Re-enacting the German Coast Uprising

I saw a story last Wednesday (via AP in the Star Tribune) about the upcoming re-enactment of the 1811 rebellion by enslaved people near New Orleans, but didn't manage to write about it. Now it has been covered on NPR and in the Guardian, so you may have heard about it already. I hope so!

The fact that rebellions like the German Coast Uprising — thought to be the largest one in U.S. history — are not better known, let alone celebrated, is indicative of the white supremacy inherent in our country. It's all about whose point of view you take when you think of a "slave revolt," right? Nat Turner in 1831 was either a crazy preacher inciting mayhem and unreasonable violence against the harmless gentry... or a freedom fighter. The leaders of the revolt in Louisiana, who — according to the AP story — "were field hands who toiled in hot, wet conditions that contributed to their 13% yearly death rate" were inspired by the recent successful Haitian revolution.

A 13 percent yearly death rate; don't you think you might get violent if you lived in those circumstances? Wouldn't that be reasonable, and perhaps worth commemorating as an outstanding example of our supposed American love of freedom?

The artist who organized this reenactment, Dread Scott (!), worked with 500 volunteers who marched 26 miles from the forced labor camp (so-called plantation) where the uprising started to New Orleans. Among the volunteers were the aunt and uncle of Oscar Grant, the young Oakland man who was killed by BART police in 2009. 

As NPR put it,

The original German Coast Uprising didn't succeed. Roughly one-fifth of those who revolted were killed. Some were put on trial first and executed — their heads then put on display to intimidate others from pursuing future uprisings.

But the re-enactment did not show that part, thank goodness. Instead, it transformed the arrival in New Orleans into a cultural celebration. As Scott put it in the Guardian,

“Even if you don’t know much about this history, you know that white people did terrible things – brutal, medieval torture of people during enslavement. That is not news. What is news is black people having agency within enslavement and, frankly, having the most radical ideas of freedom in the United States at the time.”

Not surprisingly, the story from the UK-based Guardian is the best of the three stories I've read on the re-enactment, covering more of the original rebellion's history as well as reaction to the re-enactment by black and white Louisianans.


AP photo by Gerald Herbert

And I can't end this post without connecting it with these words from Mary Annaïse Heglar, who writes about the climate crisis and environmental justice:

I can’t hear about this story of the largest slave revolt in American history without being blinded by the parallels to the climate crisis today. Just think about the odds against them? The uncertainty before them?

New Orleans is literally as far south as you can get. Any farther and you’re in the water. Even if they had succeeded in taking New Orleans, their odds of keeping it were so slim they had to have been inscrutable. I think they knew that. And did it anyway.

I don’t think they sat around debating whether or not there was hope. I think they decided whether or not they wanted to live. I think they decided living a slave was a thousand times worse than dying free. I think they decided it wasn’t a decision at all.

The climate movement could use some of the energy. Some of that Claude McKay “If We Must Die” energy. That “Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back” energy.*

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P.S. Today is also the anniversary of the 1898 Wilmington Massacre (better described as a coup), in which the fairly elected, cross-racial government of that city in North Carolina was overthrown by a violent white mob. Here are some past posts on the Wilmington Massacre:

• The Wilmington Massacre
• Wilmington on Fire
• Wilmington and Alfred Waddell

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* If We Must Die
By Claude McKay

If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!