Fighting Back

But there were obstacles. Most opportunities for self-purchase or joining mutual aid societies were not available in large and distant plantation settings, the environment where most of the enslaved population lived and worked in Cuba, Brazil, and the rest of Latin America.

In colonial North America and the independent United States, despite being forced to adhere to Christianity, enslaved people kept alive religions, ritual practices, and deities from their homelands. Catholicism, Protestantism, Vodun, Orisha, and Islam became instruments to channel slave resistance in the Americas, evident in burial ceremonies, night gatherings, and annual holidays, during which enslaved Africans and their descendants maintained a large array of musical, dance, and martial arts practices. These cultural traditions brought from their African communities were preserved and transformed in the context of bondage in the Americas. These practices also remained dynamic because even after the end of the Atlantic slave trade, freedpeople and their descendants continued to cross the Atlantic Ocean. This movement was particularly visible between Brazil and the region of present-day Angola and the Bight of Benin. Even today, religions such as Candomblé and martial arts such as capoeira express this long history of cultural resistance against the violence of slavery and racism that continued following the abolition era.

As early as the sixteenth century, enslaved Africans and their descendants organized rebellions and created runaway slave communities in the West Indies. As the legal abolition of slavery gradually evolved in the late eighteenth century in North America, enslaved people also managed to find their own paths to freedom, either by escaping, forming Maroon communities, or organizing rebellions. Enslaved people escaped individually or in groups literally everywhere in the Americas. Communities of escaped bondspeople also existed in various regions of the Americas such as today’s Mexico and Jamaica. But the largest and longest-lasting community of runaway enslaved people was the quilombo of Palmares in seventeenth-century northeast Brazil. Yet forming such communities was not always the preferred method of resisting against slavery. Bondspeople also organized plots, conspiracies, and rebellions. Each slave revolt was shaped by regional contexts, but most of them occurred in regions where plantation slavery predominated, even though enslaved people also carried out revolts in eighteenth-century New York City in the then British colony of New York and in nineteenth-century Salvador in independent Brazil. As we have seen, a spiritual dimension often oriented the leaders of several rebellions who were inspired by the principles of Christianity, Islam, and African-based religions. More important, these rebellions often occurred in regions where Black people—enslaved, freed, and free—predominated, and particularly in areas with large contingents of African-born enslaved and freed populations.

As legal abolition of slavery gradually evolved in the Americas during the nineteenth century, freedpeople migrated to West Africa, and in some cases to West Central Africa. Most of these men, women, and children traveled voluntarily, although others were forced to relocate on the African continent. Several returnees who left from Brazil were born in Africa, but many others who left from the United States were setting foot on the African continent for the first time, with hopes of building a new life of economic prosperity far from segregation and racial hatred. We know, however, that this African exodus also posed numerous challenges for those who survived the first years after relocation. The coastal areas and the hinterlands of the African continent remained deeply divided during the entire nineteenth century when these movements occurred. Several returnees to the Bight of Benin became slave merchants. Perceived as foreigners, African Americans established in Sierra Leone and Liberia often clashed with local peoples.