Abstract
This chapter will extend Chap. 2’s analysis of the articulations of “Man”/Citizen within African-American theory and praxis. The chapter argues that a tradition of independent constructions of citizenship exists within African-American political theory and activism; this tradition locates Man/Citizen beyond the contradictory formulation of the European Enlightenment model. It is a tradition that is central to the articulation of social nullification within African-American political theory and praxis. The historical investigations of Elsa Barkley Brown and Thom C. Holt on the ways that freed people rearticulated hegemonic formulations of freedom, representative government, and democracy are employed as conceptual lenses for the chapter. Through these frames, it examines the writings of Martin Delany, the political organizing of Ida B. Wells, and the reparations movement as examples of social nullification. These examples illustrate the presence of social nullification, in varied forms, as part of the history and the present of African-American social-political expression.
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Notes
- 1.
Clifton, NJ: African Tree Press, 2015.
- 2.
The final abolition of slavery by the state of New York in 1827, after a slow but steady relinquishing of the practice, becomes a point upon which to hang the “free state” versus “slave state” dichotomy, pervasive in the popular historical imagination.
- 3.
The official title of the law is the 1850 Act to Amend, and Supplementary to the Act, Entitled, “An Act Respecting Fugitives from Justice, and Persons Escaping from the Service of Their Masters” (1793).
- 4.
Northrup, Solomon. 12 Years a Slave: Solomon Northrup’s Odyssey This narrative most dramatically illustrates the dangers of the possible capture of free people who were then sold into slavery.
- 5.
It must be underscored that $1000 in 1850 is equivalent to $33,073 in 2020. The (maximum) amount of the penalty suggests the intensity of the pressure to which local law officials were being subject to.
- 6.
“When you believe in things/That you don’t understand/You will suffer” (Stevie Wonder, 1972).
- 7.
Two of the stories in this semi-autobiographical collection would today be considered to be speculative or science fiction: “Jesus Christ in Texas,” and “The Comet”. The former story imagines what would happen if Jesus of Nazareth appeared in [early 20th century] Texas as an African-American. The latter is a science-fiction narrative about a mysterious comet ending the majority of human life on Earth, leaving an African-American man and white woman to wander through a deserted New York City.
- 8.
“He [Delaney ] had met with John Brown, the radical abolitionist, in Chatham, Canada, where Brown revealed his plans, including those for Harper’s Ferry, and of his plans for a Provisional Constitution, which would allow for the rights of free Blacks and slaves. Later when Brown was caught, and tried, Delaney’s name and correspondence that he had with Brown came before the Senate investigation committee” (Malveaux 1973, 55).
- 9.
The later chapters of Delaney’s Condition (17–21) contain his assessment of possible sites for an independent society, including Liberia, Canada, Central and South America, and the Caribbean (and Nicaragua and Grenada, specifically).
- 10.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett, “Lynch Law in America,” in The Light of Truth: Writings of an Anti-Lynching Crusader, ed. Mia Bay (New York: Penguin Classics, 2014), 394.
- 11.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett, “The Crusade Justified,” in Bay, The Light of Truth, 281.
- 12.
“The Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments remained in effect, and Hayes had pledged to uphold them. He had expressed his distaste for the Republican regimes which remained in the South, and he had already sent signals during the campaign that he would remove the small contingent of federal troops that remained outside the state houses in South Carolina and Louisiana, thus causing the Republican governments that had been supported by the Grant administration to be replaced by rival, shadow governments run by Democrats” (Huebner 2016, 437).
- 13.
Foner, Eric. The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2010). Despite the opening of the lands of the Northwest Territory and the prohibition against slavery in the territory, and the antipathy of the upper south white migrants to the territory, “Such men viewed slavery less as a moral problem than as an institution that degraded white labor, created an unequal distribution of wealth and power, and made it impossible for nonslaveholding farmers to advance” (6). Foner notes the complexity of the point, “[However] hostility to slavery did not preclude deep prejudices against blacks. The early settlers of Indiana and Illinois wanted to be free of any black presence … Indiana and Illinois did everything they could to discourage the growth of a free black population” (7).
- 14.
Lerone Bennet, arguing Lincoln’s views on race were a defining feature of his character hidden by historical mythologizing and analyzing the intrigues and manipulations of his last 100 days, writes, “He believed until his death that the Negro was the Other, the Inferior, the Subhuman who had to be …subordinated, enslaved, quarantined to protect the sexual, social, political, and economic interests of whites. Everything he did in his last one hundred days, everything he said, even the speeches, his defenders are always praising, was based on this racist idea, which defined his life, his politics and his Gettyburgs.” Bennet, Lerone. Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream. Chicago: Johnson Publishing, Inc. (624).
- 15.
Frederick Douglass stalwart believer in the American republic, in the face of post-Reconstruction outrages, stated, “Let us see what are the relations subsisting between the Negro and the state and national governments—what support, what assistance he has received from either of them. Take his relation to the national government and we shall find him a deserted, a defrauded, a swindled, and an outcast man—in law free, in fact a slave; in law a citizen, in fact an alien; in law a voter, in fact, a disfranchised man. In law, his color is no crime; in fact, his color exposes him to be treated as a criminal. Toward him every attribute of a just government is contradicted. For him, it is not a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Toward him, it abandons the beneficent character of a government, and all that gives a government the right to exist.” “I Denounce the So-called Emancipation As A Stupendous Fraud: Speech on the occasion of the Twenty-Sixth Anniversary of Emancipation in the District of Columbia, Washington, D.C., April 16, 1888,” in Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, Yuval Taylor and Philip Foner, eds. (New York: Lawrence Hill Books, 2000), 717.
- 16.
Ibid., p. 533.
- 17.
William Melvin Kelley’s enigmatic but underrated novel, A Different Drummer. Anchor: New York Reprint edition (May 1, 1990), provides an absurdist but devastating imagining of the White South’s unraveling in the absence of Black people.
- 18.
See Simone W. Davis, “The ‘Weak Race’ and the Winchester: Political Voices in the Pamphlets of Ida B. Wells-Barnett,” Legacy 12, no. 2 (1995): 77–97.
- 19.
Ibid., p. 342.
- 20.
Those in the popular arena that resist the centering of Black labor as the center of the capitalist development of the nations of the North Atlantic world, for example historian Peter Wood, in his effort, 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project (New York: Encounter Books, 2020), argues against a point long asserted by figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880. (New York: Atheneum Books, 1935), C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins. (London: Secker and Warburg, Ltd., 1938) and Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1944) and one long embraced among scholars of the Africana world. More contemporarily Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. (London: Monthly Review Press, 1983) and Gerald Horne, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in 17th Century North America and the Caribbean (London: Monthly Review Press, 2018) provide deeper roots for the role of racialized labor, not only in the development of capitalism but in the very origins of capitalism and the creation of the United States as a white nationalist settler state.
- 21.
Wells enjoyed contemporaries that engaged questions of the exploitation of Black labor, its role in the ordering of US society, and the necessity of socialism as a countervailing force to address the harms done to working peoples. In Chicago, Illinois, there was Lucy Parsons (1853–1942), member of Social Democracy, a founder of the International Workers of the World (1905), and member of the National Committee of the International Labor Board (1927), Lucy Parsons fought on behalf of the working classes, challenging the parties and policies of the ruling classes to renew the American experiment. “Lucy Parsons’ life expressed the anger of the unemployed, workers, women and minorities against oppression and is exemplary of radicals’ efforts to organize the working class for social change” (9). Carolyn Ashbaugh. Lucy Parsons: American Revolutionary (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1976). Baptist minister George Washington Woodbey of California was a long proponent of Socialism and wrote three pamphlets expounding his ideas: “What to Do and How Do We Do it, or Socialism vs. Capitalism” (1903), “The Bible and Socialism: A Conversation Between Two Preachers” (1904), and “The Distribution of Wealth,” (1910) Eric Foner, ed. Black Socialist Preacher (San Francisco, CA: Synthesis Publications, 1983). And finally ideological polyglot and “America’s first Black socialist,” Peter Clark of Ohio deftly navigated post-Reconstruction America’s fraught racial politics through a complex array of political positions and alliances. Taylor, Nikki M. America’s First Black Socialist (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2013).
- 22.
At the 1876 Republican National Convention, Frederick Douglass used the Russian peasants as an example and counterpoint to the injustices visited on the freed people. “When the Russian serfs had their chains broken and were given liberty, the government of Russia, aye, the despotic government of Russia-gave to those poor emancipated serfs a few acres of land on which they could live and earn their bread” (Darity and Mullen 2020, 10). Historian Peter Kolchin argues the parallels and divergences between the conditions of the enslaved and liberated African-American and their historical peers the Russian serf. Kolchin analyzes the conditions of servitude, labor, freedom, and the ideological frames that shaped the conditions of the American freed person and the Russian serf. Kolchin notes a significant distinction in the post-servitude lives of both groups, “The most fundamental consequence concerns the the relationship between the masters and the bondsmen; on the whole Russians serfs were able to lead lives, that although circumscribed by the authority of the owners, were much more independent than those of American slaves” (46). Douglass in his acknowledgment denotes this difference as a question of land, the source of autonomy, and self-determination.
- 23.
The Republic of New Afrika’s platform and socio-political goal was the reparative act of ceding sovereignty over large areas of the US South including South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana as an independent republic for African people in America. This policy was based on the articulation of the illegitimate citizenship status of African-descended people in the United States. Rooted in the principles of the New Afrikan Political Science, “The project of RNA sovereignty, independence and reparations rests on the premise that African people in the United States have never been legitimate citizens. Instead the Fourteenth Amendment made them ‘paper citizens,’ people who were deprived of the chance to decide where to place their political consent.” Onaci, Edward. Free the Land: The Republic of New Afrika and the Pursuit of a Black Nation State. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020) 44.
- 24.
More to the point, the ADOS Movement articulates an aggressive Afri-US centricity that invokes a conservative idea of African-American historical identity, a narrow apprehension of the ways in which American white (trans-) nationalist policies have affected African peoples, historically and contemporarily, and problematic articulation of the processes of African Diasporic existence as they relate to the global structures of North Atlantic economic and political dominance and the churning waves of Black interactions that have and continue to contest those structures. In this, ADOS takes a dramatic step back from the structures of Pan-Africanist thought and praxis which have long fueled critiques of the disparate applications of US citizenship to Black residents.
- 25.
“Sign Your Own Emancipation Proclamation!” Atlanta, GA, August 11, 1967.
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Peterson, C.F. (2021). “To Establish a Different Order of Things”: Reconstructions of Afri-Civic Identity. In: Beyond Civil Disobedience. African American Philosophy and the African Diaspora. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77554-4_5
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