Opposition to 1850 Fugitive Slave Act shows the way
May 8, Worcester, Mass. – Ferreria de Oliveira, a migrant from Brazil, screamed for help. Her two daughters, one of whom was carrying her own newborn baby, tried to reach their mother. They were shoved out of the way, with the new mother forced face down onto the pavement and arrested by the ICE agents and Worcester city cops.
A community hotline, “Massachusetts 50501”, notified residents that ICE was on the scene. A crowd gathered in the working-class city of Worcester, Massachusetts, and surrounded the ICE agents and city cops. They chanted “Where is the warrant?”, objecting to these gestapo thugs ignoring the migrant woman’s right to due process.
A spokesman for ICE arrogantly told the press that they didn’t need a warrant, that Oliveira had been arrested before by local police. However, a media search for criminal arrest and court records did not show her name at all.
The city’s cops are forbidden to arrest people for their citizenship status. Massachusetts law forbids police assisting ICE agents detaining people in the state. They were sent to the scene supposedly “to preserve the peace and prevent anyone from being injured.”
Yet the Worcester cops did violate that law by attacking the crowd surrounding masked ICE thugs seizing the migrant mother and arresting her teenage daughter as well as Ashley Spring, a Worcester School Committee candidate. When Spring tried to prevent the juvenile from being arrested, she also was arrested:
“The community gathered,” Spring said on Eureka Street while in handcuffs. “We found out that (ICE) didn’t have a warrant. They didn’t have not just a judicial warrant. They didn’t have a warrant at all. They wouldn’t present it.
“The community decided that these women were free to go, and the women decided to go and exercise their right to leave. At that point, the police continued to try to brutalize them, to rip the baby out of the mother’s arms, 4-week-old baby, and the community tried to intervene and help them.”
The next day hundreds of protesters packed a local YMCA to protest these arrests by both ICE and the city police: “We know that ICE, we know that the federal government, is descending upon communities of color,” Worcester City Councilor Khrystian King said.
“’The message for ICE is to get out of our city,’ Worcester City Councilor Etel Haxhiaj said to applause from residents.
And on May 11 a thousand people rallied on Worcester’s Common. “This issue is very clear. We want ICE to stop acting unconstitutionally. The way that they are taking people reminds all of us of the Gestapo or the KKK,” said Rebecca Winter, an organizer with Massachusetts 50501.
Miller declares war on our rights.
On May 9, the day after the ICE attacks in Worcester, Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff and chief snarling-dog advisor who orchestrated President Trump’s crackdown on immigration, announced that the White House was considering defying numerous court decisions, including some by the Supreme Court, by suspending immigrants’ right to habeas corpus:
“The Constitution is clear,” he told reporters outside the White House, arguing that the right, known as a writ of habeas corpus, “could be suspended in time of invasion.”
“That’s an option we’re actively looking at,” he said, adding, “A lot of it depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not.”
Miller’s timing was not random. He made this statement to intimidate the growing militant resistance to ICE by saying that Trump has the right to not only arrest and deport migrants, but also to arrest anyone who gets in their way, including the heroic people of Worcester.
This would nullify every state and local government that prohibits police from assisting ICE’s illegal arrests and deportations.
The Miller-Trump proclamation echoes the enslaver-controlled federal government before the Civil War, who repressed those who defied the slave catchers sent to the North empowered by the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act.
The Jerry Rescue, the Boston Vigilance Committee and the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue
William Henry, who called himself “Jerry”, escaped from slavery in Missouri in 1843 and made his way to Syracuse, New York, where he found work as a cooper, a maker of wooden barrels.
In 1850, the U.S. Congress, under the control of the South’s enslavers, passed the infamous Fugitive Slave Act. It required that all escaped slaves, upon capture, be returned to the slave-owner and that officials and citizens of free states had to cooperate.
In effect, this act nullified all the northern states’ laws against slavery and turned every cop and judge into slave catchers. Anyone who opposed this could be arrested and jailed.
In 1851, five U.S. Marshals went to Jerry’s workplace and arrested him, preparing to return him to his Missouri owner. At the same time, an anti-slavery convention was set to open in Syracuse.
On October 1, the day after Jerry’s arrest, a large crowd gathered outside the jail where he was being held. At a signal, they all broke in and freed Jerry. He was then guided to Canada and freedom.
When the convention opened a few days later, Reverend Samual May spoke:
But when the people saw a man dragged through the streets, chained and held down in a cart by four or six others who were upon him; treated as if he were the worst of felons; and learnt that it was only because he had assumed to be what God made him to be, a man, and not a slave—when this came to be known throughout the streets, there was a mighty throbbing of the public heart; an all but unanimous up rising against the outrage. There was no concert of action except that to which a common humanity impelled the people. Indignation flashed from every eye. Abhorrence of the Fugitive Slave Bill poured in burning words from every tongue. The very stones cried out.
In Boston, the abolitionist Vigilance Committee conducted the same kind of militant actions, rescuing George Latimer, who had escaped from Virginia. After his rescue from jail, he was also guided to Canada. The committee also freed the couple Ellen and William Craft, who were able then to travel to England.
John Price was a young man who had escaped his Kentucky slave owner in 1856 and was able to reach the town of Oberlin in Ohio. Lured by a false promise of work in 1858, Price traveled out of Oberlin to the town of Wellington, some 8 miles away. There he was arrested by slave catchers and federal marshals, who prepared to catch a train back to Kentucky.
When the Oberlin townspeople heard about Price’s kidnapping, they sprang into action:
White and black Oberlinians hurried the eight miles to Wellington in wagons, buggies, carriages, and some even on foot to rescue Price from slavery. When John H. Scott went to his neighbor, Mrs. Oliver P. Ryder, to borrow a horse she told him, “If necessary, spare not the life of my beast, but rescue the boy.”
When the southbound train arrived, the situation grew urgent and the crowd began to force their way into the hotel. In the confusion that followed, Price escaped with the help of men who had been trying to negotiate with the captors. Energized by the success of the rescue, Oberlin residents paraded back from Wellington, “shouting, singing, rejoicing in the glad results.”
Although his final destination is unknown, it is believed that Price was able to make his way to Canada.
However, thirty-five of his rescuers were arrested and put on trial, 23 from Oberlin and 12 from Wellington. Two of the defendants sold 5,000 copies of their newspaper “The Rescuer” from inside the Cleveland jail.
On May 24, 1859, thousands of people crowded into Cleveland’s Public Square to support the Rescuers. Court costs continued to mount, and the legal tangle intensified when the Rescuers’ supporters arranged for the arrest of the slave catchers on kidnapping charges in Lorain County.
A deal was finally negotiated and the Rescuers were released on July 6, 1859, eighty-three days after being imprisoned.
The people will win!
The response by the Democratic Party leadership to the Trump-Miller fascist onslaught against undocumented workers has been criminally pathetic. Even when a Wisconsin judge and the mayor of Newark are arrested at ICE’s behest, they have caved at every turn and failed to lead any mass resistance.
This contrasts sharply with the heroic defiance shown by the people of Worcester. Just as the defiers of the Fugitive Slave Act would lead to John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry and then the Civil War, this growing militant campaign for basic solidarity with our migrant sisters and brothers is bound to awaken a massive militant class struggle.
