Violence Vs. Nonviolence - Blog Posts
The teachings of Henry Highland Garnet vs. Fredrick Douglass
Henry Highland Garnet didn’t come up with the best ideas to counteract slavery and resistance against it, as his ideas were mixed with violence that critics like Fredric Douglass opposed for fear that it would ignite rebellions across the states that African-Americans could not win or face bloody white backlashes. But, something that black leaders like Douglass didn’t understand is that the demand for equal rights by appeasing the dominant elitist through morality, will simply not work. A great black activist during this time, Martin DeLaney explains that appeasing the dominant society through morality and common decency will not work because you cannot force your morals, no matter how right they are on a people, group, or individual who are unwilling to listen or hear. In other words, it isn’t morality that holds the reins, it is power, and that is true no matter what century we’re discussing.
First, we should get to know who Henry Highland Garnet was ‘‘born a slave on December 23, 1815, in New Market, Kent County, Maryland, and escaped with his family in 1824, was the grandson of a captured Mandingo chief. Garnet’s early education was in a segregated school on Mulberry Street in Manhattan. In 1835, he was in attendance at the Canaan Academy, a New Hampshire School, that was destroyed by a racist mob. Garnet, like other abolitionists during the 1840s, was critical in his assessment of the various emigrationist programs. That process, however, was an evolutionary one.’’
One of his best quotes, ‘‘Neither God nor angels or just men, command you to suffer for a single moment. Therefore it is your solemn and imperative duty to use every means, both moral, intellectual, and physical that promises success….(in Woodon 1925, 1969), one of his most radical statements in regards to slavery. The speech, the earliest extant speech by a black man advocating violence in America, entitled ‘An Address to the Slaves of the United States, was delivered before the National Convention of Colored Citizens at Buffalo, New York, in 1862. Despite its significance of the speech and the speaker, Henry Highland Garnet is virtually unknown to students of American history’’. Garnet truly believed that the only way for slaves to gain their freedom from slave owners was to take it by force, by any means necessary, and Fredrick Douglass fiercely opposed such views, as he wanted to have all slaves be freed through non-violence and appealing to people’s sense of morality. The two went back and forth, Douglass wrote that educated men who followed Garnet’s ‘backwatered and destructive’ stance had no stomach for continuing the struggle against prejudice and ignorance in this country, and thus it was that they sought more congenial places so they could live 'peaceful lives'.
Nevertheless, Garnet inspired his people when it seemed like all was lost, a talent of his, as his voice was awe-inspiring, and people who were tired of being crushed under the weight of oppression who didn’t think non-violence was going to work, flocked to him during his weekly sermons. ‘‘There was something about his personality which few leaders possessed—the commanding presence which inspires courage and the will to fight through difficulties. In his personality were reflected the fire to genius of African chieftains who had defied the slave catchers and later rankled Southern bondage.’’
