5. Black History Hero

Flipping Tables

Monte Mader

Society & Culture

5 • 626 Ratings

🗓️ 26 February 2025

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Have you heard of Civil War hero Robert Smalls? We will today! Today we'll cover how American exceptionalism contributes to white supremacy, its foundation in the colonies, and the amazing true story of enslaved man turned war hero Robert Smalls!

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Sources:

Wood, Peter H. Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion. W.W. Norton & Company, 1974.
Morgan, Philip D. Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry. University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
Franklin, John Hope, and Alfred A. Moss Jr. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans. McGraw-Hill, 2000.
Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Harvard University Press, 1998.
U.S. Census Bureau. 1790 Census Data.
Sjursen, Daniel, A True History of the United States, 2021
Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. W.W. Norton & Company, 1975.
Washburn, Wilcomb E. The Governor and the Rebel: A History of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia. University of North Carolina Press, 1957.
Rice, James D. Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America. Oxford University Press, 2012.
Breen, T.H. Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of Revolution. Princeton University Press, 1985.
Billings, Warren M. The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606-1689. University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
The National Park Service. “Bacon’s Rebellion (1676).”
The Library of Congress. “Bacon's Rebellion: A Virginia Turning Point.”
Morgan, Edmund S.American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. W.W. Norton & Company, 1975.
Rice, James D.Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America. Oxford University Press, 2012.
Washburn, Wilcomb E.The Governor and the Rebel: A History of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia. University of North Carolina Press, 1957.
Horn, James.A Land As God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America. Basic Books, 2005.
Billings, Warren M.The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606-1689. University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
The National Park Service.“Bacon’s Rebellion (1676).”
Library of Congress.“Bacon’s Rebellion: A Virginia Turning Point.”
Taylor, Alan.American Colonies: The Settling of North America. Penguin Books, 2001.
Lineberry, Cate, Be free or die: the Amazing Story of Robert Smalls Escape from Slavery to Union War Hero, 2018

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome back to the fifth episode of Flipping Table's Happy Black History Month.
0:05.0	I spent a lot of time thinking about what I was going to do for my celebration of this month,
0:09.0	juggling both starting the podcast and my trip to New Zealand made planning topics a little hard,
0:14.0	but here we are. Google can decide to kiss the ring and they're not going to honor Black History Month or Women's History Month or the Gulf of Mexico. I will not be doing so. This week there are going to be two episodes for Black
0:25.8	History Month, one for my Patreon subscribers coming out this Friday, covering one of the most violent
0:30.9	clashes of the civil rights movement, but also one of the least known, which is the Orangeburg
0:35.7	Massacre. And today, for all of you, a celebration of
0:38.9	greatness from a Civil War slave-turned congressman that you may have never heard of. Robert Smalls.
0:44.5	We will be covering so much black history as we study deconstruction, the foundation of white supremacy,
0:49.7	both in American Christianity and American politics. So I wanted this episode for the month to
0:55.4	celebrate black greatness that most of us were never taught in our history classes. Robert Smalls was
1:00.9	born into slavery in 1839 and as an enslaved adult stole a Confederate ship, delivered information
1:07.1	to the union who made him a ship's pilot or captain, making use of his intimate knowledge of the Charleston Harbor, to the point that he was also made captain and gunmen aboard a union vessel as well. He later became a politician, civil rights activist, and congressman in 1874, and continued to advocate for the rights of black Americans and veterans in spite of the danger it put him in in the face of direct threats from white supremacy groups, as well as local white politicians.
1:35.1	Today we'll cover some civil war history as well as how the original colonies poised poor white people and indentured service against black people to prevent revolution, the American
1:44.5	slave trade, and the inspiring true story of Robert Smalls. Now if you're watching this on YouTube, you can see that I'm back in my house.
2:24.3	I'm back from New Zealand. I'm so glad I did not cancel that trip. I thought about it with
2:28.4	all the work I've been doing here on social media and the research and the reading, plus my two
2:33.9	regular jobs. I was worried
2:36.0	about taking that time off, but I'm glad that I kept the trip. It was a much needed reset.
2:40.7	And now I have to find a new set of top three countries to visit because I've hit all three
2:44.4	of mine. And I will say one of my favorite moments of the trip. I was hiking Tongariro
2:50.0	National Park, which is where they filmed Mordor in the Lord of the Rings series.
	...

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