KALI AKUNO
Executive Director of Cooperation Jackson
THE SLAVE SONGS
THE SONGS OF SLAVERY AND EMANCIPATION IN THIS BOOK, SOME WRITTEN more than two hundred years ago, are not only important historically; they have a direct bearing on today’s movements for social and economic transformation. When you hear songs like “Nat Turner” or “Hymn of Freedom,” it’s almost as if they were written yesterday. They bring inspiration and revolutionary clarity to contemporary struggles. One way the songs do this is by challenging fundamental misconceptions. For example, some would have us believe that the Nat Turner rebellion was not a major source of inspiration for the enslaved. Yet, Nat Turner’s form of resistance was in fact praised and celebrated by many. It was contemplated and tried many times over in many places and passed on in stories and in songs that were then buried. Songs of Slavery and Emancipation is a groundbreaking work because it brings to light this deeper history of unending resistance, which took many forms.
To this day, many people are misled by a false narrative: that Black people, my ancestors, just accepted their fate and didn’t resist, when, in fact, the resistance was constant, multifaceted, nuanced, and complex. This resistance shaped reality. That doesn’t mean it ended slavery, but resistance changed the terms and conditions of slavery. These songs make this clear, and they relate directly to what W. E. B. Du Bois called “the great strike.” Once the Civil War started, the word spread like wildfire. People immediately forged ahead into motion, went into action, and you could hear these songs in the background. These songs were the soundtrack of that action. I can imagine somebody running from Tennessee to part of Ohio, or from somewhere in the Carolinas or Virginia or Maryland heading up to Pennsylvania or to New York, singing these songs.
This helps explain why these songs were so dangerous. Not only are they alive, vibrant songs; they speak to specific issues in history: Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, the Haitian Revolution, Black soldiers in the Union Army. History is a powerful weapon. Memory is a powerful weapon. Culture is a powerful weapon. And these songs represent all three. If you are trying to keep a subject, captive population in abject poverty and exploitation, you have to remove all the tools of inspiration, all the tools of organizing that they might possess. You have to strip them bare of that.
These songs also remind us of slavery’s level of damage and terror. This continued during Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era right up to the explosive rebellions of the 1960s, which unleashed a new culture of resistance.
There have been efforts to mask the viciousness and cruelty of slavery and its aftermath. For example, Without Sanctuary, a picture book of lynching photos and postcards that was published in 2000 in a limited edition to expose the brutality against Black people during Reconstruction and into the twentieth century, is now out of print. In the early decades of the twentieth century, those postcards were printed, collected, and mailed around the country. You could buy them at Woolworth’s and in little mom and pop stores throughout the South and beyond. The book and the postcards are now difficult and expensive to get, although the “Without Sanctuary” website still makes its collection of images available. Gradually, the systemic horrors perpetrated then against Black people have, for many, faded into “far away and long ago.” In order to maintain an apartheid state, those in power have to obscure documentation of the crimes committed to maintain it.
More importantly, it is imperative to bury the signs of resistance. If they are not erased, somebody is going to pick up them up as tools and think “I can do something with this. I’m inspired to do something with this.” They had to suppress knowledge of this history of resistance, including the music. That removal is ongoing.
The history of the struggle here in Jackson, Mississippi, has been almost erased, from as recently as the 1970s. A lot of the institutions of resistance have been undermined or destroyed, lost funding, and lost resources. So even that recent institutional history and memory of resistance and how to organize have been nearly wiped out. It’s not just that these organizations and the activists who formed them have passed on.
The history of the struggle is not taught in any of Jackson’s public schools. The school districts and their curricula have intentionally stamped out that history. The state even tried to adopt a Texas textbook that described enslaved people as “workers and immigrants,” as if slavery was a voluntary act. The purpose is to obscure history, to deny racism, to deny the settler colonialism aspect of the United States and push the notion everything is fine. The order of things—who’s on top, who’s on the bottom—is natural, according to that perspective, and should be perpetuated well into the future So this cultural legacy, particularly calling for freedom, calling for rebellion as many of these songs do, had to be wiped out.
The relevance of these songs to young people today is tremendous. The younger generation is reinventing itself. Part of that reinventing is exploring—“Hey let’s look at the history of the Sixties and the Twenties and the Thirties and the 1890s and the 1860s.” They’re going back and looking for material, looking for inspiration, looking for knowledge of how the struggle was carried on, what we can learn from it, what were the positives, what were the negatives, what were the success stories, why did this fail, and why did it not go forward. Songs of Slavery and Emancipation will be a core part of that narrative, of speaking to a younger generation that can carry forward this legacy of resistance for our children, my children and grandchildren, into the future. This project, the book, the two CDs, and the film are coming out at the perfect time.
Very consciously and deliberately, a lot of the young folks whom we work with in Cooperation Jackson are attuned to culture in ways that my generation was not. With hip-hop, for example, we viewed it like a lifestyle, “B-boys” and “B-girls” kind of thing. But many young people now are much more focused on music that is not only an embodiment of our culture but is focused on healing. This generation is putting a lot of emphasis on deep healing of trauma. These songs speak not only to that culture of trauma but how people responded to it. They show clearly that these enslaved Africans were deeply brutalized; yet, despite all that dehumanization, they didn’t quit, they didn’t bow. They found ways to resist and ways to share in a deep quest for liberation that was unbound and unbroken.
THE ABOLITIONIST SONGS
The other inspirational part of this project is the abolitionist songs. There is a new abolitionist movement today, battling current forms of enslavement: mass incarceration and the overall government and corporate surveillance and monitoring—all the ways in which we are criminalized just for being Black, just for being of African descent.
These songs document an abolitionist movement that was out to destroy chattel slavery. In the main, it did not compromise with it, accept it, or merely try to reform it. Unfortunately, much of the dominant narrative, right down to today, has tried to make it seem that the abolitionists represented the general opinion in the North. It pretends that the North was a land of absolute freedom and the South was a land of slavery, and somehow the North was more civilized or more humane because it ended the slave trade or aspects of slavery earlier than the South. When you really look at how the North benefited economically from slavery in the South, it’s clear that this is not true in any fundamental respect. The abolitionists challenged the whole social and economic system based on slavery. And while some only wanted to return my ancestors to the African continent, many of them argued that the whole edifice of this country is built on two pillars: stealing land from the Indigenous people and stealing Black bodies, forcing them to work against their will. In effect, they called the foundations of the United States into question.
And, similarly to why the slave resistance songs have been almost forgotten, the abolitionist songs have often been removed from their context. When you obscure this particular history and the broader vision of many abolitionists, you eliminate important aspects of how people who were not enslaved actually lived and practiced in solidarity with folks who were and what they did to try to realize their own humanity.
You can’t talk about abolition without talking about the Underground Railroad, how it was organized, and the risks that folks took at every point along the road to help fellow human beings whom they didn’t even know. The helpers just knew that these people were enslaved and thus made whatever contribution they could, whether giving food, putting out a blanket, or giving shelter in their homes for however long. They provided transportation in the night, at tremendous risk to themselves, to get the escaping enslaved people from one place to another. There are parallels today with the sanctuary movement supporting the undocumented, a culture that refuses to collaborate with the state or even recognize its authority to deport people desperately seeking refuge.
Drawing upon that history and its parallels today is empowering. There are moments in our collective history when we have found the courage and the organizational means to be effective in organizing resistance against the oppression of the system. That is the critical thing that I think this music will help inspire and energize.
This leads us to the following question: why did certain institutions give this music up? And that is going to take us into some deeper issues around class divisions within our own movements, within our own families, that we have to dig into and interrogate. Instead of ignoring that, we need to expose it because we have some profound issues to deal with right now. Ignoring these songs and refusing to question why this culture of resistance has been lost are consequential mistakes.
In June 2015, Pope Francis issued a strong encyclical on climate justice, calling action on climate change a moral imperative. Based on it, Cooperation Jackson has made the effort to draw in some of our local churches to have a conversation about climate change and the Sixth Extinction (the sixth time the planet is experiencing the mass extinction of species)—an issue that is paramount for us.
That was around the same time that documentaries about the song “Amazing Grace” came out. Even before that, I knew the history of that song, but I found it amazing how many ministers who knew the song word for word did not know that it had a direct relation to slavery and abolition. You begin to see how the narrative of our resistance gets eliminated when even a song like that, a vibrant song that is a part of our civil rights tradition, loses its substantive message and is considered “just an everyday church hymn.” No! It has a much deeper meaning, which has been lost in the very churches that sing it. Why? That’s a deep question we need to ask ourselves.
Some of it has to do with the growing reactionary political and cultural movement in the US. But there is also the self-deceptive notion that “we made it. The struggle is over. These songs and cultural creations are just relics of a time when things were tough.” This kind of blindness is very dangerous, and it has cost us. I’ve heard so many people say, “I thought we defeated that. I thought that was over.” But what makes people think that? Did they forget that the Klan has been around in Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana the whole time? Have they forgotten David Duke? Are they aware of the roots of these white supremacist militias around the country? It’s a kind of amnesia.
The struggle to end chattel slavery was a multinational project, and keeping knowledge of it alive in the public consciousness is very important. People are asking deep questions such as “Can there be multiracial unity in the twenty-first century?” and “Is that possible?” In fact, it exists everywhere, all the time. The real question is whether there is a multiracial movement large enough, powerful enough, organized enough to combat the more reactionary forces. Here again, reviving history that has been obscured is crucial.
History often gets read as if the outlooks of the wealthy and powerful are the dominant views in society at all times. This is untrue. In the forty to fifty years leading up to the Civil War, there was both massive revolt against chattel slavery and stubborn retrenchment by white supremacists and segregationists. There were massive disagreements both within and between the North and South. But there is still a narrative of the “Solid South” that asserts all white people in the South agreed with and supported slavery. This is a fabrication. Mississippi provides an example. Free State of Jones, a 2016 movie, was based on the true story of Blacks and whites uniting against slavery. In fact, there was massive resistance to the power of the enslavers throughout the entire country. Some of it was large in scale, as the movie describes. Some of it was small and minute, like work stoppages or people freeing themselves, running away, sometimes twenty or thirty times. The lashes they received are seen in photos from the period. But actual stories like that told in Free State of Jones are hidden. Many people in this country have never heard of it. There was even controversy around that movie and whether it was going to be shown in Mississippi. Efforts to censor this movie, the open debates about whether it should be shown, and discussions of whether it was appropriate or revisionist history are a matter of public record. The history of the actual episode is also, but we have to know where to look for it.
Songs of Slavery and Emancipation brings a whole era of resistance forward into the twenty-first century. To forget the lessons of the revolt and rebellion of the enslaved or the organizing of the abolitionist networks and the Underground Railroad is to condemn people to the false belief that because one of us is Black and the other is white we can’t unite, we don’t have anything in common, and we can’t work together. And this goes for people of all ethnicities, places of origin, and genders.
We must not forget this history. These songs can make an important contribution. They provide a popular art form that can help people understand all Americans’ history and participate in our contemporary struggles. Songs of Slavery and Emancipation carries crucial history that enlivens our collective memory and helps keep the spirit of resistance strong and moving forward.