This is a Call! It is not a book review.
The Call: You must read this masterpiece. It is written during our lifetime on one of most important issues in the African American experience, on Black Agency, our capacity to realize our potential.
Combee, Harriet Tubman, The Combahee River Raid and, Black Freedom During the Civil War is a recent book by Edda Fields Black. She lives in Pittsburgh and teaches history at Carnegie Mellon University.
The little known June 3, 1863 Combahee River raid is a very important chapter in the American Civil War. The North sent troops on war ships that destroyed some of the largest and most importation plantations in the Confederate economy. “The Combahee River is a short Blackwater river in the southern Low country region of South Carolina.”
During the raid, over 700 Black people walked off, ran, deserted the slave labor plantations that had mercilessly exploited them. Professor Black calls this one of the largest slave revolts in the Western Hemisphere. She defines these Black people as “Freedom Seekers.” We must also call them that.
FRED LOGAN
Somewhere in his classic book, There is a River, Vincent Harding says that by far the tens of thousands of Black people, who during the North versus South Civil War, deserted the slave-labor plantations constitutes the major form of Black resistance to enslavement. He does not, by any means, discount the other very important forms of Black resistance to slavery in the United States.
In his seminal study, Principles of Black Political Economy, Lloyd L. Hogan predicts that just as Black people liberated themselves in the past from the shackles of American slavery and subsequent sharecropper-feudalism, so in the future will Black folk liberate themselves from the present day political economy that exploits and oppresses us.
Over 180,000 Black soldiers served the North during the American Civil War. Over 40,000 were killed. Many thousands more Black people were the 19th century “essential” workers who dug trenches, cared for the injured, spied on the Confederate army and performed other essential work.
“Honest” Abraham Lincoln had to concede the North would not have won the Civil War without the contribution of African American people. And we add, in 2024 the United States might still be divided, at a minimum, into two separate countries.
Professor Black’s unprecedented research gives us the priceless treasure of naming at least some of the enslaved Black folks involved in the Combee episode. This makes our nameless ancestors real people. Usually, enslaved Black people go nameless, abstract in historical accounts
Combee comes at a critical moment when the United States is in a major cultural and political battle. Forces of right-wing reaction are battling tooth and nail in every arena to ban books and literature on the real Black experience from public schools, from libraries, and other public venues. Combee then make a major contribution to the resistance against this right-wing racist assault.
In general, we know Harriet Tubman stands as a major Freedom Fighter for Black Liberation. But until Combee I had no idea of the vast scope and scale of her contributions.
Remember the demeaning portrayal of Harriet Tubman in the 2019 mainstream film Harriet? Professor Maulana Karenga said Harriet Tubman is portrayed as a somewhat deranged figure, seeing spirits because of a blow to the head she received in her youth. Her multi-faceted, autodidactic liberation-skills are overlooked.
Dr. Black provides an extremely important, a vital discussion on Combee Freedom Seekers providing each other with mutual aid in the hard, hard years after the Civil War. She also includes how Black people of diverse continental African cultures created a new Creole language, Gullah Geechee, in the South Carolina Sea Islands. This complements Julius Scott’s monumental study, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution, on the vital important of networking in what is termed “History from Below”
Edda Fields Black writes from an open partisan stance in support of Black struggle. That is most beautiful!
Right this moment, put Combee on your summer reading list. But do not read it by yourself. Read it in a group! That’s what the United Black Book Clubs of Pittsburgh did.
Be sure to read the “Afterword” and “Acknowledgement” sectors for very important information on the history of Professor Black’s research and writing that produced Combee.
And if you can’t finish reading it by this summer’s end. Keep on reading it all year long.
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