The Negro Freedom-Fighters

...As Frederick Douglass wrote: "Without Adams [John Quincy ], Giddings, Hale, Chase, Wade, Seward, Wilson [Henry, of Massachusetts] and Sumner to plead our cause in the councils of the nation, the taskmasters would have remained the contented and undisturbed rulers of the Union...

...Negro abolitionists were as militant as whites...

...In New York City, as early as 1787, the first school for Negroes was founded by the Manumission Society, with a white teacher...

...Also, from the 17th century on, runaway slaves found shelter among the Indians in both South and North and made common cause with them against the whites...

...The Negro, like every other human being, has always wanted—and struggled—to be free...

...After that, at least one such chronicle appeared every year, some of them running into several editions and achieving English as well as American publication...

...It is priced very reasonably, and the illustrations alone make it a collector's item...

...As much as $-10,000 was offered by the slave-owners for her capture...

...Their plight aroused much sympathy, but their language proved unintelligible until the three little African girls who formed part of the group but had not been imprisoned picked up a few words of English...

...his friends William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips advised against the move...

...316 pp...

...But the Spaniards instead headed for the waters off North America, where the ship was sighted by a United States Navy brig and convoyed to New London...

...This handsome quarto volume is something to own and cherish...

...This enabled Professor Josiah Willard Gibbs of Yale to learn something of their language...

...During the Second Seminole War, which ran on from 1835 to 1843, Negro fugitives were tracked down by bloodhounds imported from Cuba —as depicted in a trenchant political cartoon of 1840...

...What a soul for the tyrant to crush down in bondage...

...For the next forty years, Aldridge performed as a star in all the major European theaters...

...David Walker, the free-born son of a slave, moved from North Carolina to Boston, where in 1829 he published his inflammatory "Appeal," which went into three printings, greatly stirring all Negroes who could read and infuriating the slave-owners...

...With this key, he located a Mendi sailor on a British ship in New York harbor who could serve as interpreter...

...It is a book, by the way, which can be guaranteed—if you leave it on your table—to absorb every guest who picks it up...

...Three Negro men who were being pursued near Christiana, Pennsylvania by a man and his son killed the father, wounded the son, drove away the arresting officers and made their way to Mr...

...Only a few Northern communities—and of course no Southern ones, where the law forbade the teaching of Negroes—had free public schools open to them...

...Slaves joined with white indentured servants, in both North and South, in revolts that were put down with bloodshed...

...There the Africans were charged with the murder of the ship's captain and imprisoned by the Circuit Court in New Haven...

...A portrait of the noble young savage was painted in New Haven and is reproduced in the book, along with other artists' conceptions of the streamlined windjammer, of the killing of the Spanish captain, and of the slaves' cramped quarters aboard the ship...

...In the courts, too, white abolitionists fought for the rights of Negroes, as in the sensational case that grew out of the mutiny on the Armistad...

...Their alliance with the Indians in Florida led to the two Seminole Wars, which cost the United States $10 to $20 million...

...Covering 350 years of Negro history, Mr...

...There, before he was 20, he was playing Othello with Edmund Kean as Iago...

...One such abortive revolt was planned in Charleston, S.C...

...by Denmark Vesey, a carpenter who had bought his freedom and had read of the French and Haitian Revolutions and followed the debates in Congress on the Missouri Compromise...

...Hughes never raises his voice, but writes dispassionately of the impact of America on the Negro, of the Negro on America, and, most important, of his people's self-generated struggle to free themselves from bondage and oppression...

...There, in Canterbury in 1833, Miss Prudence Crandall, a Quaker schoolmistress, was thrown in jail after she had first admitted a Negro girl to her private school and had then opened a school expressly for colored girls, advertising for students in the Liberator...

...Later, Congress voted him a sizable sum of money...

...in 1847...

...5.95...

...During this same period, anti-slavery societies were springing up— some of them started by free Negroes in the North...

...Connecticut was further behind...

...Later, in 1854, she published in Boston a book on the educational laws of Virginia...

...In this country, slave rebellions began as early as 1663...

...At night, Cinque and his followers seized the arms of the sleeping sailors, killed the captain and the cook and lashed the two Spanish owners to the bridge, ordering them to steer for Africa...

...Negroes who succeeded in getting an education profited from it...

...Of those two wonderful Negro women, Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, both ex-slaves, both deeply religious, both unable to read and write, Mr...

...This is the unmistakable though never underlined theme that emerges from this pictorial history...

...Once free, fugitive slaves told their tales in print...

...Hughes's well-written text is as illuminating as the reproductions of the 1,000 prints, photographs and engravings, many of which come from Mr...

...One of the graduates of New York's Free African Schools was the actor Ira Aldridge...

...Joseph Cinque's drama inspired poets and artists...

...Resold in Cuba to two Spaniards, Cinque and 50 fellow-Africans were transshipped for Principe...

...founded his newspaper, the North Star, in Rochester...

...Of these our school textbooks told us practically nothing at all, written as they were by white historians who tended to patronize the Negro...

...Meltzer's unique collection...

...By 1824, there were seven Free African Schools, with Negro teachers, and the city took over their support...

...Harriet Tubman once said, "I nebber ran my train off de track, and I nebber lost a passenger...

...But Douglass declared: "The man struck is the man to cry out...

...Treat us like men and we will be your friends...

...Nine years later, the great slnvo revolt started by the Negro preacher Nat Turner threw not only Virginia but the entire South into a panic...

...It is true, of course, that without the support of the white abolitionists the Negro anti-slavery leaders could have accomplished little...

...With the onset of the Civil War, free Negroes begged to fight but were not allowed to join the Union ranks (except as scouts, cooks, laborers and wagon-drivers) until Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation...

...We learn, for instance, that revolts often occurred on the slave ships of the 17th and 18th centuries...

...White hoodlums forced the closing of that theater, but Aldridge went on to Glasgow University and thence to London...

...But one young South Carolina slave, a seaman named Robert Smalls, delivered a Confederate gunboat, the Planter, to the Union forces...

...These were the first public schools in New York City...

...In 1839, a handsome young African named Joseph Cinque, the son of a Mendi chief, was seized in Africa and sold into slavery...

...From the Civil War the chronicle moves on to Reconstruction, to the Negroes' loss of the ballot in the South, and to more familiar events in the 20th century, climaxed, of course, by the Supreme Court's desegregation decision...

...When the greatest Negro leader of the period, Frederick Douglass, an ex-slavo...

...Americans, I declare to you," his appeal concluded, "while you keep us in bondage, and treat us like brutes to make us support you and your families, we cannot be your friends...

...And: "He who has endured the cruel pangs of slavery is the man to advocate liberty, not distinct from but in connection with our white friends...

...s Frederick Douglass later wrote in his Life and Tina's: "The thing that above all else destroyed the Fugitive Slave Law was the resistance made to it by the fugitives themselves...

...On other ships, Africans are known to have committed suicide by jumping overboard, while others, in chains, managed to kill themselves by swallowing their tongues...

...Twenty years later, another pioneer teacher, Mrs...

...Negroes not only struggled for their freedom, they were avid for an education...

...Unlike Garrison, Douglass believed that slavery might be ended through political action, under the Constitution and without violence, although a night he spent with John Brown left him with a premonition of bloodshed...

...Born in 1807, son of a Presbyterian minister who was a former slave, Aldridge in his youth acted as a super in Shakespearean plays presented by a group of Negro actors at the African Grove on Bleecker Street, not far from the Negro-owned Fraunces Tavern...

...An Armistad Committee was formed, and John Quincy Adams, the former President, now a Congressman and almost sightless at the age of 73, successfully argued the case of the Armistad mutineers before the United States Supreme Court on March 9, 1841...

...One of the most famous "conductors" on the Underground Railroad...

...Douglass's house in Rochester, from where they were rushed on to Canada...

...From time to time, Harriet Tubman invaded the South and, all told, guided 300 slaves to freedom, including her aged parents...

...One night in 1862, while the ship's white officers slept ashore in Charleston, Smalls smuggled his family on board and, with the rest of the Negro crew, sailed off to deliver the ship to the United States Navy...

...Escaping Negroes often needed to fight for their lives---and did...

...Hughes writes: "Most of their lives each walked alone, and each covered wide areas in her travels...

...They believed that Garrison's Liberator and other white-owned anti-slavery papers were all that was needed...

...Conductor, "Report to the PeopleIf MCA Crown...

...Margaret Douglass of Norfolk, Virginia, went to jail for a month for teaching colored children...

...On the Kentucky, more than 40 slaves were put to death for staging an uprising in mid-ocean...

...Whittier wrote of him: "What a master spirit is his...

...Each faced danger and possible death, one at mob-threatened meetings where abolitionists were stoned and the other at state boundary lines dividing freedom and slavery...

...The first of these narratives appeared in 1837...