Movement history that can inspire today

Since I dinged one academic yesterday for what I considered weak historical analogies that shed little light on his subject, now I want to raise up an article by an historian that I think uncovers powerful resonances between contemporary events and US history.

Manisha Sinha is the author of the monumental study The Slave's Cause: a History of Abolition. In The New Fugitive Slave Laws in the New York Review of Books, she discusses several recent criminal cases brought against humanitarians which call to mind 19th century struggles to end slavery in the United States.

Scott Warren, a volunteer for the group No More Deaths, has been charged for illegally providing food and water to migrants in the Arizona desert. His travails remind her of the Ohio farmer John Van Zandt whose long legal battle in the 1840s against indictment for assisting nine fugitive slaves to hide successfully left him penniless and broken. Warren's recent trial led to a hung jury; the government wants to try him again.

The German ship captain Carola Rackete rescued 41 African migrants from the Mediterranean Sea; the right-wing populist government of Italy seized her ship, though individual criminal charges laid against here were dismissed by an Italian judge. The organization that sponsored her voyage, Sea-Watch International, charges Italy with "kidnapping." Sinha points out that

Abolitionists, too, often called those who captured free blacks and assisted in fugitive slave renditions “kidnappers,” ...

She goes on to draw out the similarities between our recoil from images of the drowned Salvadoran father, Óscar Ramírez, and his young daughter, Valeria with the immense impact of the scene of the slave Eliza and her infant escaping across the Ohio River in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852).

She concludes:

Today, in criminalizing the provision of humanitarian assistance to migrants we have resurrected the fugitive slave laws of antebellum America. Just as abolitionist activists were once targeted, human rights activists have found themselves in the sights of the Trump administration for surveillance and prosecution, according to a recent Amnesty International report. ...

Some historical analogies can mislead, granted, but we should be mindful of the lessons from history that can shine light on our current humanitarian crisis. The first is that evils we had thought long banished from civilized societies can reappear, and with alarming speed. ... The second lesson from history is how quickly such measures can be accepted as necessary, even “natural.” That ordinary people of any ethnicity or nationality can partake in and support evil actions at any time is not news to historians.

... the interracial nineteenth-century abolition movement can provide valuable inspiration to those involved in today’s efforts to provide humanitarian aid to migrants and refugees and to resist the threatened descent into authoritarianism, mass atrocity, and inhumanity. ... The plight of today’s “Dreamers” and citizens and legal immigrants married to undocumented immigrants is comparable to the status of runaway slaves who married free blacks and raised children in free states. ... We might well paraphrase Frederick Douglass’s great speech, “What to the interned migrant is the Fourth of July?”

The [1850] Fugitive Slave Law sparked outrage in the North, especially in areas where the abolition movement was strong. Hundreds of cases brought to court under the law by slave-catchers and slave owners in the 1850s led to abolitionist protests and scuffles with federal marshals.

Manisha Sinha's history of abolitionism is less a retelling of what happened in the course of this country's tormented trajectory toward ending slavery and more an exploration and evaluation of abolitionism as a prolonged social movement. Because that's how she's chosen to look at the past, it is not surprising that she excels at picturing the present within a social movement vision. Read it all here.