400 Years: Taking the Knee (3DD Productions, PBS, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I’d had a bit of a dilemma last night – did I want to watch a couple of interesting programs on KPBS or did I want to stay on the news channels and see how the recall election against California Governor Gavin Newsom turned out – but the election got called so early that I didn’t have to worry about missing the news of how it would turn out. So instead I watched a British show called 400 Years: Taking the Knee, directed by Dominic Saville, which turned out to be a series of capsule biography of African-descended people resisting their forcible enslavement and subsequent targeting for discrimination in both the U.S. and Britain. Some of the names they covered are the familiar ones you’d expect – Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey (interestingly, the earliest one whose voice we actually got to hear, courtesy of a record that sounded like he made it in the early 1920’s, during the acoustic era), Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Muhammad Ali, and Barack Obama – and some more surprising.

The show led off with the fascinating story of “Nanoo of the Maroons,” who led the first slave rebellion in the New World on Jamaica during the years of Oliver Cromwell’s rule in Britain. She led her forces to some early victories against the British military and eventually hid out in the Blue Mountains in eastern Jamaica, where she fought the British to a standstill and ultimately agreed to surrender if they’d let her continue to run her mini-state in the mountains. Unfortunately, the treaty the British offered her included a provision that her government would have to return any future fugitive slaves who came there hoping to join her and her people, and rather than fulfill that clause of the treaty she killed herself and, according to Jamaican legend, her spirit ascended to the sky and promised an end to slavery and oppression. She’s enough of a Jamaican national heroine that her picture is on the Jamaican $50 bill, but I’d never heard of her before. The show also mentioned Toussaint L’Ouverture, who led the first successful slave rebellion in Haiti and nearly conquered the rest of the island of Hispaniola as well, and it discussed the sad end – he was tricked into coming to France to sign a peace treaty, only he was put in handcuffs and leg irons and shipped back to France in chains, imprisoned and died there within a year. It did not mention Henri Christophe, who finished the Haitian revolution L’Ouverture had started and declared himself the first king of Haiti; in the 1920’s John W. Vandercook wrote a biography of him called Black Majesty and Sergei Eisenstein bought the movie rights. Eisenstein tried to set up the project both in the U.S. and the Soviet Union, with Paul Robeson set to play Christophe, but he was unable to get it green-lighted from either the capitalists or the Communists.

The program covered Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in the U.S. in 1831 (which was mostly a series of riots on plantations where slave owners were killed and their properties destroyed), but oddly left out Denmark Vesey, who attempted a far more elaborately planned slave rebellion in the U.S. nine years earlier and was betrayed by a so-called “house nigger” (a slave who worked inside the masters’ home instead of in the field) whom one of Vesey’s lieutenants, against Vesey’s advice, had recruited. (The house slaves were, not surprisingly, far more sympathetic to the planters who owned them than the field slaves,who were worked a lot harder, so when Malcolm X called Martin Luther King, Jr. a “house nigger” that was the history he was referencing.) The show also profiled some of the African-British civil-rights activists – the struggle for Black people’s rights in Britain was almost totally terra incognita to me – including the struggles of the so-called “Windrush Generation,” named after the ship that brought a lot of them from their West Indian countries to Britain in 1948 after the Labour government liberalized the citizenship laws and allowed them to immigrate. Then in 1973 the laws were tightened again and a lot of these people either got deported to “homelands” they hadn’t seen in decades or mount intensive legal fights to avoid that fate. There was also a profile of the so-called “Mangrove Nine,” so called after a London restaurant which served Caribbean food and in the late 1960’s became a favored hangout for Black Britons. Only it was regularly harassed by the Metropolitan Police, and when nine activists (including Darcus Howe, the one profiled here) organized a protest march on the local police headquarters they were arrested for inciting a riot. Their trial went on for months before they were finally acquitted and a British police department finally acknowledged that racism had played a part in their enforcement decisions. The struggles in the U.S. over the killing of George Floyd (and Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner and others) by police officers or civilian police wanna-bes were touched on in this show, which was basically a good capsule history that showed the mind-boggling persistence of racism in the white Anglo-Saxon world as well as the remarkable persistence of the struggle against it.