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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IX. Leadership and Concerted Action - 35. The Negro Protest - 1. The Slave Revolts
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CHAPTER 35
THE NEGRO PROTEST
I. The Slave Revolts.
There has always been another type of Negro leader than the “pussy-
footing” Uncle Tom. And there has always been another main motive
than accommodation for practically all Negro leadership: both as part
of the leaders’ own intuitions and as a conditioning demand from their
Negro followers and from their white supporters.
The leaders of the numerous local slave insurrections^—Gabriel Prosser,
Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, and many others, known and unknown
—
represented early types of pure protest leaders, “race men” in the modern
popular Negro terminology. They rose against overwhelming odds and
succumbed with their followers. Many plots to revolt were prematurely
revealed to the white masters by Negro stool pigeons who sought to
curry favor by their betrayal. The chief short-range result of the per-
sistent series of slave rebellions or attempts at rebellion was an ever closer
regimentation of free and slave Negroes.®
These race martyrs can be said to have laid the foundations, not only for
the tradition of Negro protest, but also—because of their regular and
conspicuous failure—for the “realistic” theory of race relations. This theory
is favored by Southern white liberals and is accepted by the great majority
of accommodating Southern Negro leaders j
it holds that everything which
stirs up the resistance of the whites will deteriorate the Negroes’ status,
and that reforms must be pushed quietly and in such ways that the
whites hardly notice them before they are accomplished facts comfortably
sunk into a new status quo.^
American Negroes, in attempting to integrate themselves into American
society, have had to pay the price of forgetting their historical heroes
and martyrs. Charles S. Johnson makes the following interesting observa-
tion:
. . . Denmark Vesey, a Negro who resisted slavery and led an insurrection in the
effort to throw off the oppression, is a type which contradicts the assumption that
* See Chapter 24, Section 3, and Chapter 28, Section 3. The rise of militant Abolitionism
in the North was a complementary cause.
"See Chapter 21, Section 5, and Chapter 38, Section 4.
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