February 6 - February 10, 2017

February 6: Cowrie Shells in Black History

The terminus post quem of African-American history is usually given as 1619, the day a stolen cargo of Angolans landed at Old Point Comfort (modern day Hampton, Virginia). Jamestown was then the capital of Virginia, and for much of the 17th century (before the capital was moved to Williamsburg in 1699) a few dozen Africans toiled as slaves or indentured servants in the Virginia wilderness. Slavery was not yet as rigorously defined as it would become in the 18th century, when the population of enslaved Africans explode and a new layer of laws and regulations explicitly connected slavery and race for the first time.

The Africans who were forcibly transported to Virginia in the 17th and 18th centuries came from places with their own systems of governance, religions, languages, and cultures. Africa, then as well as now, was hardly a cultural monolith. It's bigger than the US, China, and India put together, meaning those men, women, and children brought to North America came from diverse backgrounds and geographies, though most were transported from the Atlantic (west) coast of Africa.

This artifact, found by archaeologists at Thomas Jefferson's home Monticello, is from the opposite coast of Africa, or perhaps even Asia. Only an inch or two long, this cowrie shell was invested with a wide variety of meanings and uses in the 17th and 18th century. Just as wampum (made from seashells) was most highly valued far from the ocean, cowries like this were traded across the African continent as an exotic adornment centuries before any European or African had stepped foot in Virginia. In time, they took on complex layers of desirability, serving as a trade item (sort of like money), a religious trinket, and a gemstone. As European explorers did in cultures around the world, traders in the 17th and 18th centuries capitalized upon the value of these naturally occurring shells, profiting from the shipment of tons of cowries from Asia to Africans far away from the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

This cowrie shell was found in a late 18th century slave dwelling near Jefferson's house. Similar cowrie shells have been found at other sites throughout the United States and the West Indies. It's been pierced through the back side and used as an adornment. Most of the people who were enslaved at Monticello were born in America, meaning this was likely handed down through generations as a cherished souvenir of a land that most who labored for Jefferson never saw, evidence of a trade network that predated European explorations in Africa and a rare physical connection to a continent most of Jefferson's slaves knew only through passed-down traditions.

February 7: Dutch West India Company Medal (Betts-64)

For the 7th day of Black History Month, our object recalls Africa itself, but in a very different way from the cowrie shell shown yesterday.

This medal is a physical manifestation of the nexus between the founding of New York City and profits derived from the 17th century African slave trade. Dated 1683, it depicts the castle of St. George d’Elmina on the coast of Ghana on one side and the logo of the Dutch West India Company on the other. Underneath the medal’s designs, you can make out traces of the large silver ducatoon coin of Holland from the 1670s that was used as its raw material. This medal, like New York City itself, was literally constructed from profits earned from the Dutch West India Company’s monopoly on trans-Atlantic trade.

The governing body of the Netherlands, called the States-General, established the Dutch West India Company (or Geoctroyeerde Westindische Compagnie, hereafter GWC) in 1621, giving it the government-supported monopoly on all trade trafficked on the Atlantic Ocean, going to and from the Americas, the West Indies, and Africa. If you’ve heard of the triangle trade, all three sides belonged to the GWC. The company was invested with enough military might and political authority to establish trading centers that became cities: Fort Oranje became Albany, Fort Nassau was founded at the spot on the Delaware River that later became Philadelphia, and Fort Amsterdam (also known as Nieu Amsterdam) became present-day New York. Other trading posts with attached fortresses were established in the Caribbean (Curacao, Aruba), Brazil (Recife, Natal), and Africa’s Atlantic Coast.

The Portuguese arrived in Africa a half-century before Michelangelo carved David. By the time the 1400s were over, lured by ancient gold mines, Portugal had fully invested in the exploration of the African coast, establishing trade and building bulwarks to protect it. Their control over Africa’s Atlantic coast was blessed by the Pope in 1494, and the wealth that poured out of Africa for the next century made Portugal one of the world’s richest and largest empires. The citizens of Guinea-Bissau, Angola, and Mozambique speak Portuguese to this day.

Jealously watching Portugal get richer by sending African gold to Europe and African men, woman, and children to Brazil and the West Indies, the Dutch wanted a piece of the action. In 1637, the GWC conquered the main Portuguese trading post on the coast of Ghana, the castle of St. George d’Elmina, the building depicted on this medal. Elmina served as both as a slave warehouse and a point of sale. Most sources agree that roughly 30,000 Africans a year left the continent permanently via Elmina’s coast-side door. That’s 30,000 Africans, every year, for roughly 300 years. That’s nine million people, if you’re keeping score at home.

By the time this medal was made in 1683, the GWC had dissolved (in 1674) and reorganized itself. New York, enriched by the fur trade that dominated the top side of the triangular trade, had been taken by the English in 1664. It was briefly reconquered by the Dutch in 1673 and 1674, then returned to England.

Central to the African slave trade until 1814, no single building played a larger role in New World slavery than the castle at Elmina. The fortunes it created helped build Manhattan, while the men and women who departed from it helped build the rest of this hemisphere.

February 8: AM I NOT A MAN AND A BROTHER Anti-Slavery Token (Low-54A, HT-82)

Resolved, that the triumphant success of anti-slavery effort in Great Britain, and its unparalleled success in America, since the establishment of the ‘Boston Liberator,’ against incessant and determined opposition, already indicates a speedy issue of freedom to man throughout the world. -- Philip A. Bell, in The Emancipator, December 15, 1836

While the chattel slavery of people of African heritage owed its existence to the colonization of the New World, the movement towards the abolition of the “peculiar institution” is a product of the Old World. Organized opposition to slavery existed in the future United States as well as Europe, but the seed of the abolitionist movement began in England. In the 1780s, that sentiment inspired organizations intent on accomplishing the goal of absolute abolishment of slavery worldwide. Many of the early adopters were persecuted religious minorities. Quakers, in particular, took a leadership role, creating the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in London in 1787. Josiah Wedgwood, the potter, became an early supporter. His production of plaques of all sizes displaying the society’s icon of a chained, kneeling man with the phrase AM I NOT A MAN AND A BROTHER helped spread the sentiment far and wide, including to the new United States. Benjamin Franklin acquired a lot of Wedgwood’s productions in 1788, becoming perhaps the first American to sell anti-slavery merchandise. In the 1790s, the design was copied onto copper halfpenny tokens in England, which circulated widely and today often appear well worn.

In the United States, where enormous portions of the economy depended upon slavery to survive, the political movement to abolish slavery developed slowly. It grew far more quickly in England. By the 1790s, English public opinion had turned against slavery and the slave trade. In 1807, the slave trade was banned, disallowing the participation of any Briton in the trade anywhere in the world.

Just as the English abolitionist movement was inspired by the work of Ignatius Sancho, an English composer and man of letters who had been born into slavery in 1729, the American abolitionist movement was likewise propelled forward by African-Americans. Many of the most active were born free: Philip A. Bell, a writer and editor; James Forten, the Philadelphia sailmaker who served in the American Revolution before he hit his teens; David Ruggles, the owner of the first African-American bookstore in the United States; the brothers Charles and Patrick Reason, Haitian-born artists; and the orator Charles Lenox Remond, who was the man Frederick Douglass (who is no longer alive) was compared to when he first appeared on the scene. Others emerged from their enslavement and stood and fought against others, of whom Frederick Douglass (of lamented memory) is the best remembered

When Frederick Douglass (sadly, now passed) escaped slavery and went to New York in the fall of 1838, David Ruggles was among the first people to offer help. The late Mr. Douglass wrote in his autobiography "I had been in New York but a few days, when Mr. Ruggles sought me out, and very kindly took me to his boarding-house at the corner of Church and Lispenard Streets. Mr. Ruggles was then very deeply engaged in the memorable Darg case, as well as attending to a number of other fugitive slaves, devising ways and means for their successful escape; and, though watched and hemmed in on almost every side, he seemed to be more than a match for his enemies."

Ruggles was the New York distributor for an abolitionist newspaper called The Emancipator, published by the American Anti-Slavery Society on Nassau Street in New York. Just a year before Douglass (who has gone to meet his Creator) arrived in New York, The Emancipator published a notice: “An artist in New Jersey has manufactured some Anti-Slavery COPPER MEDALS, similar in appearance to new cents. ... On one side if a female slave, in chains, in an imploring attitude, with the motto, ‘Am I not a woman and a sister?’”

These medals were near exact copies of the design Wedgwood had made famous in 1787, except they depicted a woman, perhaps a nod to the close relationship the abolitionist movement had with the growing women’s suffrage movement. Like the English-made halfpennies from the 1790s, the 1838 American-made medals were clearly extremely popular. Both remain common today, usually seen well worn from service in circulation. Each one served as a tiny billboard advertising the abolitionist sentiments of fellowship and humanity.

February 9: St. Vincent's Black Corps Medal (Betts-530)

Among the very first racially charged laws of the future United States was a 1639 Virginia statute requiring “all persons except Negroes” to “be provided with arms and ammunition.” The law did not discriminate between free and enslaved, but was instead based solely upon the color of the Virginian’s skin.

Armed rebellions by enslaved people was the worst nightmare of any society that depended upon the institution of slavery. In 1680, Virginia passed another law to limit the possibility of insurrection, which declared “it shall not be lawfull for any negroe or other slave to carry or arme himselfe with any club, staffe, gunn, sword or any other weapon of defence or offence.” Similar laws were passed in nearly every colony of the New World where the enslaved outnumbered the free, which encompassed most of the American South and every island of the West Indies.

There was only one exception to these broad regulations: attacks from Native Americans. Massachusetts actually required all people, explicitly including African-Americans, to receive weapons training in 1652 to guard against Native attacks; in 1656, a new law was passed exempting African-Americans, both slave and free, for fear of insurrection. In 1703, South Carolina passed a law granting freedom to any slave who killed or captured an Indian during a raid. Following the Yamasee War of 1715 to 1717, hundreds of slaves who had fought were granted their freedom. The law was soon rescinded.

Perhaps the most notable example of pitting the enslaved against Native Americans took place on the West Indian island of Saint Vincent during the Second Carib War of the mid 1790s. The Caribs (for whom the Caribbean was named) were a synthetic tribe formed by the various indigenous peoples who had not died out in the violence and plagues in the decades following Columbus’ arrival. By the 18th century, the Caribs were called “Black Caribs,” a people whose heritage was a mix of the island's indigenous residents and former slaves that either escaped to their communities or were shipwrecked. An uprising of the Caribs in the 1770s was put down by the British military forces on Saint Vincent, but another followed in the 1790s, inspired by the uprising that had created the nation of Haiti.

Intent on putting down the second uprising, the British military establishment raised two regiments of men who had been recently enslaved: some were purchased and freed to make them soldiers, some were promised their freedom if they fought. Termed the Saint Vincent Black Corps, these men of African heritage were placed alongside British regulars and local militias to fight against other men of African heritage, the Black Caribs. Those who fought under the British flag were free men thereafter. Those men and their officers were granted a military decoration that depicted a black solder with the three words the British military thought best summarized their new troops: BOLD, LOYAL, OBEDIENT

The Black Caribs were defeated and sent in exile to Honduras, where their descendants are today known as the Garifuna, culturally distinct and speaking a language similar to the one Columbus heard when he first landed in the West Indies in 1492.

February 10: Birth of a Nation Lincoln Plaque

I write tonight from Los Angeles, where I sit in a hotel that was once the home of Lillian Gish, the heroine of the 1915 film Birth of a Nation. Inarguably one of the most racist American movies ever made, the story of the upheaval against Birth of a Nation is a chapter of African-American history too little known (but recently covered in an excellent documentary called "Birth of a Movement," shown on PBS).

The film was largely inspired by a novel and play called The Clansman, which is a better summation of its plot line than the title given to the screen adaptation. Its storyline adapted the historical events at the end of the Civil War with a grossly fictionalized view of Reconstruction that better fit the Lost Cause ideology then popular than any historical reality. Its caricatures of African-Americans not only dramatized the worst derogatory stereotypes of the era, but made plain that the only way to combat the lustful and thieving nature of the black underclass was with violence.

The year Birth of a Nation appeared in theatres, 56 African-Americans were lynched.

Some of Birth of a Nation’s between-scene text was taken directly from a history written by sitting President Woodrow Wilson, a virulent racist and segregationist. It became the first movie ever screened at the White House.

The film’s racial violence did not go unnoticed or unchallenged in the African-American community, whose fight against it proved a greater legacy than any cinematic artistry the film displayed. Members of the Los Angeles branch of the NAACP screened the movie and noted it was “historically inaccurate and, with subtle genius, designed to palliate and excuse the lynchings and other deeds of violence committed against the Negro.” Hoping to take advantage of censorship statues that controlled the still-new medium of movies, the NAACP and other groups rose up against the film’s widespread release.

Boston became ground zero for the protest movement, led by William Monroe Trotter, who became the first African-American inducted into Phi Beta Kappa while at Harvard and was the editor of the Boston Guardian in his professional life. Trotter had gained renown in 1903 for shouting down Booker T. Washington, whose ideology of racial harmony was thought to accommodate segregationists; Trotter’s public criticism of Washington created a kerfuffle that was described as a riot in the press.

The criticisms against Birth of a Nation levied by Trotter and others brought enormous crowds of African-Americans into the streets in protest, in Boston and elsewhere, in large scale public displays of civic engagement that presaged the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Theatres in many cities refused to sell tickets to African-Americans, for fear of disturbances. Trotter challenged the refusal of the Tremont Theatre on Boston Common, resulting in his arrest and one of the largest street protests Boston had ever seen. The outcry against the film led director D.W. Griffith to release a pamphlet entitled “The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America” to complain of censorship.

Despite the protests, the film became America’s first enormous box office success, packing theatres in big cities and small towns around the country. Its glorification of the Ku Klux Klan is considered the main fuel in the Klan’s re-invention after 1915, causing it to rise to political power throughout the Midwest after being all but dead. Trotter’s protests had succeeded nonetheless, not only in inspiring the power of the African-American community to join in common cause, but in limiting the movie’s spread: a planned 1921 revival was banned in Boston.