“Which of Britain’s thirteen North American colonies was more than half Black long before the American Revolution?” Retired Duke University historian Peter H. Wood finds that he can still stump groups of students, teachers, and parents with that question, even though it has been fifty years since he published Black Majority, his landmark study of slavery in colonial South Carolina. Today that book is taking on a fresh new life and proving more pertinent than ever.
In January, at a meeting of the American Historical Association in San Francisco, a panel of young Black historians devoted a session to “’Black Majority’ in the Age of Black Lives Matter.” They discussed Wood’s “instant and enduring classic” that has touched several generations. Marcus Rediker (University of Pittsburgh professor and author of The Slave Ship: A Human History), recently noted that the book “helped to set me on my path. I read it in a night-school class at VCU when I was working in a factory during the daytime.”
Though we are awash these days with books on race relations, most deal more with our recent past and uncertain future; too few trace American racism back to its deep roots in the colonial South. Thankfully, editors at W.W. Norton have brought an expanded and updated version of Wood’s study to a broad new public. They asked Wood to revise his text for a 21st-century audience and add an Epilogue, while inviting Imani Perry to write a Forward for this 50th-anniversary paperback edition.
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Black Majority: Race, Rice, and Rebellion in South Carolina, 1670-1740 has appeared just in time for Black History Month. Peter H. Wood, a longtime friend of First of the Month, is not to be confused with the Peter Wood who served on the 1776 Committee of the Trump administration and who trembles at the specter of diversity. (First‘s Peter notes ruefully, per Naomi Klein in Doppelganger, “we all seem to have our inverted double these days.”) What follows is an autobiographical excerpt from Wood’s Epilogue that evokes life-changing moments that led to Black Majority.
As I write, the United States is caught up in a momentous tug- of-war. Our post–John Lewis society is struggling to grapple with the Black Lives Matter Movement on the one hand and a venomous White supremacy backlash, complete with the widespread suppression of difficult history, on the other. Such moments are nothing new in America, and they make us want to revisit works that emerged from earlier decades of ferment, such as the modern civil rights era. This book, like many other studies, was initially a product of those years. But it deals with a time, a place, and a people that remain “off the radar” for most Americans.
Yet the troubling story of colonial South Carolina’s first generations, the subject of Black Majority, is neither inaccessible nor irrelevant. So I welcome the opportunity to update and sharpen a text that has reached the half-century mark… I have attempted to brush up the prose and hone the argument in ways that better suit our different century. In this form, I hope Black Majority can reach a new generation and a wider audience—people of all backgrounds who often protest rightly that they learned little, if anything, about such things when they were in school…
Intellectual journeys begin early. Born in 1943, the son of two New-England-born scientists, I started life in Ladue, an affluent suburb of St. Louis… As a Little League baseball player, I cherished watching Stan Musial and other big leaguers on our occasional visits to Sportsman’s Park. At age seven or eight, cheering for the hometown Cardinals against their hated rivals from Brooklyn, I was stunned to see Black St. Louis filling the right-field bleachers and cheering hard for the Dodgers. That seemed incomprehensible until my father explained that the man who just stole second and third base, like the fans rooting for him, was a “Negro,” the first in the major leagues. For me, as for millions of young people in those years, the initial brush with the forces for and against racial integration came from seeing the exploits of Number 42, Jack Roosevelt Robinson. Clearly, something bigger than baseball was reshaping American society. I would need to pay attention.
Several years later, on a school trip to the city’s Mississippi River waterfront, we visited the Old St. Louis Courthouse. Inside, a nervous guide explained that before the Civil War this building had been the initial site of the famous citizenship case involving Dred Scott. That name sounded ominous and intriguing. But what left a lasting memory was the disquiet of our teachers and parent-chaperones. Why did they eagerly attempt to change the subject? Any topic that made adults so anxious surely called for further exploration. My mother sensed this interest. After school on May 17, 1954, I dove as usual for the sports section of the evening paper. But she pointed me instead to the front-page headline about the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. “Read this first,” she suggested; “it is going to be important.”
…Well before setting off for college in New England, I suspected I would major in history. But what kind of history? A Harvard undergraduate class in early American history, taught by Bernard Bailyn, suggested one possibility, but the realm seemed so distant. That reservation disappeared when I spent the summer of 1963 living in Kraków, Poland, with a student exchange group. Kraków’s venerable Jagiellonian University was already more than a century old when the famous astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus enrolled there as a student in 1491, just before the first voyage of Columbus. Perhaps colonial American history was less remote than I had thought…. But as someone born west of the Mississippi, I was already chafing at the notion that Boston was the self-appointed hub of the early American universe.
Two years at Oxford University’s ancient Merton College confirmed my awareness that all of colonial American history was relatively recent and accessible. The challenge, when I returned to Harvard for graduate work in 1966, would be finding a research topic that had contemporary relevance and had not been studied to death. The answer came with a jolt, during the “long, hot summer of 1967.” In late July, while attending summer classes, I watched the riots in Detroit unfold on a tiny, black-and-white portable television. I was stunned by the violence; more than forty people lost their lives, most of them Black. But I was also struck by the inability of seasoned correspondents to fathom what was going on. Though tasked with explaining this event to the nation, reporters showed little sense of who these urban Americans were or where they had come from. How had they ended up in Detroit, and what was fueling their rage?
The next morning, I went straight to Widener Library and combed the relevant stacks, beginning with the New England shelves and moving south. Where would my interests in African American history and colonial history intersect? The bookshelf relating to the Palmetto State contained nothing on early Black South Carolinians… But 1970 marked South Carolina’s tricentennial year, so the state hosted a history conference…. I jumped at the opportunity.
My first visit to the University of South Carolina in Columbia gave me a chance to explore the State Archives, then located on Senate Street, and the Caroliniana Library on the university’s historic Horseshoe. I remember thumbing through the newest book on South Carolina history, written for the state’s high school students, and finding only two references to African Americans before reaching the antebellum period. Energized, I returned that summer and spent long hours in the underutilized Archives. It quickly became clear that more than enough records existed to tackle a dissertation on this long-hidden topic. Imagine the excitement for a graduate student, in a field still focused narrowly on thirteen English provinces, to discover that in one of those colonies more than half the story had scarcely been touched, even after two centuries….
The great labor organizer known as Mother Jones often urged crowds to “pray for the dead; fight like hell for the living.” Respectfully, I often invert her words and encourage history graduate students to “pray for the living; fight like hell for the dead.” After all, we are their advocates of last resort, working to restore their dignity, their complexity, and often their very presence.
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Black Majority: Race, Rice, and Rebellion in South Carolina, 1670-1740 is available now here at Norton Press.