Today in Haitian History - October 17, 1806 – Assassination of Jean-Jacques Dessalines
Born a slave in 1758, Jean-Jacques Dessalines rose to become one of the most important military figures of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804). He served as Haiti’s first head of state, initially as “Gouverneur Général” and then as emperor, until his assassination in the fall of 1806.
Dessalines’s office remains difficult to fully assess. While, by all accounts, he ruled as a despotic leader and, very much in the same fashion of Toussaint Louverture before him, ignored the needs of the nouveaux libres (former slaves), more recent scholarship suggests that he attempted to carry out a more complex national project. The 1805 Constitution, which for many remains one of Dessalines’ greatest achievement as leader of independent Haiti, made clear in Article 14 that “the Haytians shall hence forward be known only by the generic appellation of Blacks.” For Sibylle Fischer (2004), this represented an important break from the colonial period. She stresses that “from the taxonomic lunacy of a colony that had more than one hundred different terms to refer to different degrees of racial mixture and color, we moved to a generic denomination: black.” In an attempt at state and nation building, “black” was to serve as part of the new country’s identity. While Dessalines, like his predecessor, favoured a form of “militarised” agricultural production and gave “citizens” of the new nation the choice of either being soldiers and labourers, historians like Claude Moïse (1988) have noted how the 1805 constitution presented clear dispositions guaranteeing personal liberty (such as articles five and six) suggesting yet another attempt at breaking away from the arbitrary law that embodied most of Haiti’s colonial history.
The achievements of 1805 could not temper the mounting opposition to Dessalines’s style of governing. Through colour politics have led many to simply imagine dissidence against Dessalines as an affair opposing the anciens libres (personified by Alexandre Pétion) and the nouveaux libres (embodied by Dessalines himself), Dessalines had also managed to alienate the former slaves, the very people his leadership should have served. While trying to crush a rebellion in the South headed by the “mulâtre” fraction of the elite, he was ambushed and murdered in October 1806.
In her article “Revolutionary Commemorations: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haitian Independence Day, 1804–1904” (2016), Erin Zavitz analysed how the memory of Dessalines appeared and disappeared from collective memory and state-sponsored celebrations of Haiti’s founding throughout the nineteenth-century. In many ways, it was only during the preparations leading up to Haiti’s centennial anniversary in 1904 that true efforts were made to reintegrate Dessalines as the founding figure of Haiti’s independence. Today, despite remaining a controversial figure, most Haitians proudly sing “La Dessalinienne” on January 1rst.
Image: “Mural on wall of Lycée Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Port-au-Prince.” Courtesy of: Paul Clammer (2016).
An Apache… Speaking on the importance of women in the Native tribes… Also, how the government has imposed rules on what makes a person native… (white supremacy) she is also speaking on how the epidemic of missing native women and the high rates of domestic violence… The Pocahontas Effect… The perpetrators are white men… They are kidnapping and murdering native women
The John Jay College of Criminal Justice, part of the City University of New York, has announced the establishment of the New York Slavery Records Index, an online archive of slavery records from 1525 until the end of the Civil War.
The new online archive includes more than 35,000 records. The index includes census records, slave trade transactions, cemetery records, birth certifications, manumissions, ship inventories, newspaper accounts, private narratives, legal documents and many other sources. Include are 1,400 birth certificates of slaves and more than 30,000 records that list the names of slave owners in New York. Also included are more than 500 advertisements seeking the capture and return of enslaved New Yorkers.
Karol V. Mason, President of John Jay College, said that “this vast, public database will serve as an important research tool that will support information-based scholarship on slavery in New York and across the nation. The launch of this index marks a significant contribution to understanding and remembering the country’s history of slavery and advances the college’s mission of educating for justice.”
Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is celebrated in
Japan. In 1967, King wrote to Japan
saying he hoped to visit and bridge the
gap between East and West with ‘good
will and brotherhood’ from the US.
Today, the city of Hiroshima celebrates
their young on MLK Day to teach the
importance of electoral politics and
non-violent social change. SourceSource 2Source 3
A few years ago, I read slave narratives to explore the lives of black agricultural workers after the end of the Civil War. The narratives came from the Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration, a program that employed researchers from 1936 to 1938 to interview former enslaved people, producing more than 2,300 narratives that, thankfully, reside online and are fully searchable.
Those whom the law defined as property recounted various unique human experiences — their daily horrors and monotonies, how they freed themselves or learned of their emancipation, the surge of exhilaration upon securing freedom, and how they endured life on the edges of a white supremacist society in the decades thereafter.
As I pored over the narratives, I was struck less by their experiences, as heartrending as they were, than by how their experiences sculpted their self-perceptions. The best explanation of what I gleaned, what social scientists called internalized oppression, describes the psychological trauma that ensues when a person from a stigmatized group believes those negative stigmas.
White folk indoctrinated them into accepting their supposed inferiority. These narratives illustrate the success of this campaign of mental terrorism, and no word conveyed the depth of this internalized oppression more than “nigger.” Now, whenever I hear the epithet, a visual and emotional representation of the heinous process by which a people — my people — were induced to think they were less than trespasses into my thoughts. After years of habitual use of “nigger,” I banished it from my speech to honor the humanity that many never saw in themselves.
The internalized oppression revealed itself in various ways. Sometimes the former enslaved people clearly, perhaps subconsciously, considered themselves subhuman, just like how their former owners regarded them. Jim Allen, for example, dubbed himself his master’s “pet nigger boy” and a “stray” and thought himself privileged because he could sleep on the floor beside his master’s bed. That he likened himself to a fortunate mangy mutt or frisky feline crushed me. The word laid bare a worldview that held black folk as a lower order of being, as when Irene Robertson claimed her former master Mr. Sanders was mean, in part, because “he beat his wife like he beat a nigger woman.”
“Nigger” also signaled antipathy toward fellow black folk. After the end of slavery, Mattie Mooreman went north to Wisconsin with a white family for whom she worked. Members of the family wanted her to go to the circus to watch a black boy’s performance. She told her interviewer, “Guess they thought it would be a treat to me to see another niggah. I told ’em, ‘Law, don’t you think I see lots, lots more than I wants, every day when I is at home?’ ” But read how she talks about the family’s baby, whom she constantly watched over, fearing, irrationally, someone would kidnap him: “No matter what time they come home they’d find me there. ‘Why don’t you go in your bedroom and lie down?’ they’d ask me. ‘No,’ I’d tell ’em, ‘somebody might come in, and they would have to get that baby over my dead body.” Her eyes fixated on the white baby, but she saw too many niggers.
A barrage of dispiriting uses of the word bloodied me as I combed through the narratives. “The Ku Klux kept the niggers scared.” “The Ku Klux did a whole lot to keep the niggers away from the polls. …” Slaves owned by “nice” masters are repeatedly called “free niggers.” “Niggers ain’t got no sense. Put ’em in authority and they gits so uppity.” “I’se just a poor old nigger waitin’ for Jesus to come and take me to heaven.” Slave traders are called “nigger traders.” Defiant enslaved people required the service of a “niggerbreaker.” “Nigger dogs” aided the recapture of those who escaped.
Perhaps more depressing, ironically, was that circumstances sometimes led them to opt against calling a black person a nigger. William Porter stated that “some of the Tennessee niggers was called free niggers. There was a colored man in Pulaski, Tennessee, who owned slaves.” A black man who kept others in bondage — he’s a “colored man,” yet those who were owned were “niggers.” I instantly thought of a moment from the O.J.: Made in America documentary when a white woman who saw black people talking to Simpson uttered, “Look at those niggers sitting with O.J.” Simpson delights in hearing this because she “knew I wasn’t black. She saw me as O.J.” Porter’s outlook matched that of both the racist white woman and the unspeakably racially deranged O.J.
Since reading those narratives, I’ve noticed this mindset when perusing the remarks of freed people in other contexts. For example, before the trial of Rufus Martin, a black man who stood accused of the 1903 murder of Charles Swackhammer, a woman whom the Fort Worth Star-Telegram referred to as an “old negress who occupied a front seat in the court room” bellowed:
“It’s the white people that is to blame. They know that they got to make niggahs work or they ain’t no good and they know as long as they ‘low niggah men to loaf aroun’ low down saloons they ain’t goin’ to work. This man come from a good niggah fam’ly — one of the best I knows of, but the p’lice ‘lowed him to loaf aroun’ without workin’, and to drink and gamble, till he just got to be no good and thought he didn’t have to work. The p’lice ought to raid them low down niggah saloons every day and every night till they make every blessed one of the niggah toughs go to work or else send ’em all to the county road. Them saloons is what makes bad niggahs and the white folks is to blame for it, ’cause they let ’em run.”
That Martin sported a reddish mustache, light hair and skin so bright he could pass for white almost certainly colored her perception that Martin came from a “good niggah fam’ly.”
Black folk rescued the word from the smoldering debris of a virulently racist land, reclaimed it and renovated the slur into a celebration of black comradery — defenders of contemporary usage of “nigger” repeat this. When this tale collides with reality, however, it shatters as a misreading of history — the current use of the word is owed less to white folk calling black folk “nigger” and more to black folk who thought they were niggers and said so. Black people have hurled the infamous word for nearly as long as white folk have. It exists within black speech now because it existed within black speech then. The uncomfortable truth must be confronted: Absent the internalized oppression of those who called white men and women their masters, “nigger” would probably not be a part of black folk’s lexicon. We black folk are reclaiming it not from bigoted white folk but from our ancestors, who, sadly, deemed their blackness a badge of inferiority.
I seek not to usher the word to the gallows. I harbor no aims to kill it. I can still bump a Young Thug track or chortle at a Dave Chappelle routine. “Nigger” does not bar my enjoyment of popular culture. My soul, though, winces whenever I hear it. The decision for black people to include it in their vocabulary, nonetheless, remains personal, and I reject the criticism of black folk who continue to wield it.
I write only to summon the words of former enslaved people from beyond the grave to express that “nigger” is haunted by the ghosts of hate and the more spiritually chilling ghosts of self-hate.
Brando Simeo Starkey is an associate editor at The Undefeated and the author of In Defense of Uncle Tom: Why Blacks Must Police Racial Loyalty. He crawled through a river of books and came out brilliant on the other side.
Ads taken out by formerly enslaved people searching for their family. This should be in every US high school history book. Alongside pictures of lynchings.
This is not taught in “ Social ” Studies class #TrueHistoryMatters
“As the federal government seeks to roll back the progress we have achieved toward equality, we in New York will never stop fighting to ensure the LBGTQ community and all Americans are afforded the equal protections guaranteed to them by the United States constitution.
“The misguided action taken by the federal government last night runs contrary to the New York Promise of individual freedoms. With the stroke of a pen, they seek to move this country backwards.
“Today, I am urging the State Education Department to issue a directive to all school districts making it clear that – regardless of Washington’s action – the rights and protections that had been extended to all students in New York remain unchanged under state law.
“In New York, whether you are gay, straight or transgender, Muslim, Jewish or Christian, rich or poor, black or white or brown, we respect all people – and we will continue to enforce our laws and stand united against those who seek to drive us apart.”
The Governor issued the following letter to the State Education Department:
February 23, 2017
Commissioner MaryEllen Elia New York State Education Department 89 Washington Avenue Albany, New York 12234
Dear Commissioner Elia:
In light of the federal government’s action to rescind federal protections for transgender students, the State Education Department needs to immediately issue a directive to school districts making it clear that transgender students in this State are expressly protected from discrimination and harassment under New York State’s laws and policies.
Under State law, all students must have the opportunity to learn in an environment free from harassment and discrimination. As you may recall, in 2015, I directed that the State Education Department and the Board of Regents inform school districts of the law and clarify the rights of transgender and gender non-conforming students. The State Education Department subsequently took action, making it clear that, under federal and state laws, schools must ensure that a student’s gender identity or expression is not a basis for discrimination and intolerance.
The recent change in federal policy does not alter the protections we afford to transgender students. There can be no confusion in this State. New York State schools must continue to enforce the law and protect transgender and gender non-conforming students. Specifically, the Dignity for All Students Act (DASA), which is a State statute, expressly requires schools to protect students from discrimination, harassment or bullying based upon gender, which includes a student’s actual or perceived gender, their gender identity or expression.
No student should be confused about their rights or fearful of losing these important protections. By immediately issuing this directive, the State will provide clarity to all school administrators and provide our transgender students with the reassurance they need to maximize their potential and understand their rights. Equally as important, it will demonstrate to all that we speak with a single voice: we do not and will not tolerate discrimination in the State of New York.
Sincerely,
ANDREW M. CUOMO
Cc: Chancellor Betty Rosa New York State Board of Regents
