Pompey was called a rogue
The girls were called “wenches”
But for others they were liberators
Their arson sparked
Fires in other places
Boston, New York, Georgia and Ohio
Their owners learned
That it’s not only Gabriel’s
Army from whom you have to scurry
But teenagers like the Albany 3
About whom you have to
Worry
Black Lives Matter!
1819–1824
DENMARK VESEY
Robert Jones, Jr.
Rapper Kanye West, who emerged an admirer of Donald Trump, once suggested that slavery was a choice. From his limited understanding of history, he attempted to convey the idea that Black people never resisted their enslavers. As such, the subjugation of enslaved people was the fault of the subjugated who failed to resist.
Clearly, West was unfamiliar with the story of Denmark Vesey, who planned a powerful insurrection in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822.
Enslaved until he purchased his freedom from lottery winnings (which did not, however, permit him to purchase the freedom of his wife and children), Vesey initially lived quietly as a carpenter around whom white people felt safe. So safe, in fact, that he rented or owned a house in the heart of Charleston only a few blocks away from the mayor and the governor. He gathered with other Blacks at his residence to plot the overthrow of slavery.
In 1800 Vesey, at about thirty-three, must have noticed that Black people made up over 77 percent of the population of Charleston. It was the Blackest city in the country—and one of the most heavily policed. It seems that wherever the Black body is present, whether in solitary or in a multitude, whites feel threatened, perhaps by the ghosts of their own sins for which they have never atoned.
Given the size of their majority, it is not difficult to determine why Vesey imagined that he, along with the rest of the Black population, could overthrow the city. He planned to raid the banks and artillery storages and leave almost every one of its white citizens, young and old, massacred in the streets, then escape to Haiti. The Haitian Revolution must have inspired Vesey’s plans since he had once been enslaved on the island to work the sugarcane fields. Smartly, he had faked an epileptic seizure to get out of doing such drudgery and had been brought to Charleston.
For Vesey, Blackness was a unifier that superseded geography. Seeking a community of radical Black spirit, he joined the new African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, founded in 1817 in Charleston. But in 1818, the city shut it down because the whites feared Black people congregating and discovering that their lot was in fact neither ordained nor written in the sky. However, by then it was too late. Vesey had already found among its clergy and believers kindred spirits. For this was a moment when the Black church could be relied upon as a site of revolutionary, liberatory action rather than for what it has more recently been known: respectability, docility, anti-queerness, and greed—a shadow version of whiteness.
A brutally anti-Black city, despite its Black majority, Charleston was home to the Work House, a former sugar factory that had been converted into a torture chamber for Black people. Charleston must have shown Vesey the same untold cruelties that all Black America would witness in 2015 when one Dylann Storm Roof, after being welcomed into the open arms of the congregation of Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, opened fire and murdered nine of them in the middle of prayer.
Vesey made it clear to all his lieutenants that they were to recruit to his army only Black people who loved Black people, not those striving to be white. He was distrustful of Charleston’s biracial population, particularly the bourgeois class, whom he saw as having, at best, split loyalties. (However, he did recruit at least three biracial men into his army.) What he achieved in terms of organization is remarkable: he recruited as many as nine thousand Black people under the single banner of their own liberation, willing to risk life and limb to attain the dignity afforded to horseflies but denied to them.
What must have stung no less acutely than a lash from the whip, however, was that Vesey’s meticulous strategies were undone by other Black people. As much as by the superior military strength and numbers of the white opposing force, the possibility of Black liberation is often undermined by Black people who have been so successfully indoctrinated by white supremacist principles that the idea of mass Black freedom is threatening or, worse, unimaginable. What motivated these men (alarmingly, there is no record of any women being recruited either to aid in the rebellion or to undermine it, though they must have certainly played a significant role) to act on behalf of white masters to determine the specifics of the uprising can only be guessed at, but chief among the likely causes are cowardice and pragmatism. That they were scared was obvious; of what, however, deserves more consideration.
From these men, long dead, we will never have definitive answers. But perhaps answers can be found in questioning contemporary figures like Kanye West, U.S. Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, attorney Larry Elder, political commentator Candace Owens, or any other Black person whose actions are direct descendants of the same fealty to racist systems that undid Vesey and company’s chances at achieving humanity.
Vesey’s strategy was gruesome by necessity, yet it paled in comparison to the infinite horrors enacted by all who participated in the capture, transport, enslavement, abuse, rape, disfigurement, and murder of Black people during the enterprise known as antebellum slavery. Upon being betrayed, in the summer of 1822 Vesey and thirty-nine of his followers were executed by hanging. All transcripts of the trials were ordered destroyed by the judges (though at least one copy, discovered accidentally, survived the purge) for fear that it might inspire Black people to engage heartily in their human right to self-defense.
The Black people who attended the public executions to witness and give their respects were threatened with arrest and flogging if they dared to show any public sign of mourning. Their docility and acquiescence, however phony, were made mandatory so as to assure the white populace of Charleston, and the entire United States, that all the power still rested in white hands, and that despite the cruelties enacted upon them, Black people had nothing but boundless love in their hearts for white people. This myth of Black docility, alongside a gut-level fear of a Black uprising, is the American empire’s motivation for enforcing supplication through unjust laws, sealing a social contract that punishes the wretched for daring to recognize their own dignity, and rewarding them for conceding to the pretense of the empire’s innocence. The only peace to be had is through thorough capitulation and assimilation. These are the principles upon which bigotry is built.
However, as Vesey surely understood, the enslaver’s morality should not be the morality of the enslaved. If it is wrong to enslave, then it is right to free oneself from enslavement. The means by which that freedom is achieved is above moral speculation, with one exception: once attained, one must remember: Wash the blood from the hands. Never turn the (t)error inward. Discontinue the abject failures of humanity that lead one to regard other people as property, lest the cycle begin again, this time with the blade pointed at one’s own throat.