Nat Turner's rebellion

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File:Nat Turner woodcut.jpg

In the summer of 1831, a slave named Nat Turner convened around other seventy slaves in South Carolina's Southampton County and launched an uprising that, as Howard Zinn describes, "went on a rampage from plantation to plantation, murdering at least fifty-five men, women, and children. They gathered supporters, but were captured as their ammunition ran out. Turner and perhaps eighteen others were hanged."[1]

Joel Olson argues that the uprising exemplified "anarchistic tendencies" in Black freedom struggles and that it should "clearly count as one of the most important insurrections in American history".[2]

  1. Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States (New York: HarperPerrenial, 2003), 174.
  2. Joel Olson, "Between infoshops and insurrection: U.S. anarchism, movement building, and the racial order, "https://libcom.org/library/between-infoshops-insurrection-us-anarchism-movement-building-racial-order.