Books in Brief: Black Resistance before the Civil War

Black Resistance before the Civil War, edited by William F. Cheek (Glencoe, 161 pp. $2.95). Professor Cheek, another of those riding the interminable black-studies wave, has clipped together a pile of readings of widely differing value and palmed the whole off on college teachers to inflict on their huddled students yearning to be Aware. The subject of this book is important: the previously largely ignored record of Negro insurgency during slavery. Unfortunately, Mr. Cheek is slap-dash, contentious and not infrequently wrong, given to milking a host of current fashions —antiwhite sentiments, indiscriminate negrophilia, hate-Americanism, among them —to pass off his cheap-shots as “scholarship.” Mr. Cheek’s 35-page introductory essay is a badly written apologia for any excesses of antebellum Negro savagery because, of course, the fact of slavery made any such excess excusable—to Mr. Cheek, at any rate. Some of the book’s essays, poems, songs and manifestos are of considerable interest, but there too Mr. Cheek’s cloying introductions detract from them. In his section on Nat Turner’s rebellion, Mr. Cheek more than cloys: he positively vulgarizes, managing, under the guise of scholarship, to bolster the gross charges against William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner while pretending to report what has been “alleged” and “charged” and so on. Mr. Cheek’s fury, however, is patently obvious. When attacking Styron, he writes that the “views [used by Styron], now seriously questioned by scholars [sic], are not geared to enhance the pride, dignity, and self-respect so valued by the black power movement. . . .” Perhaps Mr. Cheek should ask himself whether those are truly the proper functions of novelists, or of history professors.