BOOK: ‘Symbols of Freedom’ chronicles pre-Civil War efforts by slaves and abolitionists in fight for emancipation

Years before Colin Kaepernick took a knee, these people stood up.

Black and white, male and female, enslaved and free, they publicly opposed racism and violence and fought for freedom and equality. And they did it by using and remaking America’s patriotic emblems and rituals.

Matthew J. Clavin tells the story in “Symbols of Freedom: Slavery and Resistance Before the Civil War.” And it’s a story of when love and honesty met bigotry and hypocrisy head-on.

“With state, local, and federal laws regarding African-descended people as property, the language and symbols that served as national touchstones made a mockery of freedom,” Clavin writes. “They encouraged an empty American culture that accepted the abstract notion of equality rather than the concrete idea.”

Some racists openly claimed American icons as their own. In 1822, abolitionist James Dickey was in the woods of Kentucky when he saw a crowd of enslaved men slowly approaching, all tethered to a heavy, 40-foot chain. White guards had made one of the Black men carry an American flag.

An outraged Dickey later wrote to a local paper, saying he couldn’t imagine a worse perversion than “to hoist the Star-Spangled Banner, the flag of freedom, the Eagle of proud America, over a set of unhappy slaves, fettered to misery.”

Anti-slavery publications soon reprinted his account, some adding an artist’s interpretation of the scene. Others added the ugly fact that, with Washington, D.C., still a major slave market, parades like this regularly passed in front of the U.S. Capitol as people were marched to auction.

One of those men was Solomon Northup. He had been a free New Yorker in 1841, working in D.C. as a musician. One night, some criminals drugged him. They then sold him to the city’s largest slave dealer, claiming Northup was a runaway. He woke up the next morning locked in a vast human stockyard. And above him, that symbol of freedom, the American flag, fluttered.

“Strange as it may seem within plain sight of this house looking down from its commanding height upon it, was the Capitol,” Northup wrote later. “The voices of patriotic representatives boasting of freedom and equality and the rattling of the poor slave’s chains almost commingled, A slave pen in the very shadow of the Capitol! How hypocritical!”

It took Northup a dozen years to escape captivity and make his way north. His memoir, “Twelve Years a Slave,” became a 19th-century bestseller and, later, an Oscar-winning film.

By the 1840s, many abolitionist groups refused to display the national symbol at their events. Others changed it. At an anti-slavery rally in New York, organizers flew a giant flag emblazoned with a slave ship. At an American Anti-Slavery Society convention in Massachusetts, founder William Lloyd Garrison proudly debuted the model for a new national banner — a bald eagle trampling on humanity.

But abolitionists had to do more than change a few flags to reclaim America’s symbols.

Although the Fourth of July was celebrated throughout the country, it had different meanings in different regions. In the North, many celebrations began with the Declaration of Independence proudly read aloud in the town square. In the South, though, that document was considered dangerous.

What if, hearing it, enslaved people began thinking of themselves “as white men with black skins, as their friends would have them think, and that all men are really ‘born free and equal,’” warned the American Cotton Planter, a pre-Civil War journal. Better to devote the day to a barbecue at the plantation, the publication advised.

If they wanted, though, the owners could share some of the food with their enslaved workers. That way, it wrote, “this festival may be made a powerful controlling” agent to manage slaves.

In the North, disgusted abolitionists began to wonder if the Fourth should be recognized at all. Some free Blacks held onto the holiday — the editor of the Black-owned Freedom’s Journal insisted that since Blacks had fought and died for this country’s freedom, they had every right to celebrate it. Yet some disagreed, suggesting abandoning Independence Day.

Others offered an alternative. Some free Blacks and their allies celebrated Aug. 1 instead, the day that Great Britain outlawed slavery. Others gathered on the fifth of July to remind the nation of the still unfulfilled ideals of the Declaration of Independence.

And at one of those gatherings, the featured speaker was Frederick Douglass.

Born into slavery in Maryland, Douglass learned the alphabet from his owner’s wife — until her husband forbade the lessons. Still, a fire had been kindled. Douglass traded food for spelling lessons from other children. When he was 20, he finally escaped, borrowing a sailor suit and government ID from a friend.

After two trains and a steamboat ride, he was in New York. But he still was not free; under the law, he could be captured and returned in chains to Maryland at any time. Years later, after he published his bestselling autobiography, supporters took up a collection and bought his emancipation.

Touring the nation, Douglass delivered one spellbinding speech after another.

“I have no love for America, as such,” he thundered. “I have no patriotism. I have no country.” As long as the government allowed slavery, he declared, “I desire to see it overthrown as speedily as possible and its Constitution shivered in a thousand fragments.”

His rage reached a boiling point in 1852 at a Fifth of July celebration in Rochester. Scheduled to speak, he strode to the stage — and held it for two hours as he attacked the hypocrisy of Independence Day.

“What, to the slave, is your Fourth of July?” he asked. “To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your sounds of rejoicing empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery.”

Still, he allowed the United States still ruled in one respect: “For revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without rival.”

For many whites, it was a call to arms. Blacks, though, needed no such encouragement. Almost from the moment they arrived here, they had resisted — sometimes escaping their brutal enslavers, sometimes choosing suicide over slavery. Others waged war, even though the odds were almost insurmountable.

In 1831, the enslaved Nat Turner swore to start a rebellion against white supremacy, deciding on July 4 as his own day of independence. Although a brief illness forced him to abandon that date, by August, he was leading 70 other blacks on a bloody rampage across Virginia. When it was over, 60 whites had been killed, and scores of Blacks — many of them noncombatants — slain in response.

Turner was caught, tried, and executed. His skin was stripped off and sold as souvenirs.

Yet although Southern newspapers covered all of this, they inevitably left out the detail of that original July 4 date. “The reason was obvious,” Clavin writes. “To reinforce the proslavery argument that enslaved people were ignorant of political rituals, symbols, and ideas, and thus undeserving of freedom and incapable of citizenship.”

But Blacks always knew what these symbols meant. They knew what promises had been made.

And very soon, they and their allies would go to war to ensure the nation kept them.