Looking at Nat Turner's Legacy | Explorer

I was ordained for some great purpose in the hands of the Almighty. Nat Turner was an enslaved African American preacher who was born in 1800 and led a large-scale rebellion in 1831 that transformed the system of slavery. He chose violence as his only option, and that option, painful as it was, shook up the system. Nat Turner was a mind-blowing experience to white culture and changed the game in a fundamental way.

They vowed before they started the revolt that they would kill every white person they saw: men, women, and children. They were done being dehumanized. They were done being treated as property, and they just rebelled. The rebels followed kind of a zigzag path. They attacked most of the houses along the way, killing the slaveholders and their families who they found there.

The judgment of this Court is that you are to be taken into jail, then to the place of execution, and be hung by the neck until you are dead, dead, dead. Lynching in America were spectator sports, not spectator events. People came from miles around, and bodies were dismembered. When people went to these kinds of affairs, they wanted to take a souvenir away that proved to everybody that they were there and that that person, that monster, is now no longer alive. And how do I know that? Because I've got a piece of his body right here. [Music]