Africans in America; 102; Revolution; Interview with Deborah Gray White, Professor of History, Rutgers University. 1 of 2

and what is the significance of last week included being alone in increasing numbers doesn't say that ortiz worries and by the middle of this seventeenth century until the seventeenth century wealth held by the milosevic a century you have at least i would say maybe at three quarters of the black population or least half anyhow are being born here in america that cuts them off from africa that cuts them off from a line of the heritage daring grandparents parents grandparents knew it makes it so that they these these new slaves have been socialized into a system of enslavement so that freedom isn't a memory to them

anymore by the time you get to the seventeen fifties most planners are little apprehensive about having too many africans it is they think that i'm that africans are a bad influence and african americans they prefer to have the players prefer to have slaves who can speak the language israel says the city is but i'm eager to the middle of the eighteenth century probably have at least half of the black population being african american and maybe moore and planners like it that way farmers like it that way here was a population that they felt was a lot more malleable a lot more manageable for the africa and then for the african american however this meant

that they had no association or when they knew what freedom meant because they could see why people around them every day about being free but as far as african culture and african savannas african life this was something that they hurt to their parents and grandparents and increasingly as a generation past generation parents africa and african culture would become something that was it really real to them and they would become a lot more american and they are thinking but becoming a lot more american men being alone brought up as a slave in and having only slavery as a frame of reference whereas before that you had a culture you had a lineage have compounds you have people who arent was speaker totally different language i am and you just have a different totally different culture where you at

this show is when the birth of a child is it is a source of joy because it is the mother does a father an identity apart from that being a slave it allows him to say this is my child i am a father and a mother com it gives them responsibilities that go beyond just doing somebody else's labor are for women when a woman could look at a child and say this child in his mind some in that they came from from her and something that the plan might take away from this is the other part of it is isn't that the most sorrowful park but something that most women on a given the meaning and in existence that was apart from that meaning in existence that was attached to enslavement presenter

rachel tell this law and that they knew it was a system designed to it's hard being a parent changes slavery women nine men mothers and fathers tried to be mothers and fathers so they want their children to obey them and if i say something you you you listen to me but they also know that the masters the ultimate authority and if a masters or something it isn't this a great story of a kid who's cool by scholar and a slave master it will or both at the same time and the child turns two as a slave master and when i when he gets back his father's father snapped summonses you know when i call you come you you're my child but imagine the dilemma

the maginot line of the child on he has seen his mother and father whipped he had seen arms just horrendous things terrific things that go on on the plantation he knows we're all has the authority he sees the parents even though parents try to feed their children by providing demand by hunting and fishing and the women and manned by growing things in a garden precious a given up given out by slave masters food clothing the authority is is this lady master and children got very mixed signals but ultimately i think this signal that they get upset that the person who is ultimately in control was a slave master okay

we go it was very difficult for an intensely there's a great story of slave labor young slave boy who is called wise father and called by his master the same time and the shelters to a semester but then when he gets back to his father's father hit him and he says you know you're my son and when i call you a lawyer to come to me because i'm your father and yet the child had to see him every day like that it was the master who have the ultimate authority and yet i still think that parents were able to impart a sense of individuality to a child and i think one of the ways he did this was by telling them stories so you have a wonderful stories being told about for instance the briar rabbit story where the tar baby gets stuck and when

the fox of that when the wolf comes through nyc eat a rabbit the rabbit and very cunning and their sly ways has you know but i want it i want it it you can burn me and i think i'd love to be burned but please throw me in the brier patch because that would be a fate worse than death and of course when there were rabbi gets thrown into the briar patch he can work his way loose but what this story taught him and what parents really wanted to impart by telling this story is set even though master might have all of the power and might be larger and have have at his command every kind of bump up wickedness that he could possibly have by use of cunning by use of weight elisa smart then the slave or the poor ran to the smaller being cleaned that proving that you know all the way

on the us is in this narrative we meet people any war on a day festivals of a hassle to the beach because they're working and house's masters says that ends well they were in fact living in a state of war mistresses and masters could never really tell what their slaves in particular the sleigh women who worked in the house what they were thinking that had to be concerned and in fact we know that they were concerned you hear you see newspaper articles for instance is a newspaper article or an the south carolina could send seventeen fifty five that informs the reader is that slave family the whole entire slate family was poisoned by a woman who was serving in food so they really can never tell what the slave woman is thinking how what

what her perceptions are and so they have to imagine and in their imaginations they turn the women who work for them and to into passive beings into loving beings but in fact the cases the poison the cases of murder delilah fact that these women were satisfied pastor says that these days an everyday way well like the times of mistresses well for one last time as women would take things to eat for their families and they would steal food and the mistress would get wind of it and the problem was that the times mistresses we're afraid to two point in fact they usually used although left the whipping to masters but women in the house were always at each other's necks throats they were there was always a test of

wills is a great story about a slave named elsie and kelsey wanted to be put in the fields she was tired of working around the wise and she kept requesting it and requesting it and nothing came of her request and finally she decides that she's going to cook a ham in this un had been the question is in the house guy is a clown posse wanted to be put in the fields because she was tired of always being at the beckoned call a white family and nothing came of her requests and she kept asking and then nothing came of it so finally she decided well i'll make sure that they put me in the fields and so she cooks up i did to him and serves

it up and end the day it does leon they had been dead for a couple of days and she served it ended with all the fixings in the next day she was sent to the field she was in recrimination listen to the fish she got her way there were other incidents where i'm going and feigned illness if they thought that the master and mistress had overstepped their bounds i had asked to do too much too many times and they would feign illness in women in particular could get away with painting illness a little bit more than men without stretching the point no without exaggerating so is will it work and very very few masters and mistresses let you know let people just not not work but the women were expected to reproduce the slave population they had they had children so they could use their menstrual cycle they could use payne's associated with it and they could use joe pains real

pains associate which i were to say look this is enough i'm sometimes in israel sometimes it was in rio but they often fade almost to get out of work so you know why so he's been in damascus where this point the two races will what is that will approach what is that the singing where you want people to go wow and very often the point at which black children and white children separate was when the white jury went off for school when it was time for them to learn to rely on and it was time for the black children to go into the

fields and up until that time quite frequently they've been playing with each other and particularly if you're in an isolated area and the white children in our children play without this life but i think what happens at that particular point is the white child then begins to understand why not only what it means to be an owner but when the city why om what it means to have privilege i'm and privilege it becomes associated with whiteness i am white therefore i learned how to read it right arm i am like before i could no longer play will have black children because it's not acceptable and it's corrupting it's corrupting some you have some games that are played by by black and why chili with a black children are always forced to to be the slave and the white chalk plays the auction master or baby on the auction are ma played whipping wind y choe can whip the black it teaches them privilege it teaches them

mastery or how to be a masterful and how to be rulers and how to rule he says the letter to the inferior and what i'm going as your mama's going to see when you do this is so sad i'm going to guess that this separation at the time of schooling teaches black children that they are inferior to white children that they are slaves in it teaches them in a way their place the parade route for slaves well

the community the slave community what we loosely call communities really a community of families a community of kinship networks and slaves were we're very adaptive and sometimes we we talk about on the development these kinship networks as an adaptive strategy a one way to to make them go to the system less brutal one way to make the slavery less oppressive arm was to develop these these networks whereby you could get support from people who either were your blood can know where nadia blye can family becomes increasingly more sacred love them or it's threatened so that even when people are separated from each other when husband and wife are so separated when children are separated with an a particular plantation people or malls and they respond automatically they know how to

stand and other women frequently stood in for the loss of a of a spell so that they would help a woman along a child that was left without apparent down there was always going to be someone someone who was going to take care of their child either a mother's friend or someone who that person had the child had come to know as on so and so and his silly enough even during the colonial period we find that children particularly girls girls are more likely to be kept when their mothers and they're more likely to be kept with the grandmothers on it maybe you get to kind of her matrilineal metro focal emphasis and that's because boys men are far more tangential to the system than our girls and mothers their men are liable to be sold off land they are valuable for the

work and politically the heavy labor that they can go adam google's lawyers for mothers in particular girls they're a source lovejoy unhappiness because quite frankly frankly one of the days that plan is depended on was that a girl child would stay with her mother and take here that's mother in old age masses didn't do that they often left on the air how old are slaves to die all the slaves needed can buy them they needed to have some sort of family unusually it was a door or a granddaughter who said that will seem within the confines of the caribbean port has the people weren't all they want to go see you know

well well one of the things that happen in particular again during the colonial period because you couldn't off times you have what we call a broad marriages and that would be where once laden lived on one plantation and the other lived on another and they would they would be married but in it we usually the mail slave who want to see the females lay and oftentimes a period of a week ago by two weeks ago by it all depends on the kind of arrangement that run the masters have made between each other but clearly these were these were un meetings that were worth waiting for that time that had a lot more meaning because they had been separated for so long one hundred years

later a search engine on romney yes as it pleases now i think the significance of the patriarchal structure is that white men become masters of over women and blacks and in fact they believe women and blacks to be inferior to them alone and the laws are structured so that they have authority and now they have power will over everyone ok the

revolutionary period is a very unique time because it is during that period that the free black population one to say is really born you have more blacks being free that during his time either because they've date stole themselves and ran away because of all the chaos of the war or because they remain limited by slave masters so it is truly revolutionary for defeat for african americans in ways that i don't think i am whites who wants to design this it in what happened this way but in fact more blacks are freedom's peer than any other time during other through slavery and a slippery create all areas of life having a good way to look at the ways that our slavery permeated white lie is by imagining black people are sort of enablers

for white people if instead of going off to war sometimes one could send a substitute so one was a white male was helped in and it was enabled by a black resin filling in for them black people enabled white people to simply differentiate among themselves as well as long as black you're going to do all of the demeaning work as long as all the hard backbreaking labor was in there was something that was a sign to black people then one thing that white people could be assured of his that they would never fall so low as to be a slave is to to do the demeaning and the terrible labor that black people have black women enabled white women to be ladies the leisure that

white women gained the leisure that they had to pay attention to their children they have that leisure because black women were taking care of their children black women were doing the cooking black window and watch me on so black women enabled white motherhood in a way that certainly white women did and didn't enable blackmon i am black women allowed black allowed white women to be to be ladies in the sense that on they could be feminine they didn't have today weren't thought there was going to be weak they were thought to be delicate and frail why because so much of the labor that required them to be something other than that was done by black women and similarly for black black and white men on the fact that black men were

disallow from carrying guns and guns in a period when they were likely to be and could be attacked by the indians it allowed whiteman to define what manhood meant they could carry guns on that they were the ones who could vote they could talk politics and they did this and they had the time to do this because in the men in black men were doing so much of the heavy labor and because black men in fact would just simply disallowed from doing that but within this is speculative but within that within isi than what was the difference between owning explain how was to wipe away people's status among themselves being slaves in a small minority and they were the ones to define what are called what is the standard way you know only a very few white people owned slaves most white people

were somehow connected with slavery so they were connected through the patrol system where by you had white man who is excluded paramilitary force who patrol the woods in the roads at night alone you have white men who were overseers of the system who who did the day to day running of the plantation you hadn't met people who run who ran so they're now mills somehow these people were associated with larry one thing was sure every white person could have status because they were not going to be black as they were not and they were not going to be slaves and among themselves yesterday there was a differentiation the planters they could look at their black and white family and they could proceed everyone to be part of their families because in many ways they were the role as a system that gave everybody a job that put everyone to work

so southern culture in southern economics is organized a run system of slavery and how does a parent raising chance that they are in the world and what brings this one to eight hundred so they can be whole organ began to be home it is very cold is very hard for a child to be whole for a black child to be whole and i think we still don't know are we still not aware of all of the devastation that's leaving children but it wasn't foreign their parents taught them first of all taught them how to hide the slave community and the feelings of the slave community from from from white folks taught them how to be quiet and when to be quiet when to when to speak and when not to speak of what information could be divulged to what information had to be kept quiet it's hard to

raise a child and slavery because a child sees daily along the clippings the brutality of the system sees the parents coming under the authority coming under the rulebook of the overseer event so it's very difficult but at the same time i think parents teach children what has to be cherished about the slave community and that's family that's religion arm and that's to get the next story preexisting conditions the revolutionary periods esteem is because during this period even though it wasn't designed says during this period more black people become free than at any other period in history slavery in this country it is during the revolution because the chaos of the war that more slaves were able to free themselves were simply running away

is also during the revolution and more slaves a man him and it is during and shortly after the revolution that the north abolish slavery or at least begin some systems of gradual emancipation that makes the entire black population even though it's not a very large population it still a very significant number of african americans becoming free and as a result of this freedom you have your you know your true freedom fighters now out of slavery because the abolitionist movement does it began with a free black population in prostitution in the new facility wasn't really an invitation for slaves the

problem with the libertarian ideology of the entire revolutionary and constitutional period is this notion that the pursuit of happiness is tied to property so even though thomas jefferson is able to say all men are created equal and endowed by the creator with inalienable rights these rights include the right of property and in as much as slaves are defined as property it means that there is going to be strong on a struggle to the debt to wrench this kind of property away from our next so when as you move out of this period and two is a civil war the notion of others is my property and the idea that the property cannot be taken from me includes that of human beings so as i strongly as people might adhere to the notion of liberty and freedom they had here just as strongly to the notion of the personal rights and property so that is can spell

disaster for the african american slaves i think the first generation african american home this generation won't know africa and the same way that their parents in africa africa will be a place that is brought to him or her through stories true tales maybe but it also know the cello solo no freedom in the same way an apparent new freedom i'm if it's a girl child one what a parent can look forward to there's probably a lot of grief in considering that a woman or that as a child grows into a woman she will be our pursuit she will this prick perhaps be

sexually exploited in ways that an african woman wouldn't win would not ever i know that kind of sexual exploitation harm there would be no laws that would protect these a new child child an african american child whereas in african child has been born into our traditions pointed to culture put into society governed by rules and laws and yet in the slave population there weren't there was nothing there was constant everything was going to be unpredictable arm as africa things were predictable and perhaps that was probably going to be one of the worst things about slavery is not knowing whether maybe it delivered his child stay within china races china and particularly for the first generation

since more than likely are the parents had the child very shortly after they arrive they may have been maybe you're only to three years if they're adults i am for then they probably have no idea well i was like marriages were not they were they weren't legally perform they weren't they had no bomb legal foundation so when a slave marriage was was a committed between a man and a woman and to be faithful to each other and to love each other to help each other and as far as the courts were concerned as far as the churches were concerned on these marriages were not binding in me they couldn't be a lawyer lisa slave system could not allow them to flee because if they were and they would have to be broken with impunity whenever or a

slave master decided it for one reason or another he had to us sell one on one or other of the slave couple but i think as far as marriage is concerned for from the slaves perspective it was part of the formation of family it was part of the formation of those changes that networks which were most of which was a form of survival and which allowed them to exist under this slave system with some sort of dignity within sort of man identity that was not that honestly idealistically we like to think that you know that all of these marriages work out and that everybody got along and there are men and women aren't loved each other and that there was no violence within the marriage that i am that support and love was was a

foundation in every marriage ended if not if the demand by sale or by a bite at that that they that they endured in fact we know the slave marriages were not a stable as we would like to we would like them to have been on there were just so many things and countless late husband why i'm it did hurt slayton in a particular to see their women abused or sexually abused to see them what am a man said i would rather not marry i'd rather not even be on the plantation that and have a wife if i cannot protect his wife if i can't take your my children on so those marriages that didn't do or had to be really strong and then they with those injured were in fact gone because this was something them in head to head to watch and in some cases

date they had to be at the fact that the white master slave master was was abusing his wife and similarly it was very hard for a woman to stand by and watch her husband may be is an know that his masculinity was being threatened i was an actor and so it was it was very difficult and particularly for women who knew that men were likely to be separated from them because men were much more likely to be still and sons were likely to be sold women in the store and just the internet he's you were a young man just twenty two years old and he i arrived at the end where the white indentured servant and leaves his wife who's perfect guy what does that siege in terms of

people's aspirations were made for themselves and what is the end with a speech to the interview it was awesome well to be sure lots of women found cells that situation where they were raising children with the help of other men women and now with the men who were the fathers of their children we know that man ran away for more frequently than women and one of the reasons that women don't know as frequently as a doula children either they are they're pregnant with a child or they have a trial is a nursing or the chill of the trial it's too small to run within minutes it's hazardous to run with a plan to run with a child and women who try to run away and wondered at the task you know they were three times more likely to be caught so

very frequently the person who was able to run was a man because he was not in the premier league and he wasn't he didn't have the care of a child and that doesn't say that he didn't love his time and that he didn't care deeply about the child but it meant that he was not responsible for the feeding of the child and children were i'm too embarrassed sometimes until the time they were three years old and then very frequently you write after in the nursing women got pregnant again soul many of the women who do run away on our middle aged women women who were done with the child care when when when he buys his own freaking mind is that he's collected from his wife who is who's

infringes on my side my own in this period on what is that statement at by his two sons live first letters two cents his wife says he would like it in this case i think that it is likely that pinterest mirth decided that his sons could probably be instrumental in helping him raise money to buy is his wife and his daughter out of slavery because the boys could do heavy labor he could you know they were more than not they were more likely to be to be money earners them or the daughters and daughters could get work as a seamstress is on winning ticket

worth the seamstresses as domestics but as far as being un wage in six would be very difficult for four though for the women as opposed to the men also the with those was cooking well yes our domestic work during this time is not anything like it is today the domestic labor in thai entailed well let's just a cooking for instance that meant that one had to cut would bring what into what is it mindset build a fire usually build a fire indoors meals are made from scratch and so one would have to go to the garden get the food if there was water to be brought in a

house that had to be brought from a river a streamer some some other source everything was made in the home from soap that's made life to butter is that is going to ensure and so very few things a storyboard store bought during this time so domestic labor is incredible is just an incredibly time consuming it's also very hard and backbreaking labor and i think it's important to really differentiate the seventeenth and eighteenth century from the nineteenth century when most people look back on slavery a cpa plantations ac and they think about cotton and i think about one thing that's very important is it can come visit is a nineteenth century phenomenon and you're in the seventeenth and eighteenth century the cash crops that we're talking about tobacco and where to aim at hampton and

ego and rice all which are very important very important step was seeing the economic stability of the colonies but none of which took on the kind of the implications of khan because cotton was a cash crop that they feel the industrial revolution of of england of european even though the united states and yet during this period though that there's a fluidity during this period that you just don't hander in the nineteenth century the front here is is is expanding there's still a lot of negotiating that has to be done with native americans it's not clear that america is going to settle all the way even to the mississippi river so that there is there are lots of questions and that is this is a time when you know some rehearsals could have been made i think it is and seventeen ninety three when eli when he discovers a cotton gin when cotton becomes king it really seals the

faith african americans and newly slavery really been clamped down on on the race in america in the seventeenth and eighteenth century is a land are wary of africans are the europeans and the americans and they're really coming together to form an american culture in american people and each one has identity each group is identifying itself against the others i mean each is borrowing from each other's culture whether it's from fool or whether it's whether it's music or whether it's just simply a way of seeing the world so an american and at seventeen fifty it is it is some sort of composite of all three groups of all three cultures and although europeans would like to think that it was just that they are pleased that the native american and the average indian influence their heritage it can influence the way that they looked at my

arm in fact they did