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the early 1790s, slavery appeared to be a dying institution. Slave imports into the New World were declining and slave prices were falling because the crops grown by slaves--tobacco, rice, and indigo--did not generate enough income to pay for their upkeep.

Stuart Hall,

Prudence Crandall

Anne Braden

For many contemporary African-American activists, race has been a blind spot for white feminists and for the feminist movement at large.

But the numerous issues of inequality facing working-class and poor Black women

had never been very vital to the mainstream feminist agenda

So how is it possible to develop the kinds of arguments that will allow people to recognize that one cannot effectively struggle for gender equality without racial equality?

“Intersectionality” is a neologism introduced in 1989 by the Black law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who teaches at U.C.L.A.

and Columbia University.

that Black women are subject to discrimination based not just on race, class or sex but the interaction of all of them

Davis sees a chance for us to re-examine capitalism, which she views as irredeemably flawed

Along with coalition building, Davis has long been passionate about radically changing the criminal justice system

)

It allows us to imagine other ways of addressing issues of safety and security. Most of us have assumed in the past that when it comes to public safety, the police are the ones who are in charge. When it comes to issues of harm in the community, prisons are the answer. But what if we imagined different modes of addressing harm, different modes of addressing security and safety?

I have thought often of Davis’s ideas on law enforcement, especially around issues involving the mentally il

but also their leadership models — and in particular, how they have avoided the pitfalls of their predecessors: primarily, a cultish fixation on a charismatic male leader

Fannie Lou Hamer

Huey P. Newton w

Mark Rudd

[Younger activists] know so much more than we did at their age,” she says. “They don’t take male supremacy for granted.

One aspect of this shift in leadership models has to do with a critique of patriarchy and a critique of male supremacy.

Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi

E.D. Nixon,

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Crucial to her intellectual development was her mother’s participation with the Southern Negro Youth Congress;

several of the organization’s leaders were members of the Communist Party.

Davis spent two of her high school years attending an integrated school in New York thanks to a Quaker-run program that placed promising Black Southerners in Northern schools

she studied under the philosopher Herbert Marcuse,

From 1965 to 1967, she studied in Europe, learning several languages, deepening her understanding of German philosophy and participating in rallies for the Socialist German Student Union.

After returning to the United States in 1967, Davis affirmed her commitment to Communism

a key reason that she became associated with the Marxist-influenced Black Panthers

NO MOVEMENT IS static. Contemporary Black activism has also largely been informed by the concurrent agitation surrounding trans and queer rights,

Though briefly married to a man in the early ’80s, Davis came out as a lesbian in 1997 and now openly lives with her partner, the academic Gina Dent.

There would have been no way to imagine that trans movements would effectively demonstrate to people that it is possible to effectively challenge what counts as normal in so many different areas of our lives.

There’s a tendency to define racial progress in America by the upward mobility of various “minority groups” — to count and celebrate how many members have entered the middle class, have graduated from college or have multimillion-dollar deals with streaming services.

We do need free education. Why is it that people pay fifty, sixty, seventy thousand dollars a year to study in a university? Housing: That’s something sort of just basic. At a time when we need access to these services more than ever before, the wealth of the world has shifted into the hands of a very small number of people.”

It may be easy to be cynical about Communism and claim that America won the Cold War, but it’s also impossible to deny that this country’s financial system breeds income inequality, homelessness and divides us into warring camps separated by class, sex and race.

Does she think the Democratic Party could be a vehicle for transforming America? “To be frank, no,” she says, but then adds, “I think it’s important to push the Democrats further to the left,” expressing great enthusiasm for the four progressive female congresswomen — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib — elected in 2018.

Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011

Black Lives Matter movement.

this is a moment many years in the making, based in grass-roots organizing that’s been happening outside the world of party politics and thus underrecognized by the mainstream media.

there are no guarantees, to use Stuart Hall’s phrase, that our work will have an immediate effect,” she says. “But we have to do it as if it were possible.”

She’s heartened, too, by the diversity of participants in Black Lives Matter marches and the willingness of white protesters to embrace the battle against white supremacy

As we looked at the damage that the pandemic was doing, people began to realize the extent to which Black communities, brown communities and Indigenous communities were sustaining the effect of a pandemic in ways that pointed to the existence of structural racism.

We buy all too easily into the jingoism of Hollywood movies and our politicians’ pious platitudes. We possess an unjustified sense of self-regard. The effects of an inflated ego are pernicious; they stifle our ability to clearly see the world outside of ourselves, or our own role in it.

grasshoppers

juggling of freight rates

The other half of this story is Africa. The very basis of the ease of the conquistadors’ take-over of the New World — the indigenous peoples’ vulnerability to European diseases — also made them useless as a labour force and so Africans had to be shipped in instead as slaves.

For the next three centuries, the exploitation of Africa made that of the New World possible.

the Triangular Trade that ensured the maturation of capitalism and underpinned the elaboration of Enlightenment high culture — the shipping of slaves from Africa to harvest such staples of European life as sugar, cotton and tobacco in the New World. It built the investment infrastructure of capitalism.

Ultimately, the Portuguese proved more adept at the ‘great game’ of imperialism than the Spanish — the 1493 Treaty of Tordesillas gave them the best slave ports in equatorial Africa and Brazilian plantations which proved so extensive and productive that they supplied even north America with tobacco

it was the Spanish that came first, and it was they that set the pattern.

but a key

was the Spanish and Portuguese conquest of the Azores, Madeiras, and Canary Islands during the 15th century.

Alfred Crosby argued in his 1986 history, Ecological Imperialism:[2]

[T]he Iberian conquest of the Azores, Madeiras and Canaries [w]as a pilot program for the reshaping of European colonies in the Americas, Africa, Australia, and Oceania. In all these places, the newcomers would conquer the human populations and Europeanize entire ecosystems. They dared this because they had seen from the Iberian experience in the Canaries that European crops and herds would thrive in all but the most hostile, unfamiliar environments, and that the fiercest indigenes could be beaten despite their superior numbers and home-ground advantage. As a result, tens of millions of natives around the world would die.

Capitol Men

Dray's

It does not really offer an assessment of Reconstruction's successes and failings

Twelve years earlier, Smalls had piloted the Planter, on which he worked as a slave crewman, out of Charleston harbor and delivered it to the Union navy, a deed that made him a national hero. In 1864, while the ship was undergoing repairs in Philadelphia, a conductor evicted Smalls from a streetcar when he refused to give up his seat to a white passenger. Ninety years before a similar incident involving Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, Smalls's ordeal inspired a movement of black and white reformers to persuade the Pennsylvania legislature to ban discrimination in public transportation.

Stephens offered a long argument based on states' rights as to why the bill was unconstitutional.

The subject of their exchange was a civil rights bill banning racial discrimination in places of public accommodation.

Elliott launched into a learned and impassioned address explaining why the recently enacted Fourteenth Amendment justified the measure (which was signed into law by President Grant the following year), then reminded Congress of an infamous speech Stephens had delivered on the eve of the Civil War: "It is scarcely twelve years since that gentleman shocked the civilized world by announcing the birth of a government which rested on human slavery as its cornerstone." Elliott already had proved that he refused to be intimidated by whites: in 1869 he whipped a white man in the streets of Columbia for writing inappropriate notes to his wife. A black man assaulting a white man in defense of his wife's good name was not a common occurrence in nineteenth-century South Carolina.

Congressmen Dray profiles came from diverse origins and differed in their approach to public policies. Some had been free before the Civil War, others enslaved

Some favored government action to distribute land to former slaves; others insisted that in a market society the only way to acquire land was to purchase it. Some ran for office as representatives of their race, others as exemplars of the ideal that, with the end of slavery and the advent of legal equality, race no longer mattered. Reconstruction's black Congressmen did not see themselves simply as spokesmen for the black community

was one of the more conservative black leaders; yet in the Senate he spoke out for more humane treatment of Native Americans and opposed legislation banning immigration from China

sixteen black members of Congress

had enjoyed opportunities and advantages unknown to most African-Americans

had been born free in North Carolina

was the slave son of his owner and was educated by the same tutor who taught his white half-siblings.

Some Congressmen had enjoyed unique privileges as slaves.

wner allowed him to learn to read and write and to run a hotel and livery stable in Selma

Others, however, had experienced slavery in all its brutality.

Jeremiah Haralson

None of these men fit the old stereotype of Reconstruction officials as ignorant, incompetent and corrupt.

All were literate, most were seasoned political organizers by the time of their election and nearly all were honest.

ne who does fit the image of venality wa

of Louisiana, whose career combined staunch advocacy of civil rights with a sharp eye for opportunities to line his pockets

Pinchback grew up and attended school in Cincinnati. In the 1850s he worked as a cabin boy on an Ohio River steamboat. He fell in with a group of riverboat gamblers and learned their trade. He turned up in New Orleans in 1862 and expertly navigated the byzantine world of Louisiana's Reconstruction politics. Pinchback was undoubtedly corrupt (he accumulated a small fortune while in office) but also an accomplished politician.

Reconstruction ended in 1877, when President Rutherford B. Hayes abandoned the idea of federal intervention to protect the rights of black citizens in the South, essentially leaving their fate in the hands of local whites.

black political power, while substantially diminished, did not vanish until around 1900, when the Southern states disenfranchised black voters. Six more African-Americans served in Congress before the end of the nineteenth century. Some of their Reconstruction predecessors remained active in politics

of Planter fame, served as customs collector at Beaufort until 1913, when he was removed as part of a purge of blacks from the federal bureaucracy by Woodrow Wilson, the first Southern-born president since Reconstruction.

Pinchback and Bruce moved to Washington, where they became leaders of the city's black elite and arbiters of federal patronage appointments for African-Americans. Bruce worked tirelessly but unsuccessfully to persuade Congress to reimburse blacks who had deposited money in the Freedman's Savings Bank, which failed during the Panic of 1873. Like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in our own time, the bank was a private corporation chartered by Congress that enjoyed the implicit but not statutory backing of the federal government. Its counterparts today are being bailed out with billions of taxpayer dollars, as they have been deemed too big to fail. The Freedman's Savings Bank was too black to rescue.

The last black Congressman of the post-Reconstruction era wa

of North Carolina, whose term ended in 1901. From then until 1929, when

took his seat representing Chicago, Congress remained lily-white. Not until 1972, with

election in Georgia and

in Texas, did black representation resume from states that had experienced Reconstruction. Today the Congressional Black Caucus numbers forty-two members, seventeen of them from the states of the old Confederacy.

One such episode involves

who in 1874 was elected to Congress from Beaufort County, South Carolina.

Equally riveting is the 1874 confrontation between

he former vice president of the Confederacy, then representing Georgia in the House of Representatives, and another black South Carolinian,

Robert Brown Elliott (1842-1884) was an African American member of the United States House of Representatives from South Carolina. Robert Brown Elliott's early life is a mystery. Although he claimed to have been born in Liverpool, England to West Indian immigrants, and to have graduated from Eton College, biographers have been unable to corroborate these facts. He moved to South Carolina in 1867 and established a law practice. Elliott helped organize the local Republican Party and served in the state constitutional convention. In 1868 he was elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives. The next year he was appointed assistant adjutant-general; he was the first African American commanding general of the South Carolina National Guard. As part of his job, he helped form a state militia to fight the Ku Klux Klan. Elliott was elected as a Republican to the Forty-second and Forty-third United States Congress. He "delivered a celebrated speech" in favor of the Civil Rights Act of 1875.[1] He resigned on November 1, 1874, to fight political corruption in South Carolina. He served again in the South Carolina House of Representatives, where he was elected as Speaker of the House. He ran unsuccessfully for South Carolina Attorney General in 1876. Reconstruction ended that year and he was forced out of office.[] He set up a private law practice in New Orleans.