Black Barbie
AADOS Queen of the Appalachian
My bad
Essential The Official African American Thread#2
- Thread starter Rhapscallion Démone
- Start date
K.O.N.Y
Superstar
BUMP
Serena Williams Wins Her 23rd Grand Slam After Defeating Sister Venus At Australian Open
This also marks her 7th Australian Open victory.
By STEFFANEE WANG
Photo credit Scott Barbour / Getty Images
Early Friday, Serena Williams defeated her sister Venus Williams in the finals of the Australian Open, taking her 23rd Grand Slam title.
This marks Serena's seventh Australian Open win, and also brings her back to No. 1 world ranking after losing that title Germany's Angelique Kerber in September. This win also broke Serena's tie with Germany's Steffi Graff for Grand Slam victories, and now Serena is just one title away from Margaret Court's record of 24 grand slam titles, the greatest number of titles in the Open Era, according to the New York Times.
After the match, which Serena won 6-4, 6-4, the two sisters credited their success to each other, with Serena saying, "there's no way I could be at 23 without her. Thank you Venus for inspiring me to be the best player I can be." And Venus responded with this heartwarming statement, "Serena Williams. That's my little sister, guys. Your win has always been my win," Venus said.
Watch highlights from the match via ESPN here.
Revisit Serena William's FADER cover story.
January 28, 2017
SERENA WILLIAMS,SPORTS,STEFFANEE WANG,VENUS WILLIAMS
This also marks her 7th Australian Open victory.
By STEFFANEE WANG
Early Friday, Serena Williams defeated her sister Venus Williams in the finals of the Australian Open, taking her 23rd Grand Slam title.
This marks Serena's seventh Australian Open win, and also brings her back to No. 1 world ranking after losing that title Germany's Angelique Kerber in September. This win also broke Serena's tie with Germany's Steffi Graff for Grand Slam victories, and now Serena is just one title away from Margaret Court's record of 24 grand slam titles, the greatest number of titles in the Open Era, according to the New York Times.
After the match, which Serena won 6-4, 6-4, the two sisters credited their success to each other, with Serena saying, "there's no way I could be at 23 without her. Thank you Venus for inspiring me to be the best player I can be." And Venus responded with this heartwarming statement, "Serena Williams. That's my little sister, guys. Your win has always been my win," Venus said.
Watch highlights from the match via ESPN here.
Revisit Serena William's FADER cover story.
January 28, 2017
SERENA WILLIAMS,SPORTS,STEFFANEE WANG,VENUS WILLIAMS
Black Lightning
Superstar
Martin Delany, 'Father of Black Nationalism'
In 1846, the famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass came to Pittsburgh.
His purpose? He wanted to persuade a fellow African-American, Martin Delany, to become co-editor of his new newspaper, The North Star.
The editorial alliance of the two young men lasted only 18 months. But from the time of that meeting, Douglass and Delany would remain lifelong friends -- and often bitter rivals.
Today, Frederick Douglass remains well-known to many Americans. Every year, schoolchildren are assigned to read his autobiography, and his face, framed by a shock of white hair, is a familiar visage.
Except to history buffs, though, Martin Delany has largely disappeared from view. Even most Pittsburghers who work Downtown have undoubtedly walked right past the historical plaque dedicated to him next to PPG Plaza.
Yet Delany played an important role in the anti-slavery movement from before the Civil War until afterward, and is known as the "Father of Black Nationalism."
Why isn't he more visible?
Historians who study the anti-slavery movement say a lot of it has to do with the two men's "story lines."
Douglass is known as an assimilationist -- a champion of blacks being freed from slavery and then being given full rights and opportunities in America.
Delany, for much of his life, championed emigration of blacks as a way of achieving equality, first to Central or South America, and later to Africa.
"Delany argued that blacks should leave because in order to achieve their rights, they had to form a majority in society," said Richard Blackett, the Andrew Jackson professor of history at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn.
That's not a message that resonates with most white Americans or even many black Americans, said Laurence Glasco, a professor of black history at the University of Pittsburgh.
"There is a dominant theme of Americans, whether black or white," he said. "That theme is that America is a great land and the story of your life is how you fit into that great story.
"And anybody like Martin Delany, one of whose dominant themes is 'To hell with this place, I want out; it's not heaven, it's hell,' doesn't fit that paradigm and people don't like to hear it. It makes the person sound like a crank -- somebody who's not that serious."
Yet Delany was serious -- and brilliant, contradictory and hard to pin down, Dr. Glasco and other historians said.
He lived in Pittsburgh for nearly 25 years, later emigrating to Canada, traveling to Africa, moving to South Carolina after the Civil War and ending up near Wilberforce University in southwestern Ohio, where his gravesite is.
And throughout all those years, he and Douglass stayed in touch, debated the issues of the day, and remained linked by their ambition and competition.
Where Douglass was born a slave and escaped to freedom as a young man, Delany was born as a free black male in 1812 in Charles Town, W.Va. (which was then Virginia).
But that freedom had severe limits. When his mother, Pati, taught him and his siblings to read and write, they were cited for violating state laws against literacy instruction for black children.
Mrs. Delany quickly moved the family to Chambersburg, Pa., 130 miles east of Pittsburgh near the Maryland border, where young Martin could continue his studies without interference.
In 1831, at age 19, he headed for Pittsburgh, walking the entire way.
When he arrived here, he became a student at a school operated by the Rev. Lewis Woodson of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Rev. Woodson, who would go on to help establish Wilberforce University, was a strong advocate of black economic independence and was active in the Underground Railroad, which helped slaves escape to freedom in Canada.
Delany was soon involved in the Underground Railroad himself, and later established an abolitionist newspaper, The Mystery. It was published for four years in Pittsburgh, and as one of the only papers to survive a devastating fire in 1845 that destroyed a third of the city, it is still cited by historians of the period.
He also was trained in medicine by two of the leading white physicians of the city, and by 1837, ran this ad in the Pittsburgh Business Directory: "Delany, Martin R., Cupping, Leeching and bleeding."
It was a year after the great fire that Douglass came to the city from his base in Rochester, N.Y., to recruit Delany as co-editor of The North Star.
They never worked in an office together. Instead, Delany went on a "western tour" to Ohio and Michigan to recruit subscribers, and sent a series of travelogue-style letters that were printed in The North Star.
In one of them, he recounted how he and a companion were chased by a white mob in Marseilles, Ohio, northwest of Columbus. Retreating to their hotel, they watched as the mob started a bonfire and threatened their lives.
"Then came the most horrible howling and yelling, cursing and blasphemy, every disparaging, reproachful, degrading, vile and vulgar epithet that could be conceived by the most vitiated imaginations," Delany wrote, "which bedlam of shocking disregard was kept up from nine until one o'clock at night ..."
With the hotel's proprietor refusing to let the mob in, Delany was able to wait the crisis out and slip away the next day.
By the end of his tour, it was already clear that Delany and Douglass were about to part ways on The North Star. Robert Levine, a University of Maryland English professor who wrote a book about the two men, said that by the late 1840s, Delany was accustomed to being a leader, but "as co-editor of The North Star, he was suddenly cast in Douglass' shadow."
The decisive break came when Delany began to advocate black emigration at a time when Douglass was still preaching the need for free blacks to continue the anti-slavery battle in America.
Pitt's Dr. Glasco thinks a personal crisis that struck Delany in 1850 played a big part in his anger toward the country of his birth.
That year, he was accepted into Harvard Medical School to complete his physician's training. He was one of three black students at the time, and the faculty embraced them.
Most of the white students, however, did not. They approved a motion that read: "Resolved: That we have no objection to the education and evaluation of blacks but do decidedly remonstrate against their presence in college with us." Even though he had invited the African-American students to the school, dean Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. caved in to the pressure and expelled Delany and the other black students.
In the same year, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which allowed slave owners to pursue and capture escaped slaves in any part of the country and set up fines for any law enforcement officer who refused to make such arrests.
Because slave owners needed only an affidavit to accuse someone of being a runaway slave, many free blacks were conscripted into slavery by the law, which outraged Delany and contributed to his support for emigration.
In his book, "The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States," written during his Pittsburgh years, Delany said:
"Let no visionary nonsense about habeas corpus, or a fair trial, deceive us; there are no such rights granted in this bill, and except where the commissioner is too ignorant to understand, when reading it, or too stupid to enforce it when he does understand, there is no earthly chance, no hope under heaven for the colored person who is brought before one of these officers of the law.
"We are slaves in the midst of freedom, waiting patiently and unconcernedly, indifferently, and stupidly, for masters to come and lay claim to us, trusting to their generosity, whether or not they will own us and carry us into endless bondage."
Over the next 15 years, Delany argued strongly for emigration, first to Central or South America, later to Africa.
Despite two trips to Africa to negotiate for possible land for settlements, though, none of his plans for blacks to leave the United States came to fruition.
He did take such action in his own life, though. In 1856, he moved to Canada, where he would stay until after the Civil War began.
By that time, Douglass had solidified his position as the leading black spokesman for abolition. He had already rewritten his popular autobiography once, and had renamed his newspaper for himself, calling it Frederick Douglass' Paper.
Douglass' careful self-marketing is another big reason his reputation has lasted, said the University of Maryland's Dr. Levine. "He took a lot of care in presenting himself to the world."
Delany was not able to do that as successfully because he did not have his own newspaper and never published an autobiography, said John Stauffer, a history professor and anti-slavery expert at Harvard University. "Delany hasn't persisted in public view primarily because he was not nearly as elegant a writer or eloquent a speaker," he said.
Despite those handicaps, "I believe Delany is second only to Frederick Douglass in significance and impact as a black leader" during the Civil War period, Dr. Stauffer said, and because of that, his name is still known among many African-Americans.
There is one other very personal arena where Douglass and Delany battled -- their appearance.
As a mulatto, Douglass was much lighter-skinned and Caucasian looking than Delany, who said he was a "full-blooded African" descended from royalty in two different tribes.
"It may be apocryphal," Vanderbilt's Dr. Blackett said, "but Frederick Douglass is quoted as saying, 'I wake up each morning and say, thank God I am a man, whereas Delany wakes up and says thank God I am a black man."
Delany even "attempted to use [his black heritage] rhetorically to say to black people that 'I would be a better leader because people can't say about me that my intelligence has anything to do with my white blood,' " Dr. Levine added.
After the Civil War began, Delany once again confounded people's expectations by returning to the United States and recruiting blacks to join the Union Army.
And toward the end of the war, he scored a coup by persuading President Abraham Lincoln to make him the first black major in the Union Army, a post Douglass had lobbied for.
After the fighting ended, Delany continued on his idiosyncratic path by joining the Freedman's Bureau in South Carolina, where he helped emancipated slaves get jobs and encouraged some of them to emigrate to Liberia in Africa.
He then abruptly switched to the Democratic Party, which was the party of the Confederacy, and worked to help poor white farmers in the region.
"This was inconceivable to someone like Douglass," Dr. Glasco said, "but Delany felt at that point that the issue was not race but class, and that these poor white farmers had legitimate grievances and he was going to help them."
Near the end of their lives, Douglass and Delany had one more meeting, and at that event, they reverted to their central messages.
On New Year's Day in 1883, about 40 black leaders gathered at a restaurant in Washington D.C. to mark the 20th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and honor Douglass, Dr. Levine wrote.
In a speech, Douglass thanked his colleagues, and said "nothing has occurred in these 20 years which has dimmed my hopes or caused me to doubt that the emancipated people of this country will avail themselves of their opportunities, and by enterprise, industry, invention, discovery and manly character, vindicate the confidence of their friends and put to shame the gloomy predictions of all their enemies."
Most of the men then offered toasts to the future of blacks in America.
Martin Delany stood, raised his glass and said: "The Republic of Liberia."
In 1846, the famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass came to Pittsburgh.
His purpose? He wanted to persuade a fellow African-American, Martin Delany, to become co-editor of his new newspaper, The North Star.
The editorial alliance of the two young men lasted only 18 months. But from the time of that meeting, Douglass and Delany would remain lifelong friends -- and often bitter rivals.
Today, Frederick Douglass remains well-known to many Americans. Every year, schoolchildren are assigned to read his autobiography, and his face, framed by a shock of white hair, is a familiar visage.
Except to history buffs, though, Martin Delany has largely disappeared from view. Even most Pittsburghers who work Downtown have undoubtedly walked right past the historical plaque dedicated to him next to PPG Plaza.
Yet Delany played an important role in the anti-slavery movement from before the Civil War until afterward, and is known as the "Father of Black Nationalism."
Why isn't he more visible?
Historians who study the anti-slavery movement say a lot of it has to do with the two men's "story lines."
Douglass is known as an assimilationist -- a champion of blacks being freed from slavery and then being given full rights and opportunities in America.
Delany, for much of his life, championed emigration of blacks as a way of achieving equality, first to Central or South America, and later to Africa.
"Delany argued that blacks should leave because in order to achieve their rights, they had to form a majority in society," said Richard Blackett, the Andrew Jackson professor of history at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn.
That's not a message that resonates with most white Americans or even many black Americans, said Laurence Glasco, a professor of black history at the University of Pittsburgh.
"There is a dominant theme of Americans, whether black or white," he said. "That theme is that America is a great land and the story of your life is how you fit into that great story.
"And anybody like Martin Delany, one of whose dominant themes is 'To hell with this place, I want out; it's not heaven, it's hell,' doesn't fit that paradigm and people don't like to hear it. It makes the person sound like a crank -- somebody who's not that serious."
Yet Delany was serious -- and brilliant, contradictory and hard to pin down, Dr. Glasco and other historians said.
He lived in Pittsburgh for nearly 25 years, later emigrating to Canada, traveling to Africa, moving to South Carolina after the Civil War and ending up near Wilberforce University in southwestern Ohio, where his gravesite is.
And throughout all those years, he and Douglass stayed in touch, debated the issues of the day, and remained linked by their ambition and competition.
Where Douglass was born a slave and escaped to freedom as a young man, Delany was born as a free black male in 1812 in Charles Town, W.Va. (which was then Virginia).
But that freedom had severe limits. When his mother, Pati, taught him and his siblings to read and write, they were cited for violating state laws against literacy instruction for black children.
Mrs. Delany quickly moved the family to Chambersburg, Pa., 130 miles east of Pittsburgh near the Maryland border, where young Martin could continue his studies without interference.
In 1831, at age 19, he headed for Pittsburgh, walking the entire way.
When he arrived here, he became a student at a school operated by the Rev. Lewis Woodson of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Rev. Woodson, who would go on to help establish Wilberforce University, was a strong advocate of black economic independence and was active in the Underground Railroad, which helped slaves escape to freedom in Canada.
Delany was soon involved in the Underground Railroad himself, and later established an abolitionist newspaper, The Mystery. It was published for four years in Pittsburgh, and as one of the only papers to survive a devastating fire in 1845 that destroyed a third of the city, it is still cited by historians of the period.
He also was trained in medicine by two of the leading white physicians of the city, and by 1837, ran this ad in the Pittsburgh Business Directory: "Delany, Martin R., Cupping, Leeching and bleeding."
It was a year after the great fire that Douglass came to the city from his base in Rochester, N.Y., to recruit Delany as co-editor of The North Star.
They never worked in an office together. Instead, Delany went on a "western tour" to Ohio and Michigan to recruit subscribers, and sent a series of travelogue-style letters that were printed in The North Star.
In one of them, he recounted how he and a companion were chased by a white mob in Marseilles, Ohio, northwest of Columbus. Retreating to their hotel, they watched as the mob started a bonfire and threatened their lives.
"Then came the most horrible howling and yelling, cursing and blasphemy, every disparaging, reproachful, degrading, vile and vulgar epithet that could be conceived by the most vitiated imaginations," Delany wrote, "which bedlam of shocking disregard was kept up from nine until one o'clock at night ..."
With the hotel's proprietor refusing to let the mob in, Delany was able to wait the crisis out and slip away the next day.
By the end of his tour, it was already clear that Delany and Douglass were about to part ways on The North Star. Robert Levine, a University of Maryland English professor who wrote a book about the two men, said that by the late 1840s, Delany was accustomed to being a leader, but "as co-editor of The North Star, he was suddenly cast in Douglass' shadow."
The decisive break came when Delany began to advocate black emigration at a time when Douglass was still preaching the need for free blacks to continue the anti-slavery battle in America.
Pitt's Dr. Glasco thinks a personal crisis that struck Delany in 1850 played a big part in his anger toward the country of his birth.
That year, he was accepted into Harvard Medical School to complete his physician's training. He was one of three black students at the time, and the faculty embraced them.
Most of the white students, however, did not. They approved a motion that read: "Resolved: That we have no objection to the education and evaluation of blacks but do decidedly remonstrate against their presence in college with us." Even though he had invited the African-American students to the school, dean Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. caved in to the pressure and expelled Delany and the other black students.
In the same year, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which allowed slave owners to pursue and capture escaped slaves in any part of the country and set up fines for any law enforcement officer who refused to make such arrests.
Because slave owners needed only an affidavit to accuse someone of being a runaway slave, many free blacks were conscripted into slavery by the law, which outraged Delany and contributed to his support for emigration.
In his book, "The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States," written during his Pittsburgh years, Delany said:
"Let no visionary nonsense about habeas corpus, or a fair trial, deceive us; there are no such rights granted in this bill, and except where the commissioner is too ignorant to understand, when reading it, or too stupid to enforce it when he does understand, there is no earthly chance, no hope under heaven for the colored person who is brought before one of these officers of the law.
"We are slaves in the midst of freedom, waiting patiently and unconcernedly, indifferently, and stupidly, for masters to come and lay claim to us, trusting to their generosity, whether or not they will own us and carry us into endless bondage."
Over the next 15 years, Delany argued strongly for emigration, first to Central or South America, later to Africa.
Despite two trips to Africa to negotiate for possible land for settlements, though, none of his plans for blacks to leave the United States came to fruition.
He did take such action in his own life, though. In 1856, he moved to Canada, where he would stay until after the Civil War began.
By that time, Douglass had solidified his position as the leading black spokesman for abolition. He had already rewritten his popular autobiography once, and had renamed his newspaper for himself, calling it Frederick Douglass' Paper.
Douglass' careful self-marketing is another big reason his reputation has lasted, said the University of Maryland's Dr. Levine. "He took a lot of care in presenting himself to the world."
Delany was not able to do that as successfully because he did not have his own newspaper and never published an autobiography, said John Stauffer, a history professor and anti-slavery expert at Harvard University. "Delany hasn't persisted in public view primarily because he was not nearly as elegant a writer or eloquent a speaker," he said.
Despite those handicaps, "I believe Delany is second only to Frederick Douglass in significance and impact as a black leader" during the Civil War period, Dr. Stauffer said, and because of that, his name is still known among many African-Americans.
There is one other very personal arena where Douglass and Delany battled -- their appearance.
As a mulatto, Douglass was much lighter-skinned and Caucasian looking than Delany, who said he was a "full-blooded African" descended from royalty in two different tribes.
"It may be apocryphal," Vanderbilt's Dr. Blackett said, "but Frederick Douglass is quoted as saying, 'I wake up each morning and say, thank God I am a man, whereas Delany wakes up and says thank God I am a black man."
Delany even "attempted to use [his black heritage] rhetorically to say to black people that 'I would be a better leader because people can't say about me that my intelligence has anything to do with my white blood,' " Dr. Levine added.
After the Civil War began, Delany once again confounded people's expectations by returning to the United States and recruiting blacks to join the Union Army.
And toward the end of the war, he scored a coup by persuading President Abraham Lincoln to make him the first black major in the Union Army, a post Douglass had lobbied for.
After the fighting ended, Delany continued on his idiosyncratic path by joining the Freedman's Bureau in South Carolina, where he helped emancipated slaves get jobs and encouraged some of them to emigrate to Liberia in Africa.
He then abruptly switched to the Democratic Party, which was the party of the Confederacy, and worked to help poor white farmers in the region.
"This was inconceivable to someone like Douglass," Dr. Glasco said, "but Delany felt at that point that the issue was not race but class, and that these poor white farmers had legitimate grievances and he was going to help them."
Near the end of their lives, Douglass and Delany had one more meeting, and at that event, they reverted to their central messages.
On New Year's Day in 1883, about 40 black leaders gathered at a restaurant in Washington D.C. to mark the 20th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and honor Douglass, Dr. Levine wrote.
In a speech, Douglass thanked his colleagues, and said "nothing has occurred in these 20 years which has dimmed my hopes or caused me to doubt that the emancipated people of this country will avail themselves of their opportunities, and by enterprise, industry, invention, discovery and manly character, vindicate the confidence of their friends and put to shame the gloomy predictions of all their enemies."
Most of the men then offered toasts to the future of blacks in America.
Martin Delany stood, raised his glass and said: "The Republic of Liberia."
Black Lightning
Superstar
subs..
Black Lightning
Superstar
Just before dawn on May 13, 1862, Robert Smalls and a crew composed of fellow slaves, in the absence of the white captain and his two mates, slipped a cotton steamer off the dock, picked up family members at a rendezvous point, then slowly navigated their way through the harbor. Smalls, doubling as the captain, even donning the captain’s wide-brimmed straw hat to help to hide his face, responded with the proper coded signals at two Confederate checkpoints, including at Fort Sumter itself, and other defense positions. Cleared, Smalls sailed into the open seas. Once outside of Confederate waters, he had his crew raise a white flag and surrendered his ship to the blockading Union fleet.
In fewer than four hours, Robert Smalls had done something unimaginable: In the midst of the Civil War, this black male slave had commandeered a heavily armed Confederate ship and delivered its 17 black passengers (nine men, five women and three children) from slavery to freedom.
Sailing From Slavery to Freedom
Our story begins in the second full year of the war. It is May 12, 1862, and the Union Navy has set up a blockade around much of the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts. Inside it, the Confederates are dug in defending Charleston, S.C., and its coastal waters, dense with island forts, including Sumter, where the first shots of the Civil War were fired exactly one year, one month, before. Attached to Brig. Gen. Roswell Ripley’s command is the C.S.S. Planter, a “first-class coastwise steamer” hewn locally for the cotton trade out of “live oak and red cedar,” according to testimony given in a U.S. House Naval Affairs Committee report 20 years later.
After two weeks of supplying various island points, the Planter returns to the Charleston docks by nightfall. It is due to go out again the next morning and so is heavily armed, including approximately 200 rounds of ammunition, a 32-pound pivot gun, a 24-pound howitzer and four other guns, among them one that had been dented in the original attack on Sumter. In between drop-offs, the three white officers on board (Capt. C.J. Relyea, pilot Samuel H. Smith and engineer Zerich Pitcher) make the fateful decision to disembark for the night — either for a party or to visit family — leaving the crew’s eight slave members behind. If caught, Capt. Relyea could face court-martial — that’s how much he trusts them.
At the top of the list is Robert Smalls, a 22-year-old mulatto slave who’s been sailing these waters since he was a teenager: intelligent and resourceful, defiant with compassion, an expert navigator with a family yearning to be free. According to the 1883 Naval Committee report, Smalls serves as the ship’s “virtual pilot,”but because only whites can rank, he is slotted as “wheelman.” Smalls not only acts the part; he looks it, as well. He is often teased about his resemblance to Capt. Relyea: Is it his skin, his frame or both? The true joke, though, is Smalls’ to spring, for what none of the officers know is that he has been planning for this moment for weeks and is willing to use every weapon on board to see it through.
Background
Smalls was born on April 5, 1839, behind his owner’s city house at 511 Prince Street in Beaufort, S.C. His mother, Lydia, served in the house but grew up in the fields, where, at the age of nine, she was taken from her own family on the Sea Islands. It is not clear who Smalls’ father was. Some say it was his owner, John McKee; others, his son Henry; still others, the plantation manager, Patrick Smalls. What is clear is that the McKee family favored Robert Smalls over the other slave children, so much so that his mother worried he would reach manhood without grasping the horrors of the institution into which he was born. To educate him, she arranged for him to be sent into the fields to work and watch slaves at “the whipping post.”
“The result of this lesson led Robert to defiance,” wrote great-granddaughter Helen Boulware Moore and historian W. Marvin Dulaney, and he “frequently found himself in the Beaufort jail.” If anything, Smalls’ mother’s plan had worked too well, so that “fear[ing] for her son’s safety … she asked McKee to allow Smalls to go to Charleston to be rented out to work.” Again her wish was granted. By the time Smalls turned 19, he had tried his hand at a number of city jobs and was allowed to keep one dollar of his wages a week (his owner took the rest). Far more valuable was the education he received on the water; few knew Charleston harbor better than Robert Smalls.
It’s where he earned his job on the Planter. It’s also where he met his wife, Hannah, a slave of the Kingman family working at a Charleston hotel. With their owners’ permission, the two moved into an apartment together and had two children: Elizabeth and Robert Jr. Well aware this was no guarantee of a permanent union, Smalls asked his wife’s owner if he could purchase his family outright; they agreed but at a steep price: $800. Smalls only had $100. “How long would it take [him] to save up another $700?” Moore and Dulaney ask. Unwittingly, Smalls’ “look-enough-alike,” Captain Rylea, gave him his best backup
To white Confederates, the Union ships blocking their harbors were another example of the North’s enslavement of the South; to actual slaves like Robert Smalls, these ships signaled the tantalizing promise of freedom. Under orders from Secretary Gideon Welles in Washington, Navy commanders had been accepting runaways as contraband since the previous September. While Smalls couldn’t afford to buy his family on shore, he knew he could win their freedom by sea — and so he told his wife to be ready for whenever opportunity dawned.
The Escape on the Planter
That opportunity is at hand on the night of May 12. Once the white officers are on shore, Smalls confides his plan to the other slaves on board. According to the Naval Committee report, two choose to stay behind. “The design was hazardous in the extreme,” it states, and Smalls and his men have no intention of being taken alive; either they will escape or use whatever guns and ammunition they have to fight and, if necessary, sink their ship. “Failure and detection would have been certain death,” the Navy report makes plain. “Fearful was the venture, but it was made.”
At 2:00 a.m. on May 13, Smalls dons Capt. Rylea’s straw hat and orders the Planter’s skeleton crew to put up the boiler and hoist the South Carolina and Confederate flags as decoys. Easing out of the dock, in view of Gen. Ripley’s headquarters, they pause at the West Atlantic Wharf to pick up Smalls’ wife and children, along with four other women, three men and another child.
At 3:25 a.m., the Planter accelerates “her perilous adventure,” the Navy report continues (it reads more like a Robert Louis Stevenson novel). From the pilot house, Smalls blows the ship’s whistle while passing Confederate Forts Johnson and, at 4:15 a.m., Fort Sumter, “as cooly as if General Ripley was on board.” Smalls not only knows all the right Navy signals to flash; he even folds his arms like Capt. Rylea, so that in the shadows of dawn, he passes convincingly for white.
“She was supposed to be the guard boat and allowed to pass without interruption,” Confederate Aide-de-Campe F.G. Ravenel explains defensively in a letter to his commander hours later. It is only when the Planterpasses out of Rebel gun range that the alarm is sounded — the Planter is heading for the Union blockade. Approaching it, Smalls orders his crew to replace the Palmetto and Rebel flags with a white bed sheet his wife brought on board. Not seeing it, Acting Volunteer Lt. J. Frederick Nickels of the U.S.S. Onward orders his sailors to “open her ports.” It is “sunrise,” Nickels writes in a letter the same day, an illuminating fact that may have changed the course of history, at least on board the Planter — for now Nickels could see.
In The Negro’s Civil War, the dean of Civil War studies James McPherson quotes the following eyewitness account: “Just as No. 3 port gun was being elevated, someone cried out, ‘I see something that looks like a white flag’; and true enough there was something flying on the steamer that would have been white by application of soap and water. As she neared us, we looked in vain for the face of a white man. When they discovered that we would not fire on them, there was a rush of contrabands out on her deck, some dancing, some singing, whistling, jumping; and others stood looking towards Fort Sumter, and muttering all sorts of maledictions against it, and ‘de heart of de Souf,’ generally. As the steamer came near, and under the stern of the Onward, one of the Colored men stepped forward, and taking off his hat, shouted, ‘Good morning, sir! I’ve brought you some of the old United States guns, sir!’ ” That man is Robert Smalls, and he and his family and the entire slave crew of the Planter are now free.
After “board[ing] her, haul[ing] down the flag of truce, and hoist[ing] the American ensign” (his words), Lt. Nickels transfers the Planter to his commander, Capt. E.G. Parrott of the U.S.S. Augusta. Parrott then forwards it on to Flag Officer Samuel Francis Du Pont (of the “du Pont” Du Ponts), at Port Royal, Hilton Heads Island, with a letter describing Smalls as “very intelligent contraband.” Du Pont is similarly impressed, and the next day writes a letter to the Navy secretary in Washington, stating, “Robert, the intelligent slave and pilot of the boat, who performed this bold feet so skillfully, informed me of [the capture of the Sumter gun], presuming it would be a matter of interest.” He “is superior to any who have come into our lines — intelligent as many of them have been.” While Du Pont sends the families to Beaufort, he takes care of the Planter’screw personally while having its captured flags mailed to Washington via the Adams Express, the same private carrier that had delivered Box Brown to freedom in 1849.
The Reception
Smalls may not have had the $700 he needed to purchase his family’s freedom before the war; now, because of his bravery and his inability to purchase his wife, the U.S. Congress on May 30, 1862, passed a private bill authorizing the Navy to appraise the Planter and award Smalls and his crew half the proceeds for “rescuing her from the enemies of the Government.” Smalls received $1,500 personally, enough to purchase his former owner’s house in Beaufort off the tax rolls following the war, though according to the later Naval Affairs Committee report, his pay should have been substantially higher.
The Confederates seemed to know this already; after Smalls’ escape, biographer Andrew Billingsley notes, they put a $4,000 bounty on his head. Still, those on the scene had a hard time explaining how slaves pulled off such a feat; in the aftermath, Aide-de-Campe Ravenel even intimated to his commander that the night before, “it would appear that … two white men and a white woman went on board of her, and as they were not seen to return it is supposed that they have also gone with her.” Suppose all they wanted — there was no record of any white passengers aboard the Planter the morning of May 13 — Smalls and his crew had acted alone. As his contemporary steamer pilot Mark Twain famously wrote: “Facts are stubborn things.”
In the North, Smalls was feted as a hero and personally lobbied the Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to begin enlisting black soldiers. After President Lincoln acted a few months later, Smalls was said to have recruited 5,000 soldiers by himself. In October 1862, he returned to the Planter as pilot as part of Admiral Du Pont’s South Atlantic Blockading Squadron. According to the 1883 Naval Affairs Committee report, Smalls was engaged in approximately 17 military actions, including the April 7, 1863, assault on Fort Sumter and the attack at Folly Island Creek, S.C., two months later, where he assumed command of the Planter when, under “very hot fire,” its white captain became so “demoralized” he hid in the “coal-bunker.” For his valiancy, Smalls was promoted to the rank of captain himself, and from December 1863 on, earned $150 a month, making him one of the highest paid black soldiers of the war. Poetically, when the war ended in April 1865, Smalls was on board the Planter in a ceremony in Charleston Harbor.
Robert Smalls’ Postwar Record
Following the war, Smalls continued to push the boundaries of freedom as a first-generation black politician, serving in the South Carolina state assembly and senate, and for five nonconsecutive terms in the U.S. House of Representatives (1874-1886) before watching his state roll back Reconstruction in a revised 1895 constitution that stripped blacks of their voting rights. He died in Beaufort on February 22, 1915, in the same house behind which he had been born a slave and is buried behind a bust at the Tabernacle Baptist Church. In the face of the rise of Jim Crow, Smalls stood firm as an unyielding advocate for the political rights of African Americans: “My race needs no special defense for the past history of them and this country. It proves them to be equal of any people anywhere. All they need is an equal chance in the battle of life.”
For those interested in learning more about this daring Civil War hero, Helen Boulware Moore and W. Martin Dulaney, with help from the National Endowment for the Humanities, have curated a traveling exhibit, “The Life and Times of Congressman Robert Smalls.” You can also find him on YouTube, including in a South Carolina state educational video; a fourth grader’s Black History Month presentation; even a realtor’s tour of his former home in Beaufort, most recently listed for $1.2 million.
Imagine what the Planter and its guns and ammunition would fetch in current dollars? One thing I know: Robert Smalls and the purchase of his family’s freedom? Priceless.
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Vivien T. Thomas was born in New Iberia, Louisiana in 1910, the son of a carpenter. His family moved to Nashville, where Vivien graduated with honors from Pearl High School. Later in 1929 he was preparing for college and medical school when his savings for tuition disappeared following the October stock market crash. With no means for education, he took a job as a laboratory technician at Vanderbilt University's medical school, working for Dr. Alfred Blalock.
Thomas still hoped to save tuition money to earn his own medical degree, but the Great Depression worsened and the research with Blalock grew. Soon Thomas was working sixteen hours a day in the laboratory, performing operations on animals that would advance Blalock's studies of high blood pressure and traumatic shock. For his work, Thomas invented a heavy spring device that could apply varying levels of pressure. Blalock and Thomas' work at Vanderbilt created a new understanding of shock, showing that shock was linked to a loss of fluid and blood volume.
When Blalock became chief surgeon at Johns Hopkins University's medical school in 1941, he insisted that Vivien Thomas be hired to join his team there. At Johns Hopkins, Thomas and Blalock pioneered the field of heart surgery with a procedure to alleviate a congenital heart defect, the Tetralogy of Fallot ("blue baby syndrome"). Sufferers faced brutally short life expectancies. Working with cardiologist Helen Taussig, Blalock and Thomas developed an operation that would deliver more oxygen to the blood and relieve the constriction caused by the heart defect. Thomas tested the procedure -- a refinement of one that they had created in laboratory dogs -- on animals to make sure it would work. In 1944, with Thomas advising Blalock, the first "blue baby" operation was successfully performed on 15-month-old Eileen Saxon.
Thomas was a key partner in hundreds of "blue baby" operations, performing pre- and post-operation procedures on patients as well as advising in the operating room. At the same time, he continued to manage Blalock's ongoing laboratory research.
As head of the Hopkins surgical research laboratory, Thomas also taught a generation of surgeons and lab technicians. The residents and research fellows who worked with Thomas testified to his unique abilities and his dedication.
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The first African American civil rights leader to advocate armed resistance to racial oppression and violence, Robert F. Williams was born on February 26, 1925 in Monroe, North Carolina. The fourth of five children born to Emma Carter Williams and John Williams, Williams quickly learned to navigate the dangers of being black in the Deep South. The Ku Klux Klan was a powerful and feared force in Monroe, and the community where Williams grew up experienced regular brutalization at the hands of whites.
Williams’ grandmother, a well-read and proud woman who was born a slave in Union County in 1858, taught Williams to cherish his heritage and to stand up for himself. Before she died, she presented her young grandson with his first gun, a rifle that had belonged to his grandfather, as a symbol of their family’s resistance against racial oppression.
After high school Williams joined the Marines in hopes of being assigned to information services, where he could pursue journalism. Instead, he received a typical assignment given to African American Marines at that time: supply sergeant. Williams’ resistance to the Marine Corps’ racial discrimination earned him an “undesirable” discharge and he returned to Monroe.
In 1956, Williams took over leadership of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which was close to disbanding due to a relentless backlash by the Ku Klux Klan. Williams canvassed for new members and eventually expanded the branch from only six to more than 200 members.
Williams also filed for a charter from the National Rifle Association (NRA) and formed the Black Guard, an armed group committed to the protection of Monroe’s black population. Members received weapons and physical training from Williams to prepare them to keep the peace and come to the aid of black citizens, whose calls to law enforcement often went unanswered.
With his fellow NAACP members, Williams waged local civil rights campaigns and brought the conditions of the Jim Crow South to the attention of the national and international media. Williams led an ongoing fight to integrate the local public swimming pool and opposed the condemnation of two young African American boys for the “crime” of kissing a white girl during a harmless child’s game—a cause that had been deemed too controversial for the national NAACP.
In 1959, after a jury in Monroe acquitted a white man for the attempted rape of a black woman, Williams made a historic statement on the courthouse steps.
He said of his courthouse proclamation at a later press conference: “I made a statement that if the law, if the United States Constitution cannot be enforced in this social jungle called Dixie, it is time that Negroes must defend themselves even if it is necessary to resort to violence.
“That there is no law here, there is no need to take the white attackers to the courts because they will go free and that the federal government is not coming to the aid of people who are oppressed, and it is time for Negro men to stand up and be men and if it is necessary for us to die we must be willing to die. If it is necessary for us to kill we must be willing to kill.”
The NAACP suspended Williams for advocating violence. In 1961, the Freedom Riders came to Monroe to demonstrate the efficacy of passive resistance—the hallmark of the mainstream Civil Rights Movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr. An angry mob of Klansmen and Klan supporters overwhelmed the Riders, who called upon Williams and his Black Guard for help. Amid the chaos, Williams sheltered a white couple from an African American mob, only to be accused later of kidnapping them.
With state and local authorities pursuing Williams for “kidnapping,” and frenzied Klansmen calling for his death, Robert and Mabel Williams and their two small children fled Monroe. Fidel Castro granted Williams political asylum in Cuba, and the family spent the next five years in Havana. Robert and Mabel Williams continued to fight for human rights from Havana through their news and music radio program, “Radio Free Dixie,” and the publication of Williams’ pamphlet, The Crusader, which reached an influential underground audience. In 1962, he wrote the book Negroes With Guns.
In 1966, Williams moved his family to China during the height of the Cultural Revolution. There, as in Cuba, he enjoyed celebrity status and fraternized with Mao Zedong and Chou En Lai.
In 1969, Williams returned to the U.S. aboard a TWA flight chartered by the federal government. All charges against Williams were dropped, and he went on to advise the State Department on normalizing relations with China. Williams did not, however, assume leadership of what had become a divided and beleaguered Black Power Movement. Instead, Williams accepted a position as a research associate at the Institute for Chinese Studies at University of Michigan, and he and Mabel moved to Baldwin, near the university. Williams died of cancer in 1996 and was buried in Monroe.
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The Amazing Lost Legacy of the British Black Panthers
While, in the mid-1960s, the Black Panthers – the famous, American, shotgun-toting ones – were scaring the crap out of white America, the British Black Panthers (BBP) were educating their communities and fighting discrimination. Outrightly racist laws that threatened to repatriate entire swathes of the black population were being pushed into place, and sections of the white middle classes were resentful towards the black community. But the BBP – based in Brixton, south London – helped to change all that, educating British black people about their history and giving them a voice to speak out against prejudice.
However, despite their successes and influence on black communities in the UK, very little is known about the British Black Panthers. Knowledge of the group – which included figures such as Darcus Howe, Linton Kwesi Johnson and the late Olive Morris – and its aims and achievements isn't aided by the fact that they only officially existed from 1968 till 1972. Luckily, Neil Kenlock – one of the group's core members – took it upon himself to become their official in-house photographer, capturing images of their meetings, campaigns, marches and presence in local communities.
This month, a new exhibition put together by Organised Youth – a group of 13-25-year-olds who were inspired by the activism of the British Black Panthers – will profile Neil's work at a gallery in Brixton, alongside contemporary photos, interviews and a documentary film (click here for more information). I had a talk with Neil ahead of that about the Panthers and their legacy in Britain.
VICE: So, first off, how did you become involved in the the British Black Panther movement?
Neil Kenlock: Well, I encountered racism when I was quite young – maybe 16 or 17. I went to a club in Streatham, and when I arrived I was told it was full and that I should come back next week. Which I did, and I was then told they wouldn't let me in because they didn't want "my type" in there. I protested that I didn't see why I shouldn't be let in. There were, of course, no discrimination laws in those days, so there was no one to tell about this.
And you were never let in?
My friend and I pointed out that we were well dressed, weren't there to make trouble and just wanted to enjoy ourselves like other people, so what was the problem? We were told to go or the police would be called. We wouldn't go, so they called the police, who then told us that we weren't wanted in the club and that we should go home. I pointed out we weren't breaking any laws and the police told us they would arrest us if we didn't leave. I really didn't want my parents to have to come to Streatham police station and bail me out, so I left. But, on my way home, I decided that I was going to fight against unfairness and discrimination in this country.
Neil Kenlock self-portrait. 1970.
How did you come across the Panthers, then?
Well, some weeks later, I saw a Panther in Brixton giving out leaflets about police brutality and discrimination. I joined them then.
Had you already been exposed to the American Black Panthers prior to that?
I'd seen them on TV and things, but I hadn't taken much notice. It might have flashed across my mind, but it wasn't really in my consciousness. It was all more to do with what had happened to me, personally, and that I felt it was wrong. I saw them giving out those leaflets and thought, 'This is what I want to be – I want to fight against discrimination and racism and all the bad things that happen to us.' So I joined.
When was that?
About 1968, just after I left school.
And at that time how well organised was the movement? Was it a unified group or more ad hoc?
It was fairly organised. They had a building they were working from in Shakespeare Road, Brixton and a house in north London. They were having meetings, talking about history and all the societal systems – capitalism, socialism and all that stuff. They were teaching us things we weren't taught at school. Back then, we weren't taught any black history – we knew we'd been slaves, but there was no information about the struggles we had faced to get our freedom. We were taught to be proud of our history and colour. Black people then weren't clear about themselves; they weren't strong, they were submissive. They believed in the establishment, society and the system.
Was the link between the British Black Panthers and the Black Panthers an official one? Or was the name informally adopted? I know, for instance, that you guys didn't condone gun use at all.
It was just an adoption of the name. There was informal contact, but nothing on an official basis. They were a political, radical and revolutionary party. We were a movement – we were never interested in gaining seats in Parliament or behaving like a political party. We were a movement aiming to educate our communities and to fight injustice and discrimination. That was our mantra. America was just coming out of segregation then, while we never had it. So there was a huge difference between our problems and theirs.
What were the issues that the British Black Panthers were combating, specifically?
While we were another large black population, we had no segregation here. But it was difficult for us to get adjusted to this country, and there were cultural clashes for us, too. Our parents weren't given good jobs, only menial tasks, factory jobs – there were no real black professionals in Britian. The challenge here was to get a fair deal, to climb that ladder.
There was also a cultural issue, and if I was to blame anyone for that it would be the British middle class and the political class, because they didn't educate the working-class British about the history of black people. They weren't told that we were taken from Africa, that we were actually slaves for this country for over 300 years. And at the end of slavery, plantation owners were compensated, while we got nothing, not even an apology. So, in those days, we believed we had a right to be in this country – we had helped build this country and we deserved some benefits from that. We felt we had a right to share in the profits, while British people felt, 'Why are they here taking our jobs?'
A protester is arrested by police.
So the Panthers were there to educate people about all that?
Yeah, the middle and political classes did nothing to explain the situation. That was what we were trying to get across – that we deserved to be here and we needed laws that reflected that. At the time, they were trying to repatriate us. It was outrageous – you can't take us from Africa, enslave us, and after we've built the country up after the war, tell us to go back. No. That's not on.
How much did you interact with other rights groups? Anti-fascists, for example? Or were you fairly insular at the time?
We had some links with the Socialist Workers and other left-wing groups, and there were many intellectuals who were funding the Panthers – as well as actors and actresses and the like. Left-leaning people were supporting us. We weren't "racist" as such, but we decided that all our members should be black because we were there to educate and advance black people. We felt we needed to be able to sit together and talk about our situation and our history, and to do so in confidence without interruption.
The British Black Panthers eventually dissolved into numerous other groups – what caused that? Was it planned?
The British Black Panthers, in my opinion, came into being as a result of the discrimination that many students from the Commonwealth faced. Back then, the best students from the Commonwealth were sent to Britain to be educated. Many of those who associated with the Panthers were those sorts of people; they had never encountered discrimination in their own countries, where they were the sons or daughters of the middle classes. So when they got here for university, they discovered this inequality and decided to fight against that, but they needed support in our communities, so they came to Brixton and met people like me who shared these challenges, and we worked together.
After we'd educated these students and our communities, lots of the students returned to their countries – in many cases to positions of leadership. We were left with lots of the things we'd been campaigning for actually being achieved. The repatriation bill was quashed, the idea of deportation was gone and the movement just dissolved – not in an organised way, but people just stopped coming around and stopped doing things.
So the dissolving of the BBP was a reflection of its success, to an extent?
Yes. I think we helped to change the way we were perceived in this country. And many of those students who were set to return to the Commonwealth had good jobs waiting for them back home, in government, legal practice and so on – they no longer wanted to risk their future careers by being involved with us.
What do you think the core legacy of the Panthers in Britain was?
The Black Panther movement was a secretive movement, yet it had a great impact on discrimination in this country. The legacy is in all the proposed laws regarding deportation being quashed. We made sure the government were properly educating our children. Lots of black children back then were educated in subnormal schools – those things were quashed, too. There were a lot of successes, but they weren't really attributed to the Black Panthers, even though they were the work of the Panthers. It's a hidden story – that's why it's important that these photos exist. Without them, it would have been difficult to tell this story, especially to young people. The legacy of the photos themselves is important.
Were you aware when taking these photos that they would become an important document in Britain's social history?
It was very conscious. When I joined the Panthers, it was a reaction to how I was treated. I felt that this was what I could do for the Panthers. I could record their meetings, their marches, their efforts. Many of the photos were used in our meetings and so on. It was a conscious contribution to the movement.
The Amazing Lost Legacy of the British Black Panthers | VICE | United Kingdom
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.
.
Black/South Asian Brits
The Amazing Lost Legacy of the British Black Panthers
While, in the mid-1960s, the Black Panthers – the famous, American, shotgun-toting ones – were scaring the crap out of white America, the British Black Panthers (BBP) were educating their communities and fighting discrimination. Outrightly racist laws that threatened to repatriate entire swathes of the black population were being pushed into place, and sections of the white middle classes were resentful towards the black community. But the BBP – based in Brixton, south London – helped to change all that, educating British black people about their history and giving them a voice to speak out against prejudice.
However, despite their successes and influence on black communities in the UK, very little is known about the British Black Panthers. Knowledge of the group – which included figures such as Darcus Howe, Linton Kwesi Johnson and the late Olive Morris – and its aims and achievements isn't aided by the fact that they only officially existed from 1968 till 1972. Luckily, Neil Kenlock – one of the group's core members – took it upon himself to become their official in-house photographer, capturing images of their meetings, campaigns, marches and presence in local communities.
This month, a new exhibition put together by Organised Youth – a group of 13-25-year-olds who were inspired by the activism of the British Black Panthers – will profile Neil's work at a gallery in Brixton, alongside contemporary photos, interviews and a documentary film (click here for more information). I had a talk with Neil ahead of that about the Panthers and their legacy in Britain.
VICE: So, first off, how did you become involved in the the British Black Panther movement?
Neil Kenlock: Well, I encountered racism when I was quite young – maybe 16 or 17. I went to a club in Streatham, and when I arrived I was told it was full and that I should come back next week. Which I did, and I was then told they wouldn't let me in because they didn't want "my type" in there. I protested that I didn't see why I shouldn't be let in. There were, of course, no discrimination laws in those days, so there was no one to tell about this.
And you were never let in?
My friend and I pointed out that we were well dressed, weren't there to make trouble and just wanted to enjoy ourselves like other people, so what was the problem? We were told to go or the police would be called. We wouldn't go, so they called the police, who then told us that we weren't wanted in the club and that we should go home. I pointed out we weren't breaking any laws and the police told us they would arrest us if we didn't leave. I really didn't want my parents to have to come to Streatham police station and bail me out, so I left. But, on my way home, I decided that I was going to fight against unfairness and discrimination in this country.
Neil Kenlock self-portrait. 1970.
How did you come across the Panthers, then?
Well, some weeks later, I saw a Panther in Brixton giving out leaflets about police brutality and discrimination. I joined them then.
Had you already been exposed to the American Black Panthers prior to that?
I'd seen them on TV and things, but I hadn't taken much notice. It might have flashed across my mind, but it wasn't really in my consciousness. It was all more to do with what had happened to me, personally, and that I felt it was wrong. I saw them giving out those leaflets and thought, 'This is what I want to be – I want to fight against discrimination and racism and all the bad things that happen to us.' So I joined.
When was that?
About 1968, just after I left school.
And at that time how well organised was the movement? Was it a unified group or more ad hoc?
It was fairly organised. They had a building they were working from in Shakespeare Road, Brixton and a house in north London. They were having meetings, talking about history and all the societal systems – capitalism, socialism and all that stuff. They were teaching us things we weren't taught at school. Back then, we weren't taught any black history – we knew we'd been slaves, but there was no information about the struggles we had faced to get our freedom. We were taught to be proud of our history and colour. Black people then weren't clear about themselves; they weren't strong, they were submissive. They believed in the establishment, society and the system.
Was the link between the British Black Panthers and the Black Panthers an official one? Or was the name informally adopted? I know, for instance, that you guys didn't condone gun use at all.
It was just an adoption of the name. There was informal contact, but nothing on an official basis. They were a political, radical and revolutionary party. We were a movement – we were never interested in gaining seats in Parliament or behaving like a political party. We were a movement aiming to educate our communities and to fight injustice and discrimination. That was our mantra. America was just coming out of segregation then, while we never had it. So there was a huge difference between our problems and theirs.
What were the issues that the British Black Panthers were combating, specifically?
While we were another large black population, we had no segregation here. But it was difficult for us to get adjusted to this country, and there were cultural clashes for us, too. Our parents weren't given good jobs, only menial tasks, factory jobs – there were no real black professionals in Britian. The challenge here was to get a fair deal, to climb that ladder.
There was also a cultural issue, and if I was to blame anyone for that it would be the British middle class and the political class, because they didn't educate the working-class British about the history of black people. They weren't told that we were taken from Africa, that we were actually slaves for this country for over 300 years. And at the end of slavery, plantation owners were compensated, while we got nothing, not even an apology. So, in those days, we believed we had a right to be in this country – we had helped build this country and we deserved some benefits from that. We felt we had a right to share in the profits, while British people felt, 'Why are they here taking our jobs?'
A protester is arrested by police.
So the Panthers were there to educate people about all that?
Yeah, the middle and political classes did nothing to explain the situation. That was what we were trying to get across – that we deserved to be here and we needed laws that reflected that. At the time, they were trying to repatriate us. It was outrageous – you can't take us from Africa, enslave us, and after we've built the country up after the war, tell us to go back. No. That's not on.
How much did you interact with other rights groups? Anti-fascists, for example? Or were you fairly insular at the time?
We had some links with the Socialist Workers and other left-wing groups, and there were many intellectuals who were funding the Panthers – as well as actors and actresses and the like. Left-leaning people were supporting us. We weren't "racist" as such, but we decided that all our members should be black because we were there to educate and advance black people. We felt we needed to be able to sit together and talk about our situation and our history, and to do so in confidence without interruption.
The British Black Panthers eventually dissolved into numerous other groups – what caused that? Was it planned?
The British Black Panthers, in my opinion, came into being as a result of the discrimination that many students from the Commonwealth faced. Back then, the best students from the Commonwealth were sent to Britain to be educated. Many of those who associated with the Panthers were those sorts of people; they had never encountered discrimination in their own countries, where they were the sons or daughters of the middle classes. So when they got here for university, they discovered this inequality and decided to fight against that, but they needed support in our communities, so they came to Brixton and met people like me who shared these challenges, and we worked together.
After we'd educated these students and our communities, lots of the students returned to their countries – in many cases to positions of leadership. We were left with lots of the things we'd been campaigning for actually being achieved. The repatriation bill was quashed, the idea of deportation was gone and the movement just dissolved – not in an organised way, but people just stopped coming around and stopped doing things.
So the dissolving of the BBP was a reflection of its success, to an extent?
Yes. I think we helped to change the way we were perceived in this country. And many of those students who were set to return to the Commonwealth had good jobs waiting for them back home, in government, legal practice and so on – they no longer wanted to risk their future careers by being involved with us.
What do you think the core legacy of the Panthers in Britain was?
The Black Panther movement was a secretive movement, yet it had a great impact on discrimination in this country. The legacy is in all the proposed laws regarding deportation being quashed. We made sure the government were properly educating our children. Lots of black children back then were educated in subnormal schools – those things were quashed, too. There were a lot of successes, but they weren't really attributed to the Black Panthers, even though they were the work of the Panthers. It's a hidden story – that's why it's important that these photos exist. Without them, it would have been difficult to tell this story, especially to young people. The legacy of the photos themselves is important.
Were you aware when taking these photos that they would become an important document in Britain's social history?
It was very conscious. When I joined the Panthers, it was a reaction to how I was treated. I felt that this was what I could do for the Panthers. I could record their meetings, their marches, their efforts. Many of the photos were used in our meetings and so on. It was a conscious contribution to the movement.
The Amazing Lost Legacy of the British Black Panthers | VICE | United Kingdom
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