Becoming Mobile in the Age of Segregation

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Black People ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Equal Access ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
The North ◽  
Historical Developments ◽  
Free People

Between the 1780s and the 1850s, two separate and interconnected historical developments led to segregation as a method of social control. The first was black emancipation in the North, the result of a prolonged and uneven process that lasted decades. In light of African American freedom, white northerners began to imagine black people as people, although nominally free, in need of regulation. As a result, whites scrutinized the travel of free people of color with a level of suspicion previously reserved for slaves. Thus, a process best thought of as the criminalization of black mobility emerged. This was highly deleterious to African Americans because it fostered antiblack vigilantism in public space. At the same time, advances in technology brought on a “transportation revolution.” As an elite cohort of newly freed African Americans sought equal access to public vehicles, transportation proprietors and white passengers in the North viciously guarded the thresholds of stagecoaches, steamships, and railroads. Colored travelers fought back against exclusion in a variety of ways that highlight the importance of travel in their conceptions of citizenship. The protest strategies of these earliest activists planted the seeds of the nineteenth-century equal rights movement.

Nigger and Home

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
White People ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
White Children ◽  
Antebellum America ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Free People

Chapter 1 is an etymology of the word nigger. Colored travelers described the word and the ideology it represented as a constantly looming threat. White children chased free people of color down the street shouting the word. White satirists and performers repeated it in literary and theatrical blackface productions that often depicted black caricatures as being dangerous precisely because they freely traversed the nation. In the nominally free states, nigger threatened brutal reprisals and thus shaped the black experience of mobility. This chapter argues that the source of the word’s virulence resided in the fact that African Americans in antebellum America had long used the word nigger to describe themselves and others. Black laborers adopted the word into their own vocabularies to subvert white authority. Whites therefore very much understood the word as part of the black lexicon. In turn, they ventriloquized nigger to mock black speech, black mobility, and, ultimately, black freedom. Considering nigger not solely as a white antiblack epithet but also as a word rooted in African American cultural and protest traditions goes a long way toward solving the perennial American racial conundrum of why black people can say nigger and white people should not.

“Your Views Cross the Atlantic”

2021 ◽  
pp. 195-222
Author(s):  
Robert Murray
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
Racial Identities ◽  
Ability To Act ◽  
Racially Ambiguous ◽  
Free People

Chapter 5 examines the overwhelming rejection of colonization by free people of color in the United States, the evolution of the colonization societies, and the agency of the settlers in enacting these changes. For the majority of African Americans rejected colonization’s principal arguments. Those few who saw potential in Liberia emphasized the performative possibilities of the colony, the ability to act in ways previously denied to them on account of race. Significantly, the small number of African Americans who willingly chose to emigrate to Liberia were often racially ambiguous. They saw opportunity in the undefined and evolving racial identities offered by moving to Liberia. The chapter also examines the settlers’ roles in changing the colonization societies. For many settlers, there was no difference between abolition and colonization. Settlers worked with colonizationists committed to black uplift and attempted to drive out those who did not favor such reforms; they changed how the societies’ governed their colonies.

Prologue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Milewski
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Legal Rights ◽  
Antebellum South ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Law ◽  
Freedom Suits ◽  
Free People ◽  
Free African Americans

The Prologue traces African Americans’ experiences with the law and the courts in the antebellum South. It shows the ways in which the law upheld the system of slavery and worked to characterize enslaved men and women as property rather than as people. At times, though, slaves could participate in the legal system as criminal defendants or as they litigated freedom suits. Free people of color, too, appealed to the law to challenge the constraints imposed upon them. The experiences of enslaved and free African Americans in the antebellum South gave them an appreciation of the power of the law, leading them to fight to gain full legal rights after the Civil War.

Policing the Black Criminal

2018 ◽  
pp. 155-186
Author(s):  
Adam Malka
Keyword(s):  
Police Officers ◽  
Black People ◽  
State Power ◽  
White Men ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
Public Authorities ◽  
The Public ◽  
Free Black ◽  
Free People

This chapter argues that white Baltimoreans acted on their fears of free black crime all the time, often violently and usually with the municipality’s approval. In the process, it shows that the compatibility between professional and popular policing manifested not only in job-busting attacks and home invasions but also in more prosaic moments, such as when an ordinary citizen arrested a black man or protected him from harm. The public authorities were nominally engaged in a broader project of seizing legitimate force for the state alone, but the policing of free black Baltimoreans relied upon informal white power no less than it did upon formal state power. Police officers did not always protect them. Prisons did not always house them. In the age of slavery, Baltimore’s officials preferred to leave the fates of free people of color to ordinary white men. When it came to policing black people, white vigilantes were the police.

Lost

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sally McKee
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Wishful Thinking ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
American Black ◽  
Black Man ◽  
Free People ◽  
Creoles Of Color

This chapter discusses how the free people of color in New Orleans pointed to Edmond Dede as an example of what African Americans could achieve if given opportunities like the ones he found in France. To his death, Creoles of color thought Dede was so unusually accomplished for an American black man that they elevated what little they knew about his life in France to the level of drama. Problems for the historian start with the realization that although the reports about his life were certainly exaggerated by his friends and admirers, some of the enhancements came from Dede himself. For those who seek to understand his opportunities and choices within their historical context, the process of separating fact from wishful thinking awakens a sympathy for the man who risked all and mustered the resources to act on his dreams.

Your Word Is Your Bond

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly M. Welch
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
Private Property ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
Racial Relations ◽  
The Social ◽  
Debt Collection ◽  
Free People ◽  
Debt Recovery ◽  
Natchez District

Debt actions represented one the most common types of lawsuits people of color initiated. Black moneylenders were regular participants in the credit economy of the slave South. Free people of color, in particular, repeatedly extended loans in various amounts to both white and black people. When the sums went unpaid, free black creditors sued borrowers to recoup the money owed. In the Natchez district, a world in which blackness symbolized dependency and whiteness independence, white debtors were bound to black creditors. The legal mechanisms involving debt collection favored lenders—even when those lenders were black. Under such circumstances, the courts could serve as a place where the social and racial relations of a slave society were temporarily suspended, insofar as their suspension furthered the goal of preserving private property. This chapter examines debt recovery from its inception (the loan) to its discharge (whether through payment or execution). The process itself was loaded with symbolic weight, for in the antebellum South, it invoked a set of highly charged ideas about virtue, ethics, membership, and race.

African Americans in the Civil War Years

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul D. Escott
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black People ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Diverse Population ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
The South ◽  
The North ◽  
The Government ◽  
Black Populations

The nation’s African Americans, living in both the North and the South and in freedom and in slavery, formed a diverse population. This chapter focuses first on the South’s slaves, whose initiatives for freedom—by running to Union lines—changed the nature of the war. It also examines the determined political activism of black people in the North and the pressures they exerted on the government in order to win not just freedom for the race but equal rights as well. Questions about the organization and resources of Northern blacks as well as the connections between the Northern and Southern black populations deserve attention, and the chapter offers many suggestions or questions.

Racial Segregation under Slavery

Social Forces ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Ruef
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
The United States ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
Economic Competition ◽  
Black Populations ◽  
Residential Distribution ◽  
Architectural Survey ◽  
Free People

Abstract Social demographers and historians have devoted extensive research to patterns of racial segregation that emerged under Jim Crow and during the post-Civil Rights era but have paid less attention to the role of slavery in shaping the residential distribution of Black populations in the United States. One guiding assumption has been that slavery rendered racial segregation to be both unnecessary and impractical. In this study, I argue that apart from the master–slave relationship, slavery relentlessly produced racial segregation during the antebellum period through the residential isolation of slaves and free people of color. To explain this pattern, I draw on racial threat theory to test hypotheses regarding interracial economic competition and fear of slave mobilization using data from the 1850 Census, as well as an architectural survey of antebellum sites. Findings suggest that the residential segregation of free people of color increased with their local prevalence, whereas the segregation of slaves increased with the prevalence of the slave population. These patterns continue to hold after controlling for interracial competition over land or jobs and past slave rebellions or conspiracies.

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