FIELD STATEMENT PROPOSAL -- AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY

A Common Enemy: Interracial Solidarity and Resistance in North America

by Charlie Lawing


Ever since European settlement in the New World and the first forced migration of African laborers to the Americas, “race” has defined pervasive inequalities in American society. Although racial animosities have characterized most of North American history, there have been important periods and organizations that involved interracial solidarity and cooperation. Thus, race and race relations have a complex history in America, and the examination of interracial resistance to prevailing beliefs and practices can illuminate the possibilities for realizing a just society that fulfills America's promise of equality.

In 1619, twelve years after the first permanent English settlement in Jamestown, Virginia, Englishman John Rolfe recorded the importation of captive Africans into the colony. Some scholars argue that, similar to poor white laborers, these Africans were legally classified by the ruling class as indentured servants who would be free after providing unpaid labor for a specified number of years. Others contend that most Africans shipped to Virginia were likely enslaved. There is little dispute, however, that throughout the century the colonies instituted an increasingly hostile system of racialized enslavement.

Many of the first slaves were Native Americans. As late as the 1680s, English settlers regularly kidnapped Native women and children who lived in the coastal plains of North Carolina and Virginia. Native resistance, however, grew insurmountable for slaveholders. In 1674 the Royal African Company began direct shipments of slaves from Africa to the North American mainland. As the price of importation dropped, the sale of African slaves flourished, and within fifty years most slaveholders abandoned Indian slavery in favor of African slavery. Virginia had already passed laws in 1670 defining slavery as a lifelong inheritable condition linked to black skin. In that same year, when newly established laws forbade free blacks and Indians to own Christian servants—the vast majority of whom were white—Virginia laid the foundation for racio-juridical provisions that would increasingly link blacks and Indians in America as culturally, socially, and economically inferior, and which priviliged whites as their cultural, social, and economic superiors. Thereafter, many Indians who colonial authorities classified as black—an identification that demonstrates the instability of racialized constructs—were forced into slavery; by 1700 the majority of blacks were slaves for life. Control over this interracial population was a formidable challenge for the ruling class as rebellion and fear of rebellion soared.

Even before but especially after Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 when poor white farmers, white servants, and black slaves joined forces to seize Native-American land and plunder the planter elite’s estates, colonial America’s white ruling class feared insurrectionary interracial solidarity. Though in 1630 a Virginia court sentenced “Hugh Davis to be soundly whipped, before an assembly of Negroes and others for abusing himself to the dishonor of God and the shame of Christians, by defiling his body in lying with a Negro,” it was another thirty-two years before the fear of racio-social encounters found absolute legal expression in the colony’s first racially based statute, which determined that the child of a black woman and a white man would be free or slave according to the condition of its mother. By defining human categories in class-conscious and gendered racio-juridical terms, this regulation sought to discourage certain interracial alliances that the planters felt threatened their economic and social dominance.

Enslaved and unfree people continually resisted their bondage by using techniques such as work slowdowns, sabotage, feigned sickness, self-mutilation, the destruction of property, and organized revolts. Another effective form of resistance was self-liberation. From the beginning of slavery to its end in 1865, people in bondage continued to escape, organize revolts, and establish their own communities, such as the many maroon societies that existed in states such as Alabama, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia.

Interracial cooperation was exercised in America’s more mainstream communities as well. Though enslaved African Americans had always resisted their bondage, Quakers, whose opposition to slavery arose during the Seven Years’ War, became one of the first formal white organizations to prohibit slaveholding. Following the publication of David Walker’s “Appeal,” and the appearance of William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator, by 1830 such antislavery agitation had grown into an interracial abolotionist crusade.

Following the Civil War, Reconstruction arose as a brief but impactful period of interracial cooperation and democracy, a time when both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were enacted. Radical agrarian organizations, who called for regulation of railroads, state aid for agriculture, and higher taxes on corporations, also flourished after the war. In the 1880s and 1890s, black and white farmers in the South joined forces when radical leaders, such as Tom Watson, convinced poor whtes and blacks that they were being intentionally separated. The Populist Party was these farmers’ political body, and by 1892 many blacks supported the Party’s advocacy of political equality.

During the 1920s, the Communist Party similarly argued that a racially-divided society and work force benefited only the dominant class, and began actively working to improve conditions for African-American workers. Identifying the common struggle for all workers against an unjust economic system, the Party attempted to break the pattern of white supremacy that pervaded the American labor movement.

The decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) was a pivotal moment in American civil rights history: after years of campaigning against Jim Crow laws, the Civil Rights Movement had won a unanimous decision from the United States Supreme Court. Almost a decade later, the March on Washington in 1963 was a defining event for the Movement, as the many black and white groups who supported civil rights united together in protest. Though the Movement in the 1960s turned increasingly to racial separatism, many advocates remained firmly convinced that integration and interracial cooperation would win the war against class oppression.

Historians have addressed the evolution of interracial collaborators who consciously and collectively challenged white upper class domination. This field statement is the basis for further research into that spirit of resistance in America, with a focus on why and how disparate racialized groups joined forces to combat ruling class authority, and an examination of the factors that too often undermined interracial cooperation. This survey of literature that focuses on interracial solidarity in America from European colonization to 1970 is a unit of study that will complement ongoing research into how the notion of “race” and racio-sociality have defined the nation.


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tags: interracialism  race  racialization