The Declaration’s significance extends far beyond the aims of the American Revolution or an expression of American nationalism. For Black thinkers, captive and fugitive, it was a referendum on the definition of the human, a rhetorical weapon against America’s conceits of liberty and democracy, and an exhortation on the right to rebel. Black people did not need a document to justify revolt, but it came in handy. It is most powerful when the people it was never meant to represent grab hold of its language and toss it back like an undetonated grenade, whether those hands belong to Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, Maria Stewart, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., or Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam. For these and other reasons, the Declaration should be read as a core text in Black studies.
My first encounter with a Black studies interrogation of the Declaration and the American Revolution was 45 years ago, when as an undergraduate I read Felix Nwabueze Okoye’s provocative essay “Chattel Slavery as the Nightmare of the American Revolutionaries.” The Nigerian-born Okoye, a noted Africanist and inaugural chair of the department of African and African American studies at SUNY Brockport, wanted to understand why the patriots persistently used the language of slavery to describe their condition. Writing in the wake of the U.S. Bicentennial, Okoye contended that white settler fear of being reduced to chattel slaves was the catalyst for the American Revolution. He takes to task every historian of the American Revolution for failing to see that the pamphlets, broadsides, and oratory did not refer to political or metaphorical slavery but dreaded the prospect of actual bondage. “What they feared,” Okoye wrote, “was ‘unmerited slavery,’ a slavery that was passed on to one’s descendants. What they detested was ‘ignominious slavery,’ a slavery that aroused feelings of shame in the breast of the oppressed. What they scorned was ‘abject slavery,’ a slavery that deprived its victims of all rights, a slavery whose elements were ‘cruel bondage and insults.’” In other words, servile status was reserved for Africans, not white men.