this inconvenience attending it, that if a man’s business be very great, and of various kinds, he must be obliged, in proportion, to carry a greater bundle of things upon his back, unless he can afford one or two strong servants to attend him. I have often beheld two of those sages almost sinking under the weight of their packs, like pedlars among us, who, when they met in the street, would lay down their loads, open their sacks, and hold conversation for an hour together; then put up their implements, help each other to resume their burdens, and take their leave.”
6 Bernice Johnson Reagon, If You Don’t Go, Don’t Hinder Me: The African American Sacred Song Tradition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 63–64.
7 Robert P. Moses and Charles E. Cobb, Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 33–34.
8 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, (New York: Vintage International, 1995), 143–144.
9 Ibid., 144.
10 See Bryan Crable, Ralph Ellison and Kenneth Burke: At the Roots of the Racial Divide, 79–111.
11 Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California, 1969/1950), 140.
Part I - The Political Role of Young People in Schools of Poverty
In 1772, at the Court of the King’s Bench in London, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield agreed with the American fugitive James Somerset that he was a free man and not the property of his master. The slave’s act of self-emancipation produced anxiety, argument, counter-argument, and increased movement toward rebellion across the Atlantic in the American colonies.12 Lord Mansfield declared property in human beings to be so “odious” a concept that it could not be countenanced by common law, and was nowhere established in the positive acts of Parliament. Slaveholders in the colonies consequently feared that their slaves would attempt to free themselves as well, and that they would seek and find protection in King George’s courts. By 1776, British encouragement of slave rebellions had proceeded far enough as both a political and military strategy that the Declaration of Independence includes reference to the King’s “excit[ing] domestic insurrection among us” as one of the colonists’ reasons for creating a new nation.13 Fear of runaway slaves was so important a motive for the revolution that the southern states insisted in 1787 on Article IV, Section 2 of the Constitution, requiring the return of fugitives to their masters. If the states with few slaves would not agree to treat fugitives as property, the states with more slaves were prepared to forego the advantages of political union.
The Constitution, of course, did not settle the issue; slaves ran away despite its provisions. From the Revolution to the Civil War, again and again, the acts of slaves seeking their freedom provoked conflicts between white people: suits for the return of runaways; trials of those who protected runaways; the abolition movement itself, fueled by the fact and narratives of fugitive slaves and by their active participation in the agitation and struggle against slavery. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, a final step before war, caused intense escalation of conflicts between competing factions of white people as they tried to position themselves in response to the self-liberating acts of slaves. In 1854, for example, the liberation of nineteen-year-old Anthony Burns, who had fled from captivity in Virginia to freedom in Massachusetts, resulted in a national political crisis. When federal authorities in Boston attempted to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act by returning Burns to his master, thousands of both white and black abolitionists took to the streets, surrounding the federal courthouse. The mayor of Boston imposed martial law, and the President of the United States, Franklin Pierce, authorized the dispatch of US Marines to assist in returning the fugitive to Virginia.
Each insurgent act of running away, or of poisoning or arson or violence against a slaveholder, had its own origins in the mind and body of the slave.14 Sometimes the unit of insurgency was a single person; sometimes a pair or small group; sometimes a band, or even scores or several hundreds in the case of the larger rebellions. Eventually, a complex network developed to support the insurgent runaways—the Underground Railroad—that might be thought of in certain cases as just several houses or farms or churches on a particular route north and, in other cases, as a whole system of communication and material assistance. All these manifestations and effects of the intention to be free hinged on each individual slave’s understanding of his or her own interests—not the interests of the slaveholder, not the interests of the northern sympathizer, but the slave’s interests. They acted, and white people with their hands on the levers of power were unable to ignore the altered circumstances caused by the insurgent slaves’ actions. Powerful people re-acted to the deliberate, consequential, voluntary movements of the less powerful, expending incalculable energy in debate, publication, assembly, argument, legislation, material assistance or material obstruction, culminating in four years of mutual maiming and slaughter, none of which would have followed from a slave population that was merely docile and inert.
The great majority of fugitive slaves were young, roughly seventy-five percent between the ages of thirteen and twenty-nine.15 Most histories do not clearly identify these young people as having played a central political role in the country’s sectional conflict or in the development of its constitutional principles. Many historians consider the maneuvers of statesmen who were enacting laws, making speeches, publishing arguments, and giving orders, or of the voters and economic interests to which these statesmen responded. Others discuss economic and legal structures, capital and labor markets, geography, technology, literature, journalism, and so on. But the political role of the fugitive slave should be understood as central.16 Each act of running away was a fully moral act, whether or not the fugitive considered or was even aware of the legal and political arguments of the powerful. And fully moral acts always carry political implications; that is, they necessarily raise questions of who has power and who does not.
The uncontrolled movements of young people in poverty today, and particularly of the descendants of slaves, generate debates about educational “reform” in much the same way that the uncontrolled movements of their insurgent ancestors generated debates about the status of slavery before the Civil War.
The indocility of young people in high schools, for example, provokes tensions and hardening of positions around school discipline and policing. The concept of “zero tolerance” feeds on the fear of insubordination, violence, and defiance; but the harshness of zero-tolerance policies provokes the outraged reactions of civil libertarians, of some parents, and of a certain kind of child advocate. This dynamic—sometimes articulated as between “permissiveness” and “structure” or between “freedom” and “order”—plays out again and again in schools as in the larger society. Here we are stressing the necessary contribution to this dynamic of the young people’s stubborn agency. Just as it was necessary that slaves stubbornly ran away in the antebellum south for there to be a controversy at all about the legal status of the runaway, so the education wars depend for their existence on the stubborn indocility of students in poverty and especially of descendants of slaves today. The Department of Education rewards states that fire teachers whose students have certain test results. The teachers and their allies demonstrate to retain their rights and privileges because young people in poverty stay home from school, cut class, ignore assignments, and defy authority. Without their defiance, the fuel for the education wars would burn out. Insurgent slaves would not tolerate political arrangements that left them enslaved, and eventually forced those arrangements to change. Similarly, young people today—whether recognized as political agents or not—defy educational arrangements that lock them into second-class citizenship; they are pushing and will continue to push on those educational arrangements until the whole country is forced to confront and change the caste
