Repression of Black Social Movements

By Crystal Nicole Eddins

Even during times of ‘normalcy’, or non-protest cycles, African descendants’ structural realities are constrained and shaped by oppressive targeting due to pervasive, institutionalized racism and capitalist exploitation. Repression against black people’s resistance activities historically has been especially heightened and involving a considerable amount of violence and public spectacle. For example, during enslavement those who escaped or rebelled were publicly whipped, beheaded in town squares, and subject to medieval torture devices. Prior to the Haitian Revolution, the most successful enslaved people’s rebellion, the French ‘breaking wheel’ was used to disembowel known maroon leaders. Co-conspirators in Denmark Vesey’s 1822 plot in South Carolina were publicly hanged; and members of the 1811 German Coast uprising in Louisiana were beheaded and had their heads put on spikes dotted along a major river. In each case, these measures were used to deter other rebels from taking their freedom into their own hands by standing up to societies that were founded on the assumption and structuration of black inferiority and subjugation.

Crises of Capital, Populist Politics

The social movements field of scholarship no longer holds strain and breakdown theories in high regard when attempting to understand and explain mobilization emergence. However, as micromobilization theorist Aldon Morris explained in Frontiers in Social Movement Theory, collective action and social movement consciousness must be located within the systems of domination that oppress actors in a myriad of ways. It might be possible then to think of crises of capitalism and heightened periods of economic exploitation as an underlying factor that inflames simmering racial tensions and popular protests over scarce resources.

“ ‘Walk Together Children!’ The Charismatic Leadership and Race-Conscious Politics of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.”

This month, we’ve celebrated the birth and legacy of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who has become the face of African American civil rights in the United States and human rights worldwide. While there is much of King’s legacy that remains under appreciated, particularly his post-1963 “I Have a Dream” speech critiques of capitalism and worker’s rights protests, there is also room to explore the influence of lesser-known Civil Rights advocates and activists.