“It is self-evident that no number of men, by conspiring, and calling themselves a government, can acquire any rights whatever over other men, or other men’s property, which they had not before legally possessed, as individuals.” — Lysander Spooner (circa 1867)
Hurtling our First Salvo
Many people have never heard the saying, “If you wanna hide something from a nigger, put it in a book… he’ll never find it.” As an avid reader of books, this crass—yet time-honored expression of white racial superiority has been inspirational for me throughout my life as a descendant of American slaves and the first in my family to attend a college. My genealogy report and research establish that my ancestors settled in colonial Virginia before the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and were moved to various southern plantations as enslaved people. After emancipation in the mid-1860s, they were sharecroppers in Mississippi and Tennessee until the late 1940s.
As a tenth-generation descendant of American slaves who suffered under Jim Crow segregation laws and government-supported racial repression, my family and I have experienced the profound benefits of the Civil Rights Movement. The landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 and the affirmative action policies in the late 1960s have opened doors for us that had been firmly shut to all African Americans for generations. The sacrifices and resilience of my ancestors and their black brethren have driven me to seize every opportunity to honor their legacy by breaking barriers and using books as a proverbial battering ram to accomplish the same.
The origins and practice of slavery in the United States are deeply shameful, revealing inconvenient truths that cast a disgraceful shadow on the Founding Generation. White colonials denied black colonials fundamental due process of law through a criminal scheme during colonial times—by way of corruption of colonial government, they institutionally exploited legally free black colonials—violated the Treaty of Paris of 1783, which guaranteed the liberation of black colonials, and they even designed the U.S. Constitution to be a “perpetual and impassable barrier” between the white race and those they enslaved.
The Framers of the U.S. Constitution created a document with inherent racial biases, a stance proudly affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Dred Scott Decision in 1857—a ruling that was never overturned and remains the law of the land. Therefore, I found it profanely contradictory when Justice Clarence Thomas, a beneficiary of affirmative action initiatives, described the U.S. Constitution as being a “color-blind” document in his concurring opinion on June 29, 2023. On this date, the Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, struck down affirmative action programs in the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard case and a companion case against the University of North Carolina. This decision reversed earlier precedents, such as the University of California v. Bakke (1978) and Grutter v. Bollinger (2003).
Further, the Court continued its rejection of the idea that remedying societal discrimination is a compelling government interest that can justify race-based state action. The Court found that the idea is “an amorphous concept of injury that may be ageless in its reach into the past” and that threatens to “open the door to competing claims for ‘remedial relief’ for every disadvantaged group” based on “inherently unmeasurable claims of past wrongs” that “cannot ‘justify a [racial] classification that imposes disadvantages upon persons . . . who bear no responsibility for whatever harm the beneficiaries of the [race-based] admissions programs are thought to have suffered.” However, the Court made clear that it continues to allow race-based efforts to “remediate[e] specific, identified instances of past discrimination that violated the Constitution or a statute.”
Disturbingly, the Court also distorted the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education, which rejected the ”separate but equal” doctrine and mandated the elimination of state-sponsored racial segregation in our educational system. Brown held separate is not equal and that society must not ignore racial inequality and can take necessary measures to address it, including race-conscious means.
In her powerful dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote:
“If there was a Member of this Court who understood the Brown litigation, it was Justice Thurgood Marshall, who led the litigation campaign to dismantle segregation as a civil rights lawyer and ‘rejected the hollow, race-ignorant conception of equal protection’ endorsed by the Court’s ruling today . . . The Court’s recharacterization of Brown is nothing but revisionist history and an affront to the legendary life of Justice Marshall, a great jurist who was a champion of true opportunity, not rhetorical flourishes about colorblindness.”
Reflecting further, I am stunned by the depth of revisionist teachings and our acceptance of historical myths as being American history. For instance, everyone is taught that the Founding Generation’s push for independence stemmed from a burgeoning democratic spirit. This is a questionable narrative. Hidden in American historical mythology is the reality that wealthy white slaveholding colonists drove the rebellion because colonial slave laws were abolished by the British Parliament’s exercise of parliamentary sovereignty in 1766, ten years before the Declaration of Independence of 1776. Yet, from a young age, we are taught that the Founding Generation pushed for independence due to the democratic spirit of the common man.
Hidden in myth is the fact that wealthy slave owners pushed rebellion because colonial slave statutes and laws were legislatively abolished by the British Parliament’s American Colonies Act 1766, commonly referred to as the Declaratory Act of 1766, “for all purposes whatsoever.” Then, England’s Court of the King’s Bench in the James Somerset v. Charles Stewart case in 1772 affirmed Parliament’s legislative supremacy over the American colonies when England’s Lord Chief Justice Mansfield declared slavery was not “allowed or approved by the law of the Kingdom” and could only be authorized in the Kingdom by “positive law,” a power only which Parliament possessed, three years before the American Revolution began.
Books and historical documents have chronicled these significant legislative, judicial, and historical milestones in colonial America. These colonial records and each colonial charter support the legal conclusion that slavery, as a state-sanctioned institution, could not have existed in colonial America when the Founding Fathers declared independence in July 1776. Moreover, this legal proposition profoundly impacts America’s historiography and U.S. constitutionalism. Despite the vigorous opposition to these provocative assertions, often derisively labeled as “critical race theory,” I am determined to frame this claim as a legal inquiry. I will also advocate and push forcefully for a demonstrative resolution in the broadest public forums.
My primary challenges are twofold: first, to discredit the false narrative that the enslavement of 500,000 black colonials after the American Revolution ended by treaty was legally authorized under English law, and second, to shatter the myth that the U.S. Constitution is a color-blind document. By meticulously utilizing books and historical documents, I aim to uncover the truth and dismantle America’s misanthrope myths, ensuring a more accurate understanding of our nation’s history and the profound contributions of black Americans. My ultimate goal is to correct the historical record of U.S. colonial and early American history, establishing beyond a legal doubt that my ancestors’ true status in this social experiment called America was that of crime victims—not slaves.
Slaveholding Patriots were puppet masters behind the rebellion that shaped America’s post-Revolutionary War policies. When examining slavery in the United States, it becomes evident that slave owners like Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, James Madison, John Marshall, and the like were America’s first robber barons, crafting domestic policies to serve their interests. Through their influence, guile, and actions, even the Catholic Church was entangled in the institution of slavery, as the Vatican permitted the Jesuits at Georgetown University to operate their own slave plantations beginning in the late 1700s.
The historian Kenneth C. Davis once stated: “Of course, in the best and worst of times, it is comfortable to think that America has held fast to the ‘dream of our founders’, a dream that has inspired millions of Americans to work and sacrifice and countless millions more to come to America.” But the then-common American and the millions more who came to America knew too little of the Founding Generation’s dream. They awoke in a criminal scheme they were profiting from and became willing participants.
American writer Susan Sontag posited during the 70s, “If America is the culmination of Western white civilization, as everyone from the Left to the Right declares, then there must be something terribly wrong with Western white civilization. This is a painful truth; few want to go that far… The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean, algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets, et al., don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.”
In response, Richard Hofstadter, who was a revisionist historian and public intellectual, wrote an article for the American Heritage magazine in 1970 entitled America as a Gun Culture. In it, he said, “Modern critics of our culture who, like Susan Sontag, seem to know nothing of American history, who regard the white race as a ‘cancer’ and assert that the United States was ‘founded on a genocide’ may fantasize that the Indians fought according to the rules of the Geneva Convention. But in the tragic conflict of which they were to be the chief victims, they were capable of striking blows.” Despite being intensely criticized for her position regarding American history but not succumbing to intellectual bullying, Sontag feigned regret, stating, “It slandered cancer patients.”
America is the culmination of Western white civilization—the “shining city upon a hill”—whose beacon light guides people everywhere, from the left to the right. With that being the case, views challenging America’s claimed historiography, its legitimacy, or its role on the world stage must be expected and constructively engaged by all, as we all know now that the version of history taught in America’s schools is heavily sculpted to favor America’s Founding Generation’s heroic public persona while concealing flaws and human failings.
Decidedly, one has only to recall George Orwell’s insight—“He who controls the present controls the past; he who controls the past controls the future”—to know that Sontag’s knowledge and grasp of America’s history are not found wanting as Hofstadter claimed. Moreover, revisionist historians have tirelessly sculpted America’s narrative. One need only consider the following excerpt from a McGraw-Hill Geography textbook marketed throughout America in 2015 to grasp the gravity of it all: “The Atlantic Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.”
However, a robust social media campaign caused McGraw-Hill Education to post this apology: “…we conducted a close review of the content and agreed that our language in that caption did not adequately convey that Africans were both forced into migration and to labor against their will as slaves.” This is a status quo-protecting narrative—targeted at America’s children, and it is devolution of history to fable: a phenomenon as old as humanity itself.
The Founding Generation’s nation-building narrative based upon race which deprived black colonials in the American colonies of liberty and civil rights during colonial times served as Nazi Germany’s inspiration. History supports that they, too, used a race-based narrative to disenfranchise people of the Jewish faith when they passed the Nuremberg Laws of 1935: the laws deprived Germans of Jewish ancestry of fundamental human rights. These laws were designed by Adolf Hitler and approved by the Nazi Party at a convention in Nuremberg on September 15, 1935.
The German people, no different from Americans, accepted race-based laws because government-sponsored policies had successfully incentivized public opinion toward acceptance of morally corrupt laws. No different from America’s Constitution, the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 took citizenship away from certain citizens and designated them as “subjects” while elevating others. They were among the first of the racist Nazi laws that culminated in the Holocaust. These laws enabled Germany to persecute a segment of its society not for their religious beliefs or practices but for a so-called racial identity transmitted irrevocably through the blood of their ancestors.
Similarly, the Founding Generation in the U.S. Constitution purported to deny citizenship to black Englishmen and Native Americans upon racial grounds. It endorsed slavery by designating that “other persons” (slaves) be viewed as three-fifths of a man according to the law. But what made these race-based laws pernicious were the underpinnings of a master race dogma and the enthusiastic acceptance of these ideologies and spoils by the European-Americans and, in later years, the Germans, who slavishly coveted their unearned largess at the expense of others.
Building upon this master race dogma, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Dred Scott versus Sandford in 1857, purported to chronicle the history of slave and “Negro Laws” in colonial America, concluding that no person descended from an American slave had ever been a citizen of the United States, as Article III purposed and had no remedies at law in federal courts.
The Dred Scott Decision (as it was later called) declared that the Founding Generation viewed all blacks as “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” The Dred Scott decision sought to destroy the legacy of all Revolutionary War-era blacks.
While the Dred-Scott Decision was well-received by slaveholders in the South, many in the North were outraged, greatly influencing the nomination of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency and his subsequent election, which led to the South’s secession from the Union and then the Civil War. But herein lies the tragedy, and it is not the unjust nature of America’s courts nor that the men of the law are wicked or imperfect. Instead, we knew so little of these men, yet we hoisted them so high, and so many died not knowing.
The bicameral legislative structure of each colonial government within the American colonies, in tandem with the British King, who served as the head of the upper House of each colonial legislature mandated in each colonial charter and the British tradition of natural-born subjecthood, liberty rights under the English Bill of Rights of 1689, and Parliament’s abolition of all colonial laws in 1766 which challenged or called into question Parliament’s supreme legislative authority eviscerates the notion that colonial slavery in the American colonies was a lawful condition when the Founding Generation declared independence in 1776.
The Treaty of Paris of 1783 approved by America’s Congress in January 1784—stipulated that all British subjects were to be “set at liberty.” Yet, the United States and its American citizens continued to enslave black Englishmen and did not grant them fundamental due process of law, making them the bedrock of its slave-based economy. The real obstacle to reconciliation has always been this legal wrong and America’s truthful history. The myth that slavery in the United States had lawful origins and was inherited from the British is false. The enslaving of 500,000 British subjects without granting them fundamental due process of law was a violation of the Treaty of Paris of 1783 and international norms.
In 1946, the Nuremberg Military Tribunal became celebrated for establishing that “crimes against international law are committed by men, not by abstract entities, and only by punishing individuals who commit such crimes can the provisions of international law be enforced.” In enslaving 500,000 black Englishmen in violation of the Treaty of Paris of 1783, America’s slaveholding leadership engaged in crimes no less horrific or repugnant to international law than Nazi Germany’s leadership. Although they are long dead, their misanthropic enterprise and crimes continue to negatively impact the civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights of all people of color in the United States.
Descendants of enslaved black colonials deserve closure for the criminal enslavement of their ancestors, just like any other group. The persistent myth that black colonials were legally enslaved and that human chattel was imported into America based on British traditions has obstructed this closure. Black Englishmen, often referred to as “free negroes”—had the same liberty rights as white patriots. As free Englishmen under English law and recognized as subjects by King George III’s imperial government, their enslavement in the emerging United States was unlawful and became sanctified by a color-biased U.S. Constitution.