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4 - “Dead, Yet Speaketh”: Robert Johnson

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2025

Stephen C. Russell
Affiliation:
John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York
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Summary

Having opposed Jamaica’s largely White plantocracy as an elected member of the House of Assembly, the island’s highest elected legislative body, and as a journalist and publisher, mixed-race Jamaican Robert Alexander Johnson migrated to New York in July 1865, where he joined the editorial staff of the Tribune. Chapter 4 recovers Johnson’s body of writing on Jamaica and the Morant Bay rebellion published in the Nation, the Evening Post, the Tribune, and Hours at Home in 1865–6. Johnson adopted the position that the events of October 11 were a riot, not a planned, organized rebellion. How, then, could Johnson account for the brutal government suppression? He quoted Hebrew 11:4 – “he, being dead, yet speaketh” – which summarizes Cain’s murder of Abel. Johnson, like a long line of Black interpreters this chapter traces, looked to the Cain and Abel story to provide an etiology of the inexplicable savagery of White violence. Johnson warned readers contemplating Reconstruction not to entrust the rights of free Black Americans to their former White enslavers.

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Chapter
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A Lesson on Race
The Bible and the Morant Bay Rebellion in the Atlantic World
, pp. 68 - 86
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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