Black Agenda Report
Black Agenda Report
News, commentary and analysis from the black left.

  • Home
  • Africa
  • African America
  • Education
  • Environment
  • International
  • Media and Culture
  • Political Economy
  • Radio
  • US Politics
  • War and Empire
  • omnibus

Essay: Record of Revolts in Negro Workers’ Past: Mary Adams, May 1, 1928
Editors, The Black Agenda Review
04 May 2022
Essay: Record of Revolts in Negro Workers’ Past: Mary Adams, May 1, 1928

A May Day 1928 essay by Black communist Williana “Liana” Jones Burroughs – aka Mary Adams – recounts the history of African revolt in the Americas.

Williana “Liana” Jones Burroughs was among the most prolific writers and energetic organizers from that cohort of notorious Black communists animating the street-corners, churches, and community halls of Harlem in the 1920s. Born on January 2, 1882 in Petersburg, Virginia, Burroughs moved to New York City as a child. She attended New York City Normal College, today’s Hunter College, and after graduating, taught for almost twenty years in New York City’s public schools. Through the New York City’s Teachers Union, Burroughs became active with the Communist Party (CP). She was an advocate for educators, but was also an early member of the American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC). Formed in Chicago in 1925, the ANLC was meant to serve as a vehicle to increase Black membership in and participation with the CP. Although the ANLC had many famous Black names on its roster – including Lovet Fort-Whiteman, Otto and Hermina Huisoud, Grace Cambell, William L. Patterson, James L. Ford, Richard B. Moore, and George Padmore – it had little success in its broader recruiting efforts. In the late 1920s, Burroughs made a number of trips to the Soviet Union, eventually settling in Moscow in 1935 where she worked for the Moscow News and as an announcer and editor for Radio Moscow. She returned to the United States in 1945, two months before her passing on December 24, 1945.

As “Mary Adams,” her party name, Burroughs wrote for The Daily Worker, Working Woman, the ANLC journals Negro Champion and The Liberator, and The Negro Worker, the journal published by the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW) and edited by James Ford and George Padmore. She wrote on the plight of Black teachers, on the working conditions of “laundry slaves,” and on labor of Black women and children in colonial Africa. Burroughs also wrote on Black resistance. For a special issue of The Negro Worker she wrote on Black social movements in North and South America and the Daily Worker published Burrough’s essay “Record of Revolts in Negro Workers’ Past.”

Reprinted below, Burroughs’ “Record of Revolts,” published on Labor Day, May 1, 1928, is a short and succinct account of the history of Black rebellion in the Americas. Burroughs draws on the research of Hubert Harrison and W.E.B. Du Bois, while anticipating CLR James’ later recovery of pan-African documented in his A History of Negro Revolt, published a decade later, in 1938. Burroughs’s essay begins with African resistance to slavery on the continent and goes on to cover slave revolts in the US south, the Underground Railroad, the communities of runaways and maroons throughout the Americas, and the Haitian Revolution. In short, Burroughs marks May Day by dispelling the idea that enslaved Africans were passive and docile, cowering meakishly beneath white power and the lash.

Record of Revolts in Negro Workers’ Past

Mary Adams

Some years ago, the late Hubert Harrison correctly pointed out that the Negro in America was learning nothing of his race’s history. Brought up in a hostile environment he had no record of African achievement in tribal government, industry or art. The story of ancient Negro kingdoms was a sealed book to colored America. His achievements in this country were minimized also.

The attitude of self depreciation which this situation developed was deliberately fostered by the white ruling class. White America has been callous and brutal in its expression of contempt for everything black.

In all this campaign there has been no more vicious slander than the gibe that the Negro is yellow.

It was charged that he would not resist oppression.

Persistent research by Harrison, Du Bois and others had put a stop to such charges. Thanks to the efforts of these men Negroes know now that they have a rich heritage of revolt.

The Negro’s resistance at the outset of the slave trade was marked by the death of thousands of African natives. Raiders had a hard fight in getting together their captives for the slave market. Slavers, carrying their living cargo over the ocean, lost many on every trip, who leaped to death rather than live in slavery.

The Negro Year Book lists twenty-five slave revolts in the South. The names of Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, Cato and Gabriel, leaders in notable insurrections, are becoming household words among us. The names of the colored men who were with John Brown at Harper’s Ferry are known and revered today.

Thousands of slaves made their escape whenever the chance offered. Southern slave owners testified that so many Negroes ran away that the institution itself was threatened. Osceola and other slaves from Georgia found a haven among the Seminoles in the Florida everglades. When the government found it impossible to defeat or dislodge these runaways, the whole tribe was transported to Indian Territory. The presence of colored groups in Mexico and Canada is evidence of the Negro’s resistance. These people are the descendents of runaway slaves.

Many Negroes were active as agents or secretaries in the “Underground Railway,” the organized movement against slavery. In St. Louis free Negroes organized the Knights of Liberty. After ten years’ work this group was finally merged with the Underground Railway. Some agents had the job of going back into slave territory and helping out their brothers. One heroic woman, Harriet Tubman, herself a runaway, made nineteen trips back into the South, bringing out over three hundred people. She did this knowing all the time there was a price on her head.

America did its best, but was never successful in keeping from the Negroes the thrilling story of Toussaint L’Ouverture. This Haitian slave led a successful revolt against the French masters on the island. He then fought for his country’s independence, defeating picked troops from Spain, England and France. Napoleon’s brother-in-law captured him through treachery, carried him to France, where he died, in a dungeon, alone and neglected. It has been stated that Napoleon was glad to cede Louisiana to America because of the trouble which L’Ouverture made for him in Hayti. Haiti gave asylum to Bolivar in his defeat, and later gave him aid in fitting out the forces with which he freed Bolivia.

In other parts of the West Indies and in Guiana, escaping slaves entrenched themselves in the jungle country or in mountain fastnesses. These are the famous Maroons. Their position was so strong that their governments, finding it impossible to beat them, made terms with them. In some places they were allotted a certain territory and permitted to have their own rulers. In Guiana they possess this land to this day.

The long history of Negro suffering has produced these these fighters mentioned above, along with men like Frederick Douglas, Dessalines, Shields, Green, Robert Smalls and others less well known. Their fight against the established institutions and governments of their time was revolution and their names are the names of revolutionists.

Mary Adams, “Record of Revolts in Negro Workers’ Past,” Daily Worker, (1 May 1928).

May Day
Black Workers
Black communists

Do you need and appreciate Black Agenda Report articles. Please click on the DONATE icon, and help us out, if you can.


Related Stories

Social Democracy Will Not Save Us
Benjamin Woods
Social Democracy Will Not Save Us
16 November 2022
The author makes the case that liberalism is a dead end and that socialism is the only tool for Black liberation.
For African/Black Working Class and Colonized Peoples, Midterm Elections in the U.S. Offer No Relief from War, Repression and Capitalist Misery
​​​​​​​ Ajamu Baraka, BAR editor and columnist
For African/Black Working Class and Colonized Peoples, Midterm Elections in the U.S. Offer No Relief from War, Repression and Capitalist Misery
09 November 2022
The 50 year old neo-liberal agenda explains why political choices in this country provide little change that benefits the masses of people.
INTERVIEW: To the Point of Production: An Interview with John Watson of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, 1969
Editors, The Black Agenda Review
INTERVIEW: To the Point of Production: An Interview with John Watson of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, 1969
07 September 2022
A 1969 interview with a founder of Detroit’s League of Revolutionary Black Workers reminds us of the radical genius and hope of Black labor.
Three Revolutionary Black Women
Dr. Gerald Horne
Three Revolutionary Black Women
31 August 2022
Dr.
Stop Confusing the Fight Against Racism with Neoliberalism
Danny Haiphong, BAR Contributing Editor
Stop Confusing the Fight Against Racism with Neoliberalism
23 November 2021
The electoral appeal of anti-Black racism is a constant in the U.S.
Looking for space for General Baker Institute, 2016 - Photo: Roy Singham
Roy Singham
On the Road from Detroit to South Africa: Black Radical Internationalist Traditions
23 November 2021
Roy Singham reminisces about his work with the late General Gordon Baker, Jr.
Claudia Passport
Lola Olufemi
Claudia Jones: A Life in Search of the Communist Horizon
26 September 2021
This is the foreword to the new edition of Marika Sherwood’s Claudia Jones: A Life in E
A History of Unemployment and the Search for Solutions
Philip Harvey
A History of Unemployment and the Search for Solutions
21 April 2021
The only time the United States has experienced real full employment was during World Wars I and II.
Black Worker Centers: Building Workplace Power in the Communities
Matthew Cunnington-Cook
Black Worker Centers: Building Workplace Power in the Communities
21 April 2021
As organized labor deals with the defeat at Amazon in Alabama, another type of base-building power beckons.
Silencing Black Radicalism Since the Cold War 
Denise Lynn
Silencing Black Radicalism Since the Cold War 
10 December 2020
Anti-communists used the full powers of the state to silence, imprison, or deport radical Black activists.

More Stories


  • Black Agenda Radio February 3, 2023
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
    Black Agenda Radio February 3, 2023
    03 Feb 2023
    This week we learn about the destruction of a Black community in Portland, Oregon and the legal efforts at restitution, and the struggle to fight for reform of the cash bail system in Minnesota. But…
  • Cuba, Africa, and Apartheid’s End: Africa’s Children Return - Part 2
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
    Cuba, Africa, and Apartheid’s End: Africa’s Children Return - Part 2
    03 Feb 2023
    Isaac Saney is a Cuba and Black studies specialist and historian at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
  • Albina Community Fights for Restitution of Seized Property
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
    Albina Community Fights for Restitution of Seized Property
    03 Feb 2023
    We now turn to a discussion of Albina, a Black community in Portland, Oregon which was devastated by so-called urban renewal in the 1950s and 1960s. The final blow came in the early 1970s, when an…
  • Minnesota Freedom Fund Fights for Bail Justice
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
    Minnesota Freedom Fund Fights for Bail Justice
    03 Feb 2023
    We are joined by Elizer Darris, Co-Executive Director of the Minnesota Freedom Fund (MFF).
  • The US Continues Escalating in Ukraine
    Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist
    The US Continues Escalating in Ukraine
    01 Feb 2023
    The U.S. got more than it bargained for after instigating the Ukrainian conflict. The Biden foreign policy team grows more desperate and their plans become more dangerous as they reckon with the…
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us