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We've Been Protesting
A digital museum of Black and African-American protest history — documented through events, songs, art, literature, poetry, and quotes, with sources for every record.
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- Poetry · UpdatedLift Every Voice and SingLift every voice and sing, Till earth and heaven ring, Ring with the harmonies of Liberty; Let our rejoicing rise High as the list’ning skies, Let it resound loud as the rolling sea. Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us, Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us; Facing the rising sun of our new day begun, Let us march on till victory is won. Stony the road we trod, Bitter the chast’ning rod, Felt in the days when hope unborn had died; Yet with a steady beat, Have not our weary feet Come to the place for which our fathers sighed? We have come over a way that with tears has been watered. We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered, Out from the gloomy past, Till now we stand at last Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast. God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, Thou who hast brought us thus far on the way; Thou who hast by Thy might, Led us into the light, Keep us forever in the path, we pray. Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee, Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee; Shadowed beneath Thy hand, May we forever stand, True to our God, True to our native land.
- Event · UpdatedThe Stono RebellionOn Sunday, September 9, 1739, about twenty enslaved Africans gathered near the Stono River, some twenty miles from Charleston, South Carolina. The colonial record names one leader: Jemmy, called their captain. Most of the rebels came from the Kongo region of Central Africa; historians believe some had been soldiers there. The group broke into Hutchinson's store, killed the two storekeepers, took guns and powder, and turned south toward Spanish Florida, where the Spanish crown had promised freedom to escaped British slaves and where free Black people had built the fortified town of Mose the year before. They marched behind two drums. A contemporary account describes the column moving "with Colours displayed, and two Drums beating," the marchers "calling out Liberty." When they halted in a field, they "set to dancing, Singing and beating Drums, to draw more Negroes to them." The drums were a summons, carrying the call to join farther than any voice could reach. The company grew to sixty or more, some said a hundred, killing white colonists and burning houses along the ten-mile march. Lieutenant Governor William Bull crossed their path on the road, escaped, and raised the alarm. That afternoon armed planters caught the marchers in a field near the Jacksonborough ferry and broke the column. Bull reported twenty-one whites and forty-four rebels killed or executed. Planters shot captives where they stood. Militia hunted survivors for weeks; one leader stayed free until 1742. It was the largest uprising of enslaved people in Britain's mainland American colonies. Within eight months, South Carolina answered with the Negro Act of 1740, banning the drums that had called the rebellion together.
- Event · UpdatedThe Negro Act of 1740On May 10, 1740, South Carolina's assembly passed "An Act for the better Ordering and Governing Negroes and other Slaves in this Province," its answer to the Stono Rebellion eight months earlier. William Bull, the lieutenant governor who had fled the Stono marchers on the Pon Pon road, signed it into law. The rebels had recruited by drumbeat, and the assembly wrote that fear into Section XXXVI, which barred enslaved people from "using or keeping of drums, horns, or other loud instruments, which may call together or give sign or notice to one another of their wicked designs and purposes." Any slaveholder who permitted drumming paid a ten-pound fine. The often-repeated claim that drumming carried the death penalty is false; the act reserved death for insurrection, murder, poisoning, and arson. The clause was borrowed, not invented. Barbados had banned drums in nearly identical words in 1688, Jamaica and St. Kitts followed, and Georgia copied South Carolina's version in 1755. Virginia and North Carolina never banned instruments, and New Orleans confined drumming to Congo Square rather than outlawing it. The act reached far beyond music. It barred enslaved people from learning to write, earning money, keeping livestock or boats, traveling without passes, or gathering in groups. Made perpetual in 1783, it stayed the foundation of South Carolina slave law until 1865. The drum ban worked, and it didn't. Mentions of drums fade from the colonial record after 1740, but rhythm moved where the law couldn't follow: into clapping, stomping, patting juba, and the ring shout, where a broomstick beat the floor in place of a drumhead. Coastal Georgians interviewed in the 1930s still remembered funeral drums. The drums outlasted the law.
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