To Take on Tomorrow ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
January 19, 2025
In the early 1760’s, a 12-year old African boy from Guinea emerged from a slave ship in Boston speaking not a word of English. He was purchased there on the dock by a man named Timothy Fuller of Middleton, and assigned to another man named Samuel Taylor of Reading, to be taught how to dress leather. The boy, now known as Cesar, (we’ll never know his real name) negotiated a deal with Taylor that if he were ever to be sold, that Taylor would purchase him, with the agreement that after six years Cesar would be able to buy his freedom out of his earnings. In fact, the original owner did attempt to sell Cesar, and Taylor purchased him. But then Samuel Taylor refused to uphold his end of their agreement, and only two years later, sold Cesar to yet another owner. Cesar sued for his freedom in 1771 in the Essex County Court of Common Pleas based on his agreement with Taylor. Cesar was awarded his freedom, along with damages, but Samuel Taylor appealed, and in the next year, the Superior Court in Newburyport decided in Cesar’s favor once again. An interesting side note from this case is that Samuel Taylor’s attorney during the appeal was a lawyer by the name of John Adams.
This court case is one of 19 cases brought by enslaved Black people, and known as the Essex County Freedom Cases. These 19 were a large percentage of the 30 court cases brought throughout the colony of Massachusetts, which ultimately helped to bring about the emancipation of enslaved people in Massachusetts in 1783.
Imagine, for just a moment, that 12-year old boy standing on a dock in a strange land, who just a few years later, was able to take control of his life, assert his agency and his very personhood, and use the court system to secure his freedom. One by one, these court cases, brought by courageous people of color, changed not only their own lives, but changed the course of history in our Commonwealth and our country. These early cases, brought to court before the United States was created, helped, one by one, to build the foundation of freedom and equal rights for all that went on to be enshrined in our founding documents, and that we continue to struggle with today. And yet, stories such as these are virtually unknown today. They are, as I so often like to say, hidden in plain sight.
Cesar’s story, and many others like it, can now be found on the Cape Ann Slavery and Abolition website, www.capeannslavery.org It’s been awhile since we have spoken much about the Cape Ann Slavery and Abolition project. As it happens, tomorrow, January 20, is the fifth anniversary of the launch of our website, and it’s a perfect time to bring it forward again, to report on progress, and share some of the new material we have researched in the past five years. Tomorrow, Cape Ann Slavery will be one of the presenters at the Meetinghouse Foundation’s Martin Luther King Day commemoration, as we focus on the stories, the history, of local people of color.
You may remember that the Cape Ann Slavery and Abolition Project was begun back in 2015 first by the Rockport UU Church and then joined by this church as well, to look for ways to counter the narrative that enslaved people had never lived on Cape Ann. And, of course, the more research that was done, the more stories emerged, stories that were hidden in plain sight. We know so much more than we did before: that prominent families who financed this church owned or invested in slave ships, and that the iconic early feminist Judith Sargent herself owned slaves with her first husband, John Stevens. While our work slowed down greatly during the pandemic, we have worked to keep the website updated and to move forward into new areas of research, such as the Essex County court cases. But most importantly, as our research expanded, we also came to understand that we were presenting our information through the wrong lens. We realized that most of us imagine the abolitionists of the pre-Civil War era to be white people, fighting on behalf of people of color. We think of William Lloyd Garrison, and The Liberator. But in reality a critical part of the story was not being told: namely, that enslaved and free Blacks were taking the lead, were fighting on their own behalf, and as we saw in the Essex County Freedom Cases, they were eventually having enough impact on case law that they spurred the Emancipation Act in Massachusetts in 1783. We realized that even as we worked to bring local history of enslavement out of the shadows, we were perpetuating a misconception, which we are working to correct.
So this weekend, we take a moment to celebrate the progress that capeannslavery.org has made in the last five years. We celebrate, but we also must recommit to the work. For there is a more compelling reason to be emphasizing these stories and to question the perspectives from which the stories are told.
Tomorrow is Inauguration Day in the United States, and it falls on the holiday celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday, a day when we take stock of our justice work, and recommit to creating more equality for all. The incoming administration has sent very strong, very clear signals that they will not continue to champion the work of equality, that they will not take up the causes of immigrants, of minorities, of women, or of those living in poverty. Tomorrow, despite the holiday we will commemorate together right here, is a sad day in our country’s history.
The presidential election in November demonstrated once again that there are two separate narratives about our country’s history. Tomorrow, we are swinging away from the narrative that all deserve to be treated compassionately and equally, and that we use government to try to level the playing field, to protect the more vulnerable in our society. Instead, starting tomorrow, we are seeing the beginning of a government that only values the voices of a very few: especially those of tremendous wealth.
We are already seeing that universities and corporations are backing away from affirmative action, backing away from diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, known collectively as DEI. We are seeing, with sadness, that the commitment to DEI in many places has only been as deep as the political winds blowing across the surface of our lives.
Which story, which narrative you choose, matters in this moment. And making sure that the hidden stories, the ones that are so conveniently forgotten, continue to be told and retold, also matters in this moment, now more than ever.
We have always hidden our failures as a society. Martin Luther King, Jr. put it this way in a speech in August of 1967: “The tendency to ignore the Negro’s contribution to American life and to strip him of his personhood is as old as the earliest history books and as contemporary as the morning’s newspaper.” (The Southern Christian Leadership Conference Presidential Address, http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/628.html)
People who crave power, political and economic, do not want a country’s citizens to know all their stories. They especially do not want people to hear of the successes of ordinary people in obtaining and wielding power for themselves. It’s in the authoritarians’ and the oligarchs’ best interests if we feel helpless, if we are allowed and even encouraged to forget the courage and the strength of people in asserting their agency.
We’ve watched in recent years as the State of Florida, in particular, began to implement laws to combat what its governor, Ron DeSantis, likes to refer to as “wokeness”. Now, the term ‘woke’ became widely used a few years ago in Black Lives Matter circles, meaning growing in awareness and understanding of justice issues, and remaining committed to working for justice. Some of us would regard being ‘woke’ as a good thing. But the Florida governor’s weaponizing of the term led to the passage in Florida in 2022 of the “Stop Woke Act”, which restricted K-12 discussions of the history of racism, and caused teachers to purge their classrooms of books that parents could challenge as violating the law. Then, in 2023 Florida passed the law SB 266, which stipulated how American history could be taught. Colleges and universities who were caught teaching about, for example, the history of Jim Crow laws, could have their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion funding reduced or revoked. The law was deliberately written vaguely enough so that teachers and professors hesitated to take risks since they couldn’t be sure whether they were following the rules. Eventually the courts intervened to protect free speech. But in attempting this level of control of the teaching of history, Florida followed the example of governments such as Russia and Turkey in restricting honest teaching, and actually rewriting history. (https://theconversation.com/desantis-war-on-woke-looks-a-lot-like-attempts-by-other-countries-to-deny-and-rewrite-history-204884). An American governor decided to follow the lead of Vladimir Putin.
The authoritarians are so afraid of allowing American children to learn their whole history, especially the history of our treatment of people of color. As I said last week, authoritarians understand that controlling the stories that can be told is a way of consolidating their political power. And what we have been seeing in recent years is that they are never willing to give up that power.
Dr. King had this to say about power, in his speech mentioned earlier: “What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.” (op.cit.)
Today, we are bearing witness to power being wielded without love.
As we brace ourselves for this Inauguration Day like no other in our history, the inauguration of an authoritarian convicted felon, we have many things to be afraid of. But perhaps the attempts to rob us of our power by trying to erase our history, and our integrity, and our stories, looms as one of the greatest problems that must be resisted. And that is why, as we gather tomorrow to tell our local stories, we are standing at an inflection point in our country. Tomorrow the narrative shifts, back to the history of white privilege and white accomplishment. And so, while sharing local history might feel like a small thing, it actually is not. We are contributing to the historical record. We are shedding light on events that many people in this country wish could remain hidden away, to avoid feelings of shame and guilt. We are doing resistance work, right here. We are remembering Cesar, and Frederick Douglass, and Dr. King, and all those who are making sure, in the words of author Clint Smith, that the word is passed.
As Amanda Gorman wrote, in her poem New Day’s Lyric:
“We remember, not just for the sake of yesterday,
But to take on tomorrow.”
We must take on tomorrow.
Amen.
