Opinion: For Black people, there’s an important history of flight as fight

Editor’s Note: : Kellie Carter Jackson is the Michael and Denise Kellen ’68 associate professor in the Department of Africana Studies at Wellesley College. She is the author of “We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance” and co-host of the podcasts “This Day in Esoteric Political History” and “You Get a Podcast!” The views expressed here are hers. Read more opinion on CNN.

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It seems every summer my friends are taking vacations, and during an election year, many of them use these vacations to figure out their exit plan. Depending on how this election goes, the constant refrain is, “Where are we going?”

In the Black experience, leaving is one of the most common forms of resistance to White supremacy. Where are we going? To Canada? Ghana? The Caribbean? Or a newfound favorite: Portugal.

The underlying question: Where can Black people live freely?

All throughout African American history, leaving has been a form of refusal — something Black people have done in response to White supremacy for centuries. Flight is one of the most common actions in the history of Black resistance. It can mean quitting a job or place. It can be short-term or permanent.

During slavery, enslaved people would sometimes engage in truancy. Perhaps running away to the North was not possible, but running away to the swamps, forests or a neighboring plantation — to withhold one’s labor, or visit a loved one — was.

It can be argued that the successes of the American Revolution and the American Civil War depended largely not on whether Black folks fought, but where they fled: Their flight from plantations crippled slaveholders because it robbed them of their labor force.

Everything in the South depended on enslaved labor. During the American Revolution, scholars estimate more than 6,000 enslaved people abandoned the city of Charleston. Roughly 15,000 enslaved people fled Georgia, which totaled 75% of its enslaved population. Thomas Jefferson believed that Virginia lost 30,000 enslaved people in one year alone. The enslaved plundered themselves from their owner’s coffers. Leaving was a vote, a way of casting a ballot in Black interests.

In the 20th century, flight became the Great Migration. From roughly 1910 to 1970, an estimated six million Black southerners left their homes to find new ones in the Midwest and Northeast and on the West Coast. Black folks moved en masse from rural to urban areas; they left with their families. They took with them their labor, skills, genius, artistry and culture.

Sometimes flight looked like being pushed out from the violence of the KKK and White mobs. But often it meant being pulled away, drawn to the promise of liberation and pleasure. Flight as a remedy can mean departing for a break or departing for good.

Leaving is about a search for belonging, safety or a place to just be, unbothered. Leaving is about creating spaces where Black people can exist. Leaving is an act of resistance because so many Black people are stuck, unable to leave the ghetto or hood or other place that has suffered from racist neglect and community divestment.

During the 1980s, major companies such as steel plants, automobile factories and other major manufacturers left cities for cheaper labor elsewhere, mainly overseas. When companies left, they took with them jobs and a stable tax base. Because school funding is tethered to property taxes, schools became severely underfunded.

Cities were already fragile from White flight: White families that were not interested in integration left cities for the suburbs decades earlier, in the 1940s and 1950s. With no tax base, cities became unlivable. Poor schools, poor sanitation and food deserts became a norm.

Mortgage companies, banks and realtors created a system of redlining that prevented Black people with means from purchasing homes in White communities. Black homes appreciated at a lower rate, so Black homeowners earned less on their investments. Selling one’s home or moving was not easily done. Black families that moved into White neighborhoods risked violence. And with economic divestment, Black spaces became unsafe as well.

It should be no surprise that when all the factors of unemployment, underemployment, economic divestment and failing schools come together, crime is often the result. And the surest way to dispose of a people is to define Blackness and poverty as synonymous with criminality. The very notion of prison is about an inability to move or have mobility in public spaces.

So when Black people do get an opportunity, many leave. Flight is about both the collective and the individual. Consider the following: Editor and activist Mary Ann Shadd Cary left the United States for Canada in 1851 after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. Journalist and crusader Ida B. Wells left the States for Europe after the destruction of her newspaper because she wanted to expand her fight for equality overseas. Black soldiers fighting in world wars left for Europe, and when they experienced a life of significantly less discrimination, many stayed.

For eight years, actor, singer and activist Paul Robeson tried to leave. Writer James Baldwin left and came back. NAACP co-founder W. E. B. Du Bois left and could not come back. Performer Josephine Baker left. Organizers Mabel and Robert Williams left for Cuba and then China and then came back to settle in Detroit. Some Black Panthers left for Tanzania, Algeria or Ghana.

Some of my own family left the South for a better life in the North. And one generation later, they left the North for a better life in the South.

It is not easy to leave home. But in America, as a Black American, what is home? Home is elusive. Sometimes home is the North and sometimes home is the South. Sometimes home is the city and sometimes home is the woods. For some, home is outside of the United States. Ironically, finding home requires leaving somewhere else.

So much of the Black experience is about isolation — the inability to travel or move from place to place, to be restricted to one town, city or country. I have thought very deeply about what happens when Black people cannot leave. An inability to escape to something better has a demoralizing impact.

This summer, Black folks will travel, and come November many of us will contemplate leaving. However, most Black and colonized people will never get to occupy the space of the tourist. Many Black people will never obtain a passport.

Perhaps this is why flight is a partial remedy to racism, but not a cure. Flight does not change the circumstances that prompt one to leave in the first place. Flight can be a reprieve, a relief, a new shelter and a new beginning. But flight cannot ensure belonging, only a new location.

Here is the hard truth: We must fight to fix what is right in front of us.