Stono Rebellion

Professor Mark Smith is the Carolina Distinguished Professor of History at the University of South Carolina.

He's also an expert on the Stono Rebellion.

Hello, Mark.

Thank you so much for being here on Nightlife tonight.

Suzanne Hill with you.

It's this week in history.

We're talking about the Stono Rebellion with Mark Smith, Carolina Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Southern Carolina.

He's also the editor of Stono, documenting and interpreting a Southern slave revolt story.

Profits from plantations fueled industrial growth, raised urbanization levels, and tightened economic dependency on slavery, forming a vicious feedback loop.

Nonetheless, the enslaved resisted constantly, whether through spontaneous rebellions aboard ships or large-scale uprisings in Caribbean plantations like Jamaica's Baptist War of eighteen thirty-one and South Carolina's Stono Rebellion of seventeen sixty-four.

These acts forced traders to tighten security measures, pay higher insurance premiums, and alter trade routes.

The moral reckoning began early in Britain when figures such as Olaudah Equiano, Thomas Clarkson, and William Wilberforce united to expose the brutal realities of the trade to a parliament that had once profited from it.

On this day in working class history, the 9th of September.

On the 9th of September 1739, the Stono Rebellion began in South Carolina, the largest uprising of enslaved people in the mainland British colonies.

A literate enslaved man named either Jemi or Kato marched with 22 others, mostly from Central Africa, brandishing a banner that decked with the word Liberty, and attacked a store seizing weapons and ammunition.

They planned to head to Florida, where Spanish colonial authorities offered escaped enslaved people freedom in an effort to undermine British rule.

And so that piece, Drum Folk, was about that.

It was about the Stono Rebellion.

Of 1739 and the subsequent Negro Act of 1740, which was the piece of legislation in the colony of South Carolina that outlawed the drum.

You could be killed for having a drum.

From where do you draw your inspiration to choreograph for Step Afrika?

I tend to be very purpose-driven, meaning I'm looking for the why.

Why are we doing this? In Drum Folk, it was to bring the story about the Stono Rebellion and the Negro Act and to share that history.

I think for Migration, it was also about this story about relating to You know, the people who are here up in the East Coast, but who have relatives in the South.

Mm-hmm.

So this actually is a good segue to, to, uh, how you started the book, 'cause you start with, um, a roadside sign on Highway Seventeen [chuckles] in South Carolina, which I've actually seen, about the, the seventeen thirty-nine Stono Rebellion.

And you focus, uh, quite a bit on Jimmy/Cato, I mean, depends on how we're referring to him.

And then you, of course, talk about the more famous example of Nat Turner.