Children of the Enslaved

Abstract

Children of the Enslaved Johnny Bernard Hill The African American struggle for freedom today, centered on the rise of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, might be best understood as an awakening of the children of the enslaved. The visceral and prophetic indignation of millions across the nation, standing up and challenging systems of police brutality, massive poverty and urban decay, and the crushing feet of poverty, is a form of reaching out to the past in striding toward the future. As a theologian teaching at a historically black college in the Deep South, just miles from the tragic massacre of nine black folk at the Emmanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, SC, what I see on the horizon is a quickening of the children of the enslaved. I see a growing awareness of a generation of black and brown souls, part of the post‐civil rights generation, who are calling into question the legitimacy of American democracy and its systems. I see a generation becoming much more aware of the brutality of the slave past and what it means in the present moment. There is an awakening. This generation is beginning to see that they are the children of the enslaved, ready to claim the full weight of freedom, justice, and human dignity. The recent 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's assassination by the actor John Wilkes Booth at the Ford Theatre on April 14th, 1865, provides an occasion to reflect on Lincoln's presidency and what it meant for the millions of enslaved Africans in the shadows of America's Civil War, and also on the deeper matrix of violence associated with his death and suffered by unfolding generations, a violence that continues to be felt today, even in places like Ferguson, Missouri. The death of Lincoln, one of the most contentious figures in American history, exposes the great perils and conflicts within the American political narrative as it relates to black lives in America. While it is true that Lincoln may have opposed slavery on moral grounds and made constant appeals to the Declaration of Independence as the ideal corrective for one day dismantling the evil of slavery, it was ultimately the preservation of the union and stabilization of visions of imperial conquest that legitimated a slow and necessary continuance of the slave system in some form. And like those of his age, Lincoln was never in favor of granting full citizenship rights to Africans on America's shores. In addition to the preservation of the Union, Lincoln also upheld the constitutional ideal of self‐government. While the South may have been forced to dismantle slavery in its legal and political form, Lincoln and the Republicans were content with the establishment of the black codes of Reconstruction, and later, the more permanent establishment of the system of segregation across the south solidified in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision. In substance, what becomes clear in the brutal death of Lincoln in the literal and figurative theater of American politics is a nation deeply divided against itself, torn between two realities and tormented by its own sins, while faced with its own demise. The negation of blackness and the terrible systematic subjugation and exploitation of enslaved Africans and their children form a terrifying foil for the stabilization of empire (in the broader sense) and notions of whiteness in particular. Lincoln's legacy endures because it continually points us to the great struggles for freedom, justice, and human dignity, reaching out to future generations yet unborn. On the anniversary of Lincoln's assassination, we also celebrated the 50th anniversary of the courageous Selma March across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, captivated by the fearless and courageous leader, Martin Luther King Jr., as he was flanked by persons of different races, genders, ethnicities, religious traditions, and orientations, casting a new and powerful vision of what America could be and would be with the determined hopes of a people who refuse to acquiesce to imperial systems, and who rise to the occasion of freedom in their time—echoing to future generations. It was a turning point because it offered up a new, expansive, and inclusive vision of what America could be, and the ways in...