Between Skin and Heart: Black Politics and Racial Authenticity in the Post-Slavery US and Jamaica

During the Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica in 1865, protestors killed Charles Price, a man whom, like themselves, they recognized as black. Because Price had aligned with the local white supremacist plantocracy, his killers noted that he had “black skin and a white heart.” During the 1876 South Carolina state elections, Frank Adamson, a man recognized as black but who voted for the Democrats, traditionally the “party of slavery,” acknowledged that in the eyes of many, he was “black as a crow but with a white folks’ heart.”

This paper asks why freedpeople employed remarkably similar metaphors in two seemingly different post-slavery moments. Comparison of the rebellion and election campaign shows that subjects like Adamson and Price, who formed allegiances and engaged in behaviors that conflicted with the ideals of their critics, were rendered “racially inauthentic.” They were deemed unworthy of membership in black communities, and their exclusion often took violent forms. The appearance of similar conflicts in different times, places, and means of popular political expression suggests that production of racial inauthenticity resulted from two principal similarities between the societies: 1) an ideology held by many freedpeople that privileged communal goals above individual ones – in both cases, I contend, it derived from West African-derived cultural traditions and the example of the Haitian revolution. 2) the impending defeat of radical visions of freedom; when white supremacists were on the verge of securing political supremacy, expectations of communal loyalty and the stakes for disobedience were raised. By showing that Caribbean examples predated American ones, this paper challenges the exceptionalism often implicit in studies of race in the US. Furthermore, its focus on moments of conflict complicates scholarly definitions of black communities as united in resistance.