We Want Freedom. Mumia Abu-Jamal
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caught him by the throat.… Then the rest beat him.… If we had not been interrupted, death would have been his fate.
We were then near enough to have killed them, concealed as we were by the darkness.
I told him we would not surrender on any conditions. I intend to fight.… I intend to try your strength. I told him, if he attempted it, I should be compelled to blow out his brains.
Before he could bring the weapon to bear, I seized a pair of heavy tongs, and struck him a violent blow across the face and neck, which knocked him down. He lay for a few moments senseless.13
This was a battle, one fought with fists, corn-cutters, and swords. Most battles are fought for land, for wealth, or for the whim of kings. This was a battle for freedom, and though little known, as significant as any in American history.
For those who tasted freedom, who worked their own plots of land so that their families could survive and prosper, who knew what life was worth, freedom was not to be surrendered easily.
It would be wrong to paint the Parkers as people who fought for the freedom of others who were unwilling to fight. They all fought. They had to fight.
The Christiana Resistance was waged a year after the government’s ignoble passage of the Fugitive Slave Act (FSA) of 1850, which threatened the lives and liberty of all Black people whether slave or “free.” As the contemporary Black nationalist Martin Delany explained:
By the provisions of this bill, the colored people of the United States are positively degraded beneath the level of whites—are liable at any time, in any place, and under all circumstances, to be arrested—and upon the claim of any white person, without the privilege, even of making a defence, sent into endless bondage. Let no visionary nonsense about habeas corpus, or a fair trial, deceive us; there are no such rights granted in this bill, and except where the commissioner is too ignorant to understand when reading it, or too stupid to enforce it when he does understand, there is no earthly chance—no hope under heaven for the colored person who is brought before one of these officers of the law.…14
Under such provisions as these, Africans had slim and grim choices: resistance or a return to bondage.
Thousands chose resistance.
From Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, hundreds fled to Canada to escape the reach of the FSA. According to the Liberator of October 4, 1850, “nearly all the waiters in the hotels” left for the border. “They went in large bodies, armed with pistols and bowie knives, determined to die rather than be captured,” the radical journal recorded. An entry referring to Blacks crossing the border from Utica, New York, was similar.
The revered Harriet Tubman, called “Gen’ral Moses” by her admirers for her courageous role in bringing freedom and hope to thousands of people in bondage, spoke for many when she said she could “trust Uncle Sam with my people no longer.” The Fugitive Slave Act and its repressive provisions forced her to carry her charges “clear off to Canada.”15
The Gorsuches were shot (Dickinson, although badly wounded, survived), their other relatives were beaten and driven from the homestead, and the US deputy marshal, Kline, beat a full and hasty retreat. The women, full of fury at men who would steal their people to return them to the hated slavery system, rushed from the house at the fallen Gorsuch armed with corn-cutters and scythe blades, and in Parker’s words, “put an end to him.”16
With the slave-catching posse dead, wounded, beaten, and dispersed, the Christiana rebels had to flee the area. William Parker and two of his men who began the resistance (believed to have been Samuel Thompson and a man named Pinckney) used the well-known routes of the Underground Railroad to make their way northward. They stopped briefly in Rochester, New York, at the home of the most famous Black abolitionist of the age, Frederick Douglass, himself an escaped captive from Maryland and a defender of freedom by any necessary means. Douglass conducted the harried and hunted party to their final depot: freedom in Canada. As thanks, Parker presented Douglass with Gorsuch’s pistol. Although it was bent and unable to fire, the abolitionist prized the souvenir. Later, Eliza would join William, and they would raise their family there on a farm, in freedom.
Meanwhile, the armed rebellion of Christiana ignited a firestorm of controversy in the US, north and south. The Philadelphia Bulletin used the event to launch a broadside at what it perceived as the greatest evil, abolition:
The melancholy tragedy of Christiana, in this State, by which two citizens of Maryland lost their lives, has established, in letters of blood, the dangerous character of the modern abolitionists.… We have, on more than one occasion, predicted this result from the doctrines of the abolitionists—Men who advocate an armed resistance to the law, especially in a republic, are enemies of order.17
Order, to the editors of the Philadelphia daily, meant legal support for slavery; any who would resist that evil, even ex-slaves themselves, were branded “enemies of order.”
To Douglass, ever the radical abolitionist, the lawfulness of the Fugitive Slave Act must yield to the rightness of resistance to it. The radical journalist and editor of the antislavery journal The North Star cared little what the press said. He lauded the events of Christiana as dealing a fatal blow to an evil law:
But the thing which more than all else destroyed the fugitive slave law was the resistance made to it by the fugitives themselves. A decided check was given to the execution of the law at Christiana, Penn.… This affair … inflicted fatal wounds on the fugitive slave bill.18
Indeed, Douglass argued, the Christiana Resistance came close to making the hated fugitive slave bill “a dead letter.”19 Historian Philip Foner called Christiana “one of the major harbingers” of the coming Civil War. Just over a century (and fifteen years) after the so-called Christiana Riot, another so-called riot, Watts, would spark militant movements across the nation. As Christiana signaled the coming of the Civil War, so Watts signaled a rising militance of Blacks, one expression of which was the Black Panther Party.
Beneath the fact of Watts, beyond the existence of the Black Panther Party, was a seething anger, a bubbling cauldron of Black rage, that Martin Luther King’s somewhat sweet, ethereal speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, several years before, could hardly assuage.
More to Black urban appetites was the cutting, insightful, militant speech of Malcolm X, whose critique of the heralded March on Washington was widely read, and heard over Black radio:
The Negroes were out there in the streets. They were talking about how they were going to march on Washington.… That they were going to march on Washington, march on the Senate, march on the White House, march on the Congress, and tie it up, bring it to a halt, not let the government proceed. They even said they were going out to the airport and lay down on the runway and not let any airplanes land. I’m telling you what they said. That was revolution. That was revolution. That was the black revolution.
It was the grass roots out there in the street. It scared the white man to death, scared the white power structure in Washington, D.C. to death; I was there. When they found out this black steamroller was going to come down on the capital, they called in … these national Negro leaders that you respect and told them, “Call it off.” Kennedy said, “Look you all are letting this thing go too far.” And Old Tom said, “Boss, I can’t stop it because I didn’t start it.” I’m telling you what they said. They said, “I’m not even in it, much less at the head of it.” They said, “These Negroes are doing things on their own. They’re running ahead of us.” And that old shrewd fox, he said, “If you all aren’t in it, I’ll put you in it. I’ll put you at the head of it. I’ll endorse it. I’ll welcome it. I’ll help it. I’ll join it.”
This is what they did at the march on Washington. They joined it … became part of it, took it over. And as they took it over, it lost its militancy. It ceased to be angry, it ceased to be hot, it ceased to be uncompromising. Why, it even ceased to be a march. It became a picnic, a circus. Nothing but a circus, with clowns and all.…
No, it was a sellout. It was a takeover.… They controlled it so tight, they told those Negroes what time to hit town, where