Notes
Notes Introduction 1. Philip Foner, ed., Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999), 375. 2. See Gary B. Nash, The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 98–105. 3. See Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), for an in-depth discussion of the establishment and emergence of slavery in North America and in the European colonies. 4. See John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), 126–44; David Waldstreicher , Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010). 5. Quoted from the constitution of the Kentucky Abolition Society in Lowell H. Harrison, The Antislavery Movement in Kentucky (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1978), 18–37. 6. Henry Clay, Speech of the Hon. Henry Clay before the American Colonization Society, in the Hall of the House of Representatives, January 20, 1827 (Washington, DC: American Colonization Society, 1827), 7–8. 7. See David Walker and Peter Hinks, eds., David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World [1831] (University Park: Pennsylvania State University , 2000). 8. George Moses Horton, The Hope of Liberty: Containing a Number of Poetical Pieces (Raleigh, NC: Gales and Son, 1829), 8–9. http://docsouth.unc.edu/ southlit/horton/horton.html. 9. Delany argues that the founding fathers chose to place people of African descent at the bottom of the political hierarchy because that group was identifiably different from those of European ancestry: The United States, untrue to her trust and unfaithful to her professed principles of republican equality, has also pursued a policy of political degradation to a large portion of her native born countrymen, and that class is the Colored People. Denied equality not only of political but of natural rights, 428 Notes to Pages 6–8 in common with the rest of our fellow citizens, there is no species of degradation to which we are not subject. Reduced to abject slavery is not enough, the very thought of which should awaken every sensibility of our common nature; but those of their descendants who are freemen even in the non-slaveholding States, occupy the very same position politically, religiously, civilly and socially, (with but few exceptions,) as the bondman occupies in the slave States. In those States, the bondman is disfranchised, and for the most part so are we. He is denied all civil, religious, and social privileges, except such as he gets by mere sufferance, and so are we. They have no part nor lot in the government of the country, neither have we. They are ruled and governed without representation, existing as mere nonentities among the citizens, and excrescences on the body politic—a mere dreg in community, and so are we. Where then is our political superiority to the enslaved? None, neither are we superior in any other relation to society, except that we are de facto masters of ourselves and joint rulers of our own domestic household, while the bondman’s self is claimed by another, and his relation to his family denied him. What the unfortunate classes are in Europe, such are we in the United States, which is folly to deny, insanity not to understand, blindness not to see, and surely now full time that our eyes were opened to these startling truths, which for ages have stared us full in the face. Martin Delany, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, ed. Toyin Falola (1852; reprint, New York: Humanity Books, 2004), 44–45. 10. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985). 11. Joy Degruy, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing (Milwaukee: Uptone Press, 2005). 12. See Ed Hotaling, The Great Black Jockeys: The Lives and Times of the Men Who Dominated America’s First National Sport (Rocklin, CA: Forum Prima Publishing , 1999). 13. See the following texts for discussions of notions of black inferiority and imagined racial destiny: W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903); David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 2002); George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998); George M...
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