the hidden history of women led slave revolts

So she started the painstaking process of sifting through the captain’s logs of slave ships, old court records in London and New York, letters between colonial governors and the British monarchy, newspaper cuttings, even forensic examinations from the bones of enslaved women uncovered in Manhattan. “I was like, what’s going on, I don’t believe it’s true,” says Hall. Every book about slave revolts said more or less the same thing, that men led the resistance while enslaved women took a back seat. So the issue of slave resistance is something I think everyone should know about.” “But if you’re taught the history of resistance, that our people fought every step of the way, that is a recovery that is crucial to our pride in our humanity and our strength and struggle.

“If you’re a black child, you learn about slavery but you don’t learn about slave resistance or slave revolt in America,” Hall says. It’s estimated 16 million Africans were brought to the Americas as enslaved people. More than anything, having heard her grandmother’s story, Hall wanted to learn about female resistance to slavery – because so little was ever taught about it at school.Ī slave family picking cotton near Savannah, Georgia, about 1860. “It was something I had to do – to understand my experience as a black woman in America today,” she says. So it was back to college and Hall attained a PhD in 2004. She felt the need to get to the root of what she saw as the racial issues “warping the world” – and made the life-changing decision to quit her job and dedicate herself to the study of chattel slavery.

I’m the attorney for the plaintiff,” she would bellow. Sometimes she would walk into a courtroom and be directed to the defendant’s chair. Racism and sexism were everywhere in the justice system, she says. But toward the end of the 1990s she became disillusioned. Now 58, she worked as a tenants’ rights lawyer in Berkeley, California. Hence the title of the book – Wake – which Hall says is intended to play on the meaning of a wake at a funeral, or the wake of a slave ship.īefore becoming a historian, Hall says her life was like living in that wake. “It’s also about growing up in the wake of slavery – which is traumatic,” she says. “The combination provides a way to look almost simultaneously into the past and the present, which was crucial for this story because it’s about haunting and the relationship between slavery, the United States and the current issues that we have today. The characters – including herself as narrator – are brought to comic-strip life with black and white illustrations and speech bubbles in the work of New Orleans artist Hugo Martínez. You look at the picture, the art, and you can see what’s happening,” Hall says. Rebecca Hall’s grandmother, Harriet Thorpe, back row, left, with her sisters.

The hidden history of women led slave revolts