Denmark Vesey: Hero? Or Villain?

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...ON Feb. 14, a group of activists in Charleston, S.C., unveiled a life-size statue of Denmark Vesey, a black abolitionist who was executed in 1822 for leading a failed slave rebellion in the city.

For many people, Vesey was a freedom fighter and a proto-civil rights leader. But the statue, the work of nearly two decades, brought out furious counterattacks; one recent critic called him a “terrorist,” and a historian denounced him as “a man determined to create mayhem.”

Radio hosts, academics and newspaper bloggers condemned the project as “Charleston’s parallel to the 1990s O. J. Simpson verdict,” and suggested other African-Americans they believed more appropriate subjects of memorialization, like the rock pioneer Chubby Checker or the astronaut Ronald E. McNair.

There’s no doubt that Vesey was a violent man, who planned to attack and kill Charleston whites. But those who condemn him as a terrorist merely demonstrate how little we, as a culture, understand about slavery, and what it forced the men and women it ensnared to do.

Vesey was as complicated a figure as the world that produced him. He was born around 1767, probably on the island of St. Thomas. As a child he was purchased as a cabin boy by Joseph Vesey, a Charleston-based slaver, who settled in the city just after the Revolution.

In 1799, the huge, bright, domestic slave won $1,500 in a city lottery and used $600 of that money to purchase his freedom. But his wife’s master evidently refused to sell her to him, and Charleston whites continued to own her and many of his children.

By early 1822, Vesey had begun to develop a plan for city slaves to rise up. On July 14, they would slay their masters as they slept, fight their way toward the docks and hoist sail for the black republic of Haiti, where slaves had successfully overthrown the French colonists two decades earlier.

Vesey had not lived through the horrors of slavery in the Caribbean and South Carolina by turning the other cheek. With a tough-minded brutality that shocks modern critics of the statue, he worried little about the civilians who might fall as the rebelling slaves worked their way to the docks. While discussing the men who owned his wife and family with his fellow plotters, Vesey picked up a large snake in his path and crushed it with one hand. “That’s the way we would do them,” he said calmly.

When the plot was foiled and Vesey and his co-conspirators captured, white Charleston erupted in anger. During his trial in June 1822, the justices charged him with “a diabolical plot” designed to instigate “blood, outrage, rapine, and conflagration.” Outside the castle-like structure, black women sang and prayed as city authorities sentenced Vesey and 34 of his followers to hang....

The hysteria and fear fomented amongst the minority white population fanned the flames of the fear of future slave insurrection. In response to the Vesey conspiracy, the South Carolina Association was formed to provide more effective control of the black population. The African Church building was ordered destroyed by city authorities.
Among the limits imposed on South Carolinians in the wake of the failed conspiracy were the restricting of owner’s right of manumission of slaves, restrictions on the movement of free persons of color in and out of the state and requiring them to secure a white guardian who could vouch for their character. An act also compelled the forced imprisonment of black sailors visiting Charleston. This later act was ruled unconstitutional in Federal Court and played a small part in the confrontation between South Carolina and the Federal Government over State Rights.
In late 1822, the City petitioned the General Assembly "to establish a competent force to act as a municipal guard for the protection of the City of Charleston and its vicinity." The General Assembly agreed and appropriated funds to erect "suitable buildings for an Arsenal, for the deposit of the arms of the State, and a Guard House, and for the use of the municipal guard."

About all he did was make life harder for existing slaves with his revolt that would have been defeated at all cost, away. He could have put his passion and energies to better use by helping slaves escape to the north. His heart was in the right place but that's not always enough.....

The reactions to this surprise me. I don't think people have done a lot of research on slavery, if they don't think slaves are entitled to kill slavers. Was Spartacus bad too?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denmark_Vesey


About all he did was make life harder for existing slaves with his revolt that would have been defeated at all cost, away. He could have put his passion and energies to better use by helping slaves escape to the north. His heart was in the right place but that's not always enough.....

But the North is full of, you know, "Liberals." Why would a slave want to leave a godly Conservative state just to go to Pinko-land?

The lesson being that if you get sold into slavery, don't revolt?

If he'd known the revolt would end in failure, I doubt he would have gone ahead with it.

Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert. -MLK