We Refuse: A Forceful History
of Black Resistance

The first documented resistance to American slavery began before the nation existed. Enslaved people fought back from the moment they were captured — on the African coast, on the Middle Passage, in the fields, in the kitchens, in the courts. The tools available were limited and the penalties for resistance were death, but the resistance never stopped.

Carter Jackson catalogs the full range: enslaved people broke tools to slow production. They feigned illness to reduce labor output. They poisoned food (a documented strategy, terrifying to slaveholders). They set fires. They ran. Harriet Tubman made 13 missions back into Maryland after her own escape. Gabriel Prosser organized an armed uprising in Virginia in 1800. Denmark Vesey planned one in Charleston in 1822. Nat Turner carried one out in Southampton County in 1831. In the 1840s, Creole enslaved people seized a ship transporting them and sailed it to the Bahamas, where they were free under British law.

The legal resistance began early too. Elizabeth Freeman sued for her freedom in Massachusetts in 1781, citing the state’s new constitution declaring all men created equal. She won. Dred Scott sued for his freedom in 1846. He lost in the Supreme Court in 1857, in a ruling so extreme — that Black people had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect” — that it accelerated the country toward Civil War. Even that defeat was an act of resistance.

The cultural resistance was equally methodical. Spirituals encoded information about escape routes and timing. “Follow the Drinking Gourd” pointed north using the Big Dipper. “Wade in the Water” instructed freedom seekers to use rivers to throw dogs off their scent. The spirituals were not just comfort for the suffering. They were operational communications, embedded in a cultural form the oppressor couldn’t read.

Reconstruction (1865–1877) was the only period in American history when Black political power existed at a meaningful scale. Black men were elected to Congress. Black communities built schools, churches, and civic institutions. Greenwood in Tulsa, “Black Wall Street,” was one of the most prosperous Black communities in the country. This prosperity was built on deliberate, organized community investment — itself a form of resistance to economic exclusion.

The backlash was organized and violent. The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1865. The White League and Red Shirts used armed terror to suppress Black voting. The Supreme Court systematically dismantled Reconstruction-era civil rights protections. By 1877, federal troops withdrew from the South and Reconstruction ended. The following decades brought Jim Crow laws, debt peonage that replicated the conditions of slavery, and systematic disenfranchisement.

The resistance continued. Ida B. Wells launched her anti-lynching campaign in 1892 after three of her friends were lynched in Memphis. She documented every case she could find, published the data, toured the country and Britain, and refused to stop when her newspaper office was burned and she was threatened with death. She named names. She published statistics. She forced the world to look at what was happening. W.E.B. Du Bois co-founded the NAACP in 1909. Both understood that documentation was a form of resistance — that the refusal to let atrocities be forgotten was itself a political act.

Carter Jackson notes the critical distinction: the same communities that practiced nonviolent petition and legal challenge also defended themselves by force when attacked. These were not competing philosophies. They were tactical choices, deployed simultaneously by people who understood that different threats required different responses.

The Civil Rights Movement is often taught as though nonviolent direct action was the obvious, natural, or philosophically correct response to white supremacy. Carter Jackson reframes this. Nonviolence was a tactical choice, made by skilled strategists who understood how to use American media and American mythology against American racism. It was not a statement that Black people had no anger, no right to defend themselves, or no awareness of the violence being done to them. It was a chosen mode of combat, selected for its strategic effectiveness in a specific historical moment.

The strategic genius of the movement: the television camera. When police turned fire hoses on children in Birmingham in 1963, the images were broadcast worldwide. The movement understood that visible, documented, disciplined nonviolence in the face of savage state violence made the violence legible as oppression — and put the oppressor on the wrong side of history in front of every viewer. This was not passive. It was an information war, and the movement was winning it.

But the movement was never exclusively nonviolent at the community level. Robert F. Williams, NAACP chapter president in Monroe, North Carolina, organized armed self-defense units in the 1950s to protect Black residents from Klan violence when police would not. The Deacons for Defense and Justice in Louisiana and Mississippi were armed groups that escorted civil rights workers, guarded meeting halls, and patrolled Black neighborhoods. Martin Luther King Jr. had armed guards at his home in the early years of the Montgomery campaign. The historical memory of nonviolence is partly a construction — a narrative that erased the armed component to make the movement more palatable to white audiences.

Carter Jackson’s argument: the full picture is more powerful, not less. A movement that simultaneously deployed legal strategy, economic boycott, nonviolent direct action, cultural production, and armed community defense was not fragmented — it was comprehensive. It was using every tool in the toolbox, simultaneously, and it worked.

Tactic	Example	Strategic Logic
Nonviolent Direct Action	Birmingham sit-ins, 1963	Force state violence into the open; win the media war
Economic Boycott	Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955	Leverage economic power; make racism costly
Legal Challenge	Brown v. Board, 1954	Use the law to delegitimize segregation on its own terms
Armed Self-Defense	Deacons for Defense, 1964	Protect organizers; deter terrorist attacks
Political Organizing	Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, 1964	Demand inclusion; expose the corruption of existing parties

The assassination of Dr. King in April 1968, followed by Robert F. Kennedy in June, and the collapse of the Poor People’s Campaign, did not end Black resistance. It changed its forms. COINTELPRO — the FBI’s domestic counterintelligence program, which spent the 1960s surveilling, infiltrating, and destroying Black organizations — had specifically targeted the most effective resistance structures. Fred Hampton was assassinated in his bed by Chicago police in December 1969. The Black Panther Party was systematically dismantled through false prosecutions, informants, and state violence.

Resistance went local and cultural. The 1970s saw an explosion of Black political representation at the city level: Black mayors in Newark, Gary, Atlanta, Detroit, Los Angeles. The Congressional Black Caucus was founded in 1971. Hip-hop emerged from the South Bronx in the mid-1970s as a direct response to urban disinvestment — a cultural form that turned poverty into art and turned that art into a global language of resistance. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message” (1982) described the conditions of Black urban life with more precision than any congressional report. N.W.A’s “F*** tha Police” (1988) was an indictment that preceded the Rodney King beating by three years.

The crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s was met with incarceration, not treatment. The 100:1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine (1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act) sent the message clearly: this is not a public health crisis, it is a criminal justice one. Resistance to mass incarceration built slowly through organizations like the ACLU, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Innocence Project (1992), and a generation of public defenders working inside a system designed to produce convictions, not justice.

Carter Jackson’s point: resistance during these decades was harder to see because it was fragmented, local, and often culturally coded rather than publicly legible. But it was present. Every organizer, every lawyer, every parent who taught their children what to do when stopped by the police, every hip-hop artist who told the truth about their block — all of them were refusing.

The acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing of Trayvon Martin in July 2013 prompted Alicia Garza to write a Facebook post she called “a love letter to Black people.” Patrisse Cullors added the hashtag. Opal Tometi built the digital infrastructure. Black Lives Matter was born as an act of cultural resistance — a refusal to let the state’s verdict on Black life stand unchallenged.

What followed over the next decade was a new demonstration of Carter Jackson’s thesis: the tactics of Black resistance adapted to new conditions. The smartphone replaced the television camera as the tool that made police violence legible. The video of Eric Garner saying “I can’t breathe” eleven times. The video of Walter Scott shot in the back while running. The video of Philando Castile bleeding in his car. The video of George Floyd. Each one spread across every platform simultaneously, creating a visual record that was harder to suppress than any previous evidence of police violence.

The 2020 uprisings following Floyd’s murder were the largest protest movement in American history by participation. They were also, in Carter Jackson’s framework, continuous with everything that came before. The same range of tactics appeared: peaceful marches, legal observers, mutual aid networks, bail funds, calls for police defunding and abolition, demands for legislative change, and, in some places, armed community protection. The debates about tactics within the movement — whether to march or disrupt, whether to engage with electoral politics or reject them, whether to seek reform or transformation — were the same debates that had been happening since Reconstruction.

Carter Jackson ends with what the full record shows: Black resistance has never been a reaction to a single injustice, or the project of a single generation, or limited to a single method. It is a 400-year practice of refusal — the ongoing assertion that Black lives have inherent worth, that oppression is not the natural order, and that every generation inherits both the obligation to resist and the accumulated knowledge of how. The title, We Refuse, is present tense. It is not a historical description. It is a statement of ongoing fact.