“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.

The World of Hosea Easton and David Walker

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Archer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
New England ◽  
African Descent ◽  
Black Population ◽  
The United States ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
David Walker ◽  
The World ◽  
Free People

Hosea Easton and David Walker described and analyzed racism in New England during the late 1820s. New England had initially been more receptive to its black population than were other sections of the United States, but as their populations of free people of African descent dramatically increased, states began to reverse themselves. By the 1820s, laws forbade free people of African descent from marrying whites, employment was limited to the most menial jobs, and education—where available—was inadequate. African Americans could not serve on juries or hold public office. Their housing opportunities were restricted, and they were segregated in church seating. They were barred from theaters, hotels, hospitals, stagecoaches, and steamships. Worst of all, whites denied blacks their humanity. Their belief that people of color were inferior to themselves underlay slavery and racism.

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.

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.

Stories of Servitude

2019 ◽  
pp. 86-124
Author(s):  
Cati Coe
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Metropolitan Area ◽  
The United States ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Social Categories ◽  
Racial Categories ◽  
Care Workers ◽  
Place Of Origin

Most of the African research participants in northern New Jersey and the Washington DC metropolitan area told stories of deliberate humiliation or diminishment in which their place of origin or Blackness was used against them. Through these interactions and stories about these interactions, African care workers were becoming familiar with American racial categories, in which they were Black, mixed in with stereotypes about Africans as non-human and about immigrants stealing jobs from citizens. These insults incorporated them into American racial categories as “Blacks” and “people of color,” social categories of person that made little sense in their home countries. As a result, African care workers were becoming more sensitive to the experiences of African-Americans. Care workers take stories of racism to be paradigmatic of their experiences in the United States.

Atlantic Passages

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Murray
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Differences ◽  
The United States ◽  
West African ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
The West ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
American Colonization Society ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Free People

Established by the American Colonization Society in the early nineteenth century as a settlement for free people of color, the West African colony of Liberia is usually seen as an endpoint in the journeys of those who traveled there. In Atlantic Passages, Robert Murray reveals that many Liberian settlers did not remain in Africa but returned repeatedly to the United States, and he explores the ways this movement shaped the construction of race in the Atlantic world. Tracing the transatlantic crossings of Americo-Liberians between 1820 and 1857, in addition to delving into their experiences on both sides of the ocean, Murray discusses how the African neighbors and inhabitants of Liberia recognized significant cultural differences in the newly arrived African Americans and racially categorized them as “whites.” He examines the implications of being perceived as simultaneously white and black, arguing that these settlers acquired an exotic, foreign identity that escaped associations with primitivism and enabled them to claim previously inaccessible privileges and honors in America. Highlighting examples of the ways in which blackness and whiteness have always been contested ideas, as well as how understandings of race can be shaped by geography and cartography, Murray offers many insights into what it meant to be black and white in the space between Africa and America.

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.

Colorism and U.S. Immigration: Considerations for Researchers

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (14) ◽  
pp. 2037-2054
Author(s):  
Carla R. Monroe ◽  
Ronald E. Hall
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Cultural Self ◽  
Intraracial Discrimination ◽  
Group Stratification ◽  
Research Studies

Research on colorism in the United States frequently focuses on people of color who were born in the country such as African Americans. Globalization, however, requires social scientists to consider new dimensions of intraracial discrimination as research studies must attend to realities and standpoints about race, as well as other forms of categorization, that are not traditionally represented in conversations about in-group stratification. In this article, we consider how colorism acts as a force that propels many immigrants toward identification with whiteness. Based on historical and contemporary snapshots of immigrant trends in the United States, we discuss how and why some groups opt to self-identify as racially White and/or align themselves with the ideological status quo regardless of their racial, phenotypic, and/or cultural self-ascriptions.

A Prudent Alternative or a Dangerous Diversion?

2019 ◽  
pp. 261-317
Author(s):  
Paul J. Polgar
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
American Colonization Society ◽  
Black Abolitionists ◽  
American Citizenship ◽  
Direct Threat

The emergence of colonization as a potential antislavery tool drove a wedge between competing factions among abolition societies. a long and at times divisive debate that fractured the abolition societies and signaled the rising influence of colonization among white reformers as an answer to ending slavery. With their claims to American citizenship under direct threat from the ideology of the American Colonization Society, black abolitionists more readily distinguished colonization from emancipation. People of color and the abolition societies of the Mid-Atlantic had jointly discredited the ACS soon after its founding. But by the beginning of the 1830s, it was black activists who had become the foremost champions of first movement abolitionist values, advancing the cause of combating slavery by overturning white prejudice and improving the condition of African Americans within the United States.

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.

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