Nation: "an imagined political community imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign" (Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities)

From the Declaration of Independence, 1776: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

18 th century: Enlightenment, but... also cradle of modern racism: 1) Enlightenment (radical attempt to define man's place in nature; preoccupation with a rational universe) 2) Christian Pietism (emphasis upon instincts, intuition, emotional life of the community)

End 18 th century: pseudo-sciences such as phrenology (reading the skull) physiognomy (reading the face) From Samuel Wells, New Physiognomy, or signs of character, 1871

Eugenicists (scientists who believed in classifying races) sometimes defined a race according to general physical appearance, but just as often they relied on language or region of origin. Definitions of race were sometimes accompanied by highly detailed measurements of body parts (fig.: Cross sections of Hairs, 1932)

Invention of RACE is the base of RACISM RACISM in its institutional forms consist in Slavery, Imperialism, Colonialism Religious justification: - The Bible (the curse of Ham) Other so-called scientific research: - Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines ( )

1492 Pedro Alonzo Nino, traditionally considered the first of many New World explorers of African descent, sails with Christopher Columbus 1526: First African slaves brought to what is now the United States by the Spanish 1619: 20 Africans brought to Jamestown, Virginia, on Dutch ship and sold as indentured servants

1641: Massachusetts becomes the first colony to legally recognize slavery 1645: First American slave ships sail, from Boston; triangular trade route brings African slaves to West Indies in exchange of sugar, tobacco and wine

The Triangular Trade - blue line: goods and weapons shipped to Africa - red line: people kidnapped and brought as slaves to the New World - green line: raw materials produced by slaves sent to England

numbers in this map would be different in light of more recent statistics, but the map still gives a graphic idea of the relative intensity of the Atlantic slave trade to New World areas through time

From J. W. Buel, Heroes of the Dark Continent (New York, 1890 – captioned victims of Portuguese slave hunters

"Stowage of the British Slave Ship 'Brookes' under the Regulated Slave Trade, Act of 1788"; it shows each deck and cross- sections of decks and "tight packing" of captives. This is one of the most famous images of the transatlantic slave trade. After the 1788 Regulation Act, the Brookes (also spelled Brooks) was allowed to carry 454 slaves, the approximate number shown in this illustration. However, in four earlier voyages ( ), the ship had carried from 609 to 740 slaves FocXoWsqSs

From The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789) (one of the first narratives by former slaves) “The first object which saluted my eyes when I arrived on the coast, was the sea, and a slave ship, which was then riding at anchor, and waiting for its cargo. These filled me with astonishment, which was soon converted into terror, when I was carried on board. I was immediately handled, and tossed up to see if I were sound, by some of the crew; and I was now persuaded that I had gotten into a world of bad spirits, and that they were going to kill me. Their complexions, too, differing so much from ours, their long hair, and the language they spoke, (which was very different from any I had ever heard) united to confirm me in this belief. Indeed, such were the horrors of my views and fears at the moment, that, if ten thousand worlds had been my own, I would have freely parted with them all to have exchanged my condition with that of the meanest slave in my own country. When I looked round the ship too, and saw a large furnace of copper boiling, and a multitude of black people of every description chained together, every one of their countenances expressing dejection and sorrow, I no longer doubted of my fate; and, quite overpowered with horror and anguish, I fell motionless on the deck and fainted.”

© Harvard College Library “I saw...a multitude of black people of every description chained together”

© Musée de la Marine During the voyage some of the enslaved people might be thrown off board due to epidemics or lack of water

Slave auction

Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, 1845 Ch.8 “We were all ranked together at the valuation. Men and women, old and young, married and single, were ranked with horses, sheep, and swine. There were horses and men, cattle and women, pigs and children, all holding the same rank in the scale of being, and were all subjected to the same narrow examination. Silvery-headed age and sprightly youth, maids and matrons, had to undergo the same indelicate inspection. At this moment, I saw more clearly than ever the brutalizing effects of slavery upon both slave and slaveholder. After the valuation, then came the division. I have no language to express the high excitement and deep anxiety which were felt among us poor slaves during this time. Our fate for life was now to be decided. we had no more voice in that decision than the brutes among whom we were ranked. A single word from the white men was enough--against all our wishes, prayers, and entreaties--to sunder forever the dearest friends, dearest kindred, and strongest ties known to human beings.” (F. Douglass escaped from slavery and became one of the most famous activists in the abolitionist cause)

R. W. Emerson, Self-Reliance, 1830 “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense” (Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of the leading representatives of Transcendentalism, a philosophical movement that believed in the power of individual will)

Slave narrative (Equiano, Douglass): form of resistance Black slaves in England and the U.S. testified against their captors and bore witness to the urge to be free and literate putting together – European dream of reason + – American dream of civic liberty

Phyllis Wheatley (?1753 – 1784), the first American woman poet, was a slave brought from Africa No longer shalt thou dread the iron chain / Which wanton Tyranny with lawless hand / Had made, and with it meant t' enslave the land. //Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song, / Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung, / Whence flow these wishes for the common good, / By feeling hearts alone best understood, / I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate / Was snatch'd from Africa's fancy'd happy seat: / What pangs excruciating must molest, / What sorrows labour in my parent's breast? / Steel'd was that soul and by no misery mov'd / That from a father seiz'd his babe belov'd: / Such, such my case. And can I then but pray / Others may never feel tyrannic sway?

1787: Constitution is ratified, classifying one slave as three-fifths of one person for congressional apportionment Congress passes Northwest Ordinance, banning slavery in Northwest Territories and all land north of the Ohio river

1807: slave-trade is abolished 1820: American Colonization Society in Africa (Martin Delany believed in black pride and returning to the land of origins) 1831: Nat Turner (a preacher) leads slave uprising in Virginia

1845: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself 1850: Fugitive Slave Act is strengthened (fugitive slaves might be kidnapped by slave catchers in the North) 1852: Harriet Beecher Stowe, a white writer, publishes the very influential Uncle Tom's Cabin

1859: Last U.S. slave ship lands in Alabama : American Civil War 1863: Emancipation Proclamation by President Lincoln 1865: Slavery outlawed by 13 th Amendment At the same time: “black codes” issued to limit African Americans' freedom in the South

1865: “40 acres and a mule” are promised for compensation to freed African American slaves after the Civil war 1868: Congress passes 14th Amendment 1865: the Ku Klux Klan is created in Tennessee 1890: Moses Fleetwood Walker plays baseball for Toledo Blue Stockings as one of the first black major leaguers 1894: Bessie Smith is born in Texas

1903: W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk “ It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.”

1903: W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk “In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.”