How pioneering Black liberals battled Thomas Jefferson's "Dark Age"

How pioneering Black liberals battled Thomas Jefferson's "Dark Age"
Scholar Keidrick Roy on the lessons of 19th-century Black thinkers who resisted racist notions of "liberty"

By Paul Rosenberg
Contributing Writer
Published November 10, 2024 6:00AM (EST)


(Salon) "All men are created equal,” wrote slaveholder Thomas Jefferson, in words that have been a source of consternation ever since. That was less true, perhaps, for a significant group of Black abolitionist writers who clearly understood Jefferson’s vision as limited by his belief in a natural hierarchy of color, even as he sought to break with the feudal hierarchies of England and the Old World.

Those writers’ vision blossomed in the early 19th century even as the popularity of artificial hierarchies rebounded among American white people, particularly in the South. A new book from Harvard scholar Keidrick Roy, “American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism,” lays out their pioneering critique of the enduring power of feudalism on American thought, along with a coherent framework of liberal ideas shaped by their individual and collective lived experiences.

What emerged was arguably more robust, and more progressive, than the liberalism developed by white theorists. Roy focuses in particular on how these Black writers responded to the experience of the Middle Passage — the traumatic journey from Africa to America made by newly enslaved people — which he describes as “cheating social death,” and on how they used “the established part of an existing system to create a new one that serves a fundamentally different form or function.” For example, the ideas of moral and intellectual advancement that Jefferson championed in the context of a so-called natural aristocracy were reinterpreted within a framework of collective advancement for all Black Americans.

....(snip)....

Chapter 8 is about two black women, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Harriet Jacobs. What’s most important about their contributions?

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Harriet Jacobs articulate a version of Black liberalism that can be described by three unifying terms: liberty, reform and progression. For them, the idea of liberty pointed to the tangible abolition of slavery and racial hierarchy; reform represented the persistent human action required to achieve liberty through moral, social and political processes; and progression suggests a practical commitment to the possibility of effecting positive political change and acknowledges the potential for future improvement to be contingent rather than inevitable. They recognized actual social change as extending beyond the idea of temperance, which they saw as a necessary but insufficient condition for improving the U.S. social order during the mid-19th century. They sought to realize a type of liberty that was no more and no less restrictive than the best of what could be achieved by white American men, even as Black women uniquely withstood what Jacobs called the “wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own.” .......................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2024/11/10/how-pioneering-black-liberals-battled-slavery-and-the-american-dark-age/