What kind of abolitionist was Benjamin Banneker? Reluctant activism and the intellectual lives of early black Americans

Abstract

ABSTRACT In recent years, Benjamin Banneker, the early American republic’s most celebrated black scientific thinker, has been routinely cast as a radical black abolitionist, while his intellectual life has largely been neglected. Drawing on the manuscripts of Banneker and his white antislavery allies, this article argues that Banneker was hardly a radical: he was a reluctant abolitionist, aiding the white-controlled movement in part so he could gain scientific recognition. Situating Banneker within the history of science and African diasporic intellectual history, it further argues that he was not America’s ‘first’ black scientist, but one among many talented eighteenth-century black thinkers. What made Banneker unique was his ability to translate the possibly African-derived intellectual traditions of his youth into a form of ‘credible’ knowledge—scientific knowledge—at a moment when white antislavery elites were briefly interested in publicizing black men with intellectual skill. This essay ultimately cautions against the tendency to instinctually equate black activism with ‘radicalism’. Instead, it calls for more careful attention to the dangers black people faced, the dubious commitments of their white allies, and the fullness of black lives, ones that may have included activism but cannot be reduced to it.