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5. Peace and love.
6. And don't let anybody make you think
7. that God chose America as his divine messianic force
8. to be a sort of policeman of the whole world.
9. God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment,
10. and it seems that I can hear God saying to America,
11. you are too arrogant.
12. If you don't change your ways,
13. I will rise up and break the backbone of your power.
14. Bow, bow, bow, bow, bow, bow, bow, bow, bow, bow, bow, bow.
15. O-Tip, which in the language of ancient Egypt means we come with justice in peace.
16. Welcome to Freedom Now, a Saturday Pan-Africanist and internationalist world affairs program.
17. Freedom Now is committed to the principle of the rights of all peoples and nations to self-determination.
18. We thank you deeply for your contribution to KPFK, which permits programs like Freedom Now to stay on the air.
19. In this era of corporate acquisition and co-optation of all dissident media,
20. We provide the microphone, challenging their corporate and racist point of view.
21. So stay tuned for Agenda here at Freedom Now.
22. Hava'i gani. This is Sister Tej with Read and Rouse Agenda for this Farsa of July Saturday,
23. July 4, 2026
24. with the central theme of slavery
25. bringing you a full program with three guest interviews
26. we commence with our sister
27. Luyanda Kaboka on the African Jumping
28. Historical Calendar
29. then prolific author, radical historian
30. professor of African American
31. Studies at the University of
32. Houston and Freedom Now co-producer
33. Dr. Gerald Horn interviews
34. Patricia Seed
35. professor of history at UC Irvine
36. and author of the book
37. Sales and Shadows, How the Portuguese Opened the Atlantic and Launched the Slave Trade.
38. Then, Dr. Horn Interviews, Sean Kim Buderak, Assistant Professor of Politics at Fairfield
39. University in Connecticut and author of the book Slave Rebellions and the Making of the Modern
40. Prison And to close out this Freedom Not Hour of Power Dr Horn Interviews Jeremy D Popkin the William T Bryant Chair Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Kentucky at Lexington and author of the book
41. The First Emancipation, The Forgotten History of Abolition in Revolutionary France.
42. Our music clip mix includes MLK, Zap Mama, Shirley Scott, George Benson, Madison Calley,
43. Jay Dilla, Duke Ellington, Alice Coltrane, and more.
44. we stand in solidarity with our
45. Venezuelan, Cuban, Palestinian, Congolese
46. Sudanese, Ghanaian, Lebanese
47. and Syrian sisters and brothers who are
48. defending themselves from western imperialism
49. its bombing, its sanctions
50. and environmental disasters
51. so this hour, sit back
52. phone a friend to tune in
53. and as always we stand, ready for revolution
54. Thank you.
55. MOLUENI EKAI, THIS IS SISTER LUYANDA KOBOKA WITH FREEDOM NOW'S WEEKLY AFRICAN DRUMBEAT
56. HISTORICAL CALENDAR WITH SIGNIFICANT DATES AND EVENTS THAT REFLECT THE STRUGGLE OF THE
57. OPPRESSED FOR THE WEEK OF JULY 4TH.
58. JULY 4TH, 1930.
59. THE NATION OF ISLAM WAS FOUNDED BY MASTER FARD MOHAMMED.
60. The nation continues in the tradition of African nationalist religious movements, which seek
61. to spiritually and politically better the conditions of African prisoners of the European
62. slatocracies and wars on Africa.
63. The Nation of Islam has produced great leaders, such as Minister Malcolm X, the Honorable
64. Elijah Muhammad, and Minister Louis Farrakhan, and more importantly, has transformed thousands
65. of men from predators of the community to soldiers in the struggle of righteousness
66. against Western decadence.
67. July 5, 1962. Algeria gains independence after an eight-year guerrilla war where over one
68. million Africans gave their lives against French colonialism. Ahmad Ben Bella and Frantz
69. Fanon are two among many whose spirit and ideological skills became role models for
70. the continued liberation movements that occur, best immortalized in the film Battle of Algiers,
71. where the twin evils of colonialism and neocolonialism are exposed.
72. July 6th, late 19th century, Sarah Noir, warrior queen of the Aznas, who in early 1899, through
73. brilliant tactical maneuvering and the creative promulgation of her reputation as a witch
74. demoness, successfully defended her African kingdom from the advancing forces of French
75. capitalism. July 7th 1954, TANU, the Tanganyika African National Union, which
76. was the movement of national liberation of the micro state of Tanzania begins the mass protest confrontation stage of struggle against British colonialism through country strikes and boycotts
77. July 7, 1975.
78. Melba Hernandez, a Cuban guerrilla and a member of the July 26 movement with Fidel Castro,
79. helps launch the Cuban Revolution.
80. Melba was a founding member of the Cuban Communist Party
81. and was brutally tortured by the Batista neocolonial government.
82. July 9, 1972, more than 3,000 Chicano workers,
83. 85% of whom were Chicana women,
84. went on strike against the Farah Pants Company in El Paso, Texas.
85. They walked out demanding a union.
86. July 10, 1875
87. Mary McLeod Bethune was born in Maysville, South Carolina,
88. one of 17 children of Samuel and Patsy McLeod, former slaves.
89. Mary worked in the cotton fields with her family.
90. She founded the Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute for Negro Girls,
91. now known as Bethune-Cookman College in 1904, and she served as president from 1904 to 1942
92. and from 1946 to 1947. She was a leader in the Black Women's Club movement and served as president
93. of the National Association of Colored Women. She was one of the founders of National Council of
94. Negro women. Vice President of the NAACP was awarded the Haitian Medal of Honor and Merit,
95. that country's highest award, and in Liberia, she received the Honor of Commander of the Order of
96. the Star of Africa. This has been Sister Luyanda Koboka with Freedom Now, 90.7 FM in Southern
97. California and 98.7 FM in Santa Barbara. Streaming live on www.kpfk.org. If you have any questions
98. or comments, email us at freedomnow at kpfk.org. And in the language of resistance in South Africa,
99. as the listening audience, join us in our chant for freedom.
100. For KPFK Pacifica Radio, this is Gerald Horne.
101. And with me on the line is Patricia Seed, professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, and author of the book, Sails and Shadows, How the Portuguese Opened the Atlantic and Launched the Slave Trade.
102. Thank you for joining us on Freedom Now. KPFK Los Angeles, Patricia Seed.
103. Yes. Good morning.
104. Thank you for joining us. So why did you write this book?
105. I wrote this book for a couple of reasons.
106. First of all, the fact that most people in the Spanish speaking world are not familiar with the prior history of the Portuguese and the Atlantic.
107. They're familiar with Columbus, maybe, and the Spanish settlement of the Americas, and
108. maybe they know a little bit about Brazil.
109. But they don know about the history that preceded it nor that the fact that this tremendous sailing expedition and series of discoveries that made it possible to cross the Atlantic were intimately linked with the slave trade
110. In other words, you can't separate the two of them out.
111. And what about the overall role of Portugal in the African slave trade in comparison to its peers?
112. speaking of Britain, France, and Spain in particular.
113. The Spanish were the ones who began
114. what became the foundations of the Atlantic slave trade.
115. They began it originally following
116. a Muslim-Christian
117. tradition of battles in Spain and in
118. Portugal during the late Middle Ages, up until
119. about 1492. And initially, when they started down the coast of West Africa,
120. they thought that they were going to meet all kinds of Arab ships that are already sailing
121. there, and then only later discovered that there weren't any. So they began by launching
122. a tax that they called by the word conquest, conquista. And this had a tradition in Iberia,
123. in both the Spanish and the Portuguese world, which meant that you were justified in taking prisoners who were of a different religion, namely Muslims.
124. And this worked out fine as they initially began their journeys down the coast of Africa.
125. But at some point, and this is when they reached the area south of the Sahara,
126. they began to encounter populations that were not Muslim.
127. And this is particularly to the south of the Senegal River,
128. which is considerably north of today's Dakar.
129. And then they were faced with a conundrum
130. because there was no historical or religious legitimacy
131. to capturing people and taking them as slaves.
132. So what Prince Henry did
133. was to seek permission
134. to ask for the Pope to bless his ability to capture people and enslave people who were not Muslim.
135. And this was the beginning of a kind of a rupture, because it no longer meant that they were fighting
136. people who were religious enemies and with whom there were all kinds of rules governing how you
137. exchange prisoners and what ransom was and what people could be held as slaves and what people
138. could be redeemed for ransom. In other words, there was a whole diplomatic apparatus that
139. surrounded the traditional Iberian concept of conquest. But what happened when Prince Henry
140. discovered all of these people who were not Muslims, who were animists or people who had
141. some kind of religion that they didn't recognize, and it was clearly not Muslim.
142. They, Prince Henry decided that he was going to find a way to enslave these people
143. and basically and remove them back to Portugal. So he went to and he got permission from a pope,
144. He basically bribed one of these very corrupt 15th century popes and said,
145. you know, I need a declaration saying that it's okay for me to enslave these people.
146. Pope promptly went around
147. along with it. But the problem was that there was a great deal of opposition to enslaving people who
148. weren't Muslims in Portugal. And so he attached a threatening note to the end when he promulgated
149. the Pope's decree. He established a threatening note saying, if you dare go against me in this,
150. I'm going to see that you are punished for it. That was the first step. That was the reason
151. of justifying people who simply because they were located on the African coast,
152. they were black, and he was going to enslave them. The next step came a few years later
153. when he decided that it was not enough because the tradition of Iberian conquest and taking
154. of slaves involved an opportunity for freedom. People could buy their way out, they could ransom
155. them their way out. They could exchange themselves for somebody else, forcibly exchanged in some
156. cases, you know, you, you're going to go serve as my place as a slave. And this was all going on
157. at a time before Miguel de Cervantes was actually held as a prisoner under the conditions of
158. traditional Iberian Christian Muslim warfare.
159. But he was released.
160. He was ransomed.
161. The traditional old rules held.
162. But the traditional old rules were not holding, and the possibility of redemption still existed.
163. So Prince Henry went back to the Pope and said, I need to make this permanent.
164. I need to make the taking of these people from Africa, whom I'm going to enslave, bring to Portugal and enslave.
165. And I need to make that permanent.
166. So, of course, the Pope, these extremely corrupt 15th century Popes simply said, all right.
167. Yes, you can enslave them and you can enslave them in perpetuity.
168. And that's the beginning.
169. of the Atlantic slave trade, when you begin to remove large numbers, when the Portuguese began to remove
170. large numbers of people from Africa and bring them back to Portugal and hold them in perpetual slavery.
171. That's the foundation of that slave trade.
172. So that when England came along and Spain came along,
173. They were simply following the navigational routes to areas that contained both gold and slaves.
174. And so they began by enslaving people.
175. But under English law, which is very different than Iberian law, under English law, people became property.
176. In other words, they were never human beings.
177. They were pieces of property to be exchanged for money.
178. It wasn't that the Portuguese didn't do this, but this whole notion of slaves as property, as being owned, right?
179. Not as existence as separate souls.
180. is something that characterized English slavery
181. and English slavery in the New World in a particularly brutal way and which explains in part the refusal of slave owners English slave owners in the new world their refusal to allow people access to
182. the Bible and the refusal to allow them to learn to read. So they struck off, they eliminated
183. one of the exit forms that had existed. Now that exit form nominally existed within Portuguese
184. slavery and in Portuguese when they begin to introduce large numbers of slaves into Brazil
185. beginning with the advent of the sugar plantation this is circa 1570-1580
186. that's when they began to increase the pace of slave owning in the new world and the Portuguese
187. took more people out of Africa than anybody else, and they just sent them into the meat grinder
188. and the sugar cane fields of northeastern Brazil.
189. Would you elaborate upon the role of Angola, southwest Africa, in your narrative? Not least
190. because a significant percentage of those now dubbed African American happen to be of Angolan
191. ancestry as represented, I'm afraid to say, by the fact that the leading prison in Louisiana,
192. which houses a disproportionate number of Black people, is called Angola, for example.
193. Angola, yeah. Angola is an interesting case because the Portuguese only reached Angola
194. during the 1470s.
195. And when they got there,
196. they found two different types of populations.
197. They found large, subtle populations to the north,
198. and to the south, they found far fewer people.
199. They found small communities of fishermen.
200. And they began to practice what they had done elsewhere in the world,
201. which was to say to kidnap.
202. And sometimes people debate, say, well, maybe these people went along willingly.
203. That's doubtful.
204. But they began to capture people in order to be able to bring them back to Portugal,
205. to teach them Portuguese language,
206. and then to send them back to Angola where they would act as intermediaries to help capture people
207. or to help serve as intermediaries in actually collecting people for the slave trade.
208. So one of the things that the Portuguese did was that they realized that they were a small number,
209. that they had relatively few people compared to, say, a large country like France.
210. So what they did was to enlist collaborators who would carry out the difficult task of
211. actually capturing people, capturing people from either the enemies of the people who
212. resided along the coast or people who resided in the interior whom they were able to defeat militarily So there were people who resided along the coast
213. who entered into these agreements of complicity
214. where they would profit from the sale of other tribes and of other people
215. and sell them to the Portuguese who would then transport them to the New World.
216. and
217. yeah
218. that became simply a very
219. convenient
220. way for them to engage
221. in the slave trade
222. well
223. Patricia Seed, professor of history
224. at the University of California, Irvine, author of
225. the book, Sails and Shadows
226. How the Portuguese Opened the Atlantic
227. and Launched the Slave Trade
228. I'm afraid we're going to have to leave it there, but thank you for joining
229. us on Freedom Now, KPFK
230. Los Angeles
231. Thank you.
232. so
233. this is sister flora and you are listening to freedom now
234. at KPFK 90.7 FM in occupied Mexico,
235. including Los Angeles, 98.7 FM Santa Barbara,
236. 93.7 FM in San Diego,
237. and streaming live on the web at kpfk.org.
238. Today's program, as well as 10 prior editions,
239. can be re-heard at kpfk.org slash audio archive,
240. and scroll down to Freedom Now.
241. For a truly alternative international perspective
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244. News 24, South Africa and Press TV Iran.
245. We will now continue with historian professor Dr. Gerald Horn.
246. For KPFK Los Angeles, this is Gerald Horn.
247. And with me on the line is Sean Kim Buterock,
248. assistant professor of politics at Fairfield University in Connecticut and author of the book
249. Slave Rebellions and the Making of the Modern Prison. Thank you for joining us on Freedom Now,
250. KPFK Los Angeles, Sean Kim Boudirak. Hello, thank you so much for having me.
251. And thank you for joining us. So why did you produce this book?
252. So as a graduate student, I had the opportunity to develop and teach my own course on the development of the American criminal legal system.
253. And one of the things that I chose to include on that syllabus in the back half of the course was moments of resistance to the development of the carceral state, beginning with slave rebellions and working all the way up through Black Lives Matter.
254. And what I sort of noticed in teaching the course were continuities in the way that the state responded to those moments of resistance by codifying new forms of racial violence in law and really naturalizing and routinizing those forms of racial violence.
255. And so, you know, I think today often when we talk about continuities between slavery
256. and prisons, you know, we're drawn to parallels between slave courts and slave patrols and
257. modern carceral institutions like the police and courts.
258. And what I saw in sort of part of the story that hadn been told were continuities in the way that the state responds to these moments of wide resistance by engineering new modes of violence
259. new modes of repression to sort of stave off those forms of resistance.
260. And why do you focus on South Carolina?
261. So I think, you know, South Carolina offers a really important window into understanding the
262. transatlantic development of these racial categories of the legal institutions that
263. eventually give way to the modern prison system. And so, you know, it was Barbados that eventually
264. settled Carolina and then South Carolina, and that were really the originators of the earliest
265. and most influential slave codes that were eventually propagated throughout much of the U.S.
266. And so I felt that, you know, in order to tell the sort of long arc history that I wanted to develop, that Barbados in South Carolina really offered a powerful window into that kind of longer history.
267. And what about the 1739 Stono Revolt of the Enslaved in South Carolina? What role does it play?
268. Yeah. So when we think about the Stono Rebellion, and this is a recurring theme in the book, is in contrast to moments like the Haitian Revolution, which have been more deeply and widely studied, and I think rightfully so, right?
269. this is such a sort of key moment, that we've spent less time thinking about rebellions that
270. were preempted or were violently repressed, as was the case in the Stono Rebellion, but that still
271. really played a constitutive role in looking at the ideas and institutions that this book traces
272. over time. So if we think about, for example, how and why the law came to select and legitimate
273. certain kinds of anti-Black violence, if we think about the making of the Black criminal as a concept
274. that is embedded in law and in legal institutions, if we think about the making of whiteness,
275. that these categories and institutions are being shaped from below through these moments
276. of wide-scale resistance. And so that even when these liberatory struggles fail, they still have
277. a transformative effect on the world. And that for us to then have a fuller picture of that history,
278. of that long arc from slavery to prisons, we also have to attend to these moments that, on the one
279. hand, from the perspective of the struggle, from the perspective of resistance, fell short of their
280. goals, they nonetheless add a transformative effect on the sort of trajectory of American
281. political development and the development of racial categories that we've inherited today.
282. And what about the 1822 revolt in South Carolina symbolized by Denmark Vesey? What role does it
283. play? Yeah, Denmark Vesey is, I think, you know, a fascinating historical figure, one who is part of
284. an emerging kind of early Black diaspora
285. and who I think anticipates
286. many of the sort of Black nationalist politics
287. that later follow.
288. And that when we think about somebody like Vesey,
289. that it's not just the ideas that Vesey anticipated,
290. but also when we look at the state's response
291. to reempting the Vesey Rebellion,
292. that this is a moment in which
293. You have this long summer of trials and that the whole sort of persecution of the rebellion is very much couched in the language of law and legal institutions in trying to figure out the right kinds of violence that are suited to addressing these moments of resistance to slavery.
294. And so what the Vesey Rebellion helps us see, I think, are these ongoing moments of adaptation in which white supremacy and racial capitalism are challenged in new ways.
295. And so they have to adapt. They have to find new ideas, new forms of violence that are suited to preserving these structures and these ideas of race.
296. What about the 1866 construction of the state penitentiary? What role does that play in your story?
297. Yeah, so the South Carolina penitentiary, like many southern states, prior to the abolition of slavery, South Carolina did not have a state penitentiary.
298. in a ten-triary. And so this is a moment in which we see, you know, in contrast to something like
299. the Vesey Rebellion or the Stono Rebellion, which very much relies on, you know, giving the
300. prerogative to engage in racial violence to everyday white people, right, including poor
301. whites. We're starting to see now the consolidation of that prerogative to engage in racial violence
302. with state actors, with state institutions. And yet, right, the way in which the penitentiary
303. selects and legitimates certain kinds of racial violence to now, right, police and to incarcerate
304. a predominantly Black prison population is very much indebted to this longer legal tradition
305. of figuring out how to preserve slavery against the changing tides of resistance.
306. But what's so fascinating, I think, about the South Carolina penitentiary is that as much as it's sort of wrapped up in the afterlife of slavery, prison administrators are also trying to figure out how to create what they perceive to be a modern penal institution.
307. And so they're looking, you know, not just to how to adapt, you know, sort of the ideas and institutions of slavery, but they're also looking to northern and to midwestern prisons across the U.S.
308. They're looking to a kind of global emerging science of penality that is taking shape across the West during this period.
309. And this becomes the kind of through line, right, to the modern prison system today, I argue, is this push and pull, right, between ideas and institutions that are rooted in slavery and in resistance to slavery.
310. And on the other hand, right, this enduring preoccupation with creating a kind of ostensibly modern, racially neutral criminal legal system.
311. Mm-hmm. And that's followed by the 1876 revolt against Reconstruction, that is to say, this brief moment of democratic promise in South Carolina and Dixie generally. What role does that play in your story?
312. Yeah I think you know the collapse of reconstruction from 1876 onwards is a really fascinating kind of window into that relationship that I just described between you know on the one hand moving back toward you know ideas and institutions that are rooted deeply in slavery And on the other hand this preoccupation with creating a modern criminal legal system that you know however superficially appears racially neutral
313. And so South Carolina is this fascinating example, right?
314. Because folks focus so much on, you know, the ascendance of convict leasing across the South
315. during and after the collapse of Reconstruction.
316. But what actually ends up happening in South Carolina is that convict leasing is actually relatively short-lived.
317. It's a remarkably unstable institution, kind of logistically and financially, for the state of South Carolina.
318. And so these prison administrators actually persuade state officials to abandon conflict leasing and to move back toward prison plantations that are very reminiscent of the slave plantation in their structure, in their day-to-day operation.
319. And yet all of this is being couched in modern ideas of crime and punishment.
320. And so what the sort of the collapse of Reconstruction helps us see is this sort of combination, right, this hybrid of new and old, of the kind of afterlife of slavery suffusing modern ideas of crime and punishment that by the turn of the 20th century give way to the kind of foundation of the modern criminal legal system.
321. Now, thus far you've mentioned resistance. Could you give us an overriding analysis of the role of resistance and struggling against this prison industrial complex, if I can use that term?
322. Absolutely. So I use two sort of terms in this book. One is resistance to refer to the wider field of, you know, ideas, discourses, everyday activities that free and enslaved people might engage in, right, to resist the institution of slavery, to resist the exploitative structure of racial capitalism.
323. And those forms of resistance were individual and collective.
324. They were small and large.
325. They were seen and unseen.
326. They were heard and unheard.
327. And what I focus primarily on in the book are what I describe as rebellions.
328. So moments like the Stono Rebellion, the Bessie Rebellion, rebellions within the South Carolina
329. Penitentiary.
330. And what I try to sort of draw out of those rebellions is the really constitutive role that they play in the making of racial categories.
331. Concepts like the black criminal that we've long inherited, concepts like whiteness that still structure American political life and American political thought, but also how they shape institutions.
332. So thinking about systems of law and in particular, right, how resistance leads law to and lawmakers to determine what kinds and what degrees of violence are best suited to addressing and limiting those forms of resistance.
333. And so really, the book is trying to draw out this kind of interactive and mutually constitutive relationship between resistance and the forms of state repression that continually kind of cyclically respond to those ever-changing tactics of resistance and the moments of rebellion that spring out of those everyday forms of resistance.
334. Finally Sean Kim Bhuttarak author of the book Slave Rebellions and the Making of the Modern Prison You alluded to this previously but perhaps you could elaborate That is to say what do you mean by the idea that whiteness is
335. consolidated via anti-Black violence, whereas Blackness is stigmatized as a condition of
336. criminality? Sure. I think, you know, what this book helps us see is by going all the way back
337. to the mid-17th century by looking to a place like Barbados, where originally phenotypically
338. white indentured servants legally, materially shared much more in common with African enslaved
339. peoples than they did with white elites, that there were moments of interracial resistance
340. in the mid-17th century.
341. And so the question became, right, and always remained,
342. how to fracture potential relationships of solidarity
343. between different exploited groups.
344. Now, certainly, right, the sort of racialized exploitation
345. of African enslaved peoples was fundamentally different
346. from the class exploitation of white indentured servants.
347. And yet there were these very potent axes of solidarity
348. between these different groups.
349. We saw something similar in South Carolina
350. with the relationships of solidarity
351. between Indigenous peoples and Black enslaved peoples.
352. And so what Barbadian lawmakers do
353. is they look for ways to fracture
354. those potential relationships of solidarity.
355. And one way they do that
356. is by creating the first comprehensive slave code
357. and the first comprehensive servant codes
358. in an English colony.
359. And what that does is it, for example, says to white indentured servants, if you capture an escaped enslaved person, we will pay out the remainder of your contract, right? You are freed from servitude.
360. And so what unfolds from this initial process is that the making of whiteness as a racial category is really built around the prerogative to engage in racial violence, to police Black bodies.
361. And so when we think today, for example, about white vigilantism and the way in which the legal system, if it doesn't overtly condone that violence, right, it supports it and reproduces it by ensuring that those individuals don't face legal consequences for their actions.
362. by taking the violence of the law into their own hands.
363. The way that we can make sense of that today
364. is by looking across this longer historical arc,
365. by looking at the way in which class divisions among whites
366. were papered over, were ameliorated,
367. by entrenching this prerogative among white men
368. of varying social, political, and economic standing.
369. At the end of the day,
370. what they were able to share in common,
371. what the law provided as a means for them
372. to build up whiteness
373. and to build relationships of solidarity
374. between these whites of very divergent standards, right?
375. Was this prerogative to engage in anti-Black violence?
376. Hmm.
377. Well, Sean Kim, Buterak, I'm afraid
378. we're going to have to leave it there.
379. But thank you for joining us on Freedom Now,
380. KPFK, Los Angeles.
381. Thank you so much for having me.
382. And up next Dr Horne interviews Jeremy D Popkin about his book The First Emancipation The Forgotten History of Abolition in Revolutionary France
383. For KPFK Los Angeles, this is Gerald Horn, and with me on the line is Jeremy D. Popkin,
384. William T. Bryant Chair Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Kentucky in
385. Lexington and author of the book, The First Emancipation, The Forgotten History of Abolition
386. and Revolutionary France. Thank you for joining us on Freedom Now, KPFK Los Angeles, Jeremy D.
387. Popkin. Well, thank you for inviting me. It's nice to be back in Southern California where I grew up,
388. if only in virtual form.
389. Oh, where'd you grow up?
390. I went to high school in San Diego
391. and a year of college at UC San Diego
392. and later graduated from Berkeley,
393. which I know is not in Southern California.
394. Welcome back.
395. Thank you.
396. So why did you produce this book?
397. I thought this was a much neglected aspect
398. of the history of the French Revolution
399. and a much neglected aspect of the history of the movement for the abolition of slavery in the world.
400. And I wanted to show how these two stories were connected in a very dramatic way
401. during the years of the French Revolution.
402. I wanted to give readers a way of understanding how France came to be the first country in the world
403. to abolish slavery and to declare it a violation of natural human rights, but also to tell the
404. story of how France's government under Napoleon made it the only country to reinstitute slavery
405. after it had been abolished, and how the black populations of France's colonies
406. resisted that attempt to take away the rights that they had gained.
407. Now, speaking of that latter point, what is the role of Haiti in your story?
408. Well, Haiti, when the French Revolution began in 1789, what's now Haiti was the most valuable
409. overseas colony of any European country. It was called Saint-Domingue. There were nearly as many
410. enslaved black people there in 1789 as there were in the 13 American states, and it produced half
411. of the world's supply of coffee and sugar, which as we know are two commodities without which
412. civilized life is unimaginable. So it was a very important part of the French empire,
413. a very substantial part of the French economy. And it was, of course, an obvious test of whether
414. the French revolutionaries really meant what they said when they passed their Declaration
415. of the Rights of Man and Citizen and declared that men are born and remain free and equal in rights.
416. When they did not abolish slavery in Saint-Domingue, they set the stage for the largest
417. slave revolt that the world had ever seen, which began in August of 1791. But even the French
418. advocates of abolition at that moment were not prepared to simply concede the colony to the
419. black insurrection. And so part of the story in my book is the very complicated story of how the
420. French revolutionaries who did support abolition nevertheless tried to reconcile it with keeping
421. control of the colony.
422. colony, and the rather surprising story of how they, after most of those early abolitionists
423. had in fact been sidelined in revolutionary politics and executed, how the French revolutionary
424. government nevertheless, rather surprisingly, eventually decided that it had to concede
425. freedom to the black populations in its colonies. Sorry for that long and convoluted sentence.
426. Oh, sorry for interrupting you.
427. No, that's it.
428. Okay. What role did the Catholic Church play in your story?
429. The Catholic Church does not really play a large role in the story.
430. The official Catholic doctrine, not only in France, but throughout the world up to the time of the French Revolution, was that slavery was legitimate.
431. It could be defended as long as one of the ostensible purposes of capturing black people in Africa and bringing them to the Americas was to convert them to the true faith of Christianity.
432. As far as the French Catholic Church was concerned, once the revolution got going, it became so
433. involved in a struggle for its own survival during the revolution that as an institution
434. it was not in any position to influence the debate about abolition.
435. Having said that, there are a few prominent Catholic priests who did participate in the
436. abolition movement.
437. The most famous of them is the Abbé Henri Grégoire, and he is now buried in the Pantheon in Paris as one of the figures most honored by the French Revolution.
438. And he was a consistent supporter of rights for people of all races, but he was also rather a cautious abolitionist.
439. He didn't play a leading role in February of 1794 when the historic decree abolishing slavery was passed.
440. Now, you mentioned a moment or two ago the role of Napoleon, and you talked about him in the context of the overthrow of the abolitionist decree and the return of slavery.
441. That's right.
442. What were the mechanics of the return of slavery? That is to say, let's take Guadalupe and Martinique, for example. I assume the enslavers did not flee. I assume that once this decree was overthrown, they returned and at gunpoint forced the Africans to resume being slaved. Tell us more about how that unfolded.
443. Well, actually, each one of the French island colonies had a different history during the
444. revolutionary period. In Martinique, Martinique was occupied by the British in 1793, and they
445. remained in control of it until they made a treaty with Napoleon in 1802 and returned it.
446. So slavery was never abolished there, and the white French plantation owners, which included
447. the family of Josephine, Napoleon's wife, they were able to stay there and continue
448. running their plantations.
449. And some of them would have been happier to remain under British protection than to go
450. back being part of France.
451. Guadeloupe is another story.
452. There the French had sent an official named Victor Hugues who took control of the island in 1794 and he set up sort of a one rule of his own He didn pay much attention to orders from France
453. And one of the things he did was to say,
454. I'm not going to fully implement the abolition decree.
455. He did, however, execute many of the white slave owners
456. and drove the rest of them to flee the island.
457. And he created an army and navy made up of black soldiers and black sailors.
458. So you could say Guadeloupe was kind of halfway between abolishing slavery and maintaining it.
459. When Napoleon came back in, Victor Hugues had been ousted earlier, and there was a kind of, well, a state of tremendous political confusion there.
460. Napoleon was able to land his army there, take back control of the island, murder the leaders of the resistance movement there, and force the population back into slavery.
461. In Saint-Domingue, however, you had a third trajectory.
462. There, after the abolition decree, the Toussaint Louverture, who had been fighting against
463. the French, came over to their side, allied himself with the French republican government,
464. and soon was elevated to the position of commander-in-chief of the French army there, and then military
465. governor of the colony.
466. So he was really in charge of Saint-Domingue, theoretically still recognizing the authority of the French government,
467. but acting more and more like an independent ruler.
468. And he sometimes contradicted official French policy.
469. So Napoleon had considerable support in France for the idea that Toussaint Louverture had really gotten too big for his britches
470. and that Saint-Domingue needed to be brought under French control.
471. But Toussaint Louverture had also had the chance to prepare the black population
472. to fight to defend its freedom.
473. And there, Napoleon's expedition was defeated.
474. They did succeed in capturing Toussaint Louverture
475. and taking him back to France, where he died in prison.
476. But at the end of 1803, the French army there had to surrender
477. And on January 1st, 1804, Haiti declared its independence as the second independent former colonial nation in the Americas, the first independent black republic in the Americas under the leadership of Jean-Jacques Dessalines.
478. Any other details to add about Toussaint, who our audience is definitely interested in knowing more about?
479. Well, I think one thing readers will learn from my book, often if you get a sort of one-paragraph description of the Haitian Revolution and Toussaint, you get the idea that he spent most of his revolutionary career heroically fighting against the French.
480. we need to understand that he spent most of the revolutionary years heroically fighting as a general and commander in the French army
481. and that it was only I would say reluctantly that he found himself fighting against Napoleon
482. he in many ways was a skilled politician within the French Republic during the 1790s before Napoleon took power Readers will see how much effort he put into influencing politics back in France
483. He wrote pamphlets, issued decrees, sent representatives to argue his case, and tried very hard actually
484. to succeed within the French system rather than fighting against it.
485. So I think that will be perhaps the most surprising aspect of what I have to say about Toussaint
486. in the book.
487. I noticed you also mentioned Biasu, Jorge Biasu, who had worked alongside Toussaint,
488. a fellow African of course, but then they split and Biasu winds up in Florida.
489. Yes, another historian, a friend of mine, David Gegas, has called him the first person to retire to Florida in history.
490. But he will not appear very much in this book.
491. I have written several other books about the Haitian Revolution, and he is a major figure in the first years of the revolution, along with Jean-Francois Papillon.
492. They are sort of the co-leaders of the insurrection in its first several years.
493. But in this book, I did make a choice to concentrate primarily on politics in metropolitan France.
494. And readers who want to know more about what was happening in Haiti during these years,
495. there are a number of good books, including a couple of my own that I could recommend.
496. one called You Are All Free, The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery,
497. and another one that's used in a lot of college courses called A Concise History of the Haitian Revolution.
498. And you'll see a lot more about Biasu and Jean-Francois in those books.
499. What about the impact of abolition in France on the United States of America?
500. Americans followed the events in the French colonies very closely.
501. Saint-Domingue in particular was a very important trading partner for American merchants,
502. and news from the Caribbean reached America much more quickly than it did. It took two months for
503. sailing ships to cross the Atlantic from the Caribbean to France, but less than a month to
504. reach the east coast of the United States. So Americans certainly knew what was happening there.
505. The news that the enslaved population had been freed in Saint-Domingue was published in many
506. American newspapers, and it certainly alarmed white slaveholders like Thomas Jefferson, who was the
507. the Secretary of State at that time.
508. But there were some American politicians
509. who thought the United States could take advantage
510. of what was happening there.
511. John Adams, for example, when he was president,
512. backed Toussaint Louverture against his rivals
513. in Saint-Domingue, hoping to use Louverture
514. against the French government, which was involved
515. in the so-called Quasi-War with the United States
516. during those years.
517. What about the impact of abolition in France
518. on Europe more broadly,
519. and particularly Britain and its colonies?
520. The British also paid close attention
521. to what the French were doing,
522. and the abolition of slavery in France was one of those radical things that allowed the conservative British government to kind of influence the British public to think that the French had really gone crazy
523. and were doing terrible things.
524. Unfortunately, I would say the fact that the British opinion turned against the French Revolution
525. really became a major obstacle to the British movement to abolish the slave trade.
526. The proponents of abolishing the slave trade in Britain essentially were silenced for a number of years,
527. and it was only after the Haitian Revolution that they were able to pick up momentum again
528. and finally persuade the British Parliament to abolish the slave trade, but not slavery itself, in 1807.
529. In the long run, the fact that the French had abolished slavery altogether during the revolution and that the result had been that their biggest colony had wound up as an independent nation and slavery had been brought back in their other colonies provided an argument for a different kind of model of abolition in Britain,
530. a kind of gradual, grudging approach to abolition that finally culminated in 1833 with the passage
531. of an abolition law that provided for a five-year period of transition and also for compensation to
532. the former slave owners. The French law of 1794 was particularly radical because it did not offer
533. any compensation to the former slave owners. And it not only freed the slaves, but it made them
534. full French citizens with all the constitutional rights of other French citizens. And several
535. black deputies were immediately seated in the French legislature. And for five years, from 1794
536. until 1799,
537. they participated,
538. Black legislators participated
539. in making the laws
540. for the whole country of France.
541. That was another thing, of course,
542. that Napoleon ended
543. as soon as he came to power.
544. Well, Jeremy D. Popkin
545. of the University of Kentucky,
546. author of the book
547. The First Emancipation.
548. I'm afraid we're going to have
549. to leave it there,
550. but thank you for joining us
551. on Freedom Now,
552. KPFK Los Angeles.
553. Well, thank you again for giving me this opportunity.
554. And in closing, we'd like to thank our guests,
555. Patricia Seed, Jean-Kim Buterach, Jeremy Dupopkin.
556. Thank you to our producers, Dr. Gerald Horn,
557. Brother Brandon, Sister Flora, our board op Sly,
558. and all those who made today's program possible.
559. This program, as well as prior programs,
560. can be re-heard for the next 60 days.
561. Go to kpfk.org, audio archives, scroll to Freedom Now,
562. Signing off for Freedom Now, this is Sister Thage, and until next week, as always, we stand ready for revolution.
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