Chicago school renamed to honor civil rights activist Tubman

Sat, February 19, 2022

CHICAGO (AP) — A Chicago elementary school has unveiled a new sign letting people know it is leaving behind the name of a racist and will instead honor a woman known for helping Black people escape slavery, Harriet Tubman.

The sign comes about a year after a group of parents successfully pushed for the school — long named after Swiss American biologist Louis Agassiz — to change its name to the Harriet Tubman Elementary School.

Officials at Chicago Public Schools are letting other schools in the city change their names after the Chicago Sun-Times reported in late 2020 that 30 of its schools were named after slaveholders and others were named after racists such as Agassiz.

The Board of Education could vote on an updated policy for school name changes next week, the Sun-Times reported.

CPS said in a statement that the new name is “more inclusive and representative” of the district's values.

"The CPS Office of Equity is committed to a comprehensive review process to consider new school names when a school is named after individuals who do not represent the values of our students, families, faculty and support staff,” CPS said.

Agassiz, was a biologist at Harvard in the 1800s and a proponent of scientific racism who sought to prove Blacks were inferior to other races. Two decades ago, a school committee in Cambridge, Massachusetts, voted to strip his name from a school there and rename it for Maria L. Baldwin, who years earlier was the first Black principal of the school.

The Harriet Tubman Elementary School on Chicago's North Side joins a long list of schools around the country to be named after the one-time slave who helped Black people to escape slavery in the South via the Underground Railroad in the 1800s.

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Harriet Tubman in the $20 Bill : Harriet Tubman

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Tubman also served as a spy and scout in the Civil War. On April 2016 the US Treasury announced that a new design of the $20 bill will have the portrait of Harriet Tubman on the front. The image of Andrew Jackson, who had been featured on the bill since 1928, will be removed from the bill because of his policy against Native Americans.

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2021-01-26 · Jan. 25, 2021 President Biden’s Treasury Department is studying ways to speed up the process of adding Harriet Tubman’s portrait to the front of the $20 bill after the Trump

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Harriet Tubman led military raids during the Civil War as well as her better-known slave rescues

The Conversation
April 28, 2022

Harriet Tubman statue in Harlem, New York 

stockelements / Shutterstock.com

Harriet Tubman was barely 5 feet tall and didn’t have a dime to her name.

What she did have was a deep faith and powerful passion for justice that was fueled by a network of Black and white abolitionists determined to end slavery in America.

“I had reasoned this out in my mind,” Tubman once told an interviewer. “There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty, or death. If I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive.”

Though Tubman is most famous for her successes along the Underground Railroad, her activities as a Civil War spy are less well known.

As a biographer of Tubman, I think this is a shame. Her devotion to America and its promise of freedom endured despite suffering decades of enslavement and second class citizenship.

It is only in modern times that her life is receiving the renown it deserves, most notably her likeness appearing on a US$20 bill in 2030. The Harriet Tubman $20 bill will replace the current one featuring a portrait of U.S. President Andrew Jackson.
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In another recognition, Tubman was accepted in June 2021 to the United States Army Military Intelligence Corps Hall of Fame at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. She is one of 278 members, 17 of whom are women, honored for their special operations leadership and intelligence work.

Though traditional accolades escaped Tubman for most of her life, she did achieve an honor usually reserved for white officers on the Civil War battlefield.


After she led a successful raid of a Confederate outpost in South Carolina that saw 750 Black people rescued from slavery, a white commanding officer fetched a pitcher of water for Tubman as she remained seated at a table.
A different education

Believed to have been born in March 1822 in Dorchester County, Maryland, Tubman was named Araminta by her enslaved parents, Rit and Ben Ross.


“Minty” was the fifth of nine Ross children. She was frequently separated from her family by her white enslaver, Edward Brodess, who started leasing her to white neighbors when she was just 6 years old.

At their hands, she endured physical abuse, harsh labor, poor nutrition and intense loneliness.

As I learned during my research into Tubman’s life, her education did not happen in a traditional classroom, but instead was crafted from the dirt. She learned to read the natural world – forests and fields, rivers and marshes, the clouds and stars.


She learned to walk silently across fields and through the woods at night with no lights to guide her. She foraged for food and learned a botanist’s and chemist’s knowledge of edible and poisonous plants – and those most useful for ingredients in medical treatments.

She could not swim, and that forced her to learn the ways of rivers and streams – their depths, currents and traps.

She studied people, learned their habits, watched their movements – all without being noticed. Most important, she also figured out how to distinguish character. Her survival depended on her ability to remember every detail.


After a brain injury left her with recurring seizures, she was still able to work at jobs often reserved for men. She toiled on the shipping docks and learned the secret communication and transportation networks of Black mariners.

Known as Black Jacks, these men traveled throughout the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic seaboard. With them, she studied the night sky and the placement and movement of the constellations.

She used all those skills to navigate on the water and land.

“… and I prayed to God,” she told one friend, “to make me strong and able to fight, and that’s what I’ve always prayed for ever since.”

Tubman was clear on her mission. “I should fight for my liberty,” she told an admirer, “as long as my strength lasted.”

The Moses of the Underground Railroad

In the fall of 1849, when she was about to be sold away from her family and free husband John Tubman, she fled Maryland to freedom in Philadelphia.

Between 1850 and 1860, she returned to the Eastern Shore of Maryland about 13 times and successfully rescued nearly 70 friends and family members, all of whom were enslaved. It was an extraordinary feat given the perils of the 1850 Slave Fugitive Act, which enabled anyone to capture and return any Black man or woman, regardless of legal status, to slavery.

Those leadership qualities and survival skills earned her the nickname “Moses” because of her work on the Underground Railroad, the interracial network of abolitionists who enabled Black people to escape from slavery in the South to freedom in the North and Canada.


Harriet Tubman, far left, poses with her family, friends and neighbors near her barn in Auburn, N.Y., in the mid- to late 1880s. Bettmann/Getty Images

As a result, she attracted influential abolitionists and politicians who were struck by her courage and resolve – men like William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown and Frederick Douglass. Susan B. Anthony, one of the world’s leading activists for women’s equal rights, also knew of Tubman, as did abolitionist Lucretia Mott and women’s rights activist Amy Post.

“I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years,” Tubman once said. “and I can say what most conductors can’t say; I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.”
Battlefield soldier

When the Civil War started in the spring of 1861, Tubman put aside her fight against slavery to conduct combat as a soldier and spy for the United States Army. She offered her services to a powerful politician.

Known for his campaign to form the all-Black 54th and 55th regiments, Massachusetts Gov. John Andrew admired Tubman and thought she would be a great intelligence asset for the Union forces.

He arranged for her to go to Beaufort, South Carolina, to work with Army officers in charge of the recently captured Hilton Head District.

There, she provided nursing care to soldiers and hundreds of newly liberated people who crowded Union camps. Tubman’s skill curing soldiers stricken by a variety of diseases became legendary.

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But it was her military service of spying and scouting behind Confederate lines that earned her the highest praise.

She recruited eight men and together they skillfully infiltrated enemy territory. Tubman made contact with local enslaved people who secretly shared their knowledge of Confederate movements and plans.

Wary of white Union soldiers, many local African Americans trusted and respected Tubman.

According to George Garrison, a second lieutenant with the 55th Massachusetts Regiment, Tubman secured “more intelligence from them than anybody else.”

In early June 1863, she became the first woman in U.S. history to command an armed military raid when she guided Col. James Montgomery and his 2nd South Carolina Colored Volunteers Regiment along the Combahee River.


The ruins of a slave cabin still remain in South Carolina where Harriet Tubman led a raid of Union troops during the Civil War that freed 700 enslaved people.

Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images

While there, they routed Confederate outposts, destroyed stores of cotton, food and weapons – and liberated over 750 enslaved people.

The Union victory was widely celebrated. Newspapers from Boston to Wisconsin reported on the river assault by Montgomery and his Black regiment, noting Tubman’s important role as the “Black she Moses … who led the raid, and under whose inspiration it was originated and conducted.”

Ten days after the successful attack, radical abolitionist and soldier Francis Jackson Merriam witnessed Maj. Gen. David Hunter, commander of the Hilton Head district, “go and fetch a pitcher of water and stand waiting with it in his hand while a black woman drank, as if he had been one of his own servants.”

In that letter to Gov. Andrew, Merriam added, “that woman was Harriet Tubman.”
Lifelong struggle

Despite earning commendations as a valuable scout and soldier, Tubman still faced the racism and sexism of America after the Civil War.


Harriet Tubman is seen in this 1890 portrait.

MPI/Getty Images

When she sought payment for her service as a spy, the U.S. Congress denied her claim. It paid the eight Black male scouts, but not her.

Unlike the Union officers who knew her, the congressmen did not believe – they could not imagine – that she had served her country like the men under her command, because she was a woman.

Gen. Rufus Saxton wrote that he bore “witness to the value of her services… She was employed in the Hospitals and as a spy [and] made many a raid inside the enemy’s lines displaying remarkable courage, zeal and fidelity.”

Thirty years later, in 1899, Congress awarded her a pension for her service as a Civil War nurse, but not as a soldier spy.

When she died from pneumonia on March 10, 1913, she was believed to have been 91 years old and had been fighting for gender equality and the right to vote as a free Black woman for more than 50 years after her work during the Civil War.

Surrounded by friends and family, the deeply religious Tubman showed one last sign of leadership, telling them: “I go to prepare a place for you.”

Kate Clifford Larson, Visiting Scholar Women's Studies Research Center, Brandeis University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

'Thank god for Canada': Harriet Tubman on the US$20 bill is a triumph for the Great White North

© Provided by National Post Portrait of Harriet Tubman taken just after the end of the U.S. Civil War.

The new administration of U.S. President Joe Biden has fast-tracked efforts to feature famed abolitionist Harriet Tubman on the US$20 bill, a change that was first announced in 2016. Below, an updated version of a post first published in 2016 arguing the Canadian case for why there could be no greater figure on the world’s most circulated banknote.

If Canada could have hoped for anyone on a United States Treasury Note, it would have to be Harriet Tubman.

Here was a woman who lived in Canada, who risked her life to turn people into Canadians and stands as a testament that when it came to basic human freedom, the so-called “land of liberty” couldn’t hold a candle to a cold, agrarian British colony. “I wouldn’t trust Uncle Sam with my people no longer, I brought ’em all clear off to Canada,” Tubman told her biographer in 1869.

Tubman will be taking the place of seventh president Andrew Jackson, one of four men featured on U.S. money who owned slaves — and a president who ironically hated central banking.

“We’re ecstatic that we can call her one of our own,” said Rochelle Bush, historian for Tubman’s former church in St. Catharines, Ont. Between the 1851 passage of the Fugitive Slave Act and the opening shots of the Civil War 10 years later, Tubman was a well-known attendee at the Salem Chapel British Methodist Episcopal Church.

That is, when she wasn’t slipping back over the border to smuggle more people to Canada via the Underground Railroad. In total, Tubman freed roughly 300 former slaves by bringing them to Canadian soil, and hundreds of their descendants remain in the country to this day. Within Tubman’s own family tree, in fact, Bush estimates there are roughly 100 descendants living in Ontario and British Columbia.

As Bush noted, it’s a further testament to Canada that some of these Tubman descendants look black, while others look white. “Thank god for Canada; interracial marriage was accepted,” she said. In several former slave states, meanwhile, interracial marriage would not be legalized until 50 years after Tubman’s death.

Canada’s history is not free of chattel slavery. Notably, James McGill, the founder of McGill University, owned black household slaves. But as a component part of the British Empire, Canada was subject to London’s 1834 effective abolition of the practice , which occurred a full 31 years before slavery was completely abolished in the U.S.

Nevertheless, U.S. history has long been unusually coy about pointing out where the Underground Railroad actually ended. Often, textbooks will merely say that slaves were fleeing “north.” While early passengers on the Underground Railroad were initially able to stop their journey in the free Northern states, that ended in 1850 with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, a notoriously coercive measure that made it a crime for Northerners to shelter escaped slaves, even if they lived in a state where slavery had already been rendered illegal. From that point forward, the Underground Railroad had to be extended beyond U.S. borders into British territory

.

Tubman has already been adopted as a figure important to Canadian history. She was briefly in the running to feature on Canada’s $10 bill, and has been named by Parks Canada as a person of national historic significance. Saint Catharines is also home to the Harriet Tubman Public School, complete with a life-sized bronze statue of Tubman.

Kathleen Powell, manager of the St. Catharines Museum, similarly touted that “someone from St. Catharines” would be on a U.S. banknote (which, incidentally, currently costs CDN$25.40).

The honour will soon make Tubman among the most recognizable visages in the world, up there with Albert Einstein and the ubiquitous portrait of Mao Zedong. United States currency is used well beyond the country’s borders, and greenbacks remain the official or unofficial means of monetary exchange in several Central American countries and unstable corners of Africa. And among this vast array of international transactions, it’s the $20 that changes hands the most.

“There’s more $20 bills than human beings out there,” said Douglas Mudd, director of the Edward C. Rochette Money Museum in Colorado. The choice of Tubman is of sort of a no-brainer, said Mudd. In her 90 years, Tubman ran the gamut of United States history; a former slave, an abolitionist, a Civil War hero and an early suffragist. And, like any archetypal American hero, she always carried a gun. “In one person, she covers a number of different bases,” he said.

And, unlike a lot of the more political choices for U.S. money, support for Tubman is definitively nonpartisan. The conservative National Review, for one, praised the addition of a “gun-toting, Jesus-loving spy” in place of “overheated pompous populist” Andrew Jackson.

Appearing on a U.S. treasury note has a way of thrusting people into immortality. Alexander Hamilton was an influential Secretary of the Treasury, to be sure, but it was likely his face on the $10 bill that kept his legend strong centuries after his death. It was the prospect of taking Hamilton off the money, in fact, that inspired a revival in the Founding Father’s life story, including the hit Broadway musical Hamilton.

Canadians, of course, have a bad habit of smugly talking up their country in the presence of Americans, but Bush said it’s entirely fine now to “proclaim it to everybody” that the woman on the $20 bill appreciated Canada’s policy of not forcing those of African heritage to work for free.

Of course, in addition to former slaves, Canada also took in the people who had once owned them.

After the Civil War, in which Tubman served as a valuable Union spy and armed scout, British North America accepted many exiled Southerners from the defeated Confederacy, including Confederate president Jefferson Davis . “Canada was the gateway to freedom,” said Bush, “not only for freedom-seekers (the name for Underground Railroad refugees) but for Confederates as well.”

The Harriet Tubman mural that transcends time

Born enslaved roughly 200 years ago, Harriet Tubman became a legendary abolitionist in the US known for working on the Underground Railroad. Street artist Michael Rosato has immortalized the celebrated figure in art.

Michael Rosato's mural "Reflections on Pine" is centered around Tubman

Tubman Country. It's what inhabitants proudly call a stretch of land on the East Coast of the United States. Washington, DC, is just over two hours away by car, but traveling to visit the area invites a journey back in time.

The peaceful maritime region located in the state of Maryland once played a notorious role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In 1619, the first slave ship docked here carrying Africans who had been kidnapped in what is now Angola.

It is also here, on this segment of land surrounded by the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, that Harriet Tubman was born, very likely in mid-March 1822, though no one knows for sure.

Born into slavery, Tubman later escaped north to freedom. She then became an abolitionist and one of the most famous participants in the Underground Railroad, a secret safe house network that helped enslaved African Americans travel north to freedom.

She led at least several dozen enslaved individuals to freedom — all at great risk to her own life. She also fought for women's suffrage and Black rights.

Rosato's murals are gigantic, as seen in this photo showing him hanging the portrait panel of Tubman

Tubman's legacy

Artist Michael Rosato is waiting at the entrance to Cambridge, a town in Maryland of 12,000 people. The artist, in his mid-50s, is known for his giant works of street art that often depict figures of American history.

Today, he is standing in front of his mural "Reflections on Pine" (pictured at the top of this article).

The colorful 11-by-48-foot (3-by-14.5-meter) mural shows Tubman as an old woman with a headwrap and coat, standing in a cornfield. Above her is a military plane while next to her are portrayals of Black artists, scientists and politicians, other heroes of history, all of whom emanate from her portrait. What immediately catches the eye is that the perspective seems shifted: We are not looking at Harriet; she is defining us as the viewer.

Tubman was one of those special individuals whose human spirit was greater than anything else, Rosato says: "And to do that took a lot of courage and a lot of faith and just a lot of fortitude."

The artist says he put Tubman at the center of his painting because she played such an important role for many African Americans. "[She] is the inspiration for many African Americans in the community. You know, 'When she could do it, then I can do it,'" he says.

Rosato in his studio in Cambridge, Maryland

Capturing a vibrant Black community

Tubman's legacy contributed to an active Black civil rights movement in Cambridge.

The streets where the Black community lived were once a lively collection of stores, cafes and schools, but things changed after the riots and confrontations with police that occurred in the 1960s.

The mural recalls the vibrant times of the past. "When you look at that mural, there are a lot of things happening in it. That tells the story of a community," Rosato explains, adding that Tubman was the basis of that community.

Rosato's large-scale works in public spaces have generated discussion and received great acclaim. "I thought in designing this, you have to incorporate things that the community, both sides, white and Black, can identify with."
Reaching out, transcending time

Another mural by Rosato, "Take My Hand," shows Tubman by a river. She appears to be stepping over a wall and out of the painting as she extends her right hand to viewers, open and ready to take someone's hand in hers. A photo of a girl symbolically reaching out to the larger-than-life Tubman went viral on social media in 2019.

Rosato's mural "Take My Hand" shows a young Tubman reaching out to the viewer

At that time, a repressed anger was changing the United States, Rosato says. "The Black community was getting tired of the police shooting[s], they were getting tired of this pent-up acceptance of how they've been treated." All of a sudden, it wasn't just about the painting but also about the young child Tubman touches. For Rosato, this was poetic, and it was moving.

"Young girl, present day, touching the hand of a woman from 200 years ago," Rosato says. "That poetry is, I think, what spoke and what really got people, because [it] allowed them to be that little girl and to be this woman, offering a hand."

Only a few photos of Tubman exist. She is always looking seriously into the camera. This is also the case in the best-known black-and-white picture from 1895, taken when she was 73. While Rosato did use the historical image as a model, he chose to paint the slave emancipator in "Take my hand" at the age of 30. He wanted to show a young, rebellious Harriet and saw it as connected to the Black Lives Matter movement.

The mural not only depicts Tubman, but also shows the landscape where she had lived when she was enslaved — the place where she had to toil as the "property" of a white plantation owner and received whippings as a 6-year-old.

When you look at the mural, you're looking into the past, Rosato says. You can see the vegetation and the water. "And she is transcending time, in a way, because she is offering her hand to us the viewer in the present," he says.

At about 14 feet (4 meters) tall, and with hands measuring 3 feet, Tubman is monumental in size. "It's big — it's imposing, it's not life size, it's larger than life!" Rosato says. "So you are engaging with this larger-than-life woman who is reaching through this wall and part of her foot is painted trompe l'oeil, tricking the eye, to look like it's coming out and into your space."

Rosato's mural centers on African American abolitionist and reformer couple Frederick and Anna Douglass

Amending historic wrongs

Connecting the past and present also has to do with belated efforts to amend historic wrongs and reparations that many governments in the US, from the local to the state to the federal levels, have struggled to make.

Tubman not only helped enslaved people to freedom; she fought in the Civil War against the Southern slave-owning states, scouting out Confederate positions, and she also served as a nurse.

Despite her services, she was denied a pension. It was not until she was in old age, shortly before her death in 1913, that she finally received a monthly pension for her nursing work. She lived to be 91.

This article was originally written in German

Cynthia Erivo On the 'Powerful, Powerful' Role Music Played in Her Embodying the Spirit of Harriet Tubman
BY H. ALAN SCOTT ON 12/20/19 

ILLUSTRATION BY BRITT SPENCER

HARRIET - Official Trailer

Cynthia Erivo, the Tony, Emmy and Grammy-award winning artist, says the Oscar buzz around her most recent performance as Harriet Tubman in the film Harriet is "very overwhelming" and she "genuinely didn't expect it."

Already nominated for two Golden Globes for the role, Erivo breathes life into the often mysterious public image of the famous abolitionist and unofficial leader of the Underground Railroad.

Erivo says she hopes people learn more about the life lived before and after the period for which Harriet (born Araminta Ross, Erivo's Tubman takes her mother's name—Harriet—in the film after running to freedom) was famous. In order to tap into Tubman's soul, Erivo used a skill she knows a thing or two about: singing, a "powerful, powerful" tool to tap into the spirit of Tubman, and ultimately into the film's message of freedom.

"I think we need to use this film to inspire us to do good things and see the strength we have in ourselves," Erivo told Newsweek. "We as people have agency and the ability to bring about really good change."

Why do you think it's important for people to know Harriet Tubman's various names?

Getting to meet Araminta Ross, we get to humanize her and watch her grow. It took time to get from Araminta to Harriet.

What is often left out of Tubman's story is her military service and her work in the women's suffrage movement. Why are these parts of her story so important?

I don't think many people realize she worked in the army and the suffragette movement—much of that in the script we didn't have time to delve into. It's very exciting that a woman, particularly a woman of color, was one of the first women full stop to lead an armed raid and was a general in the army. There's a life story there that continued for a really long time.

Did the music in the film impact your performance?

Yes. It's a connection to the spirits. Negro spirituals were a way to send a message to one another. It's a powerful, powerful thing.

What sort of impact do you hope Tubman's story has on people?

To help or to make change should be a duty of ours. I hope it gives young men and women the courage and the confidence to see a woman who is the center of her narrative and to be strong and fast and mysterious and have this wonderful heart. It's an example that women can do anything.

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=HARRIET+TUBMAN

Yellen signals support for Harriet Tubman on $20 bill
Agence France-Presse
October 01, 2021

Harriet Tubman statue in Harlem, New York 

Putting Harriet Tubman, a Black woman who escaped slavery and became a leader of the pre-Civil War abolitionist movement, on the $20 bill would be an "honor" but designing banknotes takes time, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Thursday.

Shortly after taking office in January, President Joe Biden's administration announced that it would expedite plans to put Tubman on the bill that is among the most commonly used in the country.

The project, launched by former president Barack Obama but significantly delayed under former president Donald Trump, came back to the forefront after historic demonstrations denouncing racism and police violence against people of color last year.

"I couldn't possibly think of a better way to honor Harriet Tubman's legacy and her courage in fighting for the freedom of the enslaved people and women's right to vote then seeing her on a $20 bill," Yellen said in testimony to the House Financial Services Committee.

However, she warned that "issuing notes is a very lengthy process. It involves collaboration among a number of different agencies and it's necessary to design counterfeit features."

Tubman was born into slavery in 1822 but escaped. She returned multiple times to the slave-owning southern states to help dozens of others flee bondage, either to the northern United States or Canada, both before and during the 1861-1865 Civil War.

During the war she even helped with a raid on Confederate troops, and after the war, she became a champion of women's rights before her death in 1913.

Her life, and in particular her work helping enslaved people escape as a conductor on the "Underground Railroad," were featured in a 2019 Hollywood biopic.

Tubman's image was set to replace the portrait of Andrew Jackson, the US president behind the "Trail of Tears" that drove dispossessed Native American tribes from the southeast of the expanding country, and who was much admired by Trump.

His Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin announced in 2019 that the revamp of the $20 bill was being put off until 2028, citing "security issues" around counterfeiting.


Yellen appeared alongside Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell days after two regional Fed bank presidents suddenly retired after facing questions over their stock trading activity.

The central bank has faced criticism over the lack of diversity among its top officials, and in response to a question from a lawmaker, Powell promised to consider appointing people of color to replace them.

"I can absolutely guarantee you that we will work hard in both of these processes to find and give a fair shot to diverse candidates for these two jobs; it will be a big focus of both of these processes," Powell said.

Biden administration will revamp effort to put Harriet Tubman on $20 bill

Aarthi Swaminathan
·Reporter
Mon., January 25, 2021

The Biden administration is looking to revamp the effort to place Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill, replacing former president Andrew Jackson.

“I was here when we announced that, and it was very exciting and hasn’t moved forward yet,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, who also served in the Obama administration, told reporters during a briefing on Monday afternoon. “The Treasury Department is taking steps to resume efforts to put Harriet Tubman on the front of the new $20 notes. It’s important that our notes, our money... reflect the history and diversity of our country and Harriet Tubman’s image gracing the new $20 note will certainly reflect that.”

Psaki added that the administration is trying to find ways to “speed up that effort.”

The Obama administration had first proposed putting the iconic abolitionist on the paper currency in 2016. The goal was for the replacement of Jackson, the seventh U.S. president, to take place in 2020.

Tubman would be the first black woman and the first African American to appear on U.S. currency. Born around 1820, Tubman escaped slavery and later became a “conductor” for the Underground Railroad, where she led enslaved people to freedom before the Civil War.

Obama-era Treasury Secretary Jack Lew first announced the change in 2016 after a viral online campaign to feature a woman on the currency.

In 2020, Trump administration Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announced that the new $20 bill would not be released until 2030, and the next administration’s secretary would make the decision on the change.—

Aarthi is a writer for Yahoo Finance. She can be reached at aarthi@yahoofinance.com. Follow her on Twitter @aarthiswami.

Officials have voted unanimously to rename 'Dixie' highway after Harriet Tubman

By Alisha Ebrahimji, CNN

© MPI/Archive Photos/Getty Images American abolitionist leader Harriet Tubman escaped slavery and led many other slaves to safety using the Underground Railroad.

A highway in Florida won't be keeping its name much longer after a county voted to change the name of a handful of "Dixie" highways to "Harriet Tubman Highway."

Miami-Dade County commissioners unanimously approved plans Wednesday to rename portions of The Dixie Highway, which runs 5,786 miles through 10 states from Michigan to Miami, according to CNN affiliate WPLG.

"The time is always right to do what is right," said Miami-Dade District 9 Commissioner Dennis Moss, quoting Martin Luther King, Jr.

Moss led the effort to rename the highway after Tubman, a famous African American abolitionist.

Depending on your perspective, the word Dixie takes on a different meaning for different people. Most commonly, it's associated with the old South and Confederate states. Dixie was considered the land south of the Mason-Dixon line, where slavery was was legal.

Injustice hiding in plain sight

Moss started looking into the name change after reading a letter from a man named Modesto Abety, former CEO of the Children's Trust in Miami-Dade County.

Abety's granddaugther asked him why "Dixie" was still on the name of the roadways considering its association with slavery, Moss told CNN.

"I moved forward with legislation and of course I did it because Dixie is associated with the southern Confederate states," he said.

Moss said the injustice has been hiding in plain sight for years, but he's grateful and proud his colleagues understand the importance of this name change and what the term Dixie has stood for in the past.

The decision to rename Dixie Highway after Tubman came as a suggestion from Abety's granddaughter.

"She was the antithesis of slavery," Moss said. "I thought that suggestion was a good suggestion."

It's important to Moss to set a precedent by not only removing the Dixie name from roadways that Miami-Dade County controls, but to urge the state of Florida to remove it from roadways in which it has jurisdiction.

A stepping stone on the path to change

While the name change was approved by Miami-Dade County commissioners, it's up to each state to act on other parts of the highway. State lawmakers will need to go through their own approval process for the parts each state owns.

The support hasn't been entirely unanimous, but to Moss' surprise, he said there's been little opposition.

It's unclear just how much the renaming process will cost the county, but Moss said he and his colleagues are prepared to do whatever it takes to see that they are changed once and for all.

"If this was an Adolf Hitler Highway, or if this was in our community, a Fidel Castro Highway, [the money] wouldn't even be a consideration as it relates to changing the signs," Moss said. "So let's not allow that to be an impediment and let's do what's right."

Why are US rightwingers so angry? 

Because they know social change is coming

Rebecca Solnit

The American right might win the occasional battle – but they will never win the war against progress

‘We are dismantling the trophies of the ugly old world of sanctified inequality and erecting monuments to heroes of justice and liberation.’ 

Photograph: Steve Helber/AP
Mon 20 Dec 2021 

While their fear and dismay is often regarded as rooted in delusion, rightwingers are correct that the world is metamorphosing into something new and, to them, abhorrent. They’re likewise correct that what version of history we tell matters. The history we tell today lays the groundwork for the future we make. The outrage over the 1619 Project and the new laws trying to censor public school teachers from telling the full story of American history are a doomed attempt to hold back facts and perspectives that are already widespread.

In 2018, halfway through the Trump presidency, Michelle Alexander wrote a powerful essay arguing that we are not the resistance. We, she declared, are the mighty river they are trying to dam. I see it flowing, and I see the tributaries that pour into it and swell its power, and I see that once firmly grounded statues and assumptions have become flotsam in its current. Similar shifts are happening far beyond the United States, but it is this turbulent nation of so much creation and destruction I know best and will speak of here.

When a regime falls, the new one sweeps away its monuments and erects its own. This is happening as the taking down of Confederate, Columbus and other statues commemorating oppressors across the country, the renaming of streets and buildings and other public places, the appearance of myriad statues and murals of Harriet Tubman and other liberators, the opening of the Legacy Museum documenting slavery and mass incarceration and housing a lynching memorial.

There was no great moment of overthrow, but nevertheless we are dismantling the trophies of the ugly old world of sanctified inequality and erecting monuments to heroes of justice and liberation, from the Olympic track medalists of 1968 making their Black power gesture at San Jose State University to the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park in Maryland. All those angry white men with the tiki torches chanting, in Charlottesville in 2017, “You will not replace us” as they sought to defend a statue of Gen Robert E Lee were wrong in their values and actions but perhaps not in their assessment.

White people are not being replaced, but in many ways a white supremacist history and society is. The statue of the general was removed earlier this year and will be melted down to be made into a new work of art under the direction of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center. They call the project “swords into plowshares”, a phrase suggesting that this marks the end of a war – perhaps the civil war in which the north never fully claimed its victory, the south never accepted its defeat.

What’s happening goes far beyond public monuments. The statues mark the rejection of old versions of who we are and what we value, but those versions and values matter most as they play out in everyday private and public life. We are only a few decades removed from a civilization in which corporal punishment of children by parents and teachers was an unquestioned norm; in which domestic violence and marital rape were seen as a husband’s prerogative and a wife surrendered financial and other agency; in which many forms of inequality and exclusion had hardly even been questioned, let alone amended; in which few questioned the rightness of a small minority – for white Christian men have always been a minority in the United States – holding almost all the power, politically, socially, economically, culturally; in which segregation and exclusion were pervasive and legal; in which Native Americans had been largely written out of history; in which environmental regulation and protection and awareness barely existed.

You have to remember how different the past was to recognize how much has changed. Frameworks such as indigenous land acknowledgments that were unheard of and maybe almost inconceivable a few decades ago are routine at public events.

The Civil Rights Act passed in 1964; in 1965, with Griswold v Connecticut, the supreme court overruled state laws criminalizing birth control and laid the groundwork for Roe v Wade six years later; only in 2015, Obergefell v Hodges established marriage equality for same-sex couples (while equality of rights between different-sex couples had also gradually been established as marriage became a less authoritarian institution). The right is trying to push the water back behind the dam. With deregulation and social service and tax cuts, they have succeeded in reestablishing an economy of extreme inequality, but not a society fully committed to that inequality.

They have succeeded in passing laws at the state level against voting rights and reproductive rights, but they have not succeeded in pushing the majority’s imaginations back to 1960 or 1920 or whenever their version of when America was great stalled out. They can win the battles, but I do not believe they will, in the end, win the war.

While the right has become far more extreme and has its tens of millions of true believers, it is morphing into a minority sect. This has prompted their desperate scramble to overturn free and fair elections and other democratic processes. White Christians, who were 80% of the population in 1976, are now 44%. Mixed-race and non-white people are rapidly becoming the majority. On issues such as climate, people of color are far more progressive; if we can make it through the huge backlash of the present moment, the possibilities are dazzling.

These are relatively concrete changes. Others are subtler and more recent, but no less important. Even in the last decade there has been an epochal shift in our expectations of how we should treat each other, and the casual cruelty and disdain targeting women, queer people, Bipoc, the disabled and those with divergent bodies that pervaded entertainment and daily life are now viewed as repugnant – and are met with consequences in some contexts.

A regular experience of this era (for those of us who were around for the last one) is to revisit a song, a film, a book and find that we have now become people who can see better the insults and exclusions that were so seamlessly woven into it. Some of the old art has not weathered well and will fall out of circulation, as some old culture always does; some will be interpreted in new ways; some neglected treasures will move from margin to center. We – a metamorphosing “we” – are sifting through an old and building a new canon.

Even more profound than this is a shift in worldview from the autonomous individual of hypercapitalism and social darwinism to a recognition of both the natural and social worlds as orchestras of interdependence, of survival as an essentially collaborative and cooperative business. Disciplines from neuropsychology to economics have shifted their sense of who we are, what works, and what matters. Climate change is first of all a crisis, but it’s also a reminder that the world is a collection of interlocking systems. The just-deceased bell hooks talked about a “love ethic” that included “a global vision wherein we see our lives and our fate as intimately connected to those of everyone else on the planet”.

Birth can be violent and dangerous, and sometimes one or the other of the two involved die. There is no guarantee about what is to come, and the shadow of climate chaos hangs over it all. We do not have time to build a better society before we address that crisis, but it is clear that the response to that crisis is building such a society. So much has already changed. The river Alexander described has swept away so much, has carried so many onward.

It has come so far; it still has dams to overtop and so far to go.

Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her most recent books are Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses

America's Black Civil War soldiers seen in rare photo archive

Megan C. Hills, CNN | Oscar Holland, CNN 

© Library of Congress Sergeant Major William L. Henderson and hospital steward Thomas H. S. Pennington.

 Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture A carte de visite of Lieutenant Peter Vogelsang, who served with the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment.
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As she would later learn, almost 180,000 Black soldiers fought for the North in the name of ending slavery. By the end of the war, a tenth of the Union Army was made up of free African American men.

"When Black soldiers were fighting for their emancipation, they were fighting for not only their own (freedom), but that of their families and other Black people," Willis said in a video interview. "They felt the cause was necessary to fight."

By the end of the war in 1865, 40,000 Black Union soldiers had been killed, of whom three-quarters had died from infection or disease. Many of their individual stories have been lost, but Willis' research uncovered moving tales of Black love, patriotism and bravery. Her recently published book, "The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship," shines a light on these forgotten soldiers and their families through a rich archive of rarely-seen photographs.

"Erasure appears in many ways," said Willis, who is a professor and department chair at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.

In the case of thousands of African American Civil War soldiers, she explained, their narratives weren't "hidden" -- they were shared in diaries and letters. Many Black soldiers also paid to have photographic portraits taken that depicted them as patriotic free men. They can be seen dressed in military regalia, posing proudly with the American flag or holding the weapons they fought with.
© Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture Tintype of a Civil War soldier. His buttons and belt buckle are hand colored in gold paint. The hand coloring on the buckle reads backward "SU," which when considered that the image is reversed, reads "US," the traditional inscription on Union Civil War be lt buckles. (Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift from the Liljenquist Family Collection, 2011.51.12)

In her book, Willis presents almost 100 of the images, which date from the 1840s to 1860s, alongside family correspondence and news articles, offering an intimate account of the conflict. She also included the stories of Black medical workers, servants and cooks -- including those in the South, where thousands of enslaved African Americans were taken to war as laborers or forced to serve White soldiers.

Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture Tintype of a Civil War soldier. His buttons and belt buckle are hand colored in gold paint. The hand coloring on the buckle reads backward "SU," which when considered that the image is reversed, reads "US," the traditional inscription on Union Civil War be lt buckles. (Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift from the Liljenquist Family Collection, 2011.51.12)

Willis' book challenges readers to bear witness to their varied experiences.

"I wanted this book to be kind of a memory album of sorts -- the memory of the individuals who wrote articles in the newspapers or who wrote diaries and diary entries, but also (those) who shared the visual experience of photography," she said.


A new medium

Early cameras first arrived in the United States in 1839, and by the time the Civil War began in 1861, commercial photography was taking off.

Before leaving for war, some soldiers took portraits with loved ones as mementos in the event they didn't return. One picture in Willis' book, set in a romantic brass frame, shows a husband and wife sitting beside each other. Another shows a saber-wielding soldier sitting beside his wife, who is dressed in a voluminous gown.

Commercial photographers also set up temporary studios in tents near the army camps, creating what Willis called "spaces for people to reimagine themselves." Soldiers would sometimes get photos taken to send home to their families, folding them up with love letters or notes sent home from the front lines.

© Library of Congress Portrait of an unidentified African American soldier in uniform, c. 1860s.

"We don't talk about Black love in the 19th century," Willis said. "We talk about survival which is, yes, a part of it. But having an opportunity to see a love story that's a mother and son, or a patriotic story of a man who's interested in his citizenship and freedom -- that kind of love is something I wanted to explore in this book."

While the Union's Black soldiers were fighting for the same cause as their White counterparts, their platoons remained segregated. So, too, were the war's makeshift photography studios. "There were certain days that Black people could go into studios, and on Thursdays and Saturdays at midday, (they) would say, 'coloreds only,'" Willis said. "And then other days were open to Whites."

In the South, meanwhile, African Americans had hardly any opportunity to be photographed -- and not only because of their status in the Confederacy. Early camera equipment was not readily available in Southern states, Willis writes in her book, and the few photographers there raised their fees "to compensate for the high prices of photographic materials and the inflated Confederate dollar."


'Significance of the moment'

The uncovered photographs include ambrotypes, images made on chemically treated glass plates, and tintypes, a much faster innovation that imprinted pictures onto thin metal sheets dipped in a silver nitrate solution. Some of these photographs appear in elaborate protective cases lined with red velvet or brass frames engraved with American flags, eagles and stars.

An early form of paper photograph known as a "carte de visite," which was often used as a formal calling card, was also increasingly popular in the Civil War era. Examples in Willis' book include portraits of famed abolitionist Harriet Tubman, who served in the Union Army and rescued enslaved people through a secretive network called the Underground Railroad; Nicholas Biddle, a Black man believed to be the first person wounded in the conflict after a racist mob hurled a brick at him; and Thomas Morris Chester, the first African American war correspondent for a major daily newspaper.

© National Archives African American hospital workers, including nurses, at a hospital in Nashville, Tennessee, July 1863.

Photographers typically charged between 25 cents and $2.50 ($6 to $60 in today's money), depending on the size of the image, according to Willis' research. There were additional fees for hand-painted details, such as an American flag.

Given that Black Northern soldiers were paid less than their White counterparts -- just $10 per month, with a further $3 deducted for uniforms, compared to the $13 and free clothing enjoyed by White soldiers -- having a photograph taken was relatively expensive. It was thus a "self-conscious act," Willis wrote, adding that it "shows the subjects were aware of the significance of the moment and sought to preserve it."

For Willis, however, the pictures and stories are as much to do with the present as the past. The historian hopes to help younger generations visualize "a broader story" about Black people's role in the Civil War, sharing experiences of Black American history that go beyond the narratives of slavery.

"The absence of those stories dehumanizes young people," she said, adding: "How can they reflect on the past without creating a future for themselves if it's only about a struggle?"

"The Black Civil War Soldier: A History of Conflict and Citizenship," published by New York University Press, is available now

.

© Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture A portrait of Harriet Tubman, who rescued enslaved people during the American Civil War.

C.L.R. James on Abolition and the International Proletariat

From its very beginning at the end of the eighteenth century, the Negro struggle for freedom and equality has been an international question. It would seem that the irrationality of the prejudice against Negroes breeds in revolutionary periods a corresponding intensity of loathing for its practitioners among the great masses of the people.

By C. L. R. James, the pioneering Trinidadian socialist historian and writer. 

Originally published in New International, Vol. IX No. 11, December 1943, pp. 338–341.

An indispensable contribution to the understanding of the role of the Negro in American history is a study of the period between 1830 and 1865. In this article we treat the subject up to 1860.  

The basic economic and social antagonisms of the period embraced the whole life of the country and were fairly clear then, far less today. The system of chattel slavery needed territorial expansion because of the soil exhaustion caused by the crude method of slave production. But as the North developed industrially and in population, the South found it ever more difficult to maintain its political domination. Finally the struggle centered, economically, around who would control the newly-opened territories, and, politically, around the regional domination of Congress.  

The regime in the South was by 1830 a dreadful tyranny, in startling contrast to the vigorous political democracy of the North. The need to suppress the slaves, who rebelled continuously, necessitated a regime of naked violence. The need to suppress the hostility to slavery of the free laborers and independent farmers led to the gradual abrogation of all popular democracy in the Southern states.  Previous to 1830 there had been anti-slavery societies in the South itself, but by 1830 cotton was king and, instead of arguing for and against slavery, the Southern oligarchy gradually developed a theory of Negro slavery as a heaven-ordained dispensation. Of necessity they sought to impose it upon the whole country. Such a propaganda can be opposed only actively. Not to oppose it is to succumb to it.  

The impending revolution is to be led by the Northern bourgeoisie. But that is the last thing that it wants to do. In 1776 the revolutionary struggle was between the rising American bourgeoisie and a foreign enemy. The bourgeoisie needs little prodding to undertake its task. By 1830 the conflict was between two sections of the ruling class based on different economies but tied together by powerful economic links. Therefore, one outstanding feature of the new conflict is the determination of the Northern bourgeois to make every concession and every sacrifice to prevent the precipitation of the break. They will not lead. They will have to be forced to lead. The first standard-bearers of the struggle are the petty bourgeois democracy, organized in the Abolition movement, stimulated and sustained by the independent mass action of the Negro people.

The Petty Bourgeoisie and the Negroes

The petty bourgeoisie, having the rights of universal suffrage, had entered upon a period of agitation which has been well summarized in the title of a modern volume, The Rise of the Common Man. Lacking the economic demands of an organized proletariat, this agitation found vent in ever-increasing waves of humanitarianism and enthusiasm for social progress. Women’s rights, temperance reform, public education, abolition of privilege, universal peace, the brotherhood of man — middle class intellectual America was in ferment. And to this pulsating movement the rebellious Negroes brought the struggle for the abolition of slavery. The agreement among historians is general that all these diverse trends were finally dominated by the Abolition movement.  

The Negro struggle for Abolition follows a pattern not dissimilar to the movement for emancipation before 1776. There are, first of all, the same continuous revolts among the masses of the slaves themselves which marked the pre-1776 period. In the decade 1820–30 devoted white men begin the publication of periodicals which preach Abolition on principles grounds. The chief of these was Benjamin Lundy. No sooner does Lundy give the signal than the free Negroes take it up and become the driving force of the movement.  

Garrison, directly inspired by Lundy, began early, in 1831. But before that, Negro Abolitionists, not only in speeches and meetings, but in books, periodicals and pamphlets, posed the question squarely before the crusading petty bourgeois democracy. Freedom’s Journal was published in New York City by two Negroes as early as 1827. David Walker’s Appeal, published in 1829, created a sensation. It was a direct call for revolution. Free Negroes organized conventions and mass meetings. And before the movement was taken over by such figures as Wendell Phillips and other distinguished men of the time, the free Negroes remained the great supporters of the Liberator. In 1831, out of four hundred and fifty subscribers, fully four hundred were Negroes. In 1834, of 2,300 subscribers, nearly two thousand were Negroes.  

After the free Negroes came the masses. When Garrison published the Liberator in 1831, the new Abolition movement, as contrasted with the old anti-slavery societies, amount to little. Within less than a year its fame was nation-wide. What caused this was the rebellion of Nat Turner in 1831. It is useless to speculate whether Walker’s Appeal or the Liberator directly inspired Turner. What is decisive is the effect on the Abolition movement of this, the greatest Negro revolt in the history of the United States.  

The Turner revolt not only lifted Garrison’s paper and stimulated the organization of his movement. The South responded with such terror that the Negroes, discouraged by the failures of the revolts between 1800 and 1831, began to take another road to freedom. Slowly but steadily grew that steady flight out of the South which lasted for thirty years and injected the struggle against slavery into the North itself. As early as 1827 the escaping Negroes had already achieved some rudimentary form of organization. It was during the eventful year of 1831 that the Underground Railroad took more definite shape. In time thousands of whites and Negroes risked life, liberty and often wealth to assist the rebel slaves.  

The great body of escaping slaves, of course, had no political aims in mind. For years rebellious slaves had formed bands of maroons, living a free life in inaccessible spots. Thousands had joined the Indians. Now they sought freedom in civilization and they set forth on that heroic journey of many hundreds of miles, forced to travel mainly by night, through forest and across rivers, often with nothing to guide them but the North Star and the fact that moss grows only on the north side of trees.  

The industrial bourgeoisie in America wanted none of this Abolition. It organized mobs who were not unwilling to break up meetings and to lynch agitators. Many ordinary citizens were hostile to Negroes because of competition in industry and the traditional racial prejudice. At one period in the early ’forties, the Abolition movement slumped and Negro historians assert that it was the escaping slaves who kept the problem alive and revived the movement. But we do not need the deductions of modern historians. What the escaping slaves meant to the movement leaps to the eye of the Marxian investigator from every contemporary page.  

By degrees the leadership of the movement passed into the hands of and was supported by some of the most gifted white poets, writers and publicists of their time. The free Negroes, in collaboration with the Abolitionist movement, sometimes by themselves, carried on a powerful agitation. But a very special role was played by the ablest and most energetic of the escaping slaves themselves. These men could write and speak from first-hand experience. They were a dramatic witness of the falseness and iniquity of the whole thesis upon which the Southern case was built. Greatest of them all and one of the greatest men of his time was Frederick Douglass, a figure today strangely neglected. In profundity and brilliance, Douglass, the orator, was not the equal of Wendell Phillips. As a political agitator, he did not attain the fire and scope of Garrison nor the latter’s dynamic power in organization. But he was their equal in courage, devotion and tenacity of purpose, and in sheer political skill and sagacity he was definitely their superior. He broke with them early, evolving his own policy of maintenance of the Union as opposed to their policy of disunion. He advocated the use of all means, including the political, to attain Abolition. It was only after many years that the Garrisonians followed his example. Greatest of the activists was another escaped slave, Harriet Tubman. Very close to these ex-slaves was John Brown. These three were the nearest to what we would call today the revolutionary propagandists and agitators.  

They drove the South to infuriation. Toward the middle of the century the Abolitionists and the escaping slaves had created a situation that made compromise impossible.  

The Anti-Fugitive Slave Law

In 1848 there occurred an extraordinary incident, a harbinger of the great international movement which was to play so great a part in the Civil War itself. When the news of the 1848 revolution in France reached Washington, the capital, from the White House to the crowds in the streets, broke out into illuminations and uproarious celebration. Three nights afterward, seventy-eight slaves, taking this enthusiasm for liberty literally, boarded a ship that was waiting for them and tried to escape down the Potomac.

They were recaptured and were led back to jail, with a crowd of several thousands waiting in the streets to see them, and members of Congress in the House almost coming to blows in the excitement. The patience of the South and of the Northern bourgeoisie was becoming exhausted. Two years later, the ruling classes, South and North, tried one more compromise. One of the elements of this compromise was a strong Anti-Fugitive Slave Law. The Southerners were determine to stop this continual drain upon their property and the continuous excitation of the North by fugitive slaves.  

It was the impossibility of enforcing the Anti-Fugitive Slave Law which wrecked the scheme. Not only did the slaves continue to leave. Many insurrectionary tremors shook the Southern structure in 1850 and again in 1854. The South now feared a genuine slave insurrection. They had either to secede or force their political demands upon the federal government.

The Northern bourgeoisie was willing to discipline the petty bourgeois democracy. But before long, in addition to their humanitarian drive, the petty bourgeois democrats began to understand that not only the liberty of the slaves but their own precious democratic liberties were at stake. To break the desire of the slaves to escape, and to stifle the nation-wide agitation, the South tried to impose restrictions upon public meetings in the North and upon the use of the mails. They demanded the right to use the civil authorities of the North to capture escaping slaves. Under their pressure, Congress even reached so far as to side-track the right of petition. The Declaration of Independence, when presented as a petition in favor of Abolition, was laid upon the table. Negroes who had lived peaceably in the North for years were now threatened, and thousands fled to Canada. Douglass and Harriet Tubman, people of nation-wide fame (Douglass was an international figure) were in danger. There was no settling this question at all. The petty bourgeois democrats defied the South. The escaping slaves continued to come. There were arrests and there were spectacular rescues by pro-Abolition crowds. Pro-slavery and anti-slavery crowds fought in the streets and with the Northern police. Scarcely a month passed but some escaping slave or ex-slave, avoiding arrest, created a local and sometimes a national agitation.  

Slaves on ships revolted against slave-traders and took their ships into port, creating international incidents. Congress was powerless. Ten Northern states legalized their rebelliousness by passing Personal Liberty Laws which protected state officers from arresting fugitive slaves, gave arrested Negroes the right of habeas corpus and of trial by jury, and prohibited the use of the jails for runaway Negroes. Long before the basic forces of the nation moved into action for the inevitable show-down the petty bourgeois democrats and revolting slaves had plowed up the ground and made the nation irrevocably conscious of the great issues at stake.

The Free Farmers and the Proletariat

Yet neither Negroes nor petty bourgeois democracy were the main force of the second American revolution, and a more extended treatment of American history would make that abundantly clear if that were needed by any serious intelligence. The great battle was over the control of the public doman! Who was to get the land — free farmers or slave-owners? The Republican Party, as Commons has said, was not an anti-slavery party. It was a Homestead party. The bloody struggle over Kansas accelerated the strictly political development. Yet it was out of the Abolition movement that flowered the broader political organizations of the Liberty Party and the Free Soil Party, which in the middle of the decade finally coalesced into the Republican Party.  

It was Marx who pointed out very early (The Civil War in the United States, p. 226. Letter to Engels, July 1, 1861) that what finally broke down the bourgeois timidity was the great development of the population of free farmers in the Northwest Territory in the decade 1850–60. These free farmers were not prepared to stand any nonsense from the South because they were not going to have the mouth of the Mississippi in the hands of any hostile power. By 1860 the great forces which were finally allied were the democratic petty bourgeoisie, the free farmers in the Northwest, and certain sections of the proletariat. These were the classes that, contrary to 1776, compelled the unwilling bourgeois to lead them. They were the basic forces in the period which led to the revolution. They had to come into action before the battle could be joined. They were the backbone of the struggle.  

In all this agitation the proletariat did not play a very prominent role. In New England the working masses were staunch supporters of the movement and the writer has little doubt that when the proletariat comes into its own, further research will reveal, as it always does, that the workers played a greater role than is accredited to them. Yet the old question of unemployment, rivalry between the Negroes in the North and the Irish, the latest of the immigrant groups, disrupted one wing of the proletariat. Furthermore, organized labor, while endorsing the Abolitionist movement, was often in conflict with Garrison, who, like Wilberforce in England, was no lover of the labor movement. Organized labor insisted that there was wage slavery as well as Negro slavery, and at times was apt to treat both of them as being on the same level — a monumental and crippling error.  

Nevertheless, on the whole, the evidence seems to point to the fact that in many areas the organized proletarian movement, though not in the vanguard, supported the movement for Abolition. Finally, we must guard against one illusion. The Abolition movement dominated the political consciousness of the time. Most Northerners were in sympathy. But few wanted war or a revolution. When people want a revolution, they make one. They usually want anything else except a revolution. It was only when the war began that the abolitionists reaped their full reward. Despite all this Abolition sentiment in the North, and particularly in the Northwest areas, the masses of the people on the whole were not anxious to fraternize with the free Negroes, and over large areas there was distinct hostility. But the free Negroes in the North never allowed this to demoralize them, and the masses of the revolting slaves kept on coming. Between 1830 and 186o, sixty to a hundred thousand slaves came to the North. When they could find no welcome or resting place in the North, some of them went on to Canada. But they never ceased to come. With the Civil War they will come in tens and then in hundreds of thousands.

Abolition and the International Proletariat

From its very beginning at the end of the eighteenth century, the Negro struggle for freedom and equality has been an international question. More than that, it seems to be able to exercise an effect, out of all proportion to reasonable expectation, upon people not directly connected with it. In this respect, the Abolition movement in America has curious affinities with the Abolition movement a generation earlier in Britain.  

In Britain, before the emancipation in 1832, the industrial bourgeoisie was actively in favor of abolition. It was industrially more mature than the American bourgeoisie in 1850; the West Indian planters were weak, and the slaves were thousands of miles away. But there, too, the earlier Abolition movement assumed a magnitude and importance out of all proportion to the direct interests of the masses who supported it. Earlier, during the French Revolution, the mass revolts of the Negroes brought home to the French people the reality of the conditions which had existed for over a hundred and fifty years. A kind of collective “madness” on the Negro question seemed to seize the population all over France, and no aristocrats were so much hated as the “aristocrats of the skin.”  

The Abolitionist movement in America found not only a ready audience at home but an overwhelming welcome abroad. Not only did Garrison, Wendell Phillips and others lecture in Britain. Frederick Douglass and other Negro Abolitionists traveled over Europe and enrolled many hundreds of thousands in Abolitionist societies. One inspired Negro won seventy thousand signed adherents to the cause in Germany alone. In the decade preceding the Civil War, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was read by millions in Britain and on the continent, and even as far afield as Italy. And masses of workers and radicals in France, Spain and Germany took an active interest in the question. Their sentiments will bear wonderful fruit during the Civil War itself.

It is not enough to say merely that these workers loved the great American Republic and looked forward to the possibility of emigrating there themselves one day. There are aspects to this question which would repay modern investigation and analysis by Marxists. Beard, who has some insight into social movements in America, is baffled by certain aspects of the Abolition movement. [1] Thoroughly superficial are the self-satisfied pratings of English historians about the “idealism” of the English as an explanation of the equally baffling Abolition movement in Britain. It would seem that the irrationality of the prejudice against Negroes breeds in revolutionary periods a corresponding intensity of loathing for its practitioners among the great masses of the people. [2]  

“The Signal Has Now Been Given”

The slaves played their part to the end. After Lincoln’s election and the violent reaction of the South, the North, not for the first time, drew back from Civil War. Congress and the political leaders frantically sought compromise. Frederick Douglass in his autobiography gives an account of the shameful attempts on the part of the North to appease the South. Most of the Northern Legislatures repealed their Personal Liberty Laws. And Douglass concludes his bitter chapter by saying:

“Those who may wish to see to what depths of humility and self-abasement a noble people can be brought under the sentiment of fear, will find no chapter of history more instructive than that which treats of the events in official circles in Washington during the space between the months of November, 1859, and March, 1860.” (Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Pathway Press, 1941, pp. 362–366.)  

For a long time even Lincoln’s stand was doubtful. On December 20, 1860, the very day on which South Carolina seceded, Lincoln made a statement which seemed to exclude compromise. However, in a series of speeches which he delivered on his eleven-day journey to Washington, he confused the nation and demoralized his supporters. Even after the inaugural, on March 4, the North as a whole did not know what to expect from him. Marx, as we have seen, had no doubt that the decisive influence was played by the North-west farmers, who supplied sixty-six votes or 36.6 per cent of the votes in the college which elected Lincoln.  

But there was refusal to compromise from the South also. Says Douglass:

“Happily for the cause of human freedom, and for the final unity of the American nation, the South was mad and would listen to no concessions. It would neither accept the terms offered, nor offer others to be accepted.”  

Why wouldn’t they? One reason we can now give with confidence. Wherever the masses moved, there Marx and Engels had their eyes glued like hawks and pens quick to record. On January 11, 1860, in the midst of the critical period described by Douglass, Marx wrote to Engels:

“In my opinion, the biggest things that are happening in the world today are, on the one hand, the movement of the slaves in America started by the death of John Brown, and, on the other, the movement of the serfs in Russia ... I have just seen in the Tribune there has been a fresh rising of slaves in Missouri, naturally suppressed. But the signal has now been given.”  

Fifteen days later, Engels replied:

“Your opinion of the significance of the slave movement in America and Russia is now confirmed. The Harper’s Ferry affair with its aftermath in Missouri bears its fruits ... the planters have hurried their cotton on to the ports in order to guard against any probable consequence arising out of the Harper’s Ferry affair.”  

A year later Engels writes to Marx:  

“Things in North America are also becoming exciting. Matters must be going very badly for them with the slaves if the Southerners dare to play so risky a game.”  

Eighty years after Marx, a modern student has given details which testify to that unfailing insight into the fundamental processes of historical development, so characteristic of our great predecessors. In Arkansas, in Mississippi, in Virginia, in Kentucky, in Illinois, in Texas, in Alabama, in Northwest Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina – rebellion and conspiracy swept the South between 1859 and 1860. Writes a contemporary after the John Brown raid:  

“A most terrible panic, in the meantime, seizes not only the village, the vicinity and all parts of the state, but every slave state in the Union ... rumors of insurrection, apprehensions of invasions, whether well founded or ill founded, alter not the proof of the inherent and incurable weakness and insecurity of society, organized upon a slave-holding basis” (Ibid., p. 352).  

The struggle of the Negro masses derives its peculiar intensity from the simple fact that what they are struggling for is not abstract but is always perfectly visible around them. In their instinctive revolutionary efforts for freedom, the escaping slaves had helped powerfully to begin and now those who remained behind had helped powerfully to conclude, the self-destructive course of the slave power.

Footnotes

1. Rise of American Civilization (p. 898): “The sources of this remarkable movement are difficult to discover.” Much the same can be said of the movement in Britain, which embraced literally millions of people.  

2. It is something for revolutionists to observe in the past and to count on in the future. Already in England, a country where race prejudice is still very strong, the presence of American Negro soldiers, the prejudice against them of white American soldiers, and the reports of Negro upheaval in America have awakened a strong interest among the English masses.

FROM VERSO BLOG

HE WAS MY FAVORITE LENINIST, 

FORMER SECRETARY TO TROTSKY

DURING THE FOUNDATIONAL YEARS OF THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL 

WITH RAYA DUNAYEVSKAYA CREATED A THEORY OF STATE CAPITALISM TO EXPLAIN THE STALINIST SOVIET UNION POLITICAL ECONOMY PRIOR TO AND AFTER WWII 

I HEARD HIM SPEAK AT THE U OF ALBERTA THREE TIMES

DURING THE SEVENTIES.