Nat Turner and the Virginia slave revolt
Commentary by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
Nat Turner, born into slavery October 2, 1800, on a Southampton County plantation, became a preacher who claimed he had been chosen by God to lead slaves from bondage. On August 21, 1831, he led a violent insurrection. The slave rebellion resulted in 60 white deaths and at least 100 black deaths, the largest number of fatalities to occur in one uprising prior to the American Civil War in the southern United States. He gathered supporters in Southampton County, Virginia. He hid for six weeks but was eventually caught. Turner was convicted, sentenced to death, and hanged. In the aftermath, the state executed 56 blacks accused of being part of Turner's slave rebellion. Two hundred blacks were also beaten and killed by white militias and mobs reacting with violence. Across Virginia and other southern states, state legislators passed new laws prohibiting education of slaves and free blacks, restricting rights of assembly and other civil rights for free blacks, and requiring white ministers to be present at black worship services.
At birth, Turner's owner recorded only his given name, Nat, although he may have had a last name within the slave community. In accordance with common practice, the whites referred to him by the last name of his owner, Samuel Turner. This practice was continued by historians. Turner knew little about his father's background, who was believed to have escaped from slavery when Turner was a young boy. Turner remained close to his paternal grandmother, Old Bridget, who was also enslaved by Samuel Turner. Turner's maternal grandmother was one of the Coromantee from present day Ghana, a group known for slave revolts. She was captured in Africa at thirteen years of age and shipped to America.
Turner spent his life in Southampton County, Virginia, a predominantly black area. After the rebellion, a reward notice described Turner as:
5 feet 6 or 8 inches high, weighs between 150 and 160 pounds, rather bright complexion, but not a mulatto, broad shoulders, larger flat nose, large eyes, broad flat feet, rather knockneed, walks brisk and active, hair on the top of the head very thin, no beard, except on the upper lip and the top of the chin, a scar on one of his temples, also one on the back of his neck, a large knot on one of the bones of his right arm, near the wrist, produced by a blow.
Turner had "natural intelligence and quickness of apprehension, surpassed by few." He learned to read and write at a young age. Deeply religious, Nat was often seen fasting, praying, or immersed in reading the stories of the Bible. He frequently experienced visions which he interpreted as messages from God. These visions greatly influenced his life; for instance, when Turner was 22 years old, he ran away from his owner, but returned a month later after having such a vision. Turner often conducted Baptist services, preaching the Bible to his fellow slaves, who dubbed him "The Prophet". Turner also had influence over white people, and in the case of Ethelred T. Brantley, Turner said that he was able to convince Brantley to "cease from his wickedness".
By early 1828, Turner was convinced that he "was ordained for some great purpose in the hands of the Almighty." While working in his owner's fields on May 12, Turner "heard a loud noise in the heavens, and the Spirit instantly appeared to me and said the Serpent was loosened, and Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and that I should take it on and fight against the Serpent, for the time was fast approaching when the first should be last and the last should be first." Turner was convinced that God had given him the task of "slay[ing] my enemies with their own weapons."Turner "communicated the great work laid out for me to do, to four in whom I had the greatest confidence" – his fellow slaves Henry, Hark, Nelson, and Sam.
Beginning in February 1831, Turner came to believe that certain atmospheric conditions were to be interpreted as a sign that he should begin preparing for a rebellion against the slave owners.
On February 11, 1831, an annular solar eclipse was seen in Virginia. Turner saw this as a black man's hand reaching over the sun, and he took this vision as his sign. The rebellion was initially planned for July 4, Independence Day, but was postponed for more deliberation between him and his followers, and due to illness. On August 13, there was another solar eclipse, in which the sun appeared bluish-green (possibly from debris deposited in the atmosphere by an eruption of Mount Saint Helens). Turner took this occasion as the final signal, and about a week later, on August 21, he began the rebellion.
Turner started with a few trusted fellow slaves. The rebels traveled from house to house, freeing slaves and killing the white people they found. The rebels ultimately included more than 70 enslaved and free blacks.
Because the rebels did not want to alert anyone to their presence as they carried out their attacks, they initially used knives, hatchets, axes, and blunt instruments instead of firearms. The rebellion did not discriminate by age or sex, until it was determined that the rebellion had achieved sufficient numbers. Nat Turner only confessed to killing one of the rebellion's victims, Margret Whitehead, whom he killed with a blow from a fence post.
Before a white militia was able to respond, the rebels killed 60 men, women, and children. They spared a few homes "because Turner believed the poor white inhabitants 'thought no better of themselves than they did of negros.'" Turner also thought that revolutionary violence would serve to awaken the attitudes of whites to the reality of the inherent brutality in slave-holding, a concept similar to 20th century philosopher Franz Fanon's idea of "violence as purgatory". Turner later said that he wanted to spread "terror and alarm" among whites.
The Capture of Nat Turner
The rebellion was suppressed within two days, but Turner eluded capture until October 30, when he was discovered hiding in a hole covered with fence rails. On November 5, 1831, he was tried for "conspiring to rebel and making insurrection", convicted and sentenced to death. Turner was hanged on November 11 in Jerusalem, Virginia, now known as Courtland, Virginia. His body was flayed, beheaded and quartered. In the aftermath of the insurrection there were 45 slaves, including Turner, and 5 free blacks tried for insurrection and related crimes in Southampton. Of the 45 slaves tried, 15 were acquitted. Of the 30 convicted, 18 were hanged, while 12 received mercy and were sold out of state. Of the 5 free blacks tried for participation in the insurrection, one was hanged, while the others were acquitted.
After his execution, a local lawyer, Thomas Ruffin Gray, took it upon himself to publish, "Confessions of Nat Turner: The Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, Virginia" a first-hand account of Turner's confessions published by a local lawyer, Thomas Ruffin Gray, in 1831. This work is derived partly from research done while Turner was in hiding and partly from jailhouse conversations with Turner before trial. This work is the primary historical document regarding Nat Turner. This work should not be confused with a book of the same name "The Confessions of Nat Turner" a 1967 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by U.S. writer William Styron. Presented as a first-person narrative by historical figure Nat Turner, the novel concerns the slave revolt in Virginia in 1831. It is supposedly based on The "Confessions of Nat Turner: The Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, Virginia". Turner and one of his supporters are shown fantasizing about sexually assaulting white women. Critics took issue with Styron using the "myth of the black rapist", as portraying black men as prone to sexual violence against white women. Suspected sexual assault was a longstanding racist stereotype used as rhetorical justification for lynching black men.
In terms of public response and loss of white lives, slaveholders in the Upper South and coastal states were deeply shocked by the Nat Turner Rebellion. While the 1811 German Coast Uprising in Louisiana involved a greater number of slaves, it resulted in only two white fatalities. Events in Louisiana did not receive as much attention in those years in the Upper South and Lowcountry. Because of his singular status, Turner is regarded as a hero by some African Americans and pan-Africanists worldwide.
Turner became the focus of historical scholarship in the 1940s, when historian Herbert Aptheker was publishing the first serious scholarly work on instances of slave resistance in the antebellum South. Aptheker wrote that the rebellion was rooted in the exploitative conditions of the Southern slave system. He traversed libraries and archives throughout the South, managing to uncover roughly 250 similar instances, though none of them reached the scale of Nat Turner's Revolt.
Bob Marley ---- Redemption Song
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer in Florida, is charged with second-degree murder in the death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. LA Times: Murder charge is filed in killing of Trayvon Martin.
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For weeks, protesters around the nation have demanded the arrest of George Zimmerman.
A Florida special prosecutor made that happen Wednesday. She announced that Zimmerman — the neighborhood watch volunteer who admitted to fatally shooting an unarmed black teenager on a rainy night here in February — had turned himself in and would be charged with second-degree murder in the death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.
"We did not come to this decision lightly," said Florida State Atty. Angela Corey at a news conference in Jacksonville.
Alluding to the intense publicity surrounding the case, she added, "Let me emphasize that we do not prosecute by public pressure or by petition."
Corey declined to discuss the details of the investigation that led her office to charge Zimmerman, who had claimed self-defense — and who had been free, though in hiding, for weeks. Nor would she say where he was being held, "for his safety as well as for everyone else's safety."
It was a reminder of the volatile nature of a case that has plunged the country into the kind of difficult and impassioned conversation about race and justice that has followed other notorious racial incidents, from the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955 to the police beating of Rodney King in 1991.
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We keep hearing about black-on-black crime because it fits the false media narrative. The Root: Don't White People Kill Each Other, Too?
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In the wake of the Trayvon Martin tragedy, conservatives in media have sought to deflect from the racism and racial profiling that precipitated his untimely death by referencing the broader social malaise of supposed "black-on-black violence."
On last week's episode of This Week on ABC, Washington Post columnist George Will said that despite the Trayvon tragedy, "150 black men are killed every week in this country," and "about 94 percent of them by other black men."
Will parroted arguments made by many conservatives, his intended point being that black-on-black crime remains the real problem our nation should address. The half-truth he spoke went curiously unchallenged by the panel -- including former White House adviser Van Jones -- largely because the meta-narrative of black-on-black violence is widely accepted in journalistic and political circles.
Bill O'Reilly, the Fox News host and one-man propaganda machine, recently interviewed Columbia University professor Marc Lamont Hill to discuss similar claims from Wall Street Journal contributor Shelby Steele, who wrote in "The Exploitation of Trayvon Martin" that "black teenagers are afraid of other black teenagers, not whites." O'Reilly vehemently defended Steele's premise that the Trayvon Martin case is an anomaly.
"Blacks today are nine times more likely to be killed by other blacks than by whites," Steele wrote. He went on to attack the Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson for "exploiting" Trayvon's death in an effort to promote a "liberal" agenda -- a point that O'Reilly was all too happy to expound.
Steele's perspective, though myopic and misguided, remains pervasive and embedded in the broader social consciousness. This red-herring approach is not new, but in the face of Trayvon's death -- for which there remains no arrest, no charges and no arraignment -- these obstructive tactics require an equal and opposite response.
What Will, Steele and O'Reilly failed to mention is the exacting truth that white Americans are just as likely to be killed by other whites. According to Justice Department statistics (pdf), 84 percent of white people killed every year are killed by other whites.
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The right is trying really hard to divide people of color and the LGBT community. ColorLines: Yes, Travyon’s Death Is an LGBT Issue. No, LGBT Politics Aren’t Limited by White Privilege.
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In a recent opinion piece titled “All aboard the Trayvon bandwagon,” Washington Blade editor and co-owner Kevin Naff accuses 28 national LGBT groups of hype-riding because they issued an open letter opposing racial profiling and expressing solidarity with Trayvon Martin’s family and friends.
In Naff’s view, the Trayvon Martin atrocity is simply a consequence of lax gun laws. Race only enters the picture because “ambulance-chasing zealots like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson” have intervened. “Racial tension” over the case is purely the result of “typically lazy and even deliberately inaccurate reporting by the mainstream media” and celebrity tweets. And LGBT organizations should have nothing to say about the systemic and pervasive practice of criminalizing black men and boys because race is just a “distraction that pumps up cable ratings and generates lots of heat, but no light.”
I’m going to borrow that last phrase—“generates lots of heat but no light”—and apply it to Naff’s criminally narrow lens. To accuse organizations including the National Center for Transgender Equality, UNID@S, Immigration Equality and the National Black Justice Coalition of “bandwagon posturing” is to assume that the people who make up these organizations have no stake or interest in dismantling systemic racism. Essentially what Naff has done is cast the struggle for LGBT human rights and equality as window dressing for his own demands for white male privilege.
Of course we know that to be a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or gender non-conforming person of color is to be—drum roll—a person of color. We know this because prisons and morgues are full of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and gender non-conforming people of color, their loved ones and their neighbors. They have no choice or desire to atomize their struggles. Naff shouldn’t either.
And even if Naff can’t personally identify with the intersection between race and sexuality, even if he can’t fathom, say, a Bayard Rustin, he can certainly use his journalistic skills (aka, Google) to uncover evidence that LGBT struggles are inextricably tied to racial justice struggles. For data, he can check out major reports like Injustice at Every Turn or ARC’s own Better Together. Or he can just read the damn screenshot of the National Organization for Marriage’s master plan to drive a wedge between gays, blacks and Latinos.
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At long last east Africa is beginning to realise its energy potential, hopefully they don't make the mistakes of Nigeria and Equitorial Guinnea. Economist: Eastern El Dorado?
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IN ENERGY terms, east Africa has long been the continent’s poor cousin. Until last year it was thought to have no more than 6 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, compared with 60 billion in west Africa and even more in the north. Since a third of the region’s imports are oil-related, it has been especially vulnerable to oil shocks. The World Bank says that, after poor governance, high energy costs are the biggest drag on east Africa’s economy.
All that may be about to change. Kenya, the region’s biggest economy, was sent into delirium on March 26th by the announcement of a big oil strike in its wild north. A British oil firm, Tullow, now compares prospects in the Turkana region and across the border in Ethiopia to Britain’s bonanza from the North Sea. More wells will now be drilled across Kenya, which also holds out hopes for offshore exploration blocs.
Kenya’s find raised less joy in Uganda, where oil was first struck in 2006. Tullow, together with China’s CNOOC and Total of France, will start pumping it next year, initially at a paltry rate of 5,000 barrels a day (b/d). But the Lake Albert basin, which straddles the border between Uganda and Congo, holds over a billion barrels of proven reserves and possibly twice that in potential finds. Uganda has always played Oklahoma to Kenya’s Texas. It believed its bonanza had for once put it at an advantage: instead of importing oil through the Kenyan port of Mombasa, it would build a refinery and export petroleum products to Kenya at a premium. Uganda still has a head start, but Kenyan officials now see their country as a regional hub that combines geographical advantages, and its own newly discovered energy resources, with tax breaks, skills and services.
South Sudan, for years the largest oil producer in the region and locked in an oil dispute with Sudan, now wants to send crude out through Kenya on a pipeline to a proposed new port in Lamu (see map). Such a channel could also serve Ethiopia, which shares Kenya’s joy about their joint oil prospects. But their winnings pale next to those farther south. Tanzania has done well out of gold, earning record receipts of $2.1 billion last year, a 33% increase on 2010. It will do even better from gas. The past month has seen the discovery of enormous gasfields in Tanzanian offshore waters. That of Britain’s BG Group is big, Another, by Norway’s Statoil, is bigger. Statoil’s recent gas find alone is estimated to hold almost a billion barrels of oil equivalent (boe).
Happily, Tanzania’s gasfield extends south to Mozambique, where Italy’s Eni last month unveiled a find of 1.3 billion boe, matching similar finds by an American firm, Andarko. With plans to build a liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal, Mozambique could be a big exporter within a decade. At least the vast and impoverished south of Tanzania and north of Mozambique will be opened up to much-needed investment.
Yet the region is not just excited about fossil fuels; a parallel push towards alternative energy is under way. Several east African countries are keen to realise the Rift Valley’s geothermal prospects. One of the world’s largest wind farms is being built in Kenya not far from the new-found oil in Turkana. Its backers say it will produce 300MW, three times the total output of Rwanda.
That is a drop in the bucket for Ethiopia. Its rivers, plunging from well-watered highlands into deep canyons, have hydropower potential.
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WikiLeaked cable: Invisible Children helped Ugandan security forces arrest government opponent. Foreign Policy: "Kony 2012".
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Just days after releasing its new video, Invisible Children -- the U.S.-based NGO behind the phenomenally successful "Kony 2012" campaign -- has yet again found itself in the midst of controversy over a U.S. diplomatic cable released last year by WikiLeaks, which reports that the group cooperated with the Ugandan military to facilitate the arrest of a former child soldier who was allegedly involved in the formation of a new rebel group.
The cable, released as part of WikiLeaks' massive "Cablegate" series, was sent on June 11, 2009, and signed by then ambassador Steven Browning. Titled, "GAMES THE ACHOLI DIASPORA CONTINUE TO PLAY," it concerns reports of a "new rebellion in northern Uganda" organized by members of the Acholi ethnic group, of which Joseph Kony is also a member. The cable describes Ugandan government reports of a "new resistance group called the Peoples' Patriotic Front (PPF)" that had "begun stockpiling weapons in the districts of West Nile" and was attempting to win support of Acholis abroad for a new effort to overthrow the government of President Yoweri Museveni.
In early 2009, the Ugandan army arrested a number of people alleged to be involved in plots by the PPF (originally known as the Uganda Patriotic Front or UPF) to attack military targets, including Patrick Komakech, who had reportedly been impersonating senior LRA commanders on behalf of the new rebel group. Komakech, reportedly a former LRA child soldier, had been involved with Invisible Children for some time and appeared in several of its videos. (A 2007 Des Moines Register story describes a bike trip he and other former child soldiers took across Iowa organized by American missionaries.)
According to the cable, it was Invisible Children that gave the government the tipoff on where to find Komakech:
The latest plot was exposed when the Government received a tip from the U.S. non-governmental organization (NGO) Invisible Children regarding the location of Patrick Komekech. He was wanted by the security services for impersonating LRA leaders to extort money from government officials, NGOs, and Acholi leaders. Komekech is purportedly a former child soldier abducted by the LRA. Invisible Children had featured him in its documentaries. Invisible Children reported that Komekech had been in Nairobi and had recently reappeared in Gulu, where he was staying with the NGO. Security organizations jumped on the tip and immediately arrested Komekech on March 5. He had a satellite telephone and other gadgets, which were confiscated when security forces picked him up.
Komakech is currently facing treason charges, along with over a dozen other alleged PPF members.
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The Front Porch is now open!
Grab a seat and get a plate! If you are new-introduce yourself and join in.
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