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Año 3, Núm 6. Julio /Diciembre (2023)
PP. 89-98. Provincia de Pontevedra - España
The African American Population in The United
States After the Abolition of Slavery
Carlos Alberto Navarro Fuentes*
ABSTRACT
The objective of this text is to offer a general perspective on what was the slavery of the “afro-slave” popula-
tion in the United States, from citing some of the most important authors who managed to survive the regime
and endure after the abolition of the relations between masters and slaves and the self-legitimized violence
by the former on the latter. We will do this by offering extracts from the most representative literary works
and from the life testimonies of authors of African-American origin, including as complementary support,
cinematographic and documentary references concerning the theme of identity, discursivities and related nar-
ratives, the imaginary under which the abolitionist ideal was taking shape in the nation and how said efforts
were mostly impeded by the endogenous Caucasian racism of its rulers in particular, giving rise to and feeding
as the main cause what would come together in the Civil War (1861 -1865) in that country.
Keywords:
Slavery, African American population, United States, abolition, North-South.
La población afroamericana en Estados Unidos luego de la
abolición de la esclavitud
RESUMEN
El objetivo de este texto es ofrecer una perspectiva general sobre lo que fue el esclavismo de la población
«afroesclava» en los Estados Unidos, a partir de citar algunos de los autores más importantes que lograron
sobrevivir al régimen y perdurar luego de la abolición de las relaciones entre amos y esclavos y las violencias
autolegitimadas por parte de los primeros sobre los segundos. Lo anterior, lo haremos ofreciendo extrac-
tos de las obras literarias más representativas y de los testimonios de vida de autores y autoras de origen
afroamericano, incluyendo como apoyo complementario, referencias cinematográcas y documentales con-
cernientes al tema de la identidad, discursividades y narrativas relacionadas, el imaginario bajo el cual se fue
conformando la ideal abolicionista en la nación y como dichos esfuerzos se vieron impedidos en su mayoría
por el racismo endógeno caucásico de sus gobernantes en particular, dando lugar y alimentando como causa
principal lo que conuiría en la Guerra de Secesión (1861-1865) en aquel país.
Palabras clave:
Esclavitud, población afroamericana, Estados Unidos, abolición, Norte-Sur.
* Posdoctor en Estudios Sociales (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana); Doctor en Humanidades (Tec de Monterrey);
Doctor en Teoría Crítica (17, Instituto de Estudios Críticos); Diplomado en Historia de México (UNAM). Actualmente es
profesor de la Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosí (UASLP, México). Correo electrónico: betoballack@yahoo.com.
mx ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4647-9961.
Recibido: 5/11/2022
Aceptado: 10/3/2023
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Introduction
Starting from the Enlightenment, that is, at the end of the eighteenth century, European
societies began to intellectually question the trafcking of black (African) population within
and outside their nations, as well as the treatment and suffering to which they were subjected
under various justications found by traders, trafckers, and slave owners. It is worth mentio-
ning the publication by Marie-Jean-Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis of Condorcet (1743-
1794) - mathematician, philosopher, politician, perpetual secretary of the Academy of Scien-
ces, enlightened, reformer, anti-slavery, anticlerical, profeminist, pro-Jewish, pro-Protestant,
who also actively participated in the French Revolution in radical democratic positions - better
known only as Condorcet, titled
Reections on the Slavery of the Negroes
(1781), which was ba-
sed not only on the principles of the revolution (equality, freedom, and fraternity) but also on
natural law, which is and should be related to all men - and women. Condorcet considered that
Reducing a human being to slavery, buying him, selling him, keeping him in serf-like conditions are
authentic crimes, worse crimes than theft. In fact, the slave is deprived not only of any monetary
or real estate property, but also of the faculty to acquire the property of his own time, his forces,
everything that nature has given him to preserve his life or satisfy his needs. To this harm is added
that of taking away from the slave the right to dispose of his person (2017: 13).
The aforementioned work by Condorcet did not have a great impact at the time it was
published; however, it was reissued in 1788, arousing open and heated debates, in which it
is important to locate the author and his work at the epicenter of the intellectual, ideological,
and political currents that led to the abolition of slavery as part of the Revolutionary Conven-
tion of 1794 and those that followed from here inside and outside the French nation. In this
work, the French author threw overboard the argument that the slaveholders held about the
“afro-slaves” under the yoke of their enslavement being of a different nature than that of the
white population, and therefore deserved such treatment. The idea of the racial inferiority of
the black population would become a constant and pervasive element in the cultural, political,
and economic life of the European and later the North American societies that embraced sla-
very as a way of life and, above all, as a way of economic exploitation.
We will also see how abolitionist efforts and the promulgations that surrounded these
political texts, in reality, often remained on paper without having positive effects on the daily
lives and social realities, as the economic and political interests of slaveholders and those
who beneted from this regime were the ones who viewed its abolitionist horizon with the
greatest suspicion. An example of this was the technological advances applied to production
that took place on plantations, many of which were achieved and expanded as a result of the
Industrial Revolution in England and brought to American soil by the rst colonizers and sub-
sequent generations who beneted from this. These technological advances and economic
objectives gave a new twist to the ways in which racism and other forms of discrimination
were exercised in American lands, but they were not eradicated, nor much less, as recognized
abolitionists at the time in various parts of the world, such as Condorcet, would have wanted.
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We will show that there was no goodness or humanism in the intentions of those who
were responsible for abolishing slavery and making it valid throughout the territory of the Uni-
ted States. Among these pragmatic politicians were the founders of the nation, such as Was-
hington and Jefferson, on the one hand, and the champions of republicanism and defenders
of the Union, such as Lincoln. The true concern of the latter was to save the “Union” and stay in
power, as there would be a way to recongure the country structurally and socioeconomically,
as both sides had very different cultures and interests.
Life and Literature. Abolition in Process (Some Sources)
Frederick Douglass was an African American abolitionist, social reformer, orator, writer,
and statesman. He was born on February 14, 1818 in Maryland and died on February 20, 1895
in Washington. His most famous work,
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American
Slave,
was rst published in the spring of 1845. The book, which included introductory com-
ments by William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, quickly became a bestseller. Within
three years of its publication, 11,000 copies had been printed in the United States. During the
same period, nine English editions of the work had been published and it had been translated
into French and Dutch.
Other successful works on the same topic include
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olau-
dah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African
(1789),
Narrative of Moses Roper’s, Adventures and Esca-
pe from American Slavery (
1837),
The Narrative of William Wells Brown
(1847), and
The Narrative of
Solomon Northup
(1853). These works also sold thousands of copies and had multiple editions
and reprints in the United States, as well as translations into German, Dutch, and other langua-
ges. Together, they helped to attract broad circles of European societies that practiced slavery
and the intercolonial struggle outside Europe between 1820 and 1860 to the abolitionist cause.
According to Houston A. Baker, Jr., who wrote the introduction to a 1982 edition of Dou-
glass’s work, when researchers George Fredrickson and Christopher Lasch claim that “there
simply are no adequate records of slaves’ personal reactions to slavery,” they are not questio-
ning the authenticity of the narrators. Rather, they are recognizing that the accounts of former
slaves are more important as “authentic” expressions in a literary universe than in a historical
one. If history has begun to move as a result of the recent interest in slave narratives and their
narrators, the movement is primarily that of an intellectual history, a broad cultural history that
does not simply consider the narratives as direct documentary historical evidence. The history
currently underway seeks to determine the relationship of the texts of slave narrators, which
are (by their very nature autobiographical) both literary and historical, to our interpretation of
the American past and our elaboration of a consensual history text (cited in Douglass, 1982: 6).
For Baker, “Slave narrators actually had literary aspirations. They were at once readers and
timid authors of narratives that saw themselves as literary works of art, as autobiographical
works performed both for literary posterity and on behalf of a contemporary mass of enslaved
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African Americans” (cited in Douglass, 1982: 6). On the other hand, literary critic George Kent
“has noted that Puritan confessional narratives and Methodist conversion narratives had an
obvious inuence on slave narratives, shaping their pious tone as well as the proles of their
moral reections” (cited in Douglass 1982, 5).
While literary critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr. believes that “slave narrators created what he
calls a ‘counter-genre,’ an intermediate form that participates in elements of ‘the sentimental
novel and, above all, the specically American transmutation of the European picaresque’”
(Gates, 1978: 21). Examples of this are the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s popular
work,
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
1 (1852), and
Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave
(1789). Despite
the success of these works, there was much censorship, and books and pamphlets barely
circulated in the Deep South (Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi), and there was still
much ignorance and illiteracy.2
Indeed, the inuence of missionaries and religious “currents” played an extremely impor-
tant role in the reading of the Bible, the sermon, and other rituals that were adapted and recon-
gured to become part of the religious ritual practice of African American communities in the
United States up to the present day. An important gure in this case would be the abolitionist
and suffragist Harriet Tubman (Harriet Jacobs after marriage), registered at birth as Araminta
Ross, who fought for the freedom of enslaved African Americans in the United States. In her
lifetime, she published an autobiography entitled
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
3 (1861) under
1 “Watch
12 Years a Slave
(2013). Directed by Steve McQueen and starring Chiwetel Ejiofor as Solomon Northup. The
screenplay, written by John Ridley, is an adaptation of Solomon Northup’s autobiography, ‘Twelve Years a Slave.’ Northup
was a free African American born in New York state who was kidnapped in Washington D.C. in 1841, sold into slavery, and
later freed in 1853 aer working on Louisiana plantations for 12 years. ‘12 Years a Slave’ is McQueen’s third feature film and
won three Academy Awards at the 86th Academy Awards (2013) for Best Picture, Best Supporting Actress (Lupita Nyong’o),
and Best Adapted Screenplay, as well as the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture - Drama and the BAFTA Award, among
others. The film was shot in New Orleans from June 27 to August 13, 2012, with a budget of $20 million, at four historic
plantations: Felicity, Magnolia, Bocage, and Destrehan. Of the four, Magnolia is the closest to the actual plantation where
Northup worked. African American history and culture scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. served as a consultant on the film,
and researcher David Fiske, co-author of ‘Solomon Northup: The Complete Story of the Author of Twelve Years a Slave,’
provided material used for the film’s marketing. However, news and magazine articles from the time of the film’s release
described a scholar alleging some license that Northup may have taken with his book, and the liberties that McQueen de-
finitely took with Northup’s original. The film premiered at the Telluride Film Festival on August 30, 2013, and has received
generally positive reviews from critics. It was released in U.S. theaters on October 18, 2013, and in the UK on January 10,
2014. The release of this film - along with other films about the life and work of Martin Luther King - coincided with the
150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery (1863) and the arrival of Barack Obama as President of the United States. See
Fiske, David, Brown, Cliord W. Jr. & Seligman, Rachel (2013). ‘Solomon Northup: The Complete Story of the Author of
Twelve Years a Slave.’ ABC-CLIO, 225 pp.”
2 See “Documenting the American South: Primary Resources for the Study of Southern History, Literature and Culture”.
Retrieved from https://docsouth.unc.edu/
3 See “Harriet” (2019). American biographical film about abolitionist Harriet Tubman. Directed by Kasi Lemmons, who
co-wrote the screenplay with Gregory Allen Howard, and starring Cynthia Erivo as Tubman, with Leslie Odom Jr., Joe
Alwyn, and Janelle Monáe in supporting roles. A biopic about Harriet Tubman had been in development for years, with
several actresses, including Viola Davis, rumored to star. Erivo was cast in February 2017, and much of the cast and crew
joined the following year. Filming took place in Virginia from October to December 2018. “Harriet” premiered at the Toron-
to International Film Festival on September 10, 2019, and was released in theaters in the United States on November 1,
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the pseudonym Linda Brent.4 In this work, she describes meeting an elderly Black man who
was longing to learn to read so he could better serve God by reading the Bible. Despite the fact
that it was against the law for slaves to be taught to read, Tubman agreed to teach him, and
the man promised to bring her good fruit as payment. After escaping slavery and settling in the
North, Tubman conducted thirteen rescue missions and freed around 300 slaves, using a ne-
twork of abolitionists known as the “Underground Railroad.”5 She also aided John Brown after
his raid on Harpers Ferry and fought for suffrage for women after the Civil War. Tubman’s for-
mer home was abandoned in 1920 but was later restored by the African Methodist Episcopal
Zion Church and turned into a museum and center for education. In a passage from her work,
the African American abolitionist writer expresses her desire to awaken Northern women to the
plight of the two million Southern women still in captivity, stating that only through experience
can someone realize the depth, darkness, and vileness of slavery.
2019, by Focus Features. It received generally favorable reviews from critics, who praised Erivo’s performance and found
the film sincere but formulaic. For her performance in the film, Erivo received nominations at the Academy Awards, Gol-
den Globes, and Screen Actors Guild, as well as an Oscar nomination for Best Original Song (“Stand Up”). See “Stand Up”.
Oicial Music Video (Soundtrack) Performed by Cynthia Erivo - HARRIET -. Available at https://youtu.be/sn19xvfoXvk
4 See Yellin, Jean Fagan (2004). Harriet Jacobs: A Life. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Basic Civitas Books.
5 The Underground Railroad (also known as the Clandestine Railroad) was a clandestine network organized in the 19th
century in the United States and Canada to help African American slaves escape from plantations in the southern United
States to free states in the north or to Canada. Although it is called a “network,” there was no central organization or guide;
they knew the immediate resources available and gave them to the fugitive, sometimes accompanying them to another
safe house. There was a whole industry of men searching for runaway slaves, so a place where these men did not suspect
or search for them was very valuable. John Brown built a secret room in his tannery factory, although he was not the only
one. The name “Underground Railroad” comes from the fact that its members used railroad terms metaphorically to refer
to their activities. For example, conductors or engineers were the ones who helped runaway slaves in the slave states of
the South. They provided disguises, maps, instructions on where to stay, and sometimes accompanied them during the
journey. They were, therefore, very bold activists because helping runaway slaves was punishable by death at that time.
Other activists established stations along the railroad, that is, places like private homes where runaways arrived and could
hide, eat, rest, receive medical assistance, and information about the next stage of the journey. For example, the Quaker
couple Levi and Catherine Coin, who lived in Newport, Indiana, were stationmasters for more than twenty years, and
during this time, around 2,000 runaway slaves passed through their home (the station). The runaway slaves were the
passengers. The escape routes were called tracks. The headquarters was the Central Station, and the northern states or
Canada were the destination. Members of the Underground Railroad operated clandestinely and usually only knew each
other by their pseudonyms, to avoid compromising their security. They also made passengers swear to keep the secret.
The Underground Railroad sought its collaborators within the abolitionist movement, of which it was a part, and thus
extended its activities always outside the law. Perhaps the most famous and popular character in the history of the Un-
derground Railroad was Harriet Tubman, whom they called “the Moses of the slaves,” and who was a conductor who was
born a slave in Maryland and escaped in 1848. Once she reached the North and achieved her freedom, she joined the Un-
derground Railroad and in the following years returned to the South up to 19 times to help hundreds of slaves escape. Sla-
veholders even oered a reward for capturing her alive or dead, but she continued her work. The Underground Railroad
operated until slavery was definitively abolished aer the Civil War (1861-1865). People who had collaborated with the
Underground Railroad played an important role in the war due to the instruction they received and their knowledge of the
terrain. Throughout its existence, the Underground Railroad succeeded in freeing thousands of slaves and also influenced
public opinion to gain supporters of the abolitionist cause. See Blasco Lucía “The Underground Railroad: The True Story
of the Clandestine Network that Allowed Thousands to Escape from Slavery in the United States” in BBC News Mundo,
published on September 17, 2021. See Lindley, Robin (2015).
Gateway to Freedom. The Hidden History of the Underground Rai-
lroad.
W. W. Norton & Company, 352 pp. See Foner, Eric. “Slavery and the Underground Railroad: An Interview with Robin
Lindley.” In
Hypotheses.
CLIONAUTA: History Blog. Retrieved from http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/158362 and/or
https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-57835207
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Gerardo Gurza believes that there were always voices of prominent gures who expressed
progressive ideas in the American colonies, including abolitionists or anti-slavery advocates.
He cites the example of Virginia, where a group of enlightened planters receptive to new Eu-
ropean currents of thought found critiques of slavery convincing as an obstacle to economic
and social progress. Figures such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Ma-
dison, who were among the main protagonists of the revolutionary process and the creation
of the new government, believed they were witnessing the dawn of a new era of human pro-
gress in which a barbaric and backward institution like slavery should not have a place. Enli-
ghtened Virginians like St. George Tucker, Ferdinando Fairfax and Jefferson himself dedicated
considerable efforts to conceive a viable plan for the gradual emancipation of slaves, a plan of
gradual application designed to cause the least possible economic and social disruption, and
that could in that measure win the consensus of the majority of the owning class, of which
they themselves were members (Gurza, 2016: 29).
The Reality aer the Abolition of Slavery
The reality is that the abolition of slavery remained mostly in good intentions and few
concrete and lasting actions in favor of it. The separation of families and the sale of slaves
continued, as well as the “right of rst night” and the rape of African-American women. In fact,
“religious bodies eventually adjusted to the fact that family separations were to some extent
inevitable [...] Churches opted to seek practical rules for what could be taken as valid reasons
for ending unions and allowing second marriages” (Gurza, 2016: 128). This was what most
scandalized and sought to be avoided by the North, who abolished slavery - to which mainly
those in the South opposed.6 Revolts and rebellions on plantations became more common,
one of which was led by the slave Nat Turner7 against plantation owners in Virginia. Edward
Ball shares a testimony from a descendant of a slave-owning family in South Carolina who
was the victim of actions taken by Turner.
Nat Turner, a slave from Virginia, led a rebellion with nineteen comrades in which almost
sixty whites were killed. For white Southerners, The Liberator [an abolitionist newspaper] see-
med to lead directly to Nat Turner. In reaction to the abolitionist press, Southern writers coined
their own new genre, the pro-slavery essay (Ball, 2000: 242).
6 The “Mason-Dixon Line”. British scientists Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon were renowned scientists when they were
commissioned to settle a land dispute in pre-revolutionary United States in 1763. Known in England as master surveyors
and astronomers, for 80 years the Calvert family of Maryland and the Penns of Pennsylvania engaged in a bloody dispute
over the boundary between the two colonies granted by the English crown. At the time, it was considered an innovati-
ve technical achievement, coming to symbolize the North-South border in the American Civil War, separating slave-free
Pennsylvania from slave-holding Maryland. A north-south division between Maryland and Delaware of 133.5 kilometers
and the better-known west-east division separating Pennsylvania and Maryland, covering 375 km and stretching from
southern Philadelphia to what is now West Virginia. The Mason-Dixon Line is made up of almost 400 stones marked with
the letters P, for Pennsylvania, and M, for Maryland. See Sally M. Walker (2014). Boundaries: How the Mason-Dixon Line
Settled a Family Feud and Divided a Nation. Candlewick Press.
7 See William Styron (2008). The Confessions of Nat Turner. Barcelona: La Otra Orilla.
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In this sense, Gurza states, “These plans, though well-intentioned, had very clear limitations:
they did not want to harm interests to any greater degree, and all of them categorically rejected the
possibility of cohabitation of the two races without slavery. Freedom could only be conceived if it
came hand in hand with colonization of free blacks in a distant land” (2016: 29). In practice, not all
works like those mentioned a few paragraphs earlier were taken seriously, as they lent themselves
precisely to the ideological and economic interests of abolitionists. An example of this is that even
in the early twentieth century, historiography in academia continued to be blatantly racist. It was
around the mid-twentieth century that this view began to slowly change, though not without ideolo-
gical inuences, with some historians even comparing slavery to the extermination initiated by the
Nazis and Auschwitz. “Paternalism” became a term that became common as part of this ideology
that infantilized and victimized the black population, thus legitimizing the continuation in the imagi-
nary of slavery and oppression against African Americans. Gurza maintains that:
Since the late eighteenth century, Thomas Jeerson had asserted that (love between slaves) seems
to be more an anxious desire than that tender and delicate mixture of sensation and sentiment’
that, according to him, characterized love between whites. Already in the nineteenth century, ano-
ther Southern intellectual, in less elegant terms, claimed that black couples were united by ‘very
light bonds of concubinage,’ and that their capacity for conjugal love had been greatly exaggerated.
Another writer, in even more stark language, said with all conviction that ‘the lack of family aection
and insensitivity to ties of kinship’ were inherent characteristics of the black race. These are only
well-articulated manifestations of what was a fairly widespread racist opinion about the supposed
promiscuity and licentious sexuality of blacks (2016: 124).
Remember that the “founding fathers” of the United States and many more presidents of this
country were before and after the abolition of slavery, owners of slaves. At least twelve presidents
of the country had slaves during their lives between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth cen-
turies, when the ownership of slaves was considered a common and unquestionable practice
in the face of any possible conscientious objection among statesmen. To name a few, George
Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Tyler, James Monroe, Martin Van Buren,
William Henry Harrison, James K. Polk, Zachary Taylor, Andrew Johnson, and Ulysses S. Grant, as
well as the most notorious for his infamy, the rst Democratic President: Andrew Jackson. Soler,
critical and timely, comments: “Regarding the US, one must ask oneself this question: were the
founding fathers of this country responsible for slavery in America?” (2021: 27).
June 19th commemorates the arrival in 1865 of Union soldiers (from the North) in Galves-
ton, Texas, to inform slaves that they were free from that moment on and that the civil war had
ended. This event took place more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the
Emancipation Proclamation, which freed the slaves, although there were places like the state
of Texas where the proclamation was barely enforced, since Union troops were practically no-
nexistent in that region to make it valid. Today, 47 states in the United States recognize June
19th as a holiday, although despite initiatives, Congress has never been able to expand and
make it effective at the federal level. For Diego Cobo.
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The Emancipation Proclamation, promoted by Lincoln, destroyed the legal system of slavery that
had inated the economy of the country and Europe with about six hundred thousand slaves, a
number that multiplied to four million at the time of abolition. His strategy was particular: owners
had realized that it was easier to force slaves to have children among themselves than to bring
them from Africa (2018: 76-77).
After the abolition of slavery in the United States, the slave system began to converge towards
social, economic, and political relationships - that is, deeply cultural - based on a kind of “racial
capitalism” that has not been erased even in this decade of the 2020s: exclusive, discriminatory,
biased in the application of the law and the most fundamental rights established in the Constitu-
tion, violent, among many other things. It is enough to remember only the wave of violence that
erupted in the town of Ferguson,8 Missouri in 2015, which led then-African American President
Barack Obama to afrm that racism was in the nation’s DNA. Inequalities and inequities continue
to be marked and blatant in favor of the white population and to the detriment of the African
American population, not to mention other “minorities” such as the Hispanic population mainly,
among others, who suffer no less than the target population treated in this essay.
Conclusions
This work stops short of the beginning of the Civil War, offering only some general data on
what would come next for the self-proclaimed “American” nation. It seems clear that it was
precisely the lies, economic interests, and political and social exclusions generated by racism
and discrimination around emancipation and the abolition of slavery that ignited the passions
that led to the American Civil War of the mid-19th century between the abolitionist North
(Unionists) and the anti-abolitionist South (Confederates).
Among the objectives of this document was to make it clear to the reader that it was never
kindness, humanism, or virtuous philanthropy that motivated the “abolitionists” of the North to
ght for the termination of the enslavement regime suffered by African Americans, but rather
selsh economic interests, in the rst place; and political interests, in the second place. Lin-
coln’s true concern was to save the “Union”; therefore, at the end of the war, he found a deeply
divided country between Unionists and Secessionists, going so far as to declare that “The
primary objective of the government in this struggle is to save the Union and not to support
or ght against slavery. If I can save the nation without freeing a single slave, I will do so; if I
can do it by freeing all, I will do so as well, and if I can do it by freeing some and not others, I
will do so” (quoted in Cepero Bonilla, 1977: 116). We begin with Condorcet and conclude by
quoting him. He states in the epilogue to his work, to which we alluded, that “slavery is not only
an absurdity that must be stigmatized, but an evil that can be eradicated” (Condorcet, 2017:
8 See Robin D. G. Kelley. “Class & Inequality, Race. Forum: Black Study, Black Struggle. The university is not an engine
of social transformation. Activism is”. Published in the Boston Review on March 1, 2016. Retrieved from https://www.
bostonreview.net/forum/robin-kelley-black-struggle-campus-protest/?utm_source=Boston+Review+Email+Subs-
cribers&utm_campaign=d0c48f1b4c-roundup_february_23&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_2cb428c5ad-d0c-
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CLÍO: Revista de ciencias humanas y pensamiento crítico / Año 3, Núm 6. Julio / Diciembre (2023)
Carlos Alberto Navarro Fuentes
The African American Population in The United States After the Abolition of Slavery. PP: 89-98
ISSN 2660-903797
82). This prediction, laden with good intentions by the enlightened French intellectual, has not
found its rightful place in American society to date, not to mention the place it occupies in
other social constructs and realities.
References
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Filmographic References (and others)
“12 Years of a Slave” (2013). Directed by Steve McQueen. 133 min. United States. Screenplay:
John Ridley and Solomon Northup. Biography: Solomon Northup. Music: Hans Zimmer.
Cinematography: Sean Bobbitt.
“Harriet” (2019). Directed by Kasi Lemmons. 125 min. United States. Screenplay: Gregory
Allen Howard, Kasi Lemmons. Story: Gregory Allen Howard. Music: Terence Blanchard.
Starring: Cynthia Erivo, Joshuah Brian Campbell. Cinematography: John Toll.
“Stand Up”. Ofcial Music Video Performed by Cynthia Erivo - HARRIET -. Available at https://
youtu.be/sn19xvfoXvk
