The Real Lone Ranger...Bass Reeves

The REAL ‘Lone Ranger’ Was An African American Lawman Who Lived With Native American Indians

 

The real “Lone Ranger,” it turns out, was an African American man named Bass Reeves, who the legend was based upon. Perhaps not surprisingly, many aspects of his life were written out of the story, including his ethnicity. The basics remained the same: a lawman hunting bad guys, accompanied by a Native American, riding on a white horse, and with a silver trademark.
Historians of the American West have also, until recently, ignored the fact that this man was African American, a free black man who headed West to find himself less subject to the racist structure of the established Eastern and Southern states.

While historians have largely overlooked Reeves, there have been a few notable works on him. Vaunda Michaux Nelson’s book, Bad News for Outlaws: The Remarkable Life of Bass Reeves, Deputy U.S. Marshal, won the 2010 Coretta Scott King Award for best author. Arthur Burton released an overview of the man’s life a few years ago. Black Gun, Silver Star: The Life and Legend of Frontier Marshal Bass Reeves recounts that Reeves was born into a life of slavery in 1838. His slave-keeper brought him along as another personal servant when he went off to fight with the Confederate Army, during the Civil War.
Reeves took the chaos that ensued during the war to escape for freedom, after beating his “master” within an inch of his life, or according to some sources, to death. Perhaps the most intruiging thing about this escape was that Reeves only beat his enslaver after the latter lost sorely at a game of cards with Reeves and attacked him.
After successfully defending himself from this attack, he knew that there was no way he would be allowed to live if he stuck around.
Reeves fled to the then Indian Territory of today’s Oklahoma and lived harmoniously among the Seminole and Creek Nations of Native American Indians.

After the Civil War finally concluded, he married and eventually fathered ten children, making his living as a Deputy U.S. Marshall in Arkansas and the Indian Territory. If this surprises you, it should, as Reeves was the first African American to ever hold such a position.

Burton explains that it was at this point that the Lone Ranger story comes in to play. Reeves was described as a “master of disguises”. He used these disguises to track down wanted criminals, even adopting similar ways of dressing and mannerisms to meet and fit in with the fugitives, in order to identify them.
Reeves kept and gave out silver coins as a personal trademark of sorts, just like the Lone Ranger’s silver bullets. Of course, the recent Disney adaptation of the Lone Ranger devised a clever and meaningful explanation for the silver bullets in the classic tales. For the new Lone Ranger, the purposes was to not wantonly expend ammunition and in so doing devalue human life. But in the original series, there was never an explanation given, as this was simply something originally adapted from Reeves’ personal life and trademarking of himself. For Reeves, it had a very different meaning, he would give out the valuable coins to ingratiate himself to the people wherever he found himself working, collecting bounties. In this way, a visit from the real “Lone Ranger” meant only good fortune for the town: a criminal off the street and perhaps a lucky silver coin.
Like the Lone Ranger, Reeves was also expert crack shot with a gun. According to legend, shooting competitions had an informal ban on allowing him to enter. Like the Lone Ranger, Reeves rode a white horse almost throughout almost all of his career, at one point riding a light grey one as well.
Like the famed Lone Ranger legend Reeves had his own close friend like Tonto. Reeves’ companion was a Native American posse man and tracker who he often rode with, when he was out capturing bad guys. In all, there were close to 3000 of such criminals they apprehended, making them a legendary duo in many regions.
The final proof that this legend of Bass Reeves directly inspired into the story of the Lone Ranger can be found in the fact that a large number of those criminals were sent to federal prison in Detroit. The Lone Ranger radio show originated and was broadcast to the public in 1933 on WXYZ in Detroit where the legend of Reeves was famous only two years earlier.

Of course, WXYZ and the later TV and movie adaptions weren’t about to make the Lone Ranger an African American who began his career by beating a slave-keeper to death. But now you know. Spread the word and let people know the real legend of the Lone Ranger

Vincente Guerrero

The Vincente Guerrero Story
...
Guerrero was born in Tixtla, a town 100 kilometers inland from the port of Acapulco, in the Sierra Madre del Sur, his parents were Pedro Guerrero, and María de Guadalupe Saldaña. His family consisted of landlords, rich farmers and traders with broad business connections in the south, members of the spanish militia and gun and cannon makers. In his youth he worked for his father’s freight business. His travels took him to different parts of mexico where he heard of the ideas of independence.

Vicente’s father, Pedro, supported spanish rule, whereas his uncle, Diego Guerrero, had an important position in the spanish militia; however, Vicente was opposed to the spanish colonial government. When his father asked him for his sword in order to present it to the viceroy of New spain as a sign of goodwill, Vicente refused, saying, The will of my father is for me sacred, but my Fatherland is first. "Mi patria es primero" is now the motto of the southern Mexican state of Guerrero, named in honor of the revolutionary.

He married María de Guadalupe Hernández and their daughter María de los Dolores Guerrero Hernández married Mariano Riva Palacio, who was the defender lawyer of Maximilian I of Mexico in Querétaro, and had Vicente Riva Palacio.

Guerrero joined in the early revolt against Spain in 1810, first fighting alongside José María Morelos. When the War of Independence began, Guerrero was working as a gunsmith in Tixtla. He joined the rebellion in November 1810 and enlisted in a division that independence leader José María Morelos had organized to fight in southern Mexico. Guerrero distinguished himself in the battle of Izúcar, in February 1812, and had achieved the rank of lieutenant colonel when Oaxaca was claimed by rebels in November 1812.

Following the capture and execution of Morelos in late 1815, Guerrero joined forces with Guadalupe Victoria and Isidoro Montes de Oca, taking the position of "Commander in Chief of the rebel troops. He remained the only major rebel leader still at large, keeping the rebellion going through an extensive campaign of guerrilla warfare. He won victories at Ajuchitán, Santa Fe, Tetela del Río, Huetamo, Tlalchapa and Cuautlotitlán, regions of southern Mexico that were very familiar to him.

When mexico achieved independence, he at first collaborated with Agustín de Iturbide, who proposed that the two join forces under what he referred to as the Three Guarantees or El plan de Iguala. This plan gave civil rights to Indians but not to African Mexicans. Guerrero refused to sign the plan unless equal rights were also given to African Mexicans and mulattos. Clause 12 was then incorporated into the plan. It read: All inhabitants . . . without distinction of their european, African or Indian origins are citizens . . . with full freedom to pursue their livelihoods according to their merits and virtues.

Iturbide and Guerrero eventually agreed on these ideological mandates – that mexico be made an independent constitutional monarchy, the abolition of class distinctions between spaniards, creoles, mestizos and "Indians", and that catholicism be made the state religion – earned Guerrero's support, and, after marching into the capital on 27 September 1821, Iturbide was proclaimed Emperor of mexico by Congress. However, when Iturbide's policies supported the interests of Mexico's wealthy landowners through continued economic exploitation of the poor and working classes, Guerrero turned against him and came out in favor of a Republic with the Plan of Casa Mata.

When the general Manuel Gómez Pedraza won the election to succeed Guadalupe Victoria as president, Guerrero, with the aid of general Antonio López de Santa Anna and politician Lorenzo de Zavala,[6] staged a coup d'état and took the presidency on 1 April 1829.

Guerrero, as head of the People’s Party and a liberal by conviction, called for public schools, land title reforms, industry and trade development, and other programs of a liberal nature:

"A free state protects the arts, industry, science and trade; and he only prizes virtue and merit: if we want to acquire the latter,let's do it cultivating the fields,the sciences, and all that can facilitate the sustenance and entertainment of men: let's do this in such a way that we will not be a burden for the nation, just the opposite, in a way that we will satisfy her needs, helping her to support her charge and giving relief to the distraught of humanity: with this we will also achieve abundant wealth for the nation, making her prosper in all aspects."

—Vicente Ramón Guerrero Saldaña, Speech to his compatriots

"....A man who is held up as ostensible head of the party, and who will be their candidate for the next presidency, is General Guerrero, one of the most distinguished chiefs of the revolution. Guerrero is uneducated, but possesses excellent natural talents, combined with great decision of character and undaunted courage. His violent temper renders him difficult to control, and therefore I consider Zavala's presence here indispensably necessary, as he possesses great influence over the general."
— Joel R. Poinsett, US minister for Mexico (i.e. Ambassador), about the character of Vicente Guerrero

Guerrero was elected the second president of mexico in 1829. As president, Guerrero went on to champion the cause not only of the racially oppressed but also of the economically oppressed. The most notable achievement of Guerrero's short term as president was ordering an immediate abolition of slavery on September 16th of 1829.[8] and emancipation of all slaves. During Guerrero's presidency the spanish tried to reconquer mexico however the spanish failed and were defeated at the Battle of Tampico.

“This is the most liberal and munificent Government on earth to emigrants – after being here one year you will oppose a change even to Uncle Sam”

—Stephen Fuller Austin, 1829, letter to his sister describing Guerrero's Government of Mexico (and Texas)

Guerrero was deposed in a rebellion under Vice-President Anastasio Bustamante that began on 4 December 1829. He left the capital to fight the rebels, but was deposed by the Mexico City garrison in his absence on 17 December 1829. Guerrero hoped to come back to power, but General Bustamante captured him from his home through bribery and a group of reactionaries had him executed.

After his death, mexicans loyal to Guerrero revolted, driving Bustamante from his presidency and forcing him to flee for his life. Picaluga, a former friend of Guerrero, who conspired with Bustamante to capture Guerrero, was executed.

Honors were conferred on surviving members of Guerrero's family, and a pension was paid to his widow. In 1842, Vicente Guerrero's body was returned to Mexico City and interred there. Guerrero’s political discourse was one of civil rights for all. mexicans with hearts full of pride call him the greatest man of color to ever live.

Guerrero is a mexican national hero. The state of Guerrero is named in his honour.

Several towns in mexico are named in honor of this famous general, including Vicente Guerrero in Baja California and the mexican State of Guerrero, on the mainland of mexico.

Phillis Wheatley

 

Phillis Wheatley

1753–1784

Although she was an African slave, Phillis Wheatley was one of the best-known poets in prenineteenth-century America. Pampered in the household of prominent Boston commercialist John Wheatley, lionized in New England and England, with presses in both places publishing her poems, and paraded before the new republic's political leadership and the old empire's aristocracy, Phillis was the abolitionists' illustrative testimony that blacks could be both artistic and intellectual. Her name was a household word among literate colonists and her achievements a catalyst for the fledgling antislavery movement.

Phillis was seized from Senegal/Gambia, West Africa, when she was about seven years old. She was transported to the Boston docks with a shipment of "refugee" slaves, who because of age or physical frailty were unsuited for rigorous labor in the West Indian and Southern colonies, the first ports of call after the Atlantic crossing. In the month of August 1761, "in want of a domestic," Susanna Wheatley, wife of prominent Boston tailor John Wheatley, purchased "a slender, frail female child ... for a trifle" because the captain of the slave ship believed that the waif was terminally ill, and he wanted to gain at least a small profit before she died. A Wheatley relative later reported that the family surmised the girl—who was "of slender frame and evidently suffering from a change of climate," nearly naked, with "no other covering than a quantity of dirty carpet about her"—to be "about seven years old ... from the circumstances of shedding her front teeth."

After discovering the girl's precociousness, the Wheatleys, including their son Nathaniel and their daughter Mary, did not entirely excuse Phillis from her domestic duties but taught her to read and write. Soon she was immersed in the Bible, astronomy, geography, history, British literature (particularly John Milton and Alexander Pope), and the Greek and Latin classics of Vergil, Ovid, Terence, and Homer. In "To the University of Cambridge in New England" (probably the first poem she wrote but not published until 1773) Phillis indicated that despite this exposure, rich and unusual for an American slave, her spirit yearned for the intellectual challenge of a more academic atmosphere.

Although scholars had generally believed that An Elegiac Poem, on the Death of that Celebrated Divine, and Eminent Servant of Jesus Christ, the Reverend and Learned George Whitefield ... (1770) was Wheatley's first published poem, Carl Bridenbaugh revealed in 1969 that thirteen-year-old Phillis—after hearing a miraculous saga of survival at sea—wrote "On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin," a poem which was published on 21 December 1767 in the Newport, Rhode Island, Mercury. But it was the Whitefield elegy that brought Wheatley national renown. Published as a broadside and a pamphlet in Boston, Newport, and Philadelphia, the poem was published with Ebenezer Pemberton's funeral sermon for Whitefield in London in 1771, bringing her international acclaim.

By the time she was eighteen, Phillis had gathered a collection of twenty-eight poems for which she, with the help of Mrs. Wheatley, ran advertisements for subscribers in Boston newspapers in February 1772. When the colonists were apparently unwilling to support literature by an African, she and the Wheatleys turned in frustration to London for a publisher. Phillis had forwarded the Whitefield poem to Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, to whom Whitefield had been chaplain. A wealthy supporter of evangelical and abolitionist causes, the countess instructed bookseller Archibald Bell to begin correspondence with Phillis in preparation for the book.

Phillis, suffering from a chronic asthma condition and accompanied by Nathaniel, left for London on 8 May 1771. The now-celebrated poetess was welcomed by several dignitaries: abolitionists' patron the Earl of Dartmouth, poet and activist Baron George Lyttleton, Sir Brook Watson (soon to be the Lord Mayor of London), philanthropist John Thorton, and Benjamin Franklin. While Phillis was recrossing the Atlantic to reach Mrs. Wheatley, who, at the summer's end, had become seriously ill, Bell was circulating the first edition of Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), the first volume of poetry by an American Negro published in modern times.

Poems on Various Subjects revealed that Phillis's favorite poetic form was the couplet, both iambic pentameter and heroic. More than one-third of her canon is composed of elegies, poems on the deaths of noted persons, friends, or even strangers whose loved ones employed the poet. The poems that best demonstrate her abilities and are most often questioned by detractors are those that employ classical themes as well as techniques. In her epyllion "Niobe in Distress for Her Children Slain by Apollo, from Ovid's Metamorphoses , Book VI, and from a "View of the Painting of Mr. Richard Wilson," she not only translates Ovid but adds her own beautiful lines to extend the dramatic imagery. In "To Maecenas" she transforms Horace's ode into a celebration of Christ."

In addition to classical and neoclassical techniques, Wheatley applied biblical symbolism to evangelize and to comment on slavery. For instance, "On Being Brought from Africa to America," the best-known Wheatley poem, chides the Great Awakening audience to remember that Africans must be included in the Christian stream: "Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain, /May be refin'd and join th' angelic train." The remainder of Wheatley's themes can be classified as celebrations of America. She was the first to applaud this nation as glorious "Columbia" and that in a letter to no less than the first president of the United States, George Washington, with whom she had corresponded and whom she was later privileged to meet. Her love of virgin America as well as her religious fervor is further suggested by the names of those colonial leaders who signed the attestation that appeared in some copies of Poems on Various Subjects to authenticate and support her work: Thomas Hutchinson, governor of Massachusetts; John Hancock; Andrew Oliver, lieutenant governor; James Bowdoin; and Reverend Mather Byles. Another fervent Wheatley supporter was Dr. Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

Phillis was manumitted some three months before Mrs. Wheatley died on 3 March 1774. Although many British editorials castigated the Wheatleys for keeping Phillis in slavery while presenting her to London as the African genius, the family had provided an ambiguous haven for the poet. Phillis was kept in a servant's place--a respectable arm's length from the Wheatleys' genteel circles--but she had experienced neither slavery's treacherous demands nor the harsh economic exclusions pervasive in a free-black existence. With the death of her benefactor, Phillis slipped toward this tenuous life. Mary Wheatley and her father died in 1778; Nathaniel, who had married and moved to England, died in 1783. Throughout the lean years of the war and the following depression, the assault of these racial realities was more than her sickly body or aesthetic soul could withstand.

On 1 April 1778, despite the skepticism and disapproval of some of her closest friends, Phillis married John Peters, whom she had known for some five years. A free black, Peters evidently aspired to entrepreneurial and professional greatness. He is purported in various historical records to have called himself Dr. Peters, to have practiced law (perhaps as a free-lance advocate for hapless blacks), kept a grocery in Court Street, exchanged trade as a baker and a barber, and applied for a liquor license for a bar. Described by Merle A. Richmond as "a man of very handsome person and manners," who "wore a wig, carried a cane, and quite acted out 'the gentleman,'" Peters was also called "a remarkable specimen of his race, being a fluent writer, a ready speaker." Peters's ambitions cast him as "shiftless," arrogant, and proud in the eyes of some reporters, but as a black man in an era that valued only his brawn, Peters's business acumen was simply not salable. Like many others who scattered throughout the Northeast to avoid the fighting during the Revolutionary War, the Peterses moved temporarily from Boston to Wilmington, Massachusetts, shortly after their marriage.

Merle A. Richmond points out that economic conditions in the colonies during and after the war were harsh, particularly for free blacks, who were unprepared to compete with whites in a stringent job market. These societal factors, rather than any refusal to work on Peters's part, were perhaps most responsible for the newfound poverty that Phillis suffered in Wilmington and Boston, after they later returned there. Between 1779 and 1783, the couple had three children (all of whom died as toddlers), and Peters drifted further into penury, often leaving Phillis to fend for herself and the children by working as a charwoman while he dodged creditors and tried to find employment.

During the first six weeks after their return to Boston, Phillis and the children stayed with one of Mrs. Wheatley's nieces in a bombed-out mansion that was converted to a day school after the war. Peters then moved them into an apartment in a rundown section of Boston, where other Wheatley relatives soon found Phillis sick and destitute. As Margaretta Matilda Odell recalls, "Two of her children were dead, and the third was sick unto death. She was herself suffering for want of attention, for many comforts, and that greatest of all comforts in sickness--cleanliness. She was reduced to a condition too loathsome to describe.... In a filthy apartment, in an obscure part of the metropolis, lay dying the mother, and the wasting child. The woman who had stood honored and respected in the presence of the wise and good ... was numbering the last hours of life in a state of the most abject misery, surrounded by all the emblems of a squalid poverty!"

Yet throughout these lean years, Phillis continued to write and publish her poems and to maintain, though on a much more limited scale, her international correspondence. She also felt that despite the poor economy, her American audience and certainly her evangelical friends would support a second volume of poetry. Between 30 October and 18 December 1779, with at least the partial motive of raising funds for her family, she ran six advertisements soliciting subscribers for "300 pages in Octavo," a volume "Dedicated to the Right Hon. Benjamin Franklin, Esq.: One of the Ambassadors of the United States at the Court of France," that would include thirty-three poems and thirteen letters. As with Poems on Various Subjects, however, the American populace would not support one of its most noted poets. (The first American edition of this book was not published until two years after her death.) During the year of her death (1784), she was able to publish, under the name Phillis Peters, a masterful sixty-four-line poem in a pamphlet entitled Liberty and Peace , which hailed America as "Columbia" victorious over "Britannia Law." Proud of her nation's intense struggle for freedom that, to her, bespoke an eternal spiritual greatness, Phillis ended the poem with a triumphant ring:

Britannia owns her Independent Reign,

Hibernia, Scotia, and the Realms of Spain;

And Great Germania's ample Coast admires

The generous Spirit that Columbia fires.

Auspicious Heaven shall fill with fav'ring Gales,

Where e'er Columbia spreads her swelling Sails:

To every Realm shall Peace her Charms display,

And Heavenly Freedom spread her gold Ray.

On 2 January of that same year, she published An Elegy, Sacred to the Memory of that Great Divine, The Reverend and Learned Dr. Samuel Cooper, just a few days after the death of the Brattle Street church's pastor. And, sadly, in September the "Poetical Essays" section of The Boston Magazine carried "To Mr. and Mrs.________, on the Death of their Infant Son," which probably was a lamentation for the death of one of her own children and which certainly foreshadowed her death three months later."

Phillis Wheatley died, uncared for and alone. As Richmond concludes, with ample evidence, when Phillis expired on 5 December 1784, John Peters was incarcerated, "forced to relieve himself of debt by an imprisonment in the county jail." Their last surviving child died in time to be buried with his mother, and, as Odell recalled, "A grandniece of Phillis' benefactress, passing up Court Street, met the funeral of an adult and a child: a bystander informed her that they were bearing Phillis Wheatley to that silent mansion...."

Recent scholarship shows that Phillis Wheatley wrote perhaps 145 poems (most of which would have been published if the encouragers she begged for had come forth to support the second volume), but this artistic heritage is now lost, probably abandoned during Peters's quest for subsistence after her death. Of the numerous letters she wrote to national and international political and religious leaders, some two dozen notes and letters are extant. As an exhibition of African intelligence, exploitable by members of the enlightenment movement, by evangelical Christians, and by other abolitionists, she was perhaps recognized even more in England and Europe than in America. Early twentieth-century critics of Black American literature were not very kind to Wheatley because of her supposed lack of concern about slavery. Wheatley, however, did have a statement to make about the institution of slavery, and she made it to the most influential segment of eighteenth-century society--the institutional church. Two of the greatest influences on Phillis Wheatley's thought and poetry were the Bible and eighteenth-century evangelical Christianity; but until fairly recently Wheatley's critics did not consider her use of biblical allusion nor its symbolic application as a statement against slavery. She often spoke in explicit biblical language designed to move church members to decisive action. For instance, these bold lines in her poetic eulogy to General David Wooster castigate patriots who confess Christianity yet oppress her people:

But how presumptuous shall we hope to find

Divine acceptance with the Almighty mind

While yet o deed ungenerous they disgrace

And hold in bondage Afric: blameless race

Let virtue reign and then accord our prayers

Be victory ours and generous freedom theirs.

And in an outspoken letter to the Reverend Samson Occom, written after Wheatley was free and published repeatedly in Boston newspapers in 1774, she equates American slaveholding to that of pagan Egypt in ancient times: "Otherwise, perhaps, the Israelites had been less solicitous for their Freedom from Egyptian Slavery: I don't say they would have been contented without it, by no Means, for in every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance; and by the Leave of our modern Egyptians I will assert that the same Principle lives in us."

In the past ten years, Wheatley scholars have uncovered poems, letters, and more facts about her life and her association with eighteenth-century black abolitionists. They have also charted her notable use of classicism and have explicated the sociological intent of her biblical allusions. All this research and interpretation has proven Wheatley's disdain for the institution of slavery and her use of art to undermine its practice. Before the end of this century the full aesthetic, political, and religious implications of Wheatley's art and even more salient facts about her life and works will surely be known and celebrated by all who study the eighteenth century and by all who revere this woman, a most important poet in the American literary canon.
— Sondra A. O'Neale, Emory University

Bibliography

Books

• An Elegiac Poem, on the Death of that Celebrated Divine, and Eminent Servant of Jesus Christ, the Reverend and Learned George Whitefield ... (Boston: Printed & sold by Ezekiel Russell & by John Boyles, 1770); republished in Heaven the Residence of Saints, by Ebenezer Pemberton (London: Printed for E. & C. Dilly, 1771).
• Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. By Phillis Wheatley, Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley of Boston (London: Printed for Archibald Bell & sold in Boston by Cox & Berry, 1773; Philadelphia: Printed by Joseph Crukshank, 1786).
• An Elegy, Sacred to the Memory of that Great Divine, The Reverend and Learned Dr. Samuel Cooper (Boston: Printed & sold by E. Russell, 1784).
• Liberty and Peace, A Poem (Boston: Printed by Warden & Russell, 1784).

Collections

• Life and Works of Phillis Wheatley. Containing Her complete Poetical Works, Numerous Letters and a complete Biography of This Famous Poet of a Century and a Half Ago, edited by G. Herbert Renfro (Washington, D.C.: A. Jenkins, 1916).
• The Poems of Phillis Wheatley, Edited with an Introduction and Notes, edited by Charlotte Ruth Wright (Philadelphia: The Wrights, 1930).
• The Poems of Phillis Wheatley, edited by Julian D. Mason, Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966).

Letters

• Charles Deane, ed., Letters of Phillis Wheatley, the Negro-Slave Poet of Boston (Boston: Privately printed, 1864).
• Carter G. Woodson, ed., The Mind of the Negro as Reflected in Letters Written During the Crisis: 1800-1860 (Washington, D.C., 1926): xvi-xxi.

Further Reading

William H. Robinson, Phillis Wheatley: A Bio-Bibliography (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981).

Margaretta Matilda Odell, Memoir and Poems of Phillis Wheatley (Boston: Light, 1834).

B. B. Thatcher, Memoir of Phillis Wheatley, A Native African and a Slave (Boston: G. W. Light/New York: Moore & Payne, 1834).

Benjamin Griffith Brawley, Note on Wheatley, in Early Negro American Writers: Selections with Biographical and Critical Introductions, edited by Brawley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935), pp. 31-55.

Brawley, Negro Builders and Heroes (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1937).

Shirley Graham, The Story of Phillis Wheatley (New York: J. Messner, 1949).

Martha Bacon, Puritan Promenade (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964).

Sidney Kaplan, "Phillis Wheatley," in The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution, 1770-1800 (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1973), pp. 150-170.

Merle A. Richmond, Bid the Vassal Soar: Interpretive Essays on the Life and Poetry of Phillis Wheatley (ca. 1753-1784) and George Moses Horton (ca. 1799-1883) (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974).

Carl Bridenbaugh, "The First Published Poems of Phillis Wheatley," New England Quarterly, 42 (December 1969): 583-584.

Charles F. Heartman, Phillis Wheatley: A Critical Attempt and a Bibliography of Her Writings (New York: Printed for the author, 1915).

Mukhtar Ali Isani, "The British Reception of Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects," Journal of Negro History, 66 (Summer 1981): 144-149.

Sarah Dunlap Jackson, "Letters of Phillis Wheatley and Susanna Wheatley," Journal of Negro History, 58 (April 1972): 212.

Robert C. Kuncio, "Some Unpublished Poems of Phillis Wheatley," New England Quarterly, 43 (June 1970): 287-297.

Thomas Oxley, "Survey of Negro Literature," Messenger: World's Greatest Negro Monthly, 60 (February 1927): 37-39.

Carole A. Parks, "Phillis Wheatley Comes Home," Black World, 23 (February 1974): 92-97.

Benjamin Quarles, "A Phillis Wheatley Letter," Journal of Negro History, 34 (October 1949): 462-466.

Gregory Rigsby, "Form and Content in Phillis Wheatley's Elegies," CLA Journal, 19 (December 1975): 248-257.

Rigsby, "Phillis Wheatley's Craft as Reflected in Her Revised Elegies," Journal of Negro Education, 47 (Fall 1978): 402-413.

William H. Robinson, Phillis Wheatley in the Black American Beginnings (Detroit: Broadside Press, 1975).

Robinson, "Phillis Wheatley in London," CLA Journal, 21 (December 1977): 187-201.

Robinson, ed., Critical Essays on Phillis Wheatley (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982).

Charles Scruggs, "Phillis Wheatley and the Poetical Legacy of Eighteenth Century England," Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture, 10 (1981): 279-295.

John C. Shields, "Phillis Wheatley and Mather Byles: A Study in Literary Relationship," CLA Journal, 23 (June 1980): 391-398.

Shields, "Phillis Wheatley's Use of Classicism," American Literature, 52 (March 1980): 97-111.

Kenneth Silverman, "Four New Letters by Phillis Wheatley," Early American Literature, 8 (Winter 1974): 257-271.

Ignatius Sancho

Ignatius Sancho
Signature

Ignatius Sancho (c. 1729 – 14 December 1780) was acomposer, actor, and writer. He is the first known Black Briton to vote in a British election. He gained fame in his time as “the extraordinary Negro”, and to 18th century British abolitionists he became a symbol of the humanity of Africans and immorality of the slave trade.^{[citation needed]} The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African, edited and published two years after his death, is one of the earliest accounts of African slavery written by a former slave in English.

Biography

Ignatius Sancho was born on a slave ship in 1729; his precise birthplace is thus unknown. After his mother died in the Spanishcolony of New Granada and his father committed suicide rather than live as a slave, Sancho was taken to England and in 1731 was given to three maiden sisters living inGreenwich. While a young man, he met John Montagu, 2nd Duke of Montagu, who took an interest in his education (much as Montagu already had in Francis Williams’ education), and in 1749 Sancho ran away and sought refuge with the Montagu families. The Duke had just died but his wife agreed to employ him as butler; when the Duchess of Montagu died in 1751 she left Sancho an annuity of £30 and a year’s salary. The salary and his savings gave Sancho £70 in available money, which he spent lavishly as he sought to enjoy his life.
In 1766, Sancho became valet to the newly recreated George Montagu, first duke of the new creation and son-in-law of his earlier patrons. In 1768, Sancho’s portrait was painted by Thomas Gainsborough. With help from Montagu, Sancho and his wife, Ann Osborne, set up a grocery shop in Westminster, early in 1774. In addition to shopwork, Sancho wrote and published a Theory of Music and two plays. As a financially independent male householder living in Westminster, Sancho qualified to vote in the parliamentary elections of 1774 and 1780; he was the first black person of African origin known to have voted in Britain. At this time he also wrote letters and in newspapers, under his own name and under the pseudonym ”Africanus”: he supported the monarchyand British forces in the American Revolutionary War.
Ignatius Sancho died from the effects of gout on December 14, 1780, and became the first African to be given an obituary in the British press. Two years later, Frances Crewe arranged for his letters to be published; these appeared as the two-volume The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African. The book sold very well, and his widow received over £500 in royalties.
A plaque to the memory of Sancho was unveiled on June 15, 2007, by Nick Raynsford, MP for Greenwich, on the remaining wall of Montague House on the south west boundary of Greenwich Park. The plaque was funded by Friends of Greenwich Park to commemorate bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, made law in 1807.

Elizabeth I Motives for Expulsion of Blackamoors from London

Did race discrimination by colour begin in England with Elizabeth I’s use of ‘blackamoores’ as prisoner exchange currency after the failed Spanish Armada?

The presence of Africans in early modern England has remained a subject in its infant stage of studies, suggests drama historian, Gustav Ungere (2008). As late as the 1980s, historians clung to the view that there is no way of establishing how many coloured persons had been taken to or had settled in early modern England, he states. Some evidence is gradually emerging from historical research; Ungere used Spanish documents to assist his discussion.

African Black History in Elizabethan England

One reason why the black populations of London are difficult to establish is lack of public record. With no tax on the import of slaves, such as operated in other European countries, and anyway a government monopoly on the trade of Africans from Guinea as house servants, it was 1588 before attempts were made to formalise their presence.
Most black servants were slaves, but some were freed men, the majority from Guinea, but a few Moors from north Africa, so Ungere’s researches show. It was the Moors that gave rise to anxiety, perhaps because many had strong ties with Spain, with which Elizabeth was at war, but also because Moors were Muslims.

In what inventories of servants remain from grand households of the time, no discrimination is made between servants by colour, except where they are pictorially represented. Queen Elizabeth I may have instigated the change in that.

Elizabeth I Proclaims ‘Too Many Blackamoores in London’

In 1596, Queen Elizabeth issued an “open letter” to the Lord Mayor of London, announcing that “there are of late divers blackmoores brought into this realme, of which kinde of people there are allready here to manie,” and ordering that they be deported from the country, documents in the National Archive show. At the time the letter had little effect, but Elizabeth’s skilled use of rhetoric may be considered to have stirred a sense of racist differentiation and to have begun the development of a vocabulary of discrimination.
One week later, she reiterated her “good pleasure to have those kinde of people sent out of the lande” and commissioned the merchant Casper van Senden to “take up” certain “blackamoores here in this realme and to transport them into Spaine and Portugall.” Finally, in 1601, she complained again about the “great numbers of Negars and Blackamoors which (as she is informed) are crept into this realm,” defamed them as “infidels, having no understanding of Christ or his Gospel,” and again authorized their deportation.
Emily Bartels, whose research is through evidence in literature of the time, believes that this discrimination remained a religious rather than racist one. Bartels also suggests that the increasing number of foreigners arriving in London were the result of privateers capturing Spanish ships, and that Elizabeth in fact wished to use their affiliations with Spain as currency in prisoner exchange. Many English prisoners lay in foreign gaols, and the ‘blackamoores’ were her bargaining tools.

Shakespeare Black Characters Reveal Racism in Elizabethan England

Critics have only speculated about the identity of these subjects – first called “blackmoores” and in the last letter “Negars and Blackamoors” – and, in efforts to underscore the racial politics significantly at issue here, have named them “blacks,” “black servants,” “Moors,” and “Africans,” Bartels says, suggesting that these terms are more vague than specific in a contemporary sense.
That race discrimination existed in England in the reign of Elizabeth I is underlined, Ungere suggests, by Shakespeare. “In 1594 Shakespeare confronted the Elizabethans with the dramatic figure of Aaron, a literate African trained in the classics. Shakespeare’s characterization of Aaron presented a striking departure from the established discourse of black inferiority. The novelty was calculated, in the first place, to unsettle the average Elizabethan theatregoer.”
Histories of racism and multicultural approaches to understanding it, do appear to stretch at least back into the sixteenth century. The imbalance of power that came to characterise English exploitation of the slave trade and establishment of the infamous trade triangle at the centre of the economic system certainly stems from the political turbulence of that era.
Sources:
The National Archives Online Exhibition: ‘Black Settlers in Tudor Times’
Bartels, Emily C. (2006) ‘Too many Blackamoors: deportation, discrimination, and Elizabeth I’ Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 March
Ungere, Gustav (2008) ‘The presence of Africans in Elizabethan England and the performance of Titus Andronicus at Burley-on-the-Hill, 1595/96′ Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, Vol. 21
Other Articles by Valerie Williamson on Race & History:
Black British History Teaching Strategies Challenged
Battle to Represent Black British History and Race Resistance

Scotland's Black Afrikan History

October is Black History Month, an event first marked in the UK 25 years ago. Scotland has close associations with the black African and Caribbean communities it celebrates.

Black History Month has been held annually in the US since the 1920s and in the UK from the late 80s.
It is a celebration of the contribution that black African and Caribbean communities have made on a local level and across the world.
Hackney, London, is where it all started in British terms and the London borough is holding various events to mark the 25th anniversary.
Scotland’s black history is populated by interesting and important characters, many of whom had to endure prejudice and racism. But who were some of these people?

Shipwreck survivors

On the bottom of in Eddrachillis Bay near Drumbeg, in Sutherland, lie three cannon and part of a wooden hull of an age-old ship.
Archaeologists believe it could be the remains of a Dutch vessel that got into difficulty off Scotland’s remote north-west Highland coast between 1650 and 1750.

A diver inspects one of the three cannon found in Eddrachillis Bay

One theory is that the vessel was owned by the Dutch East India Company, also known as VOC.
Founded in 1602, it was the world’s biggest and most powerful trading company until it collapsed in financial ruin in 1799.
Its vessels regularly sailed around the north of Scotland because of the favourable winds and also to avoid the English Channel, particularly at times of war and tensions in Europe.
The cannon could have been used by the Drumbeg ship’s crew to ward off privateers, privately-owned armed vessels commissioned by a state to attack an enemy’s shipping.
And it has been suggested some or all of the crew may have survived their ordeal.
There is possible evidence of foreign sailors setting up home in the north of Scotland after their vessel foundered off the Sutherland coast.
The First Statistical Account of Scotland published between 1791 and 1799 records how the climate of the area was pleasant enough for “natives of the East and West Indies” to live there.
Philip Robertson, a Historic Scotland marine archaeologist, told BBC Scotland in March that the origins of the Drumbeg crew, and their fate, was still unknown.
But he added: “The wreck gives us a unique window into our history and, interestingly, the trading activity off the Scottish coastline and across the world.”

Slaves

Scots were heavily involved in the slave trade of the 18th and 19th Centuries, something which leading historian Prof Tom Devine has accused Scotland of ignoring today.
Men and women were put to work in Scots-run plantations in the colonies. Female slaves were also sexually abused by their owners.
An exhibition on slavery held in 2011 involving the Centre for History in Dornoch and Edinburgh Beltane organisation featured correspondence detailing the keeping of sex slaves.
The letters were sent by Highland owners to relatives in Inverness and their contents were described as “graphic” and “disturbing” by researchers.
Scotland’s slave past is also recorded in other sources.

A close up of the mystery figure at Culloden who appears on the right edge of the tapestry

In 2007, historians were intrigued by a mysterious black figure who appears in a tapestry depicting the Battle of Culloden of 16 April 1746.
Some at experts at the National Trust for Scotland had a theory that he may be a Jamaican servant of an officer on the government side.
Little is known of the 18th Century needlework, and the trust said it was not clear if the tapestry was a true depiction of a scene from the battle, or one featuring later influences.
Fossil hunter
Papers in the JLM Mitchell Archive of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, meanwhile, include a Scottish soldier’s request to take his daughter Mary’s black slave with him to war in 1782.
Lt Soirle MacDonald, from Skye, was a British Army officer in the American War of Independence.
His daughter’s slave was called Doll. She was likely to have been made to do domestic duties.

“Slowly it became clear just how many Highland Scots had connections to slave-worked plantations ”
—–Dr David Alston

Records detailing compensation paid by the British government to slave owners after slavery was abolished mention Gen Sir James Duff, an army officer and MP for Banffshire.

He was awarded £4,101, more than £3m in today’s money, to compensate him for the 202 slaves he was forced by law to give up on the Grange Sugar Estate in Jamaica.
David Alston, a local historian and Highland councillor, has also examined slavery.
He was drawn to the subject after discovering that fossil hunter, geologist and writer Hugh Miller sat next to a black pupil in the school he attended in Cromarty.
Dr Alston said: “I gradually noticed more and more local connections with the Caribbean, including references on gravestones.
“Slowly it became clear just how many Highland Scots had connections to slave-worked plantations and how many children were born to these Highlanders and either enslaved or ‘free coloured’ women.”
Further research led Dr Alston to find that almost every prominent school in the Highlands had black pupils on its roll at some time between 1790 and 1830.
He said: “I keep my research very focussed on the three former Dutch colonies which later became British Guiana, now Guyana, on the north coast of South America.
“Almost everyone will recognise the name of one of the colonies – Demerara.
“I have now identified almost 450 people with Highland connections involved in the plantation of Guyana before emancipation of slaves in 1834.”

Scots fought against slavery serving with Union forces in the American Civil War

But Scots also fought against slavery.
They served in the Union army in the American Civil War of 1861-65. Slavery was among issues that divided American society at the time, and led to a violent conflict.
Lt Col William L Duff, Sgt Maj John McEwan, Robert Steedman, James Wilkie, Robert Ferguson and Alexander Smith are listed on a civil war memorial in Edinburgh.
Other Scots who fought for the Union included Glasgow-born John McTammany, who served in the 115th Ohio volunteers.
Another was George Henry Mackenzie, who was born 175 years ago in North Kessock, a small community across the Beauly Firth from Inverness.
As a captain, he led Black Union soldiers.

Sports stars

Football was where two key figures in Scotland’s black history excelled in the face of extreme prejudice in the late 1800s.
Carrie Boustead played in goals for a number of teams including Mrs Graham’s XI, a women’s team set up by Helen Matthew, the daughter of a Montrose-born master mariner.
Richard McBrearty, of the Scottish Football Museum, said: “A degree of mystery surrounds Carrie Boustead.

Carrie Boustead in a painting by artist Stuart Gibbs

“It is believed that Carrie Boustead was originally known as Clara Berry and was raised in Liverpool during the 1870s.
“Carrie first comes to prominence in 1896 when she played in a series of football matches north and south of the border.”
Boustead was in goals for a London team that played at Barrowfield Park in Glasgow in May 1896, and also in a game held in Stirling.
She was listed as being goalkeeper for Mrs Graham’s XI in a match played at Wishaw in Lanarkshire.
Boustead is among women footballers of the 1800s portrayed in paintings by Scots artist Stuart Gibbs.
Mr McBrearty said: “At a time when there was widespread cynicism towards women playing football, Boustead was a successful proponent of the women’s game and she, along with her team mates of the period, should be remembered for their achievements north and south of the border as pioneers.”
‘Greatest defenders’
While much of Boustead’s life is a mystery, the career of Andrew Watson, Scotland’s first black international footballer, is well documented.
Mr Brearty said: “Watson was one of the greatest defenders of his generation.
“He played in three of the greatest and most high profile teams of the 1880s – Queen’s Park FC, Corinthians, and Scotland.”
Watson, who was born in Georgetown, British Guiana, and whose father was a plantation manager and former slave owner from Orkney, played for Scotland at a time when they dominated international football.
His three caps for Scotland were a 6-1 and 5-1 win over England and a 5-1 win over Wales.
Mr Brearty said: “On his debut in 1881 he captained Scotland to a 6-1 win over England at the Oval in London – this remains England’s heaviest defeat on home soil.”
He added: “Watson only won three caps because he moved away from Scotland and down to London in 1882 and was beyond the gaze of the international selectors.
“While in London in 1882 he played for the London Swifts in an FA Cup match and became the first known black footballer to play in the FA Cup.
“He is the first black international footballer and international football captain.”

Watson, sitting middle, as captain of Scotland prior to the 1881 international match with England

England’s Corinthians included a few non-English players. Watson was the first of those footballers and he played in the team’s 8-1 win over reigning FA Cup holders Blackburn Rovers in 1884.
But Watson’s star qualities on the pitch did not protect him from racial abuse.
Mr McBrearty said: “The Scottish Athletic Journal provided an overview of his career in 1885.
“It stated: ‘Although on more than one occasion subjected to vulgar insults by splenetic, ill-tempered players, he uniformly preserved that gentlemanly demeanour which has endeared him to opponents as well as his club companions’.
“This suggests that he experienced racism on the field, but that he was able to rise above insults and let his sporting ability shine through on the park.”
But he added: “One of the best complements to Watson’s ability can be found in his selection in an all-star Scotland team in 1926. JAH Catton, editor of the Athletic News, selected Watson at left back in his all-time Scotland team, 44 years after his last Scotland appearance.”

Air ace

Eugene Bullard – America’s first black combat pilot – must rate among one of the most unusual characters from Scotland’s black history.
Georgia-born Bullard’s ancestors included slaves from Martinique who were brought to America by their French owners as they fled the Haitian slave revolution.
His father spoke French and also talked fondly of France, instilling in Bullard a belief that it was the true land of opportunity, free of prejudice.
Spurred by an attempt to lynch his father and his own brushes with racial hatred, Bullard worked towards getting himself to Paris. This journey first took him to Scotland.
According to Craig Lloyd’s book Eugene Bullard: Black Expatriate in Jazz-Age Paris, Bullard was barely in his teens when he stowed away on a German cargo ship at Norfolk, Virginia.

Eugene Bullard, America’s first combat pilot, fled to Scotland to escape racial hatred in the US

New history-makers

• Scotland’s history-makers today include Emeli Sande and Ikechi Anya
• Multi award-winning singer Sande was born in Sunderland of a Zambian father and English mother before moving to Alford with her parents, aged four, and being brought up in Scotland
• Glasgow-born Anya plays football for Watford and Scotland. His parents are Nigerian and Romanian academics

The captain of the Marta Russ first threatened to throw Bullard overboard, before giving him the chance of working on the ship on its passage to Aberdeen.

Bullard left his ship shortly after it reached Aberdeen. He spent a day in the Granite City before taking a train to Glasgow.
While he was relieved to find he was not the target of vicious racial abuse in Scotland, Lloyd said that Bullard did have one immediate problem.
Lloyd wrote: “At first he had difficulty with the Scottish dialect and accent: ‘the language the natives spoke was sort of like English’.”
Bullard spent five months in Glasgow and earned money acting as a lookout at illegal gambling dens.
He later headed for Liverpool and then finally France.
In World War I, he served with the French Foreign Legion and saw action at some of the bloodiest battles, including the Somme and Artois Ridge.

Eugene Bullard spent time in Aberdeen and Glasgow

Wounds he suffered at Verdun ruled him out from returning to the front line as a soldier, but he was offered a chance to become a pilot with the French Flying Corps.
In 1917, he qualified as a flyer. He earned one officially confirmed kill.
When the US entered the war, Bullard sought a transfer to its air force. His request was ignored.
Bullard remained in Paris after the war.
He became part-owner of a night club, got married and had three children.
During World War II, he fought with the French resistance until he was badly wounded and was smuggled into Spain.
Thirty-three years after his death in 1961 the US Air Force posthumously commissioned him as a lieutenant in honour of his war-time exploits.