“It seemed un-American to depict the evils of slavery and disloyal to talk about African American people fighting for freedom against whites. Omitting, neglecting, or suppressing the facts of slave defiance became a lasting American tradition.” William Loren Katz wrote these words in the introduction to this marvelous book over three decades ago. As I write this foreword in the summer of 2022, Katz’s words ring truer now than when he published Breaking the Chains thirty-two years ago. We are living through a new wave of intellectual McCarthyism. Driven by white nationalism, the latest wave of attacks on multicultural education is shrouded in racially coded language of “anti-wokeness.” The Right is using the law and bullying tactics to declare war on “critical race theory” (CRT)—which has become a stand-in for liberal multiculturalism—banning books and curricula dealing with racism, sexism, or gender identity.1 Moms for Liberty in New Hampshire offered a $500 reward for turning in teachers who violate the state’s anti-CRT law. In April 2022, Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed into law the Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act, or Stop WOKE Act, which prohibits teaching anyone that they bear “personal responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress because of actions committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, sex or national origin.” Iowa governor Kim Reynolds signed a similar bill that criminalizes teaching anything considered to be “divisive,” including subject matter that might make “any individual . . . feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of that individual’s race or sex.”2
The “individuals” these laws are designed to protect are white kids who presumably would feel shame and guilt if they had to confront the history of American racism. (The feelings of Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous children are never considered.) Let’s ponder the implications: if, as Katz observes, acknowledging the history of slavery and the heroic struggle to end it is “un-American” and “disloyal,” then defending slavery and racism is the “American” and patriotic thing to do. Absurd, you say? Consider the fact that there is no commensurate movement to ban books that explicitly promote racism: for example, Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia; works by prominent “racial scientists” and eugenicists such as Dr. Josiah C. Nott, Louis Agassiz, Herbert Spencer, William Graham Sumner, Madison Grant, and Lothrop Stoddard; or by the proslavery intellectuals Katz mentions in the introduction—John C. Calhoun, Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright, George Fitzhugh, and Columbia professor John W. Burgess.
Was Bill Katz presciently peering into the future? No, he was looking back at the past, reflecting on his own experiences as a high school teacher in Westchester, New York, during the 1950s. He had graduated from Syracuse University during the early years of the Cold War and began teaching when the good citizens of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) and related groups looked to ban “subversive” textbooks that discussed poverty, prejudice, the United Nations, and the writings of “liberal, racial, socialist, or labor agitators.”3 Having grown up in a world full of “liberal, racial, socialist, or labor agitators,” Bill was the sort of teacher the DAR despised. He recalls the FBI constantly tailing his father Bernard Katz, an agent boldly asking him: “Mr. Katz, if you say you are not a Communist why do you have so many books about Negroes?”4 Through his father, an organizer of the Committee for the Negro in the Arts, Bill met a coterie of radical African Americans, including painters Charles White and Ernest Crichlow, performer and activist Harry Belafonte, and writer Alice Childress. Over the years, he would befriend pioneering historians and librarians such as Ernest Kaiser, Jean Blackwell Hutson, Dorothy Porter, Lerone Bennett Jr., John Hope Franklin, and John Henrik Clarke.
Not surprisingly, during the 1950s Bill encountered students who thought that slavery was a benign institution in which masters cared for joyful, contented, and blissfully ignorant Negroes. He recalled one kid reckoning, “If [the enslaved] didn’t like it, they would’ve revolted.” They had no clue of the long and rich history of Black resistance to slavery. “I began bootlegging material into the classroom,” he recalled, “often eyewitness accounts that revealed the role of Black people in American history. It strayed from the curriculum. It challenged textbooks and what they had learned before.”5 And it led to a lifetime of historical writing and editing, beginning with his first book, Eyewitness: The Negro in American History (1967). Bill not only taught his students about the brutalities of slavery, dispossession, and Jim Crow, but understood that our knowledge of this history derives from anti-racist struggles. Anti-racist movements exposed America as a less-than-perfect union while charting a genuine path toward liberty for all. Once again, how is the history of anti-racism un-American? If we live in a country that is supposedly built on the principles of freedom and democracy, wouldn’t teaching about how courageous people risked their lives to ensure freedom for themselves and others be considered a good thing? Doesn’t it instill those values in students? Bill seems to think so: “I found my students, both Black and white, liked this content showing how enslaved people resisted and had some white allies [who] were moved by their conscience. These lessons showed the students how they could resist injustice and shape their own lives.”6
First published in 1990 by Atheneum, Breaking the Chains distills nearly three decades of research on the history of slavery, resistance, and abolition. In 1968, Arno Press, a New York Times imprint, hired Bill as the general editor of two series: The American Negro: His History and Literature, which generated 141 volumes, and Anti-Slavery Crusade in America, yielding over 70 volumes. These were massive undertakings—the latter, in particular, still represents the most extraordinary collection of antislavery writings to date. In the interim, he had published several books, including The Black West and Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage. Bill wrote Breaking the Chains for middle and high school students, but its breadth, scope, nuance, and subtle arguments made the book attractive to general adult readers. The opening chapters extend across the hemisphere, from the massive Brazilian quilombo of Palmares to slave rebellions in Mexico to the Haitian Revolution. Each story confirms Olaudah Equiano’s observation: “When you make men slaves, you . . . compel them to live with you in a state of war.”7 Breaking the Chains challenges the claim that the 116-year conflict between France and England over succession to the French throne was the longest war in recorded history. Katz documents four centuries of continuous warfare and skirmishes between Europeans and Africans extending from the African continent, the high seas and coastlines of the Atlantic, and across the lengths of the Western hemisphere. Wars to procure captives transformed large swaths of West and Central Africa into battlegrounds, revealing in stark terms why the Atlantic system turned every nation into a garrison state.
The book captures the myriad ways Black people resisted enslavement. Of course, Katz narrates the better-known—and lesser-known—stories of revolts and conspiracies with eloquence and drama: Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, Gabriel Prosser, the Stono Rebellion, and the Amistad mutiny, to name a few. The Africans who managed to “break the chains” fled to free territory or found refuge in maroon communities with other fugitives as well as Indigenous nations. Maroonage developed in hidden places (hills, swamps, mountains, wooded areas) and in plain sight (among Native nations such as the Seminoles in Florida). But one of the book’s greatest strengths is its recognition of resistance in the everyday acts of survival and the critical role of women in plotting and sustaining these acts. Katz demonstrates that in the realm of everyday life—in work, family, religion, culture—we find the bases for solidarity and political culture. Resistance to enslavement meant preserving dignity and sanity no matter what the costs. It meant fighting for education, literacy, knowledge; fighting to keep families and communities together and maintain physical and spiritual wholeness. Through worship and song, enslaved people sustained a culture of resistance. They embraced God’s word but rejected the master’s religion. The men and women who claimed ownership over other human beings were the real sinners, while Africans held in bondage were God’s children and the true believers. They tuned out the plantation preachers’ admonitions on slavery as God’s will, “theft” as sin, and the desire for liberty as the devil’s work. They transformed Christianity into a prophetic theology of liberation. The Bible consistently sided with the oppressed and the poor, and the God of the Old Testament had no qualms about employing redemptive violence to purge the land of sin. Indeed, this commitment to kith, kin, community, ancestors, God, and knowledge laid the basis for a Black post-emancipation vision of what freedom ought to look like and how society should be organized. This is exactly why people coming directly out of bondage led the way in creating the world’s first social democracy, however short-lived.
Finally, building on W. E. B. Du Bois’s magnificent Black Reconstruction in America, Bill Katz debunks the myth that Lincoln “freed the slaves.” If anything, the men and women who broke their own chains freed Lincoln of some of his most racist assumptions. Swirling in the middle of this conflict we call the Civil War was the largest slave revolt in the history of North America. At least one hundred eighty-six thousand armed Black men donning Union uniforms confronted their old masters on the battlefield, and over half a million fled the plantations and cities, causing the collapse of the Confederacy. The revolt birthed a new war to extend democracy and human freedom to all. Formerly enslaved people and antislavery militants tried to bring democracy to America. Men and women once held as property were determined to reconstruct the nation under new democratic principles, land redistribution, free universal education for all, and a new racial order based on equality and access to power. Tragically, they were defeated—twice. First, by the rise of Jim Crow; second, in Bill Katz’s words, by “new enemies wielding not guns but pens. These were scholars.” He was speaking of those historians who could not imagine Black people winning freedom for themselves and the nation by fighting for the abolition of slavery, racism, and all forms of oppression. The thought is downright un-American.
Breaking the Chains is still fresh, still relevant, and more dangerous than ever. It is a dangerous book not because it denigrates America or makes white children feel guilty and uncomfortable. Rather, it is dangerous because it shows us that the most oppressed and degraded people have the power, capacity, and moral vision to break their own chains and secure liberty, justice, and equality for all.
—robin d. g. kelley, Los Angeles, September 2022
1. These right-wing attacks use “Critical Race Theory” as a code for any acknowledgment of racism, sexism, or related forms of oppression and subjugation occurring in the United States. Critical Race Theory is actually a four-decades-old body of legal scholarship that examines how structural racism persists after the introduction of antidiscrimination laws, and the ways in which the remedy to address racism can further entrench structural inequality. In other words, CRT scholars argue that racism isn’t just about individual bias or prejudice but a social, economic, and political construct embedded in our legal system. See Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas, eds. Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (New York: The New Press, 1996).
2. Jaclyn Peiser, “N.H. Governor Slams Conservative Group’s $500 Reward for Reporting Critical Race Teachings: ‘Wholly Inappropriate,’” Washington Post, November 19, 2021; Wallace Hettle, “Keep History Teachers Free to Teach, in Iowa and the Nation,” History News Network (June 20, 2021), https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/180574. In August 2022, a federal judge declared the law violates the First Amendment, and the ruling does not apply to public schools or colleges, where it is still in effect. Tim Craig, “Judge blocks Florida’s ‘Stop Woke Act’ Restrictions for Private Companies,” Washington Post, August 18, 2022.
3. Gary B. Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross Dunn, History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (New York: Knopf, 1997), 69.
4. Jesse W. Shipley, “William Loren Katz (1927-2019),” The Volunteer (November 19, 2019), https://albavolunteer.org/2019/11/william-loren-katz-1927-2019/.
5. “William Loren Katz: A People’s Historian,” www.zinnedproject.org/materials/william-loren-katz.
6. Ibid.
7. Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003), 111.