“The Black People’s Side of the Story”: The Historical and Transatlantic Roots of the Movement for Black Lives (original) (raw)

2023, African American Review

I n 1898, African American freedom fighter and prison reform activist D. E. Tobias published a groundbreaking pamphlet in London titled Freed. .. But Not Free, the Grievances of the Afro-American. Born to parents who had been enslaved, Tobias had traveled to Britain to investigate the English prison system, compare it with the convict lease system in the United States, and expose the unjust incarceration of thousands of Black women, men, and children on American soil. He declared that abolition had "not made the coloured race a free people" and that the convict lease system was "a true relic and consequence of the old system of slavery with ten times its severity" (Tobias 12). 1 After years of research, and much like his contemporary Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Tobias meticulously recorded how such a system came into being after the end of the American Civil War in 1865. He wrote: the South adopted the deplorable and disgraceful practice of convicting thousands of blacks on the most flimsy charges, and farming them out to the highest bidders for human flesh.. .. The downfall of the old régime of slavery by no means eradicated that idea. The cruelty of wringing profits from the sweat and muscles of the coloured race, as slaves, was abolished, but it is still carried on in disguise by sending them to prison, which is done in the South on the slightest provocation. (25-26) With blistering rhetoric, Tobias railed against institutionalized violence, injustice for, and oppression of people of color and connected racism and poverty with a white desire for profit. Abolition had done little to challenge white oppression and the convict lease system was a "disguise" to mask the lack of progress made. Careful to differentiate between enslavement and this new barbaric system, Tobias emphasized his point by noting that, in 1879, 350 Black men and women in Georgia were leased "for state profit" for a period of twenty years, but after two years this number had doubled, with "fifteen coloured [incarcerated] to one white prisoner" (29-30). As Angela Y. Davis has summarized as recently as 2020, despite the efforts of many activists who fought to abolish enslavement, "there were those who did recognize early on that slavery could not be comprehensively eradicated simply by disestablishing the institution itself, leaving intact the economic, political, and cultural conditions within which slavery flourished." These activists understood well that abolition was a vision that "would require a thorough reorganization of US societyeconomically, politically, and socially-in order to guarantee the incorporation of formerly enslaved Black people into a new democratic order" (Davis, "Why Arguments"). While African American freedom fighters across the centuries may have faced various challenges and experienced a range of contexts, their desire for a "new democratic order" that recognized their lives, humanity, citizenship, and testimony more broadly remained the same. Black activists have always been at the forefront in pushing the United States to accept the ideals it was founded on and wereare-unrelenting in their groundbreaking campaigns for abolition, equality, and social justice. In this article, I argue that, to add nuance and a greater understanding 9