Exodus

In 1829, the Cherokee Nation addressed the United States Congress. They were literate, organised, and legally sophisticated. They had a written constitution, a bilingual newspaper, and a Supreme Court ruling in their favour — Worcester v. Georgia, 1832. Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that Georgia had no authority over Cherokee land.

Andrew Jackson ignored the ruling. The Indian Removal Act passed in 1830. Between 1838 and 1839, approximately 16,000 Cherokee were forcibly marched westward. Approximately 4,000 died.

The Cherokee Nation was not destroyed. The language survived. The government survived. The Eastern Band remained in North Carolina — some hid in the mountains and refused to leave. The Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma was reconstituted in Indian Territory. Today the Cherokee Nation has approximately 450,000 citizens.

Those are the words of Hugh Auld, the man who enslaved Frederick Douglass, speaking to his wife after she had begun teaching Douglass to read. It was illegal to teach an enslaved person to read in Maryland. Auld understood immediately what literacy meant.

Douglass heard him. He wrote later that this was the first time he understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.

He taught himself to read using a spelling book and the streets of Baltimore. In 1838, aged twenty, he escaped north disguised as a sailor.

He became the most prominent Black abolitionist in America. He wrote three autobiographies. He met Lincoln. He argued for Black enlistment in the Union Army. He was appointed US Marshal for the District of Columbia. He died in 1895, having attended a women's suffrage rally that morning.

Harriet Tubman. Escaped enslavement in Maryland in 1849. Returned south nineteen times. Guided approximately seventy people to freedom through a network of safe houses, secret routes, and coded signals. She carried a pistol — not for slavecatchers, she said. For anyone who lost their nerve and wanted to turn back. There could be no witnesses.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 required citizens in free states to assist in the capture of escaped enslaved people. The Underground Railroad operated in direct violation of federal law. Many of its conductors were white Quakers and free Black people working together. Some were clergy acting against the explicit position of their denominations.

Tubman served as a spy and scout for the Union Army during the Civil War. She led the Combahee River Raid in 1863, liberating more than 700 enslaved people in a single operation. She lived until 1913.

Fisk University opened its doors in January 1866, in Nashville, Tennessee, nine months after the Confederate surrender, to educate men and women who had been enslaved. One of three copies of the Slave Bible is held in Fisk's library.

More than 100 Historically Black Colleges and Universities were founded between 1865 and 1900. They were built because existing universities would not admit Black students. They were funded by freed people, northern philanthropists, and Black churches.

The Black church was the organisational infrastructure of the Civil Rights Movement. The HBCUs produced Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr., Toni Morrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, and thousands of others. They still exist. Fisk still holds the Slave Bible.

In 1866, Congress created the 9th and 10th Cavalry regiments — the Buffalo Soldiers — composed of Black enlisted men and initially white officers. It was one of the first times Black men were formally integrated into the peacetime US Army.

Their primary mission: enforcing the federal government's expansion into the American West. Protecting settlers. Fighting the Plains Nations — Comanche, Apache, Cheyenne, Sioux — whose land was being taken.

The Buffalo Soldiers served with distinction by the military's own measures. They had the lowest desertion rate in the Army. They were still serving in segregated units in World War II — fighting for a democracy that did not extend to them — until Truman's Executive Order 9981 desegregated the military in 1948.

The Apache leader Victorio called them buffalo soldiers — a term of respect, referring to their fighting qualities and their hair. The name was adopted. The contradiction was not resolved.

On November 20, 1969, a group of Native American activists calling themselves Indians of All Tribes occupied Alcatraz Island. They cited the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which they argued gave Native peoples the right to claim unused federal land.

Their proclamation offered to purchase the island for $24 in glass beads and red cloth — the reported price paid for Manhattan in 1626. They proposed to establish a Centre for Native American Studies, an American Indian Spiritual Centre, an Indian Centre of Ecology, and a training school.

The occupation failed by any conventional measure. It also transformed Native American political consciousness. The American Indian Movement grew directly from its energy. The occupation produced the Indian Self-Determination Act of 1975, which gave tribal nations significantly more control over their own affairs. It is widely considered the beginning of the modern Native rights movement.

In the early hours of June 28, 1969, New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village. Police raids on gay bars were routine. Patrons were arrested for wearing fewer than three pieces of "gender-appropriate" clothing. The bar's licence was suspended for serving alcohol to homosexuals.

On this night, the patrons fought back. The riot lasted several nights. It was led primarily by transgender women of colour — Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera among them.

The Gay Liberation Front was founded within weeks. One year later, the first Pride marches were held in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago. The SBC voted in 2023 to disfellowship churches that affirm LGBTQ+ people. The argument continues.

In 1982, a Presbyterian minister named John Fife declared his church in Tucson, Arizona, a sanctuary for Central American refugees fleeing US-backed violence in El Salvador and Guatemala. The Reagan administration had denied most of them refugee status — acknowledging their persecution would have meant acknowledging American complicity in it.

More than 500 churches, synagogues, and universities declared sanctuary. They sheltered refugees, transported them across state lines, and publicly defied federal immigration law. Eleven sanctuary workers were indicted in 1985.

Scott Warren, a geography teacher and humanitarian volunteer, was prosecuted in 2019 for leaving water in the Sonoran Desert for migrants. He was acquitted. No More Deaths continues to operate. People continue to die in the desert. The sanctuary movement continues. The border is the same border.

The Slave Bible removed Exodus — the story of an enslaved people leaving bondage. The people given the Slave Bible created a musical tradition whose entire structure is about leaving bondage.

Work songs encoded resistance in rhythm. Spirituals encoded the geography of the Underground Railroad in lyrics. Follow the Drinking Gourd was directions north. Go Down, Moses was not a metaphor. The blues carried the same road into the twentieth century. Gospel carried it into the church. Jazz made it complex enough to resist easy appropriation — for a while. Soul named it directly: A Change Is Gonna Come, Sam Cooke, 1964, three months before his death.

The tradition became the dominant popular music of the twentieth century. It is now owned primarily by six corporations. The music kept moving. The corporations kept following it. That is also a form of continuation.