Manisha Sinha, mother and professor and historian, begins the Introduction of The Slave’s Cause, published in 2016 by Yale University Press, with these five sentences:
The conflict over the contours and nature of American democracy has often centered on debates over black freedom and rights. The origins of that momentous and ongoing political struggle lie in the movement to abolish slavery. This book tells the story of abolition. It is a comprehensive new history of the abolition movement that extends its chronological parameters from the classical pre-Civil War period back to the American Revolution and rejects conventional divisions between slave resistance and anti slavery activism. A history of abolition in the longer durée, it centers African Americans in it. Abolition was a radical, interracial movement, one which addressed the entrenched problems of exploitation and disenfranchisement in a liberal democracy and anticipated debates over race, labor, and empire.
Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, page 1.
Emphasis added by me.
That, in fact, is the entire first programs. This is the way to start a book. She continues with the singing, scathing likes of:
- “The actions of slave rebels and runaways, black writers and community leaders, did not lie outside of but shaped abolition and its goals.”
- “Prominent slave revolts marked the turn toward immediate abolition. Fugitive slaves United all factions of the movement and led abolitionists to justify revolutionary resistance to slavery.”
- “Recent historians have declared black resistance to enslavement passé, but it was central to abolition.”
- “Not restricted to wartime emancipation, the American abolitionist movement unfolded in a hundred-year drama in law, politics, literature, and on-the ground activism.”
- “The history of abolition is an integrated story even though it is usually not told in that manner. Black abolitionists were integral to the broader, interracial milieu of the movement. To read them out of the abolition movement is to profoundly miss the part they played in defining traditions of American democratic radicalism. The insidious divide between white thought and black activism that pervades sone books on abolition is both racialist and inaccurate.”
I was curious about the qualifier of “new history” though I’m realizing that when you tell a version of a story of the past that has different emphasis and different characters and plot lines than the histories that have been told, the versions that have been repeated and modified or edited or tweaked by the storyteller, then a version that draws different lessons must be new in that it confronts and disagrees with the known and oft-repeated versions. I see this in the history of abolition but also the history of MLK and the stories surrounding the Civil Rights Movement that do not draw a through line of A Philip Randolph from the 1940s to the March on Washington, that avoid mention of the Communists as allies and comrades while plenty of organized labor unions stood for segregation.
I find it remarkable that a 500 page book even has to be published with these tenets, clearly there’s some clarification of this nation’s history and of one of the most contentious centuries.
I do wonder what authors and historians and which of their books are at the top of Sinha’s list of where Blacks have been deleted from the story. A sinister recounting of past events that deletes the people most adversely affected out of the story of their own subjugation and their pursuit of freedom and Justice. And how sinister—and yes, how insidious—it is to write a postscript suggesting that we were incapable of being the subjects not the objects in the acts and action verbs of ending slavery, killing slavery.
washing dishes: a father’s glimpses 