Barbara Fields on Af-Am insurgents

As Barbara Fields points out, African-American insurgents did not use a notion of race as an explanation for their oppression or their struggles for liberation:

It was not Afro-Americans … who needed a racial explanation; it was not they who invented themselves as a race. Euro-Americans resolved the contradiction between slavery and liberty by defining Afro-Americans as a race; Afro-Americans resolved the contradiction more straightforwardly by calling for the abolition of slavery. From the era of the American, French and Haitian revolutions on, they claimed liberty as theirs by natural right.   

Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft (New York: Verso, 2014), p.141.