Defining Moments: African American Commemoration and Political Culture in the South, 1863-1913

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african american commemoration & political culture in the south, 1863–1913

JR

defining moments Kathleen Ann Clark

The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill

∫ 2005 The University of North Carolina Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Designed by Jacquline Johnson Set in New Baskerville by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Clark, Kathleen Ann. Defining moments : African American commemoration and political culture in the South, 1863–1913 / Kathleen Clark. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-8078-2957-9 (cloth: alk. paper) isbn 0-8078-5622-3 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. African Americans—Southern States—Anniversaries, etc. 2. Slaves– Emancipation—United States—Anniversaries, etc. 3. African Americans—History—1863–1877. 4. African Americans—History— 1877–1964. 5. African Americans—Southern States—Politics and government. 6. Political culture—Southern States—History—19th century. 7. Political culture—Southern States—History—20th century. 8. Southern States—Politics and government—1865–1950. 9. Southern States—Race relations. I. Title. e185.2.c58 2005 975%.0096073—dc22 2004029988 cloth 09 08 07 06 05 5 4 3 2 1 paper 09 08 07 06 05 5 4 3 2 1 Portions of this work appeared earlier, in somewhat different form, in Kathleen Clark, ‘‘Celebrating Freedom: Emancipation Day Celebrations and African American Memory in the Early Reconstruction South,’’ in Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity, ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 107–32; and ‘‘Making History: African American Commemorative Celebrations in Augusta, Georgia, 1865–1913,’’ in Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory, ed. Cynthia Mills and Pamela H. Simpson (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003), 46–63, and are reproduced here by permission of the publishers.

contents Acknowledgments ix introduction: Language that Cannot Be Misunderstood African American Commemoration, 1863–1913 1 chapter one The Vanguard of Liberty Must Look into the Past Celebrations of Freedom 13 chapter two A Resurrection of Manhood Gendered Reconstruction 56 chapter three Has Emancipation Been a Failure? The End of Reconstruction 95 chapter four Signs of the Times Making Progress in the Post-Reconstruction South 133 chapter five Bosoms Filled with Hope Collective Representation in the Age of Jim Crow 188 Notes 229 Bibliography 271 Index 295


illustrations Emancipation Day in Port Royal, South Carolina, 1 January 1863 22 View of Broad Street in Augusta, Georgia, where African Americans paraded on Emancipation Days over the years 32 Scenes from the Emancipation Day parade and celebration in Charleston, South Carolina 58 The Freedmen’s Union Industrial School, Richmond, Virginia, 1866 87 African Americans celebrate the Fifteenth Amendment in Baltimore, 1870 93 Emancipation Day in Richmond, Virginia, [c. 1905] 216 John Hope, African American educator, c. 1920s 226


acknowledgments I have incurred many personal debts while writing this book. In particular, I wish to thank Christine Stansell. Much that I have learned over the years about the challenges and rewards of history, I have learned from her. I was fortunate enough to stumble into her women’s history class in the fall of my freshman year in college, and she has inspired me with her passion, commitment, and intellectual generosity ever since. I am particularly grateful for the time and care she devoted to reading the manuscript for this book; her support and advice were indispensable for bringing the project to fruition. Several others have provided vital support and critical insight throughout this project. I wish to thank the members of my dissertation committee at Yale University, especially Nancy Cott and Glenda Gilmore. Their vision and guidance were indispensable as I ventured onto the then-unfamiliar terrain of the nineteenth-century South. Hazel Carby both inspired me and challenged me throughout my graduate school career. Many persons, both at Yale and the University of Georgia, provided useful criticism and sound advice at different stages of this project. I give thanks to the members of my writing group in New Haven—Eve Weinbaum, Alexis Freeman, Rachel Wheeler, Rachel Roth, Barbara Blodgett, and especially Jane Levey. I am grateful to my colleagues at the University of Georgia, especially Douglas Northrop, Reinaldo Roman, Monica Chojnacka, and Michelle McClellan, for their help and support. Numerous commentators and fellow conference panelists contributed to the progress of the manuscript. The anonymous readers for the University of North Carolina Press helped to make this a much better book than it would otherwise have been. I would also like to thank the editorial staff at the Press, especially Mary Caviness, David Perry, and Mark Simpson-Vos, for their patience, skill, and commitment to this project. My good friends Jennifer Hirsch, Michelle Stephens, Neely McNulty, Erik Fatemi, and Stephanie Andrews provided insight, a balanced perspective, and much-needed levity along the many years between the book’s conception and completion. I have had the good fortune to claim Kio Stark as my close friend and confidante throughout my graduate school

x acknowledgments

and professional career. For her keen intelligence, sharp wit, and good company I am especially grateful. I received a great deal of support while writing and researching. I am thankful for the Sarah Moss Research Grant and the Center for Humanities and Arts Research Fellowship, both from the University of Georgia. I also benefited from the Albert J. Beveridge Grant awarded by the American Historical Association, the Archie K. Davis Fellowship Program for Research in North Carolina, the Pew Fellowship Program in Religion and American History, and the John F. Enders Grant and Dissertation Fellowship administered by Yale University. The knowledge, aid, and patience of numerous archivists have contributed greatly to the successful completion of this book. I wish to thank the research librarians at the Virginia Historical Society, the Library of Virginia, the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress, the MoorlandSpingarn Research Center for Research in Black Culture, the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina, the Manuscript Collection of Perkins Library at Duke University, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Avery Research Center, the South Caroliniana Library of South Carolina University, the Special Collections Department of the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia, the Special Collections and University Archives of Memorial Library at Virginia State University, and the Archives/Special Collections Department of the Woodruff Library at Clark-Atlanta University, as well as the staffs of the microfilm reading room and the interlibrary loan office at Yale University. I owe more than I can say to many members of my family for their faith and patience over the last decade. I wish to give a special thanks to my parents, Kenneth and Mary Ann Clark, for teaching me to ask the questions that led to this project. I also thank Bill and Nancy Dean, for their generosity of mind and heart. David, my husband, deserves far more thanks than I know how to give. He and our son, Samuel, have brought such delight and laughter into my life—it is to them that I dedicate this book.

introduction

Retrospect the past and view the present. To-day you crowd the streets of our town, with imposing processions, which speak in language that cannot be misunderstood. from address of Mrs. Thomas Pauley, Georgetown, S.C., 1870

JR Language that Cannot Be Misunderstood african american commemoration, 1863–1913 The incomparable thrill of the Emancipation Day celebration never left Albert Brooks. In a 1938 interview with a worker for the Works Progress Administration, Brooks vividly recalled a ceremony he had attended as a young child shortly after the end of the Civil War. On the appointed day, African Americans journeyed from the surrounding countryside to march in a massive parade that quickly overflowed the streets of the town where Brooks lived with his family. Caught up in the excitement, white missionaries rushed to join the procession. One teacher was so intoxicated with joy that she ‘‘stood on the church steps and just shouted unashamed before all the people that were present.’’ In Brooks’s memory, the wind blew strong as his stepfather climbed to the top of the church, shouldering a massive American flag. Brooks described the scene as the Stars and Stripes came to life, snapping and pulling in the fierce wind; his stepfather struggled to hold his ground, then triumphantly raised the flag overhead. Look-

2 african american commemoration

ing back, Brooks recalled: ‘‘Since that first celebration I have attended many others . . . but I’ll never forget the first Emancipation proclamation celebration.’’∞ This study centers on African American commemorative celebrations that transpired in southern towns and cities, such as the Emancipation Day ceremony so vividly recollected by Albert Brooks. African American public commemorations proliferated during the postwar years; the largest ceremonies occupied the public squares of southern towns and cities, drawing hundreds of men, women, and children from the surrounding countryside. Elaborate parades were a staple of such celebrations, along with speech-making, prayer, song, and festivities that frequently stretched late into the night. In addition to communitywide ceremonies, numerous commemorative events transpired under the auspices of individual churches, schools, and associations. While the immediate postwar years witnessed some of the most intensive commemorative activity, African American celebrations did not end with Reconstruction. Instead, black southerners sustained—and in some instances emboldened—commemorative traditions well into the twentieth century. Commemorative celebrations were one facet of a vital and dynamic African American public culture that developed in post–Civil War southern communities. Surveying the number and variety of African American public ceremonies, meetings, and demonstrations occurring after Emancipation, one woman predicted, ‘‘Some will look [back] upon these times as if nothing but politics, mass meetings, drums and fifes and gilt muskets were all the go.’’≤ For the most part, however, the dynamics of southern black public culture have eluded scholarly attention—only recently have historians begun to analyze the role of public events in postbellum southern black communities.≥ This study builds on recent scholarship by exploring the particular role of urban commemorations, such as Emancipation Day celebrations and Fourth of July ceremonies, in the development of southern black political culture during the decades following the Civil War. Most especially, I examine the role of urban commemorations in African American struggles over public self-representation, struggles that were critical to black southerners’ evolving debates over how best to define, achieve, and defend their freedom. In the years following Emancipation, as African Americans labored to define themselves in ways that would legitimate their claims to citizenship and promote their progress in the South, commemorative celebrations became critical forums for construct-

african american commemoration 3

ing collective African American identities for both black and white audiences. The development of southern black commemorations reflected ongoing debates among African Americans over how they could best represent themselves, debates that centered on such issues as the content and meaning of black history, class-inflected ideas of ‘‘respectability’’ and ‘‘progress,’’ and gendered notions of citizenship.

J African American commemorations manifested widely shared cultural and political practices, but they also embodied the varied circumstances of black southerners. With this diversity in mind, I focus on commemorations occurring in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, although the full body of evidence I use also includes examples from Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington, D.C. Each of the four states that form the core of my study produced widespread commemorative activity that, in many cases, extended from the postwar period into the twentieth century. Examined collectively, these traditions illustrate both a wide variety of local practices and common links among black ceremonies throughout a substantial area of the South. Examples from other states suggest a measure of common ground across the South— between African American commemorations in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia and those in other parts of the region. But there were clearly important differences as well, as even a cursory examination of traditions in places like Louisiana and Texas makes clear. This study offers a window onto a rich and varied public culture that deserves still further attention from scholars of southern history. This is a study of urban black public ceremonies. This does not mean, however, that African Americans from the countryside did not attend and participate in urban commemorations. Cities like Norfolk, Richmond, Raleigh, Charleston, and Augusta produced large and energetic celebrations that regularly drew visitors and participants from a wide swath of the surrounding countryside. Thus, commemorations also provide a window onto public interactions between blacks from the country and those who resided in towns and cities. In particular, large demonstrations such as Emancipation Day ceremonies and celebrations of the Fourth of July afforded urban African American spokespersons unique opportunities to convey their own understanding of black interests to large numbers of rural black laborers. A variety of black leaders—missionaries, ministers, educators, journal-


ists, political aspirants, and other community spokespersons—invested considerable time and energy in organizing commemorations in southern communities, and their efforts are at the heart of this story. Indeed, while southern black commemorations reflected the engagement of a wide range of participants, they particularly embodied the visions, strategies, struggles, and conflicts of African Americans who took up positions of leadership in urban areas of the post-Emancipation South. Community spokespersons dominated—though by no means monopolized—the ongoing public debates over collective self-representation that shaped the development of commemoration during the decades following Emancipation. The community leaders who figure prominently in the following pages were not a homogeneous class. Northern-born African Americans, freeborn black southerners, and a rising group of freedpeople all participated energetically—and at times oppositionally—in the creation and maintenance of commemorative traditions. Black spokespersons also differed by other important measures—in education, politics, material circumstance, religious identity, and gender; these differences helped to shape contrasting approaches to ceremonies.∂ As time wore on, existing distinctions among black leaders were compounded by generational conflicts. Older generations of spokespersons vied with an up-and-coming generation of black leaders who came of age after Emancipation with their own perceptions of the past and aims for the future.∑ When the high hopes of Reconstruction gave way to the increasingly tumultuous conditions of the late nineteenth century, African Americans’ difference in opinion on such pressing issues as emigration further diversified ‘‘the black leadership’’ in the South.∏ Given the wide range of distinctions among leading African Americans in the postwar decades, it is difficult to locate a point of coherence, much less choose a single form of identification, such as a black ‘‘elite,’’ ‘‘bourgeoisie,’’ or ‘‘middle class’’ or ‘‘middling class.’’ Nevertheless, there is one important point of unity that makes it possible to pair an economically struggling former slave working as an itinerant minister with a freeborn, formally educated black state representative in the postwar South, at least for the purposes of this study. In spite of the significant differences in experience and circumstance separating the two, both were self-identified leaders in southern black communities. Both aimed to speak to—and for—other members of their race. And one element of their leadership, as these black spokespersons saw it, was the responsibility to shape the collec-


tive representation of African American interests and identities through public ceremonies.π I use the terms ‘‘spokesperson,’’ ‘‘leader,’’ and ‘‘leading African American’’ throughout this study. These designations, however, are meant to signify the self-perception of a large and unwieldy cast of historical actors rather than to reflect a straightforward expression of their role in relation to large numbers of black southerners. Whenever possible, I delineate the relationship between black leaders and the communities they sought to represent, including points of both conflict and cohesion. In particular, I explore changes occurring in the composition of black commemorative celebrations from Reconstruction, when large ceremonies regularly engaged hundreds, even thousands, of African American men, women, and children, to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when smaller and more subdued events often reflected the efforts of African American leaders to forge links with potential white allies by demonstrating the ‘‘progress’’ and ‘‘respectability’’ of the black population in highly controlled public occasions. I also at times use ‘‘elite’’ and ‘‘rising’’ class to describe leaders who participated in commemorations. Representatives from fragile northern African American middle-class communities who came South after the Civil War were frequent organizers of postbellum black ceremonies. In the following decades, African American commemorations were clearly implicated in ideologies of racial uplift, premised upon class-based distinctions among blacks.∫ At the same time, improved educational and economic circumstances of some African Americans widened the distance between at least some black leaders and the broader black communities that they hoped to lead.Ω Thus it is both possible and necessary to analyze African American spokespersons’ actions in terms of sharpening class identities. While acknowledging other scholars’ important insights into the problems inherent in ideologies of black progress that rested upon highly racialized class definitions, I differ in my emphasis. I stress the ways in which African American leaders’ class-inflected actions were aimed at combating white supremacy and creating new possibilities for black success under harrowing conditions in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century South.∞≠ Many of these African American leaders of commemorations— especially during the post-Reconstruction decades—might be termed ‘‘accommodationists.’’ That is, they believed in interracial cooperation as a foundation for African American advancement and sometimes urged Afri-


can American communities to be ‘‘patient’’ in their expectations for southern progress. Some actually evinced greater trust in white elites than they did in working-class black southerners. In retrospect, it is clear that such confidence in whites was usually misplaced, and that the tendency of bourgeois black leaders to distrust working-class African Americans—and emphasize the alleged deficiencies of southern black populations—helped to reinforce the power of white supremacy and cripple black political organization. However accurate, such judgments should not prevent us from seeking to understand the complex beliefs, motivations, tactics, and accomplishments of so-called accommodationists on their own terms. Only by taking seriously the full range of southern black strategies—including those with conservative elements—can we hope to better understand the complex dynamics of African American political culture in the decades following the Civil War. Moreover, black leaders in the Jim Crow South—whatever their weaknesses—were dedicated to promoting the interests (as they perceived them) of all black southerners, under conditions that no earlytwenty-first-century scholar, however capable, can fully appreciate. When examined through the lens of commemorative activity, the strategies of many ‘‘accommodationists’’ appear as carefully calibrated efforts to extract vital white support for black interests and create sustainable methods for southern black self-help at a time when the most virulent white supremacists insisted on the impossibility of any form of African American achievement whatsoever.

J This book proceeds chronologically, beginning with the early postwar period, when substantial public celebrations engaged large numbers of rural and urban freedpeople, as well as freeborn black southerners, black northerners, white missionaries, and Federal officials. Early Emancipation Day ceremonies and other commemorations embraced a broad range of participants in a collective demonstration of black citizenship within an expanded American polity. Indeed, the energetic postwar celebrations were a moving representation of democratic, participatory urban public culture. Black and white, male and female, northern and southern, rural and urban, adult and child, freeborn and former slave—all had a role in the exuberant postbellum celebrations, in stark contrast to the lines of segregation and exclusion that characterized most antebellum public ceremonies in both the North and the South. Like the mass political meetings that overflowed church halls and town squares and engaged the participa-


tion of men, women, and children, postwar commemorations embodied the expansive visions of civic and political participation that Elsa Barkley Brown and other historians have identified as developing out of African Americans’ experiences of—and resistance to—slavery. Hundreds, even thousands, of participants marched side by side in elaborate parades, sang and prayed on behalf of freedom, and raised their voices to cheer the speeches of black and white dignitaries.∞∞ Even as they sought to celebrate a new consensus, however, commemorations clearly manifested divisions and hierarchies within the black population. Many urban ceremonies, for instance, emphasized the leadership structure, organization, and ceremonial traditions of free black communities. Indeed, one of the most notable aspects of very early celebrations in cities like New Orleans, Augusta, Charleston, Norfolk, and Richmond was the display of black associations and institutions in exuberant marches. Reflecting antebellum structures and organization, the parades rapidly expanded to embody the full panoply of churches, schools, voluntary associations, paramilitary organizations, and Republican alliances that defined black society and political culture in many southern communities. In parade formations, these organizations were typically preceded by individual leaders, including local spokesmen, who rode on horseback or in carriages at the front of the parades. The tight organization testified to the existence of considerable social and political networks prior to Emancipation, as well as to the rapid expansion of community organization and leadership after the war. But it also reflected preexisting social distinctions among black southerners—most especially between former slaves and the freeborn blacks (many of them men) who dominated political organizations and leadership positions in postwar urban black communities. And it anticipated further differences that developed in the context of freedom. Some ceremonies represented social distinctions quite clearly: men strode by in parades while women and children watched from the sidelines; farm laborers were marginalized as militias and skilled craftsmen and religious and political spokesmen occupied center stage. There was a particularly stark contrast between the highly organized—and relatively orderly—events initiated by formerly free black leaders and the parodic revelry of annual processions in which freedmen, attired in fanciful masks and costumes, teasingly mocked figures of white authority with satirical songs as they paraded through southern towns. The latter ceremonies were rooted in antebellum slave traditions and persisted in communities in Georgia and North Carolina during the decades following the war, even


as a separate set of postwar traditions, embodying very different views of black identity and political relations, developed alongside them.∞≤ During the 1870s, intensifying tactical debates and political rivalries within black communities were also reflected and reinforced in the composition and tenor of commemorative celebrations. Postwar commemorations also reflected the diverse efforts of black and white northerners who traveled to the South in the wake of Emancipation and attempted to shape black ceremonies according to their own interests. Men like Henry Turner, James Lynch, and Richard Cain—all leaders of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church—were among the most vigorous organizers; Federal officials, southern white Republicans, and white missionaries representing organizations like the American Missionary Association also had a hand. All these groups had their own visions of postwar black society and politics, visions that they attempted to enact through their leadership of public celebrations. In the years after Emancipation, many northern black leaders emphasized gendered notions of propriety—and particularly the public demonstration of middleclass manhood—as critical to the achievement of freedom and citizenship. Far from expressing a distinctly southern black political culture, then, the large, urban postwar commemorations embodied the full range of participants—and conflicts—that characterized Republican politics in the postwar South. The efforts of a broad spectrum of spokespersons to assert their leadership were evident in many aspects of the celebrations, but most particularly in the extensive speech-making that quickly became a staple of postwar events. Taking advantage of the opportunity to address large numbers of southern freedpeople, different orators made distinct, often conflicting, appeals. Some speakers, both black and white, emphasized the duties and responsibilities of freedom, taking care to warn their listeners against expectations of ‘‘free’’ land and encouraging men and women to sign contracts with white landowners. Others took a different tack. Some assertive black spokesmen and a handful of white leaders conveyed more expansive visions of freedom, as when the unflagging militant Martin Delany, speaking before an audience of freedpeople at a public meeting on St. Helena’s Island in South Carolina, urged them to continue to defend their rights in the great tradition of those who had taken up arms to fight for freedom. While they had much in common with other political meetings, rallies, and demonstrations that transpired after the war, commemorations were in many ways distinctive. Above all, they were ceremonies designed in part


to establish and reinforce collective understandings of history. Participants invoked the accomplishments of ancient Africa, reviewed the horrors of slavery, and thanked God for intervening in human affairs to end the sin of bondage in the United States. Orators established links between the founding of the country and the origination of black freedom and employed a genealogical vision that traced new patterns of American heroism through the generations. Enthusiastic crowds applauded the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation, while speakers outlined a freedom-loving American ancestry that tapped for brotherhood such diverse figures as Crispus Attucks, John Brown, Robert Gould Shaw, and Abraham Lincoln. Turning to the future, they envisioned freedom and equality spreading outward from the United States to envelop the world.∞≥ The various histories generated through African American commemorations went hand in hand with the political work of Reconstruction. Both the transformation of slaves into citizens and the reconstitution of the nation required cultural labor that rested, in part, on the ability to make history, that is, to assert particular understandings of the past. Organizers constructed both the American and black pasts to assert the legitimacy of Emancipation and promote their vision of black freedom and citizenship embedded in a united national community. Ministers representing the AME Church, for instance, repeatedly emphasized slavery as both a sin against God and a transgression against the country’s destiny to spread freedom and equality both at home and abroad. Looking to the future, they stressed the proven accomplishments of black men, whether in ancient Egypt or in American wars, as proof positive of their capacity for the full rights of citizenship, including suffrage. Even as they sought to celebrate a new historical consensus, however, postwar commemorations just as frequently embodied negotiation and debate, reflecting and reinforcing political struggles among constituencies. Freedpeople did not always agree on historical interpretation; nor did the freeborn African Americans, Union army officers, Freedmen’s Bureau officials, white Republicans, or northern missionaries who also had a role in shaping postwar ceremonies. These separate groups invested the past with multiple and conflicting meanings, which in turn were linked to distinct aspirations for the future.∞∂

J However contentious, the commemorations of the early postwar years reflected an unparalleled embrace of an integrated national community and projected a future of abundant liberty for both black and white Ameri-


cans. And yet, even before Reconstruction came to an end in 1877, white Republicans had begun to retreat from those racially inclusive visions of the nation. By the 1880s, the commencement of national ‘‘reunion’’ between northern and southern whites, which rested upon the exclusion of African Americans from both history and the full rights of citizenship, was well under way. As historian Nina Silber demonstrates, the culture of conciliation was evident in everything from highly romantic plantation melodramas—which were quite popular in the North—to joint reunions between Union and Confederate troops.∞∑ By the turn of the century, white supremacists had largely succeeded in spreading their particular gospel of the past and putting their version of history to the service of racial apartheid.∞∏ These efforts found their ultimate expression in the release of the movie Birth of a Nation in 1915, with its depiction of a noble southern family, devastated by war, bravely fighting back (by raising the Ku Klux Klan) against the still more terrible ravages of black savages—and their equally culpable white abolitionist sponsors—during Reconstruction. In the fast-changing cultural and political conditions of the latenineteenth-century South, African Americans scrambled to adjust to devastating setbacks. During the latter years of Reconstruction, political arguments among blacks, as well as interracial conflicts within the Republican Party, made it ever more difficult to mount large, unified celebrations. This was particularly true for ceremonies on the Fourth of July; here the difficulties also reflected the diminished faith of at least some black leaders in the potential for true equality within the South—or the nation at large. Black-led ceremonies, which had for a time dominated public culture in many parts of the urban South, seemed to fade in comparison with the large and dramatic celebrations that accompanied Democratic triumphs and the ‘‘redemption’’ of the region. Adding insult to injury, the violence that helped make possible Democratic victories included attacks on African American public gatherings, including several commemorations. In spite of setbacks, African Americans maintained—and in some cases, amplified—commemorative traditions such as Emancipation Day celebrations. This was particularly true in places where individual black spokespersons turned commemorations into forums for organizing African Americans and representing black communities and ideas to white audiences. So Charles Hunter, an educator and political activist in Raleigh, North Carolina, reshaped annual Emancipation Day celebrations to embody his vision of interracial progress in the South. Events under Hunter’s


guidance typically included addresses by white officials, as well as collective declarations of black interests; black leaders’ political and historical oratory stressed themes of mutual dependence and shared interests across racial lines. Through their commemorative labors, southern black organizers like Hunter literally made progress in the post-Reconstruction South. Many late-nineteenth-century Americans—including an increasing number of urban southerners—had come to define meaningful history as progress. Moreover, a growing number of white Americans embraced theories of social Darwinism that cast ‘‘Anglo-Saxons’’ as uniquely capable of achieving the qualities of ‘‘progress’’—or at least, as far advanced over other ‘‘races.’’ Southern black spokespersons embraced the fundamental notion of history as progress but challenged vital aspects of white-authored ideologies. Constructing black history so as to emphasize African Americans’ progress since Emancipation, they also insisted that future regional and national advancement would be contingent upon black freedom and interracial cooperation. In the hands of African American leaders, public commemorations thus became critical forums for enacting and projecting black-authored visions of progress, with the aim of injecting African American interests into local, regional, and national debates. While the articulations of progress that came to dominate many Emancipation celebrations in the 1880s and early 1890s clearly embodied the political strategies of urban black spokespersons vis-à-vis southern white revanchists, they also revealed intensifying tactical arguments within southern black communities, including struggles over the issue of emigration. Charles Hunter raised his voice in praise of southern black progress not only to appeal to whites but also to answer the increasingly vociferous African Americans who had ceased to believe in the possibility of black advancement in the South. At times, Emancipation celebrations became forums for emigrationist perspectives; more often, black leaders’ insistence on progress was designed to counter the emigrationists. And there were other disagreements: over the wisdom of remembering slavery, over the role of women in black society, and over what constituted ‘‘respectable’’ public behavior; these tensions and open disputes plagued efforts to elaborate a coherent vision of black progress and produce united public African American ceremonies in the late-nineteenth-century South. The decline of black militias that accompanied the onset of Jim Crow further weakened commemorations in some places, as the processions that had long been a


key component of African American self-representation no longer enjoyed the protection afforded by armed black men. Finally, escalating white-onblack violence and the steady elimination of black rights that defined the era struck a terrible blow against even the most optimistic and determined black southerners; in one state after another, confident assertions of black progress gave way to responses ranging from searching self-doubt to bitter anger in the late 1890s and early 1900s. And still, black ceremonies continued in many southern communities. Emancipation celebrations in particular maintained—or in some cases, regained—momentum during the early years of the twentieth century. As white supremacists lay waste to the fragile edifice of black rights, African American leaders scrambled once again to find a way forward. This study concludes with an examination of the various ways in which black politics during the onset of Jim Crow found expression in African American commemorative ceremonies from the late 1890s until 1913, the year marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. As black spokespersons struggled amid ever worsening conditions, conflicts intensified over how best to represent ‘‘race.’’ Some leaders set their sights on obtaining white support for an ever narrowing program of black progress, a program that frequently began and ended with ‘‘industrial’’ education. Others persisted in condemning white resistance to black achievement and demanded the reinstatement of political rights as a requisite for progress. African American commemorative culture embodied these widening conflicts, as some ceremonies disputed racist versions of the South’s past, while others praised a narrow vision of black progress, and others developed into platforms for romanticizing slavery and cautioning black participants against the alleged perils of political activities. At a time when public culture lay at the very core of the nation’s understanding of itself, all these endeavors embodied African American struggles to find a path forward for the United States—one that would, finally, bear out the promise of freedom.

chapter one

Yes, the nation will go to the cemetery at Springfield to-day, and shedding the tear-drop on the yet fresh grave of Abraham Lincoln, will swear by him, and all their orphans and widows, and slain, and wounded, and brokenhearted, to maintain the honor of the starry standard—the Union of these States— the liberty of all men—forever and forever. James Lynch in Augusta, Georgia, 4 July 1865

JR The Vanguard of Liberty Must Look into the Past celebrations of freedom Dramatic scenes unfolded even before the Civil War was over. African Americans throughout the country rejoiced at Federal victories and celebrated President Abraham Lincoln’s issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation on 1 January 1863. The president had devised the proclamation so that it applied only to slaves residing in rebellious states; he exempted Union-occupied territories of Louisiana and Virginia, as well as Tennessee and border states that remained loyal to the Union. But this did not stop African Americans—even in officially excluded areas—from celebrating.

14 celebrations of freedom

While Federal officials took care to confine the proclamation’s impact, African Americans seized upon the president’s action as a resounding affirmation of their own understanding of the ongoing national conflict— that it was a battle between slavery and freedom. African Americans’ expansive interpretation of the Emancipation Proclamation was in keeping with the mutinous actions of black southerners from the very onset of the war. Ignoring President Lincoln’s efforts to assure slaveholders that the Federal government had no intention of interfering with the South’s ‘‘domestic institutions,’’ they persisted in their belief that slavery was at the heart of the national conflict, and they began to press the cause of freedom early on. By acting in ways that weakened slavery from within and put pressure on Federal officials to alter their policies, African Americans across the South launched what historian Steven Hahn has aptly described as the ‘‘largest slave rebellion in modern history.’’∞ Praying for freedom, running away to Union lines, cultivating work slowdowns on plantations, passing on news of the war’s progress through the ‘‘grapevine telegraph,’’ and engaging in countless other acts of resistance, hundreds of thousands of black southerners worked to undermine slavery long before they were officially ‘‘set free.’’≤ By the same token, men, women, and children who rejoiced at liberty in the midst of war did more than manifest delight and thanksgiving, although the shared expression of heartfelt emotions was certainly a vital aspect of their celebrations. By embracing a carefully delimited policy as a harbinger of universal freedom, black celebrants imbued the president’s action with new meaning and propelled the cause of liberty forward. African Americans continued to step up their actions to challenge slavery in the weeks and months that followed—even slaves who remained well within the Confederate interior did all they could to spread the word of the Emancipation Proclamation, keep abreast of military and political developments, and further erode their masters’ power. When they had the opportunity, thousands more escaped to Union lines, where they built fortifications, moved supplies, and served in numerous capacities, including as seamstresses, laundresses, hospital attendants, guides, and even spies; others took over properties abandoned by their owners as they fled from the approaching Union army. These insurgencies culminated in the enlistment of tens of thousands of African American men in the Union army— the vast majority of them former slaves—where they went on to fight with great honor and bravery, thereby helping to seal the fate of both the

celebrations of freedom 15

Confederacy and slavery. When General Robert E. Lee finally conceded defeat in April of 1865, the war’s conclusion reflected both the profound hopes and prayers and the decisive actions of African Americans across the South and the nation.≥ African Americans’ particular understanding of the war, borne out in their actions, was also reflected in their later remembrances. Black southerners never did recall the ‘‘War of Northern Aggression’’ or the ‘‘War Between the States’’ or even the ‘‘War for Union’’; rather, the war, for them, was the ‘‘Freedom War,’’ the ‘‘Slavery War,’’ or the ‘‘Holy War.’’∂

J African Americans carried out some of the most assertive wartime celebrations in Virginia, which became a critical battleground early in the conflict. Under the direction of General George B. McClellan, Union soldiers sought to defend Washington, D.C., from Confederate attack at the same time that they endeavored to drive forward through the state to capture Richmond. Seeking a route to the Confederate capital, McClellan landed his forces at Fortress Monroe in the spring of 1862. From there, the Army of the Potomac advanced up Virginia’s peninsula, taking Norfolk after the Confederates abandoned the port city on 9 May.∑ African American men, women, and children streamed onto the streets of Norfolk and shouted for joy in the wake of the Confederate retreat. After Federal troops arrived, black residents staged a day of public thanksgiving, which began with sunrise services at black churches and concluded with a massive parade and bonfire.∏ Father Parker, a former slave and preacher in town, later recalled the particular pleasure everyone felt as they flaunted the long-standing curfew, walking the streets well into the night under the protection of Union troops.π But African Americans’ status remained ambiguous during the Federal occupation. Union officials at first declared all slaves in the area free, then attempted to reverse that policy to placate local white slave owners— actions that reflected widespread disagreement and uncertainty among Federal officials and Union army troops over how to respond to African Americans’ efforts to escape bondage early in the war. General McClellan, like many Union officers, firmly believed that it was the army’s duty to return fugitive slaves to their owners. Even in cases where presiding officers accepted runaway slaves as ‘‘contrabands’’—as was the case at Fortress Monroe—fugitives frequently received rough, even abusive treatment. They were put to work under harsh conditions and subject to the con-


temptuous and sometimes violent actions of northern soldiers, many of whom were deeply prejudiced against the former slaves. Black women in particular were vulnerable to sexual coercion and rape at the hands of northern soldiers.∫ Faced with robbery and violence, abused by roving Union soldiers, and exploited as laborers by Federal officials, it is not surprising that at least some black Virginians saw little difference between their past and present circumstances. With bitter irony, one man remarked: ‘‘Good God, if this is the way we are to be treated we may just as well be in slavery.’’Ω Still, local blacks forged ahead, devising strategies for survival and laying a foundation for freedom. They were helped in this slow, patient effort by northern teachers, black and white, from the American Missionary Association (AMA). Convinced that the outbreak of war had created an unprecedented opportunity for missionary work, teachers for the AMA first traveled to Virginia in the fall of 1861, arriving in Fortress Monroe to work with black fugitives who were fleeing there in ever increasing numbers. The following spring, AMA missionaries spread out across the peninsula, laboring to aid African Americans in Newport News, Portsmouth, and Norfolk.∞≠ Hundreds of black children and adults enrolled in local schools in Norfolk during the summer of 1862. In the meantime, African Americans withdrew from white churches and established mutual aid societies and relief programs. Building on the already existing networks forged by free black men and women in the city—and drawing on patterns of community and organization among local slaves—they began to expand the institutional networks that would prove vital to the constitution and support of the community in the coming years. And for their part, white residents continued to resist the signs of encroaching black freedom that were emerging all around them.∞∞ In September, news of the pending Emancipation Proclamation fanned the flames of white antipathy. One northern missionary, clearly frightened by the depth of white outrage, reported: ‘‘[Since] the [news of the] proclamation has come to us the slaveholders have begun again to maltreat their slaves. At the same time [they] tell them that no one on Earth has the power to free them.’’ In spite of white anger, African Americans in Norfolk initiated plans for a grand celebration on New Year’s Day. Worried about the prospect for violence, AMA educators in town wondered aloud about the wisdom of a public demonstration, given the ‘‘extremely uncertain’’ conditions in the wake of Lincoln’s announcement.∞≤


Black residents of Norfolk forged ahead with their plans to celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation in the face of the apparent danger—just as African Americans across the wartime South risked violence and even death when they rebelled against white control and struggled to gain their liberty. On New Year’s Day, large numbers of African Americans poured into Norfolk from the surrounding countryside in anticipation of a great celebration. A massive parade kicked off the day’s ceremonies: black soldiers led a lengthy procession through the main streets of town; behind the soldiers came a full entourage of men, women, and children, some proceeding on foot, others in wagons. In a particularly audacious performance, two African American women made a show of destroying and trampling a Confederate flag from atop the cart on which they rode. After a speech delivered by the military governor, everyone marched out to the local fairgrounds, where celebrants burned an effigy of President Davis.∞≥ Bitterly resentful of the celebration but unable to stop it, local whites nevertheless retaliated against a free black resident who had helped to organize the day’s ceremonies. Several intruders broke into the stable where he kept horses, destroyed equipment, and ‘‘cut the eyes of two of [the horses] so that they bled to death before morning’’—a gruesome act that was understood as revenge for the day’s events.∞∂

J When they took to the streets of Norfolk in joyous procession, black Virginians lay claim to a vital form of public rite and civic participation. Along with petition campaigns, outdoor meetings, and other innovations, urban ceremonies and celebrations—including commemorations—played a crucial role in the political culture of the antebellum United States.∞∑ In the wake of the American Revolution, new commemorative traditions such as Washington’s Birthday and the Fourth of July afforded a unique opportunity for large numbers of Americans to participate in the construction of a common past, which in turn worked to define the imagined community of the new nation. In the following decades, commemorative calendars expanded to accommodate a wide range of constituencies, from political parties to labor organizations, reflecting and reinforcing contrasting historical traditions, social identities, and political interests.∞∏ African Americans and women, however, were largely excluded from early-nineteenth-century, white-led commemorations, as they were from the collective identities and public histories such ceremonies helped to create. Indeed, one of the functions of commemorative ceremony was to draw the lines of race and gender that defined the limits of early American


democracy.∞π As historian Shane White has perceptively observed, ‘‘If the processions and parades of the 1790s and early decades of the nineteenth century were . . . ‘stories a people tell about themselves,’ then blacks were rarely part of the early nineteenth-century American story.’’∞∫ The same was true for white women. As public celebrations became more inclusive along lines of class, religion, and ethnicity during the decades preceding the Civil War, they became even more exclusive along the lines of race and gender. Both women and African Americans therefore found themselves further removed from the ranks of commemorative parades and related ceremonies.∞Ω Even as African Americans were largely excluded from white-led celebrations, however, public ceremonies were not without precedent in black communities. Northern blacks forged their own celebrations and occasions during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, blending and remaking Anglo and African traditions in the shifting context of northern society. Negro Election Day, Pinkster, and General Training were uniquely African American festivals that, as White has argued, lay at the very core of slave culture in the eighteenth-century North. In the decades following the Revolution, as black northerners pushed gradual emancipation acts to what was, by the 1820s, effusive freedom in the entire urban Northeast, they refashioned ceremonies and celebrations to fit the changing conditions of their lives. African Americans in Boston initiated marches honoring the abolition of the slave trade; blacks in New York celebrated the completion of gradual emancipation in the state. After emancipation in the West Indies, 1 August became a traditional date of celebration in Boston, New York, and elsewhere in the North. Additional anniversaries such as those of the death of Crispus Attucks in the Boston Massacre and Touissaint L’Ouverture’s declaration of Haitian independence established commemorative cycles that celebrated the advance of freedom within and outside the United States and emphasized black contributions to the founding of the nation.≤≠ In the antebellum South, African Americans were not at liberty to establish the full range of independent public ceremonies that characterized the North, but they nevertheless developed festivals and ceremonies that merged African and European cultures in the political context of southern slavery.≤∞ By the nineteenth century, annual slave celebrations ranged from communal corn shuckings, replete with oratory, song, dance, and feasting, to the parodic revelry of Jonkonnu processions, where slave par-


ticipants, attired in fanciful masks and costumes, teasingly mocked figures of white authority with satirical songs as they paraded through southern communities.≤≤ Funerals were another form of regular ceremony for both slaves and free blacks, providing a rare opportunity for them to gather in large numbers separately from whites. Southern black funerary occasions involved elaborate services—eulogies, hymns, and songs, ring shouts and processions. In urban settings with a substantial free black population, funeral pageantry could be particularly elaborate. Parades regularly boasted hundreds, even thousands, of free and slave participants and put on display the organization of local black society: fire companies and benevolent associations proceeded together, prominent individuals rode in carriages or on horseback, legions of mourners followed in their wake. Free black churches and benevolent societies sponsored fairs, processions, picnics, and other community activities in many places.≤≥ When black Virginians claimed their right to march openly through the streets of Norfolk, then, they did mark a departure from the past, when African Americans were excluded from mainstream public commemorations. But they also built on rich and varied traditions of public action and collective self-representation, including the ceremonies of inversion, such as the Jonkonnu parades, that were characteristic of southern slaves’ festivities—and political commentary—from before the war. That the status of black Virginians was in fact ambiguous during the winter of 1863 only heightened the importance of such demonstrations. At a moment when the fate of the war—and, with it, slavery—was as yet unsettled, African Americans in Norfolk took to the streets to assert their vision of the Confederacy’s defeat—one that emphasized the leading role of black soldiers and enslaved men and women—and enacted their own rebirth into liberty. Melding diverse antebellum traditions, black Virginians created something new: a celebration to herald the end of slavery and the coming of black freedom and citizenship to the American South.

J Emancipation celebrations in the Union-occupied South clearly represented southern black initiative, but they also reflected a range of northern attitudes toward the prospect of African American freedom. The wariness of northern officials in Norfolk was indicative of widespread ambivalence among white northerners regarding the fate of slavery throughout much of the war. Military commanders in Key West, Florida, for instance, did nothing to stop hostile whites from assaulting a local Emancipation Day


celebration organized by black residents. But in other areas, northern abolitionists actively promoted African American celebrations. It is not surprising, then, that a particularly elaborate wartime Emancipation celebration took place at Port Royal, South Carolina. Captured by Union forces in November of 1861—just seven months into the war—the islands of Port Royal Sound became the site of a significant ‘‘experiment’’ in freedom. Following a massive bombardment by Union warships on 7 November, Confederate flags came down and local whites rushed to evacuate the area, leaving behind thousands of slaves who resisted their owners’ efforts to take them on their flight to Charleston—along with thousands of acres of some of the richest cotton land in the South. Conditions were set for what would eventually become known as the Port Royal Experiment—an effort to develop black freedom in the very heart of the Confederacy, a place that one northern newspaper reporter described as ‘‘the exclusive home of the most exclusive few of that most exclusive aristocracy.’’≤∂ Northern cotton agents and some Federal officials aimed primarily to establish a new system of plantation wage labor on the islands; they sought to turn local slaves into ‘‘free’’ black workers who would cultivate the islands’ high-quality cotton. For abolitionists and their allies in the government, however, the presence of some ten thousand African American men, women, and children made the islands a unique testing ground for freedom itself, or, as one contemporary put it, a ‘‘womb for the emancipation at large.’’≤∑ The abolitionists had an unusually strong ally in General Rufus B. Saxton, who received orders to take charge of the islands’ cotton plantations and black inhabitants in the spring of 1862. A native of Greenfield, Massachusetts, Saxton had been raised by abolitionist parents and was well-known for his own strong views against slavery. AMA missionaries, who had begun arriving at Port Royal earlier that year, greeted Saxton’s appointment with great satisfaction, agreeing that he was just the man for the job—a ‘‘thoroughgoing Abolitionist, of the radical sort.’’≤∏ In the fall of 1862, as news of the upcoming Emancipation Proclamation spread throughout the islands, Saxton issued a declaration. New Year’s Day, 1863, would be ‘‘a day which is destined to be an everlasting beaconlight, marking a joyful era in the progress of a nation.’’ In response to Saxton’s proclamation, Federal officers, black troops, northern missionaries, and local African Americans began to lay plans for a daylong extravaganza to take place on 1 January.≤π The Port Royal ceremony is by far the best-documented wartime Emanci-


pation Day celebration. Numerous participants recounted the day’s events in journals, letters, and periodicals. These firsthand accounts provide a richly textured narrative of the celebration as it unfolded and shed light on the perspectives of northern organizers and witnesses.≤∫ Indeed, the documentation reveals how quickly African American commemorations became invested with multiple meanings, as distinct groups of actors imbued the celebrations with their own understandings of history, Emancipation, black identity, and the future of the nation. For northern missionaries and officials who were both heavily invested in the ‘‘experiment’’ of black freedom at Port Royal and intensely loyal to the Union, the Emancipation Day celebration powerfully exhibited black citizenship and a reunited nation in the making. In their renderings, missionaries and army officers portrayed a nation renewed and made whole by the advent of black freedom— carefully tended by northern leaders—as well as by freedpeople’s profound love of country. Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in command of the First South Carolina Volunteers, was on hand to witness the events at Port Royal on New Year’s Day, 1863, and he wrote an eloquent and moving account of the day in his diary; his writing reveals his own highly emotional response to the Emancipation celebration. Born into a New England Brahmin family in 1823, Higginson had immersed himself in the philosophy and ideas of social reform as a young man. In the 1840s, he took up several radical reform pursuits, including temperance, woman suffrage, and, in particular, abolitionism. His militancy increased during the 1850s when, after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, he joined the efforts of antislavery activists to resist the return of fugitive slaves to the South. Higginson went to Kansas in 1856 to promote free-soil emigration, and in 1858, he was one of the so-called Secret Six who supported John Brown’s plan to incite a slave uprising in Virginia. In 1860, as the prospect of war became increasingly likely, Higginson readied himself to take a role in the conflict by studying military science, taking up fencing, and in other ways preparing himself mentally and physically to serve as a soldier.≤Ω Higginson, then, was a natural choice to lead the First South Carolina Volunteers—the first regiment composed of formerly enslaved men to be recognized by the War Department. (The leaders of regiments of U.S. Colored Troops were all white men—a fact that Higginson himself objected to, as it perpetuated racial difference and hierarchy.)≥≠ The pressure on the former slaves to succeed as soldiers was intense. As one scholar


Emancipation Day in Port Royal, South Carolina, 1 January 1863. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

has noted, ‘‘These ex-slaves were meant to display, before the skeptical eyes of the national white public, a model of perfect military valor—and thus persuade the world that black men were the fighting equals of white men.’’≥∞ General Saxton began quietly organizing the First South Carolina Volunteers in October 1862, under Higginson’s command, and by November, the men had engaged in their first military action: a coastal raid that helped to free more than 150 slaves. On New Year’s Day, 1863, the slavesturned-soldiers were on hand to play an especially prominent role in celebrating freedom.≥≤ Writing in his journal, Higginson portrayed the scene as celebrants arrived by boat on the morning of 1 January: ‘‘About ten . . . people began collecting, steamboats from up & down river . . . [and] from that time forth the road was crowded with riders & walkers—chiefly black women with gay handkerchiefs on their heads & a sprinkling of men. Many white persons also, superintendents and teachers.’’≥≥ As everyone gathered in a large clearing, a military band played in the background and local dignitaries mounted a platform set beneath towering live oak trees, where they had a


clear view of the river. Like many observers, African American missionary Charlotte Forten was especially impressed by the sight of the black soldiers of the First South Carolina Volunteers. Forten, a lifelong abolitionist and member of one of the most prominent free black families in the North, felt she had ‘‘never seen a sight so beautiful’’: ‘‘There were the black soldiers, in their blue coats and scarlet pants, the officers of this and other regiments in their handsome uniforms, and crowds of lookers-on, men, women and children, grouped in various attitudes, under the trees. The faces of all wore a happy, eager, expectant look.’’≥∂ Ceremonies opened with prayer and a reading of the Emancipation Proclamation, followed by a presentation of colors to the First South Carolina Volunteers. Rev. Mansfield French delivered to Colonel Higginson a silk flag bearing the name of the regiment and the proud proclamation, ‘‘The Year of Jubilee has come!’’ As Higginson waved the flag, African American women and men in the audience broke in with the national anthem. The freedpeople’s burst of patriotism was ‘‘utterly unexpected’’ and moved many to tears. Higginson recalled, ‘‘I never saw anything so electric; it made all other words cheap; it seemed the choked voice of a race at last unloosed.’’ Humbled, he wondered how he could follow with his speech: ‘‘Just think of it; the first day they had ever had a country, the first flag they had ever seen which promised anything to their people,—& here while others stood in silence, waiting for my stupid words these simple souls burst out.’’ Higginson had little choice but to speak, so he went on, but for him and for others ‘‘the whole day was in those unknown people’s song.’’ After several more rounds of song and oration, the ceremonies were brought to a close with a rousing rendition of the abolitionist anthem, ‘‘John Brown’s Body.’’ A barbecue and dress parade capped off the day’s events.≥∑ In the wondrous sight of a black regiment ‘‘doing itself honor,’’ Forten saw a great future: ‘‘It was typical of what the race, so long downtrodden and degraded will yet achieve on this Continent.’’ Worn out from the long and exciting day but not yet willing to bring the festivities to an end, Forten and others sang their way home, serenading the crew of their boat with patriotic songs. Back at Camp Saxton, black soldiers carried on into the night, engaging in a rousing jubilee and ring shout—a highly emotional religious performance of song and dance that embodied West African traditions—while Higginson, alone in his tent, reflected happily on the day’s events; all had been ‘‘perfect & nothing but success.’’≥∏ For abolitionists like Forten and Higginson, young people who had im-


bibed antislavery beliefs from families, friends, and kin since they were children, the day must have been one of the rare moments when a lifetime’s worth of rhetoric becomes momentarily tangible. What moved people was how the Port Royal ceremony successfully blended the distinctive ceremonial practices of northern whites, freeborn blacks, and southern freedpeople into a united celebration of freedom. The formal elements of the day—prayer, speech-making, music, and the presentation of a flag— were familiar patriotic rites that white Americans had long used to define the ‘‘imagined community’’ of the nation. But the celebration also drew heavily on emancipationist histories and symbols of liberty that had characterized antebellum abolitionist commemorations in the North.≥π So long anticipated, freedom had finally arrived, and in the sparkling performances of black slaves-turned-soldiers, celebrants perceived the greater promise of the future for both African Americans and the nation at large. The outburst of song, which overwhelmed onlookers with emotion and interrupted the schedule, infused the day’s ceremonies with southern black traditions and manifested a vision of shared participation by both freeborn Americans and former slaves in the achievement of liberty and the recreation of national union. Unlike the Norfolk celebration, which involved southern black militancy in the face of white resistance, the organizers at Port Royal set up a ceremony obviously predicated on northern leadership as integral to the transition from slavery to freedom. Many elements of the day’s ceremonies underscored the importance of white guidance—even for the black troops who took such a prominent role. Still, in contrast to some white leaders of Emancipation Day celebrations, organizers of events at Port Royal made room for—and even embraced—a degree of southern black self-expression.≥∫ Indeed, the Port Royal ceremonies portrayed the accomplishment of black liberty as an interracial endeavor, one in which former slaves deserved credit for taking a critical role. Moreover, even as the formal ceremonies cast southern black participants as enthusiastic and cooperative followers of northerners’ (largely white) lead, northern abolitionists’ accounts of the day’s events, and particularly those of Higginson and Forten, disclosed their recognition—and embrace—of the former slaves’ self-assertiveness.

J The distinctive celebrations in Norfolk and Port Royal anticipated commemorative developments in the postwar South. Even as Emancipa-


tion Day celebrations and other public ceremonies rapidly developed common themes and characteristics, they involved diverse experiences and political understandings, including differences among southern freedpeople themselves. From this perspective, it is striking how quickly debates surfaced over the most appropriate day for celebrating freedom. In the years following 1865, 1 January rapidly became the preferred anniversary throughout much of the South, but numerous communities recognized alternatives. The variety of anniversaries underscored the evolution of Emancipation—the uneven and gradual process whereby African Americans gained their liberty.≥Ω In Richmond, Virginia, black residents publicly rejoiced each year on 3 April—the anniversary of Richmond’s fall to Union troops. African Americans in East Texas established annual ‘‘Juneteenth’’ celebrations, in honor of the day they first learned that they were free—19 June 1865—more than two months after the end of the Civil War. Others honored 4 July or dates marking the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments.∂≠ Leaders of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, the first independent black denomination in the United States, devoted considerable energies to promoting commemorative occasions among the freedpeople.∂∞ Indeed, AME missionaries, who traveled to areas of the Union-occupied South as early as the spring of 1863, were among the most vigorous sponsors of celebrations in southern communities. But spokesmen also worried that such celebrations were becoming too popular. An editorial in the denomination’s newspaper, the Christian Recorder, protested, ‘‘Nothing curses a people sooner than too many such days, either sacred or secular. We are in danger with being cursed.’’∂≤ Aiming to control the nature and extent of black public celebrations—which were designed, after all, to represent unity—many AME spokesmen promoted 1 January as a day to hold in common. But their efforts clashed with the varied experiences of southern freedpeople, as well as with the established traditions of northern African Americans who continued to favor 1 August, West Indian emancipation day. So notwithstanding the periodic efforts of black spokesmen to hold the line, local proclivities and varied allegiances maintained a diversity of celebration dates during Reconstruction and in the decades that followed.∂≥ But events in far-flung locations quickly developed similar features. In energetic parades that swiftly became staples of celebratory events, both freeborn African Americans and formerly enslaved men, women, and chil-


dren re-presented themselves as husbands and wives, soldiers and teachers, workers and ministers, governmental leaders and schoolchildren— the constituents of a free society. As they marched through town squares singing patriotic songs and bearing the national flag, participants claimed their membership within the larger body politic and asserted their own definitions of citizenship. Prayer, oratory, and recitations of both the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation filled out the formal elements of developing commemorations. African Americans and white allies set forth religious and historical interpretations of slavery and Emancipation, identified black liberty as the fulfillment of the American Revolution, and envisioned the country’s future as a free and equal society.

J The largest postwar commemorations transpired in towns and cities, engaged freeborn African Americans and sympathetic whites, as well as freedpeople, and drew hundreds of men, women, and children from the surrounding area for daylong ceremonies encompassing elaborate parades, speech-making, prayer, and festivity. Such was the scene that unfolded in Augusta, Georgia, on 4 July 1865—the first Independence Day after the Confederacy had surrendered. It is likely that black celebrants, whom local newspapers estimated to number in the thousands, came from a broad expanse of the surrounding countryside. Augusta was set in the midst of farmland stretching out in all directions. Nearby counties consisted of a mix of small and large landholdings, with cotton, the predominant crop, growing alongside fields of corn, wheat, sweet potatoes, and other foodstuffs. The freedpeople who traveled to Augusta that day would have lived and worked on the farms that dotted the region outside the town.∂∂ When celebrants congregated in Augusta on 4 July, they occupied a city that was just beginning to recover from the hardships of war. The town had been spared the destruction wrought in nearby areas by Sherman’s march from Atlanta to Savannah. There had been no battle of Augusta, and the town escaped much of the physical ruination that the war brought to other parts of the South. Still, plenty of work remained to be done—local railways ran nowhere, the town’s financial system was in disarray, and local industries languished. Under the direction of Presidential Reconstruction, military and civil authorities shared responsibilities for getting Augusta up and running again.∂∑


The enormous influx of new residents during the previous five years challenged available resources. Augusta, like many southern cities, experienced a surge in population over the course of the war, as thousands of refugees, white and black, poured into town from the surrounding countryside. In 1860, Augusta stood as the state’s second largest urban center, with 8,000 white and 4,000 black residents. During the war, the town housed numerous government agencies and manufactories of vital importance to the South’s war effort; this wartime expansion of Augusta’s industrial base, coupled with periodic infusions of refugees, contributed to the growth of Augusta’s population. African Americans thronged the streets. Surveying the changed landscape of the town at the end of the war, a local newspaper editor estimated that Augusta’s black population had tripled over the course of the conflict. Like other urban areas of the postwar South, the crowded Augusta streets were alive with disorder and violence. Several bloody incidents involving black military regiments culminated in December of 1865 with a battle that broke out between eight black soldiers and a local white family. Local Freedmen’s Bureau officials clearly faced an uphill battle as they struggled to convince black and white residents to cultivate more ‘‘friendly relations’’ with one another in the months following the war’s end.∂∏ In the face of these turbulent conditions, black Augustans—like African Americans in Norfolk and elsewhere in the South—set about creating a new life for themselves. Many of the freedpeople who made Augusta their home settled into two areas, known as Campbell’s Gully and Springfield Village. The latter was the site of the Springfield Baptist Church, which was established in Augusta in 1793 by Jesse Peters Galphin, a black minister. The Springfield Church, which served as an important hub of organized community life for African Americans in Augusta, was joined in the late antebellum period by four additional black churches, two Baptist and two Methodist. After Emancipation, freedpeople extended this core of community life with the creation of numerous civic organizations: the Trinity Moral Society, the Brothers and Sisters of Love, the Lilies of the Valley, the Bonds of Hope, the Morning Stars of Benevolence, and the Sons and Daughters of Jerusalem were just a few of the associations African Americans founded in Augusta soon after the war’s end. Several freedmen’s schools also opened in Augusta after the war, including the Augusta Institute, founded in the basement of the Springfield Baptist Church.∂π Federal organizations and missionary societies also contributed institu-


tional support. Toward the end of the war, General Saxton assumed leadership of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida; under his guidance, local agent John Emory Bryant quickly immersed himself in public affairs and helped to make Augusta an important center for Republican Party organizing and black politics. The bureau also helped to create services and institutions for local freedpeople, establishing a freedmen’s school in a former shoe factory, opening a hospital, and forming a bank in the town’s main business district. White and black missionaries, representing a host of organizations, including the AMA, the American Baptist Home Mission, and the AME Church also settled into town and committed themselves to guiding the transition.∂∫ This organizational foundation was on display on 4 July 1865, as groups of local freedpeople gathered together with visiting black luminaries, Federal officials, and northern missionaries to celebrate the national birthday. By midmorning, the overfull city was teeming with large crowds who had assembled in downtown Augusta in anticipation of the day’s big opening event—a massive parade. Ministers, tradesmen, field laborers, members of various societies, and local schoolchildren jostled to get in place for the procession. Just before these marchers got under way, a group of women unfurled three banners bearing inscriptions: ‘‘Abraham Lincoln the Father of Our Liberties and Savior of His Country’’; ‘‘Slavery and Disunion Dead!’’ and ‘‘Freedom and Equality Is Our Motto.’’ Then, a regiment of black troops marshaled the parade through the streets and out to a nearby parade ground, where an AME Church official led the crowd in prayer before launching into dramatic oration.∂Ω Several additional speakers had their say, a local minister gave the benediction, and the crowd dispersed.∑≠ The Fourth of July celebration in Augusta, replete with parade, prayer, recitations, and extensive speech-making, epitomized large, urban, African American celebrations in the post-Emancipation South. It was not unusual for whole families to travel considerable distances—forty, fifty, even sixty miles—in order to attend the postwar ceremonies. This in itself was an act of emancipation, a fundamental freedom African Americans had been denied under slavery.∑∞ The freedpeople’s travels reflected a striking reversal: before the war, African American slaves frequently accompanied their owners when they journeyed long distances to daylong political rallies and celebrations on the Fourth of July.∑≤ Now, former slaves strode independently through the countryside, to ceremonies of their own choosing—just as they traveled to freedmen’s conventions, political


meetings, and Republican rallies throughout the region. Not surprisingly, the freedpeople’s excursions exasperated nearby whites, who grumbled that former slaves were ‘‘desert[ing] the farms from all parts of the country’’ in order to participate.∑≥ But a Union soldier applauded African Americans who came from miles around to share in an Emancipation celebration in New Orleans: ‘‘At an early hour the people began to pour into the city from the country and surrounding villages. Men, women, and children, young and old . . . all were there. For the time being, the plantation, the farm, and work-shops, hotels—and all places of labor and amusement, were deserted and forgotten. The people were out to celebrate what to them was a great epoch in the history of the race.’’∑∂ Like other sympathetic whites, this soldier picked up the tale of a new historical narrative— one of African Americans laying claim to a new life in freedom. Those traveling great distances would have begun their long trek a day, or even two, in advance of the actual celebration. At first, there might have been only a scattering of travelers, spread out over many miles—a family here, a lone journeyer there—but as the travelers neared their destination, the roads would have grown more crowded. Those on foot were joined by others on horseback, and a few carriages increased the traffic as the travelers advanced toward their destination. An eyewitness described just such a scene as freedpeople arrived at a rally in Lexington, North Carolina: ‘‘[W]ith the earliest dawn of the morning, the sturdy farmer with his team—horse, mule, or ox, as the case might be—could be seen wending his way to ‘the grove.’ Whole families—from the . . . sire to the prattling babe [came along the way].’’∑∑ Individual families and small groupings eventually merged into the sizable marches that area whites observed with such trepidation. White onlookers imagined a ‘‘great black serpent, unfolding coil after coil, dragging its slow length along’’ as they viewed an assemblage of African Americans at an Emancipation Day celebration on New Year’s Day, 1867, in Norfolk, Virginia; four years after the Emancipation Proclamation, the town’s whites continued to view black celebrations with dismay.∑∏ Traveling long distances, African Americans refashioned a long-standing tradition of travel in slavery. In the antebellum South, slaves journeyed across plantation lines to participate in elaborate funerary rites that often culminated in lengthy burial processions. Antebellum towns and cities also witnessed extensive funeral marches composed of both free blacks and slaves.∑π Perhaps it was the memory of black funerals, coupled with their


own mournfulness over the war’s losses, that prompted the musings of white editors in Norfolk, who sardonically remarked that the 1867 Emancipation parade would have been more appropriate had it taken the form of a solemn occasion. Emphasizing the ‘‘linked blackness long drawn out’’ of the march, the editors suggested that the anniversary of freedom was ‘‘fit to be commemorated with lamentations,’’ particularly by former slaves left bereft of their former ‘‘protectors’’: ‘‘They [the former slaves] . . . are the chief mourners at the South.’’∑∫ The white editors of the Norfolk Virginian found it impossible to acknowledge the joy in freedom. The freedpeople’s celebrations marked beyond a doubt the chasm between white and black, free and slave, that the ideology of the slave regime had worked so hard to mask. It was undeniable that southerners in general and freedpeople in particular suffered tremendous hardship during the months and years following the Civil War. Throughout much of the postwar South, both whites and blacks experienced distress bordering on desperation, yet in the case of blacks, poverty and duress did not lessen the shared determination to commemorate freedom. Indeed, the biggest celebrations transpired right after the war, amid the turmoil that engulfed southern towns and cities.

J It was out of chaos, then, that African American commemorations inscribed a new civic order on the public landscape. Some ceremonies took place within African American churches and schools, but many others spilled over into public arenas shared with whites, such as town squares, city halls, downtown streets, parks, and outlying parade grounds. African Americans were not a new presence on the thoroughfares of urban areas, but their movements had long been restricted by curfews, passes, and regulations. Certain spaces were designated ‘‘whites only,’’ and the rituals of public interactions enforced social inequalities—as when black persons stepped aside to make way for white passersby on sidewalks or assumed deferential body language and speech in interracial crowds. White residents’ tireless efforts to prohibit forms of collective association among African Americans meant that a fragile and fractured black public sphere was relegated to the margins. Under slavery, opportunities for African Americans to meet, share information, and shape common strategies for combating the hardships and dangers of their lives had of necessity been composed of stolen moments, stealthy communications, and clandestine gatherings.∑Ω


By taking over public spaces—some of which had been entirely off-limits to African Americans before the war—African American processions forcefully altered the social geography of southern towns and cities.∏≠ Where once the movements of black and white residents around town had articulated the inequalities of slavery, now African Americans gave concrete meaning to freedom. In massive parades, such as the Fourth of July procession in Augusta, freedpeople dominated the streets. It must have thrilled black marchers to hold their heads high and shout slogans of liberty in places where they had formerly been expected to demonstrate deference and humility. One can imagine the joy and excitement of listening to dramatic oratory delivered by talented black leaders from atop the steps of a city hall or the center of a town square.∏∞ Parade routes nearly always encompassed vital downtown avenues. In Augusta, celebrants regularly marched up Broad Street, the ‘‘soul’’ of the city, lined by banks, dry goods stores, furniture dealers, hotels, boardinghouses, tailors, and grocers. As they marched along the avenue—one of the widest in the country—celebrants passed before the pillars of local planter society—the Augusta Insurance and Banking Company, the Planters Hotel, and the offices of the Constitutionalist, a local Democratic newspaper. Slave sales had taken place in the market houses that lined the upper end of the street. Parading on the very street where they had once been led to auction, African Americans underscored the great transformation.∏≤ The marchers then made their way to Greene Street, home to many of the town’s most prominent residents—doctors, lawyers, and city officials. On Greene Street they encountered time-hallowed symbols of the American Revolution: the ‘‘Signers Monument,’’ dedicated to the memory of Georgians who signed the Declaration of Independence, and the ‘‘White House,’’ where, as local legend had it, twenty-nine patriots lost their lives.∏≥ By incorporating markers of the Revolution into their celebrations, African Americans in Augusta, and elsewhere in the South, adorned Emancipation with the powerful symbolism of earlier struggles for American liberty.∏∂

J At the heart of the parades in Augusta and other southern towns were the determined efforts of African Americans to define their citizenship. With slavery behind them, African Americans publicly set forth their claims to citizenship in the postwar South—a radical undertaking, given the ra-


View of Broad Street in Augusta, Georgia, where African Americans paraded on Emancipation Days over the years. Courtesy of Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia Libraries.

cial boundaries that prevailed in mid-nineteenth-century America.∏∑ In the United States, the full rights of citizenship had, by the mid-nineteenth century, become the sole property of white men. Moreover, the very definition of citizen had been constructed in relation to categories of noncitizens, or, in the case of black Americans, anticitizens. White Americans had come to associate slavery, in particular, as the very antithesis of citizenship, a system producing ‘‘unfree, unproductive, dependent’’ persons, the very opposite of ‘‘free, productive, independent’’ citizens. The close association of blackness with slavery, and therefore dependence, had implications not only for enslaved African Americans but also for free blacks in both the North and the South, who found themselves increasingly bereft of civil, political, and social rights in the antebellum period. Finally, in the 1857 Supreme Court decision in the Dred Scott case, African Americans were declared to be outside the realm of citizenship all together; they were, in the infamous formulation of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, ‘‘so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.’’∏∏ African Americans insisted otherwise when they occupied the streets and public squares of southern communities during Reconstruction. By taking up methods of ceremony that had long been used to establish collective identities and civic relationships, African Americans lay claim to full membership within the communities—local, regional, and national— in which they lived. Presenting themselves as soldiers and teachers, leaders


and workers, students and patriots in shared public spaces, African Americans accomplished hard cultural labor. They redefined black identities and called on whites to respect the full range of rights—civil, political, and social—to which black people were due. This cultural labor hinged in part on the establishment of collective historical memories. Celebrations enabled whole communities to create emancipationist narratives of American history, proffered by speakers and dramatized in elaborate parades. Wherever it was celebrated, Emancipation Day defined the struggle for liberty as the key feature of African American—and American—history. Other anniversaries—from those of foreign emancipation days to those of the passage of constitutional amendments—similarly elaborated a story of a people and a nation defined by their battles for freedom and equality. Emancipation celebrations also invited memories of hardship and tribulation. Coming together to mark the passage of bondage, formerly enslaved men, women, and children— and, later, their descendants—reflected on life before freedom, creating a common body of knowledge about black people’s struggles under slavery. Additional material—from the accomplishments of Egyptian civilization to the contributions of black men to the American Revolution— contributed to the elaboration of African American history. The history also reflected efforts to redefine interracial relationships within the boundaries of American citizenship. African Americans and white allies drew a straight line from the Declaration of Independence to the Emancipation Proclamation, designating the historical struggle for freedom and equality as a uniquely American—and God-given—mission. So, they charted a course for the union of a fractured nation around a shared commitment to advancing human liberty. The United States would be made whole when all Americans, including white southerners, rejected sectionalism, recognized the value of freedom, and embraced an integrated national citizenship. Like black ceremonies in the antebellum North, which defined the past with an eye toward a desired future, postwar commemorations looked forward to an even better day for African Americans and the nation at large.∏π A parade occurring in Charleston, South Carolina, on 21 March 1865— three weeks before Appomatox—was perhaps the most remarkable of these early celebrations, not least because it transpired in the very ‘‘cradle of the Confederacy,’’ the city that, more than any other, bore responsibility for starting the war. The parade was one of a series of gala public demonstrations occurring in Charleston during the early spring of 1865. As his-


torian David Blight so aptly puts it, black South Carolinians, joined by abolitionist allies, ‘‘proclaimed their freedom and converted destruction into new life,’’ even before Lee’s surrender.∏∫ Just a few weeks before the 21 March parade, African American troops, who had played a decisive role in the months-long siege of the city, marched triumphantly into the city in the wake of the Confederates’ retreat. The symbolic power of such demonstrations was not lost on anyone. As one Unionist recalled many years later, ‘‘Never, while memory holds power to retain anything, shall I forget the thrilling strains of the music of the Union, as sung by our sable soldiers when marching up Market Street with their battle stained banners flapping in the breeze.’’∏Ω Confederate sympathizers felt different about the transformation. Wrote one man to his sister in Philadelphia, ‘‘No one . . . has the slightest conception of the real condition of affairs here—of the utter topsy-turveying of all of our institutions.’’π≠ On the morning of 21 March, a vast crowd assembled at the Citadel Green, an extension of the South Carolina Military Academy (also known as the Citadel), founded in 1842 as a bulwark against potential slave rebellions.π∞ Now, in a spectacular reversal, the green served as a meeting ground for a gala demonstration of African American freedom, a performance that enacted the end of one era and the dawning of another. Black marshals rushed to organize marchers into line; a band struck up a lively tune. Finally, the procession struck out with two decorated marshals on horseback leading the way. Next came a regiment of black troops and a company of schoolchildren with a banner, ‘‘We know no masters but ourselves.’’ Behind was a horse-drawn ‘‘car of liberty,’’ draped with flags, streamers, and banners. Fifteen young women wearing white dresses trimmed with bright colors sat on top; they smiled and waved their handkerchiefs at cheering spectators.π≤ After the car of liberty came more marchers, including schoolchildren and white teachers, butchers, tailors, coopers, firemen, painters, blacksmiths, carpenters, masons, wheelwrights, wood-sawyers, teamsters, paper carriers, bakers, and barbers. The tradesmen all displayed emblems of their work: butchers marched with their knives at their sides and displayed ‘‘a good-sized porker’’ in front of them, carpenters carried tools, teamsters their whips, and masons their trowels.π≥ And the schoolchildren hoisted a banner that read, ‘‘We know no caste or color,’’ and sang along the way, ‘‘We’ll hang [ Jefferson] Davis on a sour apple tree! . . . As we go marching on!’’π∂ The Charleston parade was unusually massive, but its tight organization presaged the content of many postwar black processions. The subdivisions


of such parades—from soldiers to butchers, fire companies to local schoolchildren—epitomized a form of nineteenth-century ceremonial citizenship that Mary Ryan has described as ‘‘heterogeneous but associated democracy.’’ Among white Americans, the practice of performing ‘‘people in association’’ peaked in the decades prior to the Civil War, as hundreds of civic organizations arranged themselves according to familiar programs and marched in formation through city streets.π∑ Among African Americans in the South, however, vigorous displays of civic organization were a dominant form of public ceremony following Emancipation. At the moment when African Americans performed their entrance into the national community, they did so not as individuals or as an undistinguished mass but as soldiers, tradesmen, ministers, civic leaders, and schoolchildren. Some parades, like the one in Charleston, embodied both democratic heterogeneity and broad unity: women and men, black and white, freeborn and recently freed, skilled craftsmen and farm laborers, all had a place in such ceremonies. Other processions expressed a more restrictive vision of civic participation that centered on male militias, skilled artisans, and professionals. The two groups leading the Charleston march, black militias and skilled tradesmen, played a dominant role in many postwar processions.π∏ In a typical urban parade, marshals strode by on horseback, as regiments of black troops or militiamen—frequently armed—escorted other participants through city streets. The companies of African American men decked out in full military dress, swords at their sides, were conspicuous to local whites, who consistently commented upon the appearance of black soldiers as they marched through town, ‘‘with drum and fife, banners, sabers, and tinseled regalia.’’ππ Indeed, nothing was more appalling to southern whites than the sight of black men in arms; they personified a transformation that few could have imagined—even in their worst nightmares—just a few years before. Processions of black soldiers also served as an unpleasant reminder of their decisive role in both the Union victory and the dismantlement of slavery. As Steven Hahn argues, turning black men into soldiers ‘‘buried slavery, secured the defeat of the Confederacy, and nourished the debate over the meaning of freedom.’’π∫ When armed black men marched through Charleston and other southern towns, white onlookers revealed their profound discomfort as they watched ‘‘[l]ibertyloving freedmen . . . bearing war-like instruments upon their shoulders, [who] looked terribly patriotic as they formed the line.’’πΩ White observers correctly perceived the threat of armed black men pa-


rading through ‘‘their’’ streets. In fact, soldiers and militiamen projected a vital message to all southerners. While the war was still on, African American troops drilled and marched in the Union-controlled South, and selforganized companies continued these practices during Reconstruction.∫≠ After Emancipation, the participation of black regiments and quasi-military organizations in commemorative processions signified the former slaves’ ongoing commitment to defend their hard-won freedom. Out on the streets, for all to see, was an armed citizenry dedicated to the protection of its rights. As it turned out, these armed men would in fact play a critical role in defending their communities militarily in the coming years, as African Americans in South Carolina and elsewhere in the region battled against the violent insurgencies of whites who were determined to retake power by force.∫∞ While African American militiamen put whites on notice, they also reinforced the broader theme of military service that permeated commemorative speeches, African American periodicals, and historical literature during the years following the war.∫≤ Time and again, African American leaders invoked black contributions to the Union victory as they endeavored to establish the underpinnings of black citizenship. Among African Americans, the theme of black men’s military service as a foundation for civil rights would extend far beyond the postwar period, even as whites in both the North and the South moved to erase the memory of black military accomplishments from regional and national memories.∫≥ Even before the war was over, struggles over the control of the freedpeople’s labor engulfed the South and preoccupied the nation; African American commemorative celebrations inevitably merged with conflicts over the nature of black labor. In the tug-of-war between white employers and black workers, African Americans’ postwar celebrations scored a point for black independence. African Americans planned postwar commemorations without the approval of employers. It became another source of outrage for whites, who had once given their paternalistic blessing to festivals of their own choosing. Now they habitually complained that African Americans were leaving work to participate in separate black celebrations.∫∂ African Americans championed themselves as capable and accomplished workers on the very days when whites accused them of negligence. Indeed, the men and women who—in the words of white protesters— ‘‘deserted the hoe and ploughshare’’ turned out in large numbers to celebrate black labor, as participants in parades and as bystanders.∫∑ In part,


the honored role of skilled tradesmen—such as the butchers in Charleston—signified African Americans’ determination to honor their expertise and celebrate individuals who had achieved the highest degree of independence in their working lives. The processions portrayed the special importance of such persons in emerging black political networks and community institutions. But workers and farm laborers also made their presence felt in many processions, reflecting their resolution to share in an expanding polity.∫∏ The resulting portrait of the full spectrum of black workers, including laborers, embodied a shared feeling that more than three centuries of unpaid labor established their firm claim to all the rights and privileges of citizenship.∫π The role of community associations in the Charleston parade further demonstrated the organization of black communities and politics, and the particular emphasis on collective self-help and self-determination that characterized southern black organizing efforts before, during, and after the war.∫∫ The role of community associations in wartime commemorative parades like the one in Charleston underscored the ongoing mobilization of African Americans and portrayed the links between antebellum structures and the organization of black community and politics after 1865. Just as historians have frequently underestimated the degree of organization among African Americans prior to Emancipation, so, too, were many contemporaries shocked to see such clear evidence of black institutional life. A missionary for the AME Church was taken aback by the sight of several African American societies—including two female societies, ‘‘one literary and the other secret’’—on display during a Fourth of July parade in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1864. He admitted, ‘‘[I]n this connexion [sic], I must certainly say that I was taken entirely by surprise. The idea of seeing literary and secret societies, that had been organized for years in the very heart of oppression and tyranny . . . and flourishing, too, was something beyond my comprehension.’’∫Ω The most vivid aspect of the Charleston parade came near its end. A mule-drawn cart bearing the announcement ‘‘a number of negroes for sale’’ carried a cast of men, women, and children who portrayed the events of a slave auction: An auctioneer appealed to the crowds that lined the street, calling out his goods for sale, while a group of women and children enacted a slave family’s separation. Behind the slave cart came a hearse, bearing a coffin inscribed with the statement ‘‘Slavery is dead.’’ Fifty female mourners dressed in black ‘‘but with joyous faces’’ followed.Ω≠ The


freedpeople’s performance, juxtaposing one of the most powerful symbols of slavery’s wrong with a mock funeral for bondage, gave the lie to white portrayals of a benign, ‘‘civilizing’’ institution and cleverly undercut white assertions that blacks should be in mourning for the passage of slavery.

J The Charleston parade, like other African American processions, enacted visions of a region and nation transformed by freedom. Legions of marchers, from participants in a mock slave auction to ranks of black soldiers, portrayed the triumph of liberty over tyranny and projected a future—not yet realized—in which former slaves would share equally in an expanded polity. The energetic participation of women and unskilled laborers in the Charleston parade pushed the boundaries of democracy even further, implying that neither gender nor class would remain as distinct lines of participation in public life. The public processions that were a cornerstone of southern black commemorations insisted that African Americans, the South, and the nation had been forever changed by the advent of black liberty. Commemorative parades projected a vision of a society transformed and made whole—all the more remarkable because they occurred amid intense conflict and turmoil. The proud, organized, and stable social order so vividly depicted in commemorative parades was meant to create a way forward by harnessing the past to a vision of the future. But the ceremonies designed to represent consensus just as frequently revealed the terms of debate. The various constituencies did not agree about the best interpretation of the history or of the future of African Americans in the South or the nation. But rather than weakening the events, the differences, at least initially, contributed to their vitality. Early postwar commemorations were the focus of so much energy and attention precisely because they engaged the major questions and conflicts of the period and skirted the social and political fissures that divided African American communities. Some differences were rooted in class: both northern abolitionists and freeborn black southerners, uneasy with the energy and motley crowds, repeatedly urged that celebrations be ‘‘orderly’’ and ‘‘dignified.’’ Such efforts to control black public life were not new—middle-class northerners, both black and white, had exerted considerable energy attempting to control the social lives and public displays of black workers in the wake of Emancipation in the North.Ω∞ Convinced that slavery had produced dependency


and degradation, black and white northerners were particularly eager to shape the southern freedpeople to conform to their own notions of moderate and restrained citizens.Ω≤ Freeborn blacks seemed to themselves and to others a better sort. In Norfolk, for instance, writers for the white newspapers pointedly remarked upon the contrast between the ‘‘better class of our colored population . . . who yesterday, stepp[ed] stately, erect and welldressed, in the front ranks of the pageant [of an Emancipation parade]’’ and the majority of participants ‘‘treading in the rear . . . mounted and dismounted, in carriages and afoot, crowding upon the heels of the ‘colored gentlemen’ in broadcloth, regalia, sash, baton, and belt.’’Ω≥ Carnivalesque ceremonies beloved by the freedpeople vividly portrayed a world turned upside down in ways that contrasted sharply with celebrations favored by black and white elites. Continuing antebellum traditions, freedpeople paraded through towns in Georgia and North Carolina on annual holidays during the postwar years, seated backward on mules and otherwise mocking the very notion of social order. Similar celebrations were also reported in Virginia. On 4 July 1866, in New Bern, North Carolina, a procession of the ‘‘most oddly dressed crowd imaginable, mounted upon horses, mules, wagons, carts, &c.’’ traveled through the streets of downtown. Accompanied by men blowing horns, the parade was followed by a mixed crowd of local blacks. In vivid burlesque, the parading freedpersons poked fun at everything from ‘‘King Cotton’’ to the Freedmen’s Bureau. A white reporter especially admired the caricature of the bureau, which ‘‘consisted of an old bureau, mounted on an old rickety wagon, with the drawers taken out and three or four little negroes inserted.’’ King Cotton also made a striking appearance as he rode down the street, wearing a ‘‘suit of clothing, boots, pants, coat, vest, [and] hat . . . all [of which] had been thoroughly coated with tar, to which as much cotton as would stick on had been added.’’Ω∂ Such ceremonies perpetuated a satirical style that had long been a common feature of African American culture under slavery. In song and in annual celebrations, slave men and women deftly employed satire—sometimes subtle, sometimes overt—to portray whites and to comment on the harshness of bondage. As Lawrence Levine and others have shown, songs in particular constituted a vital form of social and political commentary, in which slaves, who were denied other forms of expression, freely mocked their owners and white society in general. In her autobiography, the escaped slave Harriet Jacobs recalled tunes that ridiculed white owners’


stinginess at Christmastime. During the annual slave festival in North Carolina known as Jonkonnu, male slaves attired in tattered costumes and animal masks marched through towns, singing, dancing, and playing on improvised instruments. Along the way, they stopped at whites’ houses to demand recompense for their performance; those who refused to shell out a few coins were met with taunting verse: ‘‘Run, Jinnie, run! I’m gwine away, / Gwine away, to come no mo’ / Dis am de po’ house, / Glory habbilulum!’’Ω∑ In the tradition of John Kuners and satirical song, freedpeople who wound their way through southern towns during the years immediately following the war performed a vivid burlesque that both mirrored and distorted contemporary power relations in their communities. It is especially appropriate that celebrants targeted the Freedmen’s Bureau for derision. Throughout the postwar period, freedpeople turned to the bureau as a critical source of aid and protection, but their interactions with bureau agents were frequently characterized by conflicting interests and understandings, as officials asserted their own definitions of freedom, definitions that did not always correspond with black southerners’ hopes and expectations. African Americans quickly learned to frame their appeals to bureau authorities in ways that would maximize their chances of gaining a desired result, just as they had previously learned to manipulate interactions with white slaveholders. It would have been particularly delightful, then, for black marchers to caricature such a powerful institution in public and, in doing so, to give humorous voice to a broad range of feelings toward the Freedmen’s Bureau.Ω∏ To a certain extent, the reversals performed by southern freedpeople might be said to have reinforced existing lines of authority, even as they provided former slaves with an important means of expression and political critique. Prior to Emancipation, southern slaveholders widely viewed holidays and festivals, including Jonkonnu, as a kind of safety valve that helped to maintain discipline during the rest of the year; similarly, the freedpeople’s burlesques gave vent to antagonisms and frustrations toward individuals and institutions exercising authority over former slaves. In their very opposition to established lines of authority, satirical performances also served to highlight—and thereby fortify—the status quo.Ωπ Unlike the songs and marches conducted by slaves, however, postwar festivities transpired in a context of tremendous social and political upheaval.Ω∫ Indeed, the very world enacted by slave celebrants—‘‘a world of uncer-


tainty, confusion, and unlimited potential’’—had come to pass in the postEmancipation South.ΩΩ Thus the postwar ceremonies had a more ambiguous status. On the one hand, they highlighted ongoing contests over authority and power. On the other hand, they reenacted a political economy in which African Americans could only speak to power through inversion. One could scarcely imagine a masked figure carousing in the dignified ceremonies at Port Royal or in the carefully organized parades in Augusta and Charleston. But one should not draw hard-and-fast distinctions between the straightforward ‘‘political’’ commemorations and these carnivalesque events. Both sets of ceremonies enacted visions of a social order turned upside down. Indeed, some of the most dramatic pageantry of the early African American commemorations involved traditions of satire and inversion: it is difficult to imagine more striking dramatizations of role reversal than burning Jefferson Davis in effigy or holding a mock funeral for slavery. Still, the carnivalesque ceremonies did present problems to northern abolitionists and freeborn black southerners. The celebrations marked by rowdy behaviors might best be described as ‘‘anti-processions,’’ to borrow E. P. Thompson’s phrase, which mocked, in a ‘‘kind of conscious antiphony,’’ the more official ceremonial occasions.∞≠≠ The appearance and behaviors of participants directly challenged middle-class notions of a respectable black citizenry. It is hardly surprising that northern missionaries and black newspaper writers had little to say about such practices; the freedpeople’s burlesque imitations threatened to undermine their efforts to establish African American celebrations as ‘‘dignified’’—if highspirited—events. Finally, traditions of satire and inversion had evolved within slavery. To black and white elites, carnivalesque practices signified a continuation of past relations between white and black southerners, in sharp contrast to freedom and equality enacted through elite-led Emancipation Day celebrations and other commemorative events. Of course, Democratic newspapers had few scruples about reporting the ‘‘ridiculously absurd’’ ceremonies of southern freedmen—a happy fact for historians, who would otherwise be left largely in the dark. That white and black missionaries resided in areas where the parades occurred—and that they commented so extensively on other aspects of black ceremony— makes their silence on the subject of alternative forms of celebration all the more striking. The attitude of elite African Americans—and many of their white allies—toward carnivalesque occasions is best summed up by


the terse comment of AME Church missionary Theophilus Gould Steward, who worked in Macon, Georgia, after the war. On 4 July 1868, Steward briefly recorded the day’s events in Macon in his diary: ‘‘Nothing of interest took place to day a negro fantastic parade . . . was about all worth noting.’’ Similarly brief and nondescript comments appeared occasionally in the reports of other teachers and missionaries in the South.∞≠∞ There were tensions, but, still, no easy contrast can be drawn between the intentions of an elite leadership and those of the black majority. The masses of freedpeople embraced activities that were spurned by black and white elites, but they also relished the conventional ceremonies and festivities, turning out in large numbers, participating energetically. And it was not simply class positions that determined differences. Black and white spokesmen, for their part, were not of one mind regarding the best interpretation of history or direction for the future. In the orations, one sees the conflicting motivations and understandings of African American missionaries, Federal officials, Republican politicians, and local black leaders. Lengthy oratory quickly became a staple of postwar assemblies, as various organizers sought the opportunity to address the freedpeople.∞≠≤ The voices of this ensemble were not unified. Some speakers favored subjects that earned the approval of conservative southern whites; they warned freedpeople to work hard, form contracts on the planters’ terms, and not to expect ‘‘free’’ land. Such men, black, as well as white, urged their listeners to be patient and prove that the race was capable of progress.∞≠≥ Others took a more aggressive stance. Reverend Brown, an African American minister who addressed a large crowd at an 1866 Fourth of July celebration in Charleston, led his audience in prayer and bluntly ‘‘thanked God Almighty that they, the colored people, had got their feet upon the necks of their enemies, meaning the white men, and prayed that they might continue to keep their feet there.’’∞≠∂ What is most striking about the oratory is the persistent use of history. Time and again, speakers cast their arguments in historical terms, seizing upon the past as a predictor of the future. The ubiquity of historical arguments demonstrates the absolute necessity of history to the political goals and aspirations of diverse postwar actors. Seeking to recast the relationship of African Americans to one another, their former owners, and the nation, leaders put the past to work. In orators’ hands, history became a malleable instrument, capable of sustaining vastly different visions of African American interests, interracial relationships, and the nature of black citizenship. Comparing the oratory of a conservative-minded white official


of the Freedmen’s Bureau, Davis Tillson, with the speeches of three black leaders, Martin Robison Delany, James Lynch, and Henry McNeal Turner, we can see both the constancy and the diversity of historical arguments at African American events. At a freedmen’s convention held in Augusta in January 1866, General Davis Tillson, who had replaced Saxton as the assistant commissioner for the Georgia Freedmen’s Bureau, addressed a convention of black leaders from around the state. In contrast to his predecessor, Tillson had rapidly established a reputation for opposing black land acquisition and withholding rations as a means of forcing blacks to enter contracts with white employers. He was also responsible for making the bureau in Georgia the whitest in the South—he preferred to appoint local whites as agents. By 1867, when Tillson left the bureau to become a Georgia planter, local whites comprised nearly 90 percent of the Freedmen’s Bureau agents in Georgia, where they were notorious for flouting bureau rules and working to set up their friends with cheap labor. Another bureau agent, who was critical of Tillson’s policies, angrily commented, ‘‘[Native white agents have] shamefully abused [the freedpeople’s] trust, inflicted cruel and unusual punishment on the blacks, and [are] unfit from their education and belief in slavery to promote the interest of free labor.’’∞≠∑ In his speech before the audience of forty black delegates in Augusta, Tillson praised the history of African Americans as a patient, generous, and, most pointedly, nonviolent race. By working to establish the docile nature of African Americans, Tillson meant to address the turmoil of recent weeks. As the Christmas season approached, local whites—like many across the South—had greatly feared that a black uprising was about to take place. Whites were apprehensive because they picked up on the restiveness of many rural freedpeople, who looked forward to the holiday just as fervently as whites feared it, believing that they were finally going to gain what for many was a vital part of freedom—their own land. Tillson noted that the recent holidays had passed without any sign of disturbance—no black insurrection (or land redistribution) had taken place: ‘‘You have given still another proof that you cannot, as a race, be even goaded to acts of violence and murder, that as in the days of the rebellion, when the wives and children of your former . . . masters . . . were in your safe keeping, you are the same, kind, gentle, trusting people, putting far from you all the suggestions of hatred and revenge, patiently waiting for the hand of the Lord to bring your deliverance.’’∞≠∏ Summoning up images of past black loyalty and good-heartedness, other


white officials in the state also sought to reassure themselves of ‘‘friendly relations’’ with the former slaves in the future. At a celebration of the Congressional Reconstruction Acts in Augusta in the spring of 1867, Democrat and former governor Herschel V. Johnson stressed the importance of cooperation between whites and blacks: ‘‘[O]ur children have played together, together we have passed through many scenes of sorrow.’’∞≠π Even as they diagnosed black patience and kindness, many speakers also prescribed a preventative dose of forgetfulness. Looking to the days ahead, Tillson repeated an already familiar warning—one that would be heard incessantly in the next century and a half—against the dangers of focusing on past injustices: ‘‘Nothing could be so fatal to your happiness and prosperity as a people, as the growth of suspicion, hatred, and animosity between yourselves and whites.’’ At the same time, he rejoiced that such conditions would never come to pass: ‘‘Fortunately there is little danger of this state of things. You have on your part already given the most abundant proofs of your willingness to forget the past and to act in a kind and conciliatory spirit in the future.’’∞≠∫ Significantly, Tillson discouraged black Georgians from aspiring to the franchise and ‘‘social equality’’; instead, he urged them to guard against idleness and work on restoring white confidence in their labor. By attempting to ground an African American identity in an imagined past of loyal servitude, Tillson simultaneously charted a course for the foreseeable future in which little, it seemed, would be changed by Emancipation. Indeed, it was this specter of a more assertive black citizenship—as much as the visions of black retaliation—that sent some whites scurrying for such reassuring images of black passivity. African Americans would not enter the political community of the nation, which was to remain for whites only. Instead, they would stay in much the same relationship to both whites— and the nation—as before; that is, according to Tillson’s rendering, as a subordinate class of laborers existing happily outside the body politic.∞≠Ω Tillson’s reliance on history as a predictor of the future was not unique. Speakers repeatedly cast about for a usable past as they endeavored to promote their particular vision of the post-Emancipation South. Not surprisingly, African American leaders interpreted recent history differently than many whites. While hardly uniform in their views, black leaders generally heralded Emancipation as a watershed event that reflected God’s will in history and returned the nation to the principles of the American Revolution. They exchanged narratives of black patience for stories of


black heroism and envisioned a future in which black and white Americans would share equally in the full rights of citizenship. Still, as the separate speeches of Martin Robison Delany, James Lynch, and Henry McNeal Turner demonstrate, there were also distinct differences. Martin Robison Delany delivered a particularly forceful history lesson to a meeting of freedpeople on St. Helena Island, South Carolina, in July 1865. Best known as an early advocate of black nationalism, Delany was born free in Charles Town, Virginia (now West Virginia), in 1812, the son of a free mother and a slave father. As a young child, he moved to Pennsylvania with his mother, who was being threatened with arrest by Virginia authorities for teaching her children to read and write. In Pittsburgh, he was mentored by local black leaders and activists, and he organized and attended black conventions at the same time that he established a medical practice. His activism expanded in the 1840s to include black newspaper editorship, and, following the Compromise of 1850 and the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, he became a committed emigrationist, firm in his conviction that the United States would never extend citizenship rights to African Americans. Delany’s emigrationism put him at odds with many other prominent black leaders of the time, including Frederick Douglass, who continued to uphold an integrationist vision of black progress in the United States, but Delany—never one to duck controversy—vigorously pursued his goal of removing black people from the United States throughout the decade. Only after his efforts to establish an African American settlement in West Africa failed in the early 1860s—and President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863—did Delany recommit himself to integrationism within the United States. During the second half of the war, Delany helped to recruit black soldiers and served in the Union army; in 1865, he traveled to South Carolina as a representative of the Freedmen’s Bureau.∞∞≠ In the speech that he delivered on St. Helena Island, Delany electrified his black audience and horrified whites in attendance. Tapping into the deeply held beliefs of local freedpeople, Delany repeatedly emphasized that they—not their former owners—had earned the right to enjoy the fruits of liberty, including landownership. He vividly portrayed a past in which black men and women had ‘‘always been the means of riches’’ and whites ‘‘never earned a single dollar’’ but ‘‘squandered away the wealth’’ blacks produced. Freedom, too, had been of black people’s own making: ‘‘[W]e would not have become free, had we not armed ourselves and


fought out our independence.’’ Should whites attempt to reassert slavery in all but name—and Delany believed the terms of current labor contracts suggested that they were—African Americans could, and should, seize true freedom for themselves. He evoked, in no uncertain terms, the image of those proud black soldiers: ‘‘I tell you slavery is over, and shall never return again. We have now 200,000 of our men well drilled in arms and used to War fare and I tell you it is with you and them that slavery shall not come back again, if you are determined it will not return again.’’ Based on black southerners’ proven record of productivity and willingness to defend their rights, Delany predicted a future in which independent African American landholders would ‘‘become a wealthy and powerful population’’ across the South.∞∞∞ James Lynch, an ambitious young missionary for the AME Church, delivered an equally stirring—if rather different—oration before the immense crowd that assembled in Augusta to celebrate on 4 July 1865.∞∞≤ Lynch had been one of the first AME missionaries to travel to the South; as early as 1862, he pressed his fellow churchmen to contemplate the possibilities for work among the freedpeople: ‘‘[The black people of the South] are suffering for the Gospel and education. They want a light to carry them through the world, and through ‘the dark valley and shadow of death.’ . . . Surely there is a mighty work before the colored churches.’’ In 1863, Lynch arrived in the Sea Islands of South Carolina, where he worked among the freedpeople living around Port Royal, Edisto, and Beaufort; after the war, he traveled to Georgia, where he was a vigorous proponent of the church throughout the state.∞∞≥ It is not surprising that Lynch, a tireless organizer and inspiring speaker, was chosen to address the Fourth of July celebration in Augusta. At the conclusion of the joyous procession through the main streets of town, crowds gathered at a local parade ground, where Lynch mounted a podium graced by an American flag. Unlike Delany, who stressed fundamental antagonisms between the freedpeople and their former owners and who went to great lengths to characterize black people as superior to white, Lynch stressed a more peaceable vision and portrayed a country united and made whole by the end of slavery. Reviewing the unfolding of the country’s past, from the Revolution to the Civil War, Lynch marked the hand of God at work along the way. ‘‘The believer in ‘Manifest Destiny,’ ’’ Lynch insisted, ‘‘is very far from being ‘utopian or fanciful.’ ’’ History showed that God had appointed a special role for the United States in the


‘‘world’s drama’’—‘‘to elevate humanity and to oppose the despotism of the universe—to scatter light where tyranny casts the blackest shades and to whisper the promise of a brighter future in the ear of him who only hears the clinking of his chains.’’ For many years, however, Americans had failed to comprehend their mission, as was evident not only in the law of slavery but also in the struggles of the Union army during the first years of the Civil War. Only ‘‘an edict of freedom to the slaves’’ had saved the country from imminent destruction. Now that God had delivered the country ‘‘from the consuming fires of the nation,’’ America could finally look forward to an era of ‘‘Freedom, Justice, and Hope’’: ‘‘[H]er future career—unchecked—shall be like a rolling ball of fire illuminating the horizon with its glory.’’∞∞∂ Lynch’s perception of God’s hand in history resonated powerfully with the freedpeople and other African Americans in his audience, who had long identified America as Egypt—with African Americans constituting an enslaved and oppressed black Israel. As historian Albert J. Raboteau explains, antebellum black Christians identified powerfully with the story of Exodus, believing that, as long as bondage continued, ‘‘America’s destiny was in jeopardy. America stood under the judgment of God, and unless it repented, the death and destruction visited upon biblical Egypt would be repeated here.’’ Applying the story of Exodus to their own bondage and oppression, African Americans reassured themselves that—contrary to what whites claimed—slavery was not in keeping with God’s will, and, at some point in the future, God would act to free them. Vividly recalling Israel’s flight from Egypt in song and prayer, African Americans ‘‘predicted a future radically different from their present’’ and ‘‘found hope enough to endure the enormity of their suffering.’’∞∞∑ God’s retribution for slavery—envisaged by African Americans for decades—had, quite vividly, come to pass in the ravages of the Civil War. The delivery of both African Americans and the nation, so fervently hoped and prayed for, had finally arrived with Emancipation and Union victory. What people ever had more reason to believe that God was on their side? With emotional prayer and joyous song at celebrations across the postEmancipation South, freedpeople echoed the pronouncements of black orators and expressed their abiding faith that the Exodus story of liberation was manifest in their own lives. At an Emancipation ceremony in the Springfield Baptist Church in Augusta, six months after the Fourth of July celebration where Lynch pre-


sided, fellow AME minister Henry Turner echoed Lynch’s sentiments. One of the most effective African American leaders of his time, Turner, like Lynch, was an early advocate of missionary work among the freedpeople, and in December of 1865 he traveled to Georgia to fill the vacuum caused by Lynch’s recent departure.∞∞∏ On the first New Year’s Day African Americans ‘‘ever enjoyed,’’ Turner looked back on a past filled with gloom and suspense and looked forward to a future in which ‘‘the eternal principles of equity and freedom’’ would reign in their stead. Like Lynch, Turner invested Emancipation with religious, as well as historic, significance, divining that its anniversary would be ‘‘enshrine[d]’’ in African American ‘‘affections with a deathless sacredness, forever and ever.’’ Recalling that 1 January had traditionally been a day of pain and separation for African Americans, as slave owners reorganized their workforce at the start of a new year, Turner drove home his point that both the calendar and the country had been forever transformed: ‘‘This day which hitherto separated so many families, and tear-wet so many faces; heaved so many hearts, and filled the air with so many groans and sighs . . . shall henceforth and forever be filled with acclamations of the wildest joy, and expressions of ecstasy too numerous for angelic pens to note.’’∞∞π Following in Lynch’s footsteps, Turner also emphasized that Emancipation fulfilled the ‘‘eternal principles’’ of the American Revolution. The Emancipation of African Americans, he emphasized, was no accident; it was the inevitable destiny of a nation that ‘‘threw off the British Yoke, and trampled under foot the scepter of despotic tyranny.’’ Insisting that the principles of universal equality and freedom lay at the heart of the nation, both men utilized a discursive strategy employed by an increasing number of black abolitionists in the years before the Civil War. At a time when most white abolitionist allies charged that the Constitution was a proslavery document, some black leaders, including Frederick Douglass, promoted a radical vision of the nation’s founding and transformed the meaning of the Revolution. The country, they argued, had been born out of a battle for universal equality and freedom. Slavery, they insisted, violated both the spirit and the letter of the Constitution and betrayed the very essence of the Declaration of Independence. Correspondingly, the abolitionist struggle—and the eventual realization of black freedom—were part of an ongoing effort to fulfill the most basic promises of the Revolution.∞∞∫ But even as they linked Emancipation to the country’s revolutionary past, black leaders differed over how much attention should be paid to the


history of slavery and racial oppression. Some worried that attention to the southern past would hinder African American progress. James Lynch, for instance, believed that racial prejudice was an ‘‘unnatural’’ consequence of African Americans’ association with slavery. He anticipated that an undue emphasis on the history of slavery would perpetuate false stereotypes and prevent African Americans from improving their status in white society. Thus, he urged freedpeople to leave their memories of enslavement behind: ‘‘Slavery is no more,’’ he argued.∞∞Ω In contrast to Lynch, Henry Turner inveighed against the former crimes of southern whites, and he compared black people favorably to their white counterparts. ‘‘The fact is,’’ he declared, ‘‘we have a better heart than white people.’’∞≤≠ In his speech on St. Helena Island, Martin Delany went even further than Turner in his portrayal of white malfeasance and ineptitude, which he translated into a call for black self-reliance: ‘‘I tell you they (white men) cannot teach you anything . . . because they have not the brain to do it. . . . Believe not in these School teachers, Emissaries, Ministers, and agents, because they never tell you the truth.’’∞≤∞ Few speakers were as unflinching in either their backward or forward gaze as Delany. While Lynch and Turner differed in their approach to slavery, they— and most other black leaders—urged the freedpeople to let go of past antagonisms. Recasting slavery as a national sin and the Civil War as collective atonement, Lynch sought to shift the burden of guilt away from white southerners. He reminded the crowd that the blame for slavery was shared by North and South alike, for slavery enriched both regions at the expense of black humanity. And he insisted that there was ‘‘virtue, patriotism and religion in the South,’’ as well as in the North. Instead of dwelling on the wrongs of slavery, Lynch preferred to look to the future: ‘‘Now that the thunderings of artillery are no longer heard . . . and the constitutional amendment [the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery] stands like a rainbow in the national sky, let North and South, white and black shake hands—join hearts—shout for joy—gird up their loins and with a patriotism as exalted as the national grandeur, a love of justice and mercy like that which is Divine, and a hope as high as the objects of promise, go on in the pursuit of further development.’’∞≤≤ Similarly, Turner adopted a conciliatory tone near the end of his otherwise fiery speech. He urged his audience to forgive the past and look to the future: ‘‘[L]et me say that I have not referred to the cruelty of slavery to incite your passions against the white people. . . . To the contrary, let us love whites . . . neither taunt nor


insult them for past grievances; respect them; work for them; but still let us be men.’’ He ended his speech on an optimistic note: ‘‘Let us show [the whites that] we can be a people, respectable, virtuous, honest, and industrious, and soon their prejudice will melt away, and with God for our father, we will all be brothers.’’∞≤≥ Remembering bondage was tricky, fraught with political risk and uncertainty. These three speeches, delivered within a year after the war, suggest how immediately the memory of slavery was riddled with conflict and dissension, even among African Americans themselves. Many black leaders feared that continued attention to slavery would invite white anger and promote more racial conflict. Some, like Lynch, also shrank from images of black degradation. Many freeborn African Americans were especially loath to associate themselves with the history of enslavement. One strategy, utilized by Lynch, was to minimize that past. Another, displayed by Turner and Delany, was to find in slavery evidence of black superiority rather than debasement. Just as black abolitionists before them reframed national debates over slavery by insisting that the American Revolution was fought for universal freedom and equality, Turner and Delany strove to reshape current understandings of the meaning of centuries of bondage. Charged Delany, ‘‘People say that you are too lazy to work, that you have no intelligence to get on for yourselves, without being guided and driven to the work of overseers. I say it is a lie, and a blasphemous lie, and I will prove it to be so.’’∞≤∂ The emerging dialogue over slavery intensified as time passed. Indeed, the contrasts grew more pronounced in later years, as both aging former slaves and freeborn blacks vigorously argued about the wisdom of remembering bondage. These speakers’ approaches to slavery also foreshadowed their own divergent paths. Before his untimely death in 1872, Lynch left the black denomination for the Methodist Episcopal Church, acting on his view that racial segregation had no place in a free society. During the early years of Congressional Reconstruction, Turner attempted to defend black rights while cooperating with white political leaders in Georgia. Angered by repeated white betrayals, however, he became one of the AME Church’s sharpest critics of white southern society and a strong advocate of black emigration in the late 1870s and 1880s. Delany became a highly controversial figure in South Carolina politics during the late 1860s and early 1870s. After being bitterly disappointed at the failures of Reconstruction, he returned to his earlier dream of starting a black settlement in Liberia, which he pursued until his death in 1885.∞≤∑


Their oratory also shows the evolution of narratives of black progress and achievement. Emancipation Day ceremonies quickly became opportunities for recalling black heroism and accomplishment as much as, if not more than, forums for remembering bondage. Highly conscious of contemporary racist theories, which claimed the ‘‘curse of Ham’’ as the genesis of black debility and identified slavery as the natural status of an inferior race, speakers scoured world history for examples of black achievement. In so doing, they utilized a time-honored strategy of African American abolitionists, who had marshaled evidence of black accomplishment in their battles against slavery. Both Lynch and Turner pointed to the achievements of Egyptian civilization. Turner spoke of the black men who ‘‘founded the first cities and formed the first empires’’: ‘‘They were the greatest generals and the greatest mechanics; they carried the alphabet first to proud Greece, and the mathematical problems of Euclid still puzzle the world.’’ Looking forward to modern history, he urged his listeners to remember Crispus Attucks, an African American hero of the American Revolution, and the African American men who had served with honor in the Union army.∞≤∏ Similarly, Lynch took pleasure in describing the genius of Benjamin Banneker, the eighteenth-century mathematician and astronomer, and abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Henry Highland Garnet. They ‘‘thrilled the nation and . . . [silenced] the silly pratings about natural inferiority.’’∞≤π It is easy to imagine delighted black audiences taking in these ‘‘pictures and historical facts.’’ At the Emancipation celebration in Augusta, the crowded Springfield Church responded to Turner’s eloquence with ‘‘unbounded astonishment.’’ According to the chairman for the celebration, not even the whites could ‘‘conceal their admiration, [or] restrain the applause due to him, as the best orator of the day.’’∞≤∫ Journalists reported that James Lynch received a wave of applause after his Fourth of July speech in Augusta, and Martin Delany created ‘‘immense’’ excitement in South Carolina. As they attempted to work out the future, Americans looked to the past, which offered up a jumble of evidence to support their differing visions. To black spokespersons seeking to establish the legitimacy of black freedom and citizenship, history provided countless instances of black contributions to the South, the nation, and the world. Just as certainly, to those who envisioned a subordinated black populace, history offered reassurance that African Americans were naturally passive and compliant. The only constant in the historical oratory delivered at African American ceremonies was the certainty that Emancipation was a defining feature of the war


and a necessary focus of interpretation. History was not yet so malleable as to deny the meaningfulness of slavery and Emancipation for African Americans, the South, and the nation.

J The significance of African American public ceremonies was not lost on white observers. Unhappy white residents mourned the transformation of public spaces. Each year on the Fourth of July, white Charlestonians admitted to ‘‘vain longings in their breast for a recurrence of happy byegone days.’’∞≤Ω White residents of Richmond were appalled when black celebrants boldly occupied Capitol Square, an area that had been designated as off-limits to African Americans before the war.∞≥≠ On 4 July 1866, sequestered whites peered out from behind closed doors and shuttered windows to see the flags of the United States and of Virginia floating above the Capitol and the words ‘‘Liberty and Union’’ printed above the coat of arms of the state. Black celebrants had garnished the Washington Monument with evergreens and lay a small calico flag in the hands of each of the statues of Jefferson and Mason. This act unhinged a writer for the Richmond Dispatch, who described the modification of the statues as ‘‘a liberty which no white man ever yet presumed to take with Virginia’s great work of art.’’∞≥∞ Years later, when white southerners characterized the ‘‘insolence’’ of African Americans during the postwar period, many emphasized scenes of African Americans congregating at key public spaces. Attempting to convey their perceptions of utter social chaos at the congressional hearings of 1871, white witnesses zeroed in on the African American men who held frequent ‘‘marches and parades.’’ Processions, rallies, carnivals, barbecues, political meetings, and other gatherings all left a similarly powerful impression on white observers.∞≥≤ The imposition of a black calendar of public celebration was a travesty to some whites and a mere annoyance to others, but it could hardly be avoided altogether, as Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas discovered. The wife of a prominent planter who resided just outside of Augusta, Thomas came to town on business on the morning of 2 January 1871. Having left home reluctantly, she was relieved to finally make it to her destination—an office on Broad Street. No sooner was her business under way, however, when a parade of African Americans traveled up the street. Only at that point did it dawn on Thomas that African Americans were out celebrating ‘‘their emancipation.’’ Perhaps it was the joy of black celebrants that prompted Thomas to reflect on her own contrasting understanding of recent events.


‘‘[T]his is not a Happy New Year to me,’’ she lamented. After waiting out the procession, Thomas made her way home, where she looked back on her day out on the streets of Augusta with evident regret. ‘‘I do not generally go on the street on New Year’s Day but have usually remained in doors to receive calls,’’ she wrote in her journal, ‘‘but today I was not a fashionable lady but a business woman—I am afraid I am becoming cross when I remember how changed everything is.’’∞≥≥ Many whites across the South chose to shut their doors and close their shutters on days of black celebration. Others left town altogether on country excursions, popular forms of white entertainment in Augusta and elsewhere throughout Reconstruction. The Augusta Constitutionalist reported that ‘‘many of our people left town’’ on 4 July 1866, including the staff of the paper: ‘‘[A]s we went with a party of friends at an early hour . . . and enjoyed a fine time going up the canal . . . we are unable to inform our readers what the freedmen did.’’ Still, the editors could not resist trying to discredit the day’s events with a final, contemptuous comment: ‘‘We learn that the [celebration] was a highly colored affair. . . . Sic transit gloria mundi.’’∞≥∂ Implicit was a reluctant recognition that African Americans now had a share of public space, in which they represented themselves on their own terms and asserted their own visions of the past, present, and future. This realization did not come easily. White southerners battled to maintain control, as was made evident in a skirmish over graveyard ceremonies in Augusta in 1866. On an early morning in May 1866, white women assembled at the local cemetery in Augusta to pay tribute to the Confederate dead. Some days later, students and teachers from the local freedmen’s schools were attempting to ornament the graves of the Union soldiers when, suddenly, a group of armed men surrounded them and forced them to leave. The mayor of Augusta justified the exclusion of African Americans from the cemetery by drawing upon a prewar ordinance; fearful of provoking local whites, the commander of the Georgia Freedmen’s Bureau declined to help the freedpeople obtain free access to the graveyard. In the end, the Union graves went unadorned, causing a Republican editor to demand: ‘‘[H]as it already come to this; that the graves of men, who fought to overthrow our Government can be covered with flowers . . . but that the colored friends of our brave Union boys, who have died to save their country, can not honor their memory, by strewing flowers upon their graves!’’∞≥∑


More frequently, local whites failed to suppress African American public ceremonies. In spite of all their efforts, white residents of Richmond, Virginia, could not prevent freedpeople from holding a massive parade on 3 April 1866, the first anniversary of the city’s surrender to Union forces. When African Americans announced their plans for a celebration, angry whites denounced it as ‘‘a jollification on the saddest of days’’ and warned that participants would be ‘‘observed and remembered,’’ thus making ‘‘enemies where and when they most need friends.’’∞≥∏ A teacher in a local freedmen’s school recalled, ‘‘The white citizens have threatened and protested, and even burned the church . . . where the preparatory meetings have been held.’’∞≥π Still, the commemoration went forward. A sympathetic minister reported that thousands of people participated in the celebration, ‘‘notwithstanding the threats ‘We will throw them all out of employment,’ and ‘We will wade through blood before the niggershall [sic] celebrate the day.’ ’’∞≥∫ Shifting their lines of defense, white southerners labored simultaneously to undermine black accomplishments and assert contrary historical ideologies. Democratic newspapers aimed to define the meaning of black events through extensive—and typically derisive—commentary during the years following the end of the war. And, as early as 1866, white memorialists began to consecrate their own versions of recent history by decorating graves and laying plans for elaborate monuments—all dedicated to sanctifying the memory of the Lost Cause.∞≥Ω In a persistent effort to distort the meaning of African American affairs, white commentators went to great lengths to lampoon various aspects of black proceedings, portraying historical and political speech-making as a ridiculous sham and describing elaborate, well-ordered parades as vulgar and pretentious. A common—almost obligatory—strategy was to emphasize the ‘‘peculiar aroma[s]’’ allegedly emitted by black celebrants. Time and again, southern whites spoke of ‘‘rank’’ smells and offensive ‘‘perfumes’’ at black affairs. Following a Fourth of July celebration in Augusta, the Constitutionalist offered a ‘‘sanitary suggestion.’’ Alluding to the summertime warmth, the paper recommended that, in the future, city authorities be required to present every African American ‘‘man, woman, and child’’ participating in Independence Day ceremonies with a bottle of perfume.∞∂≠ But white commentators let slip an underlying anxiety that black ceremonies were not as laughable and unthreatening as they wished them to


be. Apprehensions were evident in their repeated assertions that southern society was giving way to an overwhelming black force. ‘‘This time-honored day was surrendered to the colored people’’ and ‘‘Africa has had full sway’’ were typical of the sentiments expressed by whites as they contemplated African American celebrations on 1 January and 4 July. The graphic language employed by whites commonly invoked images of plagues and pestilence. White observers of the 1867 Emancipation celebration in Norfolk drew out the themes of mourning and ruination: a ‘‘black pall appeared to hang over the city—it was negro everywhere’’; the crowds of freedpeople were a scourge from God, ‘‘like locusts in Egypt.’’ Whites’ apocalyptic imagery was not merely a rhetorical device; it reflected their profound belief that they resided in a world turned upside down. What else could possibly explain African American demonstrations on behalf of freedom and equality on the very streets where slaves had once dutifully enacted the rituals of their subordination?∞∂∞ Southern whites fervently hoped that the future would somehow be different, that the ‘‘cloud’’ that had ‘‘o’erspread the bright sky’’ of white happiness would someday lift.∞∂≤ In the coming years, white southerners searching for ways to convey ‘‘a true history of the facts of the past’’ would counter the pageantry of African American celebrations with increasingly elaborate ceremonies and historical projects of their own. Even as white southerners struggled to reestablish economic and political control after the war, they simultaneously endeavored to shape public ceremony in their own interest. Under the special conditions of Congressional Reconstruction, however, southern whites would vie with many groups for control over public space and collective memory, just as they were forced to contend with the advent of black political rights and the ‘‘interference’’ of Federal officials in the southern economy. During the years leading up to the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, it was African Americans—and black men in particular—who marshaled the forces of history and public ceremony to greatest effect in the postwar South.

chapter two

The black man has come forth from his degraded entombment to a resurrection of manhood. . . . [H]e has been summoned to break the bonds of his chattelhood and vindicate his claims to the common right of humanity. ‘‘Emancipation,’’ Christian Recorder, 15 August 1863

JR A Resurrection of Manhood gendered reconstructions

On 16 December 1865, an African American newspaper broadcast plans for an upcoming Emancipation Day celebration in Charleston, South Carolina. In a carefully worded advertisement appearing in the Charleston Leader, the all-male planning committee called on ‘‘[a]ll Male Societies, Companies, Clubs, or organized bodies’’ to send representatives to the local Union League hall to initiate plans for the celebration. The committee then made a separate appeal to ‘‘[a]ll the Ladies’ Societies and Associations,’’ indicating that ‘‘anything they could provide would be happily received by the Committee.’’ The organizers continued their address to the women, specifying the tasks they might usefully undertake: ‘‘The Committee beg to inform the ladies generally that they would be extremely happy to have their assistance in making Wreaths, Banners, etc.’’ In a third and final appeal to the women, committee members drew a sharp distinc-

gendered reconstructions 57

tion between men and women’s spheres in the celebration, concluding: ‘‘The Committee is well aware that they cannot get along without the ladies, except in the procession.’’∞ The Charleston planning committee’s move to distinguish male and female roles, and define a limited province for women, is especially striking when contrasted with women’s conspicuous participation at the freedom celebration in Charleston the previous March—waving to crowds from a ‘‘car of liberty,’’ performing the events of a slave auction, attending a mock funeral for slavery, and marching as members of schools and civic associations.≤ Less than a year later, members of the local Union League sought to curtail, or at least to circumscribe, women’s engagement. Considering their presence in Charleston the previous spring, it is not difficult to imagine women resenting—even resisting—a demotion to refreshments and decorations. Indeed, the male planning committee might have taken great pains to define women’s role precisely because they anticipated, or had already encountered, some rancor. Unfortunately, there is no record of black women’s response to the male organizers. Nor is there a detailed account of the actual parade that took place on 1 January. But depictions of later parades, including a vivid illustration of women parading at an Emancipation Day procession in 1877, indicate that—in spite of efforts by at least some men—women were not entirely relegated to the sidelines of Charleston celebrations. The contradictory evidence regarding women in Charleston is indicative of a commemorative culture that reflected and reinforced a broader social context in which gender was a defining feature of struggles over the meaning of African American history, freedom, and citizenship. As freedpeople endeavored to define liberty and citizenship for themselves, they asserted varied concepts of what it meant to be a free man or a free woman. Freeborn African Americans, white missionaries, and Federal officials also held their own beliefs about the gendered meanings of freedom and citizenship. All these groups brought their interests to bear on African American celebrations.≥ Between 1863 and 1870, however, the formal aspects of many African American ceremonies stressed the capacity of freedmen for citizenship. The emphasis on manhood reflected the efforts of several constituencies, including male missionaries for the African Methodist Episcopal Church, who struggled to construct black men as independent actors and patriotic heroes who deserved to be acknowledged as full-fledged members of the

58 gendered reconstructions

Scenes from the Emancipation Day parade and celebration in Charleston, South Carolina. Avery Research Center, College of Charleston, Black Charleston in Slavery and Freedom Collection.


nation. Aiming to shore up black men’s claims to the full rights of citizenship, especially suffrage, ministers proffered tales of black men’s achievements through history. Parades boasted legions of male marchers, and ceremonies centered on the maneuvers of black soldiers. The cumulative message of male-centered commemorative speeches and processions was clear: after centuries of bondage, African American men were ready and eager to demand all the rights and privileges of independent manhood.∂ Even as men grabbed center stage, though, women were highly visible in commemorative celebrations, and the consistent emphasis on male identity did not obviate a set of parallel concerns about freedwomen, which were also played out in commemorations. Many northern missionaries and freeborn black southerners embraced gendered notions of propriety, which emphasized the separation of male and female ‘‘spheres’’ and particularly stressed women’s domestic capacities as wives and mothers. At the same time that they aimed to strengthen black men’s case for citizenship, these groups also worked to reconstruct the role of freedwomen through ceremonial displays of genteel black womanhood. The reformation of gender—that is, the redefinition of both black manhood and black womanhood—was a conspicuous aim of many organizers. The contrary actions and conceptions of southern freedpeople in general, and freedwomen in particular, sometimes complicated such efforts. In wide-ranging public ceremonies, women and children, as well as men, asserted themselves as historical and political participants with legitimate claims to help define the rights and privileges of citizenship. In this sense, African American celebrations were indicative of the democratic black public sphere identified by Elsa Barkley Brown as flourishing in the postEmancipation South. As freedpeople struggled to delineate freedom on their own terms, masses of men, women, and children attended—and participated in—large and boisterous public meetings in church halls and other community centers, where, as Brown explains, the political discourse ‘‘varied from the prayer to the stump speech to the testimonies regarding outrages against freedpeople to shouted interventions from the galleries into the debates’’ on the floor.∑ In such an open public domain, gender was not necessarily a barrier to political agency. Freedwomen affirmed their right to participate in the political process and asserted themselves in commemorative ceremonies— not always in ways that met the approval of more ‘‘respectable’’ constituents. The prominent roles of black and white female missionaries from


the North further compromised efforts to make black ceremonies malecentered affairs. While female missionaries typically embraced notions of female domesticity, they also saw themselves and southern freedwomen as crucial participants in the transition from slavery to freedom. It is not surprising, then, that struggles over gender were a vital component of African American commemoration in the postwar South.∏ Indeed, it is striking how quickly some constituencies sought to reign in freedwomen’s public actions and assert men’s political authority; the efforts to limit women’s participation in the Charleston parade occurred just months after the end of the war. Such efforts suggest that many black male leaders and white colleagues—at least those seeking to establish a new political order in the urban South—did not challenge the principles underlying existing definitions of citizenship, save one. In essence, they ignored the racial component of contemporary definitions of manhood—or at least they argued that race should not pertain to such matters. Men were men, they insisted, and all American men ought to share equally in both the responsibilities and the birthrights of gender. These arguments, and complementary definitions of a refined and subordinate black womanhood, ran headlong into the contrasting understandings of citizenship and female agency embraced by many freedpeople, as well as the assertive actions of white female missionaries and freeborn black women.

J The leaders of the AME Church were among the most conspicuous groups championing black manhood in the years leading up to the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, and their extensive labors left their mark on commemorative celebrations in the South. Within a year of the war’s end, dozens of ministers were at work and fledgling congregations were under way in the urban centers of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee, as well as along substantial southern waterways. In all these places, missionaries undertook the painstaking labor of organizing congregations, licensing clergymen, and growing memberships. At the same time, church spokesmen worked to establish a regular calendar commemorating black achievements, and missionaries sponsored Emancipation Day events, Fourth of July celebrations, Decoration Day services, and cornerstone-laying ceremonies for new churches and schools. Powerful church orators like Henry Turner and James Lynch figured prominently among keynote speakers, and AME editors vigorously promoted commemorations on the pages of the denomination’s newspaper, the Christian Recorder.π


AME clergymen devoted time and energy to commemorative and patriotic activities for reasons ranging from a desire to give appropriate thanks to God for Emancipation to the denomination’s considerable fund-raising needs. But an especially powerful incentive was African Methodist leaders’ investment in establishing black men’s claim to the rights and prerogatives that white men had traditionally reserved for themselves. One particular point of contention during early Reconstruction, of course, was the question of black men’s right to suffrage. At the same time, there were other issues at stake that also touched on black men’s ability to claim the properties of nineteenth-century manhood: the right to claim one’s children, to provide for a family, to obtain and transmit property, to travel freely, to enter into contracts with employers. All these abilities, and more, were ensconced by law and tradition in definitions of manhood, and all became arenas of conflict as black men asserted their claims to these rights.∫ African Methodists leaped headlong into the fray. Uppermost in the minds of AME spokesmen, as in the minds of many black leaders, was the status of black male suffrage. While hardly alone in their focus on political rights—both former slaves and free African Americans began to agitate for suffrage even before the end of the Civil War—AME spokesmen argued for the right to vote from a unique position.Ω The most salient proof of black manhood, they insisted, lay in the past—by which they meant the history of their own independent denomination. By elaborating a history of independent black manhood within African Methodism, church leaders aimed to appropriate and transform the ideologies of manhood and citizenship that had long been used to reserve the qualities of independence—including the right to vote and govern the country’s affairs—for white men only. Clergymen were all the more determined to link the history of African Methodism to the achievement of black male citizenship because enormous changes were rocking the country and threatening to transform, if not obliterate, the identity of the church. While the end of slavery opened up new opportunities, it also thrust new challenges on African Methodists. AME leaders faced the possibility of tens of thousands of new congregants—and who better to minister to former slaves than members of the first separate black denomination in the country? But some ministers worried about the consequences of admitting masses of freedpeople into the denomination. How would the admission of southern blacks affect the existing structures and authority within the church? Would former slaves accept the leadership of church authorities, or would they challenge exist-


ing modes of worship and organization? Still other church officials questioned the continuing existence of a separate African American denomination. Now that slavery was over, and the possibilities for racial equality seemed close at hand, what would be the purpose of an all-black denomination? By celebrating the unique history of their church as the first separate black denomination—and linking that history to the future of black male citizenship—African Methodists hoped to gain an edge over competing denominations and legitimize the continuing existence of an all-black church. But church leaders also sought to assert some control over a fastgrowing congregation. By designating the characteristics that defined the AME Church in the past, church officials hoped to steer an ‘‘appropriate’’ course for church members—both male and female—into the future. In short, history mattered to African Methodists in the years following Emancipation, and in more ways than one.∞≠ Church leaders seized upon the timeliness of the Church’s fiftieth anniversary—occurring in 1866, at the very time that debates over the Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment had brought the character of black male citizenship to the forefront of Americans’ consciousness—to solidify their vision of independent manhood. At a meeting in Pittsburgh in January, AME bishops launched a campaign to institute anniversary ceremonies in churches throughout the country. Soon after the meeting, James Lynch issued a spirited manifesto in the Christian Recorder, in which he urged members of the church to prepare for the upcoming celebration. Lynch, who had recently returned from Georgia, now occupied the post of editor for the biweekly periodical, the perfect position from which to promote his agenda for the anniversary celebration. With evident emotion, Lynch ‘‘called to memory’’ the daily humiliations faced by black Methodists in towns and cities throughout the North in the years following the American Revolution: ‘‘[W]e were harassed and proscribed from entering ‘American’ churches, on account of our God-given color. . . . In those churches where we were allowed to enter at all, we were assigned to the back-seats, or marched up to the galleries like convicts being conducted to some isolated ‘buzzard’s roost.’ ’’ Fed up with this treatment, a talented preacher by the name of Richard Allen launched a campaign to establish a separate black denomination in Philadelphia in 1792. Lynch stressed that Allen and his followers acted out of profound religious faith and a keen sense of justice, both of which were sorely lacking in their fellow white Methodists: ‘‘Richard Allen was a firm believer in God’s word, and therefore could not


submit to such treatment as he and others received at the hands of the American people, who professed to be followers of our Lord.’’∞∞ Around the same time that Allen led a group of worshippers out of a white Methodist church in Philadelphia, black Methodists in Baltimore and several other cities also began to withdraw from white congregations. Over the next three decades, these African American congregations struggled against white church officials, who employed numerous strategies to retain control over their affairs. Finally, on 1 January 1816, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania recognized the autonomy of the church led by Allen in Philadelphia; three months later, representatives from five separate congregations came together in Philadelphia for what proved to be the first general conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. From that time forward, Lynch rejoiced, the advancement of the AME Church had been ‘‘the means of bringing about such a state of things, that the American people begin to respect every man that conducts himself as a man, do not make color a test, but treat him as an equal before the law. Hence . . . it is . . . a pleasant thing . . . to glance over [the Church’s] history up to the present time.’’ By the eve of the Civil War, the denomination had expanded to 50,000 members, even though it was largely excluded from the southern states. In addition, church leaders could boast of a successful newspaper, a publishing house, and the recent founding of Wilberforce University. The denomination, which began as a religious rebellion, had evolved into a full-fledged institution, complete with a bureaucratic hierarchy and more centralized structures of authority. Lynch concluded his proud survey of the church’s early progress by urging readers to participate in upcoming anniversary celebrations, in order to ‘‘best carry out our gratefulness to God for the prosperity of the Church, and its existence for fifty years.’’∞≤ Over the course of 1866, African Methodists elaborated the basic historical narrative laid out by Lynch in his editorial. Spokesmen told and retold the story of Allen’s departure from the white church in Philadelphia, the subsequent establishment of an independent black denomination, and the expansion of the AME Church throughout the North. Most clergymen drew a direct line from Richard Allen to Abraham Lincoln and from the founding of the AME denomination to the advent of freedom. And they argued that the church’s past revealed the ascendancy of black manhood.∞≥ African Methodists’ heightened attention to history in 1866—and especially to the history of manhood within the church—reflected their deter-


mination to intervene in the intensifying debates over the nature of black citizenship.∞∂ Joining other black leaders in citing black men’s military service, African Methodists nevertheless looked to the history of their church for compelling evidence of black men’s qualifications for all the rights and privileges of independent manhood—including suffrage. Bishop Daniel Alexander Payne, one of the leading figures of the AME Church during the period of the Civil War and Reconstruction, captured the feelings of many in the denomination when he praised its historic role in cultivating the qualities of independence. Payne declared, ‘‘Truly, we hazard nothing in saying that the African Methodist Episcopal Church has done more to demonstrate the manhood of the Anglo-African than any other ecclesiastical organization of the great Republic.’’ Dozens of speeches and articles echoed the bishop’s sentiment as leading clergymen reviewed the history of the church.∞∑ Essentially, ministers recast the story of the church’s early development into a parable of black men rejecting dependence within the white church and embarking on a journey toward the joys and challenges of ‘‘manly’’ independence. Recalling the position of their forefathers prior to the establishment of a separate black denomination, churchmen repeatedly invoked language and imagery that nineteenth-century Americans typically reserved for women, children, paupers, and slaves. They identified the situation of black men within white-run churches as akin to dependency within a household. In African Methodists’ eyes, white clergymen sinned against God and all of humanity when they denied black converts the right to lead congregations and when they forced them to pray at the back of the church. But whites also committed a special transgression against black men by denying them the dignity, respect, and authority that all members of their gender deserved. Only ‘‘men robbed of true manhood,’’ Payne insisted, could have endured the mistreatment that black Methodists faced at the hands of their white brethren.∞∏ Rather than submit to their unmanning, Allen and his followers left the offending congregation and set out to obtain structural and economic autonomy. By fighting black Methodists’ attempts to establish a separate organization, white clergymen tried to keep them within the domain of a white-run religious household. Payne recalled the determination of black Methodists to divorce themselves from the authority of white clergymen and risk whatever hardships a separate existence might bring: ‘‘There were but two alternatives left—either to fall down and lick the feet of [our]


despisers . . . that [we] might enjoy what little favor and protection they might offer . . . or stand alone, but erect ; poor, but independent; homeless, but with wings as free and as strong as the eagle’s.’’∞π Significantly, Payne emphasized the founding fathers’ decision as a choice to leave behind whatever ‘‘favor and protection’’ the white church offered— a condition clearly identified with women and other dependents—in order to go forth ‘‘alone’’ and ‘‘erect,’’ no matter what challenges such freedom and independence might bring. He stressed the deliberate rejection by African Methodist men of the status of dependents—and the equally deliberate donning of the mantle of independence. And he equated the struggle for structural and economic independence with the assertion of black manhood. Another church leader, Bishop Benjamin Tanner, drove home the association of manhood with independence. Tanner sarcastically recalled: ‘‘The giant crime committed by the Founders of the African M.E. Church, against the prejudiced white American, and the timid black—the crime which seems unpardonable, was that they dared to organize a Church of men, men to think for themselves, men to act for themselves: A Church of men who . . . spurn to have their churches built for them . . . men who prefer to live by the sweat of their own brow and to be free.’’∞∫ Once liberated from white control, African Methodist men were free to establish and preside over their own religious households—a privilege they guarded jealously from black women, as well as white men. Every church leader, from Allen onward, emphasized the competency of black men as heads of an expanding Christian family, which they measured in terms of economic prosperity and membership growth. Allen reflected the sensibilities of the Revolutionary era when he designated the acquisition of property and the construction of a church building as critical steps toward a separate black denomination. Later generations carefully charted the expansion of church-held property along with the growth of congregations. For his semicentenary volume on the history of the church, Payne produced a tally of established churches, Sabbath schools, ‘‘educated’’ ministers, and ‘‘respectable’’ communicants—all of which stood as monuments of black ministers’ accomplishment.∞Ω As AME spokesmen celebrated the church’s fiftieth birthday in the wake of the Civil War, their collective message was clear. Not only had their forefathers rejected the mantle of dependence, but successive generations of black Methodists had proven their ability to be self-governing heads of a


thriving religious household, with a sizable portion of real property to boot. Therefore, they were clearly qualified for the vote and for any other right or privilege accorded to men. Time and again, African Methodists emphasized that, had they been white, they would have been praised, not derided, for their efforts.≤≠ Moreover, they rooted their commitment to religious independence in the bedrock of American identity. Just as John Wesley had no choice but to break from the corrupt and sinful ‘‘English hierarchy’’ of Methodism, so, too, had Allen and his followers found it necessary to leave the Methodist Episcopal Church when they found that white congregants were disregarding Scripture and the rules of democracy. Similarly, Bishop Tanner linked the foundation of the AME Church to the ‘‘genius’’ of American freedom: ‘‘Are not American and Liberty synonyms?’’ The founders of the AME Church learned their love of religious freedom ‘‘from the school boy, as he threw up his cap and shouted, Liberty! They learned it from the broken accent of the fresh foreigner, as he muttered out Liberty!’’≤∞ Such arguments were at the forefront of a dramatic change in American definitions of freedom and political citizenship. As property ownership declined as the primary marker of independence in the decades prior to the Civil War, race and gender had become the principle means of separating full citizens, who had the right to vote and participate in political affairs, from individuals who were deemed unfit to exercise those rights. Indeed, Pennsylvania—where the AME Church had its origins—passed a law in 1837 that eliminated black men’s right to vote altogether. Thus, when African Methodists and other black leaders argued against racialized definitions of citizenship, they challenged the very foundation of the imagined community of the political nation. Together with radical white Republicans, they were instrumental in refiguring the boundaries of American citizenship, a transformation that was one of the most profound consequences of the Civil War and Reconstruction.≤≤ The arguments of AME spokesmen help to delineate how black leaders made their case for political equality. Even as African Methodists portrayed suffrage as the natural right of all men, they simultaneously worked to construct a historical narrative of worthy black manhood. Acutely aware that white Americans viewed enslavement—and, by extension, blackness—as the very antithesis of independent citizenship, African Methodists were determined to reconstruct black history so as to support African American men’s claims to equality.≤≥ To establish the legitimacy of black manhood, AME ministers drew on


several elements that had composed American ideologies of freedom, independence, and manhood since the American Revolution, but they were not the primary distinctions made by northern whites by the middle of the nineteenth century. At a time when many northern whites had come to center their concept of freedom on economic self-ownership, AME leaders stressed the economic autonomy of their denomination, the acquisition of church property, and their own long-standing status as heads of a religious household as constitutive of their own right—and, by extension, all black men’s right—to political citizenship.≤∂ By stressing the economic autonomy of their church and their own success as leaders of the AME household, black ministers elaborated a theory of historical black manhood that could counter the allegedly demeaning legacy of dependence—most obviously the lot of slaves but also the experience of the vast majority of ‘‘free’’ blacks in both the North and the South. During the early decades of the AME Church’s development, Americans intensely debated the significance of the rise of wage labor in the commercial and manufacturing centers of the North. Even as northern workers celebrated the independence and equal rights of working men, many criticized the economic changes that, they argued, were resulting in a new system of ‘‘wage slavery.’’ Under attack from abolitionists, southerners eagerly chimed in with a spirited critique of wage labor. It was the position of free African Americans in the North, however, that most clearly pointed up the contradictions in the emerging free labor ideology. During the antebellum era, free blacks found themselves increasingly excluded from skilled trades and other desirable work at the same time that their voting rights were curtailed. Moreover, the practices of apprenticeship and indentured servitude prevailed for ‘‘free’’ blacks long after they had declined among whites. While it would have been out of the question to construct a history of economic self-ownership for black men in the South, it was also a dubious enterprise for the vast majority of black men in the North. Rather than attempt the implausible—if not the impossible—African Methodists devised a narrative of black manhood that both resembled and diverged from contemporary white notions of freedom, independence, and political citizenship. AME leaders argued that black men had accomplished in the church what many could not do—because of slavery and racism—for themselves and their families.≤∑ Black ministers’ portrayal of church history in 1866 functioned as testimony to black men’s worthiness and as a symbolic narrative representing their greatest hopes for freedom. Just as African Methodists, filled with


‘‘manly’’ feeling, had rejected the status of dependence within the white Methodist Church, so, too, would black men everywhere now be able to act on their own long-suppressed desire for full manhood. The economic independence and political governance that African Methodists had accomplished would be extended to encompass all arenas of civic and political community. Black men would exercise independence and authority in their own work and family lives, and in politics as well. Writing to the Christian Recorder from North Carolina, where he was leading missionary efforts, James A. Handy vividly articulated these hopes and expectations: ‘‘[T]he winter of the AME Church has departed. Bayonets, bombs and balls have sent the old hoary-headed monster, Slavery, to his proper place. And the young child, baptized by Bishop Allen, in the black-smith shop, fifty years ago, to-day dips her wings in sunlight, and is flying through the South . . . preaching Christ and free salvation among the canebreaks, cotton-fields, tobacco plantations and rice swamps.’’ Basking in the recent triumph of Emancipation, Handy foresaw great achievements for the church, the race, and the ‘‘whole world.’’ He broadcast a bold vision of international progress, beginning with the formation of the all-black denomination fifty years before: ‘‘Look back to 1816. What do we see? . . . [T]he little band of noble heroes. . . . Look forward to 1916. . . . What do you see? Multitudes of every nation, kindred and tongue, all united under the bloodless banner of the AME Church marching directly onward to the . . . whole world.’’ Handy pointed to the freedpeople’s enthusiasm for the church’s semicentenary as evidence that his predictions were already coming true: ‘‘[North Carolina] is in a blaze of glory. The aged sire, the matron and the child vie with each other in doing honor to the day we celebrate.’’≤∏

J African Methodists’ emphasis on black manhood in 1866 was not a complete digression from earlier self-representations, but it did represent a significant development in church ideology. The language of manhood, which permeated postwar rhetoric, was far less developed prior to the Civil War. Still, antebellum churchmen emphasized the qualities of religious leadership and independence, along with patriotism, prayer, and resistance to slavery, as constitutive of their identity. Thus, at a ceremony commemorating Richard Allen in 1856, the keynote speaker stressed Allen’s Christian piety, his patriotism, and, above all, his steadfast rejection of white Methodists for their failure to condemn black enslavement. Portraying Allen as a paragon of ‘‘moral honesty and deathless interest . . . in


the elevation of his race,’’ the keynote speaker urged his audience to follow the founder’s example. Unfortunately, too many were ‘‘willing to hug the chain that binds them and kiss the hand of the oppressor,’’ in marked contrast to Allen, who ‘‘through his own perseverance . . . rose to be one of the greatest men of his age.’’≤π During the early months of the Civil War, black leaders addressed the issue of black manhood more directly when they argued that the preservation of black manhood required prayer rather than military service. Urging black men to refrain from attempting to join the Union army until the question of emancipation was resolved, church spokesmen argued strenuously that, in avoiding battle, black men were not shirking their patriotic duty. After all, they argued, black men’s military service in earlier wars had been unrewarded. In fact, recent decades had witnessed an increase in prejudice and persecution, until ‘‘not only our citizenship, but even our common humanity is denied.’’ Under such conditions, black men could hardly be expected to take up arms—in fact, to do so would be ‘‘to abandon self-respect, and invite insult.’’≤∫ AME ministers were nonetheless aware that their stance opened them up to charges of unmanly behavior. In order to resolve this problem, ministers argued against the notion that manhood was defined by soldiering alone—just as they had long emphasized the establishment of an autonomous black church as constitutive of black men’s independence. In both instances, African Methodists had to be resourceful in their labors to elaborate ideologies of black manhood because important elements of male identity—self-ownership or soldiering—were either unavailable or politically unacceptable. Throughout the early months of the Civil War, ministers reiterated their point: prayer was the only form of manly action, one all black men could take on behalf of freedom. The most ‘‘deadly weapon’’ black men could use against the South, insisted AME leaders, was not a soldier’s gun but ‘‘the omnipotent power of prayer.’’ Editorials in the Christian Recorder repeatedly voiced the argument that men could best fulfill their duty to the ‘‘stars and stripes’’ by making applications to God, who did not recognize ‘‘color’’ as delimiting manhood. In doing so, the paper insisted, they would ‘‘wield a power more terrible than the rifle, the revolver, or the howitzer.’’ Moreover, the power of prayer was available to all black men, from the ‘‘humblest slave . . . [to the] most cultivated man of color.’’≤Ω After President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, a rapid change occurred in AME rhetoric, as ministers joined other black leaders in advancing military service as an unparalleled opportunity for black men


to demonstrate their patriotism and courage. In a speech delivered to the Thirty-ninth Regiment of U.S. Colored Troops at Bethel Church in Baltimore in the spring of 1864, the presiding minister echoed the pronouncements of other clergymen when he urged his listeners to ‘‘let the world see that you are men who love your country, and that you have higher aspirations than hewers of wood and drawers of water: acquit yourselves like me, be strong and courageous.’’≥≠ African Americans within and outside the denomination continued to debate the pros and cons of joining the fight on behalf of a prejudiced North, especially when the U.S. government failed to compensate black soldiers fairly, but the AME Church’s official— and dominant—stand was in support of military service.≥∞

J The formation of black manhood within the AME Church, from the antebellum period, through the Civil War, and finally into the postwar era, exhibited elements of both continuity and change. The postwar era, and 1866 in particular, represented a unique moment in the history of the denomination, when leading spokesmen developed a full-blown history of independent manhood, which they used to legitimize black men’s claims in ongoing debates about their status—especially in relation to politics. In constructing a history of black men’s independence, however, AME churchmen drew on long-standing traditions—even as they made significant adjustments. In the context of slavery and the Civil War, spokesmen heralded patience and religious devotion as manly qualities—a defensible standpoint, given the Federal government’s reluctance to condone Emancipation. After the Emancipation Proclamation, leading spokesmen heralded black soldiers as exemplars of black manhood, and they began to turn their attention toward obtaining the right to vote. By early Reconstruction, then, church leaders had developed a multifaceted discourse on manhood, which they used to bolster black men’s claims to equality. This discourse culminated in the histories elaborated in honor of the semicentennial in 1866, at the same time that debates heated up on the subject of black male suffrage. Linking the church’s accomplishments in the past to its political aims in the present, African Methodists constructed a history of black manhood that bridged the distance between slavery and freedom. J In the face of ministers’ bold historical pronouncements and optimistic predictions as they debated their prospects in the post-Emancipation


South, it is important to remember that African Methodists experienced a mixture of hopefulness and trepidation when they imagined incorporating thousands of freedpeople into the church.≥≤ AME ministers’ reliance on history as the proof of black manhood—and, by extension, as justification for political citizenship—points up a significant tension in their approach to the issue of black rights. On the one hand, ministers called for suffrage as a common right of all men. On the other, they justified their stance by referencing a past in which, they argued, a specific group of black men had differentiated themselves from the black majority by acquiring the characteristics of independence. In doing so, they reinforced a distinction between themselves as individuals with a history of selfgovernance and southern freedmen, who—according to the ministers’ own definitions—had experienced only dependence. Some clergymen worried openly about bringing order to millions of former slaves. After all, Richard Allen’s cherished vision of a ‘‘disciplined’’ AME Church had materialized slowly. Senior churchmen could easily recall the conflict and dissension that had characterized the early years of the young denomination’s existence. In the decades leading up to the Civil War, African Methodists had battled one another over several issues, including qualifications for clergy, style of worship, and the role of women in the church. In each instance, the advocates of conservatism gradually won out over those who supported a more open and liberal church environment. By the onset of the war, church officials were virtually united in their support for an ‘‘educated’’ clergy, in their opposition to religious emotionalism, and in their determination to reserve positions of church leadership for men.≥≥ African Methodists also suffered from internal doubts over the future of an all-black denomination in the wake of Emancipation. James Lynch, one of the most enthusiastic proponents of the AME Church in the South, was nonetheless worried that a separate black denomination, ‘‘built upon the basis of color, would fast become an anomaly in a free society, and he urged members of the Church to drop the word ‘‘African’’ from its title: ‘‘Unless this word be stricken out, our organization . . . will become a decaying hulk grounded on the erroneousness of its own position.’’ While some clergymen joined Lynch in calling for a name change, others insisted on keeping the original title, arguing that it symbolized the accomplishments of their ancestors and denying that it represented an exclusive or separatist vision for the future. There was no reason, they argued, why other groups—


including whites—could not be part of a denomination led by black men, just as there were many blacks who belonged to white-led organizations.≥∂ Aiming to quiet internal conflicts, and seeking an advantage over white missionaries, AME spokesmen argued that they were particularly qualified to minister to southern freedpeople. Here, too, they turned to history to make their case. Recalling that African Methodists had upheld the ‘‘rights of the Negro long before [William] Lloyd Garrison and others had uttered a single word,’’ missionaries insisted that they were uniquely competent to guide the transition. Southern freedpeople, they rejoiced, could not help but be impressed by the unique legacy of the first independent black denomination. A missionary reporting from Virginia, who simply signed himself ‘‘Progress,’’ exclaimed, ‘‘As soon as the colored people in those places heard there was a Church, who for fifty years, had been laboring hard for the elevation of the African race, they rushed into her by tens of thousands. They . . . ask for the Church that has always recognized manhood.’’≥∑ As self-appointed model black men, African Methodists set out to instruct former slaves on the meaning of freedom. Lynch pressed his fellow churchmen to contemplate the potential bounty of a ‘‘redeemed’’ South. It would be an oasis for black men, who would finally flourish as selfowning (and property-holding) individuals—‘‘hardy yeomen, skillful mechanics, practical farmers, and professional men’’—amid the ‘‘rolling lands of the South, intersected with beautiful rivers, the mild winter, the early balmy spring, and the easy road to wealth.’’ Others echoed Lynch’s enthusiasm and reiterated that African American ministers were uniquely qualified to realize this vision. As Richard M. Cain, at work in South Carolina, put it, ‘‘Honest, dignified whites, may teach ever so well . . . but when the colored man . . . exhibits the same great comprehension of facts, this ocular proof . . . is tenfold more convincing . . . and enables [the freedmen] to feel that they have a claim to equal manhood with others.’’≥∏

J At work in the South, AME correspondents were eager to report on their successes. A missionary writing from Portsmouth, Virginia, portrayed a local New Year’s Day celebration as a demonstration of freedmen’s capabilities, and especially their military prowess: ‘‘About eleven o’clock our gallant Colored Regiments began to arrive . . . Civil societies, pouring in their throng, filing past, headed by spirited bands of music . . . in glittering uniforms, mounted on mettlesome steeds, while the city was literally


decked with the emblem of liberty and freedom. . . . Truly, the scene was inspiring.’’ The correspondent saw the ceremonies as compelling evidence of the quality of black manhood. After gazing on the performing black regiments, he reflected: ‘‘That the colored man can and does make a good soldier, there cannot be the least doubt. That they possess bravery has already been proved. That they are able to undergo the same hardships and sufferings as the Anglo-Saxon soldier, the whole history of the race proves beyond a doubt.’’≥π Correspondingly, ministers emphasized behaviors of women that matched their expectations of proper female deportment. Upon surveying freedwomen’s activities at a Fourth of July ceremony in Charleston during the summer of 1865, a minister gladly assured his northern colleagues, ‘‘To see our ladies now, in their altered condition, would make your heart glad.’’≥∫ With such vivid portrayals of black southerners’ performances, AME missionaries underscored the reconstruction of gender as a vital—and successful—facet of freedom. Of course, these missionaries also had a strong hand in shaping southern ceremonies, and their concerns for freedmen— and freedwomen—were evident in their actions. Bishop Payne, whose leadership had been integral to the conservative triumphs prior to the war, was especially intent on regulating the behaviors of former slaves; his caution was evident in an Emancipation Day sermon that he preached in Georgetown. Payne directed some of his advice equally to men and women: he counseled that to be free ‘‘in soul and spirit’’ was not to enjoy unbridled liberty but rather to behave in accordance with the obligations of both divine and human law. Payne urged the freedpeople to steer clear of ‘‘indolence . . . vice . . . [and] licentiousness’’ and implored them to cultivate the attributes of ‘‘Holy Freedom,’’ by which he meant industry, thrift, sobriety, moral virtue, education, and devotion to the Bible. Payne delivered many of the platitudes that characterized white missionaries’ instructions, but he also sought to convey specific attributes to the freedmen in his audience. They would need to fend for themselves, assert self-control, and assume responsibility for their lives—all tasks that mid-nineteenthcentury Americans associated with the achievement of manhood. Moreover, these tasks, together with patriotism and religious commitment, had come to embody key aspects of African Methodist male identity. In short, Payne urged the former slaves to become men—and he outlined a course in ‘‘well-regulated liberty’’ and Christian manhood that reflected broad American sensibilities, as well as the specific history of the AME Church.≥Ω


Payne also directed a portion of his sermon to freedwomen in the crowd; in so doing, he reinforced a separation of spheres that had a long, if somewhat checkered, tradition within the church. As clergymen argued over women’s role during the early decades of the denomination’s existence, Payne was one of many authorities who strongly resisted the notion that women could take a leading role.∂≠ In particular, he and other church leaders refused to contemplate the ordination of women as ministers. Intent on using the denomination as a forum for developing black manhood—and for proving the worth of black manhood to skeptical whites— AME ministers could not endorse a leadership role for women in the church. Indeed, a critical component of church leaders’ vision of manhood rested on the very authority that they exercised over women. To have allowed women into the ministry would have been to give up their own cherished status as heads of a thriving religious household.∂∞ At the same time that they fought to reserve the pulpit for men, however, ministers— beginning with Richard Allen—constructed an alternative role for pious women—that of good Christian mothers. In doing so, they echoed generations of white Americans, who had long idealized images of the ‘‘sainted mother.’’ In an editorial penned in the spring of 1867, Payne gave a typical tribute to the power of his own female relatives, and his mother in particular, whom he credited with keeping him from losing faith in God in the face of racism and slavery: ‘‘I [have] been driven to the verge of infidelity, by the slavery of the South and caste of the North. Nothing but my early Christian training, by a sainted mother and a sainted great-aunt, kept me from taking the fearful leap.’’∂≤ By promoting a vision of women as mothers— rather than peers—church leaders instituted definitions of black womanhood that helped to sustain and support their goals for black men.∂≥ Payne made a special plea to freedwomen as mothers at the Emancipation celebration in Washington, D.C. He reminded them that they were entrusted with the ‘‘culture of the heart’’ of their children—and, especially, their sons. Freedwomen, Payne emphasized, needed to be ‘‘right-minded,’’ chaste, devout, and ‘‘greater than the men, in order that they be the mothers of great men.’’∂∂ Payne’s address reflected the denomination’s efforts to define black womanhood, but it also served to reemphasize the fact that the church’s real mission was to make men. For Payne and his cohorts, true womanhood would come about only as a product of real manhood. When black men obtained their rightful authority in society, then black women would as-


sume their proper position as well, as willing subordinates to strong and capable men. Ministers’ chronicles of black achievements underscored their concerns for manhood. When missionaries like James Lynch and Henry Turner regaled their audiences with stories of black accomplishment, a particular aim was to elaborate a heroic history of black men. Highlighting the achievements of Egyptian civilization, they pointedly recalled that ‘‘Ham and his whole posterity . . . were the first great men of the world.’’∂∑ Moving forward, speakers recounted tales of African American men’s military prowess and religious leadership. Drawing a line from the past to the future, they argued that successive generations of black inventors, war heroes, and ministers modeled black men’s fitness for all the rights and privileges of independent manhood, including suffrage. AME Church leaders recited black men’s accomplishments in order not only to counter white prejudice and organize for the vote but also to alter southern freedmen’s sense of themselves. Time and again, spokesmen worried that African Americans were ‘‘emancipated’’ but ‘‘not yet free. . . . The great masses . . . have to be taught manly dignity.’’∂∏ In turn, church leaders emphasized history’s capacity to reform black identities in the South. Embodied in their own example, stories of a heroic black past would transform slaves into men. Reflecting on their experiences of Emancipation many years later, two former slaves echoed precisely these sentiments. Reminiscing about their first encounters with AME missionaries after the war, the two men neatly captured the convergence of history, race, and manhood in church ideology when they insisted that the postwar meetings had transformed their self-perception and propelled them forward into their own careers as religious leaders. Levi Coppin recalled that the most important object accomplished by the freedom celebrations in his hometown of Cecilton, Maryland, was the bringing ‘‘to one of the dark corners of the earth men who represented the higher and better element of our people, a muchneeded lesson for both colored and white to learn.’’ William Heard, who was in his teens at the end of the war, similarly testified about the impact of hearing AME leader Henry M. Turner’s speech titled, ‘‘The Negro of All Ages,’’ in Augusta, Georgia, in January 1867—two years after Turner so inspired his black audience at the Emancipation Day celebration in the Springfield Baptist Church in 1865. Heard recalled, ‘‘I was so impressed with the pictures and historic facts he presented of the Race in past ages,


and of the men of the present, that my life is largely what it is because of the impressions made at this meeting.’’∂π By the time Coppin and Heard penned their memoirs, they were elder statesmen of the AME Church, looking back on long and illustrious careers. Thus their recollections reveal as much about church tradition— and institutional memory—as they do about individual experience. It is striking how perfectly their memories correspond to the hopes and expectations of missionaries in the post-Emancipation South. For Coppin in particular, the significance of freedom was inextricably bound to the arrival of African Methodism in his hometown. He recalled the precise moment when the congregation to which his family belonged made the decision to affiliate with the AME Church: ‘‘We would now have our own class leaders, who in addressing us would say brother and sister . . . we would now have our children baptized, and give them names. Call them ‘John Wesley,’ and ‘Richard Allen,’ and ‘Abraham Lincoln’ if we wished . . . [and have] religious and business meetings without the presence of a town official.’’∂∫

J As they labored to establish black men’s worthiness, AME churchmen stumbled over the problem of slavery. Indeed, black leaders’ profound ambivalence about the memory of slavery was inextricably linked to their concern for establishing black men’s independence. Thus, when James Lynch urged southern freedpeople to ‘‘forget the sins of the past,’’ he emphasized the transformation of black men in freedom: ‘‘The colored man enters into a new life and beholds a brighter destiny.’’ Other spokesmen, like Henry Turner and Martin Delany, took a different tack. They sought to overturn white ideologies by insisting that the history of slavery, in fact, demonstrated black men’s superiority over white men, who had betrayed their own standards of manhood by falsely assigning black men to a position of dependency. Unlike white men, Turner argued, black men were truly committed to upholding the ideal of independent manhood; they did not seek ‘‘to enslave’’ other men or ‘‘deprive them . . . disfranchise them, or . . . expatriate them.’’∂Ω Another strategy was to represent slavery through images of sexually exploited black women. In fact, black women often appeared as injured and oppressed slaves in the visions of history that dominated AME ministers’ commemorative speeches. White and black abolitionists, especially female, had long designated the sexual abuse of female slaves as a particu-


larly loathsome consequence of slavery. But to AME ministers like Turner, the sexual exploitation of female slaves was primarily a crime against black men, who were unable to protect and maintain sexual possession of ‘‘their’’ women. Turner scorned the argument, set forth by whites, that black men desired white women: ‘‘Look at our ladies; do you want more beauty than that? All we ask of the white man is to let our ladies alone, and they need not fear us. The difficulty has heretofore been, our ladies were not always at our own disposal.’’∑≠ By hoisting up the image of sexually exploited female slaves, AME churchmen signaled their belief that slavery had violated black manhood—without having to portray a single degraded black man. In representing slavery in the figure of a violated black woman, ministers fought off images that frightened them most—images of weakened and disabled black men—and freed themselves to emphasize contrary narratives of strong and capable manhood. Moreover, by asserting their present and future claim to unfettered sexual access to black women, ministers like Turner marked a sharp break with the past: from here on out, they emphasized, black men intended to exercise all the contemporary prerogatives of manhood. Ministers like Turner, Lynch, and Payne were concerned with asserting the rights of men—and the concomitant subordination of women— because AME women continued to challenge male prerogatives within the church. Like earlier generations of women who disputed men’s control of the pulpit, female members during the postwar years acted to broaden their role and subtly expanded the boundaries of men’s definitions of liberty. Prominent churchwomen like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper regularly wrote and lectured on the role of women in fostering freedom and citizenship. Harper, who was born free in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1825 and flourished as an antislavery activist before the war, had, by the 1860s, become one of the country’s most prominent and prolific African American writers. She published in a wide range of genres, including essays, poetry, and fiction. Not all ministers were as conservative as Daniel Payne, however. In 1869, the Christian Recorder published a minister’s critique of the denomination’s single-minded focus on men: ‘‘[W]hile men boast of themselves, how seldom do we hear of women. Shall the Church be silent? Must she never speak of her great ones?’’∑∞ The positive coverage of activist women like Harper in the Christian Recorder suggests that there were spokesmen who


entertained more expansive ideas about women’s role. At the same time, many AME women embraced aspects of their position as ‘‘helpmeets’’ to male leaders and used that role to gain an enhanced position within their community—as when they stressed their role as wives, mothers, and teachers, or formed societies for the purpose of publicly aiding or honoring black men.∑≤ Still, at least some women challenged existing gender roles in ways that few male church leaders would have expected—or supported. Even the most liberal ministers emphasized the importance of bolstering manhood. Henry Turner, who stood out among his peers as a proponent of women’s rights within the church, nevertheless defined the achievement of liberty and rights in deeply gendered terms and constantly defended the contemporary prerogatives of manhood.∑≥ By contrast, Harper, one of the most prominent leaders in both the abolitionist and the women’s rights movements, described a path to equal citizenship for men and women. The novel Minnie’s Sacrifice, which Harper published in serial form in the Christian Recorder in 1869, told the story of a light-skinned black couple, who could have lived in relative comfort in the North after the Civil War but instead chose to return to the South, in order to work among the freedpeople.∑∂ Louis devoted himself to teaching the freedpeople ‘‘to be saving and industrious, and to turn their attention to becoming land owners’’ and delved into local politics, while Minnie worked to instill in freedwomen ‘‘those womanly arts that give beauty, strength and grace to the fireside . . . to make their homes bright and happy.’’∑∑ Up to this point in the story, Harper conveyed equivalent roles to Minnie and Louis—both had an important position in ‘‘upbuilding the future of the race’’ in the South—but in terms that adhered closely to middle-class gender conventions. Harper diverged sharply from this path later in the story, however, when she depicted a conversation in which Minnie challenged Louis on the question of women’s right to vote. Indeed, Minnie’s argument not only questioned male privilege but also contested the idea— carefully elaborated by AME churchmen and other leaders—that past actions qualified black men for suffrage. ‘‘I think the nation makes a great mistake in settling this question of suffrage,’’ argued Minnie. ‘‘It seems to me that everything gets settled on a partial basis. When they are reconstructing the government why not lay the whole foundation anew, and base the right of suffrage not on the claims of service or sex, but on the broader basis of our common humanity.’’∑∏


Harper elaborated a vision of male-female collaboration and female citizenship that directly disputed the more conservative elements of gender ideology within the AME Church. The arguments set forth by Minnie— and disputed by Louis—also reflect the broader debates that were taking place among women’s rights advocates, African Americans, and Radical Republicans in the years leading up to the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. While a minority of women activists, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Sojourner Truth, argued that any advance in suffrage must include both women and black men, many others advocated the enfranchisement of black men as a step in the right direction. The lines of debate of the Fifteenth Amendment put black women in a particularly untenable position. After failing to advance the cause of universal suffrage, some white women leaders like Stanton and Anthony came out in favor of enfranchising women before black men—resting their argument on racist and class-based stereotypes of black male debasement. Forced to choose between advocates of black male suffrage and supporters of women’s suffrage, Harper joined ranks with the reformers like Frederick Douglass, who, although a strong supporter of women’s rights, argued that black men needed the right to vote—and that black male suffrage would benefit all African Americans, including women. As Harper put it, ‘‘Being black means that every white, including every working-class woman, can discriminate against you.’’ Even as she favored black male voting rights, however, Harper, like Truth, continued to stress that universal suffrage was her ultimate goal.∑π Harper’s story helps to illuminate the complexity of gender relations within the AME Church, as well as the broader political context, but it also serves to reinforce the contrast between ministers’ emphasis on manhood and Harper’s own portrayal of gender parity. Whatever their differences— and it is important to acknowledge them—male church leaders from Payne to Turner privileged the rights of black men above all else. As Louis told Minnie when she raised the issue of black rights, ‘‘This hour belongs to the negro [i.e., men].’’ Seeking to appease his wife, Louis went on, ‘‘[Y]ou cannot better the condition of the colored men without helping the colored women. What elevates him helps her.’’∑∫ In spite of his doubts, Louis listened patiently (if a bit patronizingly) to Minnie’s beliefs and conceded a measure of wisdom in her arguments. In doing so, he far exceeded the willingness of most of his real-life counterparts to grant equal importance to women’s suffrage. Harper offered her story as a cor-


rective measure to contemporary debates over race, gender, and suffrage, rather than as a reflection of actual conditions within the church or black society at large.

J AME churchmen left their mark on institutions of memory in the postEmancipation South. Throughout the postwar period, they sponsored ceremonies that embodied their gendered visions of freedom, from Washington, D.C., to Macon, Georgia. And, with the institutional network embodied in a publishing house and weekly periodical, African Methodists had the means to secure their perceptions of local ceremonies at a national level. This is not to say that ministers were wholly unified; their portrayals of history and commemoration reflected both internal conflicts and varying degrees of paternalism toward former slaves. What AME spokesmen had in common was a shared understanding of freedom as a turning point in the history of black manhood, and a desire to carve out a role for the ‘‘Church that has always recognized manhood’’ in the future of the South. Typically, Turner celebrated black men’s expanding liberty in particularly trenchant terms: ‘‘The time has come in the history of this nation, when the . . . black man can assert his rights, and feel his manhood. No longer can the men of our race be legally made to quall up the scorn and derisions of a misanthropic rabble, many of whom are so inexplicably [corrupted] . . . from licentious lives . . . that if they were sent as delegates to . . . a dog’s assembly . . . they would be denounced as trying to insinuate themselves into ranks superior.’’∑Ω However differently expressed, AME churchmen from James Lynch to Henry Turner shared a powerful vision: with the arrival of freedom, black men had finally come into their own, and AME ministers were ready to assume their rightful place among the nation’s—indeed the world’s—leaders. When it came to emphasizing the goals of independent black manhood—and accompanying images of subordinate black womanhood— AME churchmen were far from alone. Both freeborn black men and freedmen—especially former soldiers and members of paramilitary organizations—helped to shape celebrations that defined history and citizenship primarily in terms of male achievement. The growing impact of electoral politics was a particularly important factor in male-centered ceremonies. When Republicans organized in southern black communities during the months following the war, political associations such as the Union League took an increasing role in coordinating public ceremonies, in-


cluding commemorations. Controlled by men and dedicated to electoral politics, these organizations—like the Union League in Charleston— sponsored commemorations that were clearly organized along the lines of gender. Men dominated the speech-making and grabbed center stage in many parades. When women did march alongside men, their formal roles often helped to articulate separate male and female identities, as well as rising class aspirations: Male participants strode through southern towns as soldiers, tradesmen, and political leaders, while women marched as members of schools and civic associations, or sat, dressed in white, atop lavishly decorated ‘‘cars of liberty’’—a practice particularly irritating to white southerners, as it so closely resembled the carriages of women, decked out to represent the states of the Confederacy, that were popular in southern cities during the war.∏≠ A gendered division of labor also occurred behind the scenes, as men commanded positions of leadership on planning committees and directed the coordination of big events such as the parades, while women took over the supportive tasks of fund-raising, decorations, and providing refreshment. Accounts of celebrations in the nascent southern black press mirrored the gendered organization of reports in the Christian Recorder, thereby enhancing a common portrait of celebrations as first and foremost a tribute to manhood, with women occupying a significant but ancillary role. In the months and years following Emancipation, the pages of black publications gave rise to familiar, even formulaic, accounts of commemorations. To a reader hoping to glean some insight into the individual character of local events, the standard patterning of the accounts can be frustrating. The very conventions that occlude difference, however, are most revealing of the cultural work that black writers aimed to accomplish in their reports. By presenting the commemorative and patriotic actions of black southerners in increasingly predictable terms, leaders created a common vocabulary for rearticulating African Americans’ relationship to a revitalized nation—a vocabulary that stressed, above all, the ascent of black men to their rightful place as citizens enjoying all the prerogatives of American manhood. Indeed, it was precisely by establishing a standard lexicon of black ceremonies, one that infused both personal and published accounts of celebrations, that spokesmen inscribed the membership of black men in a reconstituted national community. Male leaders, however, were not entirely successful. Reading against the grain of southern white accounts, we can see that efforts to instill ‘‘respect-


able’’ gender conventions could fall short. The aim of Democratic commentators was, of course, to discredit black ceremonies, and one way to do so was to emphasize the unfeminine actions of women at public events. Hostile observers insisted that black citizenship was a farce precisely because African American women acted in ways that contravened middleclass standards for public behavior. Used with care, however, the reports of white newspaper writers shed new light on the actions of African American women, and reveal facets of black celebrations that go undisclosed in the accounts of AME ministers and other black male leaders. Time and again, white observers noted freedwomen’s highly visible presence—and assertive actions—in processions and at the large and energetic rallies that accompanied many ceremonies. The most vivid portraits of women’s participation appeared in accounts covering early events such as the 1863 Emancipation Day celebration in Norfolk and the 1865 Emancipation celebration in Charleston. But freedwomen continued to appear in white reports of commemorations throughout the late 1860s and beyond. Thus, a reporter in Atlanta, Georgia, echoed the observations of many white colleagues when he went to considerable lengths to lampoon the proceedings at an African American celebration of the Fourth of July, noting that many at the accompanying Republican rally were women, who ‘‘seemed to enjoy the thing amazingly’’ and registered their opinions of various speakers through shouting and a vigorous ‘‘waiving of handkerchiefs.’’∏∞ Southern white observers also took note of women energetically partaking in late-night dances, barbecues, and other festivities associated with commemorative and patriotic occasions. Denying the possibility of freedwomen’s civic and political interests, many whites interpreted their presence at public ceremonies as a sign of illicit sexual activity. The Charleston Daily Courier, a Democratic newspaper, delighted in describing the sale of refreshments by black women along the Fourth of July parade route in the city: ‘‘Along the prescribed route . . . the antiquated maumas [had their wares] exposed conspicuously to the rapacious gaze of dusky promenaders.’’ The Courier also derided nighttime dances, where ‘‘dusky daughters’’ cavorted with ‘‘sable gallants’’ until late hours. Similar language permeated Democratic accounts of black women’s presence at public celebrations.∏≤ In spite of their obvious bias, Democratic accounts help us to see a broader range of public action by women, thereby revealing more complex


gender dynamics than black male authorities cared to recognize. In recent years, scholars have reconstructed several facets of freedwomen’s selfdefinition and conduct in the post-Emancipation South.∏≥ By no means uniform, these authors’ insights nevertheless help to contextualize the particular decisions individual freedwomen made as they struggled to create opportunities for themselves, their families, and their communities. While rightly stressing the limits race, class, and gender placed on freedwomen’s choices, scholars have concluded that former slave women advanced their own definitions of black womanhood—definitions that often did not conform to middle-class notions of female comportment, and that sometimes came into conflict with the interests of freedmen as well. As Elsa Barkley Brown, Julie Saville, Steven Hahn, and other scholars have shown, freedwomen’s self-assertion clearly extended into the public sphere. Freedwomen acted, both individually and collectively, to influence civic and political affairs in their communities. Freedwomen attended—and voted—at mass meetings held by freedpeople to debate pressing political issues and forcefully voiced their opinions at Republican Party conventions. Moreover, freedwomen tended to view suffrage not as a separate gain for black men but as an important step forward for all African Americans. After black men were enfranchised, women continued to engage in electoral politics by organizing political societies, helping to get out the vote, and even standing guard to protect male voters at the polls.∏∂ These insights into freedwomen’s actions, coupled with the contemporary evidence from Democratic observations of black celebrations, caution against a one-dimensional interpretation of the gendered organization of black ceremonies. Certainly, the ceremonies consistently emphasized male accomplishment.∏∑ But the democratic, participatory nature of the black public sphere ran counter to exclusive interpretations of history, freedom, and citizenship. At a moment when black male authority was far from secure, and both freedmen and freedwomen participated in political affairs, African American women asserted their own notions of history, citizenship, and freedom in the post-Emancipation South. Marching in or cheering on a parade, voicing their opinions at a rally, engaging in prayer, selling their wares on a streetside corner, or singing and dancing into the night, women were visible—not always ‘‘respectable’’—participants in patriotic and commemorative events. They were themselves a mixed group; freeborn women and freedwomen mingled together. These women—of diverse experiences, interests, and


opinions—alternately challenged and reinforced male participants’ interpretations of free manhood and womanhood, and asserted their right to participate in public ceremonies in a variety of ways. Even when women’s actions met the expectations of male leaders, it does not follow that they had common motivations. There is every indication, for example, that individual women reveled in their positions as Goddesses of Liberty, actively sought opportunities to pay homage to male soldiers, and took pride, as well as pleasure, in the work of fund-raising and decorations. But this is not to say that black women—particularly freedwomen—embraced the subordinate aspects of ‘‘ladyhood’’ in the way that many male leaders, such as AME missionaries, did. Nor did freedwomen necessarily subscribe to other elements of middle-class respectability, particularly when it came to proscriptions against assertive public behavior. No longer bound by slavery, women celebrants refashioned themselves as free women in the postwar South. When African American women donned ‘‘lovely’’ dresses in preparation for elegant public ceremonies they literally dressed themselves for freedom. When they cast themselves as Goddesses of Liberty, clothed in flowing white costumes, they embodied a symbolic position in patriotic pageantry from which they had formerly been excluded. And when they shouted out their approval or condemnation of a political speaker, they asserted their own definition of female citizenship. In all these ways and more, African American women embraced their capacity to shape their own identities as free women, liberated from the constraints of slavery—fancy dress and all.∏∏

J The gendered organization of black ceremonies becomes even more complex when viewed in the context of freedmen’s schools and Sunday schools. The participatory black public sphere that evolved after emancipation encompassed schools and churches, along with meeting halls, streets, and town squares. Compared to celebrations led by ministers or Republican organizers, events sponsored by freedmen’s schools and Sunday schools afforded women greater opportunities for participation, and even leadership. In these venues, girls and women participated in recitations, tableaux, parades, excursions to decorate the graves of Union soldiers, and annual exhibitions.∏π At an anniversary ceremony conducted at an AME Sabbath school in Georgetown, South Carolina, for instance, a prominent female church member, Mrs. Thomas Pauley, stood to deliver a speech—an act that rarely occurred in male-centered public arenas. Rising


to the occasion, Pauley hailed ‘‘the precious jewel, Heaven-sent liberty, which has broken loose the chains of more than 4,000,000 of our race’’ and instructed the listening children to ‘‘[l]ook for a moment’’ at the transformation of black southerners in recent years: ‘‘Retrospect the past and view the present. To-day you crowd the streets of our town, with imposing processions, which speak in language that cannot be misunderstood.’’∏∫ Several factors differentiated schoolyard ceremonies from celebrations directed by male ministers or Republican officials. Sunday schools and freedmen’s schools were equally open to boys and girls, men and women, in marked contrast to male-centered domains such as the Union Leagues. Women teachers, both black and white, who comprised a majority of the missionaries who traveled to the South under the auspices of the American Missionary Association and the National Freedmen’s Relief Association, often directed—and wrote about—celebrations occurring at the schools, as did women working as Sunday school teachers in southern churches.∏Ω Not only did these women cast freedwomen in leading roles, but they also jumped in themselves.π≠ Educators and Sunday school instructors were less narrowly focused on establishing the citizenship—and especially the political rights—of black men than either Republican organizations or male clergymen in the years following the Civil War. Rather, teachers emphasized ‘‘moral’’ and behavioral developments, which, along with academic training, they believed to be imperative for the transition from slavery to citizenship; while these were certainly concerns of AME spokesmen, they tended to stress the status of freedmen as the foundation for black citizenship during the years leading up to the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. Educators and Sunday school leaders, however, frequently identified freedwomen as the standard-bearers for African American freedom. Believing that African American women could best affect the development of character and behavior, they repeatedly highlighted women’s importance in the shaping of black citizenship—an approach that resembled the actions of social leaders during the years following the American Revolution who argued that women were important to the new republic because they were the mothers—and therefore the shapers—of future citizens. In many ways, the educators’ views complemented AME missionaries’ designation of women as mothers. But, like generations of women before them who had used the positive valuation of motherhood to justify expanding women’s roles into a variety of public realms, northern educators’ stress on freed-


women’s responsibilities offered a broader definition of female citizenship than ministers and Republican organizers. The emphasis on women’s civic identities in turn was expressed in teachers’ conduct and retelling of commemorative affairs.π∞ Educators’ sponsorship of ceremonies frequently brought them into conflict with southern authorities, who zeroed in on women’s leadership as a particularly bothersome aspect of school-led celebrations. White residents complained bitterly that the northern women were falsely turning African Americans against their former owners. Intensely nationalistic and wholly confident in the sinfulness of slavery, many instructors took great pleasure in schooling students in the verses of the ‘‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’’ and ‘‘John Brown’s Body.’’ Some taught black-centered visions of history; an instructor at Port Royal, for instance, tutored her students on the origins of slavery in the United States.π≤ One newspaper inveighed against the ‘‘patriotic, self-sacrificing females of New England’’ and looked forward to the day when the South could furnish its own teachers, ‘‘who will not waste time in making the freedpeople sing ‘Down with the Rebels.’ ’’ Other periodicals similarly identified female teachers as a particularly disruptive force. Muttering angrily about the corrupting influence of ‘‘female disorganizers’’ on black residents, local whites insisted that former slaves would be perfectly tractable were it not for the manipulations of northern women.π≥ Of course, southern whites indulged in wishful thinking when they imagined that, free of the influence of ‘‘female disorganizers,’’ African Americans would quietly concede to white authority. Still, they correctly identified northern women’s public initiatives as glaring examples of social unrest in their communities. The women’s presence was an unpleasant reminder of just how much the demise of slavery, the loss of the war, and the onset of Reconstruction had challenged the very core of southern identities, blurring lines between black and white, male and female, elite and impoverished. To make matters worse, northern white women’s public actions were not dedicated to resurrecting the strength and authority of white manhood, as were the organizational activities—such as Confederate memorial associations—of many southern white women in the years following the war. On the contrary, when female missionaries helped to build a black school or mount a demonstration in honor of Emancipation, they acted to extend African American freedom in ways that further eroded white authority and privilege in the postwar South.π∂


The Freedmen’s Union Industrial School, Richmond, Virginia, 1866. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Not infrequently, female missionaries ran into trouble with men. E. F. Campbell, a teacher working at a freedmen’s school in Norfolk, Virginia, wondered if she had become a ‘‘strong minded’’ and ‘‘fanatical’’ woman after she went against the wishes of a male supervisor to endorse black residents’ plans for an Emancipation Day celebration. Campbell openly demonstrated her support on the day of the black parade by throwing open the windows of the schoolhouse and vigorously waving her handkerchief at passing marchers. Later, she acknowledged that her actions were provocative, but she defended herself nonetheless, insisting that she ‘‘felt ashamed at the thought of letting them pass unnoticed.’’π∑ Teachers like Campbell assumed a vital and highly visible position in the transformation of blacks from slaves to citizens. While their role hearkened back to long-standing traditions of women as mothers and educators of future citizens, their excursions into the war-torn South placed them at the center of public controversies over the nature of black citizenship and the relationship of an ‘‘errant’’ South to the nation at large. Moreover, teaching had come to represent ‘‘respectable’’ work for middle-class women in the


North but was only gradually becoming so in the South, where acceptable activities for middle-class and elite white women expanded much more slowly.π∏ Even as hostile southerners and some male colleagues charged northern women with instigating social chaos, however, the teachers themselves sought to exert social control over southern freedpeople. Like AME ministers, male and female educators were somewhat ambivalent on the subject of black freedom. Most instructors professed their faith in the viability of black citizenship—and yet harbored deep and abiding prejudices toward the freedpeople. Of course, not all teachers thought alike, and there was considerable contrast between individuals like Jacob Yoder, a white missionary teacher in Lynchburg, Virginia, who expressed his faith in freedpeople’s capacity to ‘‘govern themselves,’’ and countless others who insisted that African Americans exhibited ‘‘depraved habits and tastes.’’ Still, most educators and Sunday school leaders—both black and white—shared common assumptions about appropriate behaviors and the need to school former slaves in the duties that accompanied freedom.ππ In contrast to AME ministers, who so clearly emphasized the reconstruction of black manhood, however, female missionaries underscored the role for black women in ‘‘reforming’’ southern communities. Confronted with actions and behaviors among southern freedpeople that confounded their own middle-class sensibilities, missionaries consistently identified the freedpeople’s homes—and thus freedwomen—as a particular source of alleged corruption. ‘‘If one could only revolutionize their homes it seems as if [they might become civilized],’’ asserted one teacher, echoing the sentiment of many others. Missionary leaders’ perception of the effects of female ‘‘depravity’’ led them to focus on recruiting women as teachers for southern communities: ‘‘A la Port Royal Enterprise, we need women— discreet and efficient—to come down here, and go round among the colored women, and at times assemble them together to teach them sewing and other things connected with good house wifery.’’π∫ Many educators also carefully transcribed freedwomen’s stories of female courage and defiance—as well as struggle—under slavery. In doing so, they aimed both to promote and to shape African American women as historical agents and deserving citizens of the nation. A letter written by a northern teacher, in which she described a flagraising ceremony at the Lincoln Industrial School in Richmond, Virginia, illuminates the teacher’s interest in black women’s civic identity. The Lin-


coln School was established shortly after the war to train African American women as seamstresses and garment workers. In a letter to the American Freedman, the Lincoln School teacher devoted a portion of her report to a straightforward account of the clothing that the student seamstresses were producing, and then went on to describe a scene that had occurred at the school during the preceding week. One of the students had suggested that the school display an American flag, and had offered her own. After listening to the woman’s story of how she had concealed the flag from Confederates during the war, students and teaches joined together for a flag-raising ceremony. The teacher explained how the woman kept the flag stashed away: ‘‘[S]he scarcely dared even look at it; but sometimes . . . a few of them would . . . carefully unfold it and look at it and take it in their own hand— and fondle it . . .—and long for the Yankees to come, and pray . . . for the Yankees to come, and fold it up and hide it away again.’’πΩ When the freedwoman produced the flag, members of the school community prepared to raise it. The solemnities of the occasion quickly gave way to a celebration of former president Abraham Lincoln. As both the flag and an engraving of Lincoln were elevated above the crowd, the hall erupted with shouts: ‘‘[A] number of school children . . . crowded in, and instantly, on seeing the picture, without being ‘called on,’ broke into the middle of the speech with ‘Lincoln for ever! Gone, gone for ever! Sleep, dear father, in thy grave; Union and freedom we will save,’ at the tops of their shrill little voices.’’ Adults, too, the teacher reported, responded with great feeling and passion: ‘‘[T]he women cried, ‘Ah, bless de Lord,’ etc., and when the murder was spoken of a shivering groan ran all round the room.’’ Finally, the teacher related how the day’s ceremonies evolved into a collective reminiscence, with the individuals sharing stories of their own encounters with President Lincoln when he passed through Richmond in 1865, and concluded with a resolution to create a monument to the martyred president.∫≠ While the letter published in the American Freedman is interesting for what it reveals about missionary teachers’ vision of African American patriotism and citizenship, it is equally useful as a window into African Americans’ role in shaping a national identity rooted in their own emancipation, and it highlights the particular ways in which school ceremonies enhanced the opportunities for freedwomen to occupy center stage. The transformation of the flag-raising ceremony into a celebration of Abraham Lincoln embodied freedpeople’s identification of Emancipation as a pivotal mo-


ment in the nation’s history. Although much of this account posits Lincoln as the architect of freedom, it is evident that the students did not simply view themselves as passive recipients of their benefactor’s generosity. Indeed, the decisive role of a black woman in the delivery and display of the flag, the alteration of the ceremony to commemorate Lincoln, the insistent chant of the schoolchildren—‘‘Sleep, dear father, in thy grave; Union and freedom we will save’’—and the call to build a monument all point toward African Americans’ insistence on their own crucial role in the creation and maintenance of freedom. Finally, the day’s events in Richmond vividly portray the role of history-making in blacks’ transformation from slaves to citizens. What began as a flag-raising ceremony concluded as a commemoration, with individual reminiscences culminating in a collective call for a monument to Abraham Lincoln. As the students at the Lincoln Industrial School gathered together to proclaim their allegiance to the flag, they began to tell stories about the past—stories that asserted a central place for African Americans in the United States.

J The cultural labor of producing black citizens—that is, the work of remaking collective histories and identities to fit the conditions of freedom—was fundamentally rooted in gender. When freedpeople asserted their rights as citizens in the post-Emancipation South, they predicated their claims on their own varied understandings of what it meant to be free men or free women. At the same time, they confronted the diverse beliefs of formerly free African Americans, missionaries, government officials, and white southerners. Each time a freedperson married, asserted control over children, made choices about how and where to work, or attended a political rally, he or she did so in the context of competing ideas of gender and citizenship. Conflicts over African American identities, in turn, took place within an even broader ‘‘crisis in gender,’’ as white southerners dealt with the impact of the war and Emancipation on the privileges of white manhood and womanhood. The men who went off to fight for the Confederacy did so with confidence in the superiority of their soldierly capabilities, only to be crushed by the overwhelming force of northern soldiers—among them, former slaves. Not only did over 260,000 Confederate soldiers lose their lives, but those who were fortunate enough to return home were broken in body and spirit. Many had formerly presided over thriving households and productive farms: some could boast of expansive plantations before the


war; most now found their fortunes drastically reduced. Those who had lost slaves also found themselves bereft of mastery—a vital component of their identities as leading men in antebellum society. In the meantime, southern white women of all classes had suffered wartime hardships that shattered their understandings of what it meant to be white and female— whether by taking over farms and plantations in the absence of men, stealing and rioting to help their families get by, attempting to wield authority over increasingly recalcitrant slaves, or losing the trappings of ladyhood from fine clothes to leisure. The result was a society in which the present—and future—organization of gender was very unclear.∫∞ Amid so much uncertainty, postwar celebrations were both a site for conflict and a force for order. Clearly, diverse actors had an impact on the representation of gender at black ceremonies. It is crucial to recognize the energetic and expansive nature of public ceremonies and the many ways in which women and children, as well as men, participated in them. But it is equally important to acknowledge the systematic construction of black history and progress in terms of male achievement and the persistent emphasis on female respectability and domesticity as a measure of freedom’s success. To many of those who took over the reins of leadership, a public reformation of gender was crucial to the establishment of African American citizenship. The historical narratives of manhood left a powerful legacy for future generations of African Americans, who would contend with ideologies of black history and progress that defined racial achievements almost exclusively in terms of male accomplishment.∫≤ The elaboration of male and female roles in African American celebrations brings us to a significant paradox. Dedicated to expanding the ‘‘imagined community’’ along the lines of race, black celebrations often relied on distinctions—and inequalities—of gender. Rooted in a black civic culture that invited—and engaged—the participation of all community members, many occasions nonetheless presented black men as the most important historical actors, patriots, and citizens. Blending the initiatives of northern missionaries, Republican officials, and formerly free African Americans, as well as southern freedpeople, African American commemoration in the early-Reconstruction South worked both to expand the imagined community of the nation beyond its antebellum boundaries and to reinforce long-standing gendered hierarchies. Still, such restrictions should not obscure the considerable accomplishments of the celebrations. Men and women who collaborated on postwar ceremonies enacted a racially


inclusive vision of history that defined Emancipation as the Civil War’s raison d’être and proclaimed black (male) citizenship as the nation’s Godgiven destiny. The passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 appeared to concretize this vision. Securing the right to vote, declared AME bishop Jabez B. Campbell, was ‘‘freedom’s triumph, and the final seal of God in the condemnation of American slavery.’’ A ‘‘second revolution’’ was taking place in America, he asserted, and all members of the church should observe a ‘‘day of Thanksgiving, praise, and prayer, to Almighty God, the Supreme Ruler and Governor of the Universe, for His goodness bestowed upon us.’’ Accordingly, a large congregation assembled in the Bethel Church in Philadelphia—‘‘Mother Bethel,’’ the first AME Church, founded in 1794 by Richard Allen—on the evening of 26 April for a program of prayer, song, speeches, and resolutions.∫≥ Elsewhere around the country, ministers rushed to heed Campbell’s call. Charles Hunter, an employee at a local branch of the Freedmen’s Savings and Trust Company in Raleigh, North Carolina, wrote excitedly of a local AME celebration. No one was left out. Campbell reported that the presiding minister invited all denominations to take part in the day’s ceremonies, which followed a by-then-familiar pattern: patriotic singing, a sermon, and a closing anthem. After the opening music, a local minister addressed the mixed congregation. ‘‘The discourse was one of ability— eloquent, impressive, and appropriate,’’ Hunter wrote. ‘‘It was very interesting and instructive. During its delivery the strictest attention was observed. On few occasions have we heard a more suitable and touching address.’’ Several other ministers addressed the crowd, and the meeting was closed by singing ‘‘Blow Ye the Trumpet Blow.’’∫∂ Throughout the nation, African Americans gathered with white allies to herald the amendment’s passage and proclaim its significance. In Baltimore, Frederick Douglass was among the speakers who welcomed black suffrage as the triumph of democracy, the glory of the Republican Party, and the culmination of decades-long struggles.∫∑ Orators echoed these themes around the country, whether in Camden, New Jersey; Edgefield, South Carolina; or Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.∫∏ While leading spokesmen rushed to interpret the meaning of the amendment, African Americans took to the streets in massive processions that rivaled the great public demonstrations of 1865.∫π The determined confidence of African Americans in the wake of the Fifteenth Amendment was personified by AME minister Henry Turner,


Image rights unavailable

African Americans celebrate the Fifteenth Amendment in Baltimore, 1870. The Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, Maryland.

who was hard at work in Georgia, endeavoring to bolster the faltering Republican Party against Democratic assaults. The events culminating in the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment were, Turner declared, so momentous as to be ‘‘overwhelmingly inexpressible.’’ The enfranchisement of black men, he avowed, was ‘‘the finish of our national fabric . . . the headstone of the world’s asylum; the crowning achievement of the nineteenth century; the brightest glare of glory that ever hung over land or sea.’’ The future could hardly be brighter: ‘‘Hereafter, the oppressed children of all countries can find a temple founded upon civil rectitude and religious equity . . . durable enough to vie with all coming time.’’∫∫ In the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, African Americans saw


both the realization and the promise of their greatest hopes. Indeed, the amendment’s passage marked a moment when the historical vision projected so boldly and eloquently in the African American commemorations of the preceding seven years appeared to be coming true. The moment, however, was short-lived. After 1870, struggles quickly intensified within the Republican Party and between Democrats and Republicans, and southern whites responded with increasing vehemence to African Americans’ enhanced position in the public life of the South.

chapter three

Would it not be well for us to inform some of our patriotic friends who are so gloriously celebrating the 100th anniversary of American Independence, that the first blood that was shed for American liberty was that of a negro, Crispus Attucks, who fell while nobly defending the city of Boston March 5th, 1770? And yet our Democratic friends say this is a white man’s country. Savannah Colored Tribune, 8 July 1876

JR Has Emancipation Been a Failure? the end of reconstruction In many respects, the scene in downtown Charleston on 4 July 1874 resembled those of previous years. By midday, African American men, women, and children thronged the local streets and sidewalks, as hundreds of visitors arrived from different points along the lines of nearby railroads and mingled with local residents downtown. Charleston was largely emptied of white residents, many of whom had gone off on boating excursions around the harbor. From early in the morning until late at night, African

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American women peddled their wares, selling lemonade, sassafras beer, and ginger pop to thirsty revelers. Crowds of onlookers were treated to a parade led by South Carolina militia companies and the Union League, followed by speech-making and festivities at the Battery.∞ As in many towns and cities, the patterns of African American celebration that developed in Charleston in the 1860s had extended into the 1870s. Here, as in other places, crowds could look forward to increasingly familiar ceremonies and festivities as years went by. On the annual occasions—Emancipation Day, Independence Day, and so on—men, women, and children came for the parades, the thrill of political debate, the satisfaction of a barbecue at the end of the day, and the pleasure of music and dancing. On these days, the city belonged to black celebrants. After lining the streets to watch the parade, crowds gathered at a central location— either a church, Military Hall, or Citadel Green during the early years of Reconstruction; White Point Garden, on the Battery, in later years—for rallies that went on into the late afternoon. Extensive speech-making, generally political, was followed by dancing and general merrymaking far into the night.≤ Leading figures were familiar faces by the 1870s. Many of the same speakers had been putting in appearances for some time, and the roster of organizers and speakers was a veritable Who’s Who of elite black leadership in the state. The most frequent participant in Charleston was Alonzo J. Ransier, who helped to organize both Emancipation Day ceremonies and Fourth of July celebrations from the immediate postwar period until the end of Reconstruction. Born free in Charleston in 1834, Ransier worked as a clerk before the Civil War and was an important political leader in South Carolina during Reconstruction. He held a number of elected and appointed positions, including state representative from 1868 to 1870, lieutenant governor from 1870 to 1872, U.S. representative from 1873 to 1875, and U.S. Internal Revenue collector from 1875 to 1877. Championing the Republican Party as ‘‘a progressive poor man’s party,’’ Ransier argued that Republican policies should benefit poor black and white men alike, and he was among those demanding more political offices for blacks in the state. Other organizers included AME Church leader and Republican official Richard H. Cain, Avery School superintendent and political official Francis L. Cardozo, State Representative Robert C. DeLarge, and the indefatigable Martin Delany, who had settled in Charleston after concluding his work for the Freedmen’s Bureau at Hilton

the end of reconstruction 97

Head in 1868. Like Ransier, all of these men were born free, had attained a high level of education before the war, and, with the exception of Delany, achieved considerable financial success during Reconstruction. Leading white Republicans also figured prominently, none more so than Thomas Jefferson Mackey, a native South Carolinian and head of the state’s Union League. Mackey, who served as a judge and magistrate under Republican administrations, acted as grand marshal in numerous parades and was a frequent speaker at black celebrations. White Republican officials, such as Governor Franklin J. Moses, also made frequent appearances, waving to the crowds from open carriages in the processions and stumping for black votes during the afternoon rallies.≥ Those who attended public ceremonies in Charleston in the early 1870s must have noted another, increasingly familiar quality in the speechmaking: strident political argument. Angry disagreements frequently marred Independence Day celebrations and other public ceremonies in Charleston during this period, as interracial distrust and tactical disputes among black political activists fractured Republican unity. Open political arguments were increasingly common, and the speeches that 4 July 1874 were particularly combative. Speakers, both black and white, descended into polemical argument and vicious name-calling. Finally, Timothy Hurley, a white official, topped off a day of hostile wrangling with a sarcastic speech, in which he mocked the very idea of African Americans celebrating the Fourth of July. ‘‘The day,’’ he reportedly insisted, ‘‘did not belong to them. They had nothing to do with it.’’ The celebration, he concluded, was simply a waste of good money. At this point, Martin Delany approached the rostrum, where he angrily defended African Americans’ right to celebrate the nation’s birthday.∂ When African American leaders heralded the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment as the capstone of freedom, few could have anticipated such a scene. In a few years, political turmoil had weakened the Republican Party across the South and made it difficult for black leaders and Republican organizers to mount public demonstrations. Such changes were not uniform. Nor did the waning years of Reconstruction bring an end to public ceremonies among black southerners—far from it. African American commemorations remained vibrant in many parts of the South throughout the 1870s and beyond. And yet shifting conditions affected the organization and tenor of many events. The developments of the 1870s were uneven, but southern black commemorations did transpire within a vastly


changed political and cultural context by the decade’s end. Celebrations closely linked to Republican organizations suffered along with the party’s fortunes. Interracial conflict within the Republican Party and political divisions among African Americans took a toll, particularly on Fourth of July ceremonies. Mounting Democratic attacks created further problems for black organizers, as local Union Leagues faltered and state Republican Parties ceded more and more power to triumphant ‘‘redeemers.’’ One of the most telling signs of change in the political culture was a shift toward segregated celebrations on Emancipation Day and Fourth of July. African Americans in Augusta, for instance, continued to mount public events during the early 1870s, but as the years went by, fewer white officials joined in the ceremonies. The shift was gradual and uneven—white officials in Raleigh, North Carolina, still played significant roles in black-led celebrations well into the 1890s—but signs of segregated ceremonies began to emerge in some parts of the South as early as the 1870s. Public ceremonies may have embodied interracial conflict within the Republican Party, but they also manifested tactical arguments and political disagreements among African Americans themselves. In South Carolina, African Americans debated the best political strategy to combat white Republicans’ resistance to sharing power. Should blacks maintain their allegiance to the Republican Party, ‘‘bolt’’ to a fusionist Reform ticket, or—as some argued—throw their weight behind Democratic campaigns? These disagreements highlighted tensions among black leaders and between leading spokespersons, especially freeborn black elites, and broader communities of African Americans in the state. Throughout the early 1870s, Martin Delany was heavily involved in South Carolina politics— although he failed to gain a major elective office, he held several minor political positions in Charleston, including jury commissioner and trial justice, and actively campaigned for Reform tickets of dissident Democrats and Republicans during the elections of 1872 and 1874. In his political activities, Delany demonstrated a profound ambivalence toward freedpeople’s capacity for organization and leadership, even as he struggled mightily to defend what he perceived to be their economic and political interests. While Delany may have been especially extreme in his distrust of freedpeople’s capabilities—and in his willingness to align himself with ‘‘intelligent’’ Democratic elites—his efforts to reshape political alliances in South Carolina exposed the fault lines that frequently ran just below the surface of public representations of black unity. Like Delany, many urban black leaders were equivocal in their attitudes toward the freedpeople and


sought to impose their own definitions of black political interests on rural communities.∑ The political struggles of African Americans and the Republican Party in South Carolina transpired within the broader context of pitched battles between Democrats and Republicans for control of the South. By 1870, the Ku Klux Klan and fellow terrorist organizations such as the Knights of the White Camelia were operating as a military arm of the Democratic Party throughout much of the South. As Eric Foner argues, the Klan was political in the ‘‘broadest sense,’’ aiming to ‘‘destroy the Republican Party’s infrastructure, undermine the Reconstruction state, reestablish control of the black labor force, and restore racial subordination in every aspect of Southern life.’’∏ Targeting both black and white Republican leaders for violent attack, the Klan had a devastating impact on Reconstruction politics, decimating many local Republican organizations, and especially the Union League.π In South Carolina, a terrible round of attacks transpired in several Piedmont counties in 1870 after the October elections returned Republicans to power in the region; hundreds of whippings and at least eleven murders in one county sent thousands of local blacks into the woods each night to avoid attack during the following winter.∫ Elaborate public demonstrations were pivotal to the Democrats as they strove to consolidate power. In one state after another, party leaders claimed public spaces for their own rallies, which enacted the ‘‘redemption’’ of the region through militaristic parades and dramatic tableaux. When Democratic gubernatorial candidate—and Confederate war hero— Wade Hampton made his famous tour across South Carolina during the pivotal election campaigns of 1876, he was escorted by hundreds of men representing dozens of rifle clubs from across the state; in town after town, they were the stars of energetic, even frenzied, rallies that overflowed local squares. At the very moment when black leaders in many southern communities were struggling to present a united front, the redeemers’ public demonstrations were becoming more and more effective at generating Democratic consensus. Challenges to the black presence in public spaces, which had never entirely ceased, gained momentum, as whites in some places physically resisted black southerners’ right to occupy key public spaces on days of celebration—and the Federal government did not act to stop them.

J In spite of rising Democratic assaults and ongoing struggles within the Republican Party, the results of Reconstruction were not foreseeable in


the early 1870s. To southerners living through the period, the future seemed very uncertain—as, in fact, it was. Especially in places like the black-majority districts of South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana, it was not obvious that Democrats would be able to muster sufficient strength and unity to overwhelm Republican and African American forces. Most state Republican governments remained standing in 1870—albeit on shaky ground. And it was not evident that the Federal government would beat a hasty retreat from southern politics and support for black rights. In 1870–71, Congress moved aggressively to combat terrorist violence when it passed the Enforcement Acts. The resulting investigations and trials decimated the Klan and led to a decline in violence across the South by 1872.Ω Even in Georgia, where Democrats’ rising power was especially apparent, the decade began auspiciously for African Americans and Republican allies. To William Jefferson White, who proudly surveyed the crowds that assembled in downtown Augusta to celebrate Emancipation on New Year’s Day 1870, it appeared as if African Americans had achieved a great deal in just five years.∞≠ From the top of the steps of the town hall, he could see hundreds of African American men, women, and children overflowing onto the adjacent streets. It was an impressive scene, and one that would have held special meaning for White, whose battles to ensure the rights of Georgia blacks had begun before the Civil War. The son of a white planter and a black Indian mother, White had lived in Georgia as a free man during the 1840s and 1850s. Earning a living as a builder and cabinetmaker, he also helped organize a clandestine school for African Americans in Augusta. After Emancipation, he emerged as one of the most prominent and effective black leaders in the city—perhaps in part because he had close ties to both black and white communities. White was instrumental in establishing the Augusta Baptist Institute in 1867, a school for local freedpeople that played an important role in training black leaders and later moved to Atlanta, becoming Morehouse College in 1913. He also helped to organize black Baptists in Georgia, worked for the first black newspaper in the state, the Colored American, and was active in Republican politics. Given the extent of his leadership, it is hardly surprising that White was also at the helm of many public ceremonies taking place in Augusta after the Civil War.∞∞ The 1870 celebration in Augusta came at a propitious moment for black Georgians. In December, Congress had responded to the appeals of state


Republicans—and black leaders in particular—for renewed Federal intervention by committing the troubled state to a third period of Reconstruction. The course of events that convinced Congress to intervene began almost immediately after Georgia was readmitted to the union on 21 July 1868. Free from Federal oversight, Democratic representatives in the state legislature wasted little time in submitting a motion to have black members expelled. They argued that the black legislators were ineligible because the new state constitution, drawn up by a white-dominated constitutional convention earlier that year, did not explicitly identify blacks’ right to hold office. By September, the Democrats had gained sufficient support from conservative white Republicans to cast out twenty-seven of the state’s popularly elected black officials.∞≤ But black legislators did not go down without a fight. Henry Turner, who had previously accepted white Republicans’ assurances that an explicit statement of the right to hold office was unnecessary, was among the ousted representatives. Bitterly angry at what he viewed as a profound betrayal by supposed allies, Turner castigated the white legislators in an impassioned speech before his removal from the state assembly. He announced his intention ‘‘to demand my rights and hurl thunderbolts at the men who would dare to cross the threshold of my manhood.’’ Invoking the forces of history, science, and religion, Turner cast the removal of black legislators as an act that would brand the ‘‘AngloSaxon race’’ with ‘‘cowardice . . . pusillanimity . . . [and] treachery’’ forever in the eyes of God and men: ‘‘You may expel us, gentlemen, by your votes, today: but, while you do it, remember that there is a just God in Heaven, whose All-seeing Eye beholds alike the acts of the oppressor and the oppressed.’’∞≥ Insisting that God and history remained on the side of black manhood, Turner registered the determination of ousted black legislators to reclaim their rights. His speech—and the angry utterances of other black leaders who rose to the floor of the state assembly to protest the expulsions—demonstrated that the actions of the white legislators, and especially white Republicans, had radicalized black leaders in Georgia, making them less willing to rely upon the leadership of whites. At an October convention held in Macon, black leaders vowed to combat white conservatives within their own party, as well as Democratic ‘‘vipers’’ intent on rolling back black rights. But they faced an uphill battle, as increasingly confident white conservatives stepped up their use of violence, intimidation, and fraud to counter black resistance. Galvanized by the successful expulsion of black representatives, the Ku Klux Klan acceler-


ated its attacks, and the state legislature passed several discriminatory measures, including a law that disqualified blacks from jury duty.∞∂ One of the most deadly acts of terror in the fall of 1868 struck directly at black political citizenship. On 19 September, a group of 300 African Americans, including armed men, marched through town, accompanied by a band, on their way to a Republican rally in the town of Camilla, Georgia. The raised and loaded guns of marchers underscored their determination to protect black rights by the same means that they were achieved in the first place, by force, if necessary. As they made their way through Camilla, a group of heavily armed whites, organized under the direction of the county sheriff, opened fire. Black marchers shot back, but they were soon overwhelmed. When the battle ended, several blacks lay dead; dozens more were wounded.∞∑ As word of the massacre spread around the state, angry freedpeople gathered in Albany and threatened to organize a counterattack. Fearful of an all-out race war, O. H. Howard, the local agent of the Freedmen’s Bureau, tried to dissuade African Americans from going to Camilla. Like many bureau agents, Howard had become increasingly apprehensive in the context of escalating violence; over a year before the attacks in Camilla, he had complained to his superiors that he and others were in dire need of military aid. Without it, he felt Georgia agents’ hands were tied—lacking the threat of force, it was virtually impossible to enforce bureau policy. In the wake of the Camilla assault, Howard tried to ease tensions by counseling black Republicans to refrain from political rallies and armed processions, at least for the time being, while the bureau worked to gather evidence of white crimes in the hope of gaining the attention and muchneeded aid of Federal officials.∞∏ In the absence of an effective Republican response, white Georgians continued their reign of terror and Democrats swept to victory in the November elections. Divided over the best strategy for combating the Democratic resurgence, Republican Party leaders split into factions that fought bitterly throughout the following year. It was not until the fall of 1869 that black spokesmen, including William Jefferson White, working with Governor Rufus Bullock and minority white support, were able to overcome widespread resistance to a plan for renewed Federal intervention. Their efforts culminated in a particularly vitriolic session of the state’s Republican Executive Committee in Atlanta in November. At that meeting, White and other black leaders from around the state supported Governor Bul-


lock’s request for a restoration of Federal rule, over the loud and angry protests of prominent white Republicans. Six weeks later, the Bullock coalition triumphed: Congress responded to a directive by President Grant and passed the Reorganization Bill, which outlined the terms for a third period of Reconstruction in the state. Acting quickly, Grant signed the bill into law on 22 December.∞π

J This was the background to the Augusta Emancipation Day celebration led by White on New Year’s Day, 1870. Inspired by recent hard-won victories, members of local organizations strode confidently through town, accompanied by a band, to the seat of the city government. In an impassioned speech delivered from the steps of town hall, White lauded black military achievements and attributed Union victory in the Civil War to the bravery and determination of black troops. Black military feats were by now a common theme in postwar black commemorative speeches, but they took on special significance amid the pitched battles in Georgia, both political and physical. Angry whites grasped the significance of White’s insistence on black military prowess in his Emancipation Day address: editors for the Augusta Constitutionalist denounced the speech as ‘‘an exhibition of intense Radicalism, and quite inflammatory.’’∞∫ Faced with a militant black display, white residents of Augusta might have been tempted to follow the example set by the men who attacked black marchers in Camilla in 1868. Under the renewed scrutiny of northern officials, however, frustrated whites were confined to verbal assaults. The Constitutionalist identified white traitors as the real force behind the black demonstration: ‘‘Altogether [White’s] language was of a decided mischievous tendency, and indicated that . . . it was prompted by all the venom necessary to please his Radical white associates.’’ Lest the threat of black political power be lost on any of the paper’s readers, however, the white newsmen also provided their own interpretation of black men’s aims and aspirations: ‘‘[White] congratulated his hearers that the stigma . . . heretofore attaching to the negro race was being wiped out, and that the day was not too far distant when the white man of Augusta will be proud to be able to claim that they had negro blood in their veins.’’∞Ω With much to celebrate, African Americans around the state laid plans for demonstrations to rival the massive commemorations of the immediate postwar years. Once again, local whites were helpless to inhibit black marches: enormous processions led by uniformed black men occupied the


streets of Georgia towns in that following spring. On one occasion, a white man unloosed a fireplug on a passing black parade—and was immediately placed under arrest.≤≠ Most white residents resorted to strategies they had devised soon after the war; they stayed indoors or left town altogether and then mocked black ceremonies in their local newspapers. For the moment, the balance of power appeared to have tipped back in the favor of black Georgians. On 26 April, a date chosen to coincide with ongoing celebrations of the Fifteenth Amendment in Philadelphia, African Americans returned to the streets of Augusta for a parade that concluded in a massive rally at the local town hall. Once the marchers had arrived at the city hall, a series of black speakers addressed the assembled crowds. Exercises were opened by a prayer, delivered by a local barber, and Edwin Belcher, a black state legislator representing Wilkes County, read the proclamation of the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment. William Jefferson White delivered a keynote address to a boisterous audience—white reporters, standing at some distance, could clearly hear their cheers and applause. After three hours, the rally concluded, but the celebration lasted well into the night. At 9:30 p.m., participants gathered for a final torchlight procession through the city streets.≤∞ Elsewhere in Georgia, African Americans carried on similar celebrations. An estimated crowd of 4,000 African Americans converged in the town of Macon for a celebration that culminated in an address by Henry Turner. With broad strokes, Turner once again placed contemporary events in the context of a sweeping historical vision. The only occasion that Turner found worthy of comparison to Emancipation and the achievement of the Fifteenth Amendment was ‘‘the almost instantaneous liberation of the Russian serfs, and their immediate investiture with citizens’ immunities.’’ Turning to the future, Turner confidently predicted that the United States would henceforth become an asylum for oppressed people from around the globe, who would find the reinvigorated country ‘‘ample enough to accommodate them all.’’≤≤ Turner’s prediction did not hold true. The hope and possibility for black Georgians with which the year began quickly deteriorated. Ongoing battles within the Republican Party widened even further, as different factions fought bitterly over the issues of prolonging Reconstruction and the racial distribution of political offices, and public conflicts erupted among prominent black leaders over the best strategy for moving forward. In the fall, two


of the most important African American leaders in the state—Aaron A. Bradley and Tunis G. Campbell—nearly came to blows. Bradley, a former slave, was the most militant black leader in Georgia and a persistent advocate of land reform as the only means to ensure equality. He was also very controversial, even among African American leaders. Elected to the state constitutional convention with a strong base of support among black laborers from his home county in 1868, Bradley was considered by white conservatives to be particularly dangerous; in an effort to get rid of him, they charged that he was an unfit delegate, based on a seduction case dating back to 1851. Bradley countered the charge by introducing a resolution ‘‘to enquire into and report on all delegates who have been guilty of seduction, of either black or white women.’’ Black colleagues, who at this point still believed in the wisdom of a more conciliatory approach, deserted Bradley, and the convention voted, 130 to 0, for expulsion. He was elected by black voters to the state senate in 1868, only to be ejected again on the old seduction charges. In the fall of 1870, he was running for Congress as an Independent—and loudly criticizing the Republican Party as paternalistic and hostile to black interests. (Some believed he was actually getting secret aid from Democrats hoping to divide the Republicans.)≤≥ Bradley’s defection brought him into direct conflict with Tunis Campbell. Also a firm proponent of black landholding, Campbell had established a black political stronghold in McIntosh County during the years following the war: both he and his son sat in the state legislature. Campbell was also a voter registrar and justice of the peace, and an adopted son was clerk of the superior court. Collectively, the men used their authority to empower blacks economically and politically in McIntosh County. When Bradley came to the area campaigning as an Independent—and attacking the Republican machine—Turner’s supporters responded with force, running him out of the county.≤∂ Such conflicts took a toll on Republican strength in Georgia, and the party was ill-prepared to counter the escalating demagoguery, violence, intimidation, and fraud inflicted by Georgia Democrats over the course of 1870. The bloodiest election period in Georgia’s history culminated in December, when Democrats reclaimed large majorities in both branches of the state legislature. From that point forward, Republicans struggled mightily just to maintain an effective presence in state politics.≤∑ The Democrats’ rise to power did not put a stop to African American public ceremonies in the state. African American processions occupied


the main streets of Augusta on dates of celebration, and participants assembled each year in the area surrounding the local town hall for speeches and rallies.≤∏ Still, there were signs of decline, particularly on 4 July. As early as the summer of 1870, white Augustans gleefully noted that African Americans’ celebration of Independence Day was ‘‘decidedly tame.’’ In striking contrast to previous years, there were no speeches—either political or historical—to mark the occasion. The Constitutionalist gloated: ‘‘There was no effort made in the city [on 4 July] by the colored celebrationists to torture the poor distressed American eagle by fresh laudations of its magnificent soarings to the dizzy pinnacle of fifteenth amendment civil liberty, and of all the intensely loyal there was not found white or black to render the Declaration of Independence.’’ As in former years, people came from near and far to participate in the Augusta celebration—some even arrived by train from Charlotte and Columbia, South Carolina. In place of a parade and rally in Augusta, however, celebrants made do with more frivolous—albeit enjoyable—activities. Some people went to nearby Rollersville for a barbecue; others gathered in the evening for a dance at the parade ground.≤π There was nothing inherently less meaningful in the shift toward less formal festivities. Still, the shift away from speech-making and processions must be understood in the context of severe breakdowns in both Republican Party and African American organization. Just a few years before, black southerners had seized the full symbolic power of the Fourth of July to set forth a vision of an integrated nation united around the principles of liberty and equality. This vision suffered a terrible blow, and Independence Day celebrations lost a measure of their power, as Republican alliances crumbled and Reconstruction came to an end in the state. After 1870, when Georgia reentered the Union for the third and final time, Augusta blacks celebrated the Fourth, but with decidedly less fanfare. Gone, too, were the white political figures who had joined in previous years’ ceremonies, a point that reflected the increasing acrimony between white and black leaders in the state Republican Party. The absence of a unified interracial leadership in turn signified the increasing breakdown of the visions of an integrated nation.≤∫ Whatever social conflicts and exclusions were embedded in the racially integrated postwar celebrations, such ceremonies had engaged both black and white participants in the mutual endeavor of rearticulating American history and citizenship in light of black freedom. And, even as more conservative leaders attempted


to define Emancipation in limited terms, many aspects of the postwar celebrations had enacted far more expansive visions of a racially inclusive America. The shift toward racially segregated celebrations of the nation’s birthday marked a clear departure from the grand visions of ‘‘freedom, justice, and hope’’ that had been extolled by black leaders in Augusta— and applauded by racially mixed audiences—at the end of the war.≤Ω In 1874, African American celebrations of the Fourth of July in Augusta came to an impasse. The Constitutionalist claimed that the day passed ‘‘without any demonstration of patriotism by either whites or blacks.’’ The newspaper explained that blacks had gone instead to Charleston, where they were among the hundreds of visitors who attended the parade and political rally that culminated in Timothy Hurley’s caustic address and Martin Delany’s angry retort.≥≠ In comparison to Augusta, where the decline in Independence Day ceremonies reflected the early end of Reconstruction in the state, both Emancipation Day ceremonies and Fourth of July celebrations in Charleston retained substantial momentum between 1870 and 1876.≥∞ To be sure, political volatility was evident. Widening divisions within the Republican Party and sharp disputes among black leaders and voters had an impact.≥≤ In 1874, Martin Delany led a faction that broke away from the regular Republican Party and formed an alliance with state Democrats, who eagerly embraced the political opportunity afforded by a fusionist ticket in a state where they were a clear minority. Although the conflict did not come to a head until the fall elections (in which the regular Republicans managed a narrow victory over the fusionists), serious discord within the party broke out during the summer months, creating open conflict in numerous public forums, including the Fourth of July celebration in Charleston.≥≥ Disharmony came from problems of corruption, interracial conflict, competition for office, and struggles over patronage, along with Democratic attacks. The consequent divisions were particularly evident in Martin Delany’s checkered political career. During the early 1870s, Delany became increasingly concerned that African American interests were not being well-served by white Republican leaders, whom he characterized as hopelessly corrupt and resistant to black officeholding. He worried that blacks would ultimately end up on the losing side of a ‘‘race war’’ if they failed to find a way to work with native whites. He viewed white Republicans as self-interested carpetbaggers who had prejudiced black South Carolinians against the possibility of ever forging economic and political alliances


with white residents. Raising the specter of white in-migration, which he believed would eventually tilt numbers in the state toward a white majority, he predicted a tragic end for African Americans if they continued to identify their interests in opposition to whites in the state. As an alternative, he envisioned an alliance between native South Carolina whites and blacks, based on mutual interests, as the best means to secure African American rights and future prosperity.≥∂ His own frustrated ambitions may have fed Delany’s anger: in the midst of a dramatic increase in black officeholding in South Carolina in the early 1870s, Delany himself failed to obtain elective office; he ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor in 1874. But it is also clear that corruption and white conservatism did plague the state Republican Party.≥∑ And yet Delany’s rejection of Republicanism in favor of a political alliance between white planters and black laborers must be placed in the context of his understanding of social relations. Although he vehemently rejected contemporary ideologies of black racial inferiority—indeed, he repeatedly railed against the ‘‘color prejudice’’ of light-skinned African Americans, as well as whites—Delany also believed that freedpeople needed to cultivate ‘‘intelligence,’’ by which he meant such qualities as education, property ownership, a capacity for independence, and proper deportment, before they could assume positions of leadership.≥∏ In the meantime, he believed they should defer to the superior wisdom and capacity of black leaders like himself, who would establish economic and political compacts with the state’s other ‘‘intelligent’’ leaders—white elites. It was imperative, in Delany’s view, that freedpeople accept the shared leadership of more capable black men, acting in concert with local whites, as the only alternative to being duped by sleazy carpetbaggers from the North: men who were disreputable and common—‘‘the lowest grade of Northern society’’—who lacked the ‘‘intelligence’’ to succeed in the North and who had managed to flourish in the South by taking advantage of naive freedpeople.≥π Like his attitudes toward the freedpeople, Delany’s suspicion of white Republicans mixed racial pride and class bias. On the one hand, he understood that many within the party were reluctant to share power equally with blacks, and he went further than many other black leaders in repeatedly insisting on proportionate racial representation in local and state offices. On the other hand, his haughty portrayal of carpetbaggers and condescending attitudes toward freedpeople gave him something to hold in common with local white elites.


Delany had his work cut out for him as he attempted to convince black South Carolinians that they were incapable of exercising leadership themselves and that an alliance with their former masters promised the best hope for the future. The clearest rejection came in 1876, when Delany was one of the most prominent of the black Red Shirts—African Americans who campaigned on behalf of Democrat Wade Hampton during that year’s fateful campaign for governor. For Delany and a handful of other black leaders who joined Hampton, the campaign represented the culmination of their intensifying distrust of the leadership of the Republican Party.≥∫ Delany’s decision to support Hampton clashed head-long with South Carolina freedpeople’s actions for self-determination on Edisto Island, where local black men and women had demonstrated impressive political organization from the earliest days of Reconstruction. In the fall of 1865, locals forcefully protested President Andrew Johnson’s order that the island’s lands, which they had been cultivating under the provisions of General William T. Sherman’s Field Order 15, be returned to their former owners. Johnson’s order marked a reversal of earlier Freedman’s Bureau policy, which had called for lands confiscated from Confederates to be divided up into forty-acre tracts for the freedpeople. In a remarkable letter to Johnson and Freedmen’s Bureau commissioner Oliver Otis Howard, a committee justified their claims to the land in terms of both their loyalty to the nation and their experiences under slavery. Contrasting the disloyalty of white secessionists with their own proven commitment to ‘‘Liberty’’ and ‘‘this glorious union,’’ they recalled the many years during which they had been ‘‘abused and oppressed’’ and disallowed the right of owning land. Urging the officials to resist pressures to return the lands to former Confederates, they decried a so-called freedom in which white planters would retain a monopoly on property. Had freedpeople suffered so much and come so far ‘‘but to be subject To the will of these large Land owners? God forbid.’’≥Ω Although they largely lost their battle to retain rights to local land, black laborers on Edisto’s rice plantations continued to resist white planters’ control. During the 1870s, they were locked in bitter struggles with the plantations’ owners over wages. In the midst of the labor disputes, which occurred in a broader context of economic depression and severe hardship for local black workers, planters used their economic clout to pressure laborers to declare themselves Democrats in order to obtain or keep posi-


tions. As Nell Painter asserts, being a Democrat on Edisto Island meant ‘‘even more than being pro-Confederate and pro-planter in the Low Country; it meant being a scab as well.’’ When Delany arrived at Edisto Island to stump for the redeemers in 1876, he urged black voters to put their future in the hands of Wade Hampton—a wealthy planter and former Confederate hero.∂≠ Delany was unprepared for the verbal tirade and physical assault that ensued almost immediately after he began to speak before a crowd of local blacks.∂∞ He received hostile receptions elsewhere in the South Carolina Low Country; shortly thereafter, he left the campaign altogether. To the end, Delany could not understand the freedpeople’s anger, except as a consequence of having been misled by ‘‘miserable white men.’’ Of black South Carolinians he repeatedly complained, ‘‘Menacing, threatening, abusing, quarreling, confusion, and frequently rioting are common results of this most disgraceful state of affairs under which we live, all in the name of Republicanism.’’∂≤ It did not occur to Delany that freedpeople who rejected his political positions did so from a reasonable assessment of their own self-interest; he continued to believe, as always, that he knew best how to act on their behalf. Even as he was shouted down at Edisto Island, Delany insisted ‘‘that he had come to South Carolina with his sword drawn to fight for the freedom of the black man. . . . He was a friend of his own race, and had always held the position that it was the duty of those who had education to teach them that their best interests were identical with the white natives of the State.’’∂≥ Although Delany’s political positioning was extreme, his problems with South Carolina blacks came from more general divisions. As Stephen Hahn argues, the Edisto Islanders had their own aspirations, rooted in their deep belief that they were entitled to possess the land that they had worked and suffered on for so long.∂∂ Like other black spokesmen who were centered mainly in southern towns and cities, Delany either failed to see—or refused to acknowledge—the community aspirations of rural freedpeople when they clashed with his own visions of an ‘‘intelligent’’ black citizenry for the postwar South. Delany’s reception in the South Carolina Low Country in 1876 shows how sharp the separation could be between the freedpeople and some black spokesmen who presumed to be their natural leaders. A recent study of black Red Shirts suggests, however, that the divisions among African Americans in South Carolina were more complicated than a conflict between freeborn elitists and struggling former slaves. The Hampton cam-


paign highlighted the most obvious social divisions among black South Carolinians—many black Red Shirts came from Charleston’s freeborn elite and more successful black entrepreneurs and property owners. But the redeemers manipulated and amplified more subtle distinctions and ambivalences as well. There were black elites who did not join the Hampton campaign, but there were also hundreds of freedpeople who did, particularly in the black-majority districts of the up-country. Edmund L. Drago suggests that freedmen and freedwomen who proclaimed their allegiance to the redeemers did so for reasons ranging from dismay at the Republicans’ failure to aid them economically or protect them from violence to a shared identity with white residents as South Carolinians and as southerners who had suffered at the hands of the Union army. Particularly in the desperate circumstances in which so many freedpeople found themselves during the depression of the 1870s, the ‘‘carrot’’ of Hampton’s paternalism was not without appeal to poor black men and women. Noting the relatively young age of many of Hampton’s known black supporters, Drago speculates that at least some might have been too young to have experienced slavery’s harshest aspects and were therefore more open to the promises of paternalism. That same youth might have been especially attracted to the dramatic and militaristic demonstrations that marked the Hampton campaign. For whatever reasons, the decision of hundreds of freedmen to join the Red Shirts pitted neighbors, coworkers, and even family members against one another, and led to pitched battles between black Democrats and Republicans in many up-country communities during the campaigns of 1876.∂∑ The animosities and factionalism within the Republican Party also entangled black leaders. In 1871, Delany had castigated mulatto men for what he perceived as their domination of state officeholding. Indeed, many of the most prominent Republican leaders and state officeholders, such as Francis Cardozo and Robert C. DeLarge, were light-skinned men, a fact that created widespread resentment among darker skinned black leaders. Born free in Charleston in 1837, the son of a prominent Jewish businessman and a free black mother, Cardozo had studied at the University of Glasgow and at Presbyterian seminaries in England as a young man before returning to South Carolina after the Civil War, where he played a critical role in establishing the Avery Normal Institute for the training of black teachers in Charleston. He also rose to political prominence, serving as South Carolina’s secretary of state from 1868 to 1872 and as state


treasurer from 1872 to 1877.∂∏ Also born free, Robert DeLarge was the son of a free black tailor and a mother of Haitian descent in Aiken, South Carolina. After the Civil War, he traveled to Charleston, where he established himself economically and politically: he served in the state House of Representatives between 1868 and 1870, and was subsequently elected to Congress, where he served from 1871 to 1873; he died of consumption in 1874.∂π As relations with white Republicans, especially northern-born officials, worsened during the 1870s, black Republicans further divided over what strategy to best pursue. In 1876, for instance, some followed Delany into the Hampton campaign; others, including AME Church leader Richard H. Cain, attempted to work within the Republican Party. These divisions intensified competition over officeholding and patronage within the Republican Party and made it ever more difficult to mount unified political campaigns. Internal discord and intraracial arguments plagued the Republicans’ efforts in other parts of the South. These conflicts in turn affected public ceremonies, as when competing factions of the state Republican Party erupted into conflict at an Emancipation Day celebration in Richmond, Virginia, in 1870.∂∫ In postbellum commemorations, African American leaders had envisioned black male political action as a vehicle for worldwide liberation, and many had thrown themselves into Republican Party organizing with great energy and enthusiasm. Now, the conflicts and problems plaguing black political leaders were all too evident in public affairs.

J White southerners’ public demonstrations moved in the opposite direction, gaining momentum during the 1870s as leading Democrats orchestrated public events to mobilize whites. Some communities even began to take back the practice of celebrating the Fourth of July—a holiday many southern whites had rejected during and after the Civil War. Inspired by recent Democratic victories in several southern states, and encouraged by growing signs of respect from the North, former Confederates like Alexander Stephens began to counsel a policy of reconciliation with the North as the best means of furthering southern interests. With celebrations of the Fourth, these men helped to lay the cultural groundwork for the end of Reconstruction.∂Ω In Augusta, white residents organized a Fourth of July celebration in the summer of 1875—the first such occasion in the city since the Civil War. As African Americans from Augusta set out for the second year in a row


to attend the Republican celebration in Charleston, large numbers of Charleston whites traveled to Augusta’s Fourth of July festivities. In effect, people traded cities; whites took over Augusta for a day, and African Americans took over Charleston. In the weeks leading up to 4 July, the white newspapers in both cities were giddy with anticipation. Editors of the Charleston News and Courier described the plans for a grand parade with armed riflemen and artillery clubs from both Georgia and South Carolina. The day in Augusta, they rejoiced, ‘‘promises to be a historical event. . . . Our neighbors, the gallant Georgians, will entertain their Charleston visitors in a style commensurate with the well known hospitality of the Georgians.’’∑≠ Expectations were similarly high for a second Fourth of July celebration, which was scheduled for Atlanta. Alexander Stephens, the former vice president of the Confederacy, was on the roster in Atlanta, and travelers were expected to arrive from Montgomery, Columbus, and Selma.∑∞ Taken together, the ceremonies in Charleston, Augusta, and Atlanta point up significant political and cultural changes that affected both the content and meaning of African American portrayals of history in the final years of Reconstruction. In Charleston, the Republican celebration was significantly smaller than in previous years. African American military companies from South Carolina and Georgia marched through town, though in smaller numbers than usual; neither the Union League nor any civic organizations were there. Later in the day, crowds gathered on the Battery for a rally, and—for the first time since the end of the war—white speakers were absent. The orators were well known, but the speeches were different in tone and content from earlier years. Notably absent was the emphasis on Republican Party organizing that had dominated previous celebrations; dissension within party ranks was now more severe than ever, and would only get worse in following months.∑≤ Local activist E. J. Adams, State Collector Alonzo J. Ransier, and Rev. Richard H. Cain delivered historical orations that stressed the progress of African Americans since Emancipation; they emphasized the importance of education—not politics—for further advancement. Martin Delany, still on board at this point, was the only one to stress electoral issues, and his address presaged his defection. In a speech that received praise from the Charleston News and Courier as ‘‘replete with excellent advice,’’ Delany urged members of his audience to ‘‘adapt their politics to their times [in order to avoid] disasters,’’ and he warned them to ‘‘avoid . . . being led by political tricksters.’’∑≥ The diminished Charleston parade contrasted with the excited white


crowds in Augusta, where local white military companies were joined by eight battalions from South Carolina for a grand martial pageant. With ‘‘guns glittering in the sunlight, banners flying, and bands playing,’’ the lengthy procession marched through town and out to the nearby Schutzenplatz, where the revelers enjoyed music, dancing, and barbecue. Throughout the afternoon and into the evening, militias engaged in several rounds of competitive marksmanship and former Confederate officials delivered congratulatory speeches.∑∂ The officers’ speeches exhibited the particular admixture of conciliation and defiance that would become a staple of white southerners’ political rhetoric for years to come.∑∑ One speaker looked forward to the day when southern men would ‘‘strike a blow to resurrect that immortal emblem of Southern liberty, the Palmetto Tree of Carolina, from the grave of oblivion,’’ while the next emphasized the special martial brotherhood of Georgia and South Carolina. It was G. Rivers Walker, however, who best summed up the theme of the day’s speeches. He spoke eloquently of peace but nevertheless concluded with a delicate evocation of the pleasures of sectionalism: ‘‘[W]hile we have shaken hands with Massachusetts, we shall never forget that, like Siamese twins, God has bound Carolina and Georgia heart and soul and geographically together, and may we ever so remain.’’∑∏ In Atlanta, both black and white celebrants attended the day’s festivities. The Atlanta Constitution offered a paean to the happy days of slavery, the ‘‘old ante-war days in the south when everybody, white and black, old and young, turned out en masse to see the military parade.’’ In the tradition of antebellum ceremonies, white celebrants ran the show—African American attendees, while numerous, were relegated to the sidelines. White officers and battalions led a military parade; as in Augusta, Federal officers were among the marchers. Behind this procession came several horsedrawn carriages, with Alexander Stephens, the much-anticipated keynote speaker, at the front of the line.∑π African Americans were present, but Stephens, in his address, denied their very existence. Stephens, too, took steps toward locating the ground for a national reunion by invoking the rhetoric and symbolism of the American Revolution. But neither Crispus Attucks nor slavery entered his patriotic portrayal of the country’s white forefathers, united in their commitment to freedom and high principle. Emphasizing the upcoming national centennial, Stephens urged his audience to take advantage of the opportunity to celebrate the common values that all white Americans pur-


portedly shared: ‘‘I would say let this reunion of the devotees of constitutional liberty from all the states be like that of the reunion of the children of Israel, who after all their sufferings in captivity, on account of their departure and wanderings from the principles written in the book of the law, assembled in Jerusalem on their great sabbatical anniversary of the festival of tabernacles.’’ Stephens continued, ‘‘Let our centennial be of like character, Let the ‘book of the law’—our constitution . . . with all of our common sacred oracles be brought forth, read, and expounded to the vast multitudes there assembled from every state of the Union.’’ He concluded dramatically: ‘‘What true son of the patriot sires of 1776 cannot fraternize and ‘shake hands across the late bloody chasm’ in a reunion of this kind?’’∑∫ What ‘‘true son,’’ indeed? While Stephens’s question was designed to pressure reluctant whites to join in the national celebration, his characterization of the ‘‘true son[s] of the patriot sires’’ also reinforced African Americans’ exclusion from the community he invoked. In this mental world, no black man could qualify as a true patriot. Whereas African American leaders had welcomed black freedom as the extension of principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence, and thereby celebrated the Revolution’s most radical import, Stephens and his southern colleagues embraced a more conservative vision of the country’s birth. A reverence for law and order, as embodied in the Constitution, was the legacy promoted by men who had long insisted on the legality of southern secession.∑Ω Stephens himself invoked an oft-repeated phrase in conciliatory southern rhetoric: ‘‘If we of the south committed error . . . in our attempt to withdraw from the union of our fathers, [it was] ‘only to save the principles of the constitution.’ ’’∏≠ The nationalistic spirit that infused the celebrations in Augusta and Atlanta was hardly shared by all southern whites.∏∞ Men like Stephens, who advocated reconciliation, took great care to demonstrate that their closest loyalties remained with the South, and they assiduously avoided placing any blame on the Confederacy for rupturing the nation. Even so, those who called for a renewal of national patriotism at this point were vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy and treason. In Richmond, Democratic newspapers debated the relevance of the Fourth of July for southern whites during the early and mid-1870s. While the Enquirer periodically urged the resurrection of the holiday, the Dispatch staunchly argued against it, insisting that ‘‘[the] Fourth of July . . . is not, and we fear will never be again,


what it was.’’∏≤ Throughout the period, local residents held a hodgepodge of celebrations and activities on the Fourth, including separate black and white parades, country excursions, Confederate reunions, martial arts competitions, and meetings of the Ku Klux Klan; no unified white celebration or substantial black celebration took place. The city’s Democratic press, in the meantime, regularly used the Fourth of July as an opportunity to assert that the South, not the North, was the true inheritor of the principles of the American Revolution.∏≥ While some rejected reconciliation out of hand, others questioned the sincerity of southern white professions of patriotic spirit. Many Americans suspected that the southern resumption of Fourth of July celebrations was cynically designed to conciliate the North in order to bring an end to Reconstruction.∏∂ Former Confederates, the doubters reasoned, were still ‘‘rebels at heart.’’ Those who advocated reconciliation angrily defended themselves. They portrayed southerners’ celebration of Independence Day as a logical step in a gradual resumption of national feeling. In 1875, the Charleston News and Courier assailed the charges of southern duplicity and contended that the celebrations of the Fourth in Atlanta and Augusta ‘‘will show that the Southerners have one face and one tongue; that to each other, and with each other, they talk and behave as they do when they are in New York or Massachusetts.’’∏∑ Certainly, southern white leaders’ political aims came into play.∏∏ The question here is not whether southern ‘‘conciliators’’ were calculated or sincere—they were both.∏π The net result of their actions was a refashioning of the imagined community of the nation—with southern whites one fractional step closer to inclusion and African Americans just a bit further out. However tentatively or cynically, white Americans in both the North and the South were inching their way toward a shared concept of a reunited country. And southern conciliators were promoting a vision of reunion that neatly omitted the issue of black citizenship. In the mid-1870s, of course, national reunion was by no means complete—indeed, its barest outlines were just taking shape.∏∫ No one could predict which course the South and the nation would take. It would be several years, even decades, before white Americans would approach consensus on the meaning of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, a consensus that would depend, first and foremost, on a common understanding of African Americans as a naturally inferior people.∏Ω But in the initial joint reunions of Confederate and Union soldiers, and in the first


shared celebrations of the Fourth of July, white Americans were beginning to lay the foundation for future collective memories (and forgetfulness) of the nation’s past.π≠

J African American leaders throughout the country observed the developments of the 1870s with increasing trepidation.π∞ As southern Democrats used terror, fraud, and intimidation in an effort to regain control of the South, and northern whites began to withdraw their support for black rights, faith in progress began to falter. Having once seen God’s hand in history, many were hard-pressed to explain the recent turn of events. ‘‘How Long!’’ cried a headline in the AME newspaper, the Christian Recorder. The history of the race, it seemed, was one of ‘‘long-suffering and anxious waiting.’’ For over 200 years, ‘‘from the land of bondage the cry went out, ‘How Long?’ ’’ Now, after the long wait for freedom, and even the achievement of the Fifteenth Amendment, it seemed that black southerners’ suffering was only going to continue.π≤ In the midst of such devastating setbacks, as during the turmoil of the following decades, African American leaders—and clerics in particular— searched for ways to find meaning in the ongoing suffering of black Americans. What was God’s plan for the race and for America at large? When would African Americans take their rightful place in the country? As historian Albert J. Raboteau argues, black spokespersons struggled with these questions throughout the late nineteenth century—just as black Christians had struggled with the persistence of slavery before the Civil War. They ‘‘struggled with this quandary in sermons, speeches, tracts, convention minutes, history books, resolutions, and editorials. . . . They searched the Bible, God’s word, for signs of his will for the race.’’π≥ Having defined black advancement almost solely in terms of black manhood—which was in turn tied to the exercise of political rights and authority—many African American leaders perceived the turn in events as a blow to black men in particular. Not only did southern black men face the humiliation of being turned away from the polls, but they also were forced to watch their wives and daughters leave home and family on a daily basis, to do ‘‘white Folk’s work.’’ When freedmen attempted to stand up for themselves and assert their rights, they met only disaster: ‘‘Many honest colored men were murdered, because they were firm in their principles, and would not be bribed. . . . This causes me to exclaim, ‘How long?’ . . . When, day by day, we hear of some inhuman deeds of the Ku Klux and


know that they are appointed by some of the most distinguished, most refined, intelligent, and religious (?) men of the South . . . I . . . sigh, ‘How long?’ ’’π∂ Faced with a severe crisis, some leaders argued that African American men needed to leave the South—or even the nation—in order to survive.π∑ Writing to the Christian Recorder, an AME correspondent insisted that the only solution was for African Americans to migrate to Africa: ‘‘[W]hites own and run this country and a black man’s life is worth less than a dog’s in England. . . . [In England] a man is put behind bars for killing a dog, in America, a man is promoted for killing a nigger.’’π∏ Others agreed. Debates over emigration, which had occupied many antebellum black activists, reemerged amid the despair and broken dreams of African Americans in the redeemed South—and nowhere were the arguments more vociferous than in the AME Church. But most church leaders were not ready to give up on the South. Seeking reassurance that black men could survive, and even thrive, in the region, several AME spokesmen began to alter their earlier visions of black advancement.ππ Invoking a long history of suffering, black spokesmen urged African American men to be patient—progress, they insisted, would take time. Inverting emigrationist rhetoric, they stressed that staying in the South—and protecting their homes and families—was the most ‘‘manly’’ course of action. Moreover, they argued, black men’s progress should not be measured in terms of politics alone. African Americans had made gains in everything from schools, churches, and homes to property, education, temperance, and ‘‘morality’’—these, too, should count in the measurement of black (male) success. Bishop Benjamin Tucker Tanner, who served as the editor of the Christian Recorder throughout the 1870s, clearly articulated this strategy in his advice to black Georgians. Recalling the long history of black struggles, Tanner urged black men to ‘‘stand still.’’ After all, Tanner insisted, African Americans in the North had been battling ‘‘prejudice and injustice’’ for many generations, but they ‘‘stood [their] ground.’’ ‘‘Do likewise,’’ he advised. ‘‘Be manly. Don’t run from a white man, the moment he frowns. Stand your ground.’’π∫ Tanner insisted that there were ample opportunities for southern black men to ‘‘build up’’ black manhood, even if whites prevented them from exercising political leadership. ‘‘What the white men have decided is, at the very worst that we shall not help to govern. This is not necessary to our growth and advancement. . . . They don’t object to us working their lands and paying us for it. . . . They don’t


object to us going to school. They dare not forbid us the franchise. Thus circumstanced, true wisdom dictates that we be quiet and unmurmeringly enter upon the work of building up a real manhood.’’πΩ Counseling forbearance and prayer, church spokesmen urged African Americans to look to the Bible for guidance: Bishop Tanner insisted that black men’s future would be ‘‘like the future of any other men. . . . ‘If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land; But if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured with the sword; for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.’ ’’∫≠ At work in Arkansas, John T. Jenifer, AME missionary and future church historian, asserted that African Americans could see that the times they lived in—no matter how cruel or harrowing they might be—were an improvement over the past. ‘‘True’’ Christians could see that they actually lived in a ‘‘glorious day with the enjoyment of life, health, and temporal comforts and religious privileges.’’ Moreover, black people could gain strength for the present by reminding themselves of their forebears’ ability to withstand terrible hardship: ‘‘When the body of Ethiopia was trampled to death beneath the heel of a brutal South, our spirits ever young, ever fresh, ever untiring in works of beneficence for mankind, survived in the nation that sprang purified from that American nursery of a generation.’’∫∞ As Tanner put it, true manhood could and would withstand even the harshest of circumstances: ‘‘Manhood is not created by the smiles of friends, neither can it be destroyed by the frowns of enemies. A thing, godlike, like God it is all conquering.’’∫≤

J It was in this context of crisis, conflict, and reassessment that African Americans began to contemplate the upcoming celebration of the nation’s 100th birthday. Whereas Alexander Stephens looked forward to the centennial as an opportunity for white men to shake hands ‘‘across the bloody chasm,’’ black spokesmen foresaw the exposition in Philadelphia as an opportunity to promote a vision of black advancement and to secure African Americans’ place in the progress of the nation. AME Church officials began to anticipate the upcoming centennial as early as 1872. In the spring, a letter appearing in the Christian Recorder initiated a discussion within the church over representing African Americans at the exposition. The letter called on African Methodists to be ‘‘up and doing,’’ in order to demonstrate the wide-ranging contributions of African Americans to ‘‘bringing this country to its present status among the civilized nations of the earth.’’∫≥ No one was more concerned than John T. Jenifer. In the fall of 1874,


Jenifer called for a definitive response to an urgent question: ‘‘Has Emancipation been a failure ? The price of liberty and the manhood of our race call for an answer to this question.’’ Black people, Jenifer continued, were ‘‘on trial.’’ Not only was their every action scrutinized by whites, but also the ‘‘future historian’’ was waiting ‘‘to record the fact of our success or failure.’’ The burden of proof was a heavy one, and, according to Jenifer, it lay entirely upon the shoulders of African Americans themselves. Therefore, he determined, they must take advantage of the upcoming centennial, ‘‘To show what progress the colored American citizens have made the past ten years. ’’ He proposed an exhibit emphasizing African American progress in industry, education, moral and social reform, Christianity, and literature. Such an exhibit, he urged, would ‘‘do more to demonstrate our manhood and elevate us in the eyes of the nations of the world than all the oratorical efforts of a century.’’∫∂ Jenifer’s high expectations for the exposition were not a straightforward expression of black hopefulness—far from it. Although he took real pride in black accomplishments, he also felt a growing sense of unease and even emergency. He and others urged a strong black presence in Philadelphia because they believed in the reality of black achievements and because they feared that further black progress was threatened by current circumstances. Emphasizing the long history of black suffering, spokesmen argued that African Americans had provided ample proof of their right to be included. In spite of the ‘‘blighting influences of American absolutism, that hunted, insulted, murdered, whipped, scorched and burned. . . . [African Americans had] done something, and . . . that something [should] be felt and seen during the Centennial Celebration.’’∫∑

J It was one thing to expound upon the necessity of displaying black progress and quite another to settle on a precise plan for doing so. AME members finally settled on a statue of AME Church founder Richard Allen, to be unveiled in Fairmount Park in Philadelphia during the centennial celebration. A statue of Allen, church leaders reasoned, would promote ‘‘self-respect’’ and unity within the denomination at the same time that it would represent African Americans’ contributions to the country at large.∫∏ In choosing to erect a statue of Richard Allen, black clergymen affirmed their belief that the leaders of the AME Church—and Allen in particular—were exemplary black men who personified the achievements and contributions of all blacks to the country’s history. Moreover, they


seized an opportunity to strengthen the denomination, at the same time that they sought to secure a place for black accomplishments in the nation’s centennial. From the beginning, however, the monument’s supporters ran up against obstacles. Some leaders objected to the expense of the proposed statue; the money, they reasoned, would be better spent expanding Wilberforce University (the country’s first black college, founded in 1855), funding missionary work, or paying off the denomination’s considerable debts. At no point did the national leadership unite solidly behind the idea of the statue. Instead, energy and guidance continued to come from Jenifer, Tanner, and a few other prominent individuals. Working to gather funds from various conferences, organizers met with their greatest success in the South, where they solicited both black and white donors; in addition, they obtained a $3,000 subsidy from Congress.∫π Advocates of the Allen monument were also frustrated in their attempts to receive support from the centennial’s white leadership. The construction of the monument was well under way when Bishop Tanner was forced to make a humiliating announcement in the Christian Recorder : the exposition’s organizers had refused African Methodists’ request for permission to erect a permanent monument to Allen at Fairmount Park, a privilege they accorded other groups, including Presbyterians, who were planning to erect a statue of Revolutionary leader John Witherspoon. Grudgingly, the Centennial Committee agreed to allow the AME Church leaders to put up the statue of Allen—but only if they agreed to take it down again within sixty days of the close of the exposition.∫∫ Still further disappointment confronted the church in June, when it became clear that the statue would not be ready on time to be unveiled on the Fourth of July. Taking solace in the fact that several other organizations were experiencing similar delays, organizers proposed that the monument’s ceremony take place on 22 September, the anniversary of the writing of the Emancipation Proclamation. In the meantime, however, a ceremony was scheduled for laying the base of the Allen monument at the centennial grounds. John T. Jenifer, who delivered the dedicatory speech, did not speak about Allen or African Methodism but instead focused his comments on conditions in the South—a subject that, he noted, currently drew the intense interest of the nation and the world. Speaking as ‘‘a representative of . . . the land where we have been crushed and the land where we as a race shall arise and reign,’’ Jenifer acknowledged the suffer-


ings of southern blacks, who daily faced ‘‘outrages and murders committed upon us . . . the fruits of wanton prejudice, hatred, and hellish passion.’’ But he affirmed his belief that these were but the ‘‘death struggles of the Lost Cause,’’ and he insisted that ‘‘God, who has begun to deliver and elevate this people, if they are faithful will not leave it halfdone.’’ Moreover, he argued, southern blacks had already made ‘‘marvelous’’ progress, ‘‘all things considered.’’ What they now needed in order to truly thrive, Jenifer insisted, was religion, unfettered access to the vote, and, above all, education. Calling for Federal support for black learning, Jenifer envisioned a future in which industrious and enterprising African Americans would form the backbone of a prosperous new South.∫Ω Finally, on 7 September, a headline in the Christian Recorder boldly announced the monument’s success. Leading organizer Andrew J. Chambers predicted: ‘‘On the 22nd day of September, 1876, in the presence of all civilizations and nations of earth, amidst stirring strains of music kindlings of the loftiest sentiments of manhood; patriotic enthusiasm; chanting of children and the ecstatic joy of the rising sons of Africa, the Allen Monument—the Negro’s Bunker Hill, Independence Hall and Liberty Bell— will be dedicated to science and progressive civilization. . . . Upon this rock shall we build the magnificent fabric of future grandeur and greatness.’’Ω≠ Having survived internal conflict, white resistance, and artistic delays, the monument’s organizers were desperate to pronounce the project a success; instead, they confronted disaster. Portions of the monument were ruined in a railroad accident while en route to Philadelphia from Cincinnati. Once again, the unveiling ceremonies were delayed, as frustrated church officials scrambled to figure out what to do. At long last, on 2 November, the surviving bust of the statue was dedicated in an afternoon ceremony at Fairmount Park. A poem by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, titled ‘‘We Are Rising,’’ was recited during the unveiling, and Bishop John Brown, the president of the Allen Monument Association and a professor of ecclesiastical history at Howard University, addressed a crowd of several hundred observers. John Mercer Langston, the former president of Howard University, had been the appointed speaker, but—in one final mishap—he was unable to attend at the last minute and Bishop Brown took his place. In a speech that transformed two years of difficult and controversial organizing into a veritable whirlwind of national support, Brown praised Allen as a man who garnered admiration and respect, not only from African Methodists, but from people of all religions and all


races. Echoing church leaders who looked forward to the creation of a multinational church led by black men, Brown emphasized that the donors for the monument ‘‘were of all classes and all colors and from every region of this union.’’Ω∞ When all was said and done, African Methodists could fairly claim that they achieved their goal: they erected a statue of Richard Allen at the Fairmount Park, two weeks before the end of the Centennial Exposition. But the many obstacles faced by the monument’s organizers provide a telling commentary on African Americans’ overall experience with the centennial. As Philip Foner has shown, the celebration of the nation’s 100th birthday vividly displayed white Americans’ willingness to exclude African Americans from the nation’s past, present, and future. Not only the AME Church, but black Americans in general, were largely left out of the elaborate Centennial Exposition that was staged in Philadelphia. Even Frederick Douglass was nearly ejected from the exposition’s opening ceremonies in May—in spite of the fact that Douglass carried an official pass, Philadelphia police refused to believe that a black man had any place in the occasion.Ω≤ Only two black artists were represented among the hundreds of exhibits, and the only work that directly related to African American history was The Freed Slave, sculpted by a white artist.Ω≥ Black Americans were most evident in a section of the fair dedicated to the U.S. South, where visitors were promised a rare view of banjo-strumming ‘‘old-time plantation ‘darkies,’ ’’ singing ‘‘their quaint melodies.’’Ω∂ Additionally, at a time of disastrously high rates of unemployment among black laborers in Philadelphia, African American workers were almost completely shut out from the jobs created by the construction and operation of the Centennial Exposition.Ω∑ A black visitor who reported on the centennial for the Washington, D.C., People’s Advocate poignantly described his disappointment at the lack of representation of African Americans among the exhibits. Writing that he had looked forward to the visit as an opportunity for ‘‘proud reflection that I was an American,’’ the correspondent found this hope immediately extinguished. Searching for a reason to explain the absent ‘‘link in the chain of [the nation’s] history,’’ he attempted to take solace in the notion that ‘‘we are all Americans now and as such nothing is lost from the general progress and acceptance of the [homogeneity] of our advancement.’’ Such reassurance was fleeting. ‘‘[A]nother thought came rising up and knocked the bottom right out of that two [sic] thin excuse which could not


be made to stand the scrutiny of the truth. When I looked back though [sic] the mind’s eye again, and could not discover among all that mass of people one single Negro in the discharge of any duty save as restaurant waiters and barbers . . . I came fully to the conclusion [that the cause was] American prejudice.’’Ω∏ In contrast to the many slights suffered by African Americans, southern whites were full-fledged participants in Philadelphia. Centennial officials welcomed southern officers with open arms, and southern militias held a prominent place in the massive parade on opening day. Northern newspapers commented favorably upon the ‘‘handsome’’ appearance of southern troops, and the New York Herald declared that the ‘‘great feature of the parade’’ was the ‘‘hearty reception given to the soldiers of the South.’’ ‘‘It was a grand sight,’’ the paper continued, ‘‘when the First Virginia marched by Independence Hall, the band playing ‘I Wish I Were in Dixie,’ amid shouts, and good nature, and laughter, and the waving of handkerchiefs and hats. There we saw the proof that the war was over.’’Ωπ The war, however, was not quite over yet. While many southern whites did travel to Philadelphia, others made clear their intention of staying home. In Charleston, for instance, white residents held their own centennial celebration in honor of the battle of Fort Moultrie on 29 June, to which they welcomed both participants and spectators from Augusta.Ω∫ Recall that South Carolina was one of the three southern states where Reconstruction continued in the summer of 1876. And, with presidential elections just around the corner in the fall, many southerners pointedly announced their preference for ‘‘h[olding] our ammunition [for patriotic celebration] until Tilden is elected.’’ΩΩ Still, the mood and content of ceremonies in Philadelphia reflected the ongoing movement around the country, halting and uneven as it may have been, in the direction of ‘‘reconciliation.’’

J The shabby treatment accorded African Americans is especially sobering when one considers the high expectations of black leaders in the years prior. Osbourne Hunter Jr. of Raleigh, North Carolina, voiced the hope of many black leaders when he asserted that the centennial would be an opportunity for African Americans to ‘‘rise up in the strength of our manhood and prove to the world that the negro is a man ‘for all of that.’ That he has brain as capable of the highest cultivation and as susceptible to the most delicate impressions as other races. And a more favorable opportunity to demonstrate this fact, than will be offered at our National Exposition, will peradventure, never be presented again.’’∞≠≠


When Congress debated the financing of the centennial celebration in 1874, black representative Josiah T. Walls of Florida spoke eloquently in favor of the planned exposition, which he believed would help to eradicate sectionalism and unite the country behind a common vision of equal rights for all citizens.∞≠∞ The Convention of Colored Newspaper Men, which met in Cincinnati in August of 1875, put together an aggressive plan for black representation at the upcoming centennial. There were other projects besides Allen’s statue. The convention conceived of a multivolume history of black people, which would trace their development from their ‘‘Ancient Glory’’ in Africa to the present day. The proposed eighteen-volume ‘‘Centennial Tribute to the Negro’’ would cover such diverse subjects as ‘‘One Hundred Years with the Negro in the Pulpit,’’ ‘‘One Hundred Years with the Negroes’ Pen, and Scissors and Press,’’ and ‘‘Negro Martyrs.’’∞≠≤ Inadequate finances and internal conflict contributed to some plans’ failure to get off the ground, but African Americans also encountered staunch resistance in their efforts to gain a foothold in the planning for the centennial. One of the clearest and best-documented instances of white organizers rebuffing black contributors came in 1873, with the organization of the Women’s Centennial Committee. The committee was charged with setting up local subcommittees to raise funds for the exposition. Black women were welcome to raise funds, but the Central Committee set clear restrictions on their participation; they were to limit their fund-raising activities to the African American community. After black women resigned from the fund-raising work in protest of the discrimination, the story was widely publicized in both the Philadelphia and the national press; subsequently, the white women were forced to backtrack and recant their earlier assertions. Still, the efforts of the Women’s Centennial Committee to circumscribe black women’s participation were representative of white organizers’ attitudes toward black leaders during the planning stages of the exposition, and they illustrate the difficulties faced by African Americans who held out hope that they would be included in the centennial’s display of national advancement.∞≠≥ Ultimately, the very conception of progress that was displayed at the exposition rested upon a racial edifice that had little space for black achievement. Like Native Americans, who were relegated to an arcane past, or ‘‘non-Teutonic’’ nations, who represented the early stages of human advancement, black people barely made it to the margins of the vision of progress established by the centennial. Appearing primarily as quaint reminders of an idealized southern history, black people stood as figures of


contrast, against which the forward-looking achievements of white men, and, to a lesser extent, white women, could be measured. John Brown’s portrayal of Allen—that he was a black hero for all peoples—was a virtual impossibility in the racialized schema of progress laid out by whites at the centennial.∞≠∂

J Black southerners faced another battle closer to home. Throughout the 1870s, armed black militiamen persisted in forming the core of many black parades. As Stephen Hahn has argued, black southerners understood that their rights were only as secure as their ability to defend them with force, and they demonstrated their will to do just that in highly militaristic urban processions, as well as in the frequent drills that were conducted by black militias on the streets of southern towns.∞≠∑ The role of paramilitary organizations in parades was practical, as well as symbolic: legions of armed black men helped to defend against potential abuse as African American marchers made their way through southern towns. In Norfolk, where Emancipation Day celebrations had long represented black assertiveness in the face of white hostility, both police and militiamen worked to protect parades. On at least one occasion, their actions were necessary to thwart an attack.∞≠∏ White southerners understood that black militias’ regular, public exercises were critical to the creation and maintenance of African American citizenship; they targeted members along with Republican Party activists and former Union army soldiers for violence and economic discrimination during the 1870s.∞≠π In July of 1876, even as crowds converged in Philadelphia, armed whites attacked a legally constituted black militia in Hamburg, South Carolina, a town that lay directly across the Savannah River from Augusta and served as a center of black Republicanism. The precipitating incident occurred when the militia assembled to perform drills as part of the Fourth of July celebration. Under the direction of Doc Adams, a former slave and prominent black Georgia politician, the company paraded up and down the empty street, armed with Winchester rifles. They were confronted by two young white men, Henry Getsen and Thomas Butler, who were passing through in a buggy. The men ordered the militia to step aside to allow the buggy to pass; an argument ensued. Finally, Adams divided the troops and then led them on their way. Dissatisfied with this result, one of the whites pressed charges against the officers for obstructing the road. His attorney, Matthew C. Butler, was a former


Confederate officer and a prominent lawyer, a leading South Carolina Reform politician, and, most significantly, a leader of one of the area’s white rifle clubs. Doc Adams countersued the white men for interfering with a militia drill.∞≠∫ On Saturday, 8 July, Prince Rivers, the local trial justice, initiated an investigation. Rivers, a former slave who had fought for the Union army, had been a member of the state legislature for several years and was currently a major general of the militia. He was one of over 1,000 black men who occupied local offices in the early 1870s and did much to change social relations at the local level. Backed by his rifle club cronies, who had gathered in town, Matthew Butler demanded the black militia surrender their arms and that Adams issue a personal apology. Adams refused. When Justice Rivers failed to broker a compromise, the black militia locked themselves up into an old brick warehouse that served as a local armory, and several additional white companies arrived at the scene. The whites commenced firing. The militia fired back; their guns claimed the first casualty: a nineteen-year-old white man. Struggling to get the upper hand in the battle, the whites called for reinforcements from Augusta, who arrived, a cannon in tow. After breaching one wall of the armory with the cannon, whites stormed the building. Some black men escaped, including Doc Adams. Others surrendered and were rounded up by white captors. Only one black man had been killed, but the whites shot and killed several of the leading members of the militia before ordering the rest to run off. As the survivors fled into nearby woods, the whites opened fire once again, wounding several.∞≠Ω Hamburg garnered regional and national attention. In the ensuing weeks, each side claimed the mantle of law and order and accused the other of inciting a riot. When leading black Republicans gathered in Charleston and Columbia to condemn the murders, they described the murdered black men as ‘‘peaceable and law-abiding citizens of the State’’ who had the legal right to bear arms and carry on drills. The black spokesmen depicted the white riflemen as ‘‘rioters’’ who had refused every opportunity to become members of the ‘‘properly authorized’’ state militia, and who took it upon themselves to commit acts of ‘‘wanton and inhuman butchery.’’ Careful to align black interests with the state, leaders reminded whites that African Americans were a ‘‘large producing class . . . contributing what bone and sinew we possess to the development of [South Carolina’s] industries.’’ The white riflemen were, on the other hand, com-


mitted to a ‘‘policy that must surely end in . . . rapine and bloodshed and anarchy and confusion.’’∞∞≠ White residents of Augusta, who received daily updates from the local newspaper, learned a very different version of events in nearby Hamburg. According to the Augusta Constitutionalist, Hamburg was known as a ‘‘nest and harbor of negro marauders incendiaries and cut throats’’ and black militias there had been preparing to attack local whites. The two white men who approached the militia on 4 July were gentlemen who made a civil request for a few individuals to move, only to be grossly insulted. Doc Adams was obstreperous and insulting to authorities. Whites who fired on the militia acted cautiously and calmly in their effort to help ‘‘a colored Magistrate to enforce the laws.’’ The newspaper’s editor also foisted blame for any crimes committed by whites onto ‘‘indiscreet youths,’’ a ‘‘drunken mob that followed the fighting . . . men who have no standing or reputation in the community,’’ and, finally, the ‘‘Republican Party, [which] has done its utmost to vitiate society, corrupt civilization, and makes laws that the devils . . . might blush to acknowledge respect for.’’ The Democratic editor argued simultaneously that whites ‘‘of well-known character’’ acted to uphold the civil law and that they acted to uphold a higher law, because the civil laws they encountered were so unjust. But no matter—the editor neatly found his way around the apparent contradiction: ‘‘When ruffianism is rampant and lynching is threatened . . . by a band of organized negroes . . . and when officers of the law [are] defied and white men are shot dead, the blood of white friends will get up, even in meek and downtrodden South Carolina.’’∞∞∞ Black men viewed themselves as rightful participants in, and indeed defenders of, a democratic polity in which public authority was widely shared—at least among men. Leading Democrats embraced a more hierarchical vision, and they viewed black men’s engagement in public life as a glaring violation of their own right—as they saw it—to maintain control over southern society and reserve the prerogatives of manhood for themselves. Unwilling to acknowledge the legitimacy of black men’s claim to equality, white residents in Hamburg literally interpreted the blacks’ actions as trespass. Insisting that they owned the road where the 4 July confrontation took place because it abutted their property, Thomas Butler and his father, Robert, refused to admit that the black militia men had any right to occupy what was, in fact, a public way. The Butlers’ claim to ownership of the road mirrored leading Democrats’ demand for a monopoly on


political authority, a demand that black men, who enacted a contrasting, democratic vision of civic life, refused to concede.∞∞≤ The attack in Hamburg, along with an assault the previous year in Vicksburg, Mississippi, demonstrates southern Democrats’ keen awareness of African Americans’ embrace of the Fourth of July.∞∞≥ For over a decade, black men had successfully commandeered the forceful symbolism the day provided. Together with black women and white supporters they had utilized and transformed narratives of American freedom and democracy and established black freedom as the legacy of the American Revolution. Marching through public spaces, rifles aloft, each year on the Fourth of July, black men also affirmed their hard-won position within the body politic. It was this position that African Americans defended and southern Democrats assaulted, not only during the Hamburg attack, but in the following months as well. In order to lay waste not just to the ceremony in Hamburg but to African Americans’ claim to citizenship, southern Democrats had to do more than kill or disarm black marchers. They had to transform peaceful and lawabiding gatherings of citizens celebrating Independence Day into menacing crowds of ‘‘negro marauders incendiaries and cutthroats.’’ That transformation was not complete in 1876: not only African Americans but also substantial numbers of whites vigorously protested the attack on black marchers in Hamburg. Indeed, had Republican officials mounted an effective response to Hamburg, African Americans might have triumphed in the struggle over the meaning of the incident. But federal and state responses were ineffectual. The Republican governor, Daniel H. Chamberlain, initially denounced the whites and called for Federal troops. But he was criticized mercilessly in the Democratic press, and he soon backed down. Congress held hearings but postponed legal action on the case until after the fall elections.∞∞∂ Emboldened by the postponement of the Hamburg case, South Carolina Democrats mobilized an all-out campaign to regain control of the state government. The campaign, which employed tactics ranging from systematic violence to blatant fraud, also devoted considerable energy to historical revision. At enormous rallies and parades, speakers compared Democratic leaders to American Revolutionaries, who expelled the British aliens from the nation.∞∞∑ Particularly vivid scenes were played out as Wade Hampton and his entourage of rifle clubs made their way across the state. In one town after another, the redeemers arrived at a local square, where a


white woman lay prostrate on the ground, bearing a ribbon with ‘‘South Carolina’’ written on it. Crowds broke into frenzied cheering as Hampton raised her up. In some towns, the drama was even more elaborate: as ‘‘South Carolina’’ rose, a group of thirty-seven women (representing other states) embraced her.∞∞∏ Even a Democratic observer was forced to acknowledge that the South Carolina election was ‘‘one of the grandest farces ever seen.’’∞∞π The end result, however, was a resounding triumph for the redeemers. Not only did Hampton claim victory in South Carolina, but, as part of a bargain struck to resolve the contested presidential election—both the Democrat, Samuel B. Tilden, and the Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes, claimed to have won— the remaining Federal troops pulled out of Louisiana and South Carolina in the spring of 1877. Reconstruction had officially ended, and a long period of Federal noninterference (southern ‘‘home rule’’) had begun.

J The combined impact of Federal withdrawal, violence, Republican disintegration, intraracial conflict, and incipient national (white) reunion produced a profound crisis among African American leaders as Reconstruction came to an end. Deeply frustrated by recent developments, some black spokesmen openly doubted freedpeople’s readiness for citizenship. At the Charleston Fourth of July celebration in 1875, one onlooker cried out to Martin Delany; he wanted to know why African Americans were being excluded from plans for the upcoming centennial celebration in Philadelphia. Delany responded with his typical mixture of racial separatism and defeatism: ‘‘It was because as a race they had allowed themselves to be beguiled by bad leaders, and hence were not up to the proper standards of American citizenship.’’∞∞∫ Others denounced the emerging harmony between northern and southern whites and steadfastly defended African Americans’ claims. Surveying the centennial in 1876, a black newspaper editor in Savannah argued, ‘‘Would it not be well for us to inform some of our patriotic friends who are so gloriously celebrating the 100th anniversary of American Independence, that the first blood that was shed for American liberty was that of a negro, Crispus Attucks, who fell while nobly defending the city of Boston March 5th, 1770? And yet our Democratic friends say this is a white man’s country.’’∞∞Ω After observing an Emancipation Day celebration in Savannah in 1878, AME Church leader Henry Turner lamented the disarray of black leaders in the wake of Reconstruction. He noted that ‘‘out of all the intelligent and


able colored orators in Savannah, not one appeared to address the people, yet the people were begging for a speech.’’ Turner concluded with sadness, ‘‘The Republican Party is regarded as dead [in Georgia]. . . . The colored men are very much inclined to let things drift in the future. Speechmaking is about ended. Men who have braved everything but death have put up their swords and say it is time to surrender.’’∞≤≠ The decline in the party’s fortunes in Georgia had stung Turner personally: after the Democratic resurgence, he did not have the access to formal political authority that he had enjoyed under Reconstruction; instead, he channeled his considerable energies within the confines of AME institutions. In 1872, Turner moved to Savannah, where he became the pastor of a prominent AME church and a leader in local black affairs.∞≤∞ For some black leaders, perhaps especially for those like Turner, whose previous historical vision had been so expansive, the setbacks that accompanied the end of Reconstruction seemed impossible to overcome. In the following years, Turner, Delany, and Richard Cain were among those who concluded that interracial progress was a hopeless cause and turned to emigration as the best means to salvage the future. Cain, who had vehemently rejected emigration during Reconstruction, wrote in support of the Liberia emigration movement in 1877: ‘‘There are thousands who are willing and ready to leave. . . . The colored people of the South are tired of the constant struggle for life and liberty.’’∞≤≤ Delany was a moving force behind the chartering of the Liberian Exodus Joint Stock Steamship Company in 1877–78. Founded by a group of black leaders in Charleston, the company purchased a ship, the Azor, which set out from the Charleston harbor in the spring of 1878 with 206 emigrants on board, bound for Africa. Although the venture was short-lived—the Liberian Exodus Joint Stock Steamship Company was quickly mired in debt and the emigrants who traveled on the Azor were ravaged by disease and hunger—the rise in back-to-Africa sentiment helped to establish a new direction for Henry Turner’s leadership. An early supporter of the Azor, Turner quickly emerged as one of the most prominent advocates of emigration and black nationalism, causes he would pursue with great passion and tenacity until his death in 1915.∞≤≥ Others, holding out hope that current setbacks were temporary, staked their future on progress in the South. As men and women struggled to find a way forward, they promoted public commemorations as a means of establishing new visions of black advancement. Late-nineteenth-century southern black spokespersons promoted ideologies of progress for many rea-


sons: to counter black emigrationists and combat white supremacists, to reach out to potential white allies and assert control over black communities, and last, but not least, to bolster their own faltering confidence in the possibilities for African American success in the South. The complex ramifications of their efforts are the subject of the next chapter.

chapter four

[U]nless I misinterpret the signs of the times, unless I mistake altogether the tendencies of the age, they are all in the direction of the fullest and freest enjoyment on the part of American citizens of all the rights, liberties, and privileges guaranteed them by the United States Constitution. William H. Crogman, Talks for the Times, 1896

JR Signs of the Times making progress in the post-reconstruction south

In the mid-1870s, as Democrats captured one southern election after another—Texas in 1873, Alabama and Arkansas in 1874, Louisiana in 1876—white Republican organizer John Emory Bryant began to clip newspaper articles in Savannah, Georgia, where he was working at the time. Bryant, who had been a vital—if controversial—political activist and leader during Congressional Reconstruction in Georgia, had seen his fortunes fall along with the state Republican Party, and he aimed to expose what he believed to be the fraudulent actions—both political and cultural—of reign-

134 making progress in the post-reconstruction south

ing Democrats. The articles Bryant collected and underlined for emphasis all reflected white southerners’ efforts to memorialize the Lost Cause. The first set, dating to January 1874, covered a local celebration dedicated to the memory of Robert E. Lee. Bryant cut out a piece from the New York Times, which covered the ceremony in Savannah. The Times emphasized the fact that the Confederate flag was flown and that the national flag was nowhere to be seen.∞ Bryant also kept the angry retort of the Savannah paper, which denounced the Times, arguing that southern whites, no less than southern blacks, should be allowed to honor their own memories by commemorating Lee’s birthday—just as local blacks celebrated Emancipation Day. In response to the New York Times portrayal of southern disloyalty, the Savannah editor drew a picture of separate but equal historical celebrations in the South, with African Americans memorializing their heroes and southern whites paying equal homage to their own. The editor did not mention that Democratic governor James Smith had recently prevented black militia companies from bearing arms—a fact that Bryant duly recorded in his burgeoning scrapbook. Indeed, the men who marched in Confederate gray at the ceremony for Lee in Savannah bore the very arms that members of black militias, who played such an important role in black commemorative ceremonies, had just been denied.≤ Bryant was thoroughly suspicious of southern conservatives’ intentions in regard to history. Over the next several years, he kept careful tabs on the growth and development of the Southern Historical Society (SHS), which was founded in 1873. Bryant catalogued articles that traced the expansion of the SHS in Georgia, such as an editorial in the Atlanta Daily Constitution that stressed the importance of maintaining a true southern history ‘‘for ourselves and our posterity.’’ For emphasis, Bryant underlined portions of articles that identified the leading members of the Southern Historical Society as former Confederate officials. In his scrapbook, Bryant interspersed features on the Society with articles covering actions of the Democratic governor, such as his efforts to diminish the strength of the black militia and pass legislation that would tighten controls on black laborers.≥ Determined to counter what he clearly perceived as a dangerous cultural movement bent on distorting history in the Confederacy’s favor, Bryant organized the Southern Advance Association in 1877, after Democrats ‘‘redeemed’’ Louisiana and South Carolina and the withdrawal of the last Federal troops from the South brought an end to Reconstruction.∂

making progress in the post-reconstruction south 135

Bryant believed that the threat of the Southern Historical Society and likeminded ventures could be contained, but only if ‘‘the white masses of the South’’ could be divided from the leaders of the ‘‘Southern Cause,’’ a group of ‘‘thoroughly united . . . wealthy, able, desperate men.’’ The Civil War, Bryant warned an associate in New York City, ‘‘is not ended . . . the Southern Aristocracy mean to rule or destroy the nation.’’∑ The only adequate response to such an ominous challenge was an all-out campaign to establish a more liberal opinion among the majority of southern whites: respect for the civil and political rights of African Americans and loyalty to the national government. Bryant founded the Southern Advance Association with the purpose of initiating an educational program among poor southern whites, aimed explicitly at refuting the historical interpretations of the Southern Historical Society, which he blamed for the declining power of the Republican Party in the South. Reviewing the past decade of southern politics in 1883, Bryant noted that when the Southern Historical Society was founded there were seven states still under Republican government. One decade later, it seemed that the South was ‘‘solid for the denfence [sic] and protection of its own civilization . . . and that it will remain so.’’ The rising power of the Democrats, insisted Bryant, could only have come about as a result of an organized campaign to reshape public opinion and manipulate history. The ‘‘southern oligarchy’’ that was behind the Southern Historical Society had successfully gained control of southern opinion makers and institutions of education. Only his association, he believed, could turn back the rising tide of sectional opinion and correctly instruct southerners in political and historical affairs.∏ John Emory Bryant’s plan to counter conservative trends by forging a bridge between liberal whites and African Americans paralleled the cultural strategies of a rising group of black men and women during the decades following Reconstruction, but with one important distinction. Like Bryant, these black spokespersons believed that class interests could and should outweigh racial considerations. Unlike Bryant, they believed that a common regard among black and white elites for a progressive vision of southern history could defeat white conservatives’ efforts to rewrite the past and condemn all African Americans to a permanent subaltern existence. After Reconstruction, a rising class of black professionals—educators, journalists, ministers, and historical writers—endeavored to chart a pro-


gressive vision of history, one that would benefit both blacks and whites alike. The theme of progress dominated the vast majority of African American commemorative celebrations, as well as the expanding field of race histories and black expositions from the late 1870s to the early 1890s. Numerous black spokespersons reiterated their claims for black achievement in everything from ‘‘morality’’ to black womanhood to politics. They also devised narratives of both southern and American progress. Contending that most whites acknowledged the wisdom of ending slavery, many black spokesmen vigorously promoted biracial visions of agricultural, industrial, and educational advancement. These African American narratives of progress embodied the complex and contradictory position of black southerners in the post-Reconstruction South. To a certain extent, black leaders’ dogged optimism reflected genuine African American success. When measured in terms of education, property, material gain, and professional position, African American achievements since Emancipation were real enough. This would have been particularly true for a rising generation of southern black men and women who could measure their own educational and professional accomplishments against the legacy of slavery.π Even as African American visions of progress were rooted in actual accomplishments, however, they were first and foremost acts of interpretation. That is, whether African Americans perceived success or failure in the post-Reconstruction South depended largely on where they looked. Certainly, those inclined to be pessimistic could point to numerous signs of distress. In 1883, African Americans suffered a particularly devastating blow when the Supreme Court overturned the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which had outlawed racial discrimination in hotels, railroads, and other public places. The civil rights cases decision did not come out of the blue, however. It marked the culmination of several Supreme Court rulings between 1873 and 1883 that narrowly interpreted the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments—and effectively curtailed the federal protection of black civil rights until well into the twentieth century. Although the systematic separation of blacks and whites known as segregation did not yet exist in the 1880s, such a world began to take shape late in the decade, when nine southern states passed railroad segregation laws—the first set of such laws to affect the region in a nearly uniform way. The proliferation of railroads throughout the South after Reconstruction created a lightning rod for racial tensions. White hostility centered on the


ability of more prosperous black southerners to buy tickets for the firstclass car, which was reserved for the most genteel travelers—men and women who did not chew tobacco or smoke. Well-dressed African American ministers and teachers—both men and women—who bought tickets and attempted to travel in the so-called parlor cars were frequently targeted for abuse and violence. In particular, however, whites worried about the potential for intimate contact between elite white women and black men in the confined space of the cars. As historian Edward Ayers notes, the ‘‘history of segregation shows a clear connection to gender: the more closely linked to sexuality, the more likely was a place to be segregated.’’ Places that tended to be occupied or frequented by only one sex—private kitchens and nurseries by women, for instance, and bars and race tracks by men—had much more fluid racial barriers. The controversies over the railroad cars—and the resulting segregation laws—highlighted the growing concern among white southerners for erecting barriers between black men and white women, and the particular fears that educated and prosperous African Americans of both sexes raised among whites.∫ A new round of violence added to the mounting concerns of African Americans. The early 1880s witnessed a sharp rise in lynchings in many parts of the region, particularly in rural areas that experienced a significant influx of black newcomers, who often moved from place to place in search of work at lumber camps and plantations. In actuality, a broad range of incidents and conflicts gave rise to the brutal murders, but white rhetoric identified black ‘‘crime’’—and particularly the rape of a white woman—as justification. Whites argued that black men, inspired by their recent gains in civil status, were seeking the ultimate symbol of equality with white men—sexual access to white women. Such claims reflected and reinforced long-held beliefs about the animalistic nature of black men’s sexuality, and—like the laws segregating train cars—worked to limit consensual relationships between white women and black men, as well as to punish black male assertiveness. (The narratives of black-on-white rape presupposed that no self-respecting white woman would ever voluntarily engage in an intimate relationship with a black man—and provided a convenient escape for any white woman caught in just such an entanglement.) In spite of the exhaustive efforts of Ida B. Wells and other black reformers to demonstrate that the accusation of rape was behind only a small minority of lynchings—and that many victims were targeted because of their economic success or political actions rather than an accusation of


crimes of any sort—whites in the late-nineteenth-century North and South increasingly accepted the notion that the menace of black-on-white rape justified the brutality of lynching.Ω Conservatives also used collective violence to thwart challenges to Democratic rule that erupted across the region in the late 1870s and 1880s. Exposing the persistence of political divisions among whites—and especially demonstrating widespread resentment at Democratic policies that narrowly promoted the interests of rural and urban elites—various combinations of third parties, Independents, and rejuvenated Republicans threatened Democratic power, nowhere more so than in Virginia, where the biracial Readjuster movement achieved impressive success in the early 1880s. A campaign to defeat the Readjusters culminated during the legislative elections of 1883, when Democrats used aggressive race-baiting tactics and violence both to persuade white Readjusters to come into the Democratic fold and to terrorize blacks into submission. The turning point in the fall elections came when Democrats murdered four black Readjusters in Danville. As historian Stephen Hahn argues, the ‘‘riot’’ in Danville had a direct impact on the following election: ‘‘Carrying doublebarreled shotguns and traveling at times in groups of forty to fifty, Democratic vigilantes roamed the precincts and polling places harassing, abusing, and threatening ‘to shoot’ the Readjusters. Many blacks, fearing for their lives, chose to stay home.’’ Such tactics were effective: the Democrats eked out a victory in the ensuing elections, regaining decisive control over the Virginia state legislature.∞≠

J African American leaders were divided on how to respond to the tumultuous conditions that engulfed the post-Reconstruction South. Arguments over emigration were especially acute, as an increasing number of black spokespersons—especially those living in the region—openly doubted whether African Americans would ever achieve equality there. The most pessimistic advocated leaving the country all together. In the late 1870s and 1880s, the resulting arguments over emigration sharply divided black institutions like the AME Church, where Henry Turner, an impassioned proponent of emigration to Africa, came up against Daniel Payne, an equally fierce opponent of such designs. Disagreements over emigration were so intense because they went to the heart of questions of African American identity and politics that had occupied African Americans throughout the nineteenth century. In the early 1800s, there had been strong opposition among free blacks—and aboli-


tionists in general—to the aims of the white-dominated American Colonization Society (ACS), which planned to transport freed black people to Africa. Although the ACS did convey nearly 11,000 African Americans to the colony of Liberia before the Civil War, most were former slaves who had been freed on the condition that they leave the United States; the society generated little enthusiasm or support among free blacks, most of whom considered the United States their home and rejected the underlying tenets of the ACS, that blacks were inferior to whites and could never achieve success in the United States. Some also suspected that the ACS, by endeavoring to empty the country of free blacks, actually intended to make slavery more secure.∞∞ Distinct from the ACS, northern blacks generated back-to-Africa movements at least as early as 1787, when eighty Boston free blacks attempted— unsuccessfully—to gain financial aid from the Massachusetts government for a mission to Africa. But significant black support for emigration did not emerge until the 1850s, as African Americans became increasingly disheartened by the power of southern slaveholders in national affairs, the deteriorating status of free blacks, and, especially, the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. A small but vocal group of leading African Americans, including Martin Delany, began to argue that American racial prejudice was too powerful to overcome. Black people would never achieve equality in the United States. They should pursue opportunities to settle and create a black nation elsewhere—either in Africa or somewhere in Latin America or the Caribbean—where they could prosper as a people, free from white harassment, and aid the black masses by introducing them to Christianity and petit-bourgeois values.∞≤ The arguments of emigrationists generated a heated response from black opponents, chief among them Frederick Douglass, who eloquently expressed the feelings of African Americans who believed that the United States was as much their home as anyone’s and feared that the issue of emigration would draw vital energy and attention away from the fight against slavery and prejudice in the United States. ‘‘The abolition of American slavery, and the moral, mental, and social improvement of our people, are objects of immediate pressing, and transcendent importance. . . . [W]e instinctively shrink from any movement which involves a substitution of a doubtful and indirect issue, for one which is direct and certain, for we believe that the demand for the abolition of slavery . . . though long delayed, will, if faithfully pressed, certainly triumph.’’∞≥ The Civil War and Emancipation temporarily quieted emigrationism, as


African Americans became more hopeful that equality could finally be achieved in the United States. Even before the end of Reconstruction, however, some southern blacks—discouraged by the virulence of white racism and determined to constitute stable black communities—began to express renewed interest in plans to emigrate. After 1877, voices calling on blacks to leave either the South or the nation grew louder still, and disputes over emigration quickly came to dominate debates among leading African Americans on how best to move forward. To a certain extent, arguments took shape along regional lines, as within the AME Church, where northern church leaders like Payne stood firmly opposed to Turner and other converts to emigration like Richard H. Cain, who resided in the South. Certainly, emigrationist plans spread rapidly among impoverished southern laborers in many states, including parts of North and South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. Struggling against devastating economic conditions and political setbacks, black southerners began to flee west in large numbers—often whole family networks left together—to states like Kansas in the late 1870s.∞∂ But the issue of emigration also sharply divided black leaders in the South; for every individual who argued that blacks needed to leave the region—or the nation—there were many others who insisted that African Americans should hold their ground and strive for progress at home.

J The representations of history and progress promoted at African American commemorations embodied the political uncertainty and argument of the post-Reconstruction South. In addition to disputes over emigration, disagreements over the meaning of slavery and women’s role in black progress were particularly sharp. At the same time, however, the commemorative ceremonies did not always mirror the full spectrum of questions and arguments in contemporary black historical ideologies and political thought. On many such occasions, black leaders constructed definitions of history and progress that carefully elided points of black discouragement and focused instead on areas of black achievement. Similarly, they consistently downplayed evidence of interracial conflict and emphasized (at times even invented) moments of interracial collaboration. The rhetoric of progress and interracial cooperation was shaped by many factors. Commemorations were frequently organized by rising-class black leaders aiming to convince African Americans to remain in the South. Indeed, speakers repeatedly stressed themes of progress in part to


answer the charges of proponents of emigration, whose historical interpretations in turn were underrepresented in celebrations of black freedom. The efforts of many southern black spokespersons to construct visions of the past to hold in common with southern whites also shaped commemorative histories along particular lines. As forums that were frequently open to white audiences, and designed in part to negotiate for white support, commemorative ceremonies occupied a peculiar position in contemporary political culture, one that often skewed black oratory toward conservative themes. The sharp rhetoric that appeared regularly in other black forums helps to contextualize the particular features of commemorative oratory, which often—though certainly not always—took a less contentious approach. At the same time that they emphasized the particular interests and strategies of individual organizers, African American commemorations also reflected broad trends in late-nineteenth-century black leadership. Most organizers of urban commemorations embraced the combination of selfhelp, group solidarity, and petit-bourgeois values that characterized the efforts of contemporary mainstream black leaders, ranging from Booker T. Washington to Anna Julia Cooper and W. E. B. DuBois. Recent scholars have pointed to the conservative nature of such leadership, which reinforced the very class distinctions used by whites to construct ideologies of racial difference and inequality. Indeed, many, if not most, organizers of commemorative events believed that the formation of a black middle class, or, as they put it, a black ‘‘better class,’’ was the key to African American advancement.∞∑ These leaders repeatedly stressed the development of characteristics, such as temperance and education, that were constitutive of contemporary middle-class identities.∞∏ Time and again, they also stressed the need to display black dignity and decorum at public ceremonies— goals that in turn required carefully scripted performances of both ‘‘ladies’’ and ‘‘gentlemen.’’∞π With the advantage of hindsight, historians have leveled trenchant critiques of elite African Americans’ ideologies of racial uplift and interracial cooperation. Indeed, the twin strategies of endorsing interracial cooperation and promoting middle-class progress meant that many black leaders were ill-prepared to address the massive social and economic problems faced by the majority of black southerners. The exodus of thousands of poor blacks from North Carolina in 1879—against the remonstrances of many ‘‘representative black men’’—is a vivid illustration of a


widening gulf between a rising class of southern black spokesmen and significant numbers of African Americans in the post-Reconstruction period.∞∫ Similarly, the efforts of elite black men and women to control the public representation of African Americans reflected their embrace of the very standards used by white contemporaries to denigrate workingclass blacks. In emphasizing the weaknesses of such strategies, however, we risk losing sight of the past as men and women actually experienced it. Whatever else might be said about the community leaders who organized southern African American commemorations, there is little doubt that they had the interests of black people (as they interpreted them) at heart, and that they worked extraordinarily hard, under adverse conditions, for the advancement of their people. At an Emancipation Day celebration in Arlington, Virginia, that won praise from a black journalist for its fine ‘‘array of AfroAmerican ladies,’’ the keynote speaker, James M. Townsend, underscored the significance of middle-class decorum in the late-nineteenth-century South. Condemning the ‘‘traitorous men’’ who had ‘‘band[ed] together for the avowed purpose of disfranchising, ostracising [sic] . . . or . . . getting rid of 8,000,000 . . . loyal, patriotic . . . people,’’ Townsend counseled the members of his audience about what we would call the gendered meaning of racial equality: ‘‘Every girl—every miss may be a lady,’’ Townsend insisted, ‘‘and to be a lady is to be something. There are some people who say that because your skin is black you cannot be a gentleman, or a lady. Whoever thus belies and slanders my people in that way . . . is a liar.’’ Townsend’s next comment reportedly drew the loudest applause from the assembled audience: ‘‘Whenever a colored girl spits in the face of a white scoundrel who insulted her, she elevates, dignifies, glorifies negro womanhood . . . and there ought to be more spitting in the face than there is.’’∞Ω James Townsend’s declaration that ‘‘every girl may be a lady’’ challenged the gendered tenets of white supremacy and highlighted an important dimension of late-nineteenth-century southern black leaders’ understanding of class. Even as they mobilized class-bound definitions of gender and progress, leading black men and women repeatedly emphasized the capacity of every person, regardless of birth or station, to achieve middle-class ideals through education, opportunity, and hard work. As Glenda Gilmore has argued, this represented a departure from the ways in which many nineteenth-century Americans, particularly white southerners, had long understood class differences. Black leaders’ overwhelming confidence in


education and equality of opportunity made class mobility the defining feature of a fair and free society; this placed them on the cutting edge of a rising generation of Americans who increasingly argued that merit—not heredity—should determine social position.≤≠ It is important to see black leaders’ efforts in the way that they themselves perceived them: as a design for enhancing the lives and opportunities of all African Americans and abrogating the power of racist ideologies. Unlike race, which was supposed to mark an indissoluble social boundary, or contrasting definitions of class distinctions, which served to separate upper- and middle-class Americans from the working classes, black leaders commonly invoked class as a means of creating community among African Americans and establishing cross-race alliances. That black leaders at times embraced class distinctions as a means of distancing themselves from poorer African Americans, and that the very values and behaviors they embraced were themselves racially inflected, certainly reflects the contradictions and problems inherent in such a strategy. Still, we should not lose sight of the sincere efforts and worthwhile aims of people working under tremendously difficult conditions.≤∞ The efforts of southern black leaders to elaborate visions of African American progress yielded significant results. Late-nineteenth-century Americans did overwhelmingly view history as progress.≤≤ By constructing historical narratives of black achievement and interracial advancement, African Americans forged a place for themselves in the dominant cultural ideologies of their time. This task was given special urgency by ominous trends in white culture. From the 1870s onward, the ‘‘Negro question’’ was asked and answered in a thousand ways, as some white theorists predicted that race war was imminent while others argued that African Americans were doomed to certain extinction. In the meantime, Union and Confederate troops began to join together in joint reunions. Popular culture also exhibited the sentiments of regional reconciliation. Plays like Augustus Thomas’s Alabama (1891) vividly enacted dramas of national white reconciliation in northern theaters; as historian Nina Silber explains, the popular plays typically centered on a ‘‘love affair between a southern belle and a northern man, initially torn apart by sectional prejudice but eventually reunited, with an abundance of sentiment and sympathy.’’≤≥ The efforts of organizations like the Southern Historical Society, which so upset John Emory Bryant, appeared to come to fruition as increasing numbers of northern whites warmed to the core elements of former Confederates’


portrayals of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, including their insistence on black inferiority.≤∂ But even as increasing numbers of white Americans moved to exclude African Americans from their visions of progress, white supremacist ideologies did not dominate national or even southern society and culture in the tumultuous decades following Reconstruction. Neither the South nor the nation was as ‘‘solid’’ as John Emory Bryant feared it was—or as historians since have often portrayed them. Instead, both political and cultural experimentation held sway, as Americans, North and South, black and white, struggled to exert authority over an unknown future. Leaping into the fray, African American leaders promoted visions of history and progress that countered the burgeoning discourse of white supremacy and established a course for black success. In doing so, they reflected both the hope and the possibility that African Americans, rather than their white opponents, embodied the ‘‘spirit of the age’’ and that the future would relegate white racism to a chapter of the ‘‘dead past.’’≤∑ The power of African American optimism was made evident in the South, where it helped to produce black achievement and interracial negotiation during the decades following Reconstruction. Out of the sundry materials of white paternalism and New South ideologies of progress, black leaders shaped a political culture in which African Americans were significant players into the 1880s and beyond. Emphasizing the mutual dependence of black and white southerners, African Americans achieved important goals, such as funding for black schools, and collaborated with white allies on issues of common concern, such as temperance and tax reform.≤∏ And, while the vast majority of African Americans struggled to eke out a living as sharecroppers or wage laborers, a small but growing number of black men and women translated their educational opportunities into more prosperous enterprises. These successes in turn gave black leaders reason to continue their strategy of working together with ‘‘liberal’’ whites.≤π Perhaps the greatest measure of the power of these discourses was the rising determination of white supremacists to oppose black-authored narratives of history and progress in the 1890s. However implicated in racial and class ideologies, portrayals of southern progress produced by southern black leaders were a far cry from contemporary theories of race and history that denied the very possibility of black achievement or an interracial society. This point was not lost on white supremacists, who redoubled their efforts to extinguish precisely the kinds of collective histories that African American spokespersons worked so hard to create.


Haunted by their own internal doubts, as well as by the renewed arguments of white supremacists and black emigrationists, southern black spokespersons redoubled their efforts to define the past, present, and future on their own terms.≤∫ In doing so, they reinforced a vital source of hope and renewal, which in turn enabled them to sustain their fight for justice in the face of daunting odds. By constantly reiterating stories of black success and interracial cooperation, leading black southerners steeled themselves for a battle that was cultural, as well as political, intellectual, as well as material, a battle whose outcome was impossible to know or predict, as long as African Americans maintained hope, and with it, their capacity to struggle, from one day to the next.

J The efforts to chart a course for black advancement and interracial cooperation were particularly intense in North Carolina, where African Americans and the Republican Party remained significant factors in local and state politics well beyond the end of Reconstruction. Indeed, as historian James Anderson points out, African American officeholding in North Carolina actually peaked in the decades following Reconstruction, with a rising generation of African American leaders achieving several seats in Congress, and black and Republican officeholders substantially represented in the state legislature, as well as in local offices in various parts of the state. Ironically, the actions of Democrats in the state legislature in 1872 helped to secure the status of both African Americans and Republicans in North Carolina. Seeking to secure their party’s control in three of the state’s four congressional districts, Democratic officials redrew district lines so as to isolate black and Republican strength. In doing so, they established the state’s Second Congressional District as a black and Republican stronghold—a place where ‘‘politics . . . developed in a fascinating mosaic of accommodation, with white leaders playing an important role in the ‘Negro party’ and Democratic strategists offering a variety of responses to black voters’’—conditions that defined the political culture in the Second District for nearly three decades. And, while black and Republican officials were most powerful locally within the counties of the Second District, Republican—and African American—leaders extended their influence through their election and appointment to state and national offices. Political conditions in North Carolina—specifically within the Second District but also more broadly throughout the state—stand as a prime example of the persistent diversity and changeability in southern politics, and help to explain black leaders’ optimism, even as they


faced significant struggles during the decades between Reconstruction and disenfranchisement.≤Ω In Raleigh, black spokesman Charles Hunter led local efforts to facilitate interracial ideologies of history and progress. Although somewhat older than the generation of black leaders who came of age after Emancipation, Hunter was in many ways typical of the African American spokespersons who made progress in the late-nineteenth-century South. One of the driving forces behind the organization of Emancipation Day celebrations in Raleigh from Reconstruction well into the twentieth century, Hunter had a hand in several progress-minded endeavors, including a groundbreaking black fair movement and a black newspaper. Additionally, Hunter authored numerous historical speeches and articles and published a booklength history of North Carolina. He also carefully documented important events in his own life—his extensive scrapbooks and collected papers reflect Hunter’s lifelong commitment to preserving the time in which he lived for future generations.≥≠ Born slaves in 1851, Hunter and his brother, Osbourne Jr., grew up in a small house that their parents—both slaves—maintained in Raleigh, North Carolina. Significantly, Hunter later recalled his childhood with great fondness; he idealized his relationship with the family that owned him and insisted that ‘‘an injury done to a Haywood Negro was an injury done to a Haywood white and vice versa.’’≥∞ During Reconstruction, Hunter was active in the Republican Party and obtained a position as assistant cashier in the Raleigh branch of the Freedmen’s Savings and Trust Company while still in his teens. After Democrats gained the upper hand in state politics in 1870, Hunter continued his involvement in local politics; he was also active in the local temperance movement, though there is evidence that Hunter himself had a drinking problem. Black activism in the temperance movement in North Carolina dated back to Reconstruction, when a number of black temperance clubs joined the Independent Order of Good Templars (IOGT), an international association that was headquartered in Great Britain. Hunter’s temperance work linked him to hundreds of educated and reform-minded African American men and women across the state, whose efforts on behalf of temperance reflected both religious and class sensibilities.≥≤ When the Raleigh branch of the Freedmen’s Bank closed in 1874, Hunter cast about for a new profession and eventually landed in a school in the village of Shoe Heel in Robeson County. From that point onward, he worked in the field of education, a career that ultimately spanned more than fifty years.≥≥


Fourteen years old at the end of the Civil War, Hunter was on the cusp of a generation of black leaders who came of age after slavery had ended. Already a teenager when Reconstruction began, Hunter was slightly older than many of the young men and women who assumed positions of leadership within southern black communities in the 1880s and 1890s, and he did not attend the educational institutions that produced so many of the region’s rising black professionals and urban activists during the postwar decades. Still, Hunter had important points in common with younger people, and his leadership was linked to broader institutional trends in southern black communities. At the end of Reconstruction, when political organizations like the Union Leagues were taking a beating, other black institutions—schools, literary societies, the press, and a nascent black publishing industry—were coming into their own. Subsequently, these institutions picked up where the Republican organizations left off, becoming even more important as forums for convening black ceremonies and articulating African American views of history. Black schools, in particular, took on responsibility for promoting black-centered views of history, and educational leaders were at the center of such efforts. Young men and women who pursued careers in the expanding field of black education thereby became immersed in numerous history-minded activities. Black educators helped to sustain, or in some cases revive, local commemorative celebrations in the context of declining Republican power. School officials not only sponsored commemorative ceremonies within their institutions, but they frequently fanned out across a locale, directing celebrations in nearby towns and cities. In Georgia, graduates representing Atlanta University predominated among the spokespersons who delivered speeches around the state each year on New Year’s Day.≥∂ Similarly, one of the most prominent Emancipation Day orators in Virginia after 1880, Daniel B. Williams, was a professor at the Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute. Like representatives of Atlanta University, Williams traveled throughout his home state, giving speeches on Emancipation Day.≥∑ Other black educators traveled even farther. John Mercer Langston, for instance, was in particularly high demand at celebrations around the country; the Howard University professor and Virginia congressman delivered commemorative speeches in such far-flung locations as Erie, Pennsylvania; Rochester, New York; Henderson, Kentucky; and Richmond, Virginia.≥∏ Among the educators who took an increasingly prominent role at public commemorations were significant numbers of women. Some even joined men at the speaker’s podium—an act that was practically un-


heard of during Reconstruction outside the relatively feminized spaces of churches and schools. After years of all-male rostrums, for instance, female educator Lucy Laney became a regular speaker at Emancipation celebrations in Augusta, Georgia. Joining male and female educators at the speakers’ podiums were ministers, who maintained their involvement in commemorative practices after Reconstruction, a scattering of black politicians, and, increasingly, historical writers and representatives of the black press. Since these individuals were involved in multiple arenas, these enterprises were never entirely separate. Charles Hunter was himself a lay leader in the AME Church; together with his brother, Osbourne Jr., he published the Journal of Industry, the official publication of the North Carolina Industrial Association, which annually sponsored a black state fair, beginning in 1879.≥π Daniel Webster Davis, who, like Daniel B. Williams, was a popular speaker in latenineteenth-century Virginia, was both a Baptist minister and a public school teacher. Like Hunter, Williams and Davis were also published writers. While Williams authored numerous historical essays and several monographs, Davis was a well-known poet and storyteller; much of his writing treated historical themes.≥∫ An increasing number of leading black women were also involved in multiple historical venues in the 1880s and 1890s. Alabama clubwoman Josephine Turpin Washington, for instance, presented her vision of black history and progress through her work in education, women’s associations, and journalism, as well as in oratory at public ceremonies. The involvement of individual journalists in organizing commemorative celebrations reflected the importance of the black press in articulating African American views of history. Both newspapers and religious periodicals helped to define a common language for treating black commemorations, through which local celebrations obtained regional and national meanings. During the latter decades of the nineteenth-century, as the black press expanded, leading newspapers gained an even more prominent role in broadcasting black-centered views of history and fostering the continuation of black historical traditions, like Emancipation Day ceremonies, as well as various forms of black memorials. In Savannah, Georgia, for instance, writers for the Savannah Tribune regularly threw their weight behind local Emancipation Day ceremonies. When either apathy or conflict threatened to diminish the annual celebration, editors and columnists joined forces to urge individuals and organizations to cooperate. An


1891 editorial, which stressed that no black person should be above celebrating the advent of freedom, was typical of the Tribune ’s determined support: ‘‘[On 1 January] every man, woman and child with one-eighth of Negro blood in his veins should deck themselves in their very best attire and show their appreciation for the birthday of their American liberty. . . . It is the Alpha of our citizenship and be ye ever so high, or so low your liberty was born on that day.’’≥Ω In addition to promoting commemorative celebrations, southern black newspapers, together with religious and educational periodicals, were important forums for defining and sustaining historical memory. Newspapers like the Petersburg Lancet and the People’s Advocate regularly featured stories about slavery and the Civil War, as well as broader narratives treating subjects in African American, U.S., and world history.∂≠ When widows of black soldiers fought to obtain their rightful pensions, black newspapers took up their cause and persistently reminded their readers and a white public of black men’s contributions to the Union.∂∞ Black newspapers also routinely played a leading role in organizing efforts to memorialize heroes ranging from John Brown to Frederick Douglass, and they regularly challenged the commemorative practices of southern whites. When a rumor spread that black students at Hampton College in Virginia were forced to participate in Confederate exercises on Memorial Day, for instance, the People’s Advocate pursued the matter closely and published several highly critical articles of the white-run institution.∂≤ Viewed through the lens of institutional growth and professional success, southern black history suddenly looks very different from the narratives of hardship and oppression that shape much of our understanding of African American life in the late-nineteenth-century South. The Raleigh educator and activist Charles Hunter and his colleagues were part of a generation of black southerners—both male and female—whose educational and professional achievements went hand in hand with institutional expansion and development during the decades after Emancipation. However benign Hunter’s recollection of his childhood, the fact remains that he was born a slave. And yet he went on to become one of the most prominent and influential black men in his community. Other rising black leaders could trace a similar lineage and mark their achievements against their own or their parents’ origins in slavery. The very real accomplishments of African Americans like Hunter, coupled with the expansion of black institutions, weigh against an interpretation of unstinting black


oppression in the post-Reconstruction South. Moreover, they help to explain why so many black leaders were dedicated to a vision of southern progress, even when faced with dispiriting political reaction.∂≥

J Active in a broad range of political and civic affairs, Hunter took a special interest in organizing events to commemorate Emancipation in Raleigh, where black North Carolinians vigorously celebrated each New Year’s Day. While the most elaborate ceremonies were held in Raleigh, black residents also carried on celebrations elsewhere.∂∂ The Raleigh Emancipation Day celebrations provide a fascinating window onto the cultural interventions of African Americans in late-nineteenth-century North Carolina. For several decades, leaders like Charles Hunter endeavored to construct a shared body of historical arguments that could resonate for both African Americans and whites. Neither condemning nor ignoring the history of slavery, Raleigh spokesmen instead worked to transform black enslavement into an allegory of interracial ‘‘influence’’ and cooperation. Just as white and black southerners had helped one another in the past, they argued, so, too, should they work together to build a better future for the state. Even before the end of Reconstruction, black leaders in Raleigh had begun to try to construct a past to hold in common with whites. In 1869, Charles Hunter called for black and white residents to join together in a celebration of 4 July. The North Carolina Standard was quick to endorse Hunter’s appeal. After the celebration took place, Hunter judged it a complete success: ‘‘We had a very nice time. . . . After the reading of the Declaration of Independence Mr. Joseph W. Holden delivered a very nice and appropriate address fitted in every respect for the occasion. I don’t know that I ever heard more impressive.’’∂∑ Unwilling to concede that the celebration expressed anything other than a united community of patriotic American citizens, Hunter made no mention of the fact that blacks and whites had been formally segregated at the ceremonies.∂∏ Throughout the following years, Hunter actively solicited the participation of white officials—ranging from radical Republicans to prominent Democrats—for Emancipation Day celebrations.∂π His efforts to bring together divergent perspectives resulted in a particularly unlikely pair of invitees for the ceremonies planned for 1872. As secretary for the Committee of Arrangements, Hunter issued one invitation to the prominent northern abolitionist Charles Sumner and another to Bartholomew Moore, who


had helped to draft the North Carolina Black Code. In his letter to Sumner, Hunter expressed his admiration for the Northern Republican’s commitment to black freedom: ‘‘Having devoted a long and useful life to the Emancipation and civilization of our race, we would esteem it a great honor to have you present with us on that occasion, that we all might behold one who have [sic] ever stood as a wall of brass in defense of the liberties of our people.’’∂∫ Unfortunately, there is no extant copy of Hunter’s letter to Moore. How did Hunter couch his appeal to a prominent state Democrat? And how did he envision Sumner and Moore on the same platform? Whatever his plan, no such ceremony took place. Both Sumner and Moore declined Hunter’s invitation. Their respective responses to Hunter’s appeal illustrate the sharp contrasts between each man’s interpretation of freedom and reinforce the improbability of common ground. Sumner sent his regrets that he could not attend but urged Hunter, and other black leaders, to continue to press for equal rights. He emphasized ‘‘justice’’ for blacks over ‘‘amnesty’’ for whites and urged African Americans in North Carolina to ‘‘make themselves felt’’ in the battle over the Civil Rights Bill, pending in Congress at the time.∂Ω Moore, on the other hand, took the opportunity to criticize ‘‘corruption’’ (an obvious reference to the Republican Party) and issued a stern warning to the freedmen on the dangers of freedom misused: ‘‘Let us all of every race and color ever bear in mind that personal freedom is worthless as a national blessing, unless its great ambition be to Exalt and honor virtue and intelligence.’’∑≠ Hunter continued to cast historical celebrations as broad-based events that could appeal to black and white southerners. Time and again, he and other black leaders in Raleigh indicated their desire to achieve rapprochement with white residents. Black commemorative speakers routinely praised the efforts of white officials on behalf of black residents, insisted that African Americans harbored no ill feeling toward former slaveholders, lauded evidence of black progress in the state, and urged their audiences to fulfill their ‘‘duty’’ by remaining in North Carolina.∑∞ Black leaders were sometimes successful in soliciting white approval. North Carolina newspapers gave complimentary coverage to black celebrations. The scathing white rhetoric that greeted black celebrations throughout much of the South was largely absent in North Carolina. In its place was a tone that was patronizing rather than hostile, faintly amused rather than angry. The Raleigh Daily News complimented the speeches of


black speakers for their ‘‘good advice—advice which, if followed, would greatly tend to the cultivation between the races.’’∑≤ White reporters applauded the behavior of large crowds. ‘‘Kaleidoscopic’’ scenes of streets ‘‘thronged’’ with men, women, and children were ‘‘pleasing to the eye.’’ Military companies ‘‘maneuvered very creditably [sic] and inspired a ‘‘[deep] interest’’ in the ‘‘maiden[s],’’ who were ‘‘out in gay colors.’’ In 1880, a white reporter was pleased to report that the behavior of African Americans on New Year’s Day had been ‘‘admirable: no drunken men . . . no fights. . . . When the older ones, those that lived under the old institution, met their old masters they spoke to them respectfully and were kindly greeted in return. None of the soul-harrowing brutalities that the Northern press takes such delight in publishing were visibly perpetuated, and instead of the exodus movement being advocated it was heartily denounced. And thus ended a joyous day for the colored folk.’’∑≥ Some black leaders were sharply critical of the efforts of Hunter and likeminded leaders to reach accord with whites. Hunter regularly came under attack from fellow African Americans who believed that he compromised black rights in order to appease white officials.∑∂ Historians have also looked askance at the ‘‘accommodationist’’ strategies of men like Hunter. Hunter’s biographer, John Haley, echoes the judgment of many scholars when he defines his subject as ‘‘the model of the accommodationist. . . . This type idealized native whites, adopted their values, sentiments, and attitudes, and eventually professed love for those whom they at first feared and resented.’’∑∑ A closer look at black celebrations in Raleigh, however, suggests a more subtle negotiation, with white officials making some concessions to black interests, even as black leaders courted white opinion. A spirit of accommodation did characterize black historical celebrations in Raleigh, and black spokesmen were clearly focused on appealing to white sentiment. But they also got something in exchange.∑∏ Time and again, black officials staged ceremonies where white leaders publicly renewed their commitment to support black endeavors. At Emancipation Day celebrations, white speakers cautioned black audiences to be ‘‘honest’’ and ‘‘industrious,’’ but they also pledged themselves to respect black rights and support African Americans’ efforts to achieve progress, particularly in education. Zebulon Vance, who was the first Democratic governor to address a black celebration in North Carolina, spoke at Emancipation Day ceremonies in Raleigh in 1877 and 1878. He reminded his audience that he had been opposed to


Emancipation originally—‘‘I struggled so long to prevent [it]’’—but he insisted that he now recognized the fact of African American citizenship: ‘‘[A]s Governor of North Carolina [I] recognize you as citizens and . . . respect all the rights with which the laws have invested you. This . . . I always shall do.’’ As long as African Americans worked hard, strove to obtain an education, and avoided ‘‘riotous or disorderly violence,’’ Vance insisted, he would support them in all their endeavors.∑π More than a decade later, Governor Thomas Michael Holt echoed these sentiments when he addressed an Emancipation Day ceremony in Raleigh. Holt derided portrayals of white violence and presented an alternative vision of white patronage and support for black strivings: ‘‘See here . . . the first fair held by the colored people, and maintained for a series of years . . . with appropriations by a white legislature. . . . Go to Warrenton and see the Colored State Normal School. . . . All these have been devised and paid for by the ‘white thieves and murderers’ of whom you have heard.’’∑∫ Black spokespersons like Charles Hunter took southern paternalists at their word. With language and images that hearkened back to the proslavery rhetoric of the ‘‘positive good,’’ they held white residents accountable for their self-professed ‘‘duty’’ and ‘‘responsibility’’ toward former slaves and their descendants. Time and again, black leaders reiterated their faith that white North Carolinians were African Americans’ ‘‘best friends’’— ‘‘best friends’’ who could be counted on to help build black schools, fund black institutions, and protect black citizenship.∑Ω Of course, not all white authorities responded positively. Just as there were African Americans who were suspicious of cross-race alliances, so, too, did a significant number of white residents vocally resist collaboration. When Governor Vance first addressed an Emancipation Day celebration in 1877, for instance, fellow Democrats harshly criticized him for participating in a black ceremony. It was precisely this division in white opinion, however, that facilitated—and encouraged—black leaders’ strategy of collaboration. Recognizing white disagreements, black leaders like Hunter seized every opportunity to throw their weight behind a vision of southern history that encompassed black advancement. Rather than a one-way accommodation, then, commemorative celebrations in Raleigh constituted a fragile, working negotiation between leading African Americans and potential white allies. Reaching back to slavery, black leaders charted a course of nearly changeless stability, in which blacks and whites worked together to achieve common ends. This ideology con-


trasted sharply with black-authored narratives that characterized Emancipation as a revolutionary event that transformed the South and the nation. But it also diverged from the dystopian visions of white racists, who similarly maintained that Emancipation instituted extreme (and in their eyes catastrophic) change in the South. In between these two radical interpretations, Raleigh blacks forged a path to guide both black and white southerners into a prosperous future.

J The black industrial fair movement, founded in 1879, further illuminates the complexities and the accomplishments of African American cultural labor. In North Carolina in the 1880s and 1890s, black fairs were a substantial forum for demonstrating black advancement and promoting interracial cooperation and negotiation. They served an important political function that paralleled Emancipation Day celebrations: black spokesmen consistently used the fairs as platforms for pressuring whites to support black interests. Whereas Emancipation Day ceremonies hearkened back to a distant past, however, the industrial fair movement focused on the accomplishments of black southerners since Emancipation as a measure of both the existing capacity and the future potential of African Americans in the state. While they functioned to assert black interests, the Raleigh industrial fairs also reflected growing disagreements among African Americans. Indeed, the organizers of the industrial fair movement aimed to convince both skeptical African Americans and incredulous whites of the potential and reality of black achievement. ‘‘Do not emigrate’’ became a yearly refrain.∏≠ The fairs also exhibited a complex class dynamic. They displayed the tension between a strategy of promoting class distinctions, on the one hand, and a democratic desire to represent the ‘‘advancements’’ of all African Americans, on the other. Black spokespersons clearly viewed the fairs as an opportunity to demonstrate the accomplishments of the ‘‘best colored people.’’ But they also invited the participation of broad swaths of the population and celebrated the large and varied attendance that the fairs generated each year. Concomitantly, some poor black southerners expressed a lack of interest in the fair, which seemed largely irrelevant to their daily struggles. Even so, large numbers went to great effort to attend the fairs in Raleigh and took considerable pride in the products they contributed to the displays. Thus, even as the industrial fairs clearly celebrated class-based visions of history and progress, it is impossible to characterize the black fairs as entirely elitist or exclusive of broader black interests.


The black fairs shed light on the ways in which African American portrayals of progress actually became constitutive of black success. That is, various portrayals of black achievements and capabilities like those presented at the fairs provided an alternative vision of black experience to unstinting discrimination, political oppression, and economic hardship. And these portrayals in turn provided much-needed inspiration for black southerners—and perhaps especially black leaders—who needed to believe that their efforts were not all in vain. No African Americans, not even the most prosperous, were immune to the increasing power of white racism during the decades following Reconstruction. Even the most fervent proponents of black progress had moments of self-doubt and uncertainty. As they struggled to shore up their own flagging optimism, African Americans of every persuasion turned to displays like the annual fairs for much-needed confirmation of the potential—and reality—of their achievements.

J In the fall of 1879, members of the newly formed North Carolina Industrial Association announced that the ‘‘First Grand Annual Fair’’ would be an opportunity for black farmers, artisans, and educators to exhibit their best work and thus to provide a practical demonstration of black advancement. In particular, members sought to demonstrate the full range of black gains since Emancipation. Although outwardly confident, they referred directly to those who viewed black potential with ‘‘doubt and anxiety’’: Fifteen years are on the eve of completion since universal Negro Emancipation in the American Republic became a fixed and an accepted fact. With keenest interest the world has been watching every indication of progress on the part of the emancipated race. Many regarded the experiment with doubt and anxiety, fearing lest we should prove unequal to the great and grave requirements of independent freemen. . . . The design of the North Carolina Industrial Association, and the object of the Industrial Fair, is to place before the world every evidence of our progress as a race which it is possible to secure.∏∞ The organizers’ resolve to ‘‘place before the world every evidence of our progress as a race’’ echoed the earlier intentions of African Methodist Episcopal churchmen, who had looked forward to the centennial in 1876 as a chance to demonstrate African American accomplishments to the nation. Unlike the dismal results achieved by African Americans at the Philadelphia exposition, however, the black industrial fairs in Raleigh


achieved a considerable degree of success. In 1879 and over the following decades, the annual event regularly drew high acclaim from both black and white leaders and attracted enormous crowds of African Americans from North Carolina and nearby states. Billed as industrial expositions, the state fairs emphasized agriculture, crafts, and mechanical products but also encompassed a range of black efforts in education and the arts. Therefore, they reflected trends in African American definitions of progress from the mid-1870s onward. At the same time, the fairs highlighted the fine line walked by black spokesmen who aimed to shift white attention away from political conflict, even as they continued to pursue political goals. Organizers billed the fair as an opportunity to demonstrate African American capabilities and specifically refrained from politics. This was interpreted by some black contemporaries as a betrayal of black rights. But the reality was more complex. While Hunter and his allies believed that it was important to represent a broad field of black endeavor, they were themselves immersed in political affairs. Rather than a withdrawal from politics, then, the fair’s design reflected a strategic approach to garner white support, at the same time that it reflected black organizers’ own belief in the wide range of black abilities.∏≤ As secretary, Charles Hunter solicited objects from a missionary in Liberia, as well as from individuals and institutions within North Carolina and elsewhere in the country. Ministers, educators, and community leaders coordinated efforts to bring various products for display. Contributions ranged from agricultural products, livestock, and machines to sewing, foodstuffs, and the fine arts. In the Educational Production Department, supervisors set out map drawings, essays, and examples of penmanship, while the Department of Mechanic Arts featured carpenters’ work and cabinetmakers’ and upholsterers’ work.∏≥ Organizers rushed to have everything ready for opening day, which began with a burst of enthusiasm and expectation. A grand military procession passed through the city’s main streets en route to the parade ground, where a large crowd gathered to hear speeches from black and white officials. The editors of the Journal of Industry particularly admired the sight of ‘‘persons representing the most prominent men in the State of both races’’ occupying a single stage: ‘‘It was a grand spectacle to behold—this entertwining [sic] or blending of mutual sympathy between two races whose circumstances are so different and yet who seem to be so dependent upon each other.’’∏∂


The organizers, who worked so hard to create a forum that would reinforce the mutual dependency of black and white southerners and who envisioned a special communality between the ‘‘most prominent men’’ of both races, must have been pleased with Governor Thomas Jarvis’s opening address. The Democratic governor pledged his support for black citizenship, urged members of the audience to work hard, and assured them they would find ‘‘in North Carolina as genial a place, as promising and hopeful a future as you can in any other place or any other climate upon the face of God’s earth.’’ And, while he told his listeners that they were a ‘‘peculiarly . . . agricultural people,’’ Jarvis also urged them to make ‘‘classes among yourselves.’’ ‘‘White people have them,’’ he continued. ‘‘Every people has them and you must have them.’’ Articulating a theory of racial uplift as clearly as any contemporary black leader, Jarvis insisted that the route to race progress was through education, the acquisition of property, and respectable living; the key to elevating black Americans to ‘‘the plane which the white man occupies’’ was to distinguish ‘‘the man who does right’’ from ‘‘the man who does wrong.’’∏∑ Local black political leader James E. O’Hara followed Governor Jarvis to the podium. Born in 1844 in New York City, O’Hara was the illegitimate son of a West Indian woman and an Irish merchant. He came to eastern North Carolina as a teacher in 1862, when the state was occupied by the Union army, and became one of the state’s most effective black leaders during the years following the war. After spending two years in Washington, D.C., where he worked for the Treasury Department and studied at Howard University, O’Hara made his home in North Carolina, where he quickly immersed himself in Republican politics. Although he narrowly lost a bid for Congress in 1878, O’Hara went on to be elected from the ‘‘Black Second’’ Congressional District in 1882 and served two terms in the House of Representatives, between 1883 and 1887. Throughout the 1880s, O’Hara worked to help build coalitions between Republicans and ‘‘liberal’’ Democrats; at the peak of his power, in 1884, he served on the executive committee of the Republican Congressional Committee.∏∏ In his speech at the 1829 state fair, O’Hara echoed the advice of Governor Jarvis, but he diverged from the white official’s script on several key points. Like the black officials who spoke at local Emancipation Day celebrations, O’Hara was intent on pushing back against the limits white men would set. Beginning with a flourish, O’Hara welcomed the dawning of a ‘‘new era’’ in North Carolina: ‘‘[T]he iron pen of history with indelible


firmness must record upon an unsullied page . . . another great and meritorious stride made by the sable sons of the Old North State in the ascent toward civilization and national grandeur. Here the free spirit of mankind at length throws its last fetters off and who shall place a limit to the giant unchained strength or curb its swiftness in the upward race?’’ Whereas Jarvis had urged blacks to invest in property and education, O’Hara detailed the ways in which they already had. After only sixteen years of freedom, he declared, African Americans were already competing with whites in many areas. While agriculture was one field of black accomplishment, there were many others of equal importance. In spite of severe ‘‘trials and hardships,’’ African Americans were excelling in the ‘‘literary and scientifical productions of the brain,’’ and in music, art, and home life as well: ‘‘No longer need we wander with covered heads and downcast eye, wondering and fearing to hear the solving of the problem, if problem it be, of what must be the status of a negro . . . [for] the answer unmistakably [is], ‘Ye are men and women worthy of a name and place in our nation’s history.’ ’’∏π O’Hara melded themes stressed by Governor Jarvis to his own call for education. African Americans felt a great love and loyalty for the state, O’Hara insisted. But, in order to ‘‘secure a stronger bond of union and perpetuate that love for North Carolina which is possessed by us,’’ state officials needed to ‘‘encourage with a generous . . . hand the education of all her children.’’ Specifically, O’Hara had in mind the construction of a state university for black residents ‘‘of equal dignity of the State University at Chapel Hill.’’ Pressing his case, O’Hara argued that existing private schools did not instill the same sense of pride and belonging that a state institution would. Moreover, if African Americans were well suited for agricultural pursuits, as whites insisted, then they needed someplace to pursue knowledge in the related fields of botany and chemistry, among other things.∏∫ While O’Hara certainly sought white support, he did not simply pander to white interests. In following years, black speakers at the fair similarly pushed beyond set expectations. Frederick Douglass was asked to speak on the subject of agriculture for the second annual fair, but he quickly diverged from the topic, explaining that there were ‘‘undoubtedly hundreds of colored men in North Carolina who could [say] more about farming’’ than he could. Douglass went on to treat such diverse subjects as the accomplishments of ancient Egyptians, the importance of black education, and the imperative of acquiring land. Like O’Hara, Douglass bal-


anced praise for ongoing race relations with pressure on behalf of black interests, and he placed substantial emphasis on the historic import of the fair.∏Ω Throughout the 1880s and beyond, Raleigh’s industrial fairs garnered support from a large number of local and national spokesmen. Clearly, upwardly mobile black men and women felt that the fairs reflected and reinforced a positive vision of southern progress. But what of the broader black population in the state? Some black residents failed to see the connection between the fair’s displays and the realities of their own lives— even if they eventually did respond to the urgings and cajoling of local leaders. Writing from Asheville in 1886, a supporter of the fair lamented the fact that African Americans in his town were not more eager to contribute products. ‘‘Any thing like this doesn’t seem to interest our people,’’ he explained.π≠ Others expressed their desire to participate but explained that their communities were too poor to sustain such an effort. When invited to travel to Raleigh for the fair in 1886, a schoolteacher in Lumberton detailed his own financial plight and described the poverty among black families in his community: ‘‘I have a large family to support and my school is self-sustaining. . . . I have in my own family eight children + three young ladies—all our own family, and my wife. By time these are fed and clothed I have not a cent to spare. . . . Our people here are awfully poor; and handle very little money.’’π∞ Such testimony belies the unflagging optimism that the fair plumped for. Recall that 1879, the year of the fair’s opening, witnessed the first major exodus of African Americans from North Carolina and elsewhere in the South. James O’Hara referred to black migration—and urged against it—in his speech that year, when he insisted that African Americans were making gains in the state: ‘‘To [those who advocate emigration] I will simply say come, look, and enjoy the feast . . . for us and our household North Carolina shall ever remain our permanent home.’’π≤ In following years, both black and white officials made similar arguments. Frederick Douglass, for example, urged African Americans not to ‘‘leave a place to which they are suited, and where they are at home.’’π≥ Obviously, the displays at the fair did not present the full range of black experience in North Carolina. Nor were they meant to do so. Instead, they reflected a carefully screened vision of progress. Like the yearly celebrations on 1 January, the annual fair enacted a set of stories about the past, present, and future—stories that both mirrored and supported black lead-


ers’ greatest hopes and dreams for the New South. In doing so, the fair sometimes failed to connect with the day-to-day experiences of the majority of African Americans in the state.π∂ But this weakness was also an important strength: the Raleigh fair allowed African Americans to immerse themselves—if only for a few days—in a self-contained world of black success. Black spokespersons repeatedly emphasized the power of the industrial fairs to shore up tired spirits and lagging faith in black advancement. Frederick Douglass articulated the apprehension shared by many African American leaders: ‘‘As a people and especially as a free people, we are today on trial. The question is asked by friends and by foes, and should be asked by ourselves, what is to become of the colored race in America? Will they advance or recede, will they rise or fall, survive or perish, die out as the Indians are dying out? It is a great question, and nobody can answer, but ourselves.’’π∑ As they struggled to foresee an uncertain future, black leaders like Douglass looked to the state fairs in Raleigh for crucial reassurance. The importance of cultivating ‘‘race pride’’ was a recurring theme in the literature and oratory of the North Carolina Industrial Association, as well as in the private correspondence of individuals connected with the fair. Black leaders in North Carolina and from around the country voiced their faith in the fair’s capacity for combating division and discouragement. They repeatedly emphasized the importance of ‘‘cultivat[ing] selfrespect’’ and ‘‘never being ashamed of [the] race,’’ and praised the fair and related institutions for ‘‘promoting a love of Race and cementing race unity.’’π∏ In addition to evidence of interracial cooperation and black achievements in industry, agriculture, and education, what black organizers looked for—and found—in the annual exhibitions in Raleigh was confirmation of their own ‘‘best’’ self-image. The coverage of the fair in the Raleigh Gazette, a local black newspaper, was typical of the panegyrics issued by black leaders in the 1880s and 1890s. Observing the scene of the fair in the fall of 1891, a reporter for the Gazette particularly relished the appearance of hundreds of ‘‘the best colored people’’ arriving in Raleigh: ‘‘Early in the week great crowds of the best colored people in the State began to pour into the city. . . . Men of learning; men eminent in the field and in the forum. . . . And not only men, but hundreds of the most refined and cultured women of the race graced the occasion with their presence.’’ Moving on to describe the actual events of opening day, the reporter em-


phasized the distinguished nature of the parade from the city out to the exposition grounds and heartily praised the members of the large audience who gathered to hear the afternoon’s speeches for their decorum and intelligence. Reflecting on the full day’s events, he proudly concluded that the fair not only reflected current achievements but pointed the way to new challenges that would bring even further ‘‘glory [to the race].’’ππ From the fair’s foundation in agricultural and industrial pursuits, black leaders went on to envision a boundless future for African Americans. In 1886, Congressman Blanche K. Bruce expressed his belief that industrial expositions, such as those held in North Carolina, ‘‘had abundantly and satisfactorily attested [to] the progress of our people, and at the same time have been auxiliaries to advance that progress.’’ AME Church bishop John T. Jenifer, who had such high hopes for the national centennial, was even more enthusiastic; he insisted that fairs such as those held in Raleigh had done more than any other institution to demonstrate the capabilities of African Americans and indicate their future potential in the United States. T. Thomas Fortune, the publisher of the New York Freeman, echoed the support of Jenifer and Blanche and expressed his regret that he would not be able to make it himself, due to financial strain.π∫ Broader communities of African Americans also valued the yearly opportunity to represent black success. The hundreds of correspondents from North Carolina and around the country who worked to collect contributions and pledged their support to the organizers in Raleigh testified to the fair’s substantial appeal to black educators, ministers, newspapermen, and community leaders, as well as to individual men and women of modest means.πΩ John Strange of Richmond, Virginia, was just one of dozens of correspondents who detailed the contributions made by neighbors to the Raleigh fair; a pair of ‘‘crosheaing kneddles’’ [sic] and ‘‘fine boots or shoes’’ were some of the homemade items Strange anticipated collecting for display.∫≠ Other correspondents offered to organize literary programs, musical performances, and educational exhibits.∫∞ Individuals in towns and villages around North Carolina and in neighboring states canvassed on behalf of the fair in exchange for free train passage to Raleigh, while local leaders promoted the fair in churches, schools, and on the pages of black newspapers.∫≤ Writing from Norfolk, Virginia, Annie Grandy testified to the high level of satisfaction and pride that individuals took in their contributions to the North Carolina fairs when she wrote to Charles Hunter out of a concern that she, rather than her daughter, would


receive credit for a particular item. Explaining that her daughter was actually going to do the work, Grandy wrote, ‘‘I would like for her to have the credick will you oblidge me by changing the name to Hattie A. Grandy instood of Annie Grandy.’’∫≥ When viewed from every angle, it becomes impossible to assign a single meaning to the industrial state fairs in North Carolina. If the fairs represented the class bias of black spokesmen—and they clearly did—then they also embodied a vision of black achievement that held great appeal to a broad spectrum of African Americans from North Carolina and around the South. By emphasizing displays of ‘‘industrial’’ progress, the fair’s spokespersons courted conservative white sentiment and countered the efforts of other black leaders to highlight points of white treachery and African American hardship. But they also generated a measure of white support for black interests and established a tradition of black success that helped to sustain the daily struggles of African Americans throughout North Carolina and beyond.

J Educator Richard R. Wright, the president of the Georgia State Industrial College, sounded the popular theme of interracial cooperation at an Emancipation Day celebration in Augusta: ‘‘In the great business of building up each other and this country, it is the opinion of the best men of both the white and black race that one race cannot go up or down without affecting the other.’’∫∂ In the 1880s and early 1890s, it became increasingly common for black spokespersons to portray black and white southerners as working in harmony toward shared goals. Returning these leaders’ compliments, white newspapers widely acclaimed Emancipation Day parades as ‘‘soldierly’’ and ‘‘dignified’’ and enthusiastically applauded African American historical speeches.∫∑ Black spokesmen’s emphasis on racial harmony, however, did not signify a lack of commitment to black rights. At the Emancipation Day ceremony in Augusta, Richard Wright underscored black accomplishments in education and wealth, but he also reminded his audience that he was in ‘‘favor of voting and voting at every election.’’ He added, ‘‘I think that a man who does not take an interest in giving to his city or State good government is not fit to be a citizen.’’∫∏ As was the case in North Carolina, African Americans elsewhere in the South steadily pursued strategies that combined the solicitation of white support with an assertion of black interests during the decades following Reconstruction. Widespread black hopefulness was also evident in the pronouncements


of the young African American educators, ministers, and journalists who predominated as historical speakers and writers throughout much of the South during the 1880s and 1890s. Not yet twenty years old, Thomas Norris Jr. captured the exuberant feeling of a rising generation of black leaders when he ascended to the podium on Emancipation Day in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1885 and declared: ‘‘I appear before you to-day as a ‘junior representative of a new order of things.’ Slavery has been buried with the oblivion of the grave. Proscription has long been detached from the minds of liberal men. Equality of privileges, equality of right, equality of burdens, are the watch words upon which the fabric of our prosperity is erected.’’ Norris went on to commemorate the accomplishments of African Americans since freedom: they were ‘‘unequaled by any race in similar circumstances; far exceeding others with superior advantages’’ in politics, literacy, landownership, ‘‘morality,’’ and the professions.∫π Similarly, when she addressed a large audience on New Year’s Day in Brunswick, Georgia, in 1895, a Mrs. J. B. Garnett detailed abundant evidence of African American accomplishments since Emancipation, including the establishment of black schools, private homes, and newspapers. If African Americans only continued along these same lines, and instilled in their children the true value of citizenship, she declared, they could look forward to ‘‘the day when we will reach our zenith.’’∫∫ Black observers also displayed a hopeful outlook when they contemplated the vision of ‘‘intelligent’’ black assemblages each year on New Year’s Day. Surveying audiences assembled for annual ceremonies, black commentators repeatedly remarked upon the transformation in southern black life in recent generations. Writers for the Atlanta University Bulletin, for instance, consistently praised the vision of students—‘‘the children of freedmen’’—gathering beneath the American flag each year on New Year’s Day: ‘‘Who could believe that the parents or grandparents of such people were actually held in bondage as slaves!’’∫Ω The proliferation of race histories during the 1880s and 1890s further embodied the considerable confidence of young black spokespersons in the late-nineteenth-century South. William H. Crogman, who authored several book-length studies, including Talks for the Times and Progress of a Race, composed historical narratives in addition to performing work in education, religion, and politics. Crogman graduated from Atlanta University in 1876 and went on to become a prominent educator and Methodist leader in Georgia; he eventually served as the president of Clark University.


In addition to his work as educator, minister, and writer, Crogman was in high demand as an orator at events in and around Georgia, and he frequently served as the keynote speaker on Emancipation Day.Ω≠ In all of his capacities, he was a steadfast proponent of black progress. In both structure and content, Crogman’s books were similar to a number of publications produced by contemporary black spokesmen during the 1880s and 1890s. In the preface to Progress of a Race, Crogman and coauthor Henry F. Kletzing summed up the motivation behind the voluminous production of race histories: ‘‘to put into permanent form a record of [the African American’s] remarkable progress under freedom—a progress not equaled in the annals of history.’’Ω∞ Talks for the Times represented a compilation of Crogman’s speeches during the 1880s and 1890s on topics ranging from the life of Frederick Douglass to the meaning of freedom, while Progress of a Race portrayed black history from antiquity to the present day and included accounts of slavery and abolition, as well as several chapters on African American achievements since Emancipation. Each book established a narrative of black progress over time and detailed a broad array of achievements, including ‘‘moral and social advancement,’’ ‘‘progress in industries,’’ and ‘‘financial growth.’’Ω≤ In print and in speech, African American portrayals of progress became so common in the 1880s and 1890s that spokesmen often commented on their ubiquity.Ω≥ Clearly, African American leaders around the South believed in the authenticity of black success, and they were determined to demonstrate the magnitude of black achievements, especially to skeptical whites. But the very persistence of black advocates of progress also signaled growing conflict and apprehension. Viewed in the full context of political disagreement and increasing black hardship, progressive visions of black history in the late-nineteenthcentury South emerge as a complex cultural formation bearing traces of consensus and argument, hope and pessimism, victory and defeat. After all, constructions of black progress in the 1880s and 1890s were themselves a product of black struggle rather than a straightforward reflection of black optimism. The very expansion of contemporary definitions of black progress, from politics to a broad range of endeavors, was in part a measure of decline, albeit uneven, in African American prospects in the post-Reconstruction South. As time wore on, African American historical narratives reflected an increasing division of opinion over the possibilities for political action. While many spokesmen continued to herald political


advocacy as a significant element of progress (among many), others criticized contemporary political affairs, downplayed the discussion of politics, or eliminated the topic all together from their historical reviews. A speech delivered by Rev. Emanuel K. Love at an Emancipation Day celebration in Savannah, Georgia, reflected the acute ambivalence that many black leaders felt when faced not only with Democratic abuse but also with repeated betrayals by white Republicans. Questioning the potential for seeking gains through any political venue, some began to urge African Americans to turn away from politics and work for success through other means. When Love declared his loyalty to the Republican Party— ‘‘But for that Party we would not have been free to-day’’—he paid particular homage to the memory of Charles Sumner. At the same time, he argued at considerable length that the Emancipation Proclamation was ‘‘purely a war measure,’’ produced more by the stubbornness and determination of Jefferson Davis than by any commitment to black freedom on the part of Abraham Lincoln. The upshot of all this, Love argued, was that African Americans could not count on any political party—or politics in general—to advance their needs. They needed to abjure politics—not to appease whites but to turn their energies toward more fruitful enterprises: ‘‘I urge that our people get an education, save their money, live within their income, buy homes, be honest and virtuous, unite together in doing a business, form real estate and mercantile associations, have confidence in each other to be true to the race, have faith in our great possibilities.’’Ω∂ Increasingly, black leaders emphasized step-by-step improvements in the condition of African American life rather than the immediate acquisition of equality and citizenship—an action that, in retrospect, seems to have acceded to white demands. But the strategy did rekindle a plan for advancing black interests at a time when it was becoming increasingly difficult to do so. A speech delivered by Rev. Leigh B. Maxwell, an Atlanta University graduate, on Emancipation Day in Savannah in 1889 exemplified this longer view of black advancement. Emphasizing African American gains in property, churches, schools, schoolteachers, newspapers, homes, and money, Reverend Maxwell predicted that the same ‘‘steady improvement over the next 25 years, which as the past 26 has witnessed[,] will soon bring us to the place where both North and South will be proud of our citizenship and be glad to bid advance to the coming generations of African extracture.’’Ω∑ Such statements were not a straightforward expression of black con-


fidence. They were instead a design for combating sorrow and discouragement and reasserting—time and again—a determination to prevail against difficult odds. Acknowledging that the recent Supreme Court civil rights cases decision had ‘‘pierced some like a ruthless and relentless snare,’’ Thomas Norris poignantly described the increasing apprehension of African Americans in the mid-1880s: ‘‘Their souls are in anguish, their hope converted to despair, and [they] are alarmed at the advent of another plague. Some say the Union has fallen, and Confederacy has been resurrected from the tomb to propel the ‘Ship of State.’ ’’ Noting that some African Americans promoted emigration as a solution while others ‘‘say, again, remain at your abiding places,’’ Norris perceived a third way out: political division. Reciting the repeated failures of the Republican Party to ‘‘remedy the flagrant injustices that are perpetrated upon the colored people in the South,’’ and especially to mount an effective response to the recent massacre in Danville, Norris urged his audience to vote in favor of ‘‘principles, not parties.’’Ω∏ While Norris’s proposal reflected his continuing faith in the capacity of African Americans to affect the future through politics, it also shows his ambivalence. Echoing Frederick Douglass’s confession at the North Carolina State Fair that African Americans were ‘‘on trial,’’ Norris spoke frankly of the ‘‘doubts and apprehensions, perplexities, anxieties, and sometimes anguish’’ experienced by many contemporaries as they turned to the future: What then of the future of the American negro? What shall another quarter century bring forth? What is to be the destiny of this thrifty, vigorous, aggressive, Africo-American race? How will the portrait, so well begun, be consummated by the records of prosperity? Is it the sad fate of this race, after all its struggle, toils and sighing, to incessantly trod the beaten path, from the degrading effects of slavery to the turrets of national renown, only to descend to the feudlands of despair? . . . Or has the Africo-American, breaking the chains of its servitude and escaping at last from its long imprisonment, struck out across the fields of sublime possibility, the promised pathway leading to the final triumph?Ωπ Having acknowledged the full measure of black uncertainty, Norris, like many other African Americans, remained doggedly optimistic. Insisting that there were ‘‘encouraging omens,’’ Norris named education as African Americans’ greatest resource and ended his speech with a stirring vision of victory snatched from defeat: ‘‘We must educate or perish. It is the duty of


this race, in fullness of time, to wipe the last hateful stain from its brow, and crown itself with the dignity, lustre and honor of a perfect manhood.’’Ω∫ Even as many black leaders emphasized ‘‘encouraging omens’’ over the ‘‘feudlands of despair,’’ however, there were those who declined to prop up sagging visions of black advancement, at least in the South. Tracing a markedly different history of unstinting white racism and black suffering from slavery into the present day, individual leaders like Richard A. Cain and Henry Turner insisted that the best hope for African Americans was to leave the region—and even the country—in order to prosper. The historical arguments of black emigrationists, in turn, placed pressure on advocates of black progress, who redoubled their efforts to demonstrate the ‘‘true’’ history of black achievement and interracial cooperation. We see this most clearly in Georgia, where Turner was a highly visible advocate of black emigration and missions to Africa in the 1880s, 1890s, and early 1900s.ΩΩ He was elected to the bishopric of the AME Church in 1880, over the strong opposition of Daniel Payne, who continued his opposition to emigrationism and tangled with Turner on other issues, including women’s rights. Although Turner was assigned to a district in the Southwest, encompassing Mississippi, Arkansas, and the Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), he maintained a home in Atlanta, having moved there from Savannah in the late 1870s, and remained active in church and community affairs in Georgia. Never one to mince words, Turner captured the most extreme frustrations of black southerners with his unwavering denunciations of white treachery. Reflecting on Democratic victories, including the overturning of the 1875 Civil Rights Act, Turner came to the opposite conclusion of fellow black spokesman Thomas Norris. Whereas Norris maintained a vision of black advancement, and particularly black manhood, in the United States, Turner angrily denounced the belief that black men could survive, much less prosper, in such a godforsaken land: ‘‘I care nothing about [the country], wish it nothing but ill and endless misfortune, wish I could only live to see it go down to ruin and its memory blotted from the pages of history. A man who loves a country that hates him, is a human dog and not a man.’’∞≠≠ Turner delivered the keynote address at an Emancipation Day celebration in Savannah, where he elaborated his vision of a separate ‘‘Negro nation.’’ Although the black-owned Savannah Tribune typically rejected emigration as a viable strategy, the paper’s complimentary coverage of


Turner clearly reflected the careful consideration that such views obtained during the 1890s, as well as Turner’s capacity to inspire even those African Americans who disagreed with him. ‘‘[Turner’s] discourse was sound, logical, and instructive,’’ the paper said of his address. ‘‘It was food for the commoner, the historian, the scientist, or the theologian. Few if any left the building without being better and wiser. We felt a deep interest in this grand and good man of our race, and the hope with which he has inspired us.’’∞≠∞ While Turner inspired black audiences with his overarching vision of black history and achievement, culminating in the establishment of a separate black nation, other emigrationists focused on drawing out the history of black oppression in the United States. At an Emancipation Day celebration in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1890, a local minister reviewed a long chronology of African American suffering in the South. ‘‘Outrages such as lynching negroes, compelling them to ride in smoking cars, refusing them hotel accommodations—are evidence that we will never attain full manhood here.’’ Turning to the future, the minister predicted that abuses suffered by African Americans in recent years were only ‘‘shadows of coming events.’’ Denouncing white paternalism as a sham, he dismissed the idea that southern whites felt any affection—or sense of duty—toward African Americans. White Americans, North and South, were interested in only one thing: to use African Americans to enrich themselves. As long as African Americans remained in the country, they would be in the unhappy position of being ‘‘beggars . . . not . . . choosers . . . [who] must take what is given, and use it as long as we do not displease the giver or his interests.’’ The choice, he concluded, was between submission in the United States and independence in Africa: ‘‘Independence and emigration are, in my opinion, the only solution to this great question.’’∞≠≤ In response to the increasing vehemence of emigrationists, proponents of progress stepped up their own arguments. Educator and historical writer Daniel B. Williams denounced both black and white ‘‘wise-acres’’ who called for an African American exodus in 1893: ‘‘I simply remark for the enlightenment of those who hold this erroneous opinion that we never intend as a body to leave our native land.’’ Invoking both the prospects of black success in the ‘‘Sunny South’’ and the legacy of black sacrifice to the country, he underscored African Americans’ strong belief in their claim to remain in the United States: ‘‘Our virgin soil has often been drenched with the sacred blood of our patriotic dead, and it preserves in its hallowed


breast the bleached bones of our fathers and mothers; and, when our spirits will have departed to the God who gave them, our bodies will repose in silent graves dug in the same sacred soil. . . . No, we will not leave Columbia.’’∞≠≥ Arguments over emigration defined particularly sharp fault lines among black leaders, but other disagreements also stood out, even among those who were committed to the struggle for black progress in the South. In particular, disputes over gender and slavery pervaded African American debates over how best to achieve and represent progress. These disputes, in turn, reflected specific arguments—for instance, about women’s role in society—and broader questions of strategy. Increasing numbers of black women joined male colleagues in historical and commemorative pursuits during the 1880s and 1890s, a natural outgrowth of their work as teachers and school administrators, religious organizers, writers, and community activists. The diverse fields of African American women’s work meant that, even as men monopolized electoral rights, women were a significant force in the social and political arenas of communities. Women’s engagement, in turn, gave them both an organizational basis and a perspective on black achievement from which to assert leadership.∞≠∂ Educated and professional black women saw eye-to-eye with their male counterparts on many issues of racial progress and uplift, and leading men and women worked together to ensure that women’s roles in public ceremonies reinforced—rather than challenged—contemporary middle-class ideologies. From the perspective of both male and female spokespersons, carefully scripted presentations of elite black womanhood helped represent ‘‘the best’’ side of the race for both black and white consumption. Such performances gained special importance amid the heightened antiblack rhetoric of white supremacists. Just as they targeted black men in specifically gendered terms, white racists commonly portrayed black women as sexually and morally degenerate. Moreover, whites frequently located the source of the ‘‘Negro problem’’ in African American women’s alleged depravity. Charging that the black woman had ‘‘the brain of a child and the passions of a woman, steeped in centuries of ignorance and savagery and wrapped about with immemorial vices,’’ white supremacists lay the blame for African American hardship specifically on black women.∞≠∑ In this context, the public behavior of leading women at African American commemorative celebrations was designed to counter the derogatory im-


ages of black womanhood proffered by whites, as well as to model appropriate behavior to black communities. With so much at stake, some began to worry that the risk of unruly behavior at open public ceremonies was becoming too great. In the 1880s and 1890s, many black ceremonies began to retreat into the separate spaces of churches, halls, and schools, a defensive action that had the double benefit of shielding black actions from white views and eliminating ‘‘shabbier’’ blacks, who declined to attend more sedate occasions. In the 1880s, when Washington Bee editor Calvin B. Chase embarked on a campaign to purge parades from Emancipation Day celebrations in Washington, D.C., out of his concern that large and unwieldy public demonstrations harmed the public image of African Americans, a woman columnist for the People’s Advocate threw her support behind him. Proposing an alternative to the parades, she suggested, ‘‘[C]onsidering the unfortunate stirring effects of the music . . . so stirring that it stirs out all the ‘rag tag and bobtail,’ (gutter-snipes) and in view of the enormous expense of the procession . . . [would not a] more modest . . . celebration [make sense]?’’ The columnist’s proposal for a more ‘‘modest’’ ceremony included a religious meeting, followed by speech-making and music, to be contained ‘‘in one of our own halls.’’ While she stressed the cost benefits of the changes she suggested, her proposal obviously reflected her concern that African Americans’ ‘‘weaker side’’ might be on display to whites at an open celebration: ‘‘Those who lack the advantages of home culture, of education, of refinement are most frequently brought in contact with the whites.’’ ‘‘We could have a good time’’ on Emancipation Day, she argued, ‘‘without ‘showing up’ the shabbier side.’’∞≠∏ As the struggle over the Washington parade suggests, commemorative ceremonies became lightening rods for class-inflected conflicts in latenineteenth-century black communities; in these conflicts, middle-class women and men labored together to control working-class black behavior and represent ‘‘the best’’ side of black manhood and womanhood in public ceremonies. After more than two decades of determined opposition to Emancipation Day parades in Washington, D.C., Chase reflected with great satisfaction that the tradition of holding a public procession each year on 16 April had finally come to an end: ‘‘It was the Bee that appealed to the people not to encourage these parades.’’∞≠π The fact that it had taken African American spokespersons so long to end the parades in Washington, however, underscores the importance such traditions held. Some


blacks were less concerned with making a decorous and refined selfpresentation than with celebrating the anniversary of slavery’s demise. In many southern towns and cities, parades similarly persisted as a cornerstone of black celebration—and not always in a manner to elite black men and women’s liking. We catch a glimpse of just such a performance in an account of a New Year’s festival in Augusta, Georgia, in 1888. A local white reporter described an ‘‘Unusual Exhibition’’: black women participated in an exhibit devised by a local farmer’s club, which brought up the rear of the annual Emancipation Day parade. Two elderly women, employed as laborers for a nearby railroad, carried picks and shovels and walked alongside the men. According to the reporter, the women were ‘‘hale and hearty’’ and one ‘‘boast[ed] that she can, at her now advanced age, go out and do a day’s work ‘with the next man.’ ’’∞≠∫ One can well imagine the discomfort of Calvin B. Chase or the female correspondent for the People’s Advocate, had they faced such a display. In fact, the Augusta parade shows what many middle-class black men and women could work so hard to minimize; the elderly women’s proud claim that they could match the laboring power of men stood in stark contrast to the carefully elaborated gender distinctions about ladyhood.

J Even as they shared much in common with male organizers, elite black women brought their own perspective to cultural work. They offered their own achievements as an appropriate measure of progress. Progress, they argued, did not rest on men alone; it reflected the achievements of both men and women over time. Women’s accomplishments provide abundant evidence of black progress, they argued, and African American women should be accorded recognition and respect for their contributions. Some went a step further still: They insisted that future African American advancement would come only when men accepted women as equal partners in their endeavors.∞≠Ω Women’s self-assertiveness reflected and reinforced a new interest in black womanhood among leading men and women, beginning in the 1880s. Historian Patricia A. Schechter traces the emergent focus on black women to the writings and speeches of Anna Julia Cooper, Alexander Crummell, and Ida B. Wells early in the decade. Cooper first penned the essay ‘‘Womanhood a Vital Element in the Regeneration and Progress of a Race’’ in 1884—the essay later became the lead chapter in the well-known


volume of Cooper’s collected works, Voice from the South; by a Black Woman of the South, published in 1891. In her essay, Cooper took up the challenge issued by Crummell the previous year to press for the uplift of black women as a prerequisite to black progress. As Schechter points out, Crummell and Cooper shared a key assumption. As Cooper put it, ‘‘That the race cannot be effectually lifted up till its women are truly elevated we take as proven.’’ But, whereas Crummell had emphasized the degradation of black women—in his words, they were ‘‘crude, rude, [and] ignorant’’ and ‘‘humble and benighted’’—Cooper represented herself, a highly educated black woman, as emblematic of black women’s abilities and achievements. She pressed for expanded educational opportunities for black women as a measure to draw them equal with men—not merely to overcome the depravations of slavery. Wells, who also wrote extensively on women during the period, refuted the notion that the history of black womanhood was defined by degradation rather than achievement and expanded on Crummell’s vision of a domestic black womanhood—‘‘thrifty wives’’ and ‘‘worthy matrons’’—to characterize women’s contributions as community organizers and workers, and especially educators.∞∞≠ The growing effort to focus attention on black womanhood—and the resulting debates over just what women’s role should be—were manifest in southern commemorations. At Emancipation Day exercises sponsored by the Phi Kappa Society at Atlanta University in 1894, speaker Mattie F. Childs reflected black women’s insistence that their accomplishments be recognized in contemporary assessments of black progress. Delivering an oration titled ‘‘The Progress of Colored Women Since 1863,’’ Childs challenged her audience to consider women’s achievements: ‘‘In this progress of which we are so proud, and of which we have a right to be, has woman had no share, or has she stood idly by as a looker on while man has done the work?’’ Significantly, Childs moved from citing women’s contributions to black progress to making claims for sexual equality, echoing arguments made by leading spokeswomen of the day, such as Wells and Cooper: ‘‘Never before in the history of America has woman occupied so high a position as she does now in this glorious Nineteenth Century. . . . Slowly but surely it is dawning upon the ‘lords of creation’ that Almighty God in his infinite wisdom did not make one sex inferior to another.’’∞∞∞ Childs’s review captured the determined optimism of a rising generation of educated black women. Reviewing the past from their perspective as black women, they counted a myriad of accomplishments, even when African Americans in general, and African American men in particular,


suffered setbacks. The pride may have been especially acute for young black women, who could measure their accomplishments not only against the past but also in contrast to their southern white female counterparts, whose own political, educational, and professional opportunities lagged far behind those of women in the North.∞∞≤ Indeed, the promising position of young, educated black women complicates any pessimistic picture of the conditions of black life after Reconstruction and helps to explain the prevalence of hope amid hardship. Young educated black women like Mattie Childs may have been in a unique position to reinvigorate African American definitions of history and progress in the post-Reconstruction South. While black women helped to revive a progressive view of black history, some argued that further advancement of the race would only occur when women and men stood together as peers and shared equally in the struggle for justice. To such women, the past oppression of their sex recalled the conditions of slavery. Josephine Turpin Washington proclaimed, ‘‘For centuries she lived in a state of degradation unappreciated, misunderstood and scorned as a being as inferior to man as the rays of the candle are to the beams of the noonday sun.’’∞∞≥ At the same time, Washington insisted, women’s recent advancements both paralleled and encouraged the progress of the race: ‘‘No longer regarded as a mere pet and plaything, or as but the necessary appendage to a home, she stands forth [man’s] peer in every respect, prepared to fight beside him in the battle-field of life and to share with him its trials and triumphs.’’∞∞∂ By announcing their willingness to take their place in the ‘‘battle-field of life,’’ women activists proposed to fight together with black men for the full rights of citizenship for all African Americans. Of course, men had never been alone in their battles against racism.∞∞∑ Increasingly, however, women insisted that their own interests in equality as women be taken into account. Mattie Childs concluded her speech in Atlanta by chiding the men in her audience: ‘‘But why continue to enumerate the good deeds of these women? Has not sufficient been said already to convince you that we have not been idle?’’ Turning to the future, Childs pointed the way to a new South. The ‘‘call for more and better workers comes loud and clear!’’ she declared. And ‘‘[t]he answer comes back, with equal force, ‘We are prepared.’ ’’∞∞∏ Women also spoke of their accomplishments in an expanding race literature detailing black advancement since Emancipation. Philadelphia activist and clubwoman Gertrude Bustill Mossell published The Work of the


Afro-American Woman in 1894. Eschewing the boundaries of church and home, Mossell characterized women’s achievements in education, entertainment, labor, and the professions. She brought black women into focus as soldiers, physicians, missionaries, and artists, as well as wives and mothers, and she traced women’s leadership in the abolition, temperance, and suffrage movements. Mossell’s book made a pointed argument: African American women’s wide-ranging accomplishments had been vital to black progress, and their contributions made them worthy of a more equal position in American society.∞∞π Josephine Turpin Washington set forth her own vision of female accomplishment and black progress in her introduction to L. A. Scruggs’s Women of Distinction, published one year after Anna Julia Cooper’s Voice from the South. Washington, an educator, club worker, and writer who taught at several southern black institutions, including Howard University in Washington, D.C., and Selma University in Alabama, was a forceful proponent of women’s rights, as well as racial justice.∞∞∫ Like Cooper and Mossell, Washington balanced claims for gender equality with an emphasis on women’s distinct contributions. While Washington asserted an expansive view of women’s capabilities, she also insisted that equality would render them no less ‘‘womanly’’ than in the past. Washington insisted, ‘‘The true woman takes her place by the side of man as his companion, his co-worker, his helpmeet, his equal, but she never forgets that she is a woman and not a man. Whether in the home as wife and mother or struggling in the ranks of business or professional life, she retains her womanly dignity, which is at once her strength and her shield.’’∞∞Ω Washington’s emphasis on the distinct but equal roles of men and women echoed Cooper’s plea for women’s higher education: ‘‘All I claim is that there is a feminine as well as a masculine side to truth; that these are related not as inferior and superior, not as better and worse, not as weaker and stronger, but as complements— complements in one necessary and symmetric whole.’’∞≤≠ Washington’s reference to black women’s ‘‘womanly dignity’’ as both ‘‘her strength and her shield’’ gestured toward a hazard in black women’s efforts: the prospect that whites would seize on women’s actions as evidence of black degeneracy. White racists heralded the virtue of white womanhood as the cornerstone of Anglo-Saxon civilization and seized every opportunity to cast black women as sexually promiscuous—a practice with a considerable history, as white Americans had long insisted that black women were ‘‘Jezebels’’—hypersexual creatures who freely engaged in relations with anyone—or anything. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, famously asserted


that black women would willingly partner with orangutans—an insult that appears particularly ironic in view of recent evidence demonstrating that Jefferson was himself engaged in a long-term sexual relationship with his slave Sally Hemmings. Some apologists for slavery went so far as to argue that the southern system was superior to the North’s because the presence of readily available female slaves enabled white men to satisfy their sexual appetites without harassing their white wives—who were deemed to be sexually chaste—or ruining the reputation of any other white woman. Emancipation did not alter white perceptions of black sexuality. Like black men, whose forceful passions, once checked by slavery, had now been unleashed—to the grave endangerment of white women—black women were allegedly free to be fully promiscuous. Nor did the end of slavery put a stop to white men’s harassment and coercion of black women, whom they continued to identify as sexually free and available in ways that white women were not supposed to be. Under such circumstances, African American women had to tread carefully, both to defend against white slander and to reassure leading black men that they would not endanger black progress by transgressing conventional middle-class standards of female propriety. Indeed, Rev. Emanuel K. Love echoed the sentiments of leaders—both male and female—when he identified the protection of women’s sexual purity as the most vital measure of black progress. Addressing an assembled crowd on Emancipation Day in Savannah in 1888, Love proclaimed, ‘‘No people have ever become great that did not protect the virtue of their women.’’ Turning the tables on white racists who argued that white ‘‘civilization’’ rested upon controlling black men, whom they presumed to be consumed by lust for white women, Love even suggested that African Americans should utilize ‘‘lynch law’’ if necessary, in order to protect black women from the sexual advances of lecherous white men: ‘‘If lynch law must prevail in this age as a result of advance civilization, then let the Negroes apply this law to those who destroy the virtue of their women.’’∞≤∞ Whereas Love depicted the struggle for civilization as a battle between black and white men over the virtue of ‘‘their’’ women, Washington crafted contemporary portrayals of progress and civilization into an argument for women’s rights. She insisted that the protection of ‘‘womanly dignity’’ could go hand in hand with female assertiveness. Acclaiming the nineteenth century as the apex of women’s development, Washington argued that black men needed to let go of gender hierarchy in order to make further progress: ‘‘The Afro-American is no anomaly in that at one stage of


his development he failed to recognize the importance of cultivating his women. All peoples, in their progress toward civilization and while yet far off, have been in the dark on this point.’’ Like Anna Julia Cooper, Washington argued that gender equality would be both measure and outcome of future black success.∞≤≤ As Love’s Emancipation Day address indicates, the efforts of women like Ida B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, Gertrude Mossell, and Josephine Turpin Washington to redefine black progress did not go unchallenged. Indeed, their historical interventions occurred amid vigorous arguments within black communities over women’s role. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, African Americans engaged in frequent and energetic debates over coeducation, women’s suffrage, married women’s paid work, and the wisdom of ordaining women as ministers.∞≤≥ No single point of view held sway; instead, both men and women argued a range of possibilities as they considered how best to move forward. Moreover, as Deborah Gray White makes clear, many black men resisted the more far-reaching implications of women’s arguments for reshaping black progress, even when they accepted, indeed sought, black women’s aid in promoting black advancement. Just as women themselves disagreed over the precise boundaries on women’s role, alternately emphasizing motherhood, domesticity, and more expansive definitions, black men assigned diverse meanings to black women’s contributions.∞≤∂ Men did not rush to meet the challenge of women’s portrayals of racial progress. Instead, they made modest, incremental concessions. At an Emancipation Day celebration in Richmond in 1887, Daniel B. Williams, a professor at the Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute, emphasized the political achievements of black men as the most important marker of black progress. Still, he cited the literature of women writers such as Phillis Wheatley and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, along with the works of men, as significant evidence of black advancement.∞≤∑ Other male contemporaries limited their evaluation to women’s capacity for moral and religious elevation. Richard R. Wright chided his audience at an Emancipation Day celebration in Augusta: ‘‘Cannot the husbands and wives make purer and sweeter homes by devoting more of their time and attention to their own families? Can we not raise the standard of Christianity among our race?’’∞≤∏ As a new round of hardships, including a new spike in lynching, rising Democratic fortunes, and the gradual spread of segregation and disenfranchisement, began to encroach even further on male-centered definitions of progress in the early 1890s, some black men became more atten-


tive to women’s accomplishments. In response to an invitation to speak at a celebration in Salem, Virginia, in 1893, Williams congratulated his hosts for not allowing the recent reelection of Democrat Grover Cleveland to ‘‘damp[en] your ardor in keeping green and fresh the memories of our freedom and achievements.’’∞≤π In his subsequent speech, Williams made scant mention of politics. Instead, he focused on homes, education, religion, and patriotism and counseled his audience against emigration. Casting back to ancient history and the Bible, Williams described the influential ‘‘deeds’’ of women through the ages and praised the ‘‘thousands of noble and pure-souled women, who, in the family, the Sunday school, the church, and in the public walks of life, are exerting a noble influence in building up humanity.’’ Williams did not share the most far-reaching visions of gender equality, articulated by women like Wells and Washington; he urged women in his audience to ‘‘submit yourselves unto your husbands as unto the Lord.’’ Indeed, his assertion that ‘‘[s]ome of [the] deeds [of women], like those of men, have benefited the world, and others have injured it,’’ betrayed a trace of discomfort at the prospect of women’s increasing authority. Still, he articulated a vision of history that accorded women recognition, as well as responsibility.∞≤∫ The enhanced appreciation of some black men for women’s accomplishments was also evident in race histories. In Progress of a Race, Henry F. Kletzing and William Crogman opened a chapter devoted to black women with a clear-cut defense of their responsibilities and achievements. Echoing the most determined pronouncements of women themselves, the authors declared: ‘‘Above all let the Negro know that the elevation of his race can come only, and will come surely, through the elevation of its women.’’ Kletzing and Crogman emphasized the importance of women’s contributions to the cultivation of ‘‘good homes’’ and ‘‘virtuous’’ children, but they also foresaw a more expansive role: ‘‘Why should not women of the race . . . prepare to fill the professions of medicine, law, etc.? What a great field for usefulness is open!’’ They found much to praise in the leadership of Mary Church Terrell within the recently founded National Association of Colored Women, and highlighted Terrell’s emphasis on the centrality of women’s role in African Americans’ ‘‘steady march onward and upward to the highest things in life.’’∞≤Ω A number of male authors enfolded the achievements of women into general race histories, and others devoted book-length studies solely to women. Lawson Andrew Scruggs, a practicing black physician in Raleigh, North Carolina, authored Women of Distinction (1893), in which he featured the accomplishments of historical female


actors and contemporary black women, ranging from Phillis Wheatley and Harriet Tubman to Ida B. Wells and Josephine Ruffin. Scruggs’s encyclopedic treatment also included studies of women in education and religion, and, of course, in the home.∞≥≠ The two strands of gender ideology—one that emphasized equality, the other that focused on women’s unique role—running throughout African American portrayals of black womanhood were evident in Scruggs’s book. On women’s claim to a higher education, he insisted, ‘‘The very fact that woman has a mind capable of infinite expansion is, in itself, an argument that she should receive the highest possible development.’’∞≥∞ At the same time, he praised women’s ‘‘quiet and often unseen work of building up, preserving, maintaining and purifying the home’’ as a crucial element in African American success: ‘‘I am not certain if our women in the home are not the most powerful and progressive and substantial agencies of the race.’’∞≥≤

J Even as some black spokespersons expanded their discussions of black progress to consider women’s achievements, they did not lessen their emphasis on male accomplishments. The very setbacks that helped to generate interest in black women’s achievements simultaneously contributed to a new round of debates over the status of black manhood. Perceiving the rising threat of segregation and disenfranchisement and the spread of lynching as attacks on manhood, and particularly that of ‘‘the best’’ black men, men and women decried recent developments, such as ongoing efforts to exclude ‘‘the educated negro’’ from superior accommodations in hotels and railroad cars, in explicitly gendered terms. At an Emancipation Day celebration in Atlanta, the presiding minister argued, ‘‘The negro does not ask for special legislation, but they demand . . . that their manhood be recognized. . . . You cannot educate men and then deprive them of their God-given rights. . . . You must either cease to educate the negro, or give him his manhood rights.’’∞≥≥ Both advocates and opponents of emigration consistently framed their arguments in terms of black manhood. The Voice of Missions captured the essence of emigrationist arguments when the paper reported on a speech of Henry Turner’s in Nashville in 1894: ‘‘[Turner] was not in favor of the wholesale emigration of the Negro from this country, but he wanted to see those who had the manhood to throw off the yoke placed upon their necks by prejudice in this country to go to Africa and assert themselves, establish governments and take possession of the lands of their fathers before it was captured by the white man from other parts of the world.’’∞≥∂ Arguing


against black migration, other African Americans reiterated their belief that black men would eventually prevail in their struggle for ‘‘full-fledged manhood’’ in the South: ‘‘The [S]outh is the negros’ [sic] home. Here is where he must obtain his full-fledged manhood. We must educate the head, the heart and the hand. Cultivate principles of sound morality. Build good houses. Cultivate friendship with your next door neighbor. . . . Get up out of the ashes of mourning, cast off ignorance and superstition, and gird yourselves for the duties and responsibilities of life’s battle.’’∞≥∑ Seeking to ward off white assaults on black rights and answer the accusations of black proponents of emigration, many leading black men and women redoubled their commitment to African American men’s accomplishments at Emancipation Day ceremonies. Time and again in the late 1880s and 1890s, African American speakers portrayed black men as patriots and citizens who could be trusted to exercise economic freedom and political rights with reason and restraint. At a celebration in Atlanta in 1897, Reverend B. T. Harvey, the pastor of a local Baptist church, dwelled on black men’s historical contributions to their ‘‘country’s sacred alter’’ in ‘‘patriotism, in obedience to law, in unparalleled advancement [and] in the blood shed in cruel warfare.’’ Predicting that African Americans would eventually enjoy ‘‘liberty and rights common to other citizens,’’ Harvey encouraged his audience to stay the course and continue on the ‘‘rugged and steep’’ road to ‘‘civilized life.’’∞≥∏ Black leaders’ responses to the emergencies of the late nineteenth century varied; there was no consensus about the nature of female achievement or the respective roles of men and women in black society. Many, both male and female, defined progress in ways that stressed the historical achievement—or denial—of black manhood, even as others grappled with diverse understandings of black women’s contributions.∞≥π But the conflation of racial progress with black male achievement maintained a tenacious hold well into the twentieth century, notwithstanding the challenges of leading women.

J The problem of representing slavery vexed blacks during the years following the end of Reconstruction, as they endeavored to define black history in heroic and progressive terms. Some spokesmen fretted about the implications of black enslavement—how could such a ‘‘dark and hideous’’ past be a source of unity and pride for African Americans? As early as 1876, African Methodist Episcopal Church leader Theophilus Gould Steward had argued vehemently that it could not. Spurning the notion that


African Americans ‘‘had passed through the same fires and therefore ought to be united,’’ Steward argued that the history of black enslavement was ‘‘not history’’ and that slavery tended to divide rather than unite African Americans: ‘‘I remark first that slave history is not history; the colored people have made not history which has the least tendency to unite. . . . How many colored men will stand up and say, ‘I never was a slave;’ ‘I am not from the South.’ . . . Our history is something to be ashamed of, rather than proud of, hence it has not power to unite but great power to divide. Men do not like to be referred to slavery now.’’∞≥∫ In an 1882 editorial titled ‘‘Union,’’ black church leader and newspaper editor George Freeman Bragg presented an opposing view: he insisted that there ought to be ‘‘a closer feeling between [African Americans] than . . . between [African Americans] and the whole human family[.]’’ The memory of black enslavement, argued Bragg, ‘‘should bind us closer and closer to each other. . . . [W]ho of us have forgotten the misery, pain, sorrow and oppression of our own people? Who of us cannot remember . . . being in worse hell than the flesh pots of Egypt! We knew what it was then to share each other’s sorrows and to bear each other’s burden.’’ Turning to the future, Bragg predicted that the history of slavery and emancipation would continue to bond African Americans together, long after the last generation of former slaves had passed away: ‘‘[I]t shall come to pass that our children’s children shall say, ‘What mean ye by these celebrations of the 14th and 15th Amendments?’ And the volumes written upon that subject, and the deeds of Brown, and the works and eloquence of Garrison and Sumner, will echo and re-echo the sound, and say it is the year of jubilee. It is a memorial of the day when Abraham Lincoln, acting as a divine agent, brought us out of the pit of destruction, [and] placed our feet upon a sure foundation, the Union flag of Liberty.’’∞≥Ω Even individual black spokesmen could not come to a definite decision on the meaning of slavery’s legacy. Just two weeks before he argued that African Americans should rally around the common experience of slavery, Bragg had offered an opposing point of view—that African American history did not begin until the end of black enslavement. In contrast to the ‘‘Caucasian race,’’ who could honorably and proudly look back at their ancestry,’’ Bragg argued, ‘‘the Africo-American could only look back upon a distressing and hideous picture of human slavery’’ until the advent of freedom. Thus, Bragg concluded, Emancipation ‘‘began a new era, or, in fact, began the history of the American Negro.’’ Echoing the assertions


of hundreds of Emancipation Day speakers during the decades following Reconstruction, Bragg emphasized recent black accomplishments— rather than slavery—as a reliable source of African American pride and unity: ‘‘[T]he down-trodden and despised race have not altogether been in a state of lethargy and supineness, but on the contrary have done more than any race or set of people have ever done under the existing circumstances and the short duration of time.’’∞∂≠ While rarely articulated so precisely, the large number of late-nineteenthcentury black ceremonies that stressed the recent past both reflected and reinforced Bragg’s argument that ‘‘the distressing and hideous picture of human slavery’’ hindered, rather than supported, black organization and that true African American history began with Emancipation. Black spokesmen frequently emphasized African American accomplishments since the advent of freedom, not only at commemorative celebrations, but on the pages of black newspapers and in the burgeoning production of race histories as well. In doing so, they effectively defined the years since Emancipation as the most relevant era of black history. Ambivalence about slavery, pride in postwar accomplishments, and a feeling of urgency in the face of crisis all contributed to black leaders’ stress on the recent past. Rev. Emanuel K. Love explained his reasons for not dwelling on slavery at the Emancipation Day ceremony in Savannah in 1888: ‘‘I need not consume much time in speaking of [the past]. The present and future concern us most. Slavery with all of its inhuman hardships, wounds, bruises, cowhides, bullwhips, patrols and every course which the damnable system of slavery in this country had, are forever gone. Fading away as the stars of the morning, losing their light in the glorious dawn so has slavery passed away weepingly and sorrowfully . . . to be supplanted by a more glorious epoch.’’∞∂∞ Still, the emphasis on post-Emancipation history was never complete. African Americans promoted the history of slavery in order to maintain memories of bondage beyond the lifetime of former slaves but also to counter the historical distortions of southern whites, who stepped up their efforts to idealize slavery in the decades following Reconstruction. However ambivalent in their approach to slavery, the majority of African American spokespersons were united in their characterization of slavery as a time of unparalleled human cruelty and oppression—in marked contrast to the romanticized portrayals increasingly set forth by whites. William Crogman and Henry Kletzing explained that their book Progress of a Race might have been titled Progress of a Generation, but they had chosen ‘‘to


record . . . the struggles and triumphs of the Race in the dark days of bondage’’ in order to dispel contemporary mythologies about slavery. Reviewing such ‘‘popular notions’’ as the belief that ‘‘African people were designed in the very first cosmology to be hewers of wood and drawers of water,’’ they asserted, ‘‘Of such knowledge and such argument it is pertinent to affirm . . . ‘that it would be better not to know so many things than to know so many things that are not so.’ ’’ Crogman and Kletzing went on to detail the many ways in which slavery had been a ‘‘curse,’’ not a ‘‘blessing,’’ that had degraded African Americans and whites alike.∞∂≤ While some black leaders challenged white southerners’ historical revisions head-on, others attempted to capitalize on aspects of white-authored history. When they characterized black enslavement as part of a long history of interracial dependency and support, individual leaders like Charles Hunter did not portray Emancipation as a radical departure from a terrible past. Instead, they refashioned the transition from slavery to freedom into a seamless narrative of gradual advancement—for African Americans, for whites, and for the South itself. In doing so, they tread a thin line. Men like Hunter sought to garner support for black interests, but they risked the possibility that their actions reinforced the very mythologies that African Americans were working so hard to dispel. In the spring of 1889, George Freeman Bragg himself promoted a more exceptional version of slavery’s legacy—in yet a third article—when he proposed that white church leaders work together with black clergymen on a single church council. In an effort to convince the reluctant white ministers to cooperate with his plan, Bragg stressed the negative impact of racial separation on the up-and-coming generation of black men and women. Without the edifying influence of actual interaction with whites, Bragg warned, young African Americans were in danger of becoming seduced by a distorted view of history: ‘‘They are convinced that the white people in past years have been their most cruel enemies; that they unmercifully treated their forefathers, separating husband and wife, and mother from children; outraged their women, oppressed and robbed them of 250 years of toil, and, in short, dealt very treacherously with them.’’ Bragg alleged that annual Emancipation Day celebrations were a particular source of danger and misinformation: In all seriousness we ask the question, Are the colored people to be let alone by the white people, so that these impressions of past injuries may be heightened, nursed, and increased, as evidently shown in the annual


recurrence of emancipation day ( January 1st), when all the past hardships are reviewed? There goes a long procession of school boys, young women and young men, rehearsing the trials of the past and keeping them alive in their bosoms. What is the white man doing to counteract these things and bring about such a reconciliation as will lead to safety and security on all sides? Surely to keep entirely away from them will never do.∞∂≥ History, Bragg suggested, could be a dangerous source of race antagonism unless like-minded white and black leaders—the ‘‘better’’ men of both races—worked together to secure a more tranquil view of the past. More precisely, Bragg linked the alleged misbehaviors of black youth to a failure to understand the ‘‘true’’ history of positive white ‘‘influence’’ on African Americans. Indeed, Bragg portrayed memories of black hardship as a particularly harmful force in African American society. In their place, Bragg wished to ‘‘preserve’’ a history of interracial friendship, linked to black advancement.∞∂∂ While Bragg’s version of history was in many ways unique, the contrast between his solicitation of white clergy and the depiction of slavery in Progress of a Race underscores the wide range of historical strategies undertaken by African Americans and helps to place the prevalence of progressive visions of black history in broader perspective. Late-nineteenthcentury black leaders disagreed mightily over the meaning of slavery, the respective roles of men and women, and the viability of progress, and they responded differently to the challenges posed by white efforts to rewrite history. Although some black leaders flat-out rejected the prospect of black advancement in the South or directly challenged white historical distortions, others consistently looked for ways to construct interracial progress, or endeavored to turn white misrepresentations to their own advantage. While they struggled with one another and engaged the ideologies of history and progress promoted by southern whites, African Americans also battled their own worries and apprehensions. Indeed, African American assertions of black progress were born of a complex mixture of success, hope, defeat, disappointment, and conflict, all of which characterized black experience in the late-nineteenth-century South.

J No black-authored narrative of southern history, no matter how ‘‘accommodationist,’’ was safe from the rising onslaught of southern white revisionism in the late-1880s and early 1890s. It is difficult to imagine a


more conservative portrayal of slavery than the one offered by Bragg in his effort to create a biracial church council. Not only did he embrace a paternalistic vision of slavery, but also his portrayal of young African Americans reflected strong class and generational prejudices. And yet Bragg quickly ran into stiff resistance from angry whites, who rejected his vision of interracial support and mutual advancement. In a nasty retort to Bragg’s proposal, a writer for the Commercial Herald vehemently denounced the theory that contact with white Americans led to black improvement. The influence, the author argued, was all in the other direction: ‘‘We who have seen do know how this contact [between whites and blacks] has wrought its polluting and poisoning work.’’ The only solution, he insisted, was to ship black Americans off to Africa.∞∂∑ In a similar vein, Virginia Democrats roundly condemned a speech delivered by former Readjuster governor William E. Cameron in 1889, in which he praised African American conduct in the Civil War.∞∂∏ In celebrating black loyalty, Cameron engaged a historical tradition that had been promoted by blacks and whites alike in the post-Reconstruction South. Invoking the figure of the loyal slave, protecting white women and children when men were off at battle, black leaders argued that African Americans had ably demonstrated a sense of duty and responsibility that qualified them for the full rights of citizenship. In doing so, they accepted a symbol developed by southern whites as a paean to slavery but manipulated it to bolster black claims to equality. Black writers and speakers commonly portrayed black fealty during the Civil War, along with black military heroism through the ages, as bonding African Americans to both the South and the nation. As the reactions to both Bragg and Cameron make clear, however, white supremacists in Virginia had begun to take issue with historical narratives that emphasized mutual interest and common ground between blacks and whites, just as they had started to overturn the interracial reforms and democratic public life that had characterized the four-year period of Readjuster government, from 1879 until 1883.∞∂π In response to Cameron’s speech, the Richmond Dispatch published an editorial denying that loyal behavior in the past could be used as a measure of African American character. Clearly concerned that such arguments were being used to defend black rights, the editors of the Dispatch tried to preserve the notion of black ‘‘fidelity’’ under slavery, even as they insisted on the dangers of black freedom. Black loyalty, they argued, had been due to ‘‘discipline’’ rather


than to real ‘‘attachment’’ to white families; how else could one explain the ‘‘alacrity’’ with which African Americans accepted their freedom and ‘‘left the homes they had so lately protected and where they spent their lives.’’ The best analogy for understanding the harmful potential of a free black person was that of a horse left untied: ‘‘Harnessed and hitched up the horse would have stood for hours in a plantation road. . . . Released he would have invaded [the surrounding fields] in a minute, just as a negro will invade a pasture, or a hog-pen, or a hen-house, or any store in Richmond but for the police.’’∞∂∫ One year later, an article in the Richmond Daily Times took a similar tack when it argued against black education by insisting that African Americans had been ‘‘tamed . . . not civilized’’ and that freedom had merely ‘‘renewed the savage’’ in them. Black people may have been ‘‘faithful’’ under slavery, argued the Times, but theirs was not a ‘‘meritorious fidelity . . . such as has characterized some of the truest and most high-spirited races of men.’’ Once again, white editors insisted that black loyalty ‘‘was mainly the effect of subjection and discipline, and as soon as the restraint was removed . . . nearly every negro sprang at one bound from slavery and obedience and fidelity; like a horse . . . the moment he is unhitched and unharnessed runs off and kicks up his heels.’’∞∂Ω In the face of such racist arguments, even the most conservative black strategies appear in a new light. What seem to be extreme accommodationist positions in fact became hotly contested issues in the late-nineteenthcentury South. Long before they accomplished black disenfranchisement, white supremacists were hard at work, endeavoring to dismantle the theories of history and progress that African Americans—and white allies—had developed in the years of compromise and experimentation that followed Reconstruction. As opposing voices became louder and more powerful over the course of the 1890s, even the most stalwart defenders of black progress and interracial cooperation were forced to grapple with the existence of a formidable white backlash. Speaking at an Emancipation Day celebration in Georgia, William H. Crogman admitted that there were many persons ‘‘still living in the dead past . . . who . . . feel it their duty to champion the old order of things, and to throw stumbling blocks in the path of our progress. . . . It is this kind of philosophy that is sending armed ruffians into firstclass cars to drag [men and women] from [their] seats. . . . It is this false philosophy, I say, by which it is made to appear that every advancement of


the Negro is a menace to the interests of the white man; and it is this philosophy that will forever keep alive in the South race antagonism.’’∞∑≠ And yet Crogman remained doggedly optimistic. Casting white supremacist theories as a throwback to the past, he asserted that racial equality, not black subordination, was the wave of the future: ‘‘[U]nless I misinterpret the signs of the times, unless I mistake altogether the tendencies of the age, they are all in the direction of the fullest and freest enjoyment on the part of American citizens of all the rights, liberties, and privileges guaranteed them by the United States Constitution.’’ Crogman challenged the historical arguments of white supremacists, point by point. The men who claimed that the United States was an ‘‘Anglo-Saxon’s government,’’ he argued, ignored the fact that vast numbers of ‘‘non–Anglo Saxons’’ made up the majority of the country. Moreover, ‘‘Anglo-Saxon blood’’ ran in the veins of thousands ‘‘now classed as Negroes.’’ Therefore, white supremacist theories were not only ‘‘unchristian’’ and ‘‘un-American,’’ they were ‘‘hopelessly untenable.’’∞∑∞ Crogman also found hope in existing interracial enterprises, such as white support for black education, and he insisted that ‘‘grander achievements’’ were possible for both races in the future: ‘‘[I]f we but cling to the God of our fathers, he will continue to lead us on . . . streaming upon our pathway the light of heaven, and making more and more the sufferings and anguish of the past to appear as nothing compared with the glory which is to be revealed to us.’’∞∑≤

J As white supremacists accelerated their attacks, a generation of African American leaders who had dedicated their lives to the promotion of black success and interracial advancement did not give up. Like their white opponents, they were fully aware of the high stakes in contemporary conflicts over history and progress. Moreover, many African American leaders shared the belief of William Crogman that racist theories were an antiquated relic of more ignorant times. John Mitchell, the editor of the Richmond Planet, captured the sentiment of many black spokesmen when he castigated Frank Ruffin, a tireless proponent of white supremacy in Virginia, for dwelling in the past: ‘‘What does the Negro of today know about the ‘wooly-headed black man’ of 4000 years ago? This is a new age. Every man is what he makes himself. The day of doting upon ancestry, or sighing about the glory of those who lived before, has passed away.’’ Against Ruffin’s ‘‘evidence’’ of black subordination through the ages, Mitchell pointed to the power of education to promote black advancement: ‘‘It has


given us Negro physicians, lawyers, theologians, scientists. . . . It has dotted the South with Negro homes of taste and beauty, institutions of learning, insurance companies, banking establishments.’’ Turning to the foreseeable future, he predicted a new era in black culture and society: ‘‘The value of his real-estate will run up in the millions. The rapidity of his educational advancement will astound you. Clean, tidy, manly, and polite, we take leave sir, to introduce you to the ‘new Negro,’—the Negro of the past is no longer.’’∞∑≥ Armed with the certainty that African Americans, rather than their white adversaries, held the key to the future, black leaders set forth to battle the racist discourse promoted by white supremacists in the late-nineteenthcentury South. In doing so, they cherished a progressive vision of history as a particularly strong defense against white abuse. Writing in the AME Church Review, Archibald Johnson insisted that knowledge of the past was a crucial weapon in African Americans’ struggle with white racism. Without an understanding of history, Johnson argued, black people were incapable of defending themselves against the onslaught of white prejudice: ‘‘History,’’ he insisted, ‘‘is no fossil remains.’’ Rather, ‘‘knowledge of past things and historical data are battalions; usefulness, power, and success depend upon [a man’s] skill and ability to combine[,] marshal and employ his forces.’’∞∑∂ Without their own accounting of history, African Americans were helpless; white-authored theories ruled the day. In contrast to this bleak picture, leading black men and women offered an inspired vision of the power of history to transform oppressed people’s self-understanding and chart a progressive course for the future.

chapter five

We know full well of all the gloomy past; Of all the darkness in which now we grope; Of all the night that seems will never pass; And still we meet with bosoms filled with hope. Daniel Webster Davis, ‘‘The Negro Meets to Pray’’ (1902)

JR Bosoms Filled with Hope collective representation in the age of jim crow The diary of African Methodist Episcopal minister Winfield Henry Mixon reveals his daily battle against pessimism and despair as the shadow of Jim Crow loomed over the landscape of Alabama, where he lived and worked. In January of 1895, while he prepared an address for an upcoming celebration of the life of Richard Allen, Mixon reassured himself that God would have the final word in the ongoing struggle against racism: ‘‘God will give the results or the conclusion of the whole matter ere long. Pray . . . and do the best you can. ‘God is not like man, he does not flatter, he kills both white, black and mulattoes.’ Eh! The country now.’’∞ One week later, in a flash of utter fury, Mixon revealed both the depth of his hatred for white racists and the source of his determination to be ‘‘up and at it’’: ‘‘Every now and then the wicked, ill-gotten, squint-eyed, blood suckers hang . . . [those who] lynch burn . . . flay their superiors—The ebony, pure, and most God-like in the heart—Negro. My pen shall never stand, my voice shall never stop, my tongue shall never cease.’’≤ In the following months and years, Mixon looked for ways to sustain

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faith and move forward as conditions worsened in Alabama. Alternately condemning white racists and urging himself—and black people in general—to guard against ‘‘sin, ignorance, laziness, and humdrumism,’’ Mixon fought off persistent feelings of discouragement by training his eyes on the dim outlines of a better future: ‘‘We can not have things as we desire them at all times. God and nature decreed that some days should be dark and dreary. We know the light when we have been in the dark.’’ He sought solace in the notion that someday ‘‘[s]omebody will find pleasure in reviewing [the] labors [of black men].’’≥ Mixon looked to local Emancipation Day ceremonies for hope and rejuvenation during these agonizing years, with mixed results. He declared 1 January 1895 a great day, after he helped to lead a celebration in Selma. Still, Mixon regretted that the annual parade was not bigger. ‘‘[T]his day,’’ he went on, ‘‘ought to be made a universal Jubilee among the sons and daughters of Ham.’’∂ In following years, Mixon’s depictions of local celebrations similarly reflected a mixture of optimism and disappointment. In 1897, he admitted that the Emancipation celebration in Selma was less impressive than in previous years. And yet he insisted that local blacks planned to reinvigorate the annual ceremony: ‘‘I think we have put new life in the thing now.’’∑ Nearly two decades later, Mixon was more confident. He reported being quite pleased with the results of celebrations in the nearby towns of Barnsville and Gadsden. Vividly describing the gathering of African Americans in Barnsville in 1914, he exclaimed, ‘‘[O]ld folks young folks kin-folks everything was out to day. [The subject of my speech was] ‘Rainbow ’ of hope.’’ The following year, he reported that a great time was had on New Year’s Day in Gadsden, a ‘‘prosperous city [where the] colored people seem to be in good shape.’’∏

J Winfield Henry Mixon’s diary underscores the ambiguities in African American commemoration during the era of Jim Crow. His yearly observations on local ceremonies honoring Emancipation and AME founder Richard Allen testify to the importance that commemorative ceremonies held for many African Americans as they struggled through years of lynching, disenfranchisement, legalized segregation, and an ever widening circumference of white control in the 1890s and early 1900s. At the same time, Mixon’s reflections hint at a weakening of African American commemorative practices. Even as he continually expressed a hopeful outlook for future ceremonies, he was repeatedly disappointed at the size of annual

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parades. The occasional despairing journal entry exposed the raw anguish and fury that was kept well hidden in Mixon’s—and other black leaders’— public pronouncements of faith, hope, duty, and gradual advancement, as their world came tumbling down around them. And yet Mixon appears to have experienced a resurgence of hope two decades later. No longer ambivalent in his assessment of black ceremonies after 1910, he took obvious pleasure in recording the success of celebrations; he particularly emphasized patterns of economic progress for Alabama blacks. Elsewhere in the state, leaders of the black press made a similar assessment. Large cities and small towns hosted annual celebrations commemorating Emancipation and the subsequent progress of African Americans. Black writers in Alabama unanimously declared those celebrations a tremendous success and a clear sign of African American prosperity. Such optimistic commentary helped to obscure a profound tension between grief and hope that underlay African American celebrations in Jim Crow Alabama. Devastated by the onslaught of white racism and violence at the turn of the century, Mixon, like many black leaders, struggled with deep feelings of hatred and despair. He was a deeply Christian man who cherished faith and longed to be ‘‘up and doing,’’ but he staggered under a crushing weight of oppression. Ultimately, the very oppression that drove Mixon to despondency intensified his need for celebrations. Joining forces with other black leaders in Alabama, he embraced commemoration as a vital expression of culture and resistance. Elsewhere in the region, African American leaders faltered, then redoubled their efforts in the face of devastating setbacks. If the end of Reconstruction led many black leaders to question their interpretations of progress, the blows dealt by the daily terrors and humiliations that accompanied the rise of Jim Crow were that much more terrible. Not only in the South, but also in the country at large, African Americans reeled from repeated attacks. White-on-black violence exploded in the 1890s and early 1900s. Lynchings climbed to an all-time high in the early 1890s and wholesale massacres occurred in cities like Wilmington, North Carolina, and Atlanta, Georgia. The violence accompanied a steady loss of political rights for African Americans across the South. Mississippi led the way, taking formal measures to disenfranchise black voters in 1890. Determined to fight back a Republican insurgency that undermined their control, Democrats sought


a way to purge the black vote from Mississippi without inviting interference from the Republican-controlled federal government. Historian Edward Ayers points out that many white Mississippians dreaded a future of ‘‘perpetual turmoil, violence, dispute, factionalism, and growing opposition’’ if they failed to dispense with black voters.π But how could they disenfranchise black voters without risking federal interference—or disqualifying a large number of white voters as well? A state constitutional convention called by Democrats finally solved the problem by establishing a number of supposedly color-blind measures that were in fact designed to disqualify black voters without affecting whites, including a provision for stateappointed voter registrars (who could be counted on to disqualify blacks), residency requirements (blacks tended to move frequently, seeking work), poll taxes, stipulations disqualifying individuals convicted of select ‘‘negro’’ crimes such as petty theft and bigamy, and the so-called understanding clause, which required that a potential voter needed to be able to read or understand any section of the state constitution to the satisfaction of the white registrar. Other southern states followed suit, enacting similar changes to their state constitutions. Louisiana, which held its constitutional convention in 1898, added what would become the most notorious of the electoral ‘‘reforms’’—the grandfather clause, which allowed only those individuals who had voted prior to the onset of Congressional Reconstruction in 1867, or whose fathers or grandfathers had voted then, to circumvent the new restrictions. By the time Georgia held its convention in 1908, all the states of the former Confederacy had passed measures to suppress the black vote.∫ During the 1890s and early 1900s, laws mandating segregation multiplied at a dizzying rate, spreading from transportation to numerous areas of public life, including hotels, restaurants, soda fountains, bathrooms, and places of entertainment and leisure. Regulations segregated everything from elevators to courtroom Bibles, prostitution districts to children’s schoolbooks. Black opposition to the rising tide of discrimination was dealt a terrible blow in 1896, when the Supreme Court gave official sanction to segregation laws in the famous ruling of Plessy v. Ferguson. Against the plaintiffs, who argued that the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed individuals’ rights not to have their freedom abridged because of skin color—in this case, the freedom to ride in the first-class car after buying a firstclass ticket—the Supreme Court ruled that ‘‘legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts.’’ Segregation, according to the court, was not only


constitutional—it was the natural course of things, given the inherent quality of racial biases.Ω During the same period, southern white officials took steps to limit the educational opportunities of African Americans— and took particular aim at the gains made by middle-class blacks—by endorsing industrial education, which emphasized the training of students for agricultural and domestic work, while refusing to support programs designed to prepare African Americans for a broader range of pursuits, including the professions of law, medicine, and higher education.∞≠ In a time of crisis, African Americans once again looked for ways to find meaning in freedom and chart a course for advancement. In spite—or rather because—of tremendous oppression, African American spokespersons rededicated themselves to ideologies of black progress and achievement in the Jim Crow South. The sense of urgency was heightened by the rise of southern white voices in national debates over history and progress. Pummeled by the tremendous changes and conflicts wrought by industrialization, white northerners sought refuge in nostalgic portrayals of the ‘‘Old South’’ and the Civil War era set forth by the Virginia-born writer Thomas Nelson Page and dozens of imitators on the pages of popular magazines and in dozens of best-selling novels during the 1880s and 1890s. As historian David Blight points out, it is particularly significant that Page invariably used a black voice to tell his stories of the good old days of slavery: ‘‘In virtually every story, loyal slaves reminisce about the era of slavery . . . before freedom left them lonely, bewildered, or ruined souls in a decaying landscape. Their function in the new order is to tell stories of the old days . . . of the grace and harmony of the old South.’’∞∞ The quest for national reconciliation also gained substantial ground in those years, a development that did not bode well for black rights. The themes of universal courage and intersectional kindness that characterized sentimental reconciliationist literature were omnipresent at veterans’ reunions by the turn of the century. As Blight demonstrates, it was the ‘‘rare Memorial Day speech that did not pay equal honor to Confederate and Union veterans’’ for valor and sincerity of cause. In the midst of such sentimental and nostalgic reconstructions, Blight argues, ‘‘[white] Civil War memory fell into a drugged state, as though sent to an idyllic foreign land.’’ The ideological content of the war—in particular, ‘‘the reality of emancipation’’—disappeared from view.∞≤ The rising emphasis on national reconciliation complemented the ef-


forts of southern advocates of the Lost Cause. Expanding earlier historical writings that depicted slavery as a civilizing institution for African Americans and insisted on the righteousness—even the holiness—of the Confederacy, advocates of the Lost Cause now transformed a narrative of defeat into one of redemption. They ended their history of the Civil War era not with Appomatox but with the overthrow of radical Reconstruction, depicted as a travesty of carpetbagger avarice and ‘‘negro rule.’’ By taking up arms against black equality and reclaiming ‘‘home rule,’’ white southerners undid the harm inflicted by Union victory—as the story went—and reestablished safety in their homes and order in their society. This vision of southern history permeated every facet of southern society by the turn of the century—from historical literature and schoolhouse textbooks to public ceremonies, political elections, and family lore. As native Georgian Katherine DuPre Lumpkin later recalled, white southerners were thoroughly immersed in the lessons of the past, lessons no less sacred than the teachings of the Bible: ‘‘My father put it this way. He would say of his own children . . . ‘Their mother teaches them their prayers. I teach them to love the Lost Cause.’ And surely his chosen family function in his eyes ranked but a little lower than the angels.’’∞≥ By the turn of the twentieth century, much of the history that saturated southern experience was flowing northward; Lost Cause loyalists had good reason to feel optimistic about the prospects for a national reunion on southern terms. An acceptance of black inferiority was fundamental to the reconciliation and Lost Cause movements, and it created the basis for common ground between the two. Both reconciliationist literature and Lost Cause rituals typically portrayed loyal and devoted slaves more concerned with serving the needs of their beloved and benevolent masters or facilitating a NorthSouth reunion than with the struggle for freedom. The slaves were invariably depicted as unimpressed by the alleged boons of emancipation or, alternatively, made broken and unhappy by their unwanted liberty. The antithesis of the faithful slave was, of course, the dangerous and uninhibited freedperson, personified by the empowered and sexually rapacious freedman wreaking havoc on southern politics and society. The dominant languages of American history at the turn of the twentieth century thereby represented emancipation as, at best, inconsequential and, at worst, an unparalleled disaster for black and white southerners alike. The only resolution to the problem of black freedom, agreed a growing number of white Americans, was the reassertion of white supremacy. In


stories of happy slaves, lawless freedmen, and valiant soldiers-turnedKlansmen, white southerners proposed a powerful rationale for lynching, segregation, and disenfranchisement—a rationale that northern whites, beset by their own worries about the integrity of ‘‘Anglo-Saxon’’ identity, readily accepted.∞∂ Historical renderings of African American identity, which presented black persons as loyal and childlike under slavery, animallike and barbaric in freedom, complemented the scientific theories of racial hierarchy that were then gaining ground. Both historical and scientific racism, in turn, appealed not only to white southerners but also to native-born northern whites who were apprehensive about the impact of immigration from southern and eastern Europe on American society.∞∑ The Spanish-American War and the concomitant rise of American imperialism further fueled both national reconciliation and racial antagonism. As northern and southern whites joined together to defeat a common— and darker—foe, they celebrated the decline of ‘‘sectional feeling’’ and bolstered the power of white supremacy at home and abroad. The crises of the 1890s and early 1900s were, then, of a different order than those in previous decades. Indeed, the very political instability of the 1880s, which culminated in the Populist movement in the early 1890s, convinced southern Democrats that more drastic measures needed to be taken to secure control. Moreover, the most prosperous African Americans—those who had achieved visible educational and economic success and who served as leaders in a variety of capacities in black communities during the years after Reconstruction—now found themselves the particular targets of white backlash. Along with federal policy, the national climate of white opinion had turned decisively away from support for black rights. The requirements of African American public self-representation were higher than ever. Somehow, African Americans needed to chart a course forward. They had to defend black historical traditions, expose the falsehoods that sustained white supremacy, and reinforce narratives of black progress. At the same time, many felt, they also needed to find cultural ground to hold in common with at least some whites. African Americans disagreed mightily among themselves about the means to each of these ends, and these differences were played out in public ceremonies and historical visions. Whatever the differences among African Americans in the wake of Emancipation, and they were considerable, commemorative ceremonies both reflected and reinforced a distinct historical vision: the movement of a people, a nation, and finally the world


toward ever greater liberty and democracy. No such unity was possible in the wake of devastating setbacks and encroaching white control. At times, black leaders’ efforts to meet the myriad challenges of Jim Crow yielded paradoxical results. Some spokespersons continued to emphasize themes of progress and interracial ‘‘cooperation’’ to the exclusion of naming the consequences of white racism. Such diligent efforts to sustain a vision of common interests helped to elide the history of white resistance to black accomplishments—reinforcing one of the signal achievements of white supremacist history during the early decades of the twentieth century. Sweeping aside decades of white racism, whites portrayed black incompetence—not white resistance—as the single greatest obstacle to African American success from Emancipation onward. When black leaders paid homage to interracial cooperation in the face of repeated attacks on black rights, they helped to sustain the historical omissions that worked to uphold white supremacy. Similarly, each time a black leader identified black character flaws like ‘‘crime’’ or ‘‘immorality’’—not white racism—as the greatest obstacle to African Americans, or promoted a narrow arena of black ambition, such as industrial education, he reinscribed the arguments of whites seeking to restrict black achievement. In light of the vicious efforts to strangle black success in the 1890s, including targeted attacks on those who had worked most diligently to achieve the attributes of ‘‘intelligence’’ and respectability—and who had committed themselves to the ‘‘uplift’’ of others— the repeated warnings to work hard, save, go to church, and obey the law seem to have been tragically misguided. Moreover, they echoed the remonstrances of whites who denied their culpability in black oppression and identified the allegedly ‘‘natural’’ character deficiencies of African Americans as justification for Jim Crow. As they attempted to forge common historical ground with whites, some black spokespersons portrayed Reconstruction as a time when African Americans made ‘‘mistakes,’’ especially by putting too much emphasis on political rights. A few went so far as to romanticize slavery in their efforts to define history in terms white southerners could support. Black leaders sometimes lent support to the growing movement among southern whites to memorialize faithful slaves. Even as African Americans negotiated broadening parameters of white control, however, commemorative celebrations persisted as sites for articulating an alternative history of the past and road map for the future.


Emancipation Day celebrations were vital expressions of black southerners’ insistence on the wrongs of slavery and the promises—as yet only partially fulfilled—of freedom. Whatever the official pronouncements of black leaders, who necessarily kept an eye to white audiences, Emancipation Day celebrations continued to provide opportunities for great numbers of black southerners to meditate on their own experiences of bondage and freedom, to share stories of past lives and present hardships, and to look forward to a better future. Increasingly segregated from mainstream portrayals of southern history, black commemorations helped to maintain African American traditions of history and visions of progress. In ways subtle and overt, celebrants, both leaders and participants, challenged white-authored accounts of the past and insisted on the legitimacy of racial equality. Throughout the 1890s and early 1900s, African Americans collectively honored memories of prominent abolitionists like John Brown and drew attention to the horrors of slavery. Leaders alternately railed against white crimes and called on southern whites to live up to their own self-image as the historical protectors of the ‘‘weaker’’ race. Annual parades, which persisted in a number of black communities, demonstrated claims to freedom and citizenship.∞∏ The odd mixture of conciliation, defiance, capitulation, and resolution at black commemorations now seems confusing, off-putting, and politically crippled. But such strategies must be viewed in the context of profound crisis and sharply diminished possibility within which black southerners operated. Certainly, the class bias of African American leaders is abundantly evident in their lectures to black audiences; their prejudices in turn rendered them less able to defend black communities against white slander—many tended to share elements of white opinion of poor blacks. At the same time, black spokespersons had to be terribly creative as they struggled to find a path forward. By turning inward and defining a carefully circumscribed field of activity through which—they hoped—blacks could help themselves, they established a means for southern black progress where there might otherwise have been none. And, by adjusting public ceremonies to fit the political climate of Jim Crow, they sustained traditions of African American history and citizenship that were themselves a vital form of resistance to white supremacy. Many black men and women—including a substantial number of middle-class African Americans—did choose to leave the region rather than suffer oppressive conditions. By World War I, the steady stream of


blacks traveling to the North in search of a better life had turned into a flood; approximately one-half million African Americans arrived in northern cities between 1916 and 1919, following in the footsteps of thousands who bid farewell to the South during the late-1890s and early 1900s.∞π In the North, where so many black southerners went seeking hope, institutions of black history, such as the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, founded by Carter G. Woodson in 1915 in Chicago, grew and flourished during the early decades of the twentieth century. Such organizations provided an important foundation from which to challenge the racial stereotypes and historical obfuscations propagated by whites. Similarly, the creation of the National Association of Colored Women in 1895 established an important institutional basis for the expansion of African American women’s work on behalf of black history and progress. Thus, the commemorative celebrations sustained by black southerners turned into just one of the many ways in which African Americans battled for the nation’s past and future in the age of Jim Crow.∞∫

J The rising power of white supremacy was vividly displayed in Emancipation Day celebrations in Raleigh, North Carolina, at the turn of the century. In January of 1898, ex-congressman Henry Cheatham, who had been a crucial figure in local black politics for many years, gave an address that drew on established commemorative traditions but also spoke directly to the growing political crisis. In his speech, Cheatham celebrated black progress, praised friendly relations between the races, and pointedly commended North Carolina whites for refusing to discriminate against black politicians: ‘‘There has always been a prejudice against negroes holding office. . . . In some States this prejudice is very strong; I’m glad this is not true in North Carolina.’’∞Ω Sadly, the following year proved Cheatham’s faith in North Carolina whites to be misplaced. Perhaps he took care to highlight the importance of white support for black political rights precisely because those rights had come under increasing attack in recent months, as a rising generation of white Democrats looked for ways to combat the power of the Populists in the state. Over the course of 1898, racial and political tensions escalated in North Carolina as Democratic leaders carried on a virulent campaign designed to drive African American men out of politics, and thereby defeat the coalitions of black and white voters that had produced Populist victories in the state in 1896. Aiming for victory in the upcoming fall


elections, Democrats used a tactic that proved to be all too successful in repressing black men’s political power across the region—they manufactured a black-on-white rape scare to arouse white panic and solidify white support for black disenfranchisement. The scheme culminated in the Wilmington massacre on 10 November. In one day, whites attacked numerous black homes and institutions, including the local black press, and slaughtered more than ten black residents.≤≠ Two months after the Wilmington massacre, Lovelace B. Capehart, the black principal of a local elementary school, delivered an Emancipation Day address in Raleigh that could not have been more different from Cheatham’s optimistic speech. In place of Cheatham’s determined confidence in interracial cooperation, Capehart devoted much of his address to a tortured discussion of black political rights. Reflecting the bitter disillusionment of African Americans in the state, he argued: ‘‘I assert without fear of contradiction that whatever . . . violence, whatever . . . injustice we have suffered, with rare exceptions, have been due largely to politics.’’ And yet Capehart did not mean to suggest that African Americans did not have rights: ‘‘For when it comes to the right, we are American citizens clothed with the same inalienable rights as other citizens.’’ He merely questioned the viability of a right that could not be exercised: ‘‘But of what value is a bare, a naked right that we can neither maintain nor defend, that has not the moral support of the people in authority where it is to be forced?’’ Capehart concluded on a note of cynicism born of despair: ‘‘It were better that it [enfranchisement] never existed than to exist but to be trampled under foot.’’≤∞ Although Capehart implicitly blamed white resistance rather than black incompetence for African Americans’ woes, he also suggested that the ignorance of black voters detracted from their ability to exercise the franchise and hold elected office. Voicing an opinion that would be echoed by increasing numbers of African American leaders in the South in coming years, Capehart urged his audience to work on attaining the qualifications for citizenship—‘‘character, property, education.’’ Capehart pointed the way out of the current hardships: ‘‘The pennies must be saved, the tobacco and snuff and whiskey must be turned into churches, into school houses, books and clothes. The sinking ship of politics must be abandoned, the acquisitions of property, the securing of homes, the rearing of respectable and peaceable families, the proper education and training of our children must be our immediate concern.’’≤≤ Not surprisingly, the white Raleigh News and Observer embraced Cape-


hart’s ‘‘thoughtful’’ address. Giving the speech the bold headline, ‘‘The Negro’s Ruin Has Been Politics,’’ the Democratic newspaper rushed to interpret Capehart’s sentiments as a straightforward denunciation of black political activity. And certainly the overall message of Capehart’s address was that African Americans should forego political aspirations, at least for the moment. In addition to the recent violence, Capehart’s perspective reflected the class-based strategies of many black leaders—he shared the tenuous hope, held by many of his colleagues, that educational qualifications could ward off mass disenfranchisement. Given the recent assault on black achievements—white supremacists took particular aim at the ‘‘best black men’’ of North Carolina—it is hard to fathom the continued belief in a class-based strategy of mutual recognition. Moreover, when leaders like Capehart argued against political action, and blamed African American ‘‘ignorance’’ for ongoing discrimination, they played directly into the strategies of white supremacists and made it all the more difficult for African Americans in the state to organize an effective defense against disenfranchisement.≤≥ But it is also important to recognize the real agony that Capehart’s speech represented and that black leaders in North Carolina and elsewhere in the South experienced as they were pummeled with one violent white action after another. Having worked so hard to ensure a vision of biracial progress in the New South, black leaders like Capehart were shocked and devastated by events in North Carolina in 1898, as well as by similar occurrences that played out across the South during the 1890s and early 1900s. Dismayed and uncertain, African Americans concluded the Emancipation Day ceremony in Raleigh with a plaintive statement: ‘‘It is not to be denied that to us the future is dark indeed. We cannot feel otherwise. We know not what it may have in store for us.’’≤∂ Black leaders in North Carolina were devastated. In spite of all of their efforts to assert a progressive understanding of the New South during the decades following Reconstruction, history—once again—was running backward. Horrified and bewildered, black spokesmen chastised themselves for having been so very wrong. Scolding himself and his race for ‘‘disregarding the signs of the time,’’ Professor Capehart searched for a way out of the terrible circumstances. But, instead of questioning the viability of strategies to overcome white prejudice by changing black behavior, he made the dubious distinction between a ‘‘real’’ and an ‘‘expedient’’ right and urged education, character, and property ownership as the key to a better future.≤∑


Others were not willing to prop up the collapsing vision of black progress in the state. In the months following the Wilmington massacre, more than a thousand African Americans, including hundreds of the most prominent black citizens, fled the city for the North.≤∏ In the meantime, those who remained fought to stay the forces of white repression and salvage some measure of black accomplishment. On 1 January 1900, Charles Hunter, the tireless promoter of Emancipation Day celebrations in Raleigh, delivered an urgent plea from local black leaders to white residents of the state. Standing before a large audience gathered in honor of the thirty-seventh anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, Hunter tried a last-ditch effort to convince white voters not to support an amendment to the state constitution that, if ratified, would effectively disenfranchise black men. Hunter vividly described African Americans’ pain and dismay at history’s reversal: ‘‘We had thought that the results of the war had forever settled [the question of our status]. We had thought that never more would the equal citizenship of any part of American freemen be brought into question.’’ Insisting that there could be no middle ground between freedom and slavery, Hunter appealed to white residents to act like Jesus and decide in favor of freedom. Proclaiming black leaders’ continuing faith in the ‘‘good white people’’ of North Carolina, he asserted, ‘‘We cannot believe, that this evil enterprise [disenfranchisement] will meet with success. We have faith in the just judgment and Christian character of the good white people of the State who are not politicians.’’ Unwilling to leave matters entirely up to white people’s Christian character, however, he also raised the threat of a black exodus: ‘‘Your lands will be depopulated of the best and cheapest labor that will ever be available to you. The great industrial progress of your cities will be checked.’’ And, finally, Hunter invoked images of God’s wrath, visited once again upon an errant South: ‘‘You will find that you have opened a Pandora’s Box of ills. . . . You will have inaugurated another irrepressible conflict and may look for a long train of baneful consequences.’’≤π Over the protests of African Americans, white voters ratified an amendment to the state constitution later that year that required literacy of all future voters except men who had been eligible to vote on or before 1 January 1867. The nefarious grandfather clause was the means by which leading Democrats convinced poor whites that they would not be affected by the proposed amendment.≤∫ In ensuing years, white officials used the amendment to powerful effect, effectively shutting black men out of electoral politics.≤Ω


As disenfranchisement descended in spite of all their efforts to resist it, black leaders struggled to construct a vision of history that could make sense of disaster and propel them into a better future. Some went so far as to cast disenfranchisement as a blessing that would allow African Americans to focus their energies on education. Others held out hope, at least for a short time, that qualified black men would continue to be able to vote. Still others could only urge African Americans to trust in God and pray for things to get better.≥≠ While leaders struggled to find a way forward, they had trouble defining a coherent vision of the black past. In place of earlier depictions of a heroic black history, some suggested that African Americans should learn from the sufferings and endurance exhibited by the ‘‘proud Anglo-Saxons,’’ which, they argued, had produced the ‘‘splendid genius’’ of their ‘‘conquering civilization.’’ Those who did commemorate black accomplishments often tempered their enthusiasm with warnings that ‘‘a recapitulation of past achievements must not lure us into believing that all has been accomplished that might have been. We could have done more, and we must do more in the future.’’≥∞ Even as they navigated a more treacherous course, African Americans continued to use public ceremonies for negotiating with white residents, though a shift in power was clearly perceptible. Throughout the early 1900s, ceremonies in Raleigh and Durham regularly established collective resolutions covering a range of political positions and historical ideologies. At a single ceremony, one resolution might urge self-help and warn against crime, while another praised the ‘‘cordial’’ relations between the races. Additional resolutions urged the continuation of public aid for black education; others forthrightly condemned the abrogation of black rights.≥≤ African American celebrants thereby sought simultaneously to accommodate white power and press for black interests—they echoed white admonitions but also set forth their own goals and demands. In so doing, they perpetuated long-standing local traditions of interracial negotiation. In striking contrast to the ceremonies prior to disenfranchisement, however, few white officials mounted public platforms to pledge white support for black interests. The measure of power enjoyed by political blacks, which had compelled white officials to partake in black-authored portrayals of history and progress, had significantly declined. In its place was increasingly menacing white judgment. After African Americans passed a particularly forceful set of resolutions in Raleigh on New Year’s Day, 1905, the Raleigh News and Observer tersely commented, ‘‘Emancipation Day is not a


good time to begin an agitation against the Grandfather clause and the Jim Crow Car Law. They—or ‘something equally as good’—have come to stay.’’≥≥ By 1910, celebrants had softened their resolutions considerably, focusing almost exclusively on recommendations to work hard, be polite, and cultivate friendship with whites.≥∂

J The onset of disenfranchisement had a similar effect in other parts of the South. Although the Georgia legislature did not pass a disenfranchisement amendment until 1908, African American celebrations in the state reflected black leaders’ growing wariness as early as the late 1890s. In Augusta, black spokesmen increasingly zeroed in on a narrow strategy of uplift, emphasizing such issues as industry, morality, and fighting crime.≥∑ Similarly, orators in Atlanta won praise from the Atlanta Constitution for instructing black audiences to reflect on their shortcomings and exercise ‘‘industry, skill, cooperation and economy.’’≥∏ At an Emancipation Day ceremony in 1900 at Atlanta University, W. E. B. DuBois focused his entire speech on the ‘‘problem of Negro crime’’ and urged that African Americans establish better homes, educate their children, and ward off idleness.≥π In spite of black leaders’ rising caution, many celebrations in Georgia continued to promote an assertive vision of history well into the 1900s. Speakers extolled the contributions of African Americans to the building of the United States, praised their struggles to achieve freedom and recognition, and emphasized a wide range of black achievements.≥∫ Black militias also carried on the long-standing practice of leading parades through the main streets of Georgia towns on days of black celebration. In Savannah, annual processions commonly included several companies of black militiamen under the command of local officers, a small contingent of civic associations, and black educators and ministers riding in horse-drawn carriages. On occasion, more elaborate displays, such as floats representing African Americans before and after Emancipation, joined these groups.≥Ω The sounds of a local artillery, firing in salute, mingling with the music of an accompanying brass band, further contributed to the ceremonies in Savannah.∂≠ The militancy of black literature, journalism, and political oratory was also manifest. At a time when white Americans cherished their own selfimage as a civilizing force in the world, African American leaders charged that white supremacists had ‘‘out barbarized the barbarians’’ and given the


lie to democracy. By exposing the fault lines in white Americans’ most deeply held beliefs about themselves, African American leaders battled segregation, lynching, and disenfranchisement and criticized U.S. foreign policy. In Augusta in 1900, a Reverend Maxwell pointed out the contradiction between the ideological foundation of American imperialism and domestic racism. Maxwell echoed the deep ambivalence of many black leaders in the wake of the Spanish-American War: ‘‘It may be all right to cross the waters to fight for humanity, but many are wondering why that love for humanity did not begin a little nearer home.’’ Maxwell castigated white men for hypocrisy when they attacked black men for allegedly raping white women but refused to accord the same respect to black women. In doing so, he accused white Americans of failing once again to live up to their own codes of civilization: ‘‘I also believe . . . that any man, of any race, of any color, of any condition, who . . . tramples upon the sanctity of the family, the purity of womanhood, the moral sense of the community, the command of God and the law of the commonwealth by committing an assault upon any woman of any race . . . forfeits his right to liberty and to life, and that he should die . . . under the sovereignty of the law.’’∂∞ The openly bitter Maxwell used commemoration as a forum for public dissent. Even as conditions grew steadily worse across the South, African Americans in Georgia exercised their right to cast open judgment on historical and contemporary injustice. It was in 1906 that a more decisive shift occurred in Georgia. As part of the ongoing effort to stir up white animosity and curtail black power, white newspapers attacked depictions of black progress at local Emancipation Day celebrations that year. The papers made a particular example of a speech delivered by John W. Gilbert, an African American teacher at the Augusta Paine Institute, in Macon. Gilbert offended white sensibilities by daring to argue that African Americans were ‘‘progressing faster than whites’’ and insisting that African Americans had a right to sit on juries. The newsmen implied that Emancipation Day ceremonies were a dangerous practice in and of themselves, with the power to grip black participants with false beliefs and aspirations. The Augusta Chronicle ominously reported that Gilbert had concluded his speech by portraying a future in which African Americans would be ‘‘on a firmer basis than that occupied by the whites. ‘They will be on top’ were the words that fell from the speaker under the spell of the occasion.’’∂≤ With whites warning that the speech in Macon could ‘‘breed mischief,’’


Gilbert rushed to issue a retraction. The editors made a great show of accepting Gilbert’s statement that he had been misunderstood, and they seized the opportunity to further reinforce earlier warnings of the dangers African Americans would face if they continued to press for rights: ‘‘While we cheerfully give Gilbert this opportunity to set himself right before his white friends, it is not difficult to understand how he came to be placed in this unenviable attitude before the public. It is quite evident that Gilbert attempted to take advanced ground as to the ‘rights of the negro,’ and in doing so he so far overshot the mark as to give offense.’’ They alluded to grave consequences, should African Americans continue to make large claims for progress and citizenship, but they also directed praise to more cautious speeches delivered by African Americans in other parts of the South, which they proposed as a model for future black orators.∂≥ In tandem, whites in Savannah challenged the fundamental right of black marchers to occupy the streets of downtown on New Year’s Day. The year 1906 was the first year that African Americans in Georgia paraded without the protection of black militias—they had been disbanded the year before by the state legislature.∂∂ Determined to parade in honor of Emancipation, just as they had done for forty years, black marchers set out, unescorted, on the morning of 1 January. The procession had not gone far, however, before a white resident and former U.S. military officer, Captain J. C. McBride, attempted to cross the line of the procession. Black celebrants refused to give way, and a fight broke out. According to reports in white newspapers, McBride was badly beaten and an off-duty streetcar conductor who attempted to ram his car through the parade twelve blocks later met a similar fate. In spite of the disorder, no arrests were made. Black and white residents seem to have been at an uneasy standoff, with white authorities satisfied to have disarmed black men and African Americans determined to defend their right to occupy the main thoroughfares of town on New Year’s Day.∂∑ After an ominous beginning, 1906 only got worse. Prominent Democrats carried on a vicious white supremacist campaign throughout the spring and summer, replete with a black-on-white rape scare. As in North Carolina eight years previously, the campaign culminated in an orgy of white violence; white mobs attacked black neighborhoods during the Atlanta riots in late September. At least eleven deaths (ten black, one white) and countless injuries were the result of five days of carnage in the city.∂∏ African American leaders struggled to get their bearings in the wake of


the violence in Atlanta. William H. Crogman, who had invested so much in a vision of biracial progress in his books Talks for the Times and Progress of a Race, noted the terrible irony that the riots held for black elites who had embraced a vision of uplift that denigrated the behaviors of poor and urban African Americans. Crogman, who was himself injured in the Atlanta attacks, reflected, ‘‘[H]ere we have worked and prayed and tried to make good men and women of our colored population, and at our very doorstep the whites kill these good men.’’∂π Crogman was not the only black spokesman to remark angrily on the fact that ‘‘good men and women’’ had not been immune to the violence in Atlanta. The Reverend D. W. Cannon, who delivered the Emancipation Day address in Savannah a few months after the September riots, drew a devastating portrait of a generation that had embraced a vision of black upward mobility only to have its hopes dashed by ‘‘the hydra-headed monster’’ of white supremacy: ‘‘We were born free and taught to believe that we were to receive all the blessings and benefits of freedom. . . . So we went to school and educated ourselves, got good characters and good religion, but on our return home we were met by . . . race prejudice, which told us that though we were constitutionally free and equal to any other race, yet we would have to accept a servant’s place and acknowledge this, the white men’s country. That sentiment is discouraging to our youthful constitutions and death-dealing to our infant ambitions.’’ Angrily, Cannon went on, ‘‘Oh, the paralyzing thought that we are free men of average intelligence, with fairly good homes and comfortable surroundings, but simply because we are black we are robbed of our God-given rights.’’∂∫ Like black leaders in North Carolina eight years earlier, African Americans in Georgia struggled to reconstitute a progressive vision of black history. Cannon openly expressed the self-doubt and uncertainty that plagued many leaders when he told his audience in Savannah that black southerners would have to ‘‘plod on’’ and put their faith in God: ‘‘We alone can’t make things right. We can do but little toward placing justice upon the throne of public sentiment.’’ Both Crogman and Cannon toyed with the possibility of violent resistance. After all, noted Crogman, black leaders in Atlanta had reached out to the ‘‘better class’’ of whites, only to be hunted down and slaughtered. ‘‘But the lawless element in our population, the element we have condemned fights back, and it is [to] these people that we owe our lives.’’ Ultimately, however, they rejected the use of force. Argued Cannon, ‘‘Anger, threats nor anything else of an incendiary nature will do


the work nor bring the best results.’’ Crogman and Cannon were unwilling or unable to take up a form of battle that went against everything they believed about themselves, even as they revisited the question of black strategy and gave nodding acknowledgment to the effectiveness of physical black resistance in Wilmington and Atlanta. Bereft of his earlier faith in upward mobility, and unwilling to contemplate anything ‘‘of an incendiary nature,’’ Cannon could only urge his listeners to ‘‘work quietly along, every now and then putting in a pleasant humble plea for the freedom of the free.’’∂Ω Rather than repudiate strategies of uplift and interracial cooperation, many leaders reworked their depictions of history and progress—once again—in order to negotiate the limits set by southern whites and maintain a vision of black success in the Jim Crow South. Atlanta Independent editor B. J. Davis urged the members of a black audience at an Emancipation Day celebration in Cartersville, Georgia, to be ‘‘sane and conservative’’ in their resistance to disenfranchisement in the state. Davis looked beyond the struggle over black men’s right to vote into an uncertain future: ‘‘In the struggle we must not stake all. We must not lose sight of the fact that whether we win or lose the great majority of us must remain in the South and live with the people whose votes will disfranchise us.’’∑≠ William Jefferson White, whose militant defense of black rights put him in conflict not only with Georgia whites but also with more conservative black leaders throughout the decades following Reconstruction, was much more vehement. He issued a scathing editorial in the wake of the Atlanta riots in the Georgia Baptist, the African American newspaper he edited in Augusta. White’s outspokenness resulted in threats on his life, and he was forced to flee the city for a time. He later returned to Augusta and continued to advocate black agitation and militancy, in contrast to the more cautious positions taken by many spokespersons.∑∞ Black leaders seeking to accommodate white power to a greater extent had to negotiate within a sharply defined space, as an editorial appearing in the Raleigh News and Observer in January 1908 made clear. The Democratic newspaper commended the recent Emancipation Day celebrations of African Americans in different parts of the South: ‘‘In the main the resolutions and speeches were in good tone and in good spirit, inculcating lessons of sobriety, virtue, and industry.’’ Of course, the measured praise carried with it an implicit threat for black leaders who dared to stray from the ideological path laid down by whites.∑≤


The News and Observer next summed up the historical revisions that proliferated in the South and the North during the early 1900s, as whites stepped up their efforts to cement interregional reunion and elaborate a historical justification for the regime of Jim Crow. Slavery, the newspaper intoned, was a ‘‘great blessing to the African brought to these shores. It brought him in contact with the best civilization and best religious faith in the world. . . . The negro trained in the hard school of American slavery is superior to the black men found anywhere else.’’ Turning to Reconstruction and the following decades of political conflict, the newspaper depicted a dark period, when ‘‘political negro traders’’ and the ‘‘saloon influence’’ corrupted African Americans. Now, however, ‘‘these demoralizing influences [had] been greatly lessened,’’ and African Americans could look forward to ‘‘better conditions than ever before.’’∑≥ The version of southern history proffered by the News and Observer illustrates just how much the balance of power had shifted away from emancipationist interpretations—and toward white supremacist ideologies—by the turn of the twentieth century.

J Holding out a sliver of hope to black leaders who yielded, at least tacitly, to this view of southern history, white southerners did maintain a vision of black progress, albeit a narrow one. African Americans, the Raleigh News and Observer insisted, were making progress in education and in obtaining property. In exchange for black spokesmen giving up their foolish pretensions, the newspaper implied, southern whites would support a version of black advancement, so long as African Americans remained industrious and, of course, swore off politics.∑∂ After disenfranchisement, many black leaders held on ever more tightly to the belief that changing black behavior was the key to diminishing white racism and ensuring black success, even as they admitted the past failures of that philosophy. Although many acknowledged governmental inaction and white racism as the sources of black hardship, they also lashed out at the ‘‘worthless, uneducated [black] class that has often . . . infected southern politics,’’ along with the ‘‘careless young men and women, who, by their indiscretion, are heaping mountains of scorn and calumny upon the heads of those who would do right.’’ Indeed, in a single commemorative speech, one minister went from bitterly noting that African Americans could ‘‘do but little toward placing justice upon the throne of public sentiment’’ to recapitulating a strategy of education, thrift, economy, patriot-


ism, and religion—the ‘‘five prerequisites to real and lasting freedom.’’∑∑ Similarly, black minister Charles T. Walker told a crowd that had gathered to celebrate Emancipation Day in Augusta on New Year’s Day, 1907, that industry and sobriety and reliability and efficiency would ensure a good future. Without a hint of irony, Walker urged the black audience to avoid crime and ‘‘never, never join a mob.’’∑∏ After a brief period during which some spokesmen openly questioned the possibilities of black success in the South, Emancipation Day ceremonies in Georgia reemerged as forums for promoting black advancement. Rather than emphasize the accomplishments of the past, however, black leaders increasingly stressed the things African Americans needed to do to change their position in the South. In some cases, speakers completely rejected the practice of celebrating past achievements and took on a reproachful tone in their orations-turned-lectures. At a celebration in Cartersville, Georgia, in 1908, B. J. Davis, who regularly won high praise from the Augusta Chronicle for his ‘‘conservative’’ and ‘‘sensible’’ speeches, informed his audience that he would not follow in the footsteps of previous speakers and ‘‘laud . . . our unprecedented progress and wonderful development.’’ Stating that he would ‘‘leave whatever progress we have made to take care of itself,’’ Davis chose instead to focus on ‘‘that growth of character and usefulness we have not developed.’’∑π Such sentiments reflected black elites’ efforts to summon a strategy for collective self-help that would defend against racial oppression and appease white supremacists, but they also represented efforts on the part of educated and professional African Americans to achieve progress by exercising control over the broader black population. The biases of middleclass black leaders fit all too well with racist characterizations of African Americans as indolent and intemperate. Like the representatives of the Washington Bee, who labored to shut down black parades, Davis and other conservative black leaders sought both to reform black communities and to control the representation of black identities to white audiences. Some were not willing to cater to white conservatives. In Georgia, North Carolina, and elsewhere in the South, black spokespersons repeatedly insisted on the reality of black achievement and balanced assessments of past accomplishments with projections of future challenges. Throughout the early years of the twentieth century, the cultural production of black progress remained, despite all obstacles, a vast and multifaceted project. Industrial fairs, black newspapers, race literature, and commemorative celebra-


tions were just a few of the sites for defining and demonstrating black advancement. Black leaders issued subtle—and not so subtle—critiques of racist stereotypes and the violent suppression of black rights.∑∫ They elaborated historical traditions that emphasized tenacity and achievement in the face of hardship and insisted on African Americans’ contributions to the South, the nation, and the world.∑Ω At an Emancipation Day celebration in Savannah, a local Baptist minister castigated white racists and lauded the historical accomplishments of African Americans, who had achieved so much in spite of unstinting racial oppression. Having been brought to the United States against his will, he charged, the ‘‘Negro . . . now stands in America as an object of ridicule, injustice and mob violence and no retreat save the throne of God.’’ And yet black Americans had affected ‘‘all the affairs and great efforts and achievements made by this country and the world.’’∏≠ Highlighting the accomplishments of African Americans in spite of white racism, the minister echoed a point made repeatedly by Emancipation Day speakers, as well as writers for the black press, and drew on long-standing religious and historical traditions. Other black spokespersons assiduously avoided overt criticism of southern whites. Many had come to believe that African Americans’ greatest hope lay in their capacity to build themselves up, rather than in efforts to get ever more recalcitrant whites to aid their success. Following in the footsteps of Booker T. Washington, these speakers stressed the ‘‘great part of . . . emancipation [that] rests on [African Americans’] own shoulders.’’∏∞ The Savannah Tribune gave an approving nod toward a speech delivered at the local Emancipation Day ceremony in 1908, in which ‘‘there was no complaint about the manner in which we are treated by others.’’∏≤ Similarly, a representative of Morris Brown College, one of the scores of black colleges that had sprung up in the late nineteenth century, who addressed a ceremony in Rome, Georgia, in 1910, instructed his audience that it was ‘‘hardly necessary . . . [to] recount hindrances or discouragements . . . [or to] bemoan and wail our struggles for 45 years.’’ Indeed, he argued that the ‘‘calamity howlers’’ who were ‘‘constantly discussing rights, limited opportunities and a down-trodden race’’ were the main obstacle to black success in the South.∏≥ In this context, blacks confronted—either explicitly or implicitly—the issue of suffrage. In doing so, they necessarily engaged contemporary portrayals of the history of Reconstruction. Nowhere was the battle to contend


with racist ideology more apparent than in this particular struggle over Reconstruction’s legacy. By rewriting the history of Reconstruction as a narrative of ‘‘redemption,’’ white southerners had erected a historical foundation for Jim Crow and cleared the way for national reconciliation on southern terms. As southern revisionists gained momentum, African Americans struggled to resist both the content and the consequences of their historical arguments. African Americans were far from unified in their approach to Reconstruction, however. Their contrasting historical positions reflected the sharp differences of opinion and strategy that characterized African American political efforts in the Jim Crow South. Some challenged white revisionists directly, using the opportunity of Emancipation Day to insist on the heroism of earlier generations who fought to obtain both liberty and political rights for African Americans. Summoning the memories of abolitionists and soldiers who gave their lives for our freedom, the editor of the Colored Alabamian called on African Americans everywhere to celebrate Emancipation Day by demanding their ‘‘fuller and larger freedom.’’∏∂ Others took a less confrontational approach, making indirect reference to voting rights when they described African Americans as citizens ‘‘with limited privileges’’ and spoke of looking forward to the day when they would qualify for the ‘‘high type of citizenship.’’∏∑ Still others avoided the topic of electoral politics entirely—or explicitly criticized black political action. As years went by, it became increasingly common for black spokespersons to issue warnings against the alleged dangers of politics, warnings that inevitably alluded to Reconstruction as a period of black error. ‘‘Politics was our ruin,’’ insisted a black Emancipation Day speaker at a celebration in Raleigh. ‘‘It took away often the incentive to work, and no race ever succeeds that does not have a great struggle.’’∏∏ Elsewhere, orators deduced similar lessons from the past, arguing that African Americans needed to focus on priorities other than suffrage. Strikingly, some AME ministers recalled the postwar period as a time when political organizing got in the way of religious work. In his memoirs, former slave and church leader Houston Hartsfield Holloway recalled that when the ‘‘Radicall partie politicks got in our midst’’ in Georgia, ‘‘our revivall or Religious work for a while began to wan[e].’’∏π Outside of politics, individual leaders framed their discussion of black achievement in a variety of ways. Some continued to emphasize a broad range of black achievements and potential, from professional goals to


artistic endeavors.∏∫ Reflecting the rising advocacy of industrial education, others narrowed African Americans’ future to their capacity as a great ‘‘working class.’’ Still others stressed good morals as being more important than ‘‘citizenship or even education.’’ Echoing white portrayals of the ‘‘Negro problem,’’ these speakers argued the detrimental effects of black immorality in southern society: ‘‘For the educated citizen, lacking in moral stamina is a constant menace to the peace of society.’’∏Ω As they turned with renewed emphasis to the role of morality in ‘‘uplifting the race,’’ black organizers continued the previous pattern of describing a special role for black women. Here, too, diversity characterized individual leaders’ approaches, even as more conservative themes gained ground. More progressive narratives of female achievement persisted, particularly in addresses by women, but a contrary pattern also emerged: An increasing number of orators depicted black women as sexually promiscuous, particularly with white men, and emphasized the importance of female sexual morality for the promotion of racial progress. When male speakers urged women to ‘‘keep the gates closed against the enemy,’’ their message was clear: black women could best help the race by refusing to sleep with white men.π≠ While African Americans had long considered sexual relations between black women and white men to be problematic, there was a striking difference between the admonitions of early-twentiethcentury black spokesmen and the claims of black men in earlier decades. Many black men continued to castigate white men for interfering with their own sexual prerogatives, but they also shifted an increasing portion of blame for interracial sex onto black women themselves. The intensifying focus on morality as a factor in African American achievement also contributed to a heightened emphasis on women’s role as keepers of the home, a theme that was consistently promoted by both male and female leaders. As one orator put it, ‘‘You know that the State is no better than the aggregate home life of the people.’’ For their part, men were urged to exercise authority over their wives and children. Echoing the admonitions of northern missionaries some forty years before, some speakers sought progress through the alteration of gender relations in black communities. Real citizenship required proper ‘‘home training,’’ which in turn necessitated that individual men take their place as the head of the family. Still, even the most conservative male orators clearly recognized their reliance upon women to share the burden of racial uplift; this dual responsibility presumably helped to check, or at least complicate,


men’s efforts to assert dominance. As one speaker put it, he believed in the ‘‘equality of man and wife and that they should be mutually dependent.’’ This did not preclude his equally firm belief, however, that a ‘‘woman should not marry a man that she cannot look up to and respect enough to obey.’’π∞

J In a move that would previously have been unimaginable, some leaders went so far as to celebrate the impact of slavery on black Americans. The influence of conservative perspectives was most evident when individual black spokesmen proclaimed that slaves ‘‘got almost as much out of slavery as the owner.’’π≤ The efforts of black educator Sam F. Harris to establish a school in Athens, Georgia, dedicated to the preparation of young black men and women for ‘‘life in the service for which they are best fitted,’’ represented a particularly clear attempt to capitalize on southern white portrayals of the past. Billed as a tribute to the ‘‘Old Black Mammies of the South’’ who ‘‘made themselves beloved and respected by the generations before the war,’’ the Black Mammy Memorial Institute was designed to offer training in domestic work, farming, and basic trades. Harris explained that the institute would continue the ‘‘progress’’ achieved by African Americans under slavery: During a period of about 250 years the foundation of the civilization of the American Negro was laid. . . . Beginning his new life on the American continent, without the fundamentals of industrial skill and moral intelligence, under the discipline of slavery . . . he developed into a skilled artisan, culinary artist, agriculturalist. . . . In the prosecution of these duties he developed such traits as—unselfishness, honor and honesty, personal affection and refined feeling, industrial stability and skill. It was these that endeared him to the white master and mistress of former generations.π≥ Harris celebrated African American ‘‘progress’’ under slavery in an effort to drum up white support for black education—not an easy proposition in Jim Crow Georgia, by any means. Summoning images of mutual dependency between hardworking slaves and the ‘‘fine type’’ of the ‘‘Southern aristocracy,’’ Harris portrayed the institute as a step toward recreating ‘‘peace and friendship ’’ between whites and blacks in Athens. Not surprisingly, this tactic proved to be quite effective—white officials from around the state enthusiastically supported the Black Mammy Memorial


Institute, for which a twenty-year charter was granted in 1910. Asked to relate his own personal memories of an ‘‘old black mammy’’ for promotional materials, Atlanta Constitution editor and New South proponent Henry Grady enthusiastically complied, as did many other prominent white men and women in Georgia. Grady reminisced, ‘‘As I attest it here, the spirit of my old black mammy from her home up there looks down to bless, and through the tumult of this night steals the sweet music of her croonings as thirty years ago she held me in her black arms and led me smiling into sleep.’’ Grady went on to indulge another ‘‘memory’’—that of loyal slave men during the Civil War: ‘‘I catch another vision. The soldier struck, staggering, fallen. I see a slave, scuffling through the smoke, winding his black form reckless of the hurtling death—bending his trusty face to catch the words that tremble on the stricken lips so wrestling meantime with agony that he would lay down his life in his master’s stead.’’π∂

J African American spokespersons’ different strategies reflected both political differences and the deeply ambiguous position of southern black leaders in the era of white supremacy. The many critics of Booker T. Washington in particular have condemned his willingness to abjure politics and advocate a gradual and limited vision of black advancement. Other southern black spokespersons—and educators in particular—came under similar criticism from fellow African Americans for accommodating segregation and inequality and downplaying the impact of white racism in their efforts to achieve white support. These judgments have been echoed in the writings of many historians. In retrospect, it is clear that the efforts of Washington and others to appease whites did not lessen racial discrimination, turn back disenfranchisement, or put a stop to lynching. But, as Adam Fairclough asserts, criticism of southern black spokespersons misses the ‘‘crucial point’’ that ‘‘things could have been even worse.’’π∑ The actions of Washington and other black educators presumably helped to sustain a minimum level of white support for African American education at a time when at least some white officials were convinced that all such efforts were a complete waste of time and money. Without the efforts of black community leaders who relentlessly advocated African Americans’ capacity for progress, however defined, and attempted to refashion accounts of the past, black southerners might have been bereft of a vital site of self-definition, as well as political advocacy. The most extreme white racists, after all, denied the very existence of African


American accomplishment and capability and refused to lend their support to black commemorative practices, such as celebrations of Emancipation, just as they denounced as useless even a minimal level of African American schooling. By celebrating Emancipation and elaborating narratives of interracial dependency, black self-help, and gradual advancement, even the most conservative black leaders bolstered theories of history and progress that made room, however slight, for the assertion of African American interests and the acknowledgment of African American accomplishment. If the black sociologist Charles S. Johnson was correct in arguing more than fifty years ago that white southerners ultimately failed in their efforts to establish a real ‘‘caste system’’ because African Americans did not internalize racist values, then Emancipation Day ceremonies and other institutions of black history played a crucial role in sustaining African American resistance to white supremacy.π∏ Commemorative affairs in the Jim Crow era represent black leaders’ efforts to achieve black interests by accommodating white power to varying degrees, but they also demonstrate a much greater variety in African American responses to rising white racism, and the accompanying historical theories, than traditional definitions of the period as the era of Booker T. Washington versus W. E. B. DuBois would have it. Just as historians of African American women have challenged the neglect of women’s contributions in analyses of black intellectual and political resistance to white supremacy, so, too, do the broad range of views articulated by black spokespersons at commemorative ceremonies contravene any attempt to dichotomize African American strategies. Separate circumstances contributed to a wide range of vantage points among black southerners—educators, for instance, were particularly reliant on white support. And individual spokespersons simultaneously pursued divergent, and at times contradictory, positions vis-à-vis both history and politics. They called on their audiences to improve their ‘‘morals’’ and save money in one breath and denounced historical injustices against African Americans in another; or they displayed one position to a predominantly black audience and quite a different one to a mixed-race or white audience. The relative diversity in African American commemorative oratory is particularly striking given the diplomatic nature of many events, and the extent to which many speakers aimed to meet challenges posed by advocates of emigration. As in previous years, African American ceremonies in the Jim Crow South were often, though not always, produced for both


black and white consumption. Some ceremonies took place out in the open. Others were attended by white officials or reporters. Speeches were frequently published in either the black or white press. Anti-emigrationist black leaders also continued to influence historical narratives generated at southern commemorations. This had been true in earlier decades, but the stress on progress in the South became more insistent in the early 1900s, in order to counter the view of an increasing number of African Americans—including a sizable portion of black leaders—that there was little choice but to leave the region.ππ Similarly, the urban ceremonies that are the focus of this study were facilitated by an educated and professional urban black elite, who in turn represented particular class interests rather than a blending of perspectives from the population at large. In spite of their diversity, commemorative ceremonies did not encompass the full range of historical traditions and political strategies deployed by African Americans.

J Patterns of African American ceremony varied in towns and cities across the region during the early 1900s. In many areas, processions persisted as vibrant demonstrations of black civic identity and organization. At a time when racist imagery abounded, and public arenas were increasingly segregated, parades afforded a unique opportunity for black southerners to define themselves as community leaders and workers, students and soldiers—that is, as active contributors to southern and American society. Of course, the very conditions that underscored the significance of black processions also led black leaders to intensify their efforts to control community performances. The absence of armed black militiamen, whose presence had provided crucial protection for black parades in earlier years, meant that the support of local white officials was important to the success of public black ceremonies. Preferring seclusion to public display, some communities held ceremonies within the relative safety of black institutions. Schools and universities in particular took a central role in maintaining commemorative ceremonies in many parts of the South. In Norfolk, Virginia, annual Emancipation Day parades remained a particularly vital tradition well into the twentieth century—albeit without the militia companies that had accompanied processions through the 1890s. Each year on New Year’s Day, legions of marchers proudly displayed the organization of black society and contributions of local residents to the establishment of black freedom and defense of the nation. Led by black


Emancipation Day in Richmond, Virginia, [c. 1905]. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

veterans of the Civil and Spanish-American Wars, hundreds of men and women, including representatives of labor unions, schools, fire companies, clubs, lodges, and associations, marched in separate divisions through the main streets of Norfolk; hundreds more crowded onto sidewalks to watch and cheer as the parade went by. After the procession, celebrants gathered in a nearby church for extensive exercises that typically incorporated prayer, song, and historical oratory and reflected the combined leadership of both men and women from the local community. Following a convention that was also practiced elsewhere in the South, participants read from ‘‘letters of regret’’ sent by various luminaries who were invited but unable (or unwilling) to attend the celebration; praiseful letters from the most prominent members of black and white society, including Booker T. Washington, Maggie Lena Walker, and Theodore Roosevelt, conveyed further authority and significance to the anniversary.π∫ The Norfolk parades challenged racist stereotypes and repudiated white monopolies on American history and citizenship. The participation of


black veterans in particular was a stark reminder of black soldiers’ roles in the creation and maintenance of the nation. Indeed, with the presence of black Spanish-American War veterans and the inclusion of tributes from prominent white officials, the Norfolk parades projected a vision of national reunion, albeit one that was very different from that put forth by the performances at Blue-Gray reunions across the country. Displaying a proud heritage of black leadership and accomplishment, and representing racial accord on issues of black freedom and national defense, the Norfolk parades offered an alternative to the racial exclusion that characterized most white-authored visions of the nation in the early twentieth century. Parades were maintained and even resurrected as an element of black ceremony in other urban areas, including Savannah, Augusta, and Richmond, and towns and cities across Texas, where black residents continued to celebrate each year on 19 June. In Richmond, a local association revived the tradition of celebrating ‘‘Evacuation Day’’ in 1904. The celebrations recalled the previously controversial practice of recognizing the anniversary of the city’s surrender to Union troops with a joyful parade each year on 3 April. Now, however, white residents appear to have made their peace with the celebration. Local newspaper reports annually praised the parades as exercising ‘‘good order’’ and reflecting the progress of black Virginians. A local tobacco company regularly issued a general holiday so that black employees could participate in festivities. White observers’ repeated emphasis on the orderly nature of parades in newspaper accounts, coupled with surviving excerpts from the accompanying conservative oratory, helps to explain the historical rapprochement between white and black leaders in Richmond. Black officials maintained orderly parades, counseled audiences to avoid the ‘‘mistakes’’ of Reconstruction, stressed the ‘‘harmony’’ between the races under current political conditions, and defined a narrow vision of black progress; in exchange, white residents tolerated and even supported a ceremony that publicly celebrated the fall of the Confederacy and annually recalled the public authority enjoyed by African Americans after the Civil War.πΩ The Evacuation Day celebrations in Richmond highlight the ambiguous position of African American commemorations in the Jim Crow South. On the one hand, the celebrations marked the sharp division between black and white interpretations of the Civil War. In commemorating the fall of the Confederate capitol, African Americans celebrated on a day typically


marked by mourning among white residents. It is hard to imagine a more clearly drawn line between black and white versions of the past. On the other hand, the support of white officials and the content of black oratory represented the efforts of African American leaders to establish histories in common with whites. At a ceremony dedicated to the celebration of Confederate defeat and the advent of black freedom, African American leaders warned against the dangers of ‘‘too much’’ black progress by referring to the ‘‘problems’’ of Reconstruction. In doing so, they attempted to meld two opposing historical traditions into a vision for (gradual) interracial advancement. Elsewhere in the Jim Crow South, African Americans maintained commemorative traditions but conducted ceremonies within the sanctuary of black churches, schools, and organizations. In Raleigh, North Carolina, African Americans typically gathered in a local hall for a program of prayer, music, and oratory, followed by a series of resolutions. A short parade of marshals, speakers, and officers of the local Emancipation Day society sometimes preceded these ceremonies.∫≠ African Americans in Alabama similarly congregated for sizable indoor celebrations, including annual Emancipation Day ceremonies in Mobile, Montgomery, Selma, and Birmingham, as well as in numerous small towns across the state.∫∞ In many Georgia towns and cities, including Atlanta, Gainesville, Rome, and Cartersville, ceremonies took place in local schools and churches.∫≤ Also in Georgia, the amplified role of educators in directing black ceremonies was particularly apparent, as representatives of various schools and colleges crisscrossed the state and traveled to locations in nearby Alabama and South Carolina to deliver orations on Emancipation Day. Even when they took place indoors, many black ceremonies were written up in local newspapers, and a good number earned approval from the southern white press as appropriately ‘‘conservative.’’∫≥

J With or without parades, Emancipation Day celebrations reflected the diverse efforts of black southerners both to uphold black historical interpretations and to foster terms for historical agreement with southern whites. Under the cultural and political conditions of white supremacy, annual celebrations of black freedom were themselves a signal accomplishment, and commemorations further nurtured important themes in African American history. While some speakers referenced the allegedly civilizing impact of slavery, most found ways to remind their audiences of the


deprivation of black rights under bondage.∫∂ Annual ceremonies also provided an opportunity for individuals to recall their own experiences as enslaved persons and to pass on those memories to children and grandchildren—regardless of orators’ historical pronouncements. On Emancipation Day and on other commemorative occasions, African Americans memorialized individual figures associated with the accomplishment of freedom and the assertion of black rights, including Frederick Douglass, John Brown, and Abraham Lincoln.∫∑ Spokesmen also emphasized the role that African Americans had played in achieving freedom, persistently invoked themes of black loyalty and courage, and forthrightly criticized the distorted images of African American history promulgated by whites. Reverend James Taylor decried the fact that ‘‘[t]he Negro is represented as a coward and frightful’’ in white-authored portrayals of the Civil War, whereas, in fact, the record showed that African Americans had demonstrated ‘‘prowess’’ and ‘‘bravery’’ throughout American history.∫∏ Emphasizing the contributions of African Americans to both the South and the nation, black spokespersons also persisted in placing those accomplishments within a broader context of the worldwide struggles and achievements of persons of African descent. Efforts to uphold black traditions were complicated by attempts to achieve at least a modicum of white support, as well as by the class-based concerns of black leaders about the public behaviors of African Americans. Educators in particular relied on white assistance for black schools; they endeavored to accommodate white southerners’ historical arguments while still making room for assertions of black history and progress. This was a tricky balance to strike, and a significant number of spokespersons ended up echoing white pronouncements on slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, even as they pressed the case for black rights. As both white complaints and black newspapers make clear, however, not all commemorations met white expectations for ‘‘acceptable’’ black traditions. Moreover, even the most conservative ceremonies were used by black spokespersons to extract white support for black interests. Thus, speakers at black state fairs in Raleigh repeatedly called for state funds to be allocated for black (industrial) schools, orphanages, and asylums in North Carolina, and Emancipation Day orators across the region regularly emphasized themes of interracial cooperation and the ‘‘cultivation of white friendship’’ in their communities.∫π We clearly see the complexity of African American history in the nar-


ratives of black progress that dominated so many commemorative events. Insisting on the reality of black achievements, African Americans impugned the efforts of white supremacists to deny black capabilities. At the same time, efforts to define black progress along distinct lines reflected clear disagreements among black spokespersons, as well as definite divisions between black leaders and the majority of black southerners. Finally, the increasingly circumscribed nature of many assertions of black accomplishment represented the efforts of African American leaders to navigate an ever more treacherous political environment. Black leaders at times disclosed their deep frustration and anger with the uphill battle they faced as they endeavored to promote African American visions of history and progress. Still, they reasoned that their cultural labors were important—if for no other reason than to record black accomplishments. When current conditions seemed particularly grim, Winfield Henry Mixon took solace in the notion that future historians would acknowledge African American accomplishments.∫∫ This hope and expectation was repeatedly voiced by black leaders in the Jim Crow South. At the very least, they reasoned, stories documenting black accomplishments could be mined by future generations, who, they hoped, would be committed to telling the full story of African Americans’ part in the country’s history. Here, too, black leaders’ achievements are noteworthy. Indeed, the cultural work of African Americans, in various ceremonies, newspapers, texts, and institutions, has been indispensable to historians working to retrace the contours of black success that so threatened white supremacists at the turn of the century. Along with the expanding field of race histories and black exhibitions, commemorative celebrations perpetuated stories of black accomplishment that continue to challenge seamless histories of white racism and black oppression.

J So much had happened since the celebrations that manifest the tremendous joy and hopefulness of African Americans after Emancipation. To many who had lived through the devastating setbacks of the previous decades, the approaching fiftieth anniversary of freedom must have seemed like a cruel joke. Still, black leaders were determined to use the upcoming anniversary to chart a course, however compromised, for black progress. In honor of the semicentennial, African Americans in Raleigh expanded the annual state fair—now in its thirty-fourth year of operation—into a week-long celebration. The semicentennial fair in Raleigh


drew enthusiastic support from white authorities; indeed, the coverage in the News and Observer was hardly distinguishable from black leaders’ own praise for the event. In anticipation of the upcoming exposition, the Democratic newspaper applauded the efforts of the North Carolina Industrial Association without reservation: ‘‘The colored people will this week show what they have done in fifty years. A race wholly without education half a century ago, it is [now] . . . considerably more than a half literate population. They are becoming landowners and builders of banks. A little hut will be exhibited as typical of the time of their freedom. A splendid structure will note the change this year.’’∫Ω White spokesmen similarly approved of plans for an ‘‘Ex-Slaves Convention’’—organized by the indefatigable Charles Hunter—to be held during the fair. The News and Observer advertised the reunion of former slaves as the week’s prime attraction and as an occasion reflecting the presumed opinion of African Americans that ‘‘the slavery that brought them into contact with the highest form of civilization and then sat the race down into the fiercest competition with the smartest race of men on earth, has been the means of showing the colored people something of their potentialities.’’ The actual advertisement for the reunion, which had been published in the Negro Fair Bulletin the previous September, did not go so far as to praise the ‘‘civilizing’’ influence of slavery. Instead, the Bulletin described the reunion as an opportunity for ex-slaves to ‘‘renew old acquaintances, strengthen old ties, cement old friendships, relate old experiences, rejoice over present prospects and set march for higher ground.’’ The Bulletin emphasized the feeling—marked by ‘‘mutual helpfulness’’ and ‘‘mutual acts of kindness’’—that lived on in both former slaves and former owners, many of whom planned to attend or at least observe the event.Ω≠ The fair itself clearly represented both the foundation and the limitations of interracial ‘‘friendship’’ in North Carolina in 1913. Featuring displays by black schools and businesses, speeches by black and white officials, a parade of 400 ex-slaves, and numerous games and races, the fair attracted large numbers of African Americans from around the state, as well as a considerable number of white participants and observers. In their speeches, white officials praised the material accomplishments of black residents and stressed the advantages of industrial education. Black speakers, in turn, stressed their trust in the friendliness of white people in the state and pledged their loyalty to North Carolina and the South as a ‘‘land of opportunity’’ for African Americans. In contrast to black fairs prior to


disenfranchisement, however, black orators did not try to raise the standard for white support; nor did they press for state allocations for specific educational endeavors. At the dinner that marked the culmination of the ex-slave reunion, approving whites looked on as black speakers reminisced about black loyalty during the Civil War and the ‘‘good times’’ that were had in the ‘‘days that are dead.’’Ω∞ Elsewhere, celebrations on 1 January embodied both the tightened grip of white control and the determined efforts of African Americans to celebrate freedom and chart a course for interracial progress. Reflecting the favored status of some black leaders among whites, Reverend Silas X. Floyd, an Augusta teacher who had long won high praise from white Georgia officials for his ‘‘conservative’’ speeches, actually reported on the fiftieth anniversary celebration in Augusta for the local Democratic newspaper. In his article, Floyd described a mile-long ‘‘monster’’ parade of African Americans who marched through the streets of downtown Augusta on New Year’s Day, before a crowd of hundreds. Led by a chief marshal, the procession included representatives from local black societies, lodges, and several schools, including the Haines School and Paine College. These groups were followed by a division of fifty men on horseback and a float containing eleven little girls representing the states of the Confederacy. Each girl held up a small U.S. flag, while an older girl, representing Columbia, sat on a throne. Next in line were several carriages containing African American ministers and educators from the city; a local band brought up the rear of the parade.Ω≤ The line of march concluded at the Springfield Baptist Church, where once again African American men, women, and children crowded together for a program of praise and thanksgiving for freedom. The ensuing speeches, however, carried few traces of Henry M. Turner’s dramatic historical address that had so affected black and white listeners at Augusta’s celebration of the first anniversary of freedom held at Springfield the year after the end of the Civil War. Instead, the orator held forth on the topic ‘‘The Emancipation of the Negro by the Negro Himself,’’ during which he addressed a by-now-familiar list of ways in which African Americans could better themselves through industrial education, property ownership, and business development. A series of resolutions, which were adopted at the end of the day, stressed the material, educational, and religious accomplishments of African Americans since Emancipation and offered thanks for black progress and prosperity in the South.Ω≥


In spite of widespread energy for celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of freedom, many local ceremonies reflected clear organizing challenges. For years, black leaders like John H. Deveaux of the Savannah Tribune had been worrying about what they perceived as a declining interest in commemorations. Of course, many of those same spokespersons had labored to ensure that commemorations were ‘‘respectable’’ events; these very efforts presumably diminished the enthusiasm of some participants. Interorganizational disputes and ambivalence about the meaning of black freedom were also reflected in small turnouts. Still, black spokespersons were nearly unanimous in declaring celebrations a success. Deveaux deemed the fiftieth anniversary celebration in Savannah to be ‘‘beyond doubt the greatest that the Negroes of the city have held since the last time the colored state militia took part in a celebration of this nature.’’ Nevertheless, the parade that kicked off the day’s ceremonies in Savannah was considerably less elaborate than the one in Augusta, and consisted primarily of several companies of black clubs and societies. According to the Tribune, the procession made up in vigor and zeal what it lacked in numbers. Playing to a large crowd, members of the procession marched through the city streets, accompanied by ‘‘an abundance of patriotic and inspiring music by the three bands.’’ Still, Deveaux hoped that next year’s celebration might be better. The tireless editor recommended a plan of recruitment and extensive preparation in order to create a ceremony that would do justice to the day: ‘‘Suppose we work up interest in the next celebration all during the year and not wait until the last month of the year to get our celebration on foot.’’Ω∂ Elsewhere in the region and throughout the country, between 1913 and 1915, African Americans put on a wide range of celebrations, including substantial parades, fairs, and public performances.Ω∑ A unified national celebration proved impossible to achieve, not the least because Congress failed to appropriate the necessary funds; instead, individual states and communities celebrated in various ways. In Houston, Texas, organizers planned an extensive procession with floats depicting both the history of slavery and African American progress since the war, to be followed by a program of oratory, music, and fireworks.Ω∏ In Mobile, Alabama, 3,000 marchers paraded through town holding aloft life-size pictures of Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson, while hundreds more waved flags and banners from the sidelines.Ωπ Many processions, such as a march in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, were billed as ‘‘industrial parades’’ and featured floats


exhibiting agricultural and mechanical achievements.Ω∫ Celebrations and exhibitions, both large and small, were also held in the North and West. Semicentennial celebrations represented both the diversity and the fundamental community of African American historical memory in the early twentieth century. Across the country, black communities commemorated Emancipation as the most meaningful anniversary in African American history. Patterns of ceremony, passed down from one generation to the next, also helped to unify the numerous celebrations taking place across the nation, as did widespread emphasis on the delineation of black progress. Reflecting long-standing traditions of African American commemoration, semicentennial ceremonies looked to the future as much as to the past, charting a course for a better day ahead by reminding African Americans of both the struggles and the triumphs of black history.

J The common elements in African American commemorations did not preclude profound disagreements among black southerners over the significance of the past and the best direction for the future. Nevertheless, the full range of African American semicentennial celebrations successfully elaborated black historical visions in communities across the South and the country at large. These visions, in turn, posed a vital challenge to prevailing white ideologies of history and progress. Even as organizers began plans to celebrate the semicentennial of freedom, movie director D. W. Griffith was hard at work on a film adaptation of Thomas Dixon’s novel of Reconstruction, The Klansman. When The Birth of a Nation opened in 1915, white moviegoers flocked to see ‘‘history writ in lightening’’: noble and determined ex-Confederate soldiers, bravely donning costumes of white, to save not just the South but the entire country from the menace of unfettered black power. Celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of Emancipation—like other African American historical initiatives— challenged the visions of the past and future that were so powerfully portrayed in Birth of the Nation, as well as in countless other forums at the time. Finally, the semicentennial celebrations reveal an additional meaning for ceremonies marking both the struggles and the achievements of African Americans since Emancipation. They demonstrate the importance and power of black hope. Richard R. Wright, president of the Georgia State Industrial College, spoke of the persistence of black hope at Atlanta University on New Year’s Day, 1913. After recounting the ways in which African Americans had met the challenges of American life in the past fifty


years, increasing their population, improving ‘‘intelligence and morals, acquiring property, and manifesting patriotism,’’ Wright described the capacity for a rising generation of African Americans to measure progress and maintain hope: ‘‘Looking back at what their fathers and mothers suffered in this country and contemplating their present advantages, they truly believe that the future will have something better for them than they have received in the past or are getting in the present. They blame their discomfort not upon America or the American spirit, but upon certain discreditable elements of our population.’’ Reasserting African Americans’ claim to full and equal citizenship, even though that claim could not be realized at present, Wright deftly cast white supremacists as the true traitors to the country, a rhetorical move that tapped into long-standing traditions in black commemoration and reasserted an emancipationist vision of national history: [African Americans] recognize the fact that the political fadists with their negrophobia ideas may now spread themselves like a green bay tree and ride into office upon their Negro domination scarecrow, but that they cannot fool all the people all the time. They believe that little by little America, their country, will be able to slough off these parasites and assume her proper role of that true democracy which means equal rights and equal opportunities for all. . . . [W]ith this hope, the Negro . . . never fails to . . . show a love of country which should cause every true citizen to hide his head in shame at the injustice heaped upon him without cause.ΩΩ Drawing strength from more than 100 years of historical traditions, black southerners acknowledged both the struggles and the triumphs of the past and looked to the future to fulfill the promise of American freedom.

J John Hope, who grew up in postwar Augusta, Georgia, and went on to serve as president of Atlanta University, observed developments in Augusta’s Emancipation Day celebrations from early Reconstruction to the turn of the century. Hope vividly recalled the celebrations he had witnessed as a young boy after the Civil War, when massive parades clogged the streets of Augusta and African Americans thronged the steps and park of the local city hall: ‘‘No hall or church could hold that concourse. The city hall park for [the] multitude and the city hall porch for orators were none too roomy. Added to these were the military and civic organizations


John Hope, African American educator, c. 1920s. Photographer: Blackstone Studios, Inc. (New York). Atlanta University Photographs, Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library.


parading each to the triumphant music of the bands, nor did foul weather ever interfere with speakers’ words, with flying banners, or with martial airs. We small boys wormed our way among the listening crowds mindful more of uniforms and drums than speakers’ words. Yet every little while such words as emancipation, freedom, liberty would lodge in our ears.’’∞≠≠ Hope went on to portray alterations in Augusta ceremonies, both during and after Reconstruction. First, he recalled, much of the oratory was given over to party politics. ‘‘[W]hen I had added inches to my stature, this immense multitude had shrunk into a hall and I heard not ‘emancipation,’ ‘freedom,’ ‘liberty,’ but these words: ‘Cable versus Grady.’ ’’ Later, when Hope returned to the city as an adult after having been away for some time, he perceived a further transformation in local Emancipation Day celebrations. ‘‘[O]n my return [I] found that vast multitude of my boyhood years shriveled into a church. The orator was no longer on the courthouse porch, he was not on the market hall stage. He said not emancipation, freedom, liberty nor yet did he discuss the subject Cable versus Grady.’’∞≠∞ When contrasted with the excitement and vitality of postwar celebrations, African American commemorations in the era of Jim Crow manifest the declining influence of emancipationist visions of history in both the South and the nation. Celebrations that once reflected a measure of white support for expanding black freedom and citizenship now underscored the limits on both. Interpretations of American history were increasingly segregated along lines of race. More and more, African American historical interpretations were marginalized, as was symbolized in Augusta by the removal of black speakers from significant public spaces. Disagreements among black leaders, as well as class conflict between leaders and broader communities of African Americans, made it more difficult to bring large numbers of black southerners together for shared commemorations. In some cases, massive celebrations indeed ‘‘shriveled’’ into much smaller ceremonies, held in the separate spaces of black institutions. Differences of strategy and interpretation fragmented African American historical arguments, making it ever more challenging to achieve a coherent historical vision. And yet Hope’s narrative of decline misses much of the story of African American commemoration in the Jim Crow South. Even the most modest ceremonies enacted African American historical traditions and visions of progress. Even the most conservative speakers sought to promote black


interests. And even the most restricted visions of black advancement represented hope for a better tomorrow. Moreover, African American commemorations continued as a vital public presence in many parts of the South, and black spokespersons challenged white-authored ideologies of history and progress in ways both subtle and direct. With public ceremonies big and small, African Americans fashioned a broad spectrum of historical interpretations, all of which challenged the power of white Americans to define the past and ordain the future. Soon after the Atlanta riots, which so profoundly shook his confidence in black progress, educator and writer William H. Crogman ascended to the presidency of Clark University in Atlanta. In 1913, he joined Richard R. Wright as one of the keynote speakers at the Emancipation Day celebration at Atlanta University. After recounting the country’s progress in material development, art, science, literature, religion, and philanthropy, Crogman set forth an idealized vision of national reunion: ‘‘[I]n all these blessings the whole country has shared, the South equally with the North. Indeed, there is now no North, no South, no East, no West, but one great unified country.’’ Moreover, Crogman insisted, ‘‘The Negro has shared in these blessings and in this prosperity.’’ Crogman, however, could not quite sustain the vision of shared blessings he invoked. Qualifying his depiction of interracial prosperity, he continued, ‘‘Perhaps [the Negro] has not had as large a share as was due to him, but as large perhaps as under the circumstances would have been expected, large enough to keep hope alive in his soul.’’∞≠≤ If we are to accept the testimony of William Crogman, Winfield Henry Mixon, Josephine Turpin Washington, and countless other black leaders, even abbreviated black ceremonies and restricted portrayals of history and progress helped to sustain the souls and therefore the struggles of African Americans in the Jim Crow South. All Americans have cause to give them thanks. Through dark and dispiriting years, black southerners maintained a path—however faint—toward a better future.

notes Abbreviations AMAA Bryant MSS Hunter MSS Langston MSS Mixon MSS Ruffin MSS

American Missionary Association Archives, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta, Ga. John Emory Bryant Papers, Manuscript Collection, Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C. Charles Hunter Papers, Special Collections, Duke University, Durham, N.C. John Mercer Langston Scrapbooks, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C. Henry Winfield Mixon Papers, Manuscript Collection, Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C. Frank G. Ruffin Scrapbooks and Papers, Archives and Manuscripts, Library of Virginia, Richmond, Va.

Introduction 1. Rawick, ed., American Slave, supp., series 2, vol. 1, Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, and Other Narratives, 320–21. 2. Laura Simmes to the Christian Recorder, 30 January 1864. 3. Elsa Barkley Brown has underscored the significance of public ceremonies such as Emancipation Day celebrations for the black community in postEmancipation Richmond, Virginia. See Brown, ‘‘Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere,’’ and Brown and Kimball, ‘‘Mapping the Terrain of Black Richmond.’’ Important studies of southern black political culture that incorporate some elements of public ceremony include Julie Saville, Work of Reconstruction, and Hahn, Nation Under Our Feet. 4. Several studies explore the composition of the black political and social leadership in the post-Emancipation South. Particularly useful is Eric Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers. See also relevant essays in Litwack and Meier, eds., Black Leaders ; Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, ch. 9; Williamson, After Slavery ; Holt, Black over White ; and Drago, Black Politicians. 5. Greenwood, Bittersweet Legacy ; Meier, Negro Thought. 6. Painter, Exodusters ; Angell, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, ch. 6. 7. On the position of individuals who serve as intermediaries between subordinate and dominate groups in society, see Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power,

230 notes to pages 5 – 9 ch. 1. On the specific position of black leaders seeking to represent black communities in the post–Civil War and Jim Crow South, see Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow ; Verney, Art of the Possible, esp. 186; and Fairclough, Teaching Equality, 1–19. 8. Both Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (Righteous Discontent, ch. 7) and Kevin Gaines (Uplifting the Race, intro.) explore the class dimension of ideologies of racial uplift. 9. Glenda Gilmore (Gender and Jim Crow, ch. 4) portrays the educational, professional, and material accomplishments of a rising class of African Americans in latenineteenth-century North Carolina and demonstrates the threat posed by a growing ‘‘middling class’’ of African Americans to white power in the state. 10. Kevin Gaines (Uplifting the Race, 3) clearly explicates the extent to which African Americans’ middle-class ideology was ‘‘replicating, even as [it] contested, the uniquely American racial fictions upon which liberal conceptions of social reality and ‘equality’ were founded.’’ 11. Brown, ‘‘Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere’’; Brown and Kimball, ‘‘Mapping the Terrain of Black Richmond’’; Black Public Sphere Collective, ed., Black Public Sphere ; Hahn, Nation Under Our Feet. 12. Lawrence Levine explores southern black folk culture before and after slavery in Black Culture. Also consult Abrahams, Singing the Master, and Fenn, ‘‘ ‘Perfect Equality.’ ’’ On southern black funeral processions, which shared many characteristics with postwar parades, see Berlin, Slaves Without Masters, 306–10, and Ryan, Civic Wars, 46. 13. This book is linked to emerging efforts to explore portrayals of history through the eyes of black Americans. As part of his groundbreaking work on American memory of the Civil War, David Blight (Race and Reunion) has illuminated the collective efforts of African Americans, and especially the struggles of black intellectuals, to counter white Americans’ depictions of the Civil War. See also Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War, ‘‘W. E. B. DuBois,’’ and ‘‘ ‘What Will Peace Among the Whites Bring?’ ’’ In his excellent study of African American freedom celebrations from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, Mitchell Kachun (Festivals of Freedom) has shed important light on the development of black commemorations after the Civil War, especially in the Northeast and West, while Kirk Savage (Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves) has illuminated the representation of African Americans and Emancipation in Civil War monuments. Kachun’s work significantly expands the knowledge produced by two pioneering studies conducted by William H. Wiggins and Leonard I. Sweet. Wiggins traced the development of African American freedom celebrations in ‘‘ ‘Lift Every Voice.’ ’’ Sweet examined the evolution of nineteenth-century African Americans’ relationship to the Fourth of July. See Sweet, ‘‘Fourth of July and Black Americans.’’ The most recent addition to the burgeoning historiography on the postwar period is William Blair’s Cities of the Dead, which explores contests between black and white southerners, especially in Virginia, for control over the past. See also Brundage, ed., Where These Memories

notes to pages 9 – 15 231 Grow, intro. In addition to work focusing on the post-Emancipation era, there is a growing body of literature on African American historical memory and commemoration prior to the Civil War, which is especially relevant for the development of black historical memory and commemorative traditions in the antebellum North. In addition to Kachun, both Shane White (‘‘ ‘It Was a Proud Day’ ’’) and Geneviève Fabre (‘‘African-American Commemorative Celebrations’’) have helped to illuminate African American festivals and commemorative practices in the late eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century northern United States. Elizabeth Rauh Bethel contributed the first book-length study on the relationship between history and memory and the formation of African American identity in free antebellum communities: Roots of African-American Identity. See also relevant essays in Brundage, Where These Memories Grow. 14. David Blight (‘‘W. E. B. DuBois,’’ 45–71) defines the study of historical memory as ‘‘the study of contested truths, of moments, events, or even texts in history that thresh out rival versions of the past which are in turn put to the service of the present.’’ John Bodnar also stresses cultural conflict and contestation in his exploration of commemorative ceremonies in Remaking America. Maurice Halbwachs (Collective Memory) pioneered the exploration of social context for individual and group memories. See also Thelen, ed., Memory and American History ; Glassberg, Sense of History, 3–22; and Gillis, Commemorations, 5. On the relationship between historical memory and identity, see French, ‘‘What Is Social Memory,’’ 9–18; and essays in Thelen, ed., Memory and American History. On the myriad facets of ‘‘unofficial knowledge’’ of the past, see Samuel, Theatres of Memory, 3–48. 15. Silber, Romance of Reunion, ch. 4. 16. Ibid.; Blight, Race and Reunion. See also studies of the memory of the Lost Cause, which include Wilson, Baptized in Blood, and Gaines Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy. Recent studies have emphasized white women’s role in shaping historical memory. See Clinton, Tara Revisited ; Whites, Civil War as a Crisis in Gender ; Brundage, ‘‘White Women’’; Mills and Simpson, Monuments to the Lost Cause ; and especially Cox, Dixie’s Daughters.

Chapter One 1. Hahn, Nation Under Our Feet, 7. 2. Ibid., ch. 2; Berlin et al., Slaves No More, ch. 1. 3. Berlin et al., Slaves No More, ch. 1; Hahn, Nation Under Our Feet, ch. 2. 4. Rawick, American Slave, Arkansas, vol. 8, pt. 1, p. 112; South Carolina, vol. 3, pt. 3, p. 26; Texas, vol. 5, pt. 3, p. 254; Texas, vol. 5, pt. 4, p. 147. 5. Robertson, Civil War Virginia ; Parramore, Norfolk, 193–208; Marten, ‘‘Feeling of Restless Anxiety’’; Hansen, Civil War, 169–210; Thomas J. Rowland, George B. McClellan, 103–64.

232 notes to pages 15 – 20 6. Parramore, Norfolk, 207; Newby, ‘‘ ‘World Was All Before Them,’ ’’ 31–32; interview of Richard H. Parker in Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, 465–66. 7. Newby, ‘‘ ‘World Was All Before Them,’ ’’ 31–32. 8. Berlin et al., Slaves No More, ch. 1; Ash, Middle Tennessee Society Transformed, ch. 6. 9. Quoted in Joe M. Richardson, Christian Reconstruction, 8. 10. Ibid., 3–8. 11. Newby, ‘‘ ‘World Was All Before Them.’ ’’ 12. Letter of John Oliver, Norfolk, Va., to Rev. S. S. Jocelyn, N.Y., 14 January 1863, AMAA. 13. New York Times, 4 January 1863; Squires, Turin, and Bennett, Through the Years in Norfolk, 51; Newby, ‘‘ ‘World Was All Before Them’ ’’; Wertenbaker, Norfolk, 242. 14. Letter of John Oliver, Portsmouth, Va., to Rev. S. S. Jocelyn, N.Y., February 28, 1863, AMAA. 15. Simon P. Newman, Parades and the Politics ; Travers, Independence Day ; Waldstreicher, Perpetual Fetes ; Susan G. Davis, Parades and Power, 73–111; Ryan, Civic Wars. 16. Waldstreicher, Perpetual Fetes ; Susan G. Davis, Parades and Power ; Travers, Celebrating the Fourth. 17. Ryan, Women in Public ; Ryan, Civic Wars. 18. Shane White, ‘‘ ‘It Was a Proud Day,’ ’’ 32. White is referring to Mary Ryan’s use of Clifford Geertz’s concept of culture in her analysis of nineteenth-century parades. See Ryan, ‘‘American Parade,’’ 131–53. 19. Ryan, Civic Wars, 87–93. 20. Kachun, Festivals of Freedom. See also Shane White, ‘‘ ‘It Was a Proud Day’ ’’ and ‘‘Pinkster’’; Reidy, ‘‘ ‘Negro Election Day’ ’’; Bethel, Roots of African-American Identity; and Fabre, ‘‘African-American Commemorative Celebrations,’’ 80–88. 21. Michael Gomez (Exchanging Our Country Marks, 8) argues the importance of taking into account the ‘‘political disequilibria’’ that influenced processes of cultural interaction between Americans of European and African descent in the colonial and antebellum American South. 22. Abrahams, Singing the Master ; Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture, 5–19; Fenn, ‘‘ ‘Perfect Equality’ ’’; Gavins, ‘‘North Carolina Black Folklore.’’ 23. Berlin, Slaves Without Masters, 306–10; Ryan, Civic Wars, 46; Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 274–78. 24. As quoted in Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction, 11. 25. Adam Gurowski, Diary from March 4, 1861 to November 12, 1862 (Boston, 1862), 147, quoted in ibid., 31. See also Stanley, From Bondage to Contract. 26. As quoted in Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction, 153. 27. ‘‘New Years Day in Port Royal, South Carolina,’’ Christian Recorder, 10 January 1863.

notes to pages 21 – 27 233 28. Looby, ed., Complete Civil War Journal, 75–78, 255; Holland, ed., Letters and Diary of Laura M. Towne, 98–99; Billington, ed., Journal of Charlotte L. Forten, 171– 75; Christian Recorder, 10 January 1863; letter of H. W., 1 January 1863, reprinted in Pearson, ed., Letters from Port Royal, 128–35. 29. Looby, ed., Complete Civil War Journal, 13–15. 30. Ibid., 21. 31. Ibid., 4. 32. For accounts of the First South Carolina Volunteers, see relevant essays in John David Smith, ed., Black Soldiers in Blue. 33. Looby, ed., Complete Civil War Journal, 75–76. 34. Billington, ed., Journal of Charlotte L. Forten, 172. 35. Looby, ed., Complete Civil War Journal, 77. 36. Billington, ed., Journal of Charlotte L. Forten, 174–75; Looby, ed., Complete Civil War Journal, 78. 37. For a comprehensive analysis of antebellum abolitionist commemorative traditions, consult Kachun, Festivals of Freedom. The phrase ‘‘imagined communities’’ draws on Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. 38. For a description of an Emancipation celebration dominated almost exclusively by white male officials, see Mary C. Ames, ‘‘Description of the Festival, by a Lady Present,’’ in Addresses and Ceremonies, 37–40. 39. Berlin et al., Slaves No More, 75. 40. On Juneteenth, consult Pemberton, Juneteenth at Comanche Crossing. 41. Payne, History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, 1–8; Charles Spencer Smith, History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, 13–29; George, Segregated Sabbaths, 49–89; James T. Campbell, Songs of Zion, 8–14. 42. Christian Recorder, 28 August 1869. 43. Kachun, Festivals of Freedom, 97–146. 44. J. William Harris, Plain Folk and Gentry. 45. German, ‘‘Economic Development of Augusta’’; Saggus, ‘‘1865—Year of Despair.’’ For a discussion of rising populations in southern cities and the growth of black urban populations in particular both during and after the Civil War, see Rabinowitz, Race Relations, 3–30. Also consult Mohr, On the Threshold of Freedom. Portions of my analysis of commemoration in postwar Augusta were published previously in Clark, ‘‘Making History.’’ 46. Cashin, Old Springfield, 43–46. On similar circumstances elsewhere in the postwar urban South, see Rabinowitz, Race Relations, and Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long. 47. The Springfield Baptist Church in Augusta is one of four churches that lay claim to being the oldest black Baptist church in the United States. Edward J. Cashin suggests that the Springfield Church in Augusta is an outgrowth of a church established in Silver Bluff, South Carolina, in 1773, and thus should be recognized

234 notes to pages 28 – 31 as the first independent black church of any denomination in the country. See Cashin, Old Springfield. On African American community development in Augusta after the war, see Harvey, ‘‘Terri,’’ and Terrell and Terrell, Blacks in Augusta. 48. Drago, Black Politicians, 28–30; McCoy, ‘‘Historical Sketch of Black Augusta.’’ 49. National Freedman 1, no. 7 (August 1865): 230–31; Christian Recorder, 29 July 1865. 50. National Freedman 1, no. 7 (August 1865): 230–31; letter of John Emory Bryant, Sub-Commissioner of the Freedman’s Bureau, printed in Lynch, Mission of the United States Republic, 2. 51. Leon Litwack and others have described freedpeople’s propensity for movement and travel in the wake of Emancipation. Some left old farms and plantations for good, seeking to live out the rest of their lives far away from the site of their enslavement. Others roamed through the countryside and nearby towns in the immediate aftermath of the war, then eventually resettled in their former neighborhoods, working for wages on the same land where they had once labored for free. Men and women sought out children, spouses, lovers, and friends. Others moved just to move—because they could. See Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, ch. 5. 52. Braden, Oral Tradition in the South, 32–38. 53. Augusta Daily Constitutionalist, 7 July 1867. Similarly, the Charleston Daily Courier reported on 6 July 1868 that ‘‘Sambo and Cuffee, too, deserted the hoe and ploughshare and came to the city to see ’de Fourth of July.’’ See also Athens Southern Watchman, 10 July 1867; Norfolk Virginian, 6 July 1868; Clark, Mary (fl.1868): ALS 28 October 1868, Chester-Clarkson Collection, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina. 54. Christian Recorder, 16 July 1864. 55. Ibid., 31 August, 5 October 1867. For a discussion of freedpeople traveling long distances to political meetings and polls, and of the forms of community organization that helped make such geographical mobility possible, see Saville, Work of Reconstruction, ch. 5, and Hahn, Nation Under Our Feet, chs. 4–6. 56. Norfolk Virginian, 2 January 1867. 57. Berlin, Slaves Without Masters, 306–10; Ryan, Civic Wars, 46; Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 274–78. 58. Norfolk Virginian, 2 January 1867. 59. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, 177. 60. The work of Elsa Barkley Brown and Gregg D. Kimball on the black public sphere in postwar Richmond, Virginia, has been especially important for my own thinking about the significance of African American commemorative parades in the early post-Emancipation period. See Brown and Kimball, ‘‘Mapping the Terrain of Black Richmond.’’ 61. For a discussion of black and white negotiations of public spaces in the postwar South, see Dailey, ‘‘Deference and Violence.’’

notes to pages 31 – 34 235 62. Pughe’s City Directory of Augusta, Ga., 1865–66; Lee, Augusta ; Rowland and Callahan, Yesterday’s Augusta. 63. Junior League of Augusta, Ga., Arts Committee, Augusta, 27–29. 64. In Richmond, Virginia, black marchers joyfully paraded through Capitol Square and even decorated the monuments of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson that presided there. Their ornamentation of the monuments projected a new version of American history onto the architectural landscape of Richmond. When black celebrants decorated the statues of Washington, Jefferson, and Mason, they adopted these founding fathers as their own forebears and invested the birth of American freedom with new significance. Claiming Capitol Square for their own purposes, they enacted their own story of the nation’s past, a story that rescued both the leaders and the principles of the Revolution from their slaveholding abductors. Correspondingly, African Americans who marched through southern towns waving flags and bearing banners proclaiming ‘‘freedom and equality’’ projected a vision of a united American community grounded in the principles of liberty and fraternity for all. See Richmond Dispatch, 6 July 1866, 6 July 1868; Richmond Enquirer, 5 July 1867; and Brown and Kimball, ‘‘Mapping the Terrain of Black Richmond,’’ 305. 65. As Evelyn Nakano Glenn (Unequal Freedom, 19) and other scholars have pointed out, citizenship, at the most general level, ‘‘refers to full membership in the community in which one lives.’’ More specifically, citizenship refers to separate but related bodies of civil, political, and social rights, which accrue to individuals acknowledged as full members of a community. Mitch Kachun (Festivals of Freedom, chs. 1–2) similarly argues that claims to citizenship were at the heart of black freedom celebrations in the antebellum North. 66. Quotes appear in Glenn, Unequal Freedom, 29, 36. See also Hall and Held, ‘‘Citizens and Citizenship’’; Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals ; and Roediger, Wages of Whiteness. 67. As Geneviève Fabre (‘‘African-American Commemorative Celebrations,’’ 72) has perceptively argued about earlier African American ceremonies, southern black commemorations in the late-nineteenth-century South were ‘‘informed by two movements: a will to . . . construct an African-American memory . . . and a desire to accomplish a ‘dream deferred’ and an unfinished revolution.’’ Through their celebrations of freedom and independence, African Americans ‘‘invented a future no one dared consider and forced its image upon black and white minds and spirits.’’ 68. Blight, Race and Reunion, 67. 69. Quote appears in Rosen, Confederate Charleston, 140. 70. Ibid., 142. 71. Powers, Black Charlestonians, 33; Mazyck and Waddell, Charleston in 1883, 7– 8; Marszalek, ed., Diary of Miss Emma Holmes, 122–23, 450. Portions of my analy-

236 notes to pages 34 – 36 sis of the Charleston parade were published previously in Clark, ‘‘Celebrating Freedom.’’ 72. New York Times, 4 April 1865; New York Daily Tribune, 4 April 1865. The Times reported that thirteen women rode the liberty car, while the Tribune said the car contained fifteen women, representing the fifteen states that held slaves at the start of the war. 73. New York Times, 4 April 1865; New York Daily Tribune, 4 April 1865. 74. New York Times, 4 April 1865; New York Daily Tribune, 4 April 1865. 75. This part of my discussion of African American parades owes much to Mary Ryan’s analysis of mid-nineteenth-century street parades in Civic Wars, 58–93. 76. ‘‘Program for the Anniversary of Freedom’s Birth-Day,’’ celebrated on 1 January 1864, in Beaufort, South Carolina, published in the Christian Recorder, 16 January 1864; letter from Roanoke Island, N.C., in the Christian Recorder, 22 July 1865; Charleston Daily News, 3 January, 5 July 1870; 3 January, 5 July 1871; 2 January 1872; 2 January 1873; Augusta Constitutionalist, 2 January 1870; 3 January 1874. Military organizations were also at the center of most white American patriotic processions and Irish American St. Patrick’s Day parades at midcentury. See Susan G. Davis, Parades and Power, ch. 3, and Moss, ‘‘St. Patrick’s Day Celebrations.’’ 77. Richmond Dispatch, 2 January 1868. 78. Hahn, Nation Under Our Feet, 90. 79. Charleston Daily Courier, 6 July 1867, 6 July 1868, 6 July 1869; Norfolk Virginian, 2 January 1866. 80. Julie Saville (Work of Reconstruction, 143–51) argues that freedpeople in South Carolina used quasi-military ‘‘companies’’ to extend local networks of communication and to initiate collective action after the war. 81. Hahn, Nation Under Our Feet, ch. 6. 82. An emphasis on black military contributions to American wars was nearly ubiquitous in African American historical speeches and literature. See Sweet, Black Images of America, 148–50. For examples in black oratory, see the speech of the Reverend E. J. Adams at the Zion Church in Charleston, South Carolina, published in the Christian Recorder, 15 July 1865; Lynch, Mission of the United States Republic ; Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, ‘‘An Appeal to the American People,’’ published in the Christian Recorder, 21 July 1866; and a report from the meeting of the ‘‘Colored Heroes of the War,’’ published in the Christian Recorder, 12 January 1867. 83. Hahn, Nation Under Our Feet, 110–11. 84. Augusta Daily Constitutionalist, 7 July 1867; Athens Southern Watchman, 10 July 1867; Charleston Daily Courier, 6 July 1868; Charleston Daily News, 20 July 1867; Norfolk Virginian, 6 July 1868. 85. ‘‘Program for the Anniversary of Freedom’s Birth-Day,’’ Christian Recorder, 16 January 1864; First Anniversary of the Proclamation of Freedom. Fourth of July parade in Augusta in 1865, described in the National Freedman 1, no. 7 (August 1865): 230–31.

notes to pages 37 – 39 237 86. The varying positions of tradesmen and laborers in commemorative parades paralleled ongoing debates over limited versus universal suffrage, with most former slaves supporting the latter. See Saville, Work of Reconstruction, 151–60. On the significance of work for black male identity in the antebellum South, see Dew, ‘‘Disciplining Slave Ironworkers,’’ and Marks, ‘‘Skilled Blacks.’’ 87. This understanding of the value of labor was articulated most clearly by rural black southerners who asserted their claims to landownership during the months and years following the war. When a group of freedmen on Edisto Island, South Carolina, presented a petition asserting their claims to land in the fall of 1865, they framed their argument in part in terms of the long history of labor in bondage: ‘‘And we who have been abused and oppressed For many long years not to be allowed the Privilege of purchasing land?’’ See Hahn, Nation Under Our Feet, 144. 88. Berlin, Slaves Without Masters, ch. 9; Curry, Free Black in Urban America, 196– 215; Hahn, Nation Under Our Feet, chs. 1–5. 89. Letter from Henry P. Jones, published in the Christian Recorder, 16 January 1864. See also letter from James F. Jones to the Christian Recorder, 16 July 1864; Danville (Ky.) Correspondence, Christian Recorder, 22 July 1865; ‘‘Colored Odd Fellows in Virginia,’’ Christian Recorder, 13 October 1866; and ‘‘Letter from Portsmouth, Va.’’ and ‘‘From Norfolk, Va.,’’ Christian Recorder, 26 October 1867. The emphasis on civic associations and fraternal organizations in African American commemorative parades also mirrored the composition of Irish American St. Patrick’s Day parades. See Moss, ‘‘St. Patrick’s Day Celebrations,’’ 125. 90. New York Times, 4 April 1865; New York Daily Tribune, 4 April 1865. 91. Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery, 96–133. Mitch Kachun (Festivals of Freedom, ch. 1) emphasizes the efforts of the ‘‘respectable’’ classes of blacks to control public performances in the antebellum North. 92. Jacqueline Jones discusses the expectations of northern white women who traveled to the South as missionaries and teachers after Emancipation in Soldiers of Light and Love, ch. 2. White women’s commitment to southern freedpeople was often an extension of abolitionism, which was itself rooted in the evangelical revivals of the antebellum period. Mary Ryan links white women’s involvement in evangelical religion to the formation of the middle class in Cradle of the Middle Class. As Leon Litwack argues in Been in the Storm So Long, many black missionaries from the North, whose impressions of former slaves had been shaped in the context of the abolitionist movement, shared their white middle-class contemporaries’ concern with ‘‘undoing the moral depravity, self-debasement, and dependency’’ that slavery allegedly ‘‘fostered in its victims’’ (457). Litwack also argues that Emancipation exacerbated existing differences and created new divisions among black southerners, including distinctions based in ‘‘class, education, income, occupation, and acculturation to white society’’ (513). 93. Norfolk Virginian, 2 January 1867. 94. ‘‘The 4th in Newbern,’’ Raleigh Daily Progress, 7 July 1866. These kinds of

238 notes to pages 40 – 42 celebrations continued in following decades, in spite of the lack of support from black leaders. The Wilmington Morning Star reported on Emancipation Day in Wilmington, North Carolina, on 2 January 1873: ‘‘[T]he D.Q.I.’s, or whatever they may be called, . . . rode through the streets dressed in costumes of the most grotesque and ridiculous descriptions and wearing masques [sic] upon their faces. These latter drew up in front of the Market House during the afternoon, where they indulged in certain cabalistic performances which seemed to be highly edifying and amusing to the large numbers crowded around them.’’ See also Norfolk Virginian, 2 January 1878, 3 January 1879. 95. Harriet Jacobs’s verse is quoted in Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture, 12–13; see also Fenn, ‘‘ ‘Perfect Equality,’ ’’ 130–34. 96. For recent interpretations of relationships between freedpeople and the Freedmen’s Bureau, see Cimbala and Miller, eds., Freedmen’s Bureau. Local studies include Cimbala, Under the Guardianship of the Nation ; Crouch, Freedmen’s Bureau ; Edwards, ‘‘ ‘Marriage Covenant.’ ’’ 97. Scholars have identified the multiple, and at times oppositional, functions of carnivalesque ceremonies in both Europe and the United States. See Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, 178–204; Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘‘Women on Top’’; Palmer, ‘‘Discordant Music’’; Reidy, ‘‘ ‘Negro Election Day’ ’’; and Shane White, ‘‘Pinkster.’’ 98. On slave festivals as temporary racial inversion, see Fenn, ‘‘ ‘Perfect Equality,’ ’’ 134–36. 99. Fenn, ‘‘ ‘Perfect Equality,’ ’’ 136. 100. Thompson, ‘‘Rough Music,’’ 478. 101. ‘‘Life of Theophilus Gould Steward’’ (diary), 4 July 1868, Theophilus G. Steward Papers, Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Divisions, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. Raymond Gavins (‘‘North Carolina Black Folklore’’) argues that middle-class African Americans in North Carolina similarly objected to Jonkonnu and other festivals in the early decades of the twentieth century, fearing that such festivities fed black stereotypes. 102. Orations figured prominently in African American commemorative celebrations, as they did in southern white celebrations of the Fourth of July in the decades prior to Emancipation. See Braden, Oral Tradition in the South, 36–38. 103. Charleston Daily Courier, 4 January 1866; Charleston Daily News, 2 January 1868; speech of General Sickel delivered at a July 4th celebration in Charleston, South Carolina, published in the Charleston Daily Courier, 6 July 1867. Leon Litwack (Been in the Storm So Long, 522) stresses that black spokesmen added their voices to the chorus urging freedpeople to be hardworking, sober, thrifty, temperate, and so on: ‘‘Nearly every black convention, cleric, editor, and self-professed leader repeated in one form or another these time-honored middle-class verities, discounte-

notes to pages 42 – 48 239 nanced vagrancy and pauperism, and extolled the virtues of the Puritan work ethic. If blacks would only heed such advice, the doors that were now closed to them would swing open.’’ 104. Charleston Daily Courier, 6 July 1867. 105. Quoted in Grant, Way It Was in the South, 99. 106. Augusta Loyal Georgian, 20 January 1866. General Davis Tillson’s policies while he was head of the Georgia Freedmen’s Bureau are examined in Grant, Way It Was in the South, and Drago, Black Politicians. 107. Augusta Constitutionalist, [16] April 1867. 108. Augusta Loyal Georgian, 20 January 1866. 109. In the fall of 1865, as South Carolina prepared to pass the black codes placing social and economic restrictions on former slaves, Edmund Rhett, a former ‘‘fire-eater,’’ clearly articulated the opinion that Emancipation should have little effect on African Americans’ status in southern society: ‘‘The general interest of both the white man and the negro requires that he should be kept as near to his former condition as Law can keep him. That he should be kept as near to the condition of slavery as possible, as far from the condition of the white man as is practicable.’’ Rhett was consulted by prominent South Carolina lawyers, who were helping Governor Benjamin Franklin Perry draw up a black code for the state (Edmund Rhett to Armistead Burt, 14 October 1865, quoted in Zuczek, State of Rebellion, 15). See also Williamson, After Slavery, 74–75. 110. Robert S. Levine, ed., Martin R. Delany, 1–2. 111. Speech of Martin Robison Delany, as reported in the letter of Lieutenant Edward M. Stoeber, reprinted in Foner and Branham, eds., Lift Every Voice, 445–51. 112. Lynch, Mission of the United States Republic. For descriptions of the Fourth of July celebration in Augusta, see National Freedman 1, no. 7 (August 1865): 230–31; see also Christian Recorder, 29 July 1865. 113. Christian Recorder, 5 April 1862. Here, as on other occasions, James Lynch wrote under the name ‘‘Sacer.’’ See also Gravely, ‘‘James Lynch.’’ 114. Lynch, Mission of the United States Republic, 6–7. 115. Raboteau, Fire in the Bones, 31–33. 116. Angell, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, 60–80. 117. Henry McNeal Turner, ‘‘On the Anniversary of Emancipation,’’ Augusta Colored American, 6 January 1866, reprinted in Redkey, ed., Respect Black, 5–7. 118. Ibid., 7–8. For a discussion of black abolitionists’ treatment of the American Revolution, see Jasinski, ‘‘Rearticulating History.’’ John Louis Lucaites considers African Americans’ interpretations of ‘‘equality’’ in ‘‘Irony of ‘Equality.’ ’’ In his study of African American perceptions of the nation, Leonard I. Sweet (Black Images of America, 150–59) describes black abolitionists’ appropriation of the symbols and principles of the American Revolution in their efforts to promote Emancipation. Black abolitionists interpreted all aspects of the fight against slavery (in-

240 notes to pages 49 – 53 cluding slave insurrections) as consistent with an American tradition of rebelling against tyranny; only by putting an end to slavery could Americans fulfill their destiny in the world. After the war, African American leaders defined Emancipation as the triumph of American ideals over the corruption of slavery. This link between the principles of the Revolution and the achievement of black freedom was reinforced at black commemorative celebrations, where it was common to recite both the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation. In effect, African Americans did more than appropriate existing American principles; by placing black freedom at the heart of an American ‘‘mission,’’ they constructed new national narratives and symbolic structures. On African Americans’ use of the memory of the American Revolution in free antebellum communities in the North, see Elizabeth Rauh Bethel, Roots of African-American Identity, prologue; see also Kachun, Festivals of Freedom, chs. 1–2. 119. Lynch, Mission of the United States Republic, 12. 120. Turner, ‘‘On the Anniversary of Emancipation,’’ 9. 121. Delany, as reported by Stoeber, in Foner and Branham, eds., Lift Every Voice, 448. 122. Lynch, Mission of the United States Republic, 14. 123. Turner, ‘‘On the Anniversary of Emancipation,’’ 11–12. 124. Delany, as reported by Stoeber, in Foner and Branham, Lift Every Voice, 447. 125. Gravely, ‘‘James Lynch,’’ 161–88; Angell, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner ; Sterling, Making of an Afro-American ; Ullman, Martin R. Delany ; Robert Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass. 126. Turner, ‘‘On the Anniversary of Emancipation,’’ 9. 127. Lynch, Mission of the United States Republic, 13. 128. Letter from Augusta, Georgia, to the Christian Recorder, 27 January 1866. See also Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, 545–46, and Charleston Daily News, 3 January 1871. 129. Charleston Daily Courier, 6 July 1867; 6 July 1868; 5, 6 July 1869. 130. Richmond Dispatch, 6 July 1866, 6 July 1868; Richmond Enquirer, 5 July 1867; Brown and Kimball, ‘‘Mapping the Terrain of Black Richmond,’’ 305. 131. Richmond Dispatch, 6 July 1866. 132. Testimony Taken by the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States, vol. 1, Alabama, 191, 208, 223, 236–38, 280, 432. 133. Burr, ed., Secret Eye, 357–58. The parade was held on 2 January in 1872 because New Year’s Day fell on a Sunday. 134. Augusta Constitutionalist, 6 July 1866. 135. Editorial by former Augusta bureau agent John Emory Bryant in the Loyal Georgian as published in the American Missionary Magazine, June 1866, 134–35. See also Cimbala, Under the Guardianship of the Nation, 19–20, and Jones, Soldiers of Light and Love, 28–29.

notes to pages 54 – 59 241 136. Richmond Whig, 30 March 1866. A similar editorial appeared in the Richmond Dispatch, 30 March 1866. 137. Letter from Bessie L. Canedy to the Freedmen’s Record 2, no. 6 ( June 1866): 116. 138. Letter from Rev. W. D. Harris to the American Missionary Magazine, May 1866, 105; Brown and Kimball, ‘‘Mapping the Terrain of Black Richmond,’’ 309. Whites also attacked a procession celebrating the Civil Rights Bill in Norfolk, Va., in the spring of 1866. See Norfolk True Southerner, 19 April 1866, and Norfolk Virginian, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 April 1866. 139. Studies of the Lost Cause include Wilson, Baptized in Blood ; Gaines Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy ; Clinton, Tara Revisited ; Whites, Civil War as a Crisis in Gender ; Brundage, ‘‘White Women’’; and Cox, Dixie’s Daughters. 140. Augusta Constitutionalist, 4 August 1869. 141. Ibid., 7 July 1867; Charleston Daily Courier, 6 July 1869; Norfolk Virginian, 2 January 1867. 142. Charleston Daily Courier, 6 July 1867.

Chapter Two 1. ‘‘Grand Celebration in Honor of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln,’’ Charleston Leader, 16 December 1865. The men on the planning committee for the Emancipation Day celebration did not represent the ‘‘elite’’ of Charleston’s antebellum free black community. Only one member of the eighteen-man committee, James T. Carroll, appears as a free person of color and taxpaying homeowner in the Charleston census of 1861. The committee chairman, James Hayne, was descended from a free black family in Charleston and rose to political prominence in the state’s Republican Party during Reconstruction. The role of the local Union League in advertising and organizing the celebration suggests that the committee was composed of men representing a generation of political leadership in South Carolina that emerged after the war. See Census of the City of Charleston, and Williamson, After Slavery, 366–67. 2. ‘‘From South Carolina,’’ New York Daily Tribune, 4 April 1865; ‘‘Department of the South,’’ New York Times, 4 April 1865. See also Powers, Black Charlestonians, 68– 69; Corey, History of the Richmond Theological Seminary, 30. 3. A growing body of literature addresses issues of gender, race, and Reconstruction. Important works include Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love ; Saville, Work of Reconstruction ; Laura Edwards, Gendered Strife ; Stanley, From Bondage to Contract ; Schwalm, Hard Fight for We ; and Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom, esp. 21–43. 4. A range of witnesses observed the prominence of male actors—and the particular emphasis on male military prowess—at black celebrations. See Mary C. Ames, ‘‘Description of the Festival, by a Lady Present,’’ in Addresses and Ceremonies,

242 notes to pages 59 – 61 37–40; Billington, ed., Journal of Charlotte L. Forten, 174; letter of Charles Hunter to the North Carolina Standard, 25 June 1869, Letterbook, Box 1, Hunter MSS; ‘‘Program for the Anniversary of Freedom’s Birth-Day,’’ Christian Recorder, 16 January 1864; Speech of Reverend E. J. Adams, published in the Christian Recorder, 15 July 1865; letter from Roanoke Island, N.C., to Christian Recorder, 22 July 1865; ‘‘Freedmen’s Celebration,’’ New Orleans Tribune, 20 November 1864; ‘‘The Celebration,’’ New Orleans Tribune, 26 January 1865; ‘‘Emancipation,’’ New Orleans Louisianian, 15 January 1871; ‘‘The National Anniversary,’’ Charleston Daily Courier, 6 July 1867; ‘‘The Fourth in the City,’’ Charleston Daily Courier, 6 July 1868, ‘‘The Fourth,’’ Charleston Daily Courier, 6 July 1869; ‘‘Emancipation Day,’’ Charleston Daily News, 2 January 1868; ‘‘New Year’s Day,’’ Charleston Daily News, 3 January 1870; ‘‘The Ball Opened,’’ Charleston Daily News, 4 July 1870; ‘‘The Emancipation Celebration,’’ Charleston Daily News, 3 January 1871; ‘‘Emancipation Day,’’ Augusta Constitutionalist, 2 January 1870; ‘‘Anniversary of Emancipation,’’ Richmond Dispatch, 2 January 1868; and ‘‘The Freedmen’s Celebration,’’ Norfolk Virginian, 2 January 1866. 5. Brown, ‘‘Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere.’’ Elsa Barkley Brown has portrayed the emergence of a democratic, participatory black public sphere in her study of post-Emancipation Richmond, Virginia. Julie Saville (Work of Reconstruction, 167–69) also emphasizes freedwomen’s engagement in the political life of their communities. See also Hahn, Nation Under Our Feet, 185, 227–33. 6. A useful synthesis of scholarship on the significance of race and gender for nineteenth-century American citizenship appears in Glenn, Unequal Freedom, 18– 55. See also Eric Foner, Story of American Freedom ; Kerber, No Constitutional Right ; Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals ; and Fraser and Gordon, ‘‘Genealogy of Dependency.’’ The phrase ‘‘white manhood suffrage’’ described the extension of voting rights to white men—and the increasing exclusion of black men from suffrage. See Steinfeld, ‘‘Property and Suffrage,’’ 353. See also Montgomery, Citizen Worker, 19–20. 7. On the organization of the AME Church in the South during the Civil War and Reconstruction, consult Walker, Rock in a Weary Land, 50–75; Wesley J. Gaines, African Methodism and the South, 4–79; and Hildebrand, Times Were Strange and Stirring, 31–72. 8. Struggles over the meaning of black freedom encompassed a broad range of political, social, and economic questions. See Stanley, From Bondage to Contract, esp. 35–55; Eric Foner, Reconstruction ; and Cimbala, Under the Guardianship of the Nation. Recent studies have addressed struggles over the meaning of black freedom from the perspective of black men’s attempts to assert their rights as men. See Edwards, Gendered Strife, 161–83; Hine and Jenkins, ‘‘Black Men’s History’’; Cullen, ‘‘ ‘I’s a Man Now’ ’’; and Reidy and Reidy, ‘‘ ‘To Come Forward.’ ’’ On nineteenth-century definitions of manhood, consult Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America. 9. On the significance of the vote for African American definitions of freedom, see Eric Foner, Story of American Freedom, 103.

notes to pages 62 – 66 243 10. As one AME correspondent put it, ‘‘We cannot well ignore the past, for we all had a lesson to learn, the past was our lesson, and we must appreciate the system that is now derived therefrom’’ (Christian Recorder, 14 September 1867). 11. Lynch’s editorial appears in the Christian Recorder, 3 February 1866. On efforts to organize for the semicentennial, see the Christian Recorder, 6, 20 January 1866. On the political context in 1866, see Eric Foner, Reconstruction, ch. 6. 12. Christian Recorder, 3 February 1866. 13. Bishop Daniel Alexander Payne, for example, released The Semi-Centenary and Retrospection of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1866; the following year, Bishop Benjamin Tanner released his own historical publication, An Apology for African Methodism. African Methodists had long expressed interest in publishing a history of the church, but early attempts had either fizzled or become mired in controversy. 14. During the period surrounding the church’s semicentennial, church leaders were intensely focused on the question of suffrage. See, for instance, Christian Recorder, 1, 22 July, 19 August, 14, 28 October, 18 November 1865; 3, 17 February, 16 September 1866. 15. Payne, Semi-Centenary, 184. See also James Lynch, ‘‘The President and the Colored Delegation,’’ ‘‘Trying Moment for the Colored People,’’ and ‘‘The Greatest Folly of White Americans,’’ in ibid., 159–60, 162–64, 170–72; and R[ichard] H. Cain, ‘‘Our Duty in the Crisis’’ and ‘‘The Rights of Colored Men and Women,’’ in ibid., 146–48, 150–52. 16. Payne, Semi-Centenary, 12–21; see also Christian Recorder, 20 April 1867. 17. Christian Recorder, 20 April 1867. 18. Tanner, Apology for Methodism, 16. William Becker (‘‘Black Church,’’ 183) notes that African Methodists have traditionally described their church as a ‘‘manifestation of black self-assertion.’’ James T. Campbell (Songs of Zion, 51) notes that African Methodists’ emphasis on manhood within the church reached a crescendo during the postwar years. 19. Allen, Life Experiences, 28–35. During the Revolutionary era, property ownership qualified individuals for independence—and participation in the polity. See Eric Foner, Story of American Freedom, ch. 1. 20. Lynch, ‘‘Greatest Folly of White Americans,’’ 170–72; Payne, Semi-Centenary, 23; ‘‘The Past and Future of the African Race on this Continent,’’ Christian Recorder, 18 July 1863. 21. Tanner, Apology for African Methodism, 23, 26. 22. Eric Foner, Story of American Freedom; Steinfeld, ‘‘Property and Suffrage,’’ 353; Montgomery, Citizen Worker, 19–20. On southern freedpeople’s understanding of citizenship, see Hahn, Nation Under Our Feet, chs. 4–6. 23. For an expression of concern about the alleged degradation of black men under slavery, see ‘‘Reconstruction,’’ Christian Recorder, 10 March 1866. Leon Lit-

244 notes to pages 67 – 70 wack (Been in the Storm So Long, ch. 9) argues that black missionaries commonly shared white Americans’ concern that slavery had degraded black southerners. See esp. 457–62. 24. Focusing on broad trends, Eric Foner (Story of American Freedom, chs. 1–4) emphasizes an overall shift from property ownership to self-ownership in his analysis of changing concepts of independence in the nineteenth century, though he does take regional differences into account to a certain extent. Amy Dru Stanley (From Bondage to Contract) emphasizes the postbellum period as a time when diverse groups of Americans mobilized around the concepts of self-ownership and contract as central to freedom. For a detailed analysis of the changing definition of independence in post-Revolutionary America, see Steinfeld, ‘‘Property and Suffrage,’’ 335–76. Steinfeld emphasizes that the expansion of definitions of independence to include propertyless but ‘‘self-owning’’ white men occurred simultaneously with a new understanding of women, children, and paupers as uniquely and naturally dependent. Steinfeld also stresses that most Americans continued to associate property with independence, even as they developed an additional understanding of self-ownership. See also Sean Wilentz (Chants Democratic) on the ways that antebellum working-class men used the rhetoric of the American Revolution to challenge the exclusive rights and privileges of property. In emphasizing their position as heads of a religious household, AME leaders forged a definition of manhood that resembled definitions of independence in the antebellum South. See McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds, ch. 2. After the Civil War, freedpeople’s emphasis on landownership, as well as familial authority and protection, further complicates the picture of change in American definitions of freedom and independence. See Edwards, Gendered Strife, ch. 5; Stanley, From Bondage to Contract, ch. 1, esp. 35–55; and Hahn, Nation Under Our Feet, ch. 4–6. 25. Foner, Story of American Freedom, 19, 75. 26. Christian Recorder, 5 May 1866. For other depictions of semicentennial celebrations, see ibid., 21 April, 5, 12 May 1866. 27. Christian Recorder, 4 March 1856. On Richard Allen’s opposition to slavery, see James T. Campbell, Songs of Zion, 20–28. 28. Christian Recorder, 27 April 1861. 29. Quotations appear in the Christian Recorder, 27 April 1861. See also ‘‘Manliness in Preaching,’’ ibid., 30 March 1861; ‘‘True Manliness,’’ ibid., 31 August 1861; ‘‘The Great Man,’’ ibid., 2 November 1861; and ‘‘The Times We Live In’’ and ‘‘The Star Spangled Banner,’’ ibid., 8 June 1861. 30. Christian Recorder, 30 April 1864. 31. See ‘‘Colored Soldiers,’’ Christian Recorder, 14 February 1863; ‘‘Colored Troops,’’ ibid., 29 August 1863; ‘‘South Carolina Correspondence,’’ ibid., 22 August 1863; ‘‘Colored Soldiers,’’ ibid., 15 August 1863; ‘‘Emancipation,’’ ibid., 15 August 1863; ‘‘The Negro Soldier,’’ ibid., 7 March 1863; ‘‘The Colored Race in

notes to pages 71 – 74 245 America,’’ ibid., 14 March 1863; ‘‘Niggers Won’t Fight,’’ ibid., 21 March 1863; ‘‘City Items,’’ ibid., 4 April 1863; ‘‘Our Colored Regiment,’’ ibid., 18 July 1863; ‘‘The Third Colored Regiment,’’ ibid., 11 July 1863; and ‘‘A Soldier’s Letter’’ and ‘‘A Letter from a Soldier,’’ ibid., 23 July 1864. 32. Hildebrand, Times Were Strange and Stirring, 31–72. 33. Payne, Recollections of Seventy Years ; Walker, Rock in a Weary Land, 22–26; James T. Campbell, Songs of Zion, 32–63. 34. Christian Recorder, 9 April 1864, 25 March 1865, 20 August 1870, 27 August 1870, 3 September 1870, 24 September 1870. James Lynch left the AME Church over the question of separatism and joined the Methodist Episcopal Church in June of 1867. He moved to Mississippi that year, where he became active in politics and served as secretary of state before his death in 1872. See Gravely, ‘‘James Lynch,’’ 175–81. 35. Christian Recorder, 3 August 1867. 36. Ibid., 5 April 1862; Christian Recorder, 29 June 1867. Here, as on other occasions, James Lynch wrote under the name ‘‘Sacer.’’ See also Gravely, ‘‘James Lynch,’’ 165–66. 37. Christian Recorder, 16 January 1864. See also ibid., 4 February 1864. 38. Ibid., 15 July 1865. 39. Payne, Welcome to the Ransomed, 6–8. See also Christian Recorder, 26 April 1862. For another example of Payne’s paternalism, see ‘‘Bishop Payne’s Letter to the National Convention [of Colored Citizens],’’ published in the Christian Recorder, 13 February 1869. On the attitudes of northern white missionaries, see Jones, Soldiers of Light and Love, and Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, ch. 9. Payne’s emphasis on morality and religion recalled earlier traditions defining freedom in the colonial period. See Eric Foner, Story in American Freedom, ch. 1. 40. On early arguments over women’s role in the AME Church, see James T. Campbell, Songs of Zion, 43–51. 41. This argument draws in part from Stephanie McCurry’s insights into the relationship between independence and household structure in the antebellum South. See McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds, ch. 2. 42. Christian Recorder, 20 April 1867. On a similar note, Payne argued for the education of girls and women because they ‘‘must, after all, become the mothers of those we educate for ministers and the wives of those men.’’ See ibid., 23 January 1869. 43. The tradition of honoring mothers reached back to the founding of the church. See Allen, Life Experience, 16, and Coppin, Unwritten History, 21. Articles treating the subject of motherhood also appeared in the church press. See Christian Recorder, 19 January, 8 June 1861, 24 January 1863, 19 September 1863, and 23 January 1869. 44. Payne, Welcome to the Ransomed, 8–10.

246 notes to pages 75 – 83 45. Lynch, Mission of the United States Republic ; Henry McNeal Turner, ‘‘On the Anniversary of Emancipation,’’ Augusta Colored American, 6 January 1866, reprinted in Redkey, ed., Respect Black. 46. Richard H. Cain set forth this view in a letter from Charleston, South Carolina, to the Christian Recorder, 29 June 1867. See also editorial of James Lynch in ibid., 30 June 1866, and ‘‘The Negro and His Future,’’ ibid., 17 April 1869. 47. Coppin, Unwritten History, 157–58; Heard, From Slavery to the Bishopric, 89–90. 48. Coppin, Unwritten History, 123. 49. Turner, ‘‘On the Anniversary of Emancipation.’’ 50. Ibid. 51. Christian Recorder, 2 October 1869. 52. Christian Recorder, 4 July, 5 September 1863; 1 July, 26 August 1865; 11 January, 3 October 1868; 23 January 1869. 53. James T. Campbell, Songs of Zion, 52. 54. Originally appearing in serial form in the Christian Recorder in 1869, the surviving chapters of Minnie’s Sacrifice have been rediscovered and republished. See Foster, ed., Minnie’s Sacrifice. The following citations are drawn from this republished edition. There are parallels between Minnie’s Sacrifice and Harper’s later novel, Iola Leroy. See Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, ch. 4. 55. Foster, ed., Minnie’s Sacrifice, 73–74. 56. Ibid., 78–79. 57. Collier-Thomas, ‘‘Frances Ellen Watkins Harper,’’ 50. 58. Foster, ed., Minnie’s Sacrifice, 73–74. 59. Christian Recorder, 10 January 1863. 60. ‘‘Department of the South,’’ New York Times, 4 April 1865; ‘‘From South Carolina,’’ New York Daily Tribune, 4 April 1865. On white women’s role in Confederate tableaux, see Faust, Mothers of Invention, 26–27; also consult Rable, Civil Wars, 141. While the liberty wagons mirrored the symbolism of Confederate tableaux, they also drew on long-standing traditions in American civic culture; the ‘‘Goddess of Liberty’’ was a republican symbol that had been a fixture of patriotic occasions in the antebellum United States. Beginning in the 1860s and particularly in the 1870s, actual women more commonly acted the part of the goddess in many northern parades. See Ryan, Women in Public, esp. 1–57. 61. ‘‘Negro Demonstration on the ‘Glorious Fourth’ at Capital Square,’’ Atlanta Constitution, 5 July 1868. 62. ‘‘The National Anniversary,’’ Charleston Daily Courier, 6 July 1867; ‘‘The Fourth in the City,’’ ibid., 6 July 1868; ‘‘The Fourth,’’ ibid., 6 July 1869; ‘‘Glory Hallelujah!’’ Charleston Daily News, 3 January 1866; Marszalek, ed., Diary of Miss Emma Holmes, 441. 63. See Jones, Labor of Love ; Edwards, Gendered Strife ; Hunter, To ’Joy My Free-

notes to pages 83 – 87 247 dom ; Zipf, ‘‘Reconstructing ‘Free Woman’ ’’; and Schwalm, ‘‘ ‘Sweet Dreams of Freedom.’ ’’ 64. Brown, ‘‘To Catch the Vision of Freedom’’; Brown, ‘‘Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere,’’ 110, 120–24; Saville, Work of Reconstruction ; Rachleff, Black Labor in the South, 32; Sterling, ed., We Are Your Sisters, 370–71; Hahn, Nation Under Our Feet, ch. 4. 65. Largely absent from the speeches at public ceremonies, stories of black women’s accomplishments were nevertheless handed down within black families and communities, from one generation to the next (Stevenson, ‘‘Gender Convention’’). 66. On the significance of gender conventions for African Americans’ efforts to define the meaning of freedom, see Edwards, Gendered Strife, esp. 145–83; Schwalm, Hard Fight for We, esp. 234–68; Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom, 21–43; and Jones, Labor of Love. 67. ‘‘School Exhibition,’’ American Missionary Magazine, July 1868, 151–52; Pierson, Letter to Hon. Charles Sumner ; Brown, ‘‘Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere.’’ 68. ‘‘The Fourth Anniversary of the Georgetown, S.C., Sabbath-School,’’ Christian Recorder, 15 January, 9 April 1870. Sally McMillen (To Raise up the South, esp. 155–62) discusses the prevalence of pageants, parades, and other festivities in both black and white Sunday schools in the South after the Civil War. Portions of my analysis of women’s role in African American commemorations were published previously in Clark, ‘‘Celebrating Freedom,’’ 121–24. 69. Morris, Reading, ’Riting, and Reconstruction, 58. 70. See, for instance, Holland, ed., Letters and Diary of Laura M. Towne, 98. 71. Morris, Reading, ’Riting, and Reconstruction, chs. 5–6. On the ideology of republican motherhood, consult Kerber, Women of the Republic. 72. Pierce, ‘‘Freedmen at Port Royal,’’ 304, 305; Rice, ‘‘Yankee Teacher,’’ 154; Ames, From a New England Woman’s Diary, 62. 73. Augusta Daily Transcript, 5 March 1866, reprinted in ‘‘Who Was Hit?’’ Loyal Georgian, 10 March 1866; ‘‘Extracts,’’ American Missionary Magazine, March 1866, 58–59; ‘‘Southern Feeling,’’ American Missionary Magazine, August 1866, 173–77; ‘‘The Education of the Negro,’’ American Missionary Magazine, October 1866, 235– 36; ‘‘From Rev. A. B. Corliss,’’ American Missionary Magazine, May 1867, 103; ‘‘A Contrast,’’ American Missionary Magazine, June 1867, 151–52. 74. Faust, Mothers of Invention ; Edwards, Gendered Strife ; Rable, Civil Wars ; Whites, Civil War as a Crisis in Gender. On southern white women’s leading role in memorializing Confederate soldiers during Reconstruction, see Whites, ‘‘ ‘Stand By Your Man,’ ’’ 133–49; Bisher, ‘‘ ‘Strong Force of Ladies’ ’’; and Kinney, ‘‘ ‘If Vanquished I am Still Victorious.’ ’’ 75. Letter of E. F. Campbell, Norfolk, Va., to Rev. Edward P. Smith, 9 January 1867, AMAA; letter of H. C. Percy, Norfolk, Va., to Rev. Edward P. Smith, 9 January

248 notes to pages 88 – 93 1867, ibid. See also letter of E. Wright, Hilton Head, S.C., to Rev. E[dward] P. Smith, 8 January 1867; letters of Sarah W. Stansbury, Charleston, S.C., to Rev. [Edward P.] Smith, 10, 27, 30, 31 January 1867; letter of Ellen Seymour, Hilton Head, S.C., to [Rev. Edward P.] Smith, 6 April 1867; and letter of H. C. Percy, Norfolk, Va., to George Whipple, 7 September 1868, all ibid. 76. Missionary work was primarily a male province in the antebellum United States; it was not until the Civil War era that significant numbers of women entered home and foreign missionary work. See Louise Michele Newman, White Women’s Rights, 34. On women’s paid work opportunities in the South, consult Censer, ‘‘Changing World of Work,’’ and Rable, Civil Wars, 265–88. 77. Horst, ed., Fire of Liberty, 55; letter of O. Brown, Richmond, Va., to General O. O. Howard, 22 January 1867, AMAA; Pierce, ‘‘Freedmen at Port Royal,’’ 307; Thorpe, ‘‘ ‘Yankee Teacher.’ ’’ 78. Letter of M. B. Babbitt, Norfolk, Va., to Rev. Samuel Hunt, 30 November 1886; letter of Leis Lockwood, Fortress Monroe, Va., 6 March 1862, both AMAA; ‘‘The Yankee Kitchen,’’ The Freedman 3, no. 6 ( June 1866): 21–22. 79. Letter to the American Freedman 1, no. 11 (February 1867): 167. The correspondent is not named, but it is likely that she is the ‘‘Miss Foster’’ who is identified in the letter. 80. Ibid. African Americans’ rejoicing upon meeting President Lincoln during his passage through northern Virginia in the spring of 1865 was described by many who witnessed it. See Jaquette, ed., South after Gettysburg. Also consult James McPherson, Ordeal By Fire, 478–81. 81. The phrase ‘‘crisis in gender’’ is drawn from Whites, Civil War as a Crisis in Gender. See also Edwards, Gendered Strife ; and Clinton and Silber, eds., Divided Houses ; and Faust, Mothers of Invention. 82. Scholars have analyzed later developments in the masculinization of African American historical memory and black identity. Consult Brown, ‘‘Imagining Lynching,’’ 100–24; Carby, Race Men ; and Barbara Blair, ‘‘True Women, Real Men.’’ 83. Christian Recorder, 9 April 1870. Church leaders began anticipating celebrations of the Fifteenth Amendment several months before its ratification. See Christian Recorder, 3 July, 14 August, 4 September 1869. 84. Letter from Charles Hunter to the Washington, D.C., New Era, 5 May 1870, Box 1, Hunter MSS. 85. Baltimore Sun, 20 May 1870; Baltimore American and Commercial Advertiser, 20 May 1870. 86. Christian Recorder, 30 April 1870, 12 March 1870, 14 May 1870; Charleston Daily News, 4 July 1870; Augusta Constitutionalist, 28 April 1870, 1 July 1870. 87. Christian Recorder, 29 July 1865; National Freedman 1, no. 7 (August 1865): 230–31; letter of John Emory Bryant, Sub-Commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau, printed in Lynch, Mission of the United States Republic, 2. 88. Turner’s speech was published in the Christian Recorder, 14 May 1870.

notes to pages 96 – 104 249

Chapter Three 1. Charleston News and Courier, 6 July 1874. 2. For especially vivid reports on African American celebrations in Charleston during the early 1870s, see the Charleston Daily News, 3 January 1871, 2 January 1872, 5 July 1872. 3. The preceding information is compiled from several sources. Consult Eric Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers ; Williamson, After Slavery ; Holt, Black Over White. 4. Charleston News and Courier, 6 July 1874. 5. Eric Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers, 59–61. 6. Eric Foner, Short History of Reconstruction, 184. 7. Ibid., 190; Hahn, Nation Under Our Feet, 265–313. 8. Eric Foner, Short History of Reconstruction, 186. 9. Ibid., 195–97; Hahn, Nation Under Our Feet, 265–313. 10. Augusta Constitutionalist, 2 January 1870. 11. For biographical information on William Jefferson White, consult Cashin, Old Springfield, and Coleman and Gurr, eds., Dictionary of Georgia Biography, 1059– 61. 12. See Drago, Black Politicians, 48–49; Currie-McDaniel, Carpetbagger of Conscience, 94; and Grant, Way It Was in the South, 113–14. 13. Henry Turner, ‘‘On the Eligibility of Colored Members to Seats in the Georgia Legislature,’’ speech delivered 3 September 1868, reprinted in Redkey, ed., Respect Black, 14–15, 28. 14. Drago, Black Politicians, 141–59. 15. Grant, Way It Was in the South, 117; Formwalt, ‘‘Camilla Massacre.’’ 16. Formwalt, ‘‘Camilla Massacre’’; Cimbala, Under the Guardianship of the Nation, 64. 17. Prominent Georgia Republican and former Freedmen’s Bureau official John Emory Bryant helped to lead the fight against Governor Bullock’s plan for an additional Reconstruction. See Currie-McDaniel, Carpetbagger of Conscience, 97– 107. The efforts of black Republicans to organize on behalf of further Reconstruction in Georgia are described by Edmund L. Drago, in Black Politicians, 54–55. Also consult Donald L. Grant, Way It Was in the South, 120. 18. Augusta Constitutionalist, 2 January 1870. 19. Ibid. 20. Augusta Constitutionalist, 28 April 1870. 21. The account of the celebration of the Fifteenth Amendment in Augusta is taken from the Augusta Constitutionalist, 28 April 1870. A former Union army officer and Freedmen’s Bureau official, Edwin Belcher had been born a slave in South Carolina, but he obtained both freedom and an education before the outbreak of the Civil War. See Eric Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers, 15–16; see also Drago, Black Politicians, 61–62, 69–70.

250 notes to pages 104 – 10 22. Speech of Henry M. Turner at Macon, Georgia, celebration on 19 April 1870, reprinted in Christian Recorder, 14 May 1870. 23. Eric Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers, 23–24; Drago, Black Politicians, 41–43; Grant, Way It Was in the South, 107–10 (quote on 109). 24. Grant, Way It Was in the South, 110–11; Duncan, Freedom’s Shore ; Eric Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers, 37–38. 25. Drago, Black Politicians, chs. 3 and 6. 26. Augusta Constitutionalist, 4 January 1871; 3 January 1872; 3 January 1873; 3 January 1874; 1, 3 January 1875. 27. Augusta Constitutionalist, 6 July 1870. 28. Edmund Drago (Black Politicians, ch. 6) describes the bitter infighting, much of which occurred along racial lines, that plagued the Republican Party after 1870. 29. Mitch Kachun analyses a national trend of increasing segregation of commemoration and historical memory in Festivals of Freedom, chs. 4–7. 30. Augusta Constitutionalist, 7 July 1874. 31. The diminishment of Republican power in Georgia after 1870 contrasted sharply with conditions in South Carolina, where Republicans were in the majority until 1877. Moreover, the black majority in the state—African Americans constituted roughly 60 percent of South Carolina’s population—translated into enhanced political power for African Americans throughout the nine-year period of the state’s Reconstruction. Of course, black Republicans’ political leverage did not mean that state affairs were free from conflict and tumult—far from it. As Thomas Holt and others have shown, social and political conditions in South Carolina were extremely volatile throughout the period of Reconstruction. See Holt, Black Over White. See also Zuczek, State of Rebellion. 32. Joel Williamson (After Slavery, 396–97) argues that the most heated political conflicts in South Carolina during Reconstruction occurred not between Republicans and Democrats but between competing factions within the Republican Party. 33. Ullman, Martin R. Delany ; Painter, ‘‘Martin R. Delany,’’ 166–67, 438–57; Williamson, After Slavery, 399–401; Holt, Black Over White, 175–80. 34. Speeches of Martin R. Delany, delivered during the fall of 1874, reprinted in Robert S. Levine, ed., Martin R. Delany, 442–47. 35. Robert S. Levine, ed., Martin R. Delany ; Ullman, Martin R. Delany. 36. Nell Painter analyzes Martin Delany’s use of the term ‘‘intelligence’’ as a reflection of his elitist view of social relations in ‘‘Martin R. Delany,’’ esp. 156. 37. Letter from Major Delany to Frederick Douglass, 14 August 1871, reprinted in Robert S. Levine, ed., Martin R. Delany, 432. 38. Ullman, Martin R. Delany, 478–506; Drago, Hurrah for Hampton! ; Williamson, After Slavery, 406–17; Holt, Black Over White, 173–207. 39. Saville, Work of Reconstruction, 90–98; Hahn, Nation Under Our Feet, 143–44 (quotes are from 144). 40. Painter, ‘‘Martin R. Delany,’’ 168–69.

notes to pages 110 – 15 251 41. Ibid., 169; testimony of Jonas Weeks, reprinted in Drago, Hurrah for Hampton! 59–62. 42. Letter from Major Delany to Frederick Douglass, August 14, 1871, reprinted in Robert S. Levine, Martin R. Delany, 435. 43. Delany quoted in Painter, ‘‘Martin R. Delany,’’ 169. 44. Hahn, Nation Under Our Feet, 144–45. 45. Drago, Hurrah for Hampton! 1–49. 46. Eric Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers, 39. 47. Ibid., 61. 48. For an account of the Emancipation Day celebration in Richmond, see Richmond Daily Dispatch, 3 January 1870. Richard Lowe analyzes divisions within the Republican Party as Reconstruction came to an end in Virginia in Republicans and Reconstruction. 49. On southern Democrats’ movement toward reconciliation in the mid-1870s, see Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy, 63–67. On the development of a northern discourse of respect for the South as early as the late 1860s, see Silber, Romance of Reunion, ch. 2, and Blight, Race and Reunion, esp. 98–139, 211–54. The resumption of Independence Day ceremonies by some southern whites echoed the use of the rhetoric and symbolism of the American Revolution by Confederates during the Civil War. See Rubin, ‘‘Seventy-Six and Sixty-One.’’ 50. Charleston News and Courier, 3 July 1875. 51. Atlanta Constitution, 7 July 1875. 52. Holt, Black Over White, ch. 8. 53. Charleston News and Courier, 6 July 1875. 54. Augusta Constitutionalist, 6 July 1875. 55. Gaines Foster (Ghosts of the Confederacy, 65) notes that although southern leaders in the 1870s and 1880s engaged in combative rhetoric, their actions were increasingly geared toward reconciliation. David Blight (Race and Reunion, 98– 139) also emphasizes signs of early movement toward reconciliation. 56. Augusta Constitutionalist, 6 July 1875. 57. The description of the Atlanta celebration is taken from the Atlanta Constitution, 7 July 1875. See also Augusta Constitutionalist, 6 July 1875. 58. As Gaines Foster points out, southerners promoting reconciliation could invoke reverence for the Constitution as a point of common ground between North and South precisely because so many southern whites argued the legality of secession. In promoting respect for the ‘‘book of law,’’ then, Alexander Stephens tapped into an important facet of former Confederates’ own self-image and historical memory. It was a conservative—rather than a radical—interpretation of the American Revolution that Stephens and his southern colleagues embraced. See Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy, 65. 59. Alexander Stephens’s speech was published in the Atlanta Constitution, 7 July 1875. At the celebration itself, Stephens, who was quite frail, delivered only a

252 notes to pages 115 – 16 portion of the planned address; it was printed in full by the press. Nina Silber (Romance of Reunion, ch. 2) describes the common use of family metaphor in the rhetoric of national reconciliation in the decades following the Civil War. Particularly around the time of the centennial in 1876, images of northern and southern men as ‘‘sons’’ and ‘‘brothers,’’ who shared common forefathers, predominated in patriotic speeches and writings. 60. Atlanta Constitution, 7 July 1875. 61. Gaines Foster (Ghosts of the Confederacy, 63) points out that there were southern whites who held on to the dream of a second southern revolt in the 1870s. Similarly, Nina Silber (Romance of Reunion, ch. 2) describes the ambivalence of many northern whites toward the sentiment of reunion in the 1870s. 62. Richmond Dispatch, 6 July 1875. 63. See Richmond Enquirer, 8 July 1871; 6, 8 July 1872; 4 July 1873; 6 July 1875; 4, 6 July 1876; Richmond Dispatch, 4, 5 July 1871; 4 July 1872; 4, 5 July 1873; 4, 6 July 1874; 6 July 1875; 6 July 1876. 64. Nina Silber (Romance of Reunion, 46–47) describes northern whites as suspicious that southern expressions in favor of reconciliation were in fact ‘‘a sham and hypocritical show’’ in the years following the war. Those suspicions did not disappear in the 1870s, even as an increasing number of whites in both the North and the South looked for ways to construct a national reunion. 65. Charleston News and Courier, 5 July 1875. 66. Less than two years after Georgia whites held their first celebrations of the Fourth of July since the Civil War, a Democrat nearly won the White House, Reconstruction came to an official end, and Democrats regained a dominant—though hardly impervious—position in states throughout the South. See Eric Foner, Reconstruction, ch. 12. 67. In her exploration of the late nineteenth century’s ‘‘culture of reconciliation,’’ Nina Silber (Romance of Reunion) explores the full range of reasons, from emotional to political, that northern whites undertook the cultural work of reunion. David Blight’s analysis of both northern and southern white Americans in Race and Reunion (1–5) is similarly sensitive to the full historical context in which the impulse toward reunion emerged. 68. Silber, Romance of Reunion, ch. 4. 69. Peter Novick (That Noble Dream, 74–80) stresses that the racism of northern historians ‘‘made possible a negotiated settlement of sectional differences in the interpretation of the Civil War and Reconstruction’’ in the late nineteenth century. Through a fundamental agreement on the point of black inferiority, northern and southern historians were able to forge common ground in their opinions on everything from abolitionists (they were fanatics) to Reconstruction (an outrageous crime against southern whites). See also John David Smith, Slavery, Race, and American History and Old Creed for the New South.

notes to pages 117 – 19 253 70. Charleston News and Courier, 5 July 1875. Gaines Foster (Ghosts of the Confederacy, 66–70) emphasizes the importance of Blue and Gray reunions to the continued advancement of national reconciliation in the 1880s. See also Silber, Romance of Reunion, 96–99, and Blight, Race and Reunion, 140–210. 71. Church leaders were painfully aware of the reign of terror that had accompanied the end of Reconstruction in several southern states. Events in Georgia were a particular source of concern, since leading clergymen like Henry Turner kept the national leadership apprised of African Americans’ worsening situation there (Christian Recorder, 15 October 1874, 2 September 1875). 72. Christian Recorder, 13 May 1871. 73. Raboteau, Fire in the Bones, 41. On the efforts of the authors of race histories to elaborate progressive narratives of history and identify God’s will for greater freedom and racial justice, consult Maffly-Kipp, ‘‘Redeeming Southern Memory.’’ 74. Christian Recorder, 13 May 1871. 75. Henry Turner, the most determined proponent of emigration in the AME Church, repeatedly framed his arguments in the language of manhood. Consult Angell, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, ch. 6; see also Gilbert Anthony Williams, Christian Recorder, 81. Edwin S. Redkey deals briefly with Henry Turner’s increasing disillusionment during the latter years of Reconstruction and his subsequent turn to emigration in Black Exodus, ch. 2. 76. ‘‘A Word in Favor of Africa,’’ Christian Recorder, 18 October 1877, quoted in Gilbert Anthony Williams, Christian Recorder, 89. 77. With few exceptions, the AME Church leadership was almost uniformly opposed to colonization and emigration in the early and mid-1870s. See Christian Recorder, 30 March 1872; 17 December 1874; 14 January, 21 October 1875; 13 April 1876. On the development of debates over emigrationism in the AME Church, see Gilbert Anthony Williams, Christian Recorder, ch. 4; see also Wesley J. Gaines, African Methodism in the South, ix, 48, 101, and James T. Campbell, Songs of Zion, 77–86. 78. Christian Recorder, 17 December 1874. Bishop Daniel Alexander Payne, one of the staunchest opponents of emigration in the AME Church, similarly invoked a rhetoric of manhood. See Angell, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, 136–37. 79. Christian Recorder, 17 December 1874. 80. Ibid., 14 January 1875. See also ibid., 2 September, 21 October 1875. 81. Ibid., 7 January 1871. 82. Ibid., 14 January 1875. 83. Ibid., 16 March 1872. In an illuminating article (‘‘Before the Eyes of All Nations’’), Mitchell Kachun places the efforts of African Methodists to erect a statue to Richard Allen at the centennial in the context of broader developments in African American memory and commemoration in the North and West. In particular, Kachun argues that the centennial marked a turning point in black commem-

254 notes to pages 120 – 26 oration in those regions, as black celebrations became increasingly segregated from white portrayals of history and national community. See also Kachun, Festivals of Freedom, ch. 4. 84. Christian Recorder, 10 December 1874. 85. Ibid., 16 March 1872. 86. Bishop James A. Handy first proposed a monument to Allen in the fall of 1873—a ‘‘marble shaft’’ to be erected outside of Bethel Church in Philadelphia (Christian Recorder, 16 October 1873). While others approved of the idea, little headway was made until Bishop Tanner proposed the statue for Fairmount Park. For Tanner’s editorials, see Christian Recorder, 22 January, 5 March, 12 November 1874. See also Kachun, ‘‘Before the Eyes of All Nations,’’ 310–11. 87. Christian Recorder, 12 November 1874, 31 December 1875, 4 March 1875, 11 March 1875, 22 July 1875, 12 Augusta 1875, 27 January 1876, 3 February 1876. 88. Ibid., 13 April 1876. 89. John T. Jenifer’s speech was printed in the People’s Advocate, 8 July 1876. 90. Christian Recorder, 7 September 1876. 91. Ibid., 9 November 1876. 92. Philip S. Foner, ‘‘Black Participation,’’ 283–84. 93. Ibid., 288–89; Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, 87. 94. Centennial Exposition Guide [1876?], quoted in Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 28–29. 95. Philip S. Foner, ‘‘Black Participation,’’ 288. See also Kachun, ‘‘Before the Eyes of All Nations.’’ 96. People’s Advocate, 1 July 1876. 97. New York Herald, as printed in the Richmond Enquirer, 6 July 1876. 98. Augusta Constitutionalist, 1 July 1876. 99. Ibid., 6 July 1876. 100. Letter from O[sbourne] Hunter to the Monthly Elevator [ January 1, 1876], Box 13, Hunter MSS. On this and other occasions, Hunter appropriated a famous radical song by eighteenth-century Scottish poet Robert Burns, ‘‘A man’s a man for a’ that,’’ which celebrated the struggle for equality as embodied by the French Revolution. Consult Fowler, Robert Burns. 101. Congressman Josiah T. Walls, quoted in Philip S. Foner, ‘‘Black Participation,’’ 285. 102. Philip Foner discusses the convention’s plans for an eighteen-volume black history in ‘‘Black Participation,’’ 285–86. The convention failed to make a definite plan for funding the project, however, and the history was never written. 103. Philip S. Foner, ‘‘Black Participation,’’ 287. 104. For a discussion of the racial definition of progress established at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, see Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, ch. 1. See also Eric Foner, Reconstruction, 564–65.

notes to pages 126 – 30 255 105. Hahn, Nation Under Our Feet, 265–313. 106. Norfolk Virginian, 1 January 1872, 3 January 1873, 3 January 1874, 3 January 1875, 4 January 1876, 2 January 1878. 107. Kantrowitz, ‘‘One Man’s Mob Is Another Man’s Militia’’; Zuczek, State of Rebellion, 141; Report of Evidence Taken before the Military Committee. 108. Contemporary accounts of events in Hamburg varied greatly according to the political persuasion and racial identity of the author. See ‘‘A Centennial Fourth of July Democratic Celebration. The Massacre of Six Colored Citizens at Hamburgh [sic], S.C.’’ (Washington, D.C., 1876), pamphlet in the African American Pamphlet Collection, Manuscript Division Reading Room, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; and Address to the People of the United States. For secondary accounts of the Hamburg conflict, see Kantrowitz, ‘‘One Man’s Mob Is Another Man’s Militia’’; Williamson, After Slavery, 266–71; and Zuczek, State of Rebellion, 163–65. 109. ‘‘Centennial Fourth of July Democratic Celebration’’; Address to the People of the United States ; Williamson, After Slavery, 266–71; Zuczek, State of Rebellion, 163–65. 110. Address to the People of the United States. 111. Daily accounts of the Hamburg ‘‘riot’’ appeared in Augusta newspapers. See Augusta Constitionalist, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18 July 1876. See also, letter from M. C. Butler to the Journal of Commerce, reprinted in the Augusta Constitionalist, 20 July 1876; and coverage of congressional debates in the Augusta Constitutionalist, 21 July 1876. 112. Kantrowitz, ‘‘One Man’s Mob Is Another Man’s Militia.’’ As Kantrowitz argues, opposing narratives of the battle in Hamburg both reflected and reinforced competing interpretations of citizenship, manhood, and public authority in the Reconstruction South. 113. The Hamburg affair was not the first time that the closing days of Reconstruction were accompanied by an attack on a black celebration of the Fourth of July. In the summer of 1875, several dozen whites attacked Republicans who had gathered in a courthouse in Vicksburg, Mississippi, for Fourth of July ceremonies, killing three men. See Jackson Weekly Pilot (Mississippi), 10, 17 July 1875. African Americans in Maury County, Tennessee, recounted attacks by Klansmen that followed a black celebration on 4 July 1868. See Report of Evidence Taken before the Military Committee, 9–10, 13, 18–20, 26–30, 38, 40, 48. On the impact of violence, see also Kachun, Festivals of Freedom, 179–82. 114. Kantrowitz, ‘‘One Man’s Mob Is Another Man’s Militia’’; Williamson, After Slavery, 266–71; Zuczek, State of Rebellion, 163–65. 115. For a description of the Democratic campaign, including the parades and rallies, see Zuczek, State of Rebellion, chs. 8 and 9. 116. Ibid., 173.

256 notes to pages 130 – 41 117. Eric Foner, Short History of Reconstruction, 241. 118. Charleston News and Courier, 6 July 1875. 119. Savannah Colored Tribune, 8 July 1876. 120. Christian Recorder, 24 January 1878. 121. Angell, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, 108–22. 122. Eric Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers, 35–36. 123. Campbell, Song of Zion, 77–86; Angell, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner.

Chapter Four 1. New York Times, 20 January 1874, Box 11, Scrapbooks 1861–75, Bryant MSS. 2. Advertiser and Republican, 20, 25 January 1874; Savannah Morning News, 20 January 1874, Box 11, Scrapbooks 1861–75, Bryant MSS. 3. Atlanta Daily Constitution, 16 January, 14, 15, 17, 18 February, 3 April 1874; Advertiser and Republican, 8 March, 15 March 1874; Savannah Morning News, 15 April 1874, Box 11, Scrapbooks 1861–75, Bryant MSS. 4. Currie-McDaniel, Carpetbagger of Conscience, ch. 6. 5. Letter from John Emory Bryant to Col. Drake De Kay in New York City, 10 December 1876, Box 8, Letter Books 1876–77, Bryant MSS. 6. John Emory Bryant, ‘‘The Southern Advance Association of Atlanta, Georgia,’’ The Southern Question (Philadelphia: Craig, Finley, and Co., [1882/83?]), and ‘‘The Southern Problem,’’ 10 June 1879, Box 16, Bryant MSS. See also Currie-McDaniel, Carpetbagger of Conscience, ch. 6. 7. Glenda Gilmore makes this argument in Gender and Jim Crow. 8. Ayers, Southern Crossing, 92–100 (quote on 96). 9. Ibid., 107–10. 10. Hahn, Nation Under Our Feet, 364–411 (quote on 404). 11. Brotz, ed., African-American Social and Political Thought, 1–2; Hahn, Nation Under Our Feet, 320–31. 12. Hahn, Nation Under Our Feet, 320–21; Brotz, ed., African-American Social and Political Thought, 2–5. 13. Frederick Douglass quoted in Brotz, ed., African-American Social and Political Thought, 5–6. 14. Hahn, Nation Under Our Feet, 317–63. 15. For the ways in which late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth century black middle-class ideology reinforced racial stereotypes, see Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham explores the complexities of class in black churchwomen’s approach to racial progress in Righteous Discontent, ch. 7. Glenda Gilmore emphasizes the extent to which middle-class black women hoped to represent poorer and younger African Americans in Gender and Jim Crow, 102. Janette Thomas Greenwood (Bittersweet Legacy) explores the efforts of a rising class of young black leaders to link their interests with the ‘‘better classes’’ of whites during

notes to pages 141 – 44 257 the decades between Reconstruction and disenfranchisement in North Carolina. As Greenwood argues, young black leaders in Charlotte during the 1880s and early 1890s identified themselves against the leadership of Reconstruction and worked to distinguish themselves from the majority of poorer blacks; seeking to privilege class over race, this emerging generation of African Americans consistently sought alliances with influential whites. 16. Blumin, Emergence of the Middle Class ; Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class. 17. Gail Bederman (‘‘Civilization’’) and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (Righteous Discontent, ch. 7) demonstrate the ways that African Americans battled racist stereotypes by promoting images of respectable and civilized black men and women. 18. Painter, Exodusters. Several historians have emphasized the appeal of emigration arguments to struggling black farmers in the South. See Redkey, Black Exodus ; Angell, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, 133; and Gilbert Anthony Williams, Christian Recorder, ch. 4. 19. Speech of Hon. James M. Townsend, ‘‘Emancipation Celebration January 1st 1891 at Alexandria, Virginia’’ (n.p., 1891), pamphlet in the Daniel A. P. Murray Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20. Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow, ch. 1. 21. Ibid., esp. 13–14. In contrast to Glenda Gilmore’s emphasis on the democratic nature of black middle-class ideologies, Kevin Gaines (Uplifting the Race) emphasizes the ways in which black elite conceptions of uplift were implicated in conceptions of racial pathology. 22. Peter Novick (That Noble Dream) argues that late-nineteenth-century historians saw no contradiction between their emphasis on ‘‘scientific’’ empiricism and their portrayals of national and human progress: ‘‘There was no tension between disinterested scholarship on the one hand, and patriotic duty or moral engagement on the other: the former, through the self-evident ethical and political truths it revealed, satisfied the latter’’ (85). 23. John David Smith (‘‘ ‘No Negro Is upon the Program’ ’’) summarizes white Americans’ ‘‘insatiable need to discuss what they called the ‘Negro problem.’ ’’ For an extensive survey of antiblack thought during the decades following emancipation, consult John David Smith, ed., Anti-Black Thought. Joel Williamson (Crucible of Race) also examines the debates swirling around African Americans’ alleged inferiority in the decades following Reconstruction. Nina Silber (Romance of Reunion, ch. 4) portrays the many facets of a rapidly growing ‘‘culture of conciliation’’ in the 1880s and 1890s (quote on 94). On the pages of the Christian Recorder, as in other periodicals, African Americans debated the questions of the day in articles such as ‘‘Are We to Die Out?’’ (28 February 1878) and ‘‘Can the Colored Man Be a Man in the South?’’ (3 July 1890). For related articles, see the Christian Recorder, 14, 23 March, 4, 7 November 1878; 5 February 1880, 2, 17 August 1882; 3 May 1883, 6 January, 22 September 1887; 20 February, 3 July 1890. 24. George M. Fredrickson charts the formation of diverse racial theories in the

258 notes to pages 144 – 47 late nineteenth century, especially in relation to social Darwinism, in Black Image in the White Mind, ch. 8. On the rise of scientific racism in the late nineteenth century and, more specifically, its effect on white Americans’ portrayals of history, see Novick, That Noble Dream, 74–80. Novick also emphasizes the role of historians in promoting a vision of national reconciliation premised on a shared (North and South) notion of black inferiority. Argues Novick, ‘‘Through some give-and-take, a nationalist and racist historiographical consensus . . . was achieved [among northern and southern historians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries]’’ (77). On late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century white historians’ treatment of slavery and race, see John David Smith, Old Creed for the New South and Slavery, Race, and American History. 25. Crogman, Talks for the Times, 204–5. 26. Regional, state, and local studies have demonstrated both the variety of conditions in the South between Reconstruction and disenfranchisement and the extent to which the period was characterized by extensive ferment and experimentation in both race relations and politics. Consult Woodward, Strange Career of Jim Crow ; Ayers, Promise of the New South ; Kousser, Shaping of Southern Politics ; Eric Anderson, Race and Politics in North Carolina ; James Tice Moore, Two Paths to the New South ; and Dailey, ‘‘Deference and Violence.’’ 27. Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow, ch. 1. 28. The issue of emigration was fiercely debated on the pages of black newspapers in the 1880s and 1890s. See the Christian Recorder, 19 May 1881; 4, 11, 25 January, 22 February, 1, 8 March, 12 April 1883. 29. Eric Anderson, Race and Politics in North Carolina (quote on 5). See also Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow. 30. Hunter MSS. 31. Charles Hunter quoted in Haley, Charles N. Hunter, 2. 32. Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow, 45–46. 33. Haley, Charles N. Hunter, 1–52. 34. For accounts of Emancipation Day celebrations at Atlanta University, as well as records of graduates who gave speeches elsewhere in the state, see ‘‘Emancipation Day,’’ Atlanta University Bulletin, ser. 1, 15 ( January 1890): 2; ‘‘Orations by Graduates,’’ ibid., 34 (February 1892): 4; ‘‘Exercises on Emancipation Day,’’ ibid., 52 ( January 1894): 5; ‘‘From An Address . . . Athens, Ga.,’’ ibid., 53 (February 1894); Notice of celebration in Atlanta, ibid., 70 ( January 1896): 1; Notice of address in Atlanta, ibid., 89 (February 1898): 1; Notice of graduates speaking in Augusta, Macon, Milledgeville, Atlanta, and Chattanooga, ibid., 97 ( January 1899): 2; ‘‘Address of Prof. Du Bois,’’ ibid., 107 (February 1900): 3; ‘‘Emancipation Day’’ and ‘‘Three Products of Education,’’ ibid., 116 (February 1901): 2– 3; Notice of celebration, ibid., 134 (February 1903): 3; Notice of celebration, ibid., 151 ( January 1905): 3; Notice of celebration, ibid., 160 ( January 1906): 3;

notes to pages 147 – 50 259 ‘‘Emancipation Day,’’ ibid., ser. 2, 6 ( January 1912): 25; ‘‘Emancipation Exercises,’’ ibid., ser. 2, 10 ( January 1913): 2–10; ‘‘Emancipation Exercises,’’ ibid., ser. 2, 14 ( January 1914): 12–20. 35. Daniel B. Williams, Freedom and Progress and Other Choice Addresses, 19–34, and Emancipation Address. 36. Langston MSS. 37. Haley, Charles N. Hunter, 46. 38. Among Daniel B. Williams’s numerous publications is Science, Art, and Methods of Teaching. Daniel Webster Davis also published widely. See Daniel Webster Davis, Idle Moments, and Jackson and Davis, Industrial History. 39. Savannah Tribune, 12 December 1891. See also Savannah Tribune, 5 January 1889; 26 December 1891; 2, 7 January 1892; 30 January 1893; 5, 6 January 1894; 8, 15, 29 December 1894; 28 December 1895; 4 January 1896; 26 December 1896; 9 January 1897; 1 January 1898; 8 January 1898; 7 January 1899; 30 December 1899; 6 January 1900; 9 January 1904; and 7 January 1905. 40. Black newspapers in the 1880s and 1890s were saturated with historical material. See, for instance, the Petersburg Lancet, 26 August, 28 October, 4, 11 November 1882; 13, 20 January, 7 July 1883; 13 January, 22 March 1884; and Washington Bee, 24 June 1882; 28 April, 5, 12, 19 May, 30 June, 25 August 1883; 6 December 1884; 3, 10, 24 January, 26 September 1885. Black literary societies also treated historical subjects. See the Minutes of the Bethel Literary and Historical Society, 18 February 1896, 10 March 1896, 14 April 1896, 30 March 1897, 20 April 1897, 22 February 1898, 28 March 1898, 13 March 1899, Box 5-1, Series C, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C. 41. People’s Advocate (Washington, D.C.), 23 June 1883. 42. People’s Advocate (Alexandria, Va.), 10 June, 1, 29 July, 19 August, 2 September 1876. 43. On African American education in the postbellum South, see James D. Anderson, Education of Blacks, ch. 1. For early educational developments, see also Morris, Reading, ’Riting, and Reconstruction. Elsa Barkley Brown portrays the development of black institutions and their role in defining and organizing black public culture in Richmond, Virginia, after Reconstruction in ‘‘Uncle Ned’s Children.’’ On the organization of black community in Georgia after Reconstruction, see Dittmer, Black Georgia. See also Meier, Negro Thought in America, ch. 9. On the relationship between black hope and the educational and professional accomplishments of a rising generation of African Americans, see Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow, ch. 1. 44. Each year, Emancipation Day celebrations drew large crowds to Raleigh for ceremonies that began with an elaborate parade featuring black military organizations, fire companies, and civic associations. After the procession, participants typically converged at Metropolitan Hall, where they joined in prayers and song,

260 notes to pages 150 – 52 listened to speeches and poems, and voted on resolutions treating issues of the day. There was extensive coverage of black celebrations in several cities in North Carolina newspapers. See the Wilmington Morning Star, 2 January 1871; 2 January 1872; 2 January 1873; 2 January 1874; 2, 3 January 1878; 1, 2 January 1897; New Bern Daily Times, 3 January 1873, 3 January 1874, 1 January 1886; Raleigh Daily News, 2 January 1874, 3 January 1877, 2 January 1878, 1 January 1879, 2 January 1880; Raleigh News and Observer, 2 January 1892; 1, 2 January 1898; 1, 3 January 1899; 2 January 1900; 2 January 1901; 2 January 1902; 2 January 1903; 2 January 1904; 4 January 1905; 2 January 1906; 2 January 1907; 2 January 1908; 2 January 1910; 2 January 1912; 2 January 1913; 2 January 1914; 2 January 1915. Also consult considerable coverage of Emancipation Day celebrations and related correspondence collected by Charles Hunter, Boxes 13, 14, and 15, Hunter MSS. See also Haley, Charles N. Hunter, 24. 45. Letter written by Charles Hunter to the North Carolina Standard, 25 June 1869, Letterbook, Box 1, Hunter MSS. 46. Letter to Colonel Jacob F. Chur, 5 July 1869, Box 1, Hunter MSS; Haley, Charles N. Hunter, 23. 47. See letters from William H. Battle and A. W. Shaffer to Raleigh News and Observer, 2 January 1874. 48. Draft of a letter from Charles Hunter to Charles Sumner, 22 December 1871, Box 1, Hunter MSS. 49. Letter from Charles Sumner to Charles Hunter, 29 December 1871, Box 1, Hunter MSS. 50. Letter from B. J. Moore to Charles Hunter, 1 January 1872, Box 1, Hunter MSS. 51. Raleigh Daily News, 2 January 1878, 2 January 1880, 2 January 1898. 52. Ibid., 2 January 1873. 53. Ibid., 2 January 1880. The coverage of black celebrations in the Raleigh Daily News and later in the Raleigh News and Observer was largely favorable, though condescending, throughout the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. See, for example, Raleigh Daily News, 2 January 1879; and Raleigh News and Observer, 2 January 1885, 2 January 1892, 3 January 1893, 2 January 1896, 2 January 1897. 54. John Haley (Charles N. Hunter, 36) depicts the hostile responses that Charles Hunter received from many black contemporaries when he attempted to forge alliances with white Democrats and temperance workers. One particular point of controversy among African Americans in North Carolina’s Republican Party was whether to support black or white candidates for office. See Eric Anderson, Race and Politics in North Carolina, 36. 55. Haley, Charles N. Hunter, 34. Haley draws his definition of accommodationist from the work of Dollard in Caste and Class. 56. The give-and-take at Emancipation Day celebrations resembled the ‘‘fascinat-

notes to pages 153 – 59 261 ing mosaic of [black and white] accommodation’’ and ‘‘interracial bargains’’ that characterized politics in the Second Congressional District of postwar North Carolina, as described by Eric Anderson in Race and Politics in North Carolina, 5. As John Haley himself points out, Charles Hunter was ‘‘never locked into the accommodationist role.’’ See Charles N. Hunter, 34. 57. Accounts of Governor Zebulon Vance’s speeches were published in the Raleigh Daily News, 2 January 1877, 2 January 1878. 58. Raleigh News and Observer, 2 January 1892. 59. Glenda Gilmore (Gender and Jim Crow, 189–90) argues that Charlotte Hawkins Brown wrote and published Mammy in 1919 in order to define white women’s duty to black women. The evidence from Emancipation Day ceremonies in Raleigh suggests that Brown was drawing on long-standing African American traditions of appropriating and modifying white-authored racial discourse in North Carolina. 60. Painter, Exodusters; Redkey, Black Exodus. Eric Anderson discusses the opposition of black Republican leaders in North Carolina to emigration in Race and Politics in North Carolina, 80–81. 61. Executive Committee of the North Carolina Industrial Association, ‘‘To the Colored People—The Farmers, the Mechanics, the Artisans and the Educators, of North Carolina,’’ n.p., [1879], Box 13, Hunter MSS. 62. John H. Haley (Charles N. Hunter, 46–48) explains that the founders of the North Carolina Industrial Association were accused by some black spokesmen of committing the ‘‘rankest political heresy’’ because they carefully refrained from emphasizing politics in literature that was designed to elicit white support. 63. ‘‘The First Negro State Fair: Organization of Departments,’’ n.p. [1879], Box 13, Hunter MSS. 64. Journal of Industry, 19 November 1879, Box 13, Hunter MSS. 65. Speech of Governor Thomas Jarvis, Journal of Industry, 19 November 1879, Box 13, Hunter MSS. 66. Eric Anderson, Race and Politics in North Carolina, 64–75; Eric Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers, 64. 67. Speech of James O’Hara, Journal of Industry, 19 November 1879, Box 13, Hunter MSS. 68. Ibid. 69. Frederick Douglass’s speech was printed in full in the Journal of Industry, 9 October 1880, supplement, Box 12, Hunter MSS. See also the Raleigh News and Observer, 2 October 1880, Box 13, Hunter MSS. 70. Letter of Jm. L. Love to Col. G. T. Wasson, 14 September 1886, Box 1, Hunter MSS. 71. Letter of B. P. Allen, Lumberton, North Carolina, 9 October 1886, Box 1, Hunter MSS.

262 notes to pages 159 – 62 72. Speech of James O’Hara, Journal of Industry, 19 November 1879, Box 13, Hunter MSS. 73. Speech of Frederick Douglass, Raleigh News and Observer, 2 October 1880, Box 13, Hunter MSS. 74. John Haley emphasizes the disjunction between black ideologies of progress and oppressive conditions in post-Reconstruction North Carolina in Charles N. Hunter, ch. 2. 75. Speech of Frederick Douglass, Journal of Industry, 9 October 1880, supplement, Box 12, Hunter MSS. 76. Letter from Hon. J. H. Smythe, U.S. Minister to the Republic of Liberia, to Charles Hunter, Secretary of the North Carolina Industrial Association, 3 October 1879, Box 1; letter from Professor R. T. Greener of Howard University Law Department to Charles Hunter, 7 May 1879, Box 1; and letter of Senator Blanche K. Bruce to Journal of Industry, 19 November 1879, Box 13, all Hunter MSS. 77. Raleigh Gazette, 7 November 1891, Box 13, Hunter MSS. 78. Letter of Blanche K. Bruce, Washington D.C., 14 October 1886; letter of John T. Jenifer, Boston, 15 September 1886; and letter of T. Thomas Fortune, New York, 18 October 1886, all Box 1, Hunter MSS. 79. Letter of Maggie Whiteman, [1886]; letter of Mamie E. Alexander, 27 October 1886; unsigned letter, New Berne, North Carolina, 21 October 1886; letter of C. C. Tucker, Teacher in Mechanics Department, Atlanta University, 28 October 1886; letter of Geo. McArnold, 20 September 1886; and letter of L. W. Bloxom, Baltimore, Maryland, 23 August 1886, all Box 1, Hunter MSS. 80. Letter of John Strange, Richmond, Virginia, 26 October 1886, Box 1, Hunter MSS. 81. Letter, 21 October 1886, and letter of S. G. Atkins, Secretary of the North Carolina State Teachers’ Educational Association, 18 October 1886, both Box 1, Hunter MSS. 82. Letter of George T. Wassom and J. M. Mabry, Cary, North Carolina, 14 September 1886; letter of J. R. Harrison, Warrenton, North Carolina, 18 September 1886; and letter of W. C. Coleman, Concord, North Carolina, 6 September 1886, all Box 1, Hunter MSS. J. M. Mabry of Cary, N.C., repeated his earlier offer to canvas in support of the fair, but only if he received free passage to Raleigh and other towns in exchange for his efforts: ‘‘[I]f you will send me a ticket . . . I will go all over [a] section of country and speak and put up bills’’ (letter from J. M. Mabry, 18 September 1886, Box 1, Hunter MSS). See also ‘‘Scotia Seminary Industrial Association’’ and ‘‘Notes By the Way,’’ Journal of Industry, 15 May 1880, Box 12, Hunter MSS. 83. Letter of Annie Grandy, 26 October 1886, Box 1, Hunter MSS. 84. Speech of Richard R. Wright, printed in Augusta Chronicle, 2 January 1894. 85. Augusta Chronicle, 2 January 1885, 2 January 1892.

notes to pages 162 – 71 263 86. Ibid., 2 January 1894. 87. Speech of Thomas Norris Jr. in Twenty-Two Years of Freedom, 41. 88. Savannah Tribune, 12 January 1895. 89. Atlanta University Bulletin, ser. 1, no. 5 (December 1888): 3; ser. 1, no. 17 (March 1890): 3; ser. 2, no. 10 ( January 1913): 4. 90. For biographical information on William H. Crogman, consult Clement Richardson, ed., National Encyclopedia of the Colored Race, 318; Kletzing and Crogman, Progress of a Race, 467–72; and Crogman, Talks for the Times, x–ix. 91. Kletzing and Crogman, preface to Progress of a Race. 92. Crogman, Talks for the Times ; Kletzing and Crogman, Progress of a Race. 93. Daniel B. Williams, Emancipation Address, 12. 94. E. K. Love, ‘‘Oration Delivered on Emancipation Day, January 2nd 1888,’’ [from the Savannah Tribune], pamphlet from the Daniel A. P. Murray Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Beginning in 1885, Emanuel K. Love served as pastor of the First Baptist Church in Savannah; he was also active in Baptist publishing. See Pegues, Our Baptist Ministers, 319–21. 95. Savannah Tribune, 5 January 1889. 96. Speech of Thomas Norris Jr. in Twenty-Two Years of Freedom, 45–50. 97. Ibid., 49–50. 98. Ibid. 99. Late in 1874, Henry Turner issued a ‘‘manifesto’’ calling for black people to emigrate from the South, then from the United States. Turner’s advocacy of emigration ignited an immediate conflict within the AME Church, with most leaders uniting in passionate defense of staying in the United States. See Christian Recorder, 17 December 1874, 14 January 1875, 21 October 1875, 13 April 1876; Angell, Henry McNeal Turner, ch. 6; and Redkey, Black Exodus, 2–46. 100. AME Church Review 1, no. 3 ( January 1885): 246–48. 101. Savannah Tribune, 6 January 1894. 102. Augusta Chronicle, 2 January 1890. 103. Daniel B. Williams, Emancipation Address, 25–26. 104. Shaw, ‘‘Black Club Women’’ and What a Woman Ought to Be and Do ; Salem, To Better Our World, 65–100; Sims, Power of Femininity, 18–19, 24–25, 27, 46, 52, 54– 79; Hewitt, Southern Discomfort, 38–66; Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom, 74–97; Feldman, Sense of Place, 164–87; Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow ; Hine and Thompson, Shining Thread of Hope, 160–64, 177–86, 226–27; Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load, 21–109; Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent ; Streitmatter, Raising Her Voice. 105. Article in Outlook magazine ( January 1904), quoted in Salem, To Better Our World, 8. See also Morton, Disfigured Images, esp. 27–37. 106. People’s Advocate (Washington, D.C.), 28 April 1883. 107. Washington Bee, 28 September 1912. 108. Augusta Chronicle, 3 January 1888.

264 notes to pages 171 – 75 109. Scholars exploring the formation of black feminist thought in the late nineteenth century have emphasized progressive black women’s insistence on linking racial progress to expanded opportunities for women. Consult Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, ch. 5; Brown, ‘‘Womanist Consciousness,’’ 268–83; and Higginbotham, ‘‘Black Church,’’ 203–5, 213–14. Also consult Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow, 1, 4, 20; and Mossell, Work of the Afro-American Woman, xxvii–xlii. 110. I am grateful for the insights of Patricia Schechter (Ida B. Wells-Barnett, 51– 55) into the emergent interest in black womanhood among black leaders in the 1880s. 111. Atlanta University Bulletin, ser. 1, no. 52 ( January 1894): 5–6. 112. Glenda Gilmore makes the argument about black women’s educational attainments in relation to those of southern white women in Gender and Jim Crow, 31– 59. On the struggles of the women’s rights movement in the South, consult Wheeler, Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement. See also Schechter, Ida B. WellsBarnett, 1, and Harley, ‘‘For the Good of Family and Race,’’ 338. Jennifer Lund Smith (‘‘Ties that Bind’’) portrays the educational achievements, professional aims, and community efforts of women who graduated from Atlanta University during its first fifteen years of operation. For further discussion of African American women’s educational opportunities and community in the late-nineteenth-century South, consult Neverdon-Morton, Afro-American Women, and Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, ch. 2. 113. Josephine Turpin Washington, ‘‘A Plea for Co-Education of the Sexes,’’ AME Church Review 3 ( January 1886): 270. 114. Ibid. 115. Some women put their point even more forcefully. An 1896 editorial in Woman’s Era was highly critical of ‘‘timid men and ignorant men’’ who had faltered in the struggle for racial justice. The editorial is quoted by Deborah Gray White in Too Heavy a Load, 36–37. 116. Atlanta University Bulletin, ser. 1, no. 52 ( January 1894): 5–6. See also ‘‘A Farewell Reception,’’ Petersburg Lancet, 6 October 1883; and ‘‘Higher Education For Women,’’ Gazette, 12 May 1892, Hunter MSS. 117. Mossell, Work of the Afro-American Woman. See also Des Jardins, ‘‘Reclaiming the Past and Present,’’ and Streitmatter, Raising Her Voice, ch. 10. 118. Fenalla Macfarlane, ‘‘Josephine Turpin Washington,’’ in Hine, Brown, and Terborg-Penn, ed., Black Women in America, 1232–33. 119. Josephine Turpin Washington, introduction to Scruggs, Women of Distinction, ix. 120. Anna Julia Cooper, ‘‘Higher Education of Women’’ (1890–91), reprinted in Lemert and Bahn, eds., Voice of Anna Julia Cooper, 78. 121. Love, ‘‘Oration Delivered on Emancipation Day, January 2nd 1888.’’ On African Americans’ use of ideologies of civilization in critiques of lynching, see Bederman, ‘‘Civilization.’’

notes to pages 176 – 81 265 122. Washington, intro. to Scruggs, Women of Distinction, x–xv. See also Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load, 42–44. Gail Bederman illuminates the relationship between late-nineteenth-century ideologies of ‘‘civilization’’ and the promotion of white male supremacy and American imperialism in Manliness and Civilization, 23– 41. See also Bederman, ‘‘Civilization.’’ 123. Rev. Jas. H. A. Johnson, ‘‘Female Preachers,’’ AME Church Review 1, no. 2 (October 1884): 102–5; ‘‘The Ordination of Women: What Is the Authority for It?’’ ibid., 2, no. 4 (April 1886): 351–61, 452–60; C. Hatfield Dickerson, ‘‘Woman Suffrage,’’ ibid., 4, no. 2 (October 1887): 196; Mrs. M. E. Lee, ‘‘The Home-Maker,’’ ibid., 8, no. 1 ( July 1891): 63–66; Rev. R. E. Wall, ‘‘Shall Our Girls Be Educated?’’ ibid., 6, no. 1 ( July 1889): 45–48; ‘‘Happy and Unhappy Women,’’ Washington Bee, 10 November 1883; ‘‘Shall Women Vote?’’ and ‘‘Clara to Louise,’’ Washington Bee, 28 February 1885; ‘‘Louise to Clara,’’ Washington Bee, 21 March 1885; ‘‘Discrimination Against Female Graduates,’’ Washington Bee, 4 April 1885; ‘‘Visit from Susan B. Anthony,’’ Atlanta University Bulletin, ser. 1, no. 6 (March 1995). See also Harley, ‘‘For the Good of Family and Race.’’ 124. Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load, 60–68; see also Salem, To Better Our World, 39–41. 125. Daniel B. Williams, Freedom and Progress, 19–34. 126. Augusta Chronicle, 2 January 1896. See also ‘‘The New Era for Women in the South,’’ Atlanta University Bulletin, ser. 1, no. 32 (December 1891): 32; Twenty-Two Years of Freedom, 45; Crogman, Talks for the Times, 329; John Mercer Langston, ‘‘The Christian Ideal of Manhood and Womanhood,’’ n.p., 1 July 1893, Langston MSS. 127. Daniel B. Williams, Emancipation Address, 5–6. 128. Ibid., 13–14. 129. Kletzing and Crogman, Progress of a Race, 191–228. 130. Scruggs, Women of Distinction. For biographical material on Lawson Andrew Scruggs, see W. H. Quick, Negro Stars in All Ages of the World (Richmond: S. B. Adkins & Co., Printers, 1898). 131. Scruggs, Women of Distinction, 366. 132. Ibid., 376. 133. Atlanta Constitution, 3 January 1888. 134. Voice of Missions 2, no. 5 (May 1894). 135. Atlanta Constitution, 3 January 1888. 136. Ibid., 2 January 1897. Jennie Jones, the winner of an essay contest sponsored by the Washington Bee in honor of Emancipation Day in 1891, stressed similar themes. See ‘‘The Negro Race,’’ Washington Bee, 25 April 1891. 137. Carby, Race Men. Also consult Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load. 138. Christian Recorder, 14 December 1876. 139. Petersburg Lancet, 11 November 1882. 140. Ibid., 28 October 1882. 141. Love, ‘‘Oration Delivered on Emancipation Day, January 2nd 1888.’’

266 notes to pages 182 – 87 142. Kletzing and Crogman, preface to Progress of a Race. 143. Editorial by George Freeman Bragg Jr. [Southern Churchman, 1889], Scrapbook vol. 5, Ruffin MSS. 144. Ibid. 145. Commercial Herald, 28 March 1889, Scrapbook vol. 5, Ruffin MSS. 146. As governor during the brief period of Readjuster control in Virginia, William Cameron was instrumental in the abolition of the poll tax and the whipping post. He also helped lead efforts to reform the state tax code, establish institutions of higher education for African Americans, and secure positions for black teachers in the state. See Wynes, Race Relations in Virginia, 16–38, 127–28; and James Tice Moore, Two Paths to the New South, 87–92. 147. Jane Dailey (‘‘Deference and Violence’’) analyzes the violent response of white residents to blacks’ refusal to demonstrate deference—or ‘‘good manners,’’ as whites put it—on the streets of Danville, Virginia, in 1883. Like the enforcement of ‘‘race-based standards of social deference,’’ acts of historical revision that denied any possibility for interracial cooperation or mutual interest were part and parcel of the political transformation that established the dominance of the Democratic Party in the state. On the political campaign that placed Democrats in office in Virginia and the eventual achievement of black disenfranchisement, see Wynes, Race Relations in Virginia, 39–67. Also consult James Tice Moore, Two Paths to the New South, 109–18. 148. Richmond Dispatch, 28 April 1889, Scrapbook vol. 5, Ruffin MSS. 149. Richmond Daily Times, 6 February 1890, Scrapbook vol. 5, Ruffin MSS. 150. Crogman, Talks for the Times, 204–6. 151. Ibid., 204, 208. 152. Ibid., 214. 153. Richmond Planet, 22 December 1888. Frank Ruffin saved John Mitchell’s editorial in a scrapbook, which he titled ‘‘Trash Book.’’ Additionally, he cut out a copy of the ‘‘Persons Lynched’’ column from the Planet, 22 December 1888, along with letters from white southerners who objected to Ruffin’s depiction of them as hostile to the U.S. flag. See Trash Book, Ruffin MSS. In a letter to the Richmond Dispatch in January 1889, Ruffin defended an incident of flag desecration in Macon, Georgia, arguing that the U.S. flag had become a symbol of ‘‘mis-government, law-lessness and dis-order’’; he likened southern ambivalence toward the U.S. flag to Irishmen’s feelings for the flag of England. Ruffin staunchly rejected the idea of national reunion and insisted that continued southern hostility toward the North was inevitable: ‘‘The soup and whiskey reunions of the Blue and Gray cannot change it; nor the exhortations of our newspapers; nor the persuasion of our Federal politicians; nor the expostulations of a few business-men, so called.’’ See ‘‘Hail, Flag of My Country,’’ Richmond Dispatch, 4 January 1889, Scrapbook vol. 4, Ruffin MSS. 154. AME Church Review 12, no. 3 ( January 1896): 352, 357.

notes to pages 188 – 200 267

Chapter Five 1. Winfield Henry Mixon Diary, 15 January 1895, Mixon MSS. 2. Ibid., 22 January 1895. 3. Ibid., 12, 13 February, 5 March 1895. 4. Ibid., 1 January 1895. 5. Ibid., 1 January 1897. 6. Ibid., 1 January 1914, 1 January 1915. 7. Ayers, Southern Crossing, 101. 8. Ibid., 100–103, 169, 267. 9. Ibid., 167–68. 10. Ibid.; Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow, 138–40. 11. Blight, Race and Reunion, ch. 7 (quotation on 222). 12. Ibid., 343, 217. 13. Lumpkin, Making of a Southerner, 121. 14. O’Dell, Sites of Southern Memory, 1–40; John David Smith, ‘‘ ‘No Negro Is upon the Program.’ ’’ 15. O’Dell, Sites of Southern Memory, 4; Blight, Race and Reunion, 276. 16. Montgomery Colored Alabamian, 15 February 1908; 2, 9 January 1909; 15 January 1910. 17. Grossman, Land of Hope. 18. Elizabeth Lindsay Davis, Lifting As They Climb ; Ruffins, ‘‘ ‘Lifting As We Climb’ ’’; Goggin, Carter G. Woodson. 19. Raleigh News and Observer, 2 January 1898. 20. For an account of the white supremacist campaign in North Carolina that culminated in the Wilmington massacre, consult Prather, ‘‘ ‘We Have Taken a City.’ ’’ 21. An account of Lovelace Capehart’s speech was printed in the Raleigh News and Observer, 3 January 1899. 22. Ibid. 23. Eric Anderson (Race and Politics in North Carolina, 297–98) discusses weaknesses in the response of African Americans and fusionists to events surrounding disenfranchisement in North Carolina. 24. Raleigh News and Observer, 3 January 1899. 25. Ibid. 26. Prather, ‘‘ ‘We Have Taken a City,’ ’’ 35–36. 27. Raleigh News and Observer, 2 January 1900. Other black leaders raised the specter of a black exodus in their desperate attempts to ward off disenfranchisement, but they were not able to unite around the strategy. See Eric Anderson, Race and Politics in North Carolina, 297. 28. Eric Anderson, Race and Politics in North Carolina, 296. 29. Kousser, Shaping of Southern Politics, 194.

268 notes to pages 201 – 9 30. Raleigh News and Observer, 2 January 1901, 2 January 1902. 31. Ibid., 2 January 1901. 32. Ibid., 2 January 1901, 2 January 1902, 2 January 1904, 4 January 1905, 2 January 1906, 2 January 1907, 2 January 1910. 33. Ibid., 4 January 1905. 34. Ibid., 2 January 1910, 2 January 1912. 35. Augusta Chronicle, 2 January 1896; 2 January 1897; 3 January 1899; 2 January 1900; 1, 2 January 1902; 3 January 1905. 36. Atlanta Constitution, 2 January 1903. See also ibid., 2 January 1897, 2 January 1898. 37. Atlanta University Bulletin, ser. 1, no. 107 (February 1900): 3. See also ibid., ser. 1, no. 116 (February 1901): 2–3; and Savannah Tribune, 7 January 1899. 38. Savannah Tribune, 8 January 1898. 39. Ibid., 4 January 1896, 1 January 1898. 40. Ibid., 9 January 1897, 8 January 1898, 6 January 1900. 41. Augusta Chronicle, 2 January 1900. See also Savannah Tribune, 6 January 1900, 9 January 1904. On African Americans’ complex responses to the SpanishAmerican War, consult Blight, Race and Reunion, 345–54. 42. Augusta Chronicle, 2 January 1908. 43. Ibid., 3 January 1908. 44. ‘‘The Georgia Equal Rights Convention,’’ Atlanta University Bulletin, ser. 1, no. 162 (March 1906): 2–3. 45. Savannah Morning News, 2 January 1906; Norfolk Landmark, 2 January 1906. 46. Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 48–51. 47. William H. Crogman quoted in ibid., 59–60. 48. Savannah Tribune, 5 January 1907. 49. Ibid. William H. Crogman quoted in Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 59–60. 50. Augusta Chronicle, 2 January 1908. 51. Bess Beatty, ‘‘William Jefferson White,’’ in Coleman and Gurr, eds., Dictionary of Georgia Biography, 1059–61. 52. Raleigh News and Observer, 2 January 1908. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. Savannah Tribune, 5 January 1907. 56. Augusta Chronicle, 2 January 1907. See also Atlanta University Bulletin, ser. 1, no. 166 (October 1906): 1–3. 57. Augusta Chronicle, 2 January 1908. See also Raleigh News and Observer, 2 January 1906. 58. Montgomery Colored Alabamian, 28 December 1907. 59. Atlanta Constitution, 2 January 1908, 2 January 1910; Augusta Chronicle, 2 January 1907; Montgomery Colored Alabamian, 15 February 1908. 60. Savannah Tribune, 8 January 1910.

notes to pages 209 – 17 269 61. Ibid., 4 January 1908. See also Search-Light, [1912?]; Baptist Sentinel, 11 January 1912; News and Observer, 2 January 1912; and Raleigh Times, 1 January 1912, all Box 14, Hunter MSS. 62. Savannah Tribune, 4 January 1908. 63. Atlanta Constitution, 2 January 1910. See also Raleigh News and Observer, 2 January 1914. 64. Montgomery Colored Alabamian, 1 January 1916. See also Norfolk Landmark, 2 January 1908. 65. Savannah Tribune, 8 January 1910; see also ibid., 2 January 1915, and Montgomery Colored Alabamian, 28 December 1907. 66. Raleigh News and Observer, 2 January 1913, Box 14, Hunter MSS. 67. ‘‘Autobiography of Houston Hartsfield Holloway,’’ [n.d.], 110, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 68. Montgomery Colored Alabamian, 28 December 1907. 69. Norfolk Virginian, 2 January 1896; Huntsville Journal, 9 January 1902. 70. Savannah Tribune, 8 January 1910. See also Richmond News Leader, 4 April 1906, and Raleigh News and Observer, 2 January 1915. 71. Norfolk Virginian, 2 January 1896; Montgomery Colored Alabamian, 1 January 1910; Raleigh News and Observer, 2 January 1906. 72. Atlanta Constitution, 2 January 1908. Reverend D. W. Cannon commented on the trend toward praising ‘‘what slavery did for the negro’’ in Emancipation Day speeches. See the Savannah Tribune, 5 January 1907. 73. Black Mammy Memorial. 74. ‘‘A Tribute by Henry Grady,’’ in ibid. 75. Fairclough, Teaching Equality, 14, 18. Fairclough is attentive to the particular position of African American teachers, but his general conclusions are not irrelevant for the status of other black leaders in the Jim Crow South. The literature taking Booker T. Washington and other black leaders to task for accommodations to white racism is extensive. For a complex, if ultimately critical, analysis of Booker T. Washington, consult the two-part biography by Louis R. Harlan: Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856–1901 and Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915. See also Spivey, Schooling for the New Slavery, and Gaines, Uplifting the Race. 76. I am grateful to Adam Fairclough for bringing Charles S. Johnson’s view to my attention. Johnson is quoted by Fairclough in Teaching Equality, 19. More sympathetic accounts of black community leaders’ efforts to negotiate on behalf of African American interests include Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow ; Jacqueline M. Moore, Leading the Race ; and Verney, Art of the Possible. 77. Raleigh News and Observer, 2 January 1902. 78. Norfolk Landmark, 2 January 1903, 2 January 1905, 2 January 1906, 2 January 1907, 2 January 1908, 2 January 1909. 79. Richmond News Leader, 3, 4 April 1904; 4 April 1905; 4 April 1906; 4 April

270 notes to pages 218 – 28 1907; 4 April 1908; 4 April 1910. On Savannah ceremonies, see Savannah Tribune, 5 January 1907, 9 January 1909; on Augusta, see Augusta Chronicle, 2 January 1907, 2 January 1908, 2 January 1909, 3 January 1911, 2 January 1912. On Texas, consult the Houston Daily Post, 20 June 1901, 20 June 1902, 20 June 1905, 20 June 1906, 19 June 1913. 80. Raleigh News and Observer, 2 January 1902, 2 January 1903, 2 January 1904, 2 January 1905, 2 January 1906, 2 January 1907, 2 January 1908, 2 January 1910, 2 January 1912. 81. See, for instance, Montgomery Colored Alabamian, 21 December 1907, 9 January 1909, 10 January 1914; and Tuscumbia American Star (Alabama), 16 January 1901, 30 January 1902, 2 January 1903. 82. Atlanta Constitution, 2 January 1908, 2 January 1910, 2 January 1913; Atlanta University Bulletin, ser. 2, no. 10 ( January 1913). 83. Atlanta Constitution, 2 January 1908; Augusta Chronicle, 2 January 1909, 2 January 1912. 84. Montgomery Colored Alabamian, 28 December 1907, 15 January 1910; Raleigh News and Observer, 2 January 1908. 85. Savannah Tribune, 2 January 1915. 86. Ibid., 10 January 1914. 87. Raleigh News and Observer, 28 October 1911, and Baptist Sentinel, 11 January 1912, Box 14, Hunter MSS. 88. Winfield Henry Mixon Diary, 12, 13 February, 5 March 1895, Mixon MSS. 89. Raleigh News and Observer, 26 October 1913. 90. Negro Fair Bulletin, 16 September 1913. 91. Raleigh News and Observer, 30 October, 1 November 1913. 92. Augusta Chronicle, 2 January 1913. 93. Ibid. 94. Savannah Tribune, 8 January 1913. The Savannah Tribune ’s complaints about the declining interest among the black middle class for Emancipation Day ceremonies were persistent throughout the early 1900s. See ibid., 30 December 1911. 95. Blight, Race and Reunion, ch. 10. 96. Houston Daily Post, 19 June 1913. 97. The Tuskegee Institute News Clippings File [microfilm], reel 240, no. 832, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Mobile. 98. Ibid., reel 240, no. 840. 99. Atlanta University Bulletin, ser. 2, no. 10 ( January 1913): 1–10. 100. John Hope, quoted in Torrence, Story of John Hope, 56–60. See also Clark, ‘‘Making History,’’ 46–47. 101. Ibid. 102. Atlanta University Bulletin 2, no. 10 ( January 1913): 1–10.

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index Adams, Doc, 126–27. See also Hamburg, S.C. Adams, E. J., 113 African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, 8, 9, 25, 28, 42, 46, 50, 57, 60–80, 88, 117–24, 148, 179, 187, 188–89, 243 (n. 10); and citizenship, 60–80, 85, 243 (n. 18); founding of, 62–65; semicentennial of, 62–68, 243 (nn. 11, 13); Wilberforce University, 63, 121; women in, 65, 71, 74–75, 77–80, 245 (nn. 42, 43); on military service, 69–70; Bethel Church, 70, 92; and Fifteenth Amendment, 92–94, 248 (n. 83); and end of Reconstruction, 117–19, 253 (n. 71); and emigration, 118– 19, 138–40, 167, 253 (n. 77), 263 (n. 99); and U.S. centennial exposition, 119–24, 155, 161, 253– 54 (n. 83). See also Commemoration—African American: ministers in Alabama (Thomas), 143 Allen, Richard, 62–63, 64, 71, 74, 76. See also African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church: founding of; Commemoration—African American: of Richard Allen American Colonization Society (ACS), 139 American Missionary Association (AMA), 8, 16, 20, 28, 85 Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, 197

Atlanta, Ga., 26, 113–15; riots, 190, 204, 205. See also Emancipation Day celebrations: Atlanta, Ga.; Independence Day celebrations: Atlanta, Ga.; Atlanta University Atlanta University, 147, 163, 165, 172, 202, 224, 225, 228 Augusta, Ga., 3, 7, 26–31, 52–53, 54, 98, 100, 104, 106–7, 112–14, 148, 225–28. See also Emancipation Day celebrations: Augusta, Ga; Independence Day celebrations: Augusta, Ga. The Azor, 131 Belcher, Edwin, 104, 249 (n. 21) Birth of a Nation (Griffith), 10, 224 Black code, 151, 239 (n. 109) Black Mammy Memorial Institute, 212–13 Blight, David, 34, 192 Bradley, Aaron A., 105 Bragg, George Freeman, 180–83, 184 Brooks, Albert, 1–2 Brown, Elsa Barkley, 7, 59, 83 Brown, John (abolitionist), 9, 21, 23, 219 Brown, John (African Methodist Episcopal Church bishop), 122 Bruce, Blanche K., 161 Bryant, John Emory, 28, 143–44, 249 (n. 17); on white-authored southern history, 133–35 Bullock, Rufus, 102

296 index Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (Freedmen’s Bureau), 27, 28, 40, 45, 109; in Georgia, 28, 43, 53, 102; in South Carolina, 28, 96–97 Butler, Matthew C., 126–27. See also Hamburg, S.C. Butler, Thomas, 126–27. See also Hamburg, S.C. Cain, Richard H., 8, 72, 96, 112, 113, 140, 167; on emigration, 131 Cameron, William E., 184, 266 (n. 146) Camilla massacre, 102 Campbell, E. F., 87 Campbell, Jabez B., 92 Campbell, Tunis, 105 Cannon, D. W., 205–6 Capehart, Lovelace B., 198–99 Cardozo, Francis L., 96, 111–12 Centennial Exposition, 119–26 Chamberlain, Daniel H., 129 Chambers, Andrew J., 122 Charleston, S.C., 3, 7, 20, 33–38, 52, 56–57, 95–97, 111, 124. See also Emancipation Day celebrations: Charleston, S.C.; Independence Day celebrations: Charleston, S.C. Chase, Calvin B., 170–71 Cheatham, Henry, 197 Childs, Mattie F., 172–73 Citadel Green, 34, 96 Citizenship, 2–3, 6–7, 31–33, 57–60, 61–80, 90–94, 235 (n. 65), 244 (n. 24). See also African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church: and citizenship; Commemoration—African American: of Fifteenth Amendment; Commemoration—African American: and ideologies of manhood;

Commemoration—African American: and ideologies of womanhood Civil Rights Act (1875), 136, 151, 167 Clark University, 228 Cleveland, Grover, 177 Commemoration, 2–3, 5, 6–12, 30– 31, 140–45, 190, 214 —African American: and postEmancipation public culture, 2, 3, 6–7, 8, 12, 29, 30–31, 59–60, 83, 229 (n. 3), 234 (n. 60), 242 (n. 5); ministers in, 3–4, 8, 25, 28, 46–52, 60–81, 84, 119–23, 148, 237 (n. 92); black press and, 3–4, 81, 83, 148–49, 170–71, 223, 259 (n. 40), 270 (n. 94); educators in, 3–4, 84– 90, 147–48, 213, 218, 237 (n. 92), 247 (n. 68), 269 (n. 75); parades in, 7, 11–12, 25–26, 28, 31, 33–39, 56– 57, 105–6, 170–71, 202, 204, 215– 18; of American Revolution, 9, 18, 31, 46–47, 48, 114, 235 (n. 64), 239–40 (n. 118); of Abraham Lincoln, 9, 28, 63, 76, 89–90; troops and militias in, 11–12, 21–23, 28, 34, 35–6, 73, 96, 103, 126, 202, 204, 215–17; and violence, 17, 19, 102, 126–30, 204, 241 (n. 138); women in, 17, 28, 34, 37–38, 81–90, 140, 142, 147–48, 163, 169–73; of Haitian Independence, 18; of Touissaint L’Ouiverture, 18; antebellum history of, 18–19, 233 (n. 37), 237 (n. 91); of Fifteenth Amendment, 25, 92–94, 104; civic associations in, 27, 37; white responses to, 17, 29–30, 52– 55, 103–4, 106, 151–52; oratory in, 42–52; of Egypt, 51, 158; of Richard Allen, 63, 68–69, 120–23, 188–89, 253 (n. 83); and ideologies of manhood, 57–80, 90–92, 142, 178–79,

index 297 233 (n. 38); and ideologies of womanhood, 73, 74–75, 77, 79–80, 85– 86, 90–92, 142, 171–79, 211–12; and ideologies of progress, 162–83, 202, 205–6, 208–9, 219–20; of Phillis Wheatley, 176, 178, of Frederick Douglass, 219. See also Emancipation Day celebrations; Evacuation Day; Independence Day celebrations; Semicentennial —Southern white, 53–55, 112–17, 129–30, 133–34, 247 (n. 74); participation in Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, 124 —United States: antebellum history of, 17–18; centennial celebrations, 115, 119–26, 130 Convention of Colored Newspaper Men, 125 Cooper, Anna Julia, 141, 171–72, 174, 176 Coppin, Levi, 75–76 Crogman, William H., 163–64; on women and racial progress, 177; on history of slavery, 181–82; on status of race relations, 185–86; on Atlanta riots, 205; on future of African Americans, 228 Crummell, Alexander, 171–72 Danville (Va.), 138, 266 (n. 147) Davis, B. J., 206, 208 Davis, Daniel Webster, 148, 165 Davis, Jefferson, 17, 41, 165 Delany, Martin R., 8, 50, 51, 139; on meaning of freedom, 45–46; attitudes toward freedpeople, 45–46, 49–50, 76, 108, 110; attitudes toward whites, 49–50, 76, 96, 97, 108; on history of slavery, 76; in South Carolina politics during Re-

construction, 98, 107–11, 113, 130; involvement in Liberian Exodus Joint Stock Steamship Company, 131 DeLarge, Robert C., 96, 111–12 Democratic Party, 99, 100, 112, 128– 29, 138; in Georgia, 101–2, 105; in South Carolina, 107–11, 128–30; in Virginia, 116, 184; in North Carolina, 157, 198–200 Deveaux, John H., 223 Disenfranchisement, 190–91, 198– 202, 203, 207, 209–10, 267 (nn. 23, 27) Dixon, Thomas, 224 Douglass, Frederick, 45, 48, 51, 92, 123; on emigration vs. integration, 139; on black history, 158–59; apprehensions regarding African American progress, 160, 166 Dred Scott, 32 DuBois, W. E. B., 141, 202, 214 Edisto Island, S.C., 109–10, 237 (n. 87) Educators. See Commemoration— African American: educators in Emancipation Day celebrations, 1–3, 6, 10, 11, 13–15, 25, 33, 51, 154, 182, 185, 189, 196, 208, 214, 218–20; Norfolk, Va., 16–17, 19, 24, 29–30, 82, 87, 163, 215–17; Key West, Fla., 19; Port Royal, S.C., 20–24; New Orleans, La., 29; Charleston, S.C., 33–38, 56–57, 82, 107, 168; Augusta, Ga., 47–51, 52–53, 98, 100, 103, 162, 171, 208, 225–28; Richmond, Va., 54, 112, 176; Portsmouth, Va., 72–73; Georgetown, S.C., 73; Raleigh, N.C., 98, 146, 150– 54, 197–202, 206, 210, 218, 259–60 (n. 44); Savannah, Ga., 130, 165,

298 index 167–68, 175, 181, 202, 205, 209; Arlington, Va., 142; Brunswick, Ga., 163; Washington, D.C., 170–71; Atlanta, Ga., 172, 178, 179, 202, 218, 224, 228; Salem, Va., 177; Barnsville, Ala., 189; Gadsden, Ala., 189; Selma, Ala., 189, 218; Durham, N.C., 201; Macon, Ga., 203; Cartersville, Ga., 206, 208, 218; Rome, Ga., 209, 218; Birmingham, Ala., 218; Gainesville, Ga., 218; Mobile, Ala., 218; Montgomery, Ala., 218; New Bern, N.C., 260 (n. 44); Wilmington, N.C., 260 (n. 44) Emancipation Proclamation, 12, 13, 14, 16, 20, 26, 45, 69–70, 121, 165 Emigrationism, 11, 45, 50, 118, 131– 32, 138–41, 145, 154, 159, 167–69, 178–79, 215, 253 (nn. 75, 77), 263 (n. 99). See also African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church: and emigration; Cain, Richard H.; Payne, Daniel Alexander; Turner, Henry McNeal Enforcement Acts, 100 Evacuation Day, 25, 54, 217–18 Exodus (story of), 47, 115 Fairclough, Adam, 213 Fifteenth Amendment, 55, 60, 79, 85, 92–94, 97, 117, 136. See also African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church: and African American citizenship; African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church: and Fifteenth Amendment; Commemoration—African American: of Fifteenth Amendment; Suffrage First South Carolina Volunteers, 21– 22, 23 Floyd, Silas X., 222

Foner, Eric, 99 Forten, Charlotte, 23–24 Fortress Monroe, Va., 15, 16 Fortune, T. Thomas, 161 The Freed Slave (sculpture), 123 French, Mansfield Fugitive Slave Act (1850), 45, 139 Garnett, Mrs. J. B., 163 Georgia State Industrial College, 162 Getsen, Henry, 126. See also Hamburg, S.C. Gilbert, John W., 203–4 Grady, Henry, 213 Great Migration, 196–97 Griffith, D. W., 224 Hahn, Steven, 14, 35, 83, 126, 138 Haley, John, 152 Hamburg, S.C., 126–30, 255 (nn. 108, 112, 113) Hampton, Wade, 99, 109–11, 129 Handy, James A., 68 Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins, 77, 122, 176; author of Minnie’s Sacrifice, 78–80 Harris, Sam F., 212–13 Harvey, B. T., 179 Hayes, Rutherford B., 130 Heard, William, 75–76 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 21–24 Historical memory, 9, 33, 42–52, 141– 45, 209, 218–19, 230–31 (nn. 13, 14), 235 (n. 67); white-authored, 10–11, 43–44, 114–15, 134–35, 143–44, 183–86, 192–94, 207, 210, 216, 231 (n. 16), 252 (n. 69), 257 (n. 22); of slavery, 48–50, 76–77, 140, 150–54, 179–83, 195, 196, 212–13, 221–22; of Reconstruction, 209–10

index 299 Holloway, Houston Hartsfield, 210 Holt, Thomas Michael, 153 Hope, John, 225–28 Howard, O. H., 102 Howard, Oliver Otis, 109 Howard University, 122, 147, 157 Hunter, Charles, 10–11, 92, 146–47, 149, 182, 221, 260 (n. 54); educator in Shoe Heel, N.C., 146; and Freedmen’s Savings and Trust Company, 146; and Independent Order of Good Templars, 146; organizer of Emancipation Day celebrations, 150–53; organizer of industrial fairs, 156, 221– 22; on disenfranchisement, 200 Hunter, Osbourne, Jr., 146, 254 (n. 100); expectations for national centennial, 124 Hurley, Timothy, 97, 107 Independence Day celebrations, 2, 3, 10, 17, 25, 28, 129; Augusta, Ga., 26–31, 46–47, 53, 54, 98, 106–7, 112–14; Norfolk, Va., 37; New Bern, N.C., 39; Charleston, S.C., 42, 52, 73, 82, 95–97, 107, 112–13, 130; Richmond, Va., 52, 115–16, 235 (n. 64); Atlanta, Ga., 82, 113, 114– 15; resumption by southern whites, 112–17, 251 (n. 49); Hamburg, S.C., 126, 128–29; Vicksburg, Miss., 129 Jarvis, Thomas, 157 Jenifer, John T., 119–22, 161 Johnson, Andrew, 109 Johnson, Archibald, 187 Johnson, Charles, 214 Johnson, Herschel V., 44 Jonkonnu, 7, 18–19, 39–42, 237–38 (n. 94) Juneteenth, 25

The Klansman (Dixon), 224 Kletzing, Henry F., 164, 177, 181–82 Ku Klux Klan, 10, 99, 100, 101, 116, 117 Laney, Lucy, 148 Langston, John Mercer, 122, 147 Lee, Robert E., 134 Liberian Exodus Joint Stock Steamship Company, 131. See also Delany, Martin R. Liberty (Goddess or Wagon of), 34, 81, 83, 246 (n. 60). See also Commemoration—African American: women in Lincoln, Abraham, 13, 45, 165. See also Commemoration—African American: of Abraham Lincoln Lincoln Industrial School, 88–90; flagraising ceremony at, 88–89 Love, Emmanuel K., 165, 175, 181 Lumpkin, Katherine DuPre, 193 Lynch, James, 8, 46, 50, 60, 71, 77, 80, 245 (n. 34); as commemorative speaker, 46–47; on American Revolution and Emancipation, 48; on slavery, 49–50, 76; on black achievements, 51; on semicentennial of African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, 62–63; on African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in postEmancipation South, 71–72; on black manhood, 75–76 Lynching, 137–38, 175, 203 Mackey, Thomas Jefferson, 97 Macon, Ga., 42, 101, 104 Maxwell, Leigh B., 165 McClellan, George B., 15 McIntosh County, Ga., 105 Militias, 126–30, 236 (n. 80). See also

300 index Commemoration—African American: troops and militias in Ministers. See Commemoration— African American: ministers in Minnie’s Sacrifice (Harper), 78–79, 54 Missionaries. See African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church; American Missionary Association (AMA); Commemoration—African American: educators in; Commemoration— African American: ministers in Mitchell, John, 186–87, 266 (n. 153) Mixon, Winfield Henry, 188–90, 220, 228; on commemorative celebrations, 189–90; on recording African American accomplishments, 220 Moore, Bartholomew, 150–51 Morehouse College, 100 Morris Brown College, 209 Moses, Franklin J., 97 Mossell, Gertrude Bustill, 173–74, 176 National Association of Colored Women, 177, 197 National Freedmen’s Relief Association, 85 Newport News, Va., 16 Norfolk, Va., 3, 7, 15–17, 19, 24, 29– 30, 37, 39. See also Emancipation Day celebrations: Norfolk, Va.; Independence Day celebrations: Norfolk, Va. Norris, Thomas, Jr., 163, 166 North Carolina Industrial Association, 148, 155, 160, 221, 261 (n. 62) North Carolina Industrial Fair, 154– 62, 166, 219, 220–22; and ideologies of progress, 154–62 O’Hara, James E., 157–59

Page, Thomas Nelson, 192 Paine Institute (later College), 203, 222 Painter, Nell, 110 Pauley, Mrs. Thomas, 84–85 Payne, Daniel Alexander; on role of African Methodist Episcopal Church in promoting ‘‘manly’’ independence, 64–65; attitudes toward freedpeople, 73–74; attitudes toward women in church, 74, 77, 79; attitudes toward emigration, 138, 167, 253 (n. 78) Populism, 194, 197 Port Royal, S.C., 20–21, 41. See also Emancipation Day celebrations: Port Royal, S.C. Portsmouth, Va., 16 Progress, 135–37, 140–41, 143, 144, 145, 195, 205–6, 208–9, 212–13. See also Commemoration—African American: and ideologies of progress; North Carolina Industrial Fair: and ideologies of progress Progress of a Race (Crogman), 163–64, 177, 181–83, 205 Raboteau, Albert J., 47, 117 Race histories, 163–64, 173–74, 175– 76, 177–78, 181–82, 183, 253 (n. 73) Raleigh (N.C.), 3, 92, 98, 124, 149, 150–54, 155–62. See also Emancipation Day celebrations: Raleigh, N.C.; Independence Day celebrations: Raleigh, N.C. Ransier, Alonzo J., 96, 113 Readjuster movement (Va.), 138, 184, 266 (n. 146) ‘‘Red Shirts,’’ 109–11 Republican Party, 7, 8, 10, 80–81, 83,

index 301 85, 96–98, 99, 100, 135, 147, 165, 166; in South Carolina, 96, 97–98, 107–12, 113, 127–29, 241 (n. 1), 250 (nn. 31, 32); in Georgia, 100, 101–3, 104–6, 131, 133, 250 (nn. 28, 31); in Virginia, 112, 251 (n. 48); in North Carolina, 145–46, 157, 260–61 (n. 56) ‘‘Reunion’’ (North-South), 10, 115–17, 143, 192–94, 217, 251 (nn. 49, 55, 58, 59), 252 (n. 61, 67, 69), 253 (n. 70), 257–58 (nn. 23, 24), 266 (n. 153) Richmond, Va., 3, 7, 15, 25, 52, 235 (n. 64), 242 (n. 5). See also Emancipation Day celebrations: Richmond, Va.; Evacuation Day; Independence Day celebrations: Richmond, Va. Rivers, Prince, 127. See also Hamburg, S.C. Roosevelt, Theodore, 216 Ruffin, Frank, 186, 266 (n. 153) Ruffin, Josephine, 178 Ryan, Mary, 35 St. Helena Island, S.C., 45–46, 49 Savannah, Ga., 26, 133–34. See also Emancipation Day celebrations: Savannah, Ga. Saville, Julie, 83 Saxton, Rufus B., 20, 21, 28 Scruggs, Lawson Andrew, 174, 177 Segregation (de jure), 136–37, 191– 92, 202, 203 Semicentennial (of Emancipation), 12, 220–24; Raleigh, N.C., 220–22; Augusta, Ga., 222; Savannah, Ga., 223; Houston, Tex., 223; Mobile, Ala., 223; Hopkinsville, Ky., 223 Shaw, Robert Gould, 9

Sherman, William T.: Field Order 15, 109 Smith, James, 134 Social Darwinism, 257–58 (n. 24) Soldiers, 14, 21–22, 23, 29. See also Commemoration—African American: troops and militias in Southern Advance Association, 134–35 Southern Historical Society (SHS), 134–35, 143 Spanish-American War, 194, 203, 216, 217 Springfield Baptist Church, 27, 47, 51, 222, 233 (n. 47) Stephens, Alexander, 113, 119; on North-South reunion, 114–15, 251– 52 (n. 59) Steward, Theophilus Gould, 42; on history of slavery, 179–80 Suffrage, 57–60, 61, 66, 70, 76, 78–80, 81, 92–94, 162, 165, 195, 209–10, 237 (n. 86), 244 (n. 24). See also African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church: and citizenship; African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church: and Fifteenth Amendment; Commemoration—African American: Fifteenth Amendment; Disenfranchisement; Women’s suffrage Sumner, Charles, 150–51, 165 Supreme Court: Dred Scott case, 32; civil rights cases, 136, 166; Plessy v. Ferguson, 191 Talks for the Times (Crogman), 163–64, 205 Taney, Roger B., 32 Tanner, Benjamin Tucker, 121; on founding of African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, 65, 66; against emigration, 118–19

302 index Taylor, Rev. James, 219 Terrell, Mary Church, 177 Thomas, Ella Gertrude Clanton, 52–53 Thompson, E. P., 41 Tilden, Samuel B., 130 Tillson, Davis, 43–45 Townsend, James M., 142 Truth, Sojourner, 79 Tubman, Harriet, 178 Turner, Henry McNeal, 8, 60, 75, 138, 222; as Emancipation Day speaker, 47–52; on black achievements throughout history, 51; on rights of black men, 75, 78, 79, 253 (n. 75); on history of slavery, 76; on sexual abuse of enslaved women, 77; on African Methodist Episcopal Church and black manhood, 80; on Fifteenth Amendment, 92–93, 104; on expulsion of black legislators in Georgia, 101; on decline of Republican Party in Georgia, 130–31; proemigration, 167–68, 178–79, 263 (n. 99) Union League, 56, 80–81, 85, 96, 99, 113, 147, 241 (n. 1) Vance, Zebulon, 152–53 Virginia, 13, 15, 16 Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute, 147, 176 Voice from the South; by a Black Woman of the South (Cooper), 172, 174 Walker, G. Rivers, 114 Walker, Maggie Lena, 216

Walls, Josiah T., 125 Washington, Booker T., 141, 209, 213– 14, 216 Washington, Josephine Turpin, 148, 228; on women’s achievements and equality with men, 173–77 Wells-Barnett, Ida B., 137; on women’s accomplishments and African American progress, 171–72, 176–78 West Indian emancipation, 18, 25 White, Shane, 18 White, William Jefferson, 100, 102, 206; as commemorative speaker, 103, 104 Williams, Daniel B., 147; opposed to emigration, 168; on women and African American progress, 176–77 Wilmington, N.C., massacre, 190, 206 Wilson, Woodrow, 223 Women. See Commemoration—African American: women in; Commemoration—African American: and ideologies of womanhood Women of Distinction (Scruggs), 174, 177 Women’s Centennial Committee, 125 Women’s suffrage, 79–80 Woodson, G. Carter, 197 The Work of the Afro-American Woman (Mossell), 173–74 Wright, Richard R., 228; on interracial cooperation, 162; on women and African American progress, 176; on future of African Americans, 224–25 Yoder, Jacob, 88

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