A Black Philadelphia Reader
A Black Philadelphia Reader

Author: Louis J. Parascandola

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2024-06-11

Total Pages: 381

ISBN-13: 0271098260

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The relationship between the City of Brotherly Love and its Black residents has been complicated from the city’s founding through the present day. A Black Philadelphia Reader traces this complex history in the words of Black writers who were native to, lived in, or had significant connections to the city. Featuring the works of famous authors—including W. E. B. Du Bois, Harriet Jacobs, Sonia Sanchez and John Edgar Wideman—alongside lesser-known voices, this reader is an immersive and enriching composite portrait of the Black experience in Philadelphia. Through fiction and nonfiction, poetry and prose, readers witness episodes of racial prejudice and gender inequality in areas like public health, housing, education, policing, criminal justice, and public transportation. And yet amid these myriad challenges, the writers convey an enduring faith, a love of family and community, and a hope that Philadelphia will fulfill its promises to its Black citizens. Thoughtfully introduced and accompanied by notes that contextualize the works and aid readers’ comprehension, this book will appeal to a wide audience of Philadelphians and other readers interested in American, African American, and urban studies.

William Still and the Underground Railroad
William Still and the Underground Railroad

Author: Lurey Khan

Publisher: iUniverse

Published: 2010-03-29

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781440186271

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The Stills were the prototypical African American family who lived, worked, and sometimes prospered before, during, and after the Civil War. History is replete with the selfless contributions of these black individuals. Beginning in the waning decades of the 18th century on Maryland's Eastern Shore, a slave named Levin Steel confronted his slave master with a demand his owner could not ignore-his urge to be a free man. He bought himself, settled in the Pines of Burlington County, New Jersey, in 1806, and was soon joined there by his self-emancipated wife, Charity. The dynasty these hardworking former slaves began in 1807 produced a bevy of freeborn children, who were the ancestors of our central character, William Still. Although it was William who ran station two, the hub of the American Underground Railroad in Philadelphia, beginning in the 1840s, his siblings accomplished a staggering list of professional, entrepreneurial, social welfare, and legal activities while the mass of American slaves lay in chains in the South. After the Civil War, when emancipation came to the slaves, William Still, a successful coal merchant, used his own money to finance a host of civil rights and other social reforms to elevate the freed men arriving in the city.

But One Race
But One Race

Author: Margaret Hope Bacon

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2012-02-01

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 0791480429

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Born in South Carolina to a wealthy white father and mixed race mother, Robert Purvis (1810–1898) was one of the nineteenth century's leading black abolitionists and orators. In this first biography of Purvis, Margaret Hope Bacon uses his eloquent and often fierce speeches to provide a glimpse into the life of a passionate and distinguished man, intimately involved with a wide range of major reform movements, including abolition, civil rights, Underground Railroad activism, women's rights, Irish Home Rule, Native American rights, and prison reform. Citing his role in developing the Philadelphia Vigilant Committee, an all black organization that helped escaped slaves secure passage to the North, the New York Times described Purvis at the time of his death as the president of the Underground Railroad. Voicing his opposition to a decision by the state of Pennsylvania to disenfranchise black voters in 1838, Purvis declared "there is but one race, the human race." But One Race is the dramatic story of one of the most important figures of his time.

"We Will Be Satisfied With Nothing Less"

Author: Hugh Davis

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2011-08-15

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 0801463653

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Historians have focused almost entirely on the attempt by southern African Americans to attain equal rights during Reconstruction. However, the northern states also witnessed a significant period of struggle during these years. Northern blacks vigorously protested laws establishing inequality in education, public accommodations, and political life and challenged the Republican Party to live up to its stated ideals. In "We Will Be Satisfied With Nothing Less", Hugh Davis concentrates on the two issues that African Americans in the North considered most essential: black male suffrage rights and equal access to the public schools. Davis connects the local and the national; he joins the specifics of campaigns in places such as Cincinnati, Detroit, and San Francisco with the work of the National Equal Rights League and its successor, the National Executive Committee of Colored Persons. The narrative moves forward from their launching of the equal rights movement in 1864 to the "end" of Reconstruction in the North two decades later. The struggle to gain male suffrage rights was the centerpiece of the movement's agenda in the 1860s, while the school issue remained a major objective throughout the period. Following the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, northern blacks devoted considerable attention to assessing their place within the Republican Party and determining how they could most effectively employ the franchise to protect the rights of all citizens.

Civil War Issues in Philadelphia, 1856-1865
Civil War Issues in Philadelphia, 1856-1865

Author: William Dusinberre

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2017-11-15

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 1512815675

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Philadelphia, before the Confederate bombardment of Fort Sumter, was not simply a "Northern" city. Unlike proslavery Washington but also unlike antislavery Boston, Philadelphia lay in the "Northern border area," where mixed sympathies led to divided loyalties and to frequent convulsions over the great issues that preceded the war. In Civil War Issues in Philadelphia, 1856-1865, author William Dusinberre examines three traditional interpretations of the war and shows how each has to be modified to fit Philadelphia's experience. In Part I he portrays the fundamental Philadelphia attitudes as they appeared in 1856 and the two main controversies—the fugitive slave question and the territorial issue—as they developed until 1858. Part II is devoted to the John Brown affair and the secession crisis. Part III analyzes wartime issues: the treatment of dissenters, the Negro question, and the recruitment of short-term soldiers when Confederate armies approached Pennsylvania. From this investigation emerges a vivid portrait of the North's second greatest city and its leading citizens—racist sympathizers with the South, cautious conciliators, firm conservatives, unconstrained anti-Southerners, outnumbered idealists—contending with the crisis of the Civil War periods.

Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North
Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North

Author: Patrick Rael

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2003-01-14

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 0807875031

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Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Martin Delany--these figures stand out in the annals of black protest for their vital antislavery efforts. But what of the rest of their generation, the thousands of other free blacks in the North? Patrick Rael explores the tradition of protest and sense of racial identity forged by both famous and lesser-known black leaders in antebellum America and illuminates the ideas that united these activists across a wide array of divisions. In so doing, he reveals the roots of the arguments that still resound in the struggle for justice today. Mining sources that include newspapers and pamphlets of the black national press, speeches and sermons, slave narratives and personal memoirs, Rael recovers the voices of an extraordinary range of black leaders in the first half of the nineteenth century. He traces how these activists constructed a black American identity through their participation in the discourse of the public sphere and how this identity in turn informed their critiques of a nation predicated on freedom but devoted to white supremacy. His analysis explains how their place in the industrializing, urbanizing antebellum North offered black leaders a unique opportunity to smooth over class and other tensions among themselves and successfully galvanize the race against slavery.

The Negro Leagues, 1869-1960
The Negro Leagues, 1869-1960

Author: Leslie A. Heaphy

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2015-03-13

Total Pages: 1035

ISBN-13: 1476603057

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At his induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame, former Negro League player Buck Leonard said, "Now, we in the Negro Leagues felt like we were contributing something to baseball, too, when we were playing.... We loved the game.... But we thought that we should have and could have made the major leagues." The Negro Leagues had some of the best talent in baseball but from their earliest days the players were segregated from those leagues that received all the recognition. This history of the Negro Leagues begins with the second half of the 19th century and the early attempts by African American players to be allowed to play with white teammates, and progresses through the "Gentleman's Agreement" in the 1890s which kept baseball segregated. The establishment of the first successful Negro League in 1920 is covered and various aspects of the game for the players discussed (lodgings, travel accommodations, families, difficulties because of race, off-season jobs, play and life in Latin America). In 1960, the Birmingham Black Barons went out of business and took the Negro Leagues with them. There are many stories of individual players, owners, umpires, and others involved with the Negro Leagues in the U.S. and Latin America, along with photos, appendices, notes, bibliography and index.

Vigilance
Vigilance

Author: Andrew K. Diemer

Publisher: Knopf

Published: 2022-11-01

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 0593534395

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The remarkable and inspiring story of William Still, an unknown abolitionist who dedicated his life to managing a critical section of the Underground Railroad in Philadelphia—the free state directly north of the Mason-Dixon Line—helping hundreds of people escape from slavery. Born free in 1821 to two parents who had been enslaved, William Still was drawn to antislavery work from a young age. Hired as a clerk at the Anti-Slavery office in Philadelphia after teaching himself to read and write, he began directly assisting enslaved people who were crossing over from the South into freedom. Andrew Diemer captures the full range and accomplishments of Still’s life, from his resistance to Fugitive Slave Laws and his relationship with John Brown before the war, to his long career fighting for citizenship rights and desegregation until the early twentieth century. Despite Still’s disappearance from history books, during his lifetime he was known as “the Father of the Underground Railroad.” Working alongside Harriet Tubman and others at the center of the struggle for Black freedom, Still helped to lay the groundwork for long-lasting activism in the Black community, insisting that the success of their efforts lay not in the work of a few charismatic leaders, but in the cultivation of extensive grassroots networks. Through meticulous research and engaging writing, Vigilance establishes William Still in his rightful place in American history as a major figure of the abolitionist movement.

In the Shadow of the Civil War
In the Shadow of the Civil War

Author: Nat Brandt

Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 9781570036873

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Six years before the onset of the Civil War, two courageous figures - one a free white man and one an enslaved black woman - risked personal liberty to ensure each other's freedom in an explosive episode that captured the attention of a nation on the brink of cataclysmic change. In this deeply researched account of the rescue of the slave Jane Johnson by the Philadelphia Quaker and fervent abolitionist Passmore Williamson, of the federal court case that followed, and of Johnson's selfless efforts to free the jailed Williamson, veteran journalist Nat Brandt and Emmy-winning filmmaker Yanna Kroyt Brandt capture the heroism and humanity at the heart of this important moment in American history. written plea from Johnson and rushed to the Camden ferry dock to liberate her and her two children from their master in a daring confrontation. Unbeknownst to the abolitionists, Johnson's owner, Col. John Hill Wheeler, was connected to the highest levels of government and was a personal friend of President Franklin Pierce. As a result, Wheeler was able to have Williamson arrested and confined to Moyamensing Prison, an institution notorious for harboring Philadelphia's worst criminals. with famous leaders of the abolitionist movement, black and white, visiting the prisoner. In one of the episode's most dramatic moments, Johnson returned to Philadelphia, risking her own freedom, to testify on Williamson's behalf. There were petitions in many states to impeach Judge John Kintzing Kane, who stubbornly refused to release Williamson. The case became a battle of wills between a man who was unwavering in his defiance of slavery and another determined to defend the so-called rights of the slave owner. Williamson's martyrdom spotlighted Philadelphia as one northern city where the growing rifts between states' rights, federal mandates, and personal liberties had come to the fore. drama, and the rise of a cult of celebrity, the Brandts' brisk narrative takes readers into the lives of the central participants in this complex episode. Passmore Williamson, Jane Johnson, William Still, Colonel Wheeler, and Judge Kane are brought vibrantly to life as fully developed and flawed characters drawn unexpectedly into the annals of history. In the Shadow of the Civil War chronicles events that presage the divisive national conflict that followed and that underscore the passionate views on freedom and justice that continue to define the American experience.