In 1829, David Walker published Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World. In this pamphlet, Walker rhetorically asked humanity “to search the pages of historians diligently, and see if [anyone] ever treated a set of human beings, as the white Christians of America do us, the blacks….” Walker cited the most quoted section of the United States Declaration of Independence in the opening pages of his Appeal: “We hold these truths to be self-evident—that All men are created EQUAL!!! that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness!!!!!!!”[1] For Walker, these famous words sat at the heart of the central contradiction between the United States’ professed commitment to creating a democratic republic while maintaining chattel slavery and continuing the genocidal removal and erasure of First Nations peoples across the continent. With verve and candor, Walker asked white Americans to focus on their own words in the Declaration and try to reconcile those bold claims of “unalienable rights” with the “cruelties and murders inflicted by your unmerciful fathers and yourselves on our fathers and on us---men who have never given your father or you the least provocation.”[2]
Walker’s Appeal sent shockwaves through the US South. Georgia offered a $10,000 reward for anyone who captured Walker alive and $1,000 for whoever killed him. Born free in North Carolina, Walker was the son of an enslaved African but came of age in Boston, where he wrote the Appeal while circulating in abolitionist circles advocating for the rights of the enslaved.
Two decades later, Frederick Douglas, the most prominent Black abolitionist of his day, wrote “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro” on July 5, 1852. Like Walker, Douglas strained to reconcile the celebratory ideas of the new republic’s Fourth of July with its deep commitments to slavery. “The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me,” wrote Douglas. Indeed, Douglas adamantly asserted, “This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.” Douglas was befuddled by the idea that whites would “drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join…in joyous anthems…Indeed, the Fourth of July was both cruel and insulting.”[3] Douglas, who had been enslaved in Maryland and escaped bondage, became the most publicly prominent Black abolitionist organizer and orator of his time. He was repulsed by The Fourth of July celebrations and made it clear that his words were a clarion call to his people and a historical corrective to the nation. “Whether we turn to the declarations of the past or the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.”[4]
Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Frederick Douglass (Public Domain; Wikimedia Commons via picryl.com)
Intellectual Insurgents
David Walker and Frederick Douglas are part of what Black studies scholar Cedric Robinson referred to as the Black Radical Tradition—“the continuing development of a collective consciousness informed by the historical struggles for liberation and motivated by the shared sense of obligation to preserve the collective being, the ontological totality.”[5] At the heart of this tradition was revolt and resistance grounded in the ideas and cultural practices of African people’s unquenchable desire to be free and human.
Black Studies scholar George Lipsitz noted that one of Black people’s most significant achievements was their capacity to resist the barbarity of slavery, colonialism, and white supremacy and fight for social justice while maintaining their humanity. Lipsitz also underscored that Black did not strictly refer to phenotype. He noted:
Black’in the Black Radical Tradition is a politics rather than a pigment, a culture rather than a color. Yet this Blackness does not presume a unified, homogenous community with only one set of interests, needs, and desires. On the contrary, Robinson’s research reveals that the key building blocks for Black survival, Black humanity, and Black democracy came from the lower rungs of Black society, from plantations and slave quarters, out of the contradictions of the rural regimes of slavery and debt peonage, and the living conditions in ghettoes in northern and western cities.[6]
Moreover, the Black Radical Tradition was “descriptive and presented the reality of Black life and experiences from the point of view of Black People themselves.”[7]Activist-intellectuals in this tradition refer to all people who champion ideas that seek to improve, liberate, and transform the realities for Black people in the United States and worldwide. Black intellectuals, across the spectrum of literacy and informal and formal education, always focused on Black people’s humanity and recognized them as subjects rather than objects. These activist intellectuals saw themselves as direct extensions and representatives of their people. As subjects, they served as participant observers who began their study and advocacy for Black people as human beings with feelings, emotions, rights, and desires. As a point of departure, Black intellectuals always understood Black people as agents in service of their liberation. They sought to align their efforts with Black people’s diverse needs, dreams, and aspirations.
In addition, the Black intellectual tradition chronicled the “subjective truths of a people’s collective experience…and prescribe[d] practical steps for Black empowerment.”[8] With freedom, power, and liberation square in sight, this tradition worked to be restorative and attend to preserving and fortifying the identity and self-esteem of Black people persistently dehumanized and erased by slavery, racism, colonialism, and white supremacy.
Without question, David Walker and Frederick Douglass bore witness to the Black struggle for survival and freedom, much like abolitionist writer and autobiographer Harriet Jacobs. Born into slavery in North Carolina in 1813, Jacobs, like Douglass, escaped bondage in 1842. She went on to write and self-publish Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in 1861, “widely considered one of the earliest and most comprehensive narratives written by an enslaved woman.”[9] Throughout her autobiography, Jacobs painstakingly detailed her firsthand experiences with slavery and chronicled everything from gruesome torture whippings to rape.
David Walker, Frederick Douglas, and Harriet Jacobs were insurgent Black intellectuals whose ideas, insights, and practices were foundational to the development of Black Studies. The formal term Black studies emerged in the 1960s to refer to the development of academic and institutional programs designed to take an interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary approach to studying Black people in the United States and worldwide. These initiatives grew out of the Black campus movements in the late 1960s. Black students and their allies challenged Eurocentric approaches to education. They demanded that the university become more inclusive and attuned to offering courses and skills that enabled students to become “change agents”[10] in their respective communities. Black Studies scholar Abdul Alkalimat, a student activist in the 1960s, spent most of his activist and academic life chronicling the development and maturation of Black Studies as a field of study. He noted five major activities that define the field:
Black Studies Defining Activities
Black Studies practitioners study and teach about Africa and the African diaspora.
Within Black Studies, Black people are examined as subjects and the primary agents within their own socio-historical experience.
Black Studies seeks to be a humanistic counterweight to racism and white supremacy.
Black Studies celebrate Black life and the Black experience.
Black Studies recognizes itself “as one precious case among many in the universality of the human condition."[
As an evolving field of study, Black Studies seeks to counter racism and racist ideas that Black people are inferior, deficient, and incapable of self-liberation. For Alkalimat, Black Studies
consists of a broad set of intellectual activities generated by Black people to rationally and culturally reflect on and celebrate their own experience. An autonomous process evolves in dialogue and struggle in mainstream institutions of power. It is the intellectual and cultural manifestation of centuries of Black people’s resistance to the racism and national oppression that began with the transatlantic trade of Africans into chattel slavery. [12]
Movements and Principles
Before examining the impact of slavery and the larger history of Black Studies' formal development and institutionalization as an interdisciplinary/multi-disciplinary field of study, we must account for the fact that Black people’s history did not begin with their enslavement. Although the transatlantic slave trade is often presented as the critical starting point for understanding why Black Studies is essential to examining the human condition, it is only part of the story. Enslaved Africans had histories and experiences that preceded their enslavement. To appreciate and understand Africans as human beings, it is essential that we return to Africa and briefly examine the social, political, economic, and cultural contexts that gave birth to those who found themselves in shackles in the United States and throughout the Caribbean and the Americas.
Africa: Land, People, and Culture
Africa is the second largest continent in the world and is not a country. Today, it is common and almost customary for people to discuss Africa as a country, not a continent of fifty-four countries. Though its land mass was formally carved into European colonial territories between 1884-85 at the Berlin Conference, this oversimplification is rooted in a long history of deliberate misrepresentation directly tied to enslavement and colonialism that attempts to narrate Africa out of the modern world, belittle its existence, and relegate it to a past that is static and stands outside of European conceptions of time. This is a tragedy that persists.
To gain some perspective on Africa’s immense size, the United States can fit inside the continent about three and a half times. If it were possible to place the United States inside the Sahara Desert, one could get lost trying to find it in the vast land mass. In addition to being large, Africa is also the birthplace of humanity. Paleontologists have long established that humans originated in eastern Africa, near Kenya and Tanzania. Humans emerged from hominids that date back 4.5 million years ago. Homo sapiens, the ancestors of modern humans, evolved on the continent about 200,000 years ago and began migrating to other parts of the world 100,000 years later.
One of the hallmark characteristics of the African continent is that it is incredibly diverse. Africa’s diversity begins in its land and climate. The Sahara Desert largely dominates Northern Africa. Just below the Sahara is the Sahel, and right below the Sahel are huge savanna grasslands. Below the Sahel, Western Africa is primarily made up of savannas and rainforests “that extends east from the Atlantic coast over most of the central part of the continent.”[13] In addition to the savannas and rainforests, Africa contains extensive mountain ranges. For centuries, European philosophers, writers, and colonial agents negatively misrepresented Africa as a “dark continent” full of impenetrable jungles and wild savages desperately in need of European enlightenment and civilization. Many purported that Africa and its many peoples could not achieve civilizational prowess, although history spoke to the contrary. Indeed, these depictions and mischaracterizations were grounded in ignorance, fear, and colonial interest in conquest. Countering these claims and mythical narratives has been one of the primary concerns of Black Studies.
Africa's Diversity
Africa’s regional and climatic diversity is vital to understanding the evolution of its diverse human population. The Nile River, which flows from south to north, is the world’s largest river and was critical to the development of ancient Egyptian civilization, widely regarded as one of the highest-achieving civilizations known to humanity. The Nile allowed Egypt to flourish agriculturally and gave the ancient Egyptians a “transportation and communications artery, while their desert surroundings protected them from foreign invasion.”[14] Egypt became a unified empire around 3150 BCE and extended its reign to southwest Asia, Nubia to the south, and what is today recognized as modern-day Libya in the west.
Ancient Egypt, one of humanity's most complex and sophisticated civilizations, and its remains have been studied extensively. Ruled by pharaohs who presided over “classes of warriors, priests, merchants, artisans, and peasants,” Egypt developed a complex writing system known as hieroglyphics, and the Egyptians were some of the earliest practitioners of polytheism where many gods came to represent one’s passage into immortality.”[15] Later, Egypt would be at the forefront of monotheistic (belief in one God) religious practices, which is foundational to today’s great religions. Without question, Egyptian developments and advancements in mathematics, architecture, and the sciences, in general, were without a peer in the ancient world and remained the most outstanding example of human achievement during that period.
The Egyptians were melanated Africans. This point might seem obvious because Egypt resides in Africa; however, scores of European writers, historians, and anthropologists have asserted otherwise. Because of the grandeur of Egyptian civilization, many have sought to sever Egypt from the continent and suggest that its achievements were more aligned with European developments connected with Greece and other areas in the Mediterranean world. Racism and white supremacy made it unthinkable for some that the Egyptians were people with melanin tied to the greater interior of the African continent. Despite many Greek philosophers’ deference to Egypt and immense respect for its civilizational prowess, many European writers refused to see Egypt as part of sub-Saharan Africa because it disrupted and destabilized many racist myths that have been established for centuries. (Diop 1974 reissued in 1989, 1-42)
As early as 1526, Africans were captured, shackled, and transported in the bottom of ships headed to the Americas. They were primarily the descendants of African nations and communities in West Africa. Although there have been legends that have suggested developments in West African societies were directly tied to the Kushite communities in Meroe (the capital) that were part of the Egyptian empire, it is more plausible that West Africa evolved independently of these societies. This is not to suggest “that the Nile Valley civilizations of Egypt and Kush did not contribute to the heritage of all Africans.”[16] However, it is essential to recognize that West African societies evolved from sources and circumstances distinct to their own region. For example, ironworking developed in West Africa before Meroe.
Settlement patterns in the West African countries that came to be recognized as Senegal, Gambia, Guinea, and Ghana conformed to the area's savanna and rainforest environments. Throughout the region, people settled into “isolated homesteads and hamlets…villages, towns, and cities.” “West Africans farmed crops and domesticated animals between 1000 BCE and 200 CE. Rice, millet, and sorghum were commonly harvested, and cows and goats became a dietary staple and an essential resource for agricultural development. Ironworking, which emerged around 500 BCE among the Nok people, became essential for creating tools and weapons.”[17]
In many respects, ironmaking was foundational to the growth of West African empires like Ghana, Mali, and Songhai. The Soninke people of Ghana led the way sometime between the fourth century and the eighth century BCE with their superior iron weaponry. Their empire grew out of warfare, the creation of extensive trade networks, and commerce. Gold, silk, cotton, beads, textiles, mirrors, dates, and salt were leading commodities that made up these trade networks which made Ghana a regional juggernaut.
West African societies were exceptionally diverse, and we must resist overly generalizing the cultural similarities that bonded communities. However, some areas of African life bear a resemblance and are worth noting. Most West African communities were comprised of hamlets, villages, extended family units, and clans from an ethnic lineage. These communities were either patrilineal or matrilineal. In the latter's case, the family bloodline was passed down through African women. Although men tended to maintain control over property, African women held important positions of power and maintained a relatively high degree of sexual freedom. Families were both nuclear and polygynous, and they coexisted in numerous communities.
Indigenous African spiritual practices revered ancestors and made little distinctions between the living, those who had passed on, and generations yet to be born. Islam flourished in the 15th century and co-existed with indigenous religious practices. It also fostered Arab-based literacy, the creation of learning centers, and the building of Mosques. Although resolutely monotheistic, Africans in the forest regions outside the emerging city centers that arose with the great West African empires were often polytheistic and animistic. Oracles, conjurers, magicians, and diviners played a critical role in managing the fabric of everyday life and leading communities in rituals and cultural practices that privileged sacred rites and beliefs.
After Ghana, Mali (“where the emperor resides in Mende”) emerged in 1230 and was geographically more extensive than Ghana. However, much like Ghana, Mali traded with merchants in Europe, Asia, and the Mediterranean. “Mali’s evolution merged with the spread of Islam, which had been ongoing for centuries. Under the leadership of Sundiata, Mali became an Islamic state and a center for scholarship and learning in its most important city, Timbuktu. Sundiata gained near-legendary status through his military genius. Still, Mansa Kankan Musa assumed the throne in 1312, expanded the Mali Empire's frontiers, and became legendary after his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324.”[18]
The year 1324 proved to be a momentous year for the birth of the modern world in terms of technological innovation, new geographical knowledge, and socio-economic systems of commerce that connected continents and emerging nations. Since grade school, we have often been taught that the modern world was the product of the “Age of Discovery” when Europe yearned to develop trade routes to Asia. Africa has largely been presented as an obstacle that had to be circumnavigated because early European explorers had no significant interest in its people or resources. Yet, Mansa Musa’s extravagant pilgrimage to Mecca, which included a delegation of some sixty-thousand persons and camels and horses carrying “hundreds of pounds of gold dust,” was a theatrical display of power that did not go unnoticed in Europe and beyond.[19] Indeed, Musa’s lavish movements “set the creation of the Atlantic world into motion” as European map makers began to highlight “the road to the land of the Negroes” that was said to be a “ sandy country” that “possess[ed] an extraordinary abundance of gold mines.”[20]
Thus, it was not Asia that Europe coveted but rather the gold fields of West Africa.
“Iberia’s most famous sailors cut their teeth, not seeking routes to Asia, but rather plying the coastline of West Africa,”[21] and developing their seafaring skills, which would lead to the creation of more efficient ships, while expanding their cartographical knowledge of the Atlantic Ocean. In 1471 the Portuguese discovered the African gold trade and began their colonial exploits by building the fort of Elmina in 1482. Not coincidentally, Christopher Columbus, an Iberian from Italy, spent his early years engaged in expeditions to Elmina. These initiatives “helped make it possible for Lisbon, until then the seat of a small and impecunious European crown, to steal a march on its neighbors and radically alter the course of human history.”[22] Between the Canary Islands and Elmina, Columbus got his first exposure to the process of enslavement. He would take these practices to the so-called “New World” and impose them on Indigenous communities during his early encounters.
With King Ferdinand's and Queen Isabella's blessings, Columbus raised the sails of the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria and headed west across the Atlantic on a providential mission fueled by a pursuit of gold, glory, and God. This mission's priorities amplify Africa's centrality to Western Europe’s expanding economy. Enslaved Africans would later mine gold and silver in Central and South America and contribute mightily to Western Europe’s need for a coin for currency exchange. African gold became the “main source for the mintage of Dutch gold coin in the seventeenth century, helping Amsterdam to become the financial capital of Europe in that period; further, it was no coincidence that when the English struck a new gold coin in 1663, they called it the ‘guinea.’”[23] Quoting the Encyclopedia Britannica, historian Walter Rodney noted that the guinea “was first coined in 1663, in the reign of Charles II, from gold imported from the Guinea Coast of West Africa by a company of merchants trading under charter from the British crown–hence the name.”[24
Endnotes
[1] Kaepernick, Colin, Kelly, Robin, and Talyor, Keeaga-Yamahtta. Our History Has Always Been Contraband: In Defense of Black Studies. Chicago: Haymarket Books. 2023. 27
[8] Marable, Manning. “Black Studies and the Racial Mountain.” SOULS, no. summer, 2000. 17
[9] Kaepernick, Colin, Kelly, Robin, and Talyor, Keeaga-Yamahtta. Our History Has Always Been Contraband: In Defense of Black Studies. Chicago: Haymarket Books. 2023. 33
