One of the most iconic images of Black masculinity in the history of American slavery is a depiction of a bondman on bended knee. Bound in chains, the figure looks longingly upward to the heavens under a banner that reads, “Am I not a man and a brother?” Originally adopted as the seal of the Society for the Abolition of Slavery in England in the 1780s, that image cemented in the minds of many the emasculating effects of slavery. The idea that slavery robbed bondmen of their masculinity entered American historiography in U. B. Phillips's 1918 conception of the plantation as a “civilizing school” and in Stanley Elkins's 1959 depiction of “Sambo” as a standard plantation personality type. Later, Daniel Patrick Moynihan mobilized slavery's presumptive emasculating effects in The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965), arguing that slavery created a “matrifocal,” topsy-turvy Black family structure. More recently, historians...
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