◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Agitate I was born a slave in Maryland, around 1818. I say “around” because they did not record the birthdays of property. I was taken from my mother in infancy — by design, so that I would not love her — and she died while I was still a child, a stranger to me. A person with no past is easier to own. Then a white woman began teaching me to read, and her husband stopped her. He warned that if I learned, I would become “unfit to be a slave.” Understand what that moment gave me. He meant it as a warning to her; I received it as a map. In forbidding me the alphabet, he told me exactly where the door was. From that hour I understood the whole machinery of bondage — that the chain on the body begins as a chain on the mind, and that the master fears nothing so much as a slave who can read. So I stole the knowledge. I traded bread to poor white boys for lessons and read every scrap I could hide. When the slave-breaker Covey tried to break me, I was sixteen, and I fought him — two hours, in the dirt — and he never raised his hand to me again. You have seen how a man was made a slave. I am telling you a slave can be made a man, and the making begins the moment he refuses. I escaped in 1838. I took a new name. And I decided that the men who wrote that all men are created equal had made a promise they never meant to keep — and that I would hold them to it anyway. On the fifth of July, 1852, they asked me to celebrate their independence. I told them the truth: this Fourth of July is yours, not mine; you may rejoice, I must mourn. I would not bless a liberty built on my mother’s grave. And then I said the one thing I have found to be without exception — the only law of politics I ever trusted: Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. We made the demand. We won a war. We wrote freedom and citizenship and the vote into the Constitution itself. And I lived long enough to watch them take it back. I watched the country grow tired of our freedom. I watched them strike a bargain in 1877 and call it peace — a peace made on our backs. I watched the men who lost the war win the story of it, until slavery was draped in honor and the slave was written out of his own emancipation. I watched the vote we bled for stolen back by terror and by law. I died in 1895. The next year they made the lie official and called it equal. So I know the shape of what you are living through. I have seen it before. When they ban the book, recognize the master forbidding the alphabet. When they rewrite the history until the cruelty comes out gentle and the traitors come out noble, recognize the Lost Cause putting its costume back on. When they tell you that the stripping of your rights is the correction of a mistake, recognize this: freedom, once won, is never kept by being admired. It is kept by being defended — in every generation, against men who are patient. Do not wait for power to be reasonable. It will not be. Read what they forbid you. Remember what they rewrite. Make the demand — loudly, without apology, and again tomorrow. Agitate. Agitate. Agitate.