From the linked video intro, which is a partial transcript: "Stephen Miller told ICE agents that no law but Trump’s applies to them. No city official, no state official, no other justice but their own.
JD Vance turned a dead American into a loyalty test—called her a “deranged leftist.” She had just dropped her 6-year-old off at school.
One authority. Theirs. No other law. No other morality. Just theirs.
But we have a history for this.
AMERICA IN THE 1850s. For 80 years, the federal government told Black America exactly what Miller and Vance are saying now. No power protects you. There is only our power to oppress you. You can never be free, never have rights. Your very presence threatens real Americans.
That was the (white) consensus.
George Washington believed freed Black people couldn’t coexist with whites. Told Lafayette that emancipation was impossible until someone figured out what to do with them afterward. Thomas Jefferson, in his Notes on Virginia, wrote that freed slaves had to be “removed beyond the reach of mixture.” He used the word deportation. And he warned that if they weren’t removed, the result would be “convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.”
Lincoln said it to Black leaders’ faces. In the White House. August 1862. Four months before the Emancipation Proclamation: “Your race suffer very greatly, many of them by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence… it is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.”
This was the consensus. For 80 years.
THE FUGITIVE SLAVE ACT OF 1850. How did they enforce it? In 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act. It made it a federal crime to help anyone escaping slavery. Food, shelter, any assistance—$1,000 fine and six months in prison. Federal marshals could deputize any citizen to help catch people. Whether you liked it or not. You could be conscripted into a slave-catching posse against your will. If a marshal refused to act, he was fined $1,000. No jury trial. The accused—the person being dragged back into slavery—couldn’t testify in their own defense. The federal commissioners who decided these cases were paid $10 if they ruled the person should be returned to slavery. $5 if they let them go.
Ten dollars to send someone to slavery. Five to free them.
Federal agents overriding local authority, no due process, financial incentives baked into enforcement.
DRED SCOTT. In 1857, Chief Justice Roger Taney, in Dred Scott v. Sandford, wrote that Black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
So by 1857, every avenue was closed. Congress had passed the laws. The courts upheld them. The president enforced them. Petitions went nowhere. Protests changed nothing.
WHAT ACTUALLY WORKED? Action. Community action. Direct action.
Community networks. The Vigilance Committees were organized. They had communication systems, safe houses, legal support, and people ready to act at a moment’s notice. When someone was seized, the response was immediate.
Legal obstruction. They used the courts against the catchers. Arrests, bonds, delays. They made enforcement expensive and exhausting.
Physical confrontation. They put bodies between federal power and the people it wanted. They stormed courthouses. They surrounded agents. They made it dangerous to operate.
Jury nullification. Even when abolitionists were prosecuted, juries wouldn’t convict. One person with a conscience could stop the whole machine.
Credible deterrence. Lewis Hayden with his gunpowder. The message was clear: the cost of enforcement might be your life.
They didn’t do one of these things. They did all of them. Together. Relentlessly.
Not words. Action.
Authoritarian power is never persuaded to surrender. Never. You don’t change it with arguments. You don’t change it with appeals to its conscience. It doesn’t have one.
You make it unable to function.
You let them claim immunity from the power of the people.
You don’t let them use it.
RESOURCES
If you want to go deeper:
Steve Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829-1889. Covers the Boston abolitionists in detail, including Lewis Hayden and the Vigilance Committees.
Kellie Carter Jackson—her book Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence is essential. Her newer book We Refuse expands on Black resistance strategies across centuries. Follow her work. She’s been saying this.
Black public historians have been doing this work for years. I’m just building on what they’ve built.
#resistancehistory #publichistory #blackhistory"
