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.

Family, Church, Community

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Janifer LaRoche
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Family Relations ◽  
Black Churches ◽  
Black Families ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Underground Railroad ◽  
Church And Community ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
American Churches ◽  
Church Organizations

This chapter explores the roles played by family, church, and community in the Black Underground Railroad movement. By mapping Black settlements, it clarifies and exposes the relationship between African American churches, settlements, and historic Underground Railroad routes. It shows how Black families sustained an important family organizational structure that drove the Underground Railroad. It explains how African American communities connected through family relations and intermarriage, church organizations, benevolent societies, and the fraternal structure of the Prince Hall Masons. It considers how maintaining family connections motivated escape from slavery, particularly when imminent sale threatened to break up the family. Finally, it highlights the ways that Black churches and their ministers helped free Blacks, or self-liberated men and women, to succeed in winning freedom for themselves and their loved ones.

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.

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.

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.

Press Propaganda and Subaltern Agents of Pan-Islamic Networks in the Muslim Mediterranean World prior to World War I

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Odile Moreau
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
North Africa ◽  
World War ◽  
Subaltern Studies ◽  
Resistance Movements ◽  
The Press ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
History Of

This chapter explores movement and circulation across the Mediterranean and seeks to contribute to a history of proto-nationalism in the Maghrib and the Middle East at a particular moment prior to World War I. The discussion is particularly concerned with the interface of two Mediterranean spaces: the Middle East (Egypt, Ottoman Empire) and North Africa (Morocco), where the latter is viewed as a case study where resistance movements sought external allies as a way of compensating for their internal weakness. Applying methods developed by Subaltern Studies, and linking macro-historical approaches, namely of a translocal movement in the Muslim Mediterranean, it explores how the Egypt-based society, al-Ittihad al-Maghribi, through its agent, Aref Taher, used the press as an instrument for political propaganda, promoting its Pan-Islamic programme and its goal of uniting North Africa.

scholarly journals Decolonization and the aesthetics of disorder: Naipaul, Evaristo, Boland

2021 ◽  
pp. 002198942199605
Author(s):  
Matthew Whittle
Keyword(s):  
European History ◽  
Resistance Movements ◽  
Eavan Boland ◽  
History Of ◽  
Paul Gilroy ◽  
Orderly Transition ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Bear Witness ◽  
Formal Features

Decolonization is presented in dominant accounts as an orderly transition and not the culmination of anticolonial resistance movements. This in turn contributes to what Paul Gilroy terms an endemic “post-imperial melancholia” across contemporary European nations and the removal of empire and its demise from understandings of European history. Drawing on Bill Schwarz’s reconceptualization of a Fanonian commitment to disorder, this article focuses on Britain’s history of colonialism and post-imperial immigration and argues for the mapping of a disorderly aesthetics in works by V. S. Naipaul, Bernardine Evaristo, and Eavan Boland. The three formal features of non-linearity, polyvocality, and environmental imagery enable these writers to bear witness to the complex histories of empire, transatlantic slavery, decolonization, and immigration from the colonial “margins”. These “aesthetics of disorder” counter a dominant narrative of decolonial order and challenge conceptions of British exceptionalism that were reinforced at the moment of imperial decline.

A Brief History of Selected Black Churches in Atlanta, Georgia

1989 ◽  
Vol 74 (1-4) ◽  
pp. 31-52
Author(s):  
Roswell F. Jackson ◽  
Rosalyn M. Patterson
Keyword(s):  
Black Churches ◽  
History Of

The Segregation of Black Students at Oberlin College after Reconstruction

2001 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 344-364 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cally L. Waite
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Black Students ◽  
Black Families ◽  
Important Place ◽  
Educational History ◽  
College Curriculum ◽  
The North ◽  
History Of ◽  
Oberlin College ◽  
One Year

The community of Oberlin, Ohio, located in the northeast corner of the state, holds an important place in the history of the education of Black Americans. In 1834, one year after its founding, the trustees of Oberlin College agreed to admit students, “irrespective of color.” They were the only college, at that time, to adopt such a policy. Oberlin's history as the first college to admit Black students and its subsequent abolitionist activities are crucial to the discussion of Black educational history. Opportunities for education before the Civil War were not common for most of the American population, but for Blacks, these opportunities were close to nonexistent. In the South, it was illegal for Blacks to learn to read or write. In the North, there was limited access to public schooling for Black families. In addition, during the early nineteenth century there were no Black colleges for students to attend. Although Bowdoin College boasted the first Black graduate in 1827, few other colleges before the Civil War opened their doors to Black students. Therefore, the opportunity that Oberlin offered to Black students was extraordinarily important. The decision to admit Black students to the college, and offer them the same access to the college curriculum as their white classmates, challenged the commonly perceived notion of Blacks as childlike, inferior, and incapable of learning.

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