William Johnson's Hypothesis: A Free Black Man and the Problem of Legal Knowledge in the Antebellum United States South

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly Welch
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Free Black ◽  
The Law ◽  
Black Man ◽  
Case Basis

This essay uses the diary of free black barber and Natchez, Mississippi, businessman William T. Johnson as a means to explore the extent to which one black man in the antebellum U.S. South knew the law; how he came to know it; and what role he saw it play in his life and community. In recent years, scholars have paid increasing attention to black Americans' engagement with the legal system in the pre-Civil War U.S. South and have undermined the notion that black people were legal outsiders. In particular, they have shown that African Americans in the slave South were legal actors in their own right and were legally savvy. Yet what does it mean when scholars say that free blacks and slaves knew how to use the law? This essay uses Johnson's diary to demystify the phrase “to know the law” and shows that we speak of “knowing the law,” we speak of a remarkably complex and uneven phenomenon, one best mapped on a case-to-case basis. Understanding what it meant “to know the law” sometimes requires examining an individual's personal theory or hypothesis of what law does for them.

The Optics of Liberian Emigration

2020 ◽  
pp. 145-167
Author(s):  
Aston Gonzalez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Political Leadership ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Colonization Society ◽  
Fugitive Slave

This chapter explores the life and work of Augustus Washington, the free African American photographer, who envisioned more rights and freedoms than those available in the United States. Anticipating a future in the United States bound by racial restraints, he packed up his successful photography studio in Hartford, Connecticut, and emigrated to Monrovia, Liberia. Washington worked closely with the American Colonization Society to convince black Americans to leave their homeland for Liberia and attempted to provoke viewers of his images to envision the potential of black rights in the United States that he enjoyed in Liberia. Washington’s images promulgating black Liberian political leadership and economic promise abroad offered a vision of freedom that belied a hierarchical, and often oppressive, Liberian society. In the wake of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, his images brought into focus the debates among African Americans about the uncertain, and perhaps imperiled, future of black people in the United States.

Leaving Home

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa A. Lindsay
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black People ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Leaving Home ◽  
New Developments ◽  
American Colonization Society ◽  
Free Black ◽  
Back To Africa

In late 1852, twenty-four year old Church Vaughan boarded a ship bound for Liberia. The vessel had been chartered by the American Colonization Society, an organization founded by white philanthropists and politicians to send African Americans “back” to Africa. As this chapter details, the Society’s mission and efforts were fraught with racist condescension. Since its beginning, African Americans and their allies were repelled by the white supremacy inherent in the Society’s mission and its kowtowing to slaveholders, and relatively few enrolled in the emigration scheme. By the early 1850s, however, new developments pushed increasing numbers of African Americans, like Vaughan, to look toward the continent of their ancestors. As sectional divisions tore at the United States, southern politicians devised new laws to limit free black people’s mobility, inhibit their ability to make a living, and generally equate them with slaves. As Church reached adulthood, predatory officials threatened his family’s livelihood, while the old ties of patronage that had protected them in an earlier era disappeared. Even if emigration did offer a chance for a new life where black people governed themselves, it was a hard bargain to make. This chapter includes an account of some of Church Vaughan’s Liberia-bound shipmates, who chose to leave the United States only under terrible duress. Church Vaughan almost did not leave either.

“The Effect Was Immediate”

2021 ◽  
pp. 25-44
Author(s):  
Jonathan A. Noyalas
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Free Black ◽  
Shenandoah Valley ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Black Man

This chapter focuses on how the Shenandoah Valley’s African Americans reacted to John Brown’s raid and how enslavers in the region responded. Although throngs of enslaved people and free blacks from the Shenandoah Valley did not join Brown’s army of liberation in large numbers as Brown had hoped, this chapter illustrates that once the Valley’s enslaved learned of Brown’s attempt to strike a blow against slavery they employed various methods of resistance including arson and killing livestock to show their support for Brown’s actions, unnerving enslavers. This chapter examines the efforts of not only whites in the Valley to prevent Brown’s attack from sparking a broader insurrection through an increase in slave patrols but also enslavers’ attempts to downplay the events of Brown’s raid, advancing the notion that enslaved people in the Shenandoah Valley did not support Brown and remained loyal to their enslavers. At the epicenter of this particular discussion is the story of Heyward Shepherd, a free black man who became the raid’s first casualty.

Questions

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James L. Gibson ◽  
Michael J. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Public Support ◽  
The United States ◽  
Future Research ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
The U.S

We have investigated the differences in support for the U.S. Supreme Court among black, Hispanic, and white Americans, catalogued the variation in African Americans’ group attachments and experiences with legal authorities, and examined how those latter two factors shape individuals’ support for the U.S. Supreme Court, that Court’s decisions, and for their local legal system. We take this opportunity to weave our findings together, taking stock of what we have learned from our analyses and what seem like fruitful paths for future research. In the process, we revisit Positivity Theory. We present a modified version of the theory that we hope will guide future inquiry on public support for courts, both in the United States and abroad.

Memory Making on Parade

2019 ◽  
pp. 48-72
Author(s):  
Susan T. Falck
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Black Community ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Free Black ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
Union Soldiers

This chapter clarifies that black communities experienced emancipation traditions in different ways. Given the large proportion of blacks in Natchez, and the region’s well-established free black community, it seemed probable that Natchez would experience a robust emancipation tradition. That was not the case. The grand 1867 Fourth of July parade in Natchez organized by the Union League drew a large crowd of African Americans, suggesting the beginnings of a bold emancipation tradition. Instead, public emancipation celebrations dwindled. By the time of the 1871 Decoration Day observance, leaders stressed reconciliation and a tribute to Confederate as well as Union soldiers, a far different message heard only four years earlier. The erosion of a black emancipation tradition resulted from the unusually close ties that existed between Natchez free blacks and white elites, and the fear among free blacks that it was in their best political interests to suppress such traditions.

Republicans of Color

2019 ◽  
pp. 122-165
Author(s):  
Paul J. Polgar
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Black Education ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Reform Agenda ◽  
The Public ◽  
Free Black ◽  
Reform Project ◽  
American Experiment ◽  
Revolutionary Ideology

The genesis of the first movement abolitionist reform project stemmed from a central dilemma bequeathed to abolitionists by the American Revolution. The same natural rights Revolutionary ideology that aided the first abolition movement also presented slaves as the very antithesis of the independent, virtuous citizenry necessary to uphold representative government and maintain the American experiment in republicanism, making emancipation a problematic process. Out of their quest to solve this paradox, abolition society members and their free black collaborators constructed a reform agenda of societal environmentalism. Based on free black socioeconomic uplift and the application of the early republic's educational mores to free blacks, societal environmentalism aimed to inculcate republican virtue in former slaves. Black education and citizenship would help to defeat white prejudice and convince the public that African Americans were worthy of emancipation. Through these reformist initiatives, first movement abolitionists sought to prove black capacity for freedom by integrating African Americans into the American republic and making them virtuous and independent citizens, fully capable of productively exercising their liberty within greater white society.

The Great Migrations and Black Urban Life in the United States, 1914–1970

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tyina Steptoe
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Population ◽  
The United States ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Dramatic Shift ◽  
Agricultural Areas

During the 20th century, the black population of the United States transitioned from largely rural to mostly urban. In the early 1900s the majority of African Americans lived in rural, agricultural areas. Depictions of black people in popular culture often focused on pastoral settings, like the cotton fields of the rural South. But a dramatic shift occurred during the Great Migrations (1914–1930 and 1941–1970) when millions of rural black southerners relocated to US cities. Motivated by economic opportunities in urban industrial areas during World Wars I and II, African Americans opted to move to southern cities as well as to urban centers in the Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast. New communities emerged that contained black social and cultural institutions, and musical and literary expressions flourished. Black migrants who left the South exercised voting rights, sending the first black representatives to Congress in the 20th century. Migrants often referred to themselves as “New Negroes,” pointing to their social, political, and cultural achievements, as well as their use of armed self-defense during violent racial confrontations, as evidence of their new stance on race.

Latino/a and African American Relations

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian D. Behnken
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Black And White

African Americans and Latino/as have had a long history of social interactions that have been strongly affected by the broader sense of race in the United States. Race in the United States has typically been constructed as a binary of black and white. Latino/as do not fit neatly into this binary. Some Latino/as have argued for a white racial identity, which has at times frustrated their relationships with black people. For African Americans and Latino/as, segregation often presented barriers to good working relationships. The two groups were often segregated from each other, making them mutually invisible. This invisibility did not make for good relations. Latino/as and blacks found new avenues for improving their relationships during the civil rights era, from the 1940s to the 1970s. A number of civil rights protests generated coalitions that brought the two communities together in concerted campaigns. This was especially the case for militant groups such as the Black Panther Party, the Mexican American Brown Berets, and the Puerto Rican Young Lords, as well as in the Poor People’s Campaign. Interactions among African Americans and Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and Cuban/Cuban American illustrate the deep and often convoluted sense of race consciousness in American history, especially during the time of the civil rights movement.

Free Blacks and Coloreds and the Administration of Justice in Eighteenth-Century Curaçao

2010 ◽  
Vol 84 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 63-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Han Jordaan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Daily Practice ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Administration Of Justice ◽  
The Law

Two case studies show the daily practice of justice regarding free Blacks and Coloreds in Curacao and the functioning of the early modern Dutch legal system pertaining to colonial and slavery-related matters. According to the author, both cases reveal that the application of the law, when free non-Whites were involved, was apparently open to interpretation and that there was a divergence in this respect between the colony and the metropole. Author assesses this conflict between the theory of the law and the practice of the administration of justice in the colonies.

Conclusion

2014 ◽  
pp. 115-118
Author(s):  
Eddie S. Glaude
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black People ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
American Religion ◽  
Cultural Inheritance ◽  
African American Religion

African Americans are generally more religious than other groups in the United States. But African American religion is much more than a description of how deeply religious African Americans are. The phrase helps to differentiate a particular set of religious practices from others that are invested in whiteness; it invokes a particular cultural inheritance that marks the unique journey of African Americans in the United States. African American religion is rooted in the sociopolitical realities that shape the experiences of black people in America, but this is not static or fixed. The ‘Conclusion’ suggests that African American religious life remains a powerful site for creative imaginings in a world still organized by race.

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