Fight songs
If everything seems overwhelming right now and the idea of fighting back feels impossible, please take this little note from history:
When George Washington was first elected in 1789, the nation’s capital was Philadelphia. At that time, Pennsylvania had a law that freed enslaved people if they lived in the state for at least six months.
Despite what you may have heard, Ol’ Georgie was a classic aristocrat. He was born into unimaginable wealth, and by the time he was president he was the richest man in the country. He inherited 10 enslaved people when he was only 11 years old, so he would’ve been stumbling around with his wig on backwards and his underwear outside his pants were his every lifelong need not tended by those he referred to as “my negroes.”
Barely aware as he was, Georgie knew this six-months-to-freedom bullshit was not gonna work for him. So he got his secretary and the attorney general to help him come up with a scheme to avoid doing literally anything for himself. Just before every six-month mark, the people Georgie enslaved would be taken out of state and then immediately returned. This was somehow considered a legitimate loophole allowing circumvention of the law and repeated tyrannical violations of rights.
Georgie wrote about hiding these actions from voters and the people he’d enslaved, but Black folks figured out what he was doing pretty quick and many actually escaped his enslavement. I bet he was thinking of them when he signed the 1793 Fugitive Slave Law allowing the legal hunting and abduction of Black folks “alleged” to have escaped enslavement.
Police were originally created in the South to re-abduct people who’d escaped enslavement. When police forces were officially established in the North, officers would often kidnap Black people at random and sell them off to Southern slavers. Judges, of course, could intervene, but many came from enslaver families, so they rarely did. In fact, judges were permitted to decide the status of an alleged “fugitive slave” without a jury trial. On top of that, a later law created “ten dollar judges,” who received a fee of ten dollars — more than $400 in today’s money — from the state for every Black person they “returned” to enslavement.
If you were a Black person on the run, it was in absolutely no one’s material interest to help you, especially white people’s. This is not only because aiding escape was illegal, but because enslavers frequently offered a bounty up to five times more lucrative for capture of a white person who helped someone escape than for the escapee.
Yes, if you were Black at that time — free or otherwise — you could trust that any white person, from the president down to the local cop to the random passerby on the street, was incentivized one way or another to send you to a plantation where you could be tortured, sexually assaulted, maimed, murdered, and at the very least, imprisoned for the rest of your life.
There’s no shortage of people who will tell you that’s just how it was back then. They’ll tell you racism was more accepted, and even evils like slavery were just thought to be perfectly natural.
Those people are, historically speaking, completely, humiliatingly fucking wrong. As long as slavery has existed, there have been abolitionists. And while, yes, some founding fathers like Washington loved slavery from the depths of their souls, others, like his vice president and our second president, John Adams, called slavery “an evil of Colossal magnitude.”
There were white men like William Lloyd Garrison, an abolitionist and journalist who published the anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator. And, naturally, Black folks were always breaking ourselves free. Over 500,000 of us escaped to so-called contraband camps operated by the Union Army. Free Black folks formed mutual aid societies to buy more of us out of slavery. And then there were folks like Harriet Tubman.
Even here in lil’ ol’ Maine, there was Reuben Ruby. In fact, if you go to the heart of downtown Portland, you’ll find a marker that reads as follows:
“The hack stand of Reuben Ruby, corner of Temple and Federal Streets. Ruby (1798-1878) was Portland’s foremost African American Anti-Slavery activist and underground railroad conductor.
“In 1826, Ruby helped publish a protest in the newspaper against the treatment of ‘some six hundred African Americans’ in the white houses of worship in Portland. In 1832 he escorted William Lloyd Garrison around Portland in one of his carriages, introducing him to twenty-one Black anti-slavery activists, and hosting him at the Abyssinian Church, which Ruby helped to found and finance.”
Yes, times are scary, but they’ve been scarier, and many fought back while facing worse odds with far more at stake and still found victory.
Fight.
Samuel James also writes “Banned Histories of Race in America” at samuelj.substack.com.
