By Kaylee Hayes | Reporter
On Wednesday evening, associate professor Dr. Ronald Angelo Johnson presented his book, “Entangled Alliances,” in a lecture, “Reinterpretation of Blackness and Freedom in the American Revolution.”
“Entangled Alliances” was created in a cottage on the Caribbean island of St. Croix, where Johnson said he had the realization that there was a gap in the literature concerning the U.S. and Haiti during the American Revolution.
With this book, Johnson said his hope is to illustrate a truer, broader image of the American Revolution. He does this by looking through a more global lens — a transnational view — and by considering the history of Haiti, Black Americans and white Americans in conjunction.
During the lecture, he presented a picture that is multicultural and diverse, illustrating how Black patriots, white patriots and Haitian individuals all fought for liberation together.
When looking back at Transatlantic history, Johnson said many Americans make the mistake of thinking that all Black individuals were enslaved.
That is not the case.
The history of the American Revolution is still segregated, Johnson said. If you search for photos of the American Revolution on the internet, photos of white men and women appear, but there are no black individuals pictured. The images that appear aren’t wrong, but they are incomplete, Johnson argued.
Crispus Attucks is a prime example of how erasure occurs.
According to Johnson, Attucks was a Black man who lived and worked in Boston for 20 years. When the Boston Massacre began, he raced out of a nearby tavern to defend his home — America — alongside other Black and white individuals.
As time passed and new paintings were created of the Boston Massacre, the color of Attucks’ skin got lighter, and although he was there and fighting, many have never heard his name. His life was valuable and important too, Johnson said.
Mission freshman Oscar Siller Gonzales, who attended the lecture, is an example of Johnson’s argument that American history has forgotten these individuals.
“I never knew he existed,” Gonzales said. “I knew his name. I never knew he was Black, but I never put that much attention to it because there was never that much emphasis on the Black individuals.”
Gonzales agrees with Johnson in that there is a clear lack of blackness among the previously told history of the American Revolution.
“We need to have as much emphasis on these individuals — the people that weren’t mentioned, as well as all the other revolutionaries — in order for us to not be as ignorant and for us to be as educated as possible,” Gonzales said.
Gonzales said that while playing the video game “Sid Meier’s Civilization VII”, he had gotten into arguments with other players about Harriet Tubman. One person said that Tubman was a “wives’ tale,” and another said the history surrounding her is “fiction.”
“We, in some ways devalue Crispus Attucks when he is only useful to us after his death,” Jonhson said. “It is not dissimilar to our current relationships with the names Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and George Floyd. Their lives were more than hashtags.”
Freedom meant a lot of things in the 1700s. For some it was less taxes and more property control; for others it was freedom from slavery; and for all, it was “the spark” that freedom creates. The American Revolution occurred, and then the Haitian Revolution followed.
“The American Revolution was a cry for freedom and equality,” Johnson said.
Johnson said it was diplomacy that started, supported and ended the American Revolution, and it had mutual encouragement and tangible achievements across all peoples.
