Published in 1938, “Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution” became C.L.R. James’ magnum opus, though fans of the sport of cricket might beg to differ. “Black Jacobins” was printed by the British publishing house Seckel Warburg as addressing “the only successful slave revolt in history.” Though this claim has been countered by successive historians, it should be argued that the Haitian Rebellion was truly the first social revolution in modern world history. 

Defying the capitalist and racist historiography on Black rebellion that had defined academia and even radical intelligentsia, James displays how it was, in fact, Saint-Domingue/Haiti which resulted in the greatest shift in social relations. For, despite the French overthrow of the Ancien Régime, which left the bourgeoisie in power, the uprising on what was once known as “the Jewel of the Antilles,” when the dust settled, the ownership of the land rested in the hands of the formerly enslaved. 

As one historian quaintly notes: the paradox of the Haitian Revolution is in the end, Africans defended ideals of the French Revolution against the French themselves. What the radical historian Robin D.G. Kelley says of the James’ abbreviated account of the Black radical tradition, “A History of Pan-African Revolt,” is certainly true of “Black Jacobins”: “What made this book even more subversive is that James places Black people at the center of world events; he characterizes uprisings of [people previously described as] savages and religious fanatics as revolutionary movements; and he insists that the great Western revolutionaries needed the Africans as much as the Africans needed them.”1

The dialectical materialism of James as well as Toussaint L’Ouverture and the other revolutionaries in “Black Jacobins” altered the way we all came to the process of Black internationalist struggle for the last 200 years. It also alters the erasure of the Black Radical Tradition amongst the other great social revolutions. No longer just “France, Russia and China,” as Theda Skocpol writes about, Haiti, Jamaica, the Reconstruction American South, Cuba and South Africa, are indispensable for our study of global revolutions.

“Black Jacobins” is the result of C.L.R. James’ ideological and political development as James moved from the liberalism of West Indian society to revolutionary socialism, pan-Africanism and Black Internationalism. 

Culture and anti-imperialism

Cyril Lionel Robert (C.L.R.) James was born in 1901 in Tunapuna, Trinidad, about ten miles east of the nation’s capital, Port of Spain, to a family of Barbadian descent. Affectionately known as Nello by his friends, James was raised in a middle-class and religiously conservative household, where he was deeply impacted by British culture from classical to Late Victorian culture, namely theater and literature. 

James read everything from William Shakespeare to William Thackeray and developed a deep interest in the humanities and social sciences. James writes, “I laughed without satiety at Thackeray’s constant jokes and sneers and gibes at the aristocracy and at people in high places. Thackeray, not Marx, bears the heaviest responsibility for me.”2 James completed his secondary education at the prestigious Queen’s Royal College (QRC) in Port of Spain. Excelling in academics and athletics, James became a club cricketer and an accomplished track and field athlete, setting the Trinidadian record in the high jump. It was there that James also developed his love for writing.

In his first act of resistance, James rebelled against the Puritanic Christian beliefs of his parents and the trappings of bourgeois Caribbean culture. James’ love for carnival, calypso, jazz and cricket literally moved him beyond the trappings of his class privilege and racial subjugation in colonial Trinidadian society. 

It would eventually be his works as a sports journalist and biographer that influenced his migration to England in the early 1930s. Yet, after his completion at QRC, James had decided to remain in Port of Spain, where he served as a schoolmaster teaching English and History. 

At QRC, James taught the radical scholar and future Trinidadian prime minister, Eric Williams. As a teacher and part-time journalist, James joined two groups that expanded his love for literature and began the process of advancing his political ideology. Now a liberal Trinidadian nationalist, James became the secretary of the Maverick Club, an elite social club free of white colonial participation: “For the most part we were Black people and one brown,” James noted. 

James also participated in an anti-colonial literary society called the Beacon group. James’ love for Victorian literature became the counterpoint through which he began to attack colonial British society through what has been defined as his cultural activism. 

With the Maverick Club, James staged operas and other theatrical performances. With his class at QRC, James put on a fully public rendition of “Othello.” James’s production of the Shakespearean classic undoubtedly anticipated his chronicling of the man that Abe Reynal defined as “The Black Spartacus”: Toussaint L’Ouverture. Understanding the centrality of art and cultural production to radical scholarship and social movements, at the climax of “Black Jacobins,” James notes, “There is no drama like the drama of history.” It was not enough just to tell the truth. One must make it fun.

C.L.R. James and the Black radical tradition

In 1958, the Caribbean American radical Cyril Briggs was red-baited by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Cold War U.S. strategy had sought to blame the surge of Black communist activity in the United States on outside agitation, removing any form of Black agency. 

In his retort, the founder of the African Blood Brotherhood and former Communist Party member Briggs stated, “I don’t know what Communists or communism have to do with my position, because this has been my position since 1912, before there was, as I understand it, a Communist Party in the United States. It will continue to be my position despite any attempt by this committee to intimidate me.”3 

Briggs’ story is true of James and many other Black Marxists since. Communism did not bring them to Black liberation politics. Black liberation politics brought them to communism. Though many would like to remove this context from the production of “Black Jacobins,” it would be ahistorical. “Black Jacobins” is the result of James’ movement towards revolutionary socialism and African liberation politics upon his migration to England in the early 1930s as he fell into Trotskyist circles.

“Black Jacobins” is not just a historical text but also a Black manifesto — a declaration of revolutionary independence. In the preface to the 1963 version of the book, James writes that “Black Jacobins” was “intended to stimulate the coming emancipation of Africa” but “only the writer and a handful of close associates thought, wrote and spoke as if the African events of the last quarter of a century were imminent.” 

As well, he intended his second edition of the book to attempt “for the future of the West Indies, all of them, what was done for Africa in 1938.” Both of James’ editions proved to be prescient adventures seen as an independence movement emerged in the Caribbean in the 1960s as it had in Africa during the 1940s — and let us not forget the social and cultural revolutions taking place in Black North America as well.

“Black Jacobins” has become not just a blueprint for revolution, but a blueprint for writing about revolutions. The text stands out because of the fact that it is not simply a historical analysis but also a historiographical analysis in which James engages the traditional historian critique of the Haitian Revolution as well as the overall discourse on Black agency. 

“The only place where Negroes did not revolt is in the pages of capitalist historians,” James wrote in 1939. Notably, James did not simply say “conservative” or even “white supremacist.” Instead, he states “capitalist historians,” which expresses the limits of conservative and white supremacist scholarship. Conservative historians such as Ulrich B. Phillips had penned apologies for slavery. Yet, it was the liberal scholar that attributed Black freedom to well-intentioned European and white American reformers.

In a remarkable line in the preface, James says that the traditionally famous historians were more artists than scientists: “They wrote so well because they saw so little.” This trend–his critique of traditional historiography–continues later in the text; he criticizes French historians’ patronizing and critical views of Toussaint while lacking major critique of Laveaux (Etienne Laveaux). As well, another instance of historiographic critique is in his explanation of the destruction of the white population of Saint-Domingue, which James describes as being caused by voluntary white emigration to the United States of America in the late 18th century. In James’ critique, historians seemed more interested in apologizing for white racism than actually intensely critiquing the actions of the Black revolutionaries.

It is worth noting that James also departed from Marxist scholarship of the moment, including that of his childhood friend Malcolm Nurse, who had by the 1930s assumed the nom de guerre George Padmore. At that moment, in stark contrast to James’ Trotskyism, Padmore was a Stalinist. Yet, despite the anti-vanguardist position taken by some adherents to Trotskyist socialism, the difference between Padmore’s “The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers” (1931) and James’ “Black Jacobins” was not whether a vanguard party would emerge to lead the cause for Black liberation, but exactly how that revolutionary leadership would emerge. 

The question of power

This became the essence of what James would later call “The Question of Power.” Very similar to James in his text, Padmore chronicled the exploitation of Black workers, condemning slavery, colonialism and the exploitation of the Black masses by opportunist reformists. Yet in the end, Padmore saw it as the role of the progressive white working class to educate “backward” Black workers. 

In an obituary to the historian and revolutionary, Walter Rodney, C.L.R. James recalled a conversation he had with Leon Trotsky about Vladimir Lenin’s leadership and political analysis. Trotsky told James, “Lenin always had his eyes upon the mass of the population, and when he saw the way they were going, he knew that tomorrow this was what was going to happen.”4 

Far from a submission to spontaneity, revolutionary leadership came from within, “ This defined Toussaint’s leadership. A formerly enslaved coach driver, Toussaint had risen to the level of a well-read landowner. But once the revolution began, Toussaint committed what the Guinean-Cape Verdean revolutionary, Amilcar Cabral, called “class suicide.” Toussaint abandoned his wealth and privilege, fled to the hills and built amongst the rebels.

Throughout the text, emphasis is placed on the collective organization of the slaves as well as the remarkable sense of justice and restraint repeatedly shown towards mulattoes, big whites (“grand blancs” — the planter class) and the small whites. Common identity and place of origin as well as religious commonality emerge as signifying factors in “Black Jacobins.” 

“Voodoo was the medium of the conspiracy. In spite of all prohibitions, the slaves travelled miles to sing and dance and practice the rites and talk.” The first leader of the conspiracy was a head slave and high voodoo priest named Boukman. James describes Boukman as following in the tradition of a maroon slave revolutionary, Mackandal, who attempted to lead an overthrow of slavery in Haiti a generation earlier.

African slaves poisoned their masters, broke tools and destroyed crops. Obviously, James attempts to explain the role of slaves in the destruction of capitalism; henceforth, he compares them to “the Luddite wreckers.” As stated earlier, even amidst the remarkable white-on-Black violence that takes place throughout the text, the slaves and Toussaint are repeatedly described as practicing restraint. 

Distinction is placed on this being an organized revolution and not merely a slave riot, as it was repeatedly described. “The slaves had revolted because they wanted to be free,” James writes. But as the famous adage goes, without struggle there can be no progress, and progress for Haitian revolutionaries took over a decade. Toussaint led the fight against the white and mulatto slaveholders, the Spanish, the English and the French before the Black slaves of Saint-Domingue were able to declare complete independence in 1804.

The lessons of Saint-Domingue

Besides Toussaint and Boukman, major players in this text are: 

• Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who is described as a fearless ex-slave who was willing to be more violent with whites; 
• André Rigaud, a mulatto revolutionary and French loyalist from the South; 
• Jean François, a native of San Domingo who was good looking and very proud; 
• Georges Biassou, a Black revolutionary “fire-eater”; 
• Léger Félicité Sonthonax, a French abolitionist and Jacobin; and 
• British Col. Thomas Hedouville and British Gen. Thomas Maitland, English dispatches to Saint-Domingue. 

The story plays out as a struggle between the most privileged of the population versus those seen as grassroots leaders. The whites and mulattoes are treated with the most suspicion throughout the book. They are even treated with more skepticism than metropole white’s Sonthonax, the right-wing Jacobin. 

Seemingly critiqueing his contemporary times, James goes back and forth with his critique of French liberal efforts to end slavery — such as the efforts of the “Friends of the Negro” society. While they had very well-intentioned rhetoric, they are depicted as powerless early on in the book and unwilling to take extra steps to eradicate slavery later on in the book. At the points where they do find legislative success in France, it is because they were aided by the revolutionary actions of slaves back in the Antilles.

Recalling his love for drama, “Black Jacobins” is told in acts. James begins with the conspiracy of the island’s maroon societies led by François Mackandal and ends with Jean-Jacques Dessalines’ final thrust towards Haitian Independence. 

Toussaint’s central leadership, in “Black Jacobins” is defined by his keen sense of strategy. Toussaint successfully united various forms of Saint-Domingue’s society: Free and enslaved; Christian and Vodun; African and mulatto. 

Unlike almost every other African slave rebellion, the rebels in Saint-Domingue solicited foreign support for the cause of the rebels and not the slave owners, as Toussaint played European nations against each other. However, Toussaint’s organizational strength in the end became his weakness. Captured by the French and imprisoned in a cold prison in the French Alps, Toussaint fell victim to his own Eurocentrism. 

His “failure was the failure of enlightenment, not of darkness,” James wrote. Comparatively, Toussaint’s successor, Jean Jacques Dessalines “could see so clearly and simply … because the ties that bound this uneducated soldier to French civilization were of the slenderest.” The path towards freedom for people of African descent now is just as it was in Haiti, James believed: Clear your mind of any negative ideas of Africa. Turn your head away from Europe and towards Africa to find freedom.

“Black Jacobins” was the final leg in a three-part chronicling of the Haitian Revolution and the Black Radical Tradition. First, James produced a play on the life of Toussaint starring Paul Robeson. Second, James produced the pamphlet, “A History of Negro Revolt,” later retitled “A History of Pan-African Revolt,” and lastly, was the masterpiece: “Black Jacobins.” 

With three distinct forms of media, James altered Black consciousness and world history. Accompanied by W.E.B. Du Bois’ “Black Reconstruction in America” and Herbert Aptheker’s “American Negro Slave Revolts,” no longer could it be said that freedom was something given to African people. Subsequent authors like Cedric Robinson, Robin Kelley, Walter Rodney, Angela Davis, William Martin and Michael West, Vijay Prashad, Robin Blackburn, Steven Hahn, Gerald Horne, Hakim Adi and others have followed in James’ stead. But James’ work remains the pinnacle of Black radical scholarship.

1. Robin Kelley, “Introduction” to “A History of Pan-African Revolt” by C.L.R. James, 17.
2. James in “Beyond a Boundary”quoted in Cedric Robinson’s  “Black Marxism, 70.
3. HUAC, tinyurl.com/v3oru7s
4. “Walter Rodney and the Question of Power,” C.L.R. James, 1981, tinyurl.com/thvngp9

Recently, I watched the opening episode of the new HBO series “Watchmen.” Like millions of other viewers, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the episode began with the white terrorist assault on the community of Greenwood in Tulsa, Okla., popularly known as the Black Wall Street Massacre. 

The Black Wall Street riot resulted in as many as 300 Black people killed and hundreds more injured and has left a critical mark on the Black popular memory in recent decades, which we will discuss later. The omnipresence of Black Wall Street in the Black imagination undoubtedly influenced its insertion into the debut episode. 

The premier episode opened with a young Willis Reeves sitting in a Black movie theater watching a motion picture while his mother played the score on a piano. This fictional film featured a Black sheriff coming to the rescue of a frontier town and recalled the cinematography of Oscar Micheaux, the father of Black Cinema, and his two early films, “The Homesteader” and “Within Our Gates,” the latter being a cultural response to D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of A Nation” and the Chicago Race Riot of 1919. 

Willie’s film-going experience is abruptly ended by a white supremacist aerial assault. Immediately after Willie is transported out of town, the building he was in explodes from another bomb, killing his parents. The episode then moves to the present, where an unarmed Black police officer is shot by a white supremacist. In the following scenes, it is revealed that the hero of the television show, played by Regina King is, once again, a police officer.

I know what you are wondering. “I thought this article was about Chicago 1919? Why in the world is he talking about Tulsa 1921?” For this reason, let’s turn to this popular social media meme.

This widely distributed meme displays the way the period of racial violence and resistance has been largely retained as part of the Black capitalist imagination. This sort of memory obscures the way that the accumulation of Black wealth was the precise purpose for the colonial violence African people in the United State have endured. 

Instead, the lesson of Black Wall Street has become that “the color of Black Power is green.” Neither “Watchmen,” this meme, nor the popular documentary series “Hidden Colors” makes mention of the African Blood Brotherhood, the revolutionary nationalist organization led by Black Communist Cyril Briggs, which took up arms and defended Greenwood. Black capitalist histories have instead erased the legacy of New Negro-era Black radicalism.

This article seeks to recover the history of interwar Black Radicalism’s response to white terror. I aim to make three points: 

1. Cultural workers played a vital role in leading the call for armed self-defense and revolution; 
2. This was an internationalist struggle where African descended people clearly understood the white terror in the U.S. as a form of colonial violence, they saw their local and national struggles as tied to the international revolutions and; 
3. This legacy still informs the vanguard of African global revolution in the 21st century.

Ida B. Wells recognized lynchings as colonial violence

Let’s go back a little further, and then I promise we will move forward in time. In March 1892, three friends of Ida B. Wells–Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart–were killed as a part of the People’s Grocery lynching. Co-owners of the People’s Grocery, Moss, McDowell and Stewart were murdered at the moment that their business began to rival a local white grocery store. 

Wells credits this event for the radical shift in how she viewed lynchings. Before, she admits, she believed them to be excessive acts against criminals. Yet, as Megan Ming Francis notes, Wells discovered that the cause of lynchings is economic and not criminal. Unfortunately, when recounting the history of lynchings and racial violence, it is assumed that allegations of sexual assault were the leading cause. THEY WERE NOT. Ignoring this reality limits not only our analysis but our political practice.

Racial violence in the United States was a form of colonial violence. The purpose was to reinforce the unevenly structured relations between white people and Black people in the United States. Ida B. Wells, Marcus Garvey, Claude McKay and subsequent activists recognized this and it became the factor for Black international formation. In response to the death of her friends, Ida B. Wells noted that it was “a scene of shocking savagery that would have disgraced the Congo.”

Migration of the African working class

Black Internationalism of the early 20th century was the product of the contradictions of global Black migration. Before he was shot to death, Thomas Moss reportedly said: “Tell my people to go West — there is no justice for them here.” 

Ida B. Wells moved to Chicago, Ill. Jim Crow’s racial terror is one push factor that overdetermined the rural to urban migration of millions of African Americans known as the Great Migration. Yet, Black migrants were met with more white terrorism. 

Illinois was home to three of the largest destinations–Springfield, East Saint Louis and Chicago–in the Red Summer of 1919, a term dubbed by James Weldon Johnson, an NAACP leader at the time. Two years earlier, the U.S. had been rocked with a series of race riots, including the one in East Saint Louis. W.E.B. Du Bois and Johnson responded by organizing a silent march in protest.

Yet, two years later, African Americans did not respond passively to racial violence. In 1919, over forty cities in the U.S. experienced race riots and as many as 1,000 people were killed. Arguably the worst, however, was in Chicago between July 27th and Aug. 3rd.

However, the Red Summer represented a turning point. While white violence claimed the lives of 23 Black Chicagoans, responding in armed self-defense, 15 whites were killed. Similarly, just weeks earlier in Longview, Texas, Black residents used their rifles in self-defense. This prompted the publication of “If We Must Die,” which became an anthem of Black resistance. Not surprisingly, however, it was not originally published in a Black organ but instead in a new socialist publication, The Liberator, edging towards the political shifts in Black radical politics:

IF WE MUST DIE

IF we must die—let it not be like hogs

Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,

While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,

Making their mock at our accursed lot.

If we must die—oh, let us nobly die,

So that our precious blood may not be shed

In vain; then even the monsters we defy

Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!

Oh, Kinsmen! We must meet the common foe;

Though far outnumbered, let us show us brave,

And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!

What though before us lies the open grave?

Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,

Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

— Claude McKay (1919)

Claude McKay and the African Blood Brotherhood

Let us compare McKay’s poem to another piece of cultural work produced that year: Oscar Micheaux’s “Within Our Gates.” Also, a response to the Red Summer, Micheaux’s film, while groundbreaking, represented the respectability politics and pigmentocracy of the mainstream civil rights activists. 

“If We Must Die” helped prompt the organization of the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB) in September 1919. This was a period of global revolutionary struggle. McKay and others were inspired by the groundswell of anticolonial struggles amongst African people around the world as well as the Bolshevik Revolution, and even the Irish Revolution. Even Marcus Garvey, who spoke disparagingly of white American socialists, spoke favorably of Lenin, the Bolsheviks and he supported Irish struggles. However, it is important to note that the ABB and McKay were inspired by the Communist International and the Bolsheviks, but not organized by them. They organized independently.

McKay represented another Black migration, the movement of African and Caribbean migrants from the periphery of the Western empire to its metropolitan centers. In 1912, McKay immigrated to the United States from Jamaica to attend Tuskegee Institute but was quickly shocked by the white power he encountered. 

As Winston James argues in “Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicals in Early Twentieth-Century America,” these confrontations with American racial capitalism had a jolting impact on Caribbean migrants for whom class and other privileges eroded. For in the United States, “race became the modality through which class was lived.” Immigration of African and Caribbean people to the U.S. in the early 20th century generated cross identification within the African diaspora that caused a multidirectional shift in identity and politics.

McKay, Cyril Briggs, Grace Campbell, Otto Huiswood and the leadership of the ABB developed the Universal Negro Improvement Association into a vanguard organization in the Black Freedom struggle. Sympathetic with the mass movement and respectful of the leadership of Marcus Garvey and the UNIA, they had all embraced socialism, in its different forms. Sympathetic with the struggles of the global working class, they also gained inspiration from the anticolonial struggles and socialist revolutions of the age. The ABB’s internationalism is captured in Briggs’s 1920 statement, “The cause of freedom, whether in Asia or Ireland or Africa, is our cause.”

The ABB also forged unity between African American and Afro-Caribbean migrants. As Minkah Makalani notes in his seminal text on Black internationalism “In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939”:

“The ABB’s membership consisted largely of workers — skilled laborers in Chicago; coal miners in West Virginia; World War I Veterans in Tulsa, Oklahoma; Anglo-Caribbean migrant laborers in the Domincan Republic and Panama.” 

At its peak, the ABB had 8,000 members. This paled in comparison to the millions in the ranks of the UNIA. Fashioned as “revolutionary secret order,” the ABB sought to raise the consciousness of the global African working class through what later became known as programmatic influence.

In 1921, the ABB gained a surge in popularity as reports of their armed defense of Tulsa spread. The following year, the ABB merged with the Communist Party. Vladimir Lenin had already stressed the importance of solidarity with anticolonial struggles in Africa and Asia. 

Yet, it is people like McKay and Huiswood who not only sharpened the Communist International’s position on the Negro Question: that is, the right to self-determination for the Black working class in the United States and Africa. The end result was, in fact, a synthesis of communist and Garveyist thought at the Sixth Comintern in 1928 with the production of the Black Belt Thesis on the U.S. and the Native Republic Thesis on South Africa, which demanded Black independence in the U.S. and national leadership in South Africa.

The one downfall, however, is that the ABB and the UNIA never found complete unity. The conflict between the ABB and the UNIA was hastened by government agitation — the first Black agents of the then Bureau of Investigation (now FBI) were hired to infiltrate and bring down both movements. 

However, the ABB suffered from its own failure to accept the will of the people. The African masses had chosen Garvey and the UNIA. As many argue, in the United States the movement would have been much stronger if the ABB leadership had made a stauncher commitment to principled engagement from within as members of the UNIA. In South Africa, far away from the center of conflict in New York, activists such as James La Guma synthesized Garveyism and Socialism — it would not be until the 1960s that these efforts would be reignited.

The Hip Hop Generation

As I have tried to show in my discussion of McKay’s response to the Red Summer, cultural work and cultural workers were central to Black radical formation. Cultural workers have the ability to move us beyond contemporary crises and enable the masses to imagine a new world beyond oppression — historian Robin Kelley refers to these radical productions as freedom dreams. 

Much of the contemporary freedom dreaming has been devoid of meaningful Black internationalism and calls to arms. Instead, appeals to the American nation-state and calls for nonviolent direct action have predominated.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the end of apartheid, the creation of NAFTA and the creation of Operation Gatekeeper. Defined by a rise in neoliberal policy and cultural production, this period has been defined by an increased transnational movement of capital but a fracturing of Black international unity. 

We must remember that 1994 was also the year of the Rwandan Genocide and the U.S. invasion of Haiti. Confronted with images (1) a tendency of reformist activists would join with the Democratic Party or, at the least, further engage the arena of electoral politics; (2) a new generation of cultural nationalism would emerge. Far more intersectional than its predecessors, this tendency would be just as biologically determined as earlier forms of cultural nationalism. If not more turmoil throughout the African diaspora, the last 25 years have consisted of crosscurrents of disidentification. At no place is this sharper than at many college campuses. Yet this tide has begun to recede. And, once again, it is the product of struggle and cultural production.

Too often the activism in the era of Black Lives Matter has targeted local, state and national reforms as organizational goals — and even worse, mere demands to make white politicians “say black lives matter” became the terrain of struggle. We saw this fatal contradiction during the 2016 election season. 

Following a 2015 interaction between BLM activists and Hillary Clinton, I proposed that three dimensions would emerge from this age of Black radicalism: 

• a tendency of reformist activists would join with the Democratic Party or, at the least, further engage the arena of electoral politics; 
• a new generation of cultural nationalism would emerge. Far more intersectional than its predecessors, this tendency would be just as biologically determined as earlier forms of cultural nationalism, if not more; and 
• revolutionary socialist tendencies would inevitably spread.

Recent studies show that the masses of youth are embracing socialism. This turn towards socialism has been matched with calls for armed self-defense. Chants such as “Fist Up! Fight Back!” and “Black Power Matters” guide the masses at demonstrations. As well, groups such as the Huey P. Newton Gun Club and Guerilla Maneframe have sought to train the masses of the African Working Class. This is the true legacy of 1919 — socialism and self-defense.

In Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America, the late popular historian Lerone Bennett refers to the African captives who arrived in Jamestown in 1619 as immigrants. “An estimated million of these slaves found their way to the land that became the United States of America. But the first Black immigrants … were not slaves,” Bennett wrote. 

Bennett did not aim to obscure the harsh reality of slavery in American colonial society. Instead, Bennett had used this term to highlight the shifts in the colonial political economy that slavery ushered in. Duke University Professor Emeritus of History Peter H. Wood called this shift “The Terrible Transformation”: “enslavement of people solely on the basis of race.” 

While this is the popular telling of the first century of slavery in North America, capitalist and liberal contradictions limit the true importance of remembering 1619. A socialist analysis is needed to truly reveal the complexities of that moment.

Rethinking the story of Anthony Johnson

Many of those first Africans who arrived in Virginia had life experiences that were different than those who followed them. Many gained freedom, land and status in the early years of the Virginia Colony. 

The story of Anthony Johnson has been used by historians as the prime example of this early moment. Initially documented as “Antonio a Negro,” Johnson was eventually manumitted and acquired land and wealth. However, Johnson acquired his status by participating in the same economy as his former captors and even maintained an indentured labor force of his own. By the end of his years, Johnson and his family had their “relative equality” revoked. Deemed foreigners and not citizens in Virginia, the Johnsons were exiled to Maryland. 

When examined through a socialist analysis, Anthony Johnson’s story actually reveals the complete opposite of what Bennett attempted to teach. From his classification as a “Negro,” it is clear that racial consciousness, and burgeoning white power, was always apparent in the colonies. As noted in the previous article, the lack of a formal system of slavery in those early years of Virginia had more to do with the colonial ruling class’s reluctance to pay the high prices for slaves. 

In British North America, Indigenous people had clearly been enslaved. 

Even at his peak, Johnson struggled against white power, including efforts by a white neighbor to use the courts to steal his property. Most importantly, Johnson and the hundreds of other Africans that arrived in Virginia were certainly enslaved and on slave ships. 

More importantly, the colonial ruling class did not live in a vacuum. In fact, the early settlers and landowners passed through Spanish and British colonies in the Caribbean and the Atlantic which were all highly functioning slave societies by the early 16th century. 

From a society with slaves to a slave society

The first decades of Virginia are best described as a society with slaves, and not a slave society. Mixed labor forces were initially used in Virginia, the way the labor in New England had functioned. A slave society is described as a political economy where slavery and slave ownership defined the relations of production. 

It is safe to argue that the development of a Southern colonial slave society was overdetermined by the broader transnational society in which Virginia and the subsequent colonies of Maryland and the Carolinas existed. The formation of the United States has influenced a form of teleology in American history. 

This means that because the 13 North American colonies collectively seceded from England, many assume these societies were always linked. To continue to tell the story of the early Virginia colony as an “Uncertain Century” where slavery was not preordained also conjures a form of American Exceptionalism. Nowhere else in the colonial world, at that time, had a single-crop agricultural society been crafted with free-labor. Slavery was always an option in Virginia, even before the official laws emerged. 

The Virginia planter class were highly familiar with the system of slavery.

Indentured servitude was always a trick and never meant to produce the “relative freedom” that Anthony Johnson had, which is why it was eventually destroyed. 

At the beginning of the Virginia Colony, Christians could not, initially, be permanently enslaved, like Indigenous Peoples already had been. Anthony Johnson, an Angolan native who had likely been previously enslaved in the Caribbean, simply exposed the contradictions of early colonial society and, for a moment, slipped through the cracks. 

Angola had been colonized by the Catholic Portuguese since the middle of the 15th century. Either in Africa, or as a part of the “seasoning” process in the Caribbean, Johnson would have already been baptized. However, christening only nominally changed the status of these early Africans. Even when they were tagged as servants, none of these laborers were expected to live out their terms of indenture. In the early years of the colony, mortality rates were as high as 55 percent. By the 1630s, mortality rates began to subside. As well, the number of white servants migrating to Virginia decreased. 

Slavery dominated gender and family relations of Africans

The planter class’s cost-benefit analysis then revealed the institutionalization of slavery in the American colonies to be far more profitable than the servitude scheme. But again, both systems were meant to be lifelong systems of servitude. 

By the late 17th century, the Middle Atlantic colonies began to craft laws that clearly defined the institution of slavery in the U.S. Africans could not gather in large numbers without whites present. Africans could not own weapons. Africans could not own land. 

Conversion to Christianity did not protect Africans from enslavement. Importantly, freedom was determined by the status of one’s mother, not one’s father. In 1656, Elizabeth Key, the offspring of an African mother and European father had won freedom and land because of her father’s status. Planters overturned English common law by linking freedom to the status of the mother. 

This is why the study of race, class and gender are crucial in grasping the origins of slavery and capitalism. Whereas in the Caribbean, the cost-benefit analysis of the planter class deemed it cheaper to work enslaved Africans to death, in the North American colonies it was assessed that “natural” birth was best for profit margins. So, unlike other parts of the Americas, there was far more gender parity in the Africans important to British North America.

Toward a Black socialist analysis

The institutionalization of slavery in the British American colonies did not only produce the wealth of the United States and England, it produced the modern global system of capitalism. As Walter Rodney notes in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, even when plantation economies emerged in Indian Ocean societies, Egypt, Zanzibar or India, it was still a part of the expanding system Europeans crafted in the Americas, including Virginia. 

With all due respect to Bennett’s work, Bennett’s thesis on colonial slavery was the product of his own liberal and capitalist contradictions. A socialist analysis revealed in the writings of people like Eric Williams, C.L.R. James, Walter Rodney and Omali Yeshitela, Angela Davis and Cedric Robinson are far more useful than Bennett’s theses.

In his seminal work Black Marxism: The Black Radical Tradition, Cedric Robinson documents the move towards chattel slavery took far longer than a few decades and notes it did not even begin with African-European relations. It was instead a process initiated “for Europeans and by Europeans,” Robinson notes. 

Instead of the Terrible Transformation, Robinson referred to this process as the “invention/creation of the negro.” Race became the ideological justification for the oppression of African people because it was needed to produce capitalism. This is why Robinson used the term racial-capitalism to describe the institution and Chairman Omali Yeshitela of the African People’s Socialist Party uses the term Parasitic Capitalism to describe the system.

Part 1: Slavery, Settler Colonialism, Gender Oppression and Resistance in the Early Colonial Years

This year marks 400 years since “20 and odd” enslaved Africans on board a Dutch frigate were traded for supplies to English settlers at Jamestown.

As historians have noted, these African captives were not the first to be enslaved in North America. Enslaved Africans had been a part of the labor force that had been coerced to build the Spanish colonies of Mexico and Florida. As well, enslaved Africans accompanied the English settlers of the “vanished” colony of Roanoke, thirty years earlier. Also, there were very likely Africans in Jamestown before 1619 who might have arrived by way of Florida.

Nevertheless, none of these new findings diminish the importance of 1619 to our study of slavery, capitalism and the Black freedom struggle. With the introduction of enslaved Africans, the plantation society of colonial Virginia expanded and the wealth of the American colonies was generated. From this, the primary contradiction in American history was generated.

The enslavement of hundreds of thousands of Africans over the following 160 years produced the independence of the bourgeois class of American settlers from England — literally. Tobacco farmed by enslaved Africans in Virginia became currency paid to the French for their decisive support of American colonial rebels.

American culture celebrates the formation of the Plymouth Colony as its national origin because it reinforces national mythology: units of Christian families migrated to the United States in search of religious freedom. No such pretenses are in the formation of the Virginia Colony. As historian Annette Gordon-Reed notes, Jamestown is the United States’ Garden of Eden and slavery and white supremacy is the nation’s original sin.

In May 1607, the 104 original settlers arrived in Jamestown. All of them were men and boys contracted as a part of an expedition financed by the Virginia Company of London. With no women, this trek was an economic venture intent on creating an extractive economy. The settlers hoped to find precious minerals, wood and other natural resources that could be sent back to England. As well, they were in search of a Northwest Passage to Asian trade markets. In exchange, they were met with death and starvation.

The subsequent three years are historically known as the Starving Time. Less than 40 of the original settlers survived until 1608. As many as 500 more settlers arrived, but only 60 were alive by 1610. Mineral extraction had failed and the drought hurt their efforts at sustenance farming. The fate of the colony shifted in 1610 with the arrival of John Rolfe and a shift in the extractive economies.

In 1610, John Rolfe arrived in Virginia. Rolfe, an English merchant, aimed to undercut the Spanish monopoly on the tobacco trade. The tobacco smoked in the American northeast was too strong to be mass produced for the English market.

Introducing a much more popular strand of tobacco to the English and European society, Rolfe cornered the market and made Virginia the center of the tobacco industry. This became the material basis for the development of American society. By 1620, Rolfe was shipping 40,000 pounds of tobacco to England, annually. By 1624, it had become 240,000 annual pounds. By 1680, that metastasized to 25 million pounds per year.

Tobacco became one-fourth of all American colonial exports and 70 percent came from Virginia. In European society, tobacco moved from being an elite luxury to a common practice and a plurality of the global product came from the Chesapeake region.

However, tobacco is a very labor intensive crop. Mass production of tobacco was first made possible through servant and slave labor and subsequently through automation. Very hard on the soil, tobacco also requires frequent crop rotations. The need for more plantation land and cheap or enslaved labor highlights the relationship between settler colonialism and that enslavement which defined the peculiarity of the American political economy in the 17th century.

Commemorating four hundred years of Black freedom struggle in the British North America, this series examines that first century of life in the American colonies. In the construction of a racial capitalist venture, slavery, the histories of African, Native and working people in the American colonies overlapped.

This first decade was a moment of uncertainty which included multiple acts of resistance and solidarity. In this series, we will highlight the struggles of Africans, Native people and indentured servants to forge solidarity and find freedom. These struggles at the rise of American colonialism serve as a lesson of solidarity and resistance in the 21st century.

Part 2: From the Terrible Transformation to the Creation of the Negro: A Black Socialist Analysis of the First Century of Slavery in North America