In this week’s interview, commentator Michael Harriot delivers a reframing of U.S. history centered around the Black experience. The title of his forthcoming book, Black AF History, The Un-Whitewashed Story of America, gives you a sense of his approach to investigating the past.
Michael is a columnist at theGrio.com, where he covers the intersection of race, politics, and culture. Michael’s work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, NBC, and BET. Michael is a political commentator on MSNBC and CNN and has been honored by the National Association of Black Journalists. He’s also the host of Drapetomaniax: Unshackled History, a collaboration between Sony Music and OTHERTone, with Pharrell Williams serving as executive producer.
In conversation, Mike resurrected the stories of many forgotten figures and pushed back on oversimplified narratives surrounding Black resistance. A condensed transcript edited for clarity is below. You can also listen to the audio of our conversation, which includes Mike talking about the importance of South Carolina in U.S. history, his views on reparations, and more:
Ben: Michael, thank you so much for being here.
MH: Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be on.
Ben: You write, “The only difference between the Black AF version of history and the way America’s story is customarily recounted is that whiteness is not the center of the universe around which everything revolves.” Today, I want to trace some of the people and stories that capture your recentering of the American story.
Let’s begin with Mustafa Azemmouri, aka Esteban. Who was he, and how does he maybe have a better claim to “discovering” America than anyone else?
MH: Most people who’ve ever heard of Azemmouri know him as Esteban or Estevanico. He was a person who was enslaved and brought to America in the 1500s on a trip with an explorer named Pánfilo de Narváez— well, it's kind of nice to call him an “explorer.”
Ben: Kind of nice to call it a “trip,” too.
MH: Also that.
So Esteban came here, and the people who brought him planned to settle land around modern-day Florida, claim it for Spain, and rob the Apalachee people for gold. But the Apalachee were not hearing it and chased the Spanish to the Gulf of Mexico. Azemmouri, separated from the exploration mission, would end up traveling throughout the Gulf and into Mexico.
Not only did he end up seeing more of the continent than Lewis or Clark, but he may have seen more than anyone before him and for hundreds of years afterward. There’s a quote by the native Pueblo people in New Mexico, who say, “The first white man our people saw was a Black man.”
Ben: When I read that quote, I couldn’t help but wonder how they’d react to Rachel Dolezal.
MH: Ha!
Ben: Another notable figure in your book is Forest Joe, the “undisputed king of the maroon bandits.” Can you give more background on him and maroon communities in the South?
MH: We often talk about the Underground Railroad and people who escaped North or to places where slavery wasn't legal, but many enslaved people escaped and lived in freeform maroon communities that they created in places like the Great Dismal Swamp (on the border of Virginia and North Carolina). Scholars think maybe thousands of escaped enslaved people lived there.
Further south, in the 1820s, Forest Joe escaped from a plantation and created a community in a swamp between Georgia and South Carolina. He became a legendary bandit, robbing plantations and farmers at night. People thought he was impervious to bullets and that he could disappear into thin air. In reality, he had created camouflage to disguise himself in the woods, and he had melted down lead and essentially created a bulletproof vest.
For years he was on the run and the subject of national articles and hysteria. Ultimately, he was captured but he survived for a long time because enslaved people on plantations basically served as an intelligence network for him.
Ben: Forest Joe’s story also touches on an important argument of your book, which is that more violent forms of Black resistance have been scrubbed from the historical record.
In a similar vein, you emphasize that Black history is one of perseverance. For example, you argue, “The lesson of Reconstruction is us. That we exist and breathe and love and sing and laugh and are still here is not a miracle or a revelation. It is a simple, unignorable fact that we cannot be extinguished.” Can you talk about what you mean?
MH: Well, the only way to characterize the coordinated violence that occurred all over America after Reconstruction is to call it a terrorist campaign. White supremacist groups like the White League in Louisiana, the Klan in Tennessee, and the Red Shirts in South Carolina terrorized Black citizens and their allies in a widespread effort to “redeem” white supremacy.
But even when you extend this history to the Red Summer of 1919, when white supremacists unleashed violence in more than three dozen cities, what’s most interesting to me is that Black people survived. Every imaginable offense that could be committed to preserve and maintain white supremacy and inequality was enacted against Black people, and yet we survived and even thrived.
Ben: Charley Case’s story in the early 1900s seems to embody the thriving part of that narrative.
MH: Yes, Charley Case is generally considered the first standup comedian. During the vaudeville era, he was the first person to stand on stage without music, without accompaniment, and just make people laugh.
At first, he studied law, but he wasn’t a good lawyer. There's a funny story about how he lost his first court case when a guy was accused of stealing a cow. Charley argued that his client had found a rope on the ground and took it home before realizing there was a cow attached to it. The judge didn’t buy it.
After law, he became a door-to-door salesman and slowly generated a following because people loved to hear him tell stories in bars and on the streets. One day, he filled in for a performer who got sick before their show, and his career took off. He soon earned a reputation for telling personal stories.
Charley’s father was a Black albino, who married an Irish woman before the Irish were kind of welcomed into whiteness. Charley was Black, but he had whiter skin than most white people. Stigmatized in different ways, he encapsulated many questions about what race actually is and what it means in America.
And I mean, he really became a star. At one point he was the highest-paid vaudeville performer, and newspapers described him as this revolutionary guy who just walked on stage and talked.
Ben: I noted that not knowing what to call him, marketers in show business landed on “The Man Who Talks About His Father.” A very Freudian analysis.
MH: Ha yup. And he would famously swing his arms to amplify the point of his stories. Vaudeville experts agree that this is the origin of the phrase “punch line.”
It’s a beautiful story of resilience and creativity.
Ben: On that note, let’s go to the resilience and creativity of the Civil Rights Movement. You talk about unheralded figures like Ella Josephine Baker, who helped pioneer nonviolent tactics. On the other hand, you emphasize that nonviolence was a strategy that had to be learned.
MH: Right. So we like to call it nonviolence, but remember that it was really nonviolent resistance. We've kind of whitewashed off the resistance part.
Ella Josephine Baker gave Black activists the template for using nonviolent resistance. A longtime activist who helped form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (led by MLK), in 1960 Baker gave a pivotal speech at her alma mater, Shaw University. She told students that a youth-oriented, grassroots movement that was democratic and leaderless was necessary for change. She famously said the movement was “bigger than a hamburger,” and her words inspired many in the audience to more radical actions, including people like Stokely Carmichael and John Lewis.
But tactical nonviolence was really hard for many Black people to accept. Armed self-defense was often much more palatable, and in fact, it was so natural that King and others had to train people to stand down; to take police brutality.
And it’s a mistake to think that the Civil Rights Movement was nonviolent. For example, think about the famous march from Selma to Montgomery. The successful one that reached Montgomery was the third march, right? The first one was violent. In the second one, the marchers returned the violence, and the third, most successful one was violent too.
So the history of self-defense among Black citizens has been washed away through the idea that we achieved equality by holding hands and singing songs when it never could have been like that.
Ben: Your work seems to add to a growing body of scholarship emphasizing that violent tactics have long been a part of Black history; and that violence is a legitimate response to, say, a justice system that has long worked against people of color.
MH: Yes, but it's also a little bit more than that. Think about American history. How did the U.S. become the U.S.? Through violence, right? Through the bloodiest war in the history of this continent. How did European settlers claim this land? Through violence against Indigenous people.
So the violence that we responded with is one of America's most consistent historical tactics. Arguably, it’s the most American tactic of all, and I think it's crazy to suggest that Black people got what they wanted by not doing the things that everyone else had done.
Ben: A great point, which also ties into one of your conclusions. “If this nation ever truly becomes a post-racial society with liberty and justice for all,” you write, “let the history of Black people in America reflect: We were doing it first.”
Mike, this has been a pleasure. Thank you so much again for your time.
MH: Thank you for having me on, Ben. I'm a big fan of Skipped History.
Ben: You and Pharrell are reading together?
MH: We sure are.