Freedpeople rejected uplift suasion and integration as antiracist strategies

Evidence

Black people all over the South were saying this to Union officials: Do not abolish slavery and leave us landless. Do not force us to work for our former masters and call that freedom. They distinguished between abolishing slavery and freeing people. You can only set us free by providing us with land to “till … by our own labor,” they declared. In offering postwar policy, Black people were rewriting what it meant to be free. And, in antiracist fashion, they were rejecting integration as a race relations strategy that involved Blacks showing Whites their equal humanity. They were rejecting uplift suasion—rejecting the job of working to undo the racist ideas of Whites by not performing stereotypes. Racist ideas, they were saying, were only in the eyes of the beholder, and only the beholders of racist ideas were responsible for their release. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 616

Categorization

• XREF: This is a pivotal point for the reader’s stated goal: freedpeople themselves pre-figured Kendi’s inversion — racist ideas live in beholders, not in the marginalized — placing them as antiracists before the term existed. — connects to: the MOC “The Enemy-Making Machine: Ours, True, and the Identity That Defends Both”
• SEED: Article angle: ‘The freedpeople were the first antiracists’ — how 1865 Black activists rejected uplift suasion decades before the term existed.
• QUESTION: Does this historical posture of Savannah Blacks contradict later Black intellectual movements that DID embrace uplift suasion (e.g., Du Bois’s Talented Tenth)?