, who constructed the country’s financial regulatory system, is buried not far from the spot where this slave market once stood. On this piece of property, Black bodies evolved from a simple commodity for forced labor into an asset for investment, speculation, and security, traded the same as pork bellies and crude oil. In 1792, twenty-four of New York’s wealthiest men signed the document that would create the New York Stock Exchange. To commemorate its slave-trading past, the men named the charter after the site where they exchanged souls for money. They called it the Buttonwood Agreement. The location described by the Dutch moniker eventually evolved into a simpler name: Wall Street. That’s where all of Haiti’s wealth lies. Whenever Haiti couldn’t make its payments to the French, the country would take out loans, sending it deeper into poverty, because the loans could only come from French banks. Over the years, French banks lent the Caribbean nation money so often that Haiti wasn’t simply repaying its original reparations debt: it was paying the loans, interests, and fees. As late as 1915, nearly 80 percent of Haiti’s government revenue was paid to service its debt. And by the time it made the last payment in 1947—eighty-four years after the Emancipation Proclamation and 143 years after dismantling the shackles of its own slaveowners—Haiti was still in debt. Those payments didn’t include the money that was taken by U.S. Marines when they marched into the Haitian National Bank, took $500,000, and deposited it at 111 Wall Street, New York, N.Y., for “safekeeping” during a period of unrest in 1919. The cost of German soldiers who assisted the American army in occupying Haiti from 1915 to 1934 didn’t count either. Neither did the 40 percent of Haiti’s national income that it was forced to pay to the United States and France when the U.S. occupiers wrote the demand into Haiti’s 1918 constitution.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“On December 7, 1711, New York City’s Common Council passed one of its earliest zoning laws. It ruled that the city’s official place for selling and renting humans would be at a wooden structure near the edge of the city under a buttonwood tree. The area was protected by a rampart built by Dutch settlers, who called it “De Waal Straat.” By the end of the Haitian Revolution, George Washington had been inaugurated there, and the Bill of Rights had been passed at the very same spot. Alexander Hamilton, who constructed the country’s financial regulatory system, is buried not far from the spot where this slave market once stood. On this piece of property, Black bodies evolved from a simple commodity for forced labor into an asset for investment, speculation, and security, traded the same as pork bellies and crude oil. In 1792, twenty-four of New York’s wealthiest men signed the document that would create the New York Stock Exchange. To commemorate its slave-trading past, the men named the charter after the site where they exchanged souls for money. They called it the Buttonwood Agreement. The location described by the Dutch moniker eventually evolved into a simpler name: Wall Street.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“On December 7, 1711, New York City’s Common Council passed one of its earliest zoning laws. It ruled that the city’s official place for selling and renting humans would be at a wooden structure near the edge of the city under a buttonwood tree. The area was protected by a rampart built by Dutch settlers, who called it “De Waal Straat.” By the end of the Haitian Revolution, George Washington had been inaugurated there, and the Bill of Rights had been passed at the very same spot. Alexander Hamilton, who constructed the country’s financial regulatory system, is buried not far from the spot where this slave market once stood. On this piece of property, Black bodies evolved from a simple commodity for forced labor into an asset for investment, speculation, and security, traded the same as pork bellies and crude oil.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“Today, Haiti’s legacy is often tarnished, known more for its tragedies than its rich legacy. But the reason for its impoverishment today is that America and France instituted what is possibly the most racist economic foreign policy that ever existed, and upheld it for over two centuries. They did this while other European powers watched quietly. Understanding what two of the most powerful countries in the world did to Haiti requires a suspension of disbelief, because it is so absurd that it sounds like fiction. 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. One could argue that this debt, which thrust the new nation into poverty and took 122 years to pay, was at least half the fault of the European countries who silently allowed France to enact this racist policy. One could perhaps fault America for helping France to extort Haiti. The 1823 Monroe Doctrine had explicitly stated that “any attempt by a European power to oppress or control any nation in the Western Hemisphere would be viewed as a hostile act against the United States,” which America overlooked in this particular case. We just let it slide, because—let’s be honest—using violence or the threat of violence to extract wealth and labor from Black people is kinda America’s thing. America reprimanding France for stealing from Haiti would be like the Rolling Stones calling out the Beatles for appropriating Black music.”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“In case you’re wondering, of course, the French reimposed slavery. 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. The racist French general had invented the gas chamber. But the rebels did not quit. After Louverture’s capture and the other Black generals’ defection to the French side, the freedom fighters resorted to guerrilla tactics. They wore the French Army down, causing them to hire Polish mercenaries as reinforcements. Sickened by the inhumanity of what Rochambeau had ordered the soldiers to do, one of Toussaint’s former commanders, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, decided to abandon his position in France’s army and lead the rebels. When Dessalines marched into Port-au-Prince in his French uniform, whites cheered his arrival. Dessalines waited for the applause to die down and told them that he remembered what it felt like to live as a slave. As the whites gathered around, Dessalines announced his plans to restore peace to the island: He was going to kill all the white people. The formerly enslaved soldier proceeded to capture and hang a hundred white people in Port-au-Prince. When Rochambeau realized that he might have to face an army that was now using white people’s tactics, he advised the white people of Saint-Domingue to follow his own plan and leave. And with that—Haitians had freed themselves. The lesson would send shock waves around the world. With nothing but a knife, a pig, and relentless fortitude, Haiti’s enslaved people had defeated the greatest white empires in Europe of that time.*”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

“Leclerc and Rochambeau were stunned at the discipline and fortitude of Louverture’s well-trained troops. However, in 1802, after the defection of his two top generals, who were promised positions in the French Army in exchange for their loyalty, Toussaint Louverture surrendered to the French under the condition that his soldiers would become part of the French Army and that slavery would not be reinstated. He planned to retire at his plantation, but the French had another plan. French general Jean Baptiste Brunet tricked Louverture into meeting with him, shipped him to France, and locked him in prison in the French countryside, where Louverture eventually starved to death. In case you’re wondering,”
― Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America