12 Years a Slave is the story of Solomon Northup, a free black man living in Saratoga, New York around 1841. He is kidnapped and sold into slavery. The film does a good job of depicting the horrors of slavery, from beatings to the humiliations of being treated like animals, with men and women paraded naked for potential buyers to inspect. I watched the movie with clenched fists and tight jaws — I wanted to see the slavers punished for their wrongdoing.
For all the degradation the slaves went through, the situation cried out for scenes of rebellion, but they are missing. There were many in those years that could have been referred to. Northup and some other kidnapped slaves do talk of a rebellion on the slave ship taking them to the South. It doesn’t happen, though: Although Solomon says “The crew is fairly small...if it were well-planned, “I believe they could be strong armed.”  Another replies, “Three can’t stand against the whole crew , the rest are N****** born and bred slaves. N****** ain’t got the stomach for a fight, not a damn one.” The movie illustrates racist division rather than unity. It ignores the unity of many white women and men — indentured servants — with slaves.
The movie also failed to show the critical role of women. Fighters such as Sojourner Truth, Harriet
Tubman, Angelina and Sarah Grimke, were crucial in the fight against slavery, revealing that the fight against racism and sexism is one intertwined battle.
Personal vs. Collective Freedom
The movie also portrays Solomon as depending on the legal system for his personal freedom — if only he could get his “papers” from New York he could prove that he was a free man. The slave traders mocked him in this quest. This movie is concerned with the freedom of one slave while the whole system of slavery was causing misery for millions. It was not the legal system or a court or Abraham Lincoln that ended slavery; it took hundreds of slave rebellions, the abolitionists and a civil war to end it.
Never in mainstream media has the real story of Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, and John Brown been told. In fact, there are over 400 accounts of recorded slave rebellions and revolts in the United States. Instead, the story of Solomon Northup highlights a single courageous black man’s struggle to survive slavery only to wait 12 years to be freed by a stroke of luck and a sympathetic Canadian.
The end of slavery was not a simple death, either. The racism it rested on continued, and so did the power of the plantation-owning  aristocrats. Within a few years after the Civil War ended they were back in power, using state, local and Federal governments, their courts and the Ku Klux Klan to spread racist terror throughout the South, ushering in the era of Jim Crow. They used intimidation and lynching to enforce power to terrorize the black working-class population — and to warn off any whites who understood the need for unity between black and white workers.
The power of workers fighting back together can be seen in one incident: the attempted judicial lynching of nine young black men by the state of Alabama in 1931. Known as the Scottsboro Boys, they were arrested and tried on fake charges of raping two white women on a train. Even though one of the accusers admitted it was a lie, within two weeks their trial was over and they were sentenced to death.
But the International Labor Defense (ILD), led by the U.S. Communist Party, took their case, determined that “they shall not die.” Unlike the movie, they used but didn’t depend on the legal system. The ILD provided the lawyers and the legal fight; the Communist Party organized mass demonstrations around the world, in Latin America, Europe, Asia, the Soviet Union and across the U.S. The campaign saved them from the electric chair — but even though they were innocent some of them still served many years in jail.
In the movie 12 Years a Slave, it is a big letdown to see one man freed by a sheriff, while all the others on the plantation are left in bondage. The sharp contrast to the case of the Scottsboro Boys, and the mass actions led by communists, exposing Jim Crowism to the whole world, show us how to fight against slavery and racism, and that fight continues to this day.