2.19 Black Political Thought: Radical Resistance

Many abolitionists in the 1830s and 1840s, led by William Lloyd Garrison, believed in moral suasion: changing people's minds by appealing to their sense of right and wrong, through speeches, newspapers and petitions.

Advocates of radical resistance thought that was too slow. Enslaved people were suffering and dying every day. They wanted enslaved people to destroy slavery themselves, by revolt and, when needed, by force. They used pamphlets describing slavery's horrors to urge enslaved people to use any means to win freedom, and supporters smuggled these pamphlets into the South.

David Walker was a free Black man who ran a used-clothing shop in Boston. In 1829 he published his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, addressing people of African descent everywhere, not just in the US.

Walker answered Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), which claimed that Black people were naturally inferior, unable to govern themselves and better off enslaved. Walker rejected every point. He also rejected colonization in Africa, insisting that the US, built with Black labor, belonged to Black Americans too.

The Appeal is an example of early Black religious nationalism. Walker warned that God would punish the United States unless it repented and freed the enslaved, and he argued that slavery and true Christianity could not coexist. He urged enslaved people to fight for their freedom, with violence if they had to. Copies were smuggled into Southern ports, some sewn into the clothing of sailors, and Southern states offered rewards for Walker and passed laws against spreading such writing.

Henry Highland Garnet, a minister who had escaped slavery as a child, delivered his address at a national Black convention in Buffalo, New York, in 1843. Speaking directly to enslaved people, he told them they had a duty to resist: 'Let your motto be resistance! resistance! RESISTANCE!' He left the form of resistance to their circumstances but made clear that submission was not acceptable.

The speech was controversial. Frederick Douglass, then still a believer in moral suasion, opposed it, and the convention narrowly refused to endorse it. Garnet's wife, Julia Williams Garnet, also a leading abolitionist, helped write it. Garnet later came to support emigration and served as US minister to Liberia.

Walker and Garnet shaped a tradition of Black radical and religious nationalism that runs through the twentieth century, including organizations like the Nation of Islam (4.9). Their arguments for self-defense and self-determination echo in later debates over nonviolence and Black Power.