The Fire This Time

From the colonial era to the end of the Civil War, European-Americans systematically enslaved Africans and African Americans. Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s essay excerpts the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, who wrote of her enslavement: “I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate / Was snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat: / What pangs excruciating must molest, / What sorrows labour in my parent’s breast?” (67). Many, many Africans experienced the same traumatic capture and were denied essential human rights—including working without proper compensation and being separated from their families—once they reached America. While researching slavery in New England, Wendy S. Walters attended a talk about an African Burial Ground, during which a man named Keith Stokes said, “Slavery is violent, grotesque, vulgar, and we are all implicated in how it denigrates humanity” (47). 

Although the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery in 1865, state legislatures and other authorities sought to suppress black Americans through other means over the ensuing decades. As Carol Anderson describes, “emancipation brought white resentment that the good ol’ days of black subjugation were over” (84). This suppression of African Americans continues to the present, as indicated in events like the shootings of unarmed black people during the 2010s.