Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (26 page)

Walker’s
Appeal
spread quickly, forcing racial commentators like Garrison to respond to its arguments. Garrison’s philosophical
commitment to nonviolence caused him to deplore it as a “most injudicious publication.” But he did concede in early 1830 that the
Appeal
contained “many valuable truths and seasonable warnings.” By then, the South had begun a dogged political and legal battle to suppress the pamphlet. The North Carolina governor called the
Appeal
“totally subversive of all subordination in our slaves”—a proclamation Walker enjoyed reading. In the midst of (and probably because of) the commotion over Walker’s pamphlet, Baltimore authorities jailed Garrison on April 17, 1830. Garrison did not seem to mind his seven weeks of imprisonment. “A few white victims must be sacrificed to open the eyes of this nation,” he declared upon his release in June, when a wealthy abolitionist paid his fine.

David Walker died weeks later of tuberculosis. But the force of his opposition to racism and slavery—save the part about violent resistance—lived on in the pens and voices of his friends, especially the firebrand abolitionist and feminist Maria Stewart. “It is not the color of the skin that makes the man or the woman, but the principle formed in the soul,” Stewart told Bostonians. Stewart’s four public lectures in 1832 and 1833 are known today as the first time an American-born woman addressed a mixed audience of White and Black men and women. And she was a pioneering Black feminist, at that. But some called the idea of a mixed audience “promiscuous.”
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Lundy continued to publish the
Genius
, though irregularly, after that, but he and Garrison parted ways. Garrison needed a new medium to continue his antislavery advocacy. He headed north on an antislavery lecture tour, where his opponents denigrated him as “a second Walker,” and where he encountered “prejudice more stubborn” than anywhere else. It was a sentiment Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville would echo after he toured the United States in 1831. “The prejudice of race appears to be stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists,” Tocqueville shared in his instant political-science classic,
Democracy in America
(1835). Tocqueville described the vicious cycle of racist ideas, a cycle that made persuading or educating racist ideas away nearly impossible. In “order to induce whites to abandon” their opinions of Black inferiority, “the
negroes must change,” he wrote. “But, as long as this opinion persists, to change is impossible.” The United States faced two options: colonization or the eradication or extinction of African Americans—since uplift suasion, Tocqueville felt, would never work. Tocqueville labeled colonization a “lofty” idea, but an impractical one. Extinction remained the only option.
¹⁰

Garrison had a different option in mind when he settled back in Boston: immediate abolition and gradual equality. On Saturday, January 1, 1831, he published the first issue of
The Liberator
, the organ that relaunched an abolitionist movement among White Americans. In his first editorial manifesto, “To the Public,” Garrison made a “full and unequivocal” recant of the “popular but pernicious doctrine of
gradual
abolition.”
¹¹

For the rest of his abolitionist life, Garrison never retreated on immediate emancipation. He rebuked any talk of gradual abolition—of preparing society and enslaved Africans for emancipation one day. But he did make clear his preference for gradual equality, retreating on immediate equality and outlining a process of civilizing Black people to be equal one day. Garrison and his band of assimilationists would stridently fight for gradual equality, calling antiracists who fought for immediate equality impractical and crazy—just as segregationists called him crazy for demanding immediate emancipation.

Black subscribers were the early lifeblood of
The Liberator
. Garrison spoke to Black people in his newspaper and in speeches in New York and Philadelphia. He pressed for free Blacks to challenge “every law which infringes on your rights as free native citizens,” and to “respect yourself, if you desire the respect of others.” They had “acquired,” and would continue to acquire, “the esteem, confidence and patronage of the whites, in proportion to your increase in knowledge and moral improvement.” Garrison urged Blacks to acquire money, too, because “money begets influence, and influence respectability.”

Garrison believed that the nearer Blacks “approached the whites in their habits the better they were,” according to an early biographer. “They always seemed to him a social problem rather than simply people.” When Blacks were seen as a social problem, the solution to
racist ideas seemed simple. As Blacks rose, so would White opinions. When Blacks were seen as simply people—a collection of imperfect individuals, equal to the imperfect collection of individuals with white skins—then Blacks’ imperfect behavior became irrelevant. Discrimination was the social problem: the cause of the racial disparities between two equal collections of individuals.
¹²

In emphasizing Black self-improvement to ward off racism, Garrison was reflecting the views of the elite Black activists who invited him to their cities and subscribed to his newspaper. Black activists in many cases saw each other as social problems that needed to be fixed. “If we ever expect to see the influence of prejudice decrease and ourselves respected, it must be by the blessings of an enlightenment education,” resolved the attendees of Philadelphia’s Second Annual Convention for the Improvement of Free People of Color in 1831.
¹³

GARRISON WAS WRITING
in response to the racial disparities and discrimination he witnessed in the North, where Blacks were free. His calls for an “increase in knowledge and moral improvement” among free Blacks was an effort in uplift suasion not unlike the avowals of the editors of the first Black newspaper, the
Freedom’s Journal
. Of course, recent history had not shown a proportional relationship between Black uplift and White respect. The existence of upwardly mobile Blacks did not slow the colonization movement, the spread of enslaved Africans into the southwestern territories, or the unification of White commoners and enslavers in the new anti-Black Democratic Party. When Tennessee enslaver and war hero Andrew Jackson became the new president as the hero of democracy for White men and autocracy for others in 1829, the production and consumption of racist ideas seemed to be quickening, despite recent Black advances. When Kentucky senator Henry Clay organized aristocrats, industrialists, moralists, and colonizationists into the Whig Party in 1832 to oppose Jackson’s Democratic Party, racist ideas were spreading on pace within the United States.

In the early 1830s, the new urban penny press turned away from the “good” news and printed more eye-catching “bad” news,
sensationalizing and connecting crime and Blackness and poverty. Free Blacks had been forced into the shacks, cellars, and alleys of segregated “Nigger Hill” in Boston, “Little Africa” in Cincinnati, or “Five Points” in New York—“the worst hell of America,” wrote a visitor. Black behavior—not the wrenching housing and economic discrimination—was blamed for these impoverished Black enclaves. As early as 1793, a White minister protested that “a Negro hut” had depreciated property values in Salem. Similar protests surfaced in New Haven and Indiana, and they had become commonplace in Boston by the time Garrison settled there. The vicious housing cycle had already begun. Racist policies harmed Black neighborhoods, generating racist ideas that caused people not to want to live next to Blacks, which depressed the value of Black homes, which caused people not to want to live in Black neighborhoods even more, owing to low property values.
¹⁴

Millions of the poor European immigrants pouring into northern port cities after 1830 further amplified the housing discrimination and threatened free Blacks’ hold on menial and service jobs. Native Whites swung their rhetorical tools, long used to demean Blacks, and hit Irish immigrants, calling them “white niggers.” Some Irish struck back at this nativism. Others channeled—or were led to channel—their economic and political frustrations into racist ideas, which then led to more hatred of Black people.

It was in this environment of entrenched racism that America’s first minstrel shows appeared, and they began attracting large audiences of European immigrants, native Whites, and sometimes even Blacks. By 1830, Thomas “Daddy” Rice, who learned to mimic African American English (today called “Ebonics”), was touring the South, perfecting the character that thrust him into international prominence: Jim Crow. Appearing in blackface, and dressed in rags, torn shoes, and a weathered hat, Jim Crow sang and danced as a stupid, childlike, cheerful Black field hand. Other minstrel characters included “Old darky,” the thoughtless, musical head of an enslaved family, and “Mammy,” the hefty asexual devoted caretaker of Whites. The biracial, beautiful, sexually promiscuous “yaller gal” titillated White men. “Dandy,” or “Zip Coon,” was an upwardly mobile northern Black male who
mimicked—outrageously—White elites. Typically, minstrel shows included a song-and-dance portion, a variety show, and a plantation skit. In the decades leading up to the Civil War, blackface minstrelsy became the first American theatrical form, the incubator of the American entertainment industry. Exported to excited European audiences, minstrel shows remained mainstream in the United States until around 1920 (when the rise of racist films took their place).
¹⁵

Amid the illogic and perpetual challenges to racist ideas over the course of the nineteenth century, superior Whiteness found a normalizing shield in blackface minstrelsy. In 1835 and 1836, those who did not like minstrel shows could see the “Greatest Natural and National Curiosity in the World.” A bankrupt twenty-five-year-old, P. T. Barnum, started showing off Joice Heth, who he claimed was 161 years old. What’s more, he said, she was the former mammy of George Washington. And she looked the part, with her skeletal frame, paralyzed arm and legs, deeply wrinkled skin, toothless grin, “talons” for nails, and nearly blind eyes. Most of all, Heth’s dark skin made her longevity believable. Longevity was common in Africa, the
Evening Star
told its readers. P. T. Barnum, of course, would go on to become one of the greatest showmen in American history, exhibiting all kinds of “freaks,” including whitening Blacks. Physical assimilationists continued to view them with pleasure, declaring that skin-color change was what would eventually cure the nation’s racial ills.
¹⁶

In addition to minstrel shows and “freak” shows, a series of novels and children’s books produced racist ideas to inculcate younger and younger children. John Pendleton Kennedy’s novel
Swallow Barn
(1832) inaugurated the plantation genre that more or less recycled minstrel-show mammies and Sambos as characters in inebriating novels. Boston-born South Carolina enslaver Caroline Gilman wrote the plantation genre into
The Rose Bud
, the South’s first weekly magazine for children, established in 1832. Reading Gilman (but more often, simply observing their parents), southern White children played master, or worse, overseer, with enslaved Black playmates, ordering them, ridiculing them, and tormenting them. Enslaved children took solace in outwitting their free playmates in physical games, such as
anything involving running, jumping, or throwing. “We was stronger and knowed how to play, and the white children didn’t,” recalled one ex-slave. In slavery, both Black and White children were building a sense of self on a foundation of racist ideas.
¹⁷

This was the America that
The Liberator
entered in the 1830s, a land where Black people were simultaneously seen as scary threats, as sources of comedy, and as freaks. In their totality, all these racist ideas—emanating from minstrel shows, from “freak” shows, from literature, from newspapers, and from the Democrats and Whigs—looked down upon Black people as the social problem. Garrison loathed the shows and the literature, and he loathed those politicians, too. And yet he also crafted Black people as the social problem.

ONE ENSLAVED VIRGINIAN
did not share Garrison’s view that enslaved Africans should wait while White abolitionists and refined free Blacks solved the problem through nonviolent tactics of persuasion. This preacher rejected uplift suasion, and he rejected racist talk of Black behavior as part of the problem. On the evening of August 21, 1831, Nat Turner and five of his disciples, believing they had been given a task by God, began their fight against the problem in Southampton County. Turner killed his master’s family, snatched arms and horses, and moved on to the next plantation. Twenty-four hours later, about seventy freed people had joined the crusade.

After two days, seventy Black soldiers had killed at least fifty-seven enslavers across a twenty-mile path of destruction before the rebellion was put down. Panic spread as newspapers everywhere blared the gory details of the “Southampton Tragedy.” Before his hanging, Turner shared his liberation theology with a local lawyer named Thomas Gray. “I heard a loud noise in the heavens, and the Spirit instantly appeared to me and said the Serpent was loosened, and Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and that I should take it on and fight against the Serpent, for the time was fast approaching, when the first should be the last and the last should be the first.”

“Do you find yourself mistaken now?” Gray had flatly asked. “Was not Christ crucified?” Turner replied.
¹⁸

“We are horror-struck,” Garrison wrote of the rebellion. In America’s “fury against the revolters,” who would remember the “wrongs” of slavery? Garrison would, and he listed them. But he could not condone the strategy of violence. He did not realize that some, if not most, enslavers would die rather than set their wealth free. Garrison pledged his undying commitment to his philosophy: that the best way to “accomplish the great work of national redemption” was “through the agency of moral power,” that is, of moral persuasion.