Previous articleNext article FreeLectureBlack cargo 2019 Lewis H. Morgan LectureLaurence RalphLaurence RalphPrinceton University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThis lecture is about why we need stories.1 We, in one sense, are the people who were not allowed to read so that we could be made to toil. I am referring, of course, to the 600,000 enslaved Africans brought to the United States against their will over the course of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Since the US government forbade Blacks to read, write, and learn, we told our stories orally. Many of the anti-literacy laws enforced in slave states before and during the Civil War, in fact, sounded a lot like Virginia’s. “Every assemblage of negroes for the purpose of instruction in reading or writing,” it stated, “shall be an unlawful assembly” (Virginia 1849: 747). The prevailing logic went something like this: If Black people could read they would learn about the revolution in Haiti in 1804, and the Vesey revolt in 1822, and Turner’s rebellion in 1831, and White people would be in danger.Many guilt-riddled Whites imagined that Black folks’ world revolved around attacking them. Undeterred by immoral laws, slave abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, Harriet Ann Jacobs, Sojourner Truth, and William Wells Brown enlightened themselves—though our first generation of Black writers to be educated in the United States of America’s colleges and universities would not emerge in critical mass until the early 1900s.One of those early pioneers, Zora Neale Hurston, recognized that we needed to somehow hear the unwritten record of Black folklore to understand the history of the United States. In one of her most influential books, Mules and men, Hurston traveled across Florida with the intent to collect, document, and analyze the tales of her childhood. As an older generation of African Americans who had lived through slavery were beginning to pass away, Hurston embarked on a journey to rescue the precious vessel of Black oral tradition before it sank into the abyss. She wanted to prove that Black people were not subhuman, that they were not less-than, that they had systems of rationality and traditions of spirituality all their own, and thus that it had been immoral to subjugate them.* * *Hurston was among a new wave of African American scholars who were writing in the voice of everyday Black folk. In the preface to Mules and men, Franz Boas, Hurston’s advisor at Columbia University, where she studied anthropology, wrote, “It is the great merit of Miss Hurston’s work that she entered into the homely life of the southern Negro ‘with the charm of a lovable personality and of a revealing style.’” But unlike her contemporaries, such as Jean Toomer, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay, Hurston was not just writing poems and short stories and novels. She was attempting to bridge the divide between literary and social scientific writing. To be sure, there were systematic studies of Black life written by African Americans before Hurston came on the scene, like The Philadelphia Negro by W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois, though, was not trying to do away with the notion of the disciplined, rational, and distanced observer. “More than any other leading American sociologist during the decade after 1898,” wrote historian David Levering Lewis, “Du Bois undertook for a time the working out of an authentic objectivity” (1993: 202).2But if Du Bois, determined to be more objective than the most objective White scholar, believed that the social scientist must not “dally with the truth to humor the whims of the day” (Du Bois 1968: 200), Hurston bellowed forth with laughter, while sitting on an old friend’s porch as they traded tall tales of mules and horses and cows and enslaved people engaging in supernatural feats. By revealing the “inner life” of Black people, Hurston sought to convince the world of their humanity through emotion as well as sound argumentation. Her approach was not merely to employ the enduring anthropological “trick” of using seemingly exotic tales of “Negro magic” and “voodoo” to reveal the shared values between the White and Black worlds. Rather, she believed that to understand a person’s life, one had to historically situate it. Applying the culture-historical method, characteristic of Boas’ students, Hurston thought it more productive to examine how and when the boundaries of a group were formed in the first place. Rooted in a temporal understanding of difference as opposed to a cultural understanding, Hurston thought ‘how a group of people came to be who they are today’ was the critical ethnographic question. Unlike other leading ethnographers of her day (including Du Bois), Hurston would suspend her moral judgements about Black people’s behavior and values in favor of closely scrutinizing the historical epochs that molded women and men (Bunzl 2004).You only have to picture Zora Neale Hurston, draped in a colorful chemise, suede fedora tilted to the side while telling folktales to a table full of White patrons like Charlotte Mason (the self-described “guardian of black folklore”), to see why some people believed that there was a problem with Hurston’s persona—not to mention her literary style and scholarship, which were both extensions of herself. Delving into the fables that Black people in the rural South organized their lives around, Hurston was representing her subject matter in a way that, some Black scholars felt, crossed the line into caricature. More to the point, she was commenting on social issues that they felt would undermine the cause of Black equality by allowing Whites to participate in that time-honored American pastime: blaming Black people for their own oppression.* * *Case in point was Hurston’s groundbreaking study of the last known survivor of that deadly journey across the Atlantic known as the Middle Passage. She called the book Barracoon after the enclosure in which enslaved people were confined before boarding slave ships. The book was published in 2018, fifty-eight years after Hurston’s death, in large measure because its content was so controversial for Black intellectuals and political leaders in her day. Alice Walker describes the sticking point: “It resolutely records the atrocities African people inflicted on each other, long before shackled Africans, traumatized, ill, disoriented, starved, arrived on ships as ‘black cargo’ in the hellish West” (2018: xv).More concretely, Hurston sat down with Cudjo Lewis, previously known as Kossula, to record the life history of a man who had been born in Africa, and had experienced slavery and then freedom against the backdrop of World War I and the Great Depression. A remarkable man, Kossula outlasted all of the social calamities that threatened to tear him asunder. Over the course of many visits to Kossula’s home, he tells Hurston of how he was captured by a neighboring “kingdom,” Dahomey. Kossula’s village was confronted by Dahomey’s warriors, who slaughtered many of them before they had risen from their slumber. Some of Kossula’s tribespeople escaped and even made it to the town gates, but another group of warriors captured and swiftly beheaded them before they could abscond. The King of Dahomey, a man named Glele, sold Kossula and his other tribespeople to a White man from the United States named William Foster, who owned the slave ship Clotilda. Kossula was among the 22,500 captives illegally smuggled from the African continent during the period from 1851 to 1860, at least four decades after the practice of selling and transporting enslaved people overseas had been legally outlawed.3 There were approximately 110 people in chains with Kossula aboard the Clotilda, which set sail from the Bight of Benin, the port controlled by Dahomey (Plant 2018: xxiv). In telling his story to Hurston, Kossula relives a past that would have been erased were it not for their exchange. And so it is that in Barracoon, we come to see the conversations between Hurston and Kossula as an attempt to showcase the humanity that stems from longing and having lost the ones you’ve loved as a consequence of state-sanctioned violence.Along these lines, Hurston’s ethnographic work was inspired by the time-honored tradition of folklorists carrying survival stories with them like African griots. Embracing the role of the folklorist/ethnographer, Hurston does away with the conventions of social science that Du Bois valorized, “rejecting the objective observer stance of Western scientific inquiry” (Plant 2018: xxv) in favor of an approach that highlights the worldview of the people with whom the ethnographer speaks. Indeed, she cherishes Black people’s storytelling sensibilities, even going so far as to assume “the office of a priest,” as Deborah Plant said, in order to create a narrative space for their “unburdening” (2018: 10). But beyond these methodological gems, Hurston’s approach has profound implications for how we should think about race.Let us consider the exchange that sparks Hurston and Kossula’s initial dialogue (Hurston 2018:18):Hurston: “I want to know who you are, and how you came to be a slave, and to what part of Africa do you belong, and how you fared as a slave, and how you have managed as a free man?”Kossula: “Thankee Jesus! Somebody come ast about Cudjo! I want tellee somebody who I is, so maybe dey go in de Afficky soil some day and callee my name and somebody dere say, ‘Yeah, I know Kossula.’”Here Hurston was, a Black woman, recording the life history of a Black man, who is telling her the story of how he became Black, which is to say, how she herself came to be seen as Black, and how they, together, became part of the same race. Before Kossula was Black in the way that would become commonsensical in the United States, his tribe was raided to fill the royal stockades of a Dahomey King. To say that he was Black before then is like saying he was Cudjo Lewis before he landed in the United States. The name, like the racial category, only takes hold once he reaches North American shores.Another lesson Barracoon teaches its readers is how collective identity is forged through a shared sense of endangerment. Kossula explains how experiences can be so painful to remember that subsequent generations must make do with a partially erased reality. Still, Black people’s status as victims didn’t effectively turn them into a vacuous shell of themselves to be bought and sold to the highest bidder. What Hurston reveals is that the African people who were once legally considered property never lost their humanity.* * *The term “black cargo” emerges from this history of enslavement. But in this talk, Black cargo does not merely refer to dark-skinned people being stolen and packaged aboard slave ships like the Clotilda. Black cargo, in fact, does not pertain to the people themselves, who were never fully stripped of their humanity, even through enslavement. Black cargo consists, instead, of the stories those enslaved people carried with them.I must admit, as I have listened to stories of Black people who face state-sanctioned violence today, part of me felt like Zora Neale Hurston in her old Chevrolet, traveling through Eatonville, collecting stories that, presumably, were soon to be forgotten. But there are key differences between what Hurston was doing then, and what I was doing one hundred years later. When I embarked on my own ethnographic journey, I had no clue that I would encounter an oral tradition of Black people passing along their stories of being betrayed by their government in the form of police abuse. I had set out to speak with any Chicagoan who was willing and able to talk, no matter his or her race or socioeconomic status, about the role they believed the police should play in our society. I interviewed over one hundred Chicagoans for this study, fifty-three of whom identified as Black. While speaking with those Black residents, I found it remarkable how much the stories of police violence they told me resonated with each other, and yet differed from the respondents of other races. Even if they themselves had not personally been victimized by the police, the Black respondents expressed solidarity with victims of police violence through the stories they had carried with them their entire lives.These stories were as historical as they were personal. They were rooted in chattel slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights movement, and the backlash to the political gains of the 1950s and 1960s that my interviewees were living with today. Through their descriptions of racial discrimination, of being treated as predators and criminals, of being entrapped by sexual violence—all at the hands of the police—I realized that these African descendants were organically articulating a theory of racialization. The stories they carried with them were no less than precious reflections about what it means to be Black.Just as Kossula trusted Hurston to “tell his story and transmit it to the world” (Plant 2018: xx), the Chicagoans who have contributed to my research with their profound insights likewise trusted me. As Hurston teaches us, the key benefit of the ethnographic enterprise is that it allows the researcher to inquire into experiences, and to learn about who people really are and how they came to be that way—or how, in this case, the legacy of slavery impacts the way people are policed today. It is through these careful and delicate queries that “Black cargo” is transformed from an empty, hollowed-out shell that is the legal property of another person, into a human vessel that passes on stories of survival for the edification of all.My talk today demonstrates this point by exploring a 2014 police shooting. The shooting of Laquan McDonald garnered national attention when, on October 20, 2014, Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke shot the seventeen-year-old Black teenager sixteen times. For one of my interviewees, Kenya Davis, a twenty-five-year-old middle school teacher, the McDonald shooting became an event that deeply impacted her life. My interview with Kenya, and the stories about the event that she carried with her, thus help me understand how a fantasy of Black predatory violence that is rooted in slavery works to propel police violence.* * *Kenya was born and raised in Chicago, a city known for its activist roots, but she didn’t start organizing until she was miles away from home, at college. As she remembers it now, two defining features of her college were that it was predominantly White and profoundly privileged. “A couple of years ago,” she told me, “The New York Times wrote an article entitled, ‘Where does the top one percent send their kids?’”4 And her college was number two on the list, Kenya said.Initially Kenya felt as though she were living in a bubble, and she was comfortable being enclosed and protected within it. But with each passing semester, she was continuously reminded that she was different from the White students enrolled there. At first she experienced her stigma in a solitary way. But when the issue of state-sanctioned violence and the police’s use of force began to receive renewed national attention in the early 2000s, Kenya was compelled to act.“There was a man named Troy Davis,” she said. “He was on death row in the South, and he was killed at the hands of the state. But there was a lot of evidence that he didn’t really do this crime.” Kenya spoke about the witnesses who recanted their original testimony, and of the Black residents of Davis’s hometown who had been trying to exonerate him for decades. When the state of Georgia executed him on September 21, 2011, Kenya now recalls, “It was a very sad day on campus” for activists like her. After Davis’s execution, Kenya started to connect the racism she had experienced throughout the course of her life to the state-sanctioned violence that was happening outside of campus. And after Davis’s death, when she and the other Black students held a rally in the major city adjacent to her college, she understood that the racism she had encountered was not merely the result of her classmates’ naiveté. It was far more insidious.“When we were walking down the street, people were spitting at us,” she said. Kenya found the response shocking because all she was doing was exercising her first amendment right to assemble peacefully. This was a big deal for her. Back then Kenya did not have the language to pinpoint what was wrong. But now, if she could speak to the White residents of that city, the people who yelled and cursed and spat at her as she marched downtown in the hopes of saving a man’s life, she would say a few words to make them contemplate their actions: “Somebody has been murdered. And y’all are so anti-Black, y’all are so racist, that you are angry that I’m walking down the street?”Kenya now counts Troy Davis’s execution as a milestone on a journey to becoming more politically aware about the use of force in the legal system. She now realizes that the use of force is not merely relevant for people like Davis who were locked up because they may have been wrongfully accused. It affects Black people like her as well, every day. When she began to talk to me about the way that the police made her feel, it struck me that her critique was not merely about the lethal injection that took Davis’s life. It was expressly about the gun.“Maybe this is me speaking as a young Black person,” she said, “but the police make me nervous. And the police make all of my students nervous. They make everyone I know nervous. Regardless of whether or not you’ve done anything wrong, when the police drive past you, when the police are in the building, when they’re in the space with you, they make you nervous.”“You have to understand: this person is armed,” she continued. “To me, the fact that they have a gun and the power to take a life puts fear in me. I’m very terrified of the police.” When Kenya said these words, they instantly struck a chord with the words of other Black respondents I had interviewed for my study. While feelings about the police varied for the non-Black interviewees, all of the African Americans reported not feeling safe around the police. The reason this concern felt so familiar, I later realized, was that in voicing their anxieties over the police’s use of force, my Black respondents were revisiting a very old debate about whether or not the police should be able to carry guns.* * *One of the earliest renditions of the police use-of-force debate took place in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1830, the first year in the city’s history that a police officer with a gun took the life of a civilian. The local government had been living in fear of a major violent attack from Black people for seventy-five years, ever since the First Maroon War of Jamaica and the Natchez Massacre of Louisiana took place in the same year. During the Natchez event, fugitive slaves united with Native Americans like the Natchez and Choctaw to demand their autonomy from the French colonial government (Genovese 1979).The fear that Black people posed eventually led the New Orleans government to create their first slave patrol thirty years later, in 1764 (Ingersoll 1995). That fear was reinforced in 1791, at the start of the Haitian Revolution, when the municipal government enlisted a domestic armory to enforce a new decree that Blacks—be they enslaved or free—were no longer allowed to immigrate to the city (Wagner 2009). Slave patrols were critical to slaveowners, who had previously been forced to expend their own resources to capture these so-called fugitives (Williams 1972). The existence of slave patrols also helped city government officials argue that they needed to protect the White public (Wish 1939; Williams 1972; Wagner 2009).When the idea of an armed police force was introduced to New Orleans residents in the 1800s, many of the White residents at the time disapproved of or were outright angered at the prospect, the implication being that the government wanted to treat them as if they were enslaved (Wagner 2009). Most New Orleans residents did not own slaves, but the White residents understood why it was useful to have an armed patrol to catch fugitive Blacks. But if that patrol was allowed to arrest and shoot them too? Well, that was an indignity, difficult for them to understand. A critical mass of Whites felt that the government had unduly encroached on their civil liberties by appointing a “well-filled armory” in “plain blue uniforms” to monitor their movements (Ingraham 1835: 111–12). And after the fatal police homicide of 1830 when the police killed a White person, an event that seemed to corroborate their fears about a weaponized police force, they created a reform campaign.For the reformers, police violence was not a signal of progress, but a holdover from an archaic past when patrols could enact any form of violence on enslaved people that they deemed fit. Because they viewed the police as an extension of the slave patrol, they argued that police represented the abrogation of the rule of law (Wagner 2009). Meanwhile, the advocates of a weaponized police force argued that political society begins when individuals transfer their personal ability to inflict violence on another citizen to a sovereign with an exclusive right to initiate deadly force. The absolute right to violence, they asserted, was crucial to the defense of the city (ibid.). This was the argument most often made by New Orleans mayor, Denis Prieur (Prieur 1836). When the reformers tried to strip the police of their guns, Prieur responded by initiating a well-publicized operation against Bras-Coupé (which in French means “arm cut off”), a maroon leader who was meant to epitomize the social threat emanating from the swamps (Wagner 2009).The legend of Bras-Coupé, can be recounted as follows:Once a slave named Squire was hired out by his owner. A talented performer, he was allowed to travel alone. The problem was that, when Squire traveled, he often failed to return. After numerous escape attempts, the police captured him and amputated his right arm as punishment. Confined to a hospital where his arm was amputated, he got dysentery. As he fell into a state of weakness and unrest, the slave patrol suspended its surveillance. Taking advantage of the situation, Bras-Coupé leaped through an open window and fled to the swamp, where he organized a band of fugitives that subsequently terrorized the city.5Who will defend you from Bras-Coupé, Prieur suggested, if not the police? And how will the police defend you if they are stripped of their guns? In the police reports Bras-Coupé is described as “a fiend in human shape,” imperceptible except as a threat. Meanwhile, leading local newspapers asserted that “fire shoots from his eyes,” while claiming that the police’s guns are rendered useless when bullets ricochet from his “iron-like” torso (Wagner 2009: 76). The rationale that they dramatized through Bras-Coupé eventually became so pervasive that it no longer had to be explicitly tied to the reform debate (Wagner 2009). By the beginning of the 1900s, there was no longer a need to argue for the police’s need for guns, because that need was no longer in doubt. The public had come to believe that there would always be social threats like Bras-Coupé (Wagner 2009). Based upon this kind of moral panic, police power eventually came to seem socially necessary.Many of my interviews pointed to the enduring legacy of this kind of panic. For example, Kenya brought up the recent scandal involving a Black teenager who had been shot sixteen times. “It all reminds me of Laquan McDonald,” she said. In the McDonald case, Kenya went on to say, false reports covered over the full extent of police force. On the news the night of the shooting in 2014, for example, reporters said McDonald was shot one time, “when in actuality he was shot many, many more times,” she said. The problem with this kind of misrepresentation, for Kenya, is that it allows the public to believe that people are getting punished in line with what they deserve. Because the violence inflicted on McDonald was so out of line with the threat he posed, Kenya felt, the media was motivated to misrepresent the case and the police were determined to hide evidence of their own aggression. Just as newspapers in the 1830s worked to construe Bras-Coupé as a threat, Kenya believes that the media continues to denigrate Black people to justify police violence.For Kenya, police abuse covers a vast spectrum, ranging from speaking to residents too harshly to fatal shootings—and she thought the two ends of this spectrum were tied together as if in a knot. “In my opinion,” Kenya said, “the police are inherently abusive.” She elaborated: “If a cop comes up to me and is verbally assaulting me, that is abuse. Think about it. That person has a gun and they have the power—they have the authority of the state to use their weapon whenever they feel like they’re in danger.”The notion that the police’s use of force can be tied to their own perception of fear, which can conflict with whether or not they are actually in danger, resonates with early reformers’ concerns with discretion. The reformers felt that it was shortsighted and ethically wrong to create a legal norm around a subjective feeling. Perhaps they worried that citizens would be shot arbitrarily. That has not been the case. What has happened, in countless cases involving the police’s use of force, including Laquan McDonald’s case, is that it has become reasonable for a police officer to fear a Black person, in particular.To this point, Kenya said that, in theory, she understood why police officers might need to use lethal force if their lives were in danger. Then she posed this question: “What happens when the police use force because they feel like they’re in danger?” Perhaps Kenya emphasized this word, “feel,” to distinguish the reality of danger from the idea of it. But if there was any doubt that Kenya did not know the answer to the question, she soon clarified her stance. “It’s so subjective,” Kenya said, still talking about an officer’s legal right to feel afraid.* * *Six months after this interview with Kenya, Jason Van Dyke’s first-degree murder trial began. Van Dyke would take the stand on October 5, 2018, four years and two weeks after he killed Laquan McDonald.6 From his court testimony, the jurors deciding this case would learn that on October 20, 2014, on the southwest corner of 59th and Pulaski, Van Dyke heard a distress call. The call came from a police officer named McElligott who reported that one of the tires on his squad car had been punctured. Van Dyke and his partner, Walsh, had been assigned to the “rapid response car” that night. This meant that it was their duty to report to any calls where officers might need help. Taking heed of their obligation, Van Dyke and Walsh immediately headed towards McElligott’s location at the intersection of 40th and Pulaski. While they were driving the nineteen blocks it would take to reach McElligott and his partner, Van Dyke spoke to Walsh about the suspected criminal who had been so bold as to puncture the tires of a police car. “Why didn’t they shoot him if he’s attacking them?” Van Dyke wanted to know. A short time before they reached the person suspected of puncturing the tire, Van Dyke followed this question with an ominous declaration. “Oh my God,” he said about the suspect, “we’re going to have to shoot the guy.”When they got to 40th and Pulaski, Van Dyke and Walsh saw McElligott pointing with one hand to a male wearing a black hoodie and blue jeans. Van Dyke noticed the person running away from McElligott was carrying a knife. This person was seventeen-year-old Laquan McDonald.The response car circled around until it was close to McDonald, and Van Dyke exited the vehicle. At this point, he and McDonald were twenty feet away from each other. Another squad car was approaching from behind McDonald, and an empty field was to his right. With nowhere else to run, McDonald, according to Van Dyke, started to advance towards him, while extending his knife out. Van Dyke said he could see McDonald’s face, and promised he wouldn’t soon forget the expression it held—or rather, the lack thereof. “His face had no expression,” Van Dyke said from the stand. “His eyes were just bugging out of his head. He had just these huge white eyes, just staring right through me.” Van Dyke said that he began yelling at McDonald to drop the knife. But McDonald kept advancing towards him. He got “about 10–15 feet away,” Van Dyke said. “We never lost eye contact,” he proclaimed.His “eyes were bugging out” and “his face was just expressionless,” Van Dyke repeated, before describing how McDonald threatened him with the knife. “He waved the knife from his lower side upwards, across his body towards my left shoulder,” Van Dyke said, claiming that it was only after McDonald made this movement that he began to shoot.Van Dyke claimed that he had no idea whether he had accidentally hit McDonald when he started to fire. Eventually, though, McDonald fell to the ground. Van Dyke recalled that once he realized McDonald had fallen, he stopped shooting. But then he saw McDonald moving. “I could see him starting to push up, with his left hand, off the ground. I see his left shoulder start to come up. I still see him holding that knife with his right hand, not letting go of it. And his eyes were still bugged out. His face has got no expression on it.”While McDonald was on the ground, Van Dyke said that he was still yelling at him to “drop that knife.” He couldn’t say how many times he yelled at McDonald. All h