ALONG THE COLOR LINE — AUGUST 2005
Every August, I reflect and pour libations, in the African tradition, to the spirit of Nat Turner. Curiously, the name of the great slave rebel is not as widely known among the hip-hop generation as it was for those of us in the Black Power generation. Perhaps we would do well to revive it.
On the outskirts of Jerusalem (now Courtland), Virginia in late August of 1831, a band of slave rebels led by charismatic preacher Nat Turner began butchering white men, women, and children. Within thirty-six hours about sixty white slaveholders and their family members had been killed.
The white authorities responded with overwhelming force, rounding up the rebels along with over one hundred African Americans who had not been involved in the insurrection. As many as two hundred blacks were burned alive, beheaded, and/or lynched. Turner himself was captured and hung on November 11, 1831. His corpse was decapitated, and strips of his skin were removed and sewn into souvenir purses. The remnants of his body were buried in an unmarked grave near a railroad track.
Today, six of the twenty-nine slave-owners’ houses that Turner and his followers attacked still stand. One current owner proudly displays a bullet hole left from the 1831 rebellion. Aside from a few bullet holes, only two signposts bear witness to these events. The most visible, and literal, representation of the uprising is “Blackhead Signpost Road,” so named because an African American slave rebel’s severed head had been mounted high on a stake along the country road. The continued existence until recently of “Blackhead Signpost Road” into the twenty-first century is an indication that white Americans are still taught to believe that “being white” means never having to say they are sorry.
For almost two centuries, white America has had difficulty explaining the reasons for Nat Turner’s infamous revolt, which unleashed such violence against “innocent” whites. In the aftermath of the uprising the New York Morning Courier and Enquirer in 1831 questioned why “mistresses famed for their kindness–virgins renowned for their beauty and little helpless lisping infants in the cradle, were shot, hewed down with axes, butchered with knives, and had their brains dashed out by those fiends in human form.”
But from the terrain of black consciousness, a different set of questions emerges, all predicated on the right of the oppressed to use any means necessary at their disposal to overturn the forces of domination against them. To W. E. B. Du Bois, for instance, Nat Turner was “the preacher revolutionist” who believed that he “was to lead the liberation movement and that the first should be last and the last first.”
For the late, great actor Ossie Davis, Turner represented “our secret weapon, our ace in the hole, our private consciousness on manhood.” For these legendary African Americans, Turner’s actions required no apologies. We need the same courage and dedication of Nat Turner in our struggles against racism today.
