The death of William Loren Katz in 2019 was a devastating loss in general and specifically to the Black and Native American communities, where his books were lodestones of his outstanding publishing and literary career. His indelible work was renewed recently with the reissue of “Breaking the Chains: African American Slave Resistance” with a new introduction by acclaimed scholar Robin D.G. Kelley.
Katz, as with all of his books, is unequivocally aligned with the oppressed, particularly with the enslaved and their struggle to gain freedom and justice. He deftly chronicles how Black Americans struggled valiantly, and often successfully to obtain some measure of their civil and human rights. At the very inception of the European plunder of Africa and subsequent Atlantic slave trade, Katz cites the countless mutinies aboard slave ships that began an unrelieved resistance. Each chapter of “Breaking the Chains” reveals the determination for freedom: “A Troublesome Property,” “The Battle for Family and Knowledge,” “Industrial and Urban Resistance,” and “Revolts in the Age of Revolution,” et al.
Katz marshals the facts, presents the data, and makes it abundantly clear that Black Americans were by no means passive onlookers in the fight for liberation, dispelling any notion that they were “the only people in the history of the world who became free without any effort of their own,” as historian W.E. Woodward wildly once claimed according to Katz.
Not only were African Americans agents of their liberation, but Katz shows their courage and resolve in the nation’s wars: the Revolutionary War, Spanish American War, and most significantly the Civil War. Many of the events overlooked or distorted by other historians get a fresh analysis from Katz including John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry in 1859. In too many accounts Brown is dismissed as a half-crazed zealot, but to Katz, he was a radical abolitionist and imbued with a charisma to convince several African Americans to join him. “On October 16, 1859,” Katz wrote, “Brown led a band that included five Blacks and seventeen whites, including his sons.” He intended to take command of the government arsenal, arm members of the enslaved on farms and plantations, and set up command stations to bring out the end of slavery. While the attempt failed, many believe it was the catalyst that ignited the Civil War.
Katz, as Kelley notes, debunks another longstanding myth that President Lincoln freed the slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation. “It did not liberate the four hundred and fifty thousand in Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri, or the two hundred and seventy-five thousand in Tennessee, and the tens of thousands in the Union-ruled portions of Louisiana and Virginia. In short, it liberated people in areas controlled by the Confederacy,” Katz wrote.
Some of what Katz recounts about America’s history, the dissolution of democracy, and the continuing menace of the Ku Klux Klan occurred with the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Readers of this book will be reminded of just how much more has to be done to fully liberate our society, and that Katz is needed all the more since there are still chains to be broken.