Documented slave rebelliousness preempted the docile Sambo debate among colonial historians

Evidence

“Slave rebelliousness was a familiar reality in eighteenth-century America. This may explain why most historians who have studied blacks in the colonial and Revolutionary periods have never been drawn into the debate over the creation of docile Sambos that absorbed scholars of nineteenth-century slavery for so long.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1979

Categorization

• XREF: This counters the Sambo thesis of Stanley Elkins, directly relevant to the historiographic contest over whether enslaved people resisted or accommodated—central to Robinson’s argument that resistance was the norm.