Rocky Fork, Illinois

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Janifer LaRoche
Keyword(s):  
Social Institution ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Underground Railroad ◽  
African Methodist Episcopal Church ◽  
Ame Church ◽  
Methodist Episcopal Church ◽  
Black Resistance ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Influence

This chapter examines the Rocky Fork community's relationship to other nearby Black communities and to the Underground Railroad. Drawing on oral and family histories, it reconstructs the story of the African American presence at Rocky Fork, first by discussing the site's originating families. It then considers the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first social institution and the earliest AME church built in Illinois, and how the Underground Railroad emerged as a multi-pronged vehicle for Black resistance and escape from slavery. The chapter identifies evidence of cooperation between Black settlements on the frontlines of freedom and known abolitionist towns and shows that the abolitionist center and Underground Railroad town of Alton played a powerful role in the fight against slavery in the region. Minister William Paul Quinn and the early influence of the AME Church embedded in the Underground Railroad history of the Rocky Fork settlement and its free Blacks characterizes the geography of resistance.

Southern Looks? A History of African American Missionary Photography of Africa, 1890s–1930s

2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 390-417
Author(s):  
ELISABETH ENGEL
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Christian Missions ◽  
Us South ◽  
New Negro ◽  
American Institution ◽  
African Methodist Episcopal Church ◽  
The Us ◽  
Methodist Episcopal Church ◽  
History Of ◽  
Visual Description

This article traces and analyzes the missionary photography of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), the most important independent black American institution that began to operate in colonial South Africa at the onset of the politics of racial segregation in the 1890s. It argues that AME missionary photography presents a neglected archive, from which a history of black photographic encounters and a subaltern perspective on the dominant visual cultures of European imperialism and Christian missions in Africa can be retrieved. Focussing in particular on how AME missionaries deployed tropes of the culturally refined “New Negro” and the US South in their visual description of South Africa, this article demonstrates that photography was an important tool for black subjects to define their image beyond the representations of black inferiority that established visual traditions constructed.

The Geography of Resistance

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Janifer LaRoche
Keyword(s):  
Free Blacks ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Underground Railroad ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Physical Suffering ◽  
Bad Weather

This chapter examines escape routes, churches, iron forges and furnaces, and waterways that make up the pathways to freedom and “the geography of resistance.” It considers the concept of freedom as a place by exploring the connections between freedom and the landscape, and between Black communities and the Underground Railroad. It discusses the obstacles that captives escaping slavery had to hurdle, such as losing the challenges of the terrain and bad weather, betrayal, physical suffering, and slave catchers. It also looks at houses as artifacts of the Underground Railroad in the landscape, along with the patterns of rural Black settlements and how most free Blacks often found themselves saddled with the least desirable land. It argues that the landscape is an intimate component of the Black experience, providing crucial pathways out of slavery, and that generations of escapees on the Underground Railroad turned to the sheltering anonymity of the land to conceal their journey.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Janifer LaRoche
Keyword(s):  
Black Churches ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Underground Railroad ◽  
Alternative Perspective ◽  
Free Black ◽  
Parallel Connections

This book explores the free Black communities in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio and their associations with the Underground Railroad. Focusing on the Black settlements in Rocky Fork and Miller Grove in Illinois, Lick Creek in Indiana, and Poke Patch in Ohio, it considers how the Underground Railroad movement secretly operated in conjunction with free Blacks and their historic Black churches. The book uses vital elements of what it calls the “geography of resistance” to examine the mechanisms of escape from slavery from an alternative perspective. By drawing on geography in combination with archaeology, community and church histories, and traditional Underground Railroad stories, the book makes visible unrecognized parallel connections between free Black communities and larger better-known abolitionist centers.

Freedom and Resistance

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Curry
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Caribbean Region ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
The Bahamas ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Treaty Of Versailles ◽  
The Social ◽  
Black Resistance ◽  
History Of

A popular misconception about the American Revolution is that it was largely contained within the continental boundaries of North America. However, the American Revolution neither ended with the cessation of armed conflict in 1781 nor the Treaty of Versailles in 1783; rather it continued and mutated in unusual places, a revolution often carried by those who had the most to lose by being denied the freedom that was promised at the outset of the war. Freedom and Resistance: A Social History of Black Loyalists in the Bahamas studies the struggles for freedom of a group of black loyalists (those enslaved and free blacks loyal to the British causes), who settled in the non-plantation, slave-holding colony of the Bahamas, located on the periphery of the Caribbean region. By focusing on the struggles for freedom that black loyalists experienced in the Bahamas, this book not only aims to recover the social history of black loyalists but seeks to examine the nature of their contributions to Bahamian society. One of the major themes explored in this study is black resistance and political activism. Much of this activism was shaped by the racial discord which erupted in the Bahamas between black and white loyalists in two distinct locales: the previously uninhabited islands of Abaco and the older, more urban center of Nassau, located on the island of New Providence.

Destination Freedom

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Janifer LaRoche
Keyword(s):  
Black Churches ◽  
Black Families ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Underground Railroad ◽  
Research Strategies ◽  
Resistance Movements ◽  
Southern States ◽  
Critical Junctures ◽  
Black Abolitionists ◽  
History Of

By focusing on the geography of resistance and its landscape features in four different Black settlements, this book has cast a different light on the nature of Black escape from slavery and the history of Underground Railroad activities. It has shown that free Blacks carried out much of the clandestine work of the Underground Railroad as they sought freedom in pre-Civil War America, thus contributing in a significant way to the efforts inside one of the world's most successful resistance movements. Whether urban or rural, Black settlements positioned at the borders between northern and southern states or at other critical junctures acted as the first line of freedom while simultaneously offering sanctuary to escaping captives. The book has also highlighted migration as a means of escape for fleeing slaves, as well as the crucial roles played by Black churches, Black families, and Black abolitionists in the success of the Black underground. This concluding chapter summaries the book's research strategies and the future implications of its findings for reshaping modern interpretation of the Underground Railroad.

Miller Grove, Illinois

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Janifer LaRoche
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Community Formation ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Underground Railroad ◽  
American Missionary Association ◽  
White Families ◽  
Missionary Work ◽  
South Central ◽  
History Of ◽  
Archaeological Excavations

This chapter examines the connections between the Miller Grove community of free Blacks and the Underground Railroad. Established in 1844, Miller Grove is a cluster of rural farmsteads named for Bedford Miller, whose family stood among the sixty-eight people who received their freedom from one of four White families in south-central Tennessee. Primary archaeological excavations at Miller Grove took place at the farmstead of William Riley Williams, a free-born African American from Tennessee. Among the original migrants, former slaveholder Henry Sides and his wife lived among the freemen and freewomen at Miller Grove. This chapter begins with a discussion of how the American Missionary Association, through its missionary work, linked known Underground Railroad participants across the country. It then considers abolitionist strategies, particularly the dissemination of antislavery literature among African Americans. By tracing the history of Miller Grove, the chapter reveals distinct details of community formation and interracial cooperation within regional Underground Railroad operations.

African American Religions in the Nineteenth Century

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Suzanne Clark
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Black Church ◽  
African Methodist Episcopal ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Methodist Episcopal ◽  
African American Religion ◽  
African Methodist Episcopal Church ◽  
Methodist Episcopal Church

The typical story of African American religions narrates the development and power of the Protestant black church, but shifting the focus to the long nineteenth century can reorient the significance of the story. The nineteenth century saw the boom of Christian conversions among African Americans, but it also was a century of religious diversity. All forms of African American religion frequently pushed against the dominance of whiteness. This included the harming and cursing element of Conjure and southern hoodoo, the casting of slaves as Old Israel awaiting their exodus from bondage, the communications between the spirit of Abraham Lincoln and Afro-Creoles in New Orleans, and the push for autonomy and leadership by Richard Allen and the rest of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. While many studies of African American religions in the nineteenth century overwhelmingly focus on Protestantism, this is only part of the story.

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