Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

against the massive, stony resistance of the Afrikan
masses. This was the greatest single labor strike in the entire
history of U.S. Empire. It was not done by any AFL-
CIO-type official union for higher wages, but was the
monumental act of an oppressed people striking out for
Land and Liberation. Afrikans refused to leave the lands
that were now theirs, refused to work for their former
slavemasters.
U.S. General Rufus Saxon, former head of the
Freedmen's Bureau in South Carolina, reported to a Congressional
committee in 1866 that Afrikan field workers in
that state were arming themselves and refusing to "submit
quietly" to the return of settler rule. Even the pro-U.S.
Afrikan petit-bourgeoisie there, according to Saxon, was
afraid they were losing control of the masses: "I will tell
you what the leader of the colored Union League ... said to
me: they said that they feared they could not much longer
control the freedmen if I left Charlesto wn.. . they feared the
freedmen would attempt to take their cause in their own
hands. "(44)
citizenship as the answer to all problems. Instead of nationhood
and liberation, the neo-colonial agents told the
masses that their democratic demands coud be met by
following the Northern settler capitalists (i.e. 'the
Republican Party) and looking to the Federal Government
as the ultimate protector of Afrikan interests.
So all across the Afrikan Nation the occupying
Union Army - supposedly the "saviors" and "emancipators"
of Afrikans - invaded the most organized, most
politically conscious Afrikan communities. In particular,
all those communities where the Afrikan masses had seized
land in a revolutionary way came under Union Army attack.
In those areas the liberation of the land was a collective
act, with the workers from many plantations holding
meetings and electing leaders to guide the struggle. Armed
resistance was the order of the day, and planter attempts to
retake the land were rebuffed at rifle point. The U.S. Empire
had to both crush and undermine this dangerous
development that had come from the grass roots of their
colony.
The U.S. Empire's strategy for reenslaving their In August, 1865 around Hampton, Virginia, for
Afrikan colony involved two parts: 1. The military repres- example, Union cavalry were sent to dislodge 5,000
sion of the most organized and militant Afrikan com- Afrikans from liberated land. Twenty-one Afrikan leaders
munities. 2. Pacifying the Afrikan Nati.on by neo- were captured, who had been "armed with revolvers,
colonialism, using elements of the Afrikan petit- cutlasses, carbines, shotguns." In the Sea Islands off the
bourgeoisie to lead their people into embracing U.S. 39 south Carolina coast some 40,000 Afrikans were forced