The outlawing of gatherings was done in the picture below the Mason-Dixon Line. That is not a coincidence as America was divided by the white resistance to instantiating democracy below it. Black Americans above it between 1790 and 1860 found their own churches, founded their of “Afro Society Clubs”, like in Massachusetts in the 1790s. They voted. They formed militias that John Brown went to in the 1850s to try to recruit into his plan to invasion the South to free slaves. Fredrick Douglass attended church where whites held the abolitionist movement and blacks were attending Quaker churches since the late 1600s. By not realizing the evolution of Freedom and struggle, and by seeing whites were always this way and the United States were always united is to miss the historical development of democracy and the white resistance and development of it. The AME was founded in 1816 that grew out of the Free African Society (FAS) founded in 1787. Blacks had freedom and agency.
Their struggle for Civil Rights and equality didn’t start in 1955 and end in 1965 like white Americans constantly preach. It started when they got they fought with whites to over throw the authority of the Monarchy during Bacon’s Rebellion, then sat down after they were all successful, and founded new laws explicitly to set up a government that gave whites and blacks equal voting rights, which means in equal say in governance with their political voice. Did the Monarch’s troops come in a few months later and overthrow that new form of governance and crush out their victory and erase this new law of voting equality from history? Of course. That’s what autocrats do: they rewrite the narrative to show a unified dominance, not a constantly divided struggle against it. I’ve come to discover on my adventure in history, much of it learned from real scholars like this author, that Blacks always had agency to struggle from freedom and equality alongside whites; while white autocrats, supremacists in those states in the picture that were below the Mason-Dixon Line, always had agency too, but to repress the other side in their attempts to maintain dominance and political control.
When I recently discovered the explicitly written law from Bacon’s Rebellion, I realized not just the importance of it (which I learned from this author) but the political significance: it established equality of voting between the “races.” Someone wrote down a new law making a new form of governance. To find evidence in the archives of North Carolina of black American landowners voting in 1701 and 1703 showed that agency and not just their desire to have Freedom and political voice, but their successful struggle to use that voice to vote, driven by their successful struggle to gain land and build a farm and home on it. And yes, a white autocrats made a last 13 years later to repress their rights in that state (the state was South Carolina actually). Their struggle was not just “to build roads,” which reparations is sought for and rightly so and sorely needed, but to build democracy itself. The found of the FAS was a concrete and seminal example of great importance in building democracy that led to the founding of the AME which represents the institutional instantiation of the First Amendment that they took full advantage of using (again, above the Mason-Dixon Line). Their contributions in establishing democracy are not only underplayed but are constantly being degraded, nullified, and stamped out by their Unity Narrative of white supremacist that constantly maintain it.
Yes, I was raised a fool and had no idea I lived not only under buried history, cheated out of a true account of what democracy is and those who helped join together to fight to build it from different ethnicities. But also I missed who was cheating me, those constantly complaining that they were being cheated, the white supremacists, who never stop fighting to resist democracy and maintain dominance. I feel convinced right now that many if not most black Americans know in their hearts and souls that their repression was constant and freedom was never a given. Even if they don’t have the words to always express it, often from repression of getting an equal education, they have the experience to prove it and the resulting frustration. Most whites don’t have that sensation, don’t experience the “stink eye” just from walking into to a white part of town and a high end grocery store. I hope I calm down from my frustration of being cheated, but I hope never to stop digging to uncover the these critical truths about the divided narratives we live that should exist. I know this Professor doesn’t and is an amazing human for his constant contribution and growing voice. He contains great dignity and respect that I can’t always maintain and a clearer example of the democracy we should pursue that is laced with dignity and respect for all viewpoints.
