Before freedom was something
else. Before this language. Before freedom of speech and freedom
of press and the anti-alien/inalienable right to shoot people,
before the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, labor unions, Oakland Panthers
serving breakfast, the Philadelphia MOVE bombing, Fred Hampton’s blood
on soaked mattress, there was war. There was always war. People always
got shot. Before African American but not before nigger, colored, Negro.
Before AAVE, before Black America. Before we voted
we won. Before New Orleans we invented jazz. Before this
revolution and that Revolution and this revelation.
Before California, before Rodney King, before Trayvon Martin, before justifiable
homicide, before manifest destiny, before they kept using this language.
Before Barack Obama, before Emmett Till, the crack epidemic,
the housing crash, opioids, ecstasy, before white flight.
Before Harriet Tubman before FloJo before Serena before Aretha.
Before Shirleys Chisholm and Bassey, before June Jordan and Juneteenth.
Before Roberta Flack sang “Go Up Moses.” Before Phillis Wheatley, before
the Black Happy Birthday Song, before we could call spades
spades, before we wrote us down. Before Roberta Flack said
“Pharaoh doesn’t want you, but he needs you.
My people.” Before Sojourner, Ruby Bridges.
Before Board of Education, before railroads and Hawaiian
Airlines and Alaska Airlines and the NFL. Before the wars
on homelessness and poverty and terror and security
and Black trans women and Black women driving cars and Black girls
at pool parties and Black kids on playgrounds and corners and Black
veterans Black single mothers Black schizophrenics Black
professors Black athletes. Before we wasted all the water.
Before Flint, Michigan, Watergate, thoughts and prayers,
before semiautomatics. “Without you there is no pharaoh.”
Before The Arsenio Hall Show. Before it was televised. Before Blaxploitation
and Lil’ Kim and Dennis Rodman and before NYPD surveillance footage and
dash-cam footage the Lorraine Hotel and before Tamir Rice and Oscar Grant.
Before the West, west coast rap, west coast wineries, Mexican immigrants.
Before Ellis Island, before Japanese internment camps, before the gold rush,
cop shows, award shows, westerns, chain restaurants, Asian fusion,
the temperance movement and the suffragette movement
Hillary Clinton and Eleanor Roosevelt and Sandra Bullock in The Blind Side.
Before Jonestown. Before Selma. Before we almost lost Detroit.
Before Presidents of the United States of America. Before a noose
was a figure of speech. Before unimaginable
tragedy. No one put their hands over their hearts.
1739–1744
THE STONO REBELLION
Wesley Lowery
I often think back to a balmy spring afternoon when I stood—my parents to my right and my two younger brothers to my left—beneath the rows of coffin-shaped pillars erected to chronicle a recent era of American terrorism.
We had traveled here, to Montgomery, Alabama, in early 2018, about one month after the grand opening of this exhibit: the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which is a fancy name for what is a gut-punch of a memorial. It features 804 slabs of stone, suspended in midair as if hanging from tree branches, that represent every American county where a man, woman, or child was lynched.
We had come not only to see but to search. As we entered the walkway that snaked beneath the pillars, my father recited the names of four or five counties, primarily in rural North Carolina, and reminded us of various married names and divergent branches of his family tree. Our eyes searched the roster etched into each stone. We weren’t looking for a specific name or incident—there aren’t any known lynching victims in our lineage—but we knew it was possible, perhaps even likely, that at least one of those memorialized here would be recognizable as kin.
As my eyes interrogated each name of the slain, my ears drew me to a conversation just a few feet away, where another group stood, marveling, beneath a stone coffin. They appeared to be a family. They were all white. I can’t recall precisely what I overheard. But I can’t forget the realization, in that moment, that this family had no counties for which they’d been instructed to search.
This family was here to learn what my own had always known. While some nations vow never to forget, our American battle has always been over what we allow ourselves to remember.
Our historical record, we know, is subjective. Not every account is written down. The distinction between equity and injustice, riot and uprising, hinges on whose hand holds the pen. So often, it seems, our history is hiding from us, preventing the possibility that we dare look back and tell the truth—afraid of what doing so may require of us now.
Perhaps this is why we’ve been allowed to remember so little about the Stono Rebellion.
By the mid-eighteenth century, slavery had expanded so rapidly in the colony that would become the state of South Carolina that it was home to a Black majority. “Carolina looks more like a negro country than like a country settled by white people,” Swiss traveler Samuel Dyssli wrote in 1737. “In Charleston and that neighborhood there are calculated to be always 20 blacks, who are called negroes, to one white man, but they are all slaves.” The ratio wasn’t quite that lopsided, but it was significant nonetheless. By 1740, Carolina’s Black population was estimated at more than 39,100, while the white population stood at just 20,000.
But the booming population of enslaved people brought with it the same nightmare that has long tormented oppressive minorities: what happens when they realize that they have us outnumbered? Those fears were only exacerbated by a promise from the Spanish, eager to destabilize the British colonies, to free any enslaved person who made it to their territory in what is now Florida, specifically to St. Augustine. Soon the white slaveholders of Carolina would see their night terror come to life.
In the early hours of Sunday, September 9, 1739, about twenty Black rebels met on a bank of the Stono River, twenty miles southwest of Charleston, to carry out the plan that they had formed the night prior.