Contains a historical survey and sketches of African Americans and African American life and society in Cincinnati, Ohio. The author, the son of a former slave, served as the first African American city paymaster and was the first president of the local chapter of the NAACP. Founder and editor of the Cincinnati newspapers "The Ohio enterprise" (1902-1907) and "The Union" (1907-1952), Dabney used these newspapers as a way to champion the cause of African Americans.
In 1926 Wendell Phillips Dabney published his first book, Cincinnati's Colored Citizens, which was an unprecedented review of the city's most successful and important African American citizens. Never before had a publication marshaled together such an immense amount of historical, sociological, statistical, and biographical information about Cincinnati's black community. Its nine chapters, well illustrated with photographs, provided a wealth of information about black schools, churches, businesses, property owners, benevolent organizations, and much more. Cincinnati's Colored Citizens remains today an important piece of Cincinnati's rich African American heritage and a critical resource for those interested in the history of the Queen City.
Nineteenth-century Cincinnati was northern in its geography, southern in its economy and politics, and western in its commercial aspirations. While those identities presented a crossroad of opportunity for native whites and immigrants, African Americans endured economic repression and a denial of civil rights, compounded by extreme and frequent mob violence. No other northern city rivaled Cincinnati's vicious mob spirit. Frontiers of Freedom follows the black community as it moved from alienation and vulnerability in the 1820s toward collective consciousness and, eventually, political self-respect and self-determination. As author Nikki M. Taylor points out, this was a community that at times supported all-black communities, armed self-defense, and separate, but independent, black schools. Black Cincinnati's strategies to gain equality and citizenship were as dynamic as they were effective. When the black community united in armed defense of its homes and property during an 1841 mob attack, it demonstrated that it was no longer willing to be exiled from the city as it had been in 1829. Frontiers of Freedom chronicles alternating moments of triumph and tribulation, of pride and pain; but more than anything, it chronicles the resilience of the black community in a particularly difficult urban context at a defining moment in American history.
There is probably no better way to catch the flavor of a time period or of a people than by perusing the pages of contemporary periodicals. The problem is that very often newspapers, newsletters, and magazines are not saved and preserved as the precious historical record that they represent. This is doubly true of the ephemera of African-Americans in by-gone eras for a number of reasons. First of all, periodicals are intended at their inception to be for immediate consumption and not for posterity. Their own creators, the many editors and publishers referenced here, were probably too busy to worry about preserving their publications. Unlike artifacts or material goods, paper products are likely to disintegrate if not properly stored. And institutions, such as archives and libraries, where they might have been collected, tend to be white-dominated and not to value information pertaining to African-Americans until fairly recently. With the passage of time, the precious record of African-American life that is recorded in African-American publications is too often lost to later generations. Not only are the newspapers themselves often lost, but the memories of their impact disappear with each death of a community elder who remembers the personalities and issues involved. That is why Najiyyah Duncan’s work in researching the history of Cincinnati’s African-American newspapers is so important. Not only did Ms. Duncan scour local and national collections to determine where old Cincinnati newspapers were archived, but she also located individuals who had retained some precious copies privately. If she saw a citation for a Cincinnati newspaper in one of the few books published on the topic of African-American newspapers, she did everything within her power to try to locate extant copies. Then she scrutinized what was in the papers, recording information about founders, editors, dates of publication, mastheads, news stories, and typical contents, including businesses that advertised in the papers. By interviewing people who still remembered some of the earlier publications and the personalities behind them, Ms. Duncan supplements what she found in print. Although her main focus is on African-American newspapers published in Cincinnati, she also shares here what she found in the way of other types of local African-American publications as well as newspapers published elsewhere but circulated in Cincinnati. All of this is very important to anyone interested in how we got to where we are today in matters of culture and race. I know from personal experience while researching the life of Maurice McCrackin, a white minister who lived among African-Americans in Cincinnati’s West End and worked tirelessly to end racism and war, how important it is to have a balanced historical record to draw on. Such a record, however, is useful to far more than writers and historians. Anyone inspired to address today’s complex social inequities needs to know what has gone before. Furthermore, the record of any group should be articulated by members of that group rather than filtered and interpreted by the majority or dominant group. One of the first African-Americans to articulate the importance of this idea was John Brown Russwurm. In the first edition of the first African-American newspaper published in the United States, Freedom’s Journal in 1827, Russwurm wrote: “We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us. To long has the public been deceived by misrepresentations, in things which concern us dearly” (Quoted by Mary Sagarin in John Brown Russwurm: The Story of Freedom’s Journal, Freedom’s Journey. NY: Lothrop, Lee & Shepart, 1970, 57). Najiyyah Duncan has paid homage to Russwurm’s vision and a long history of self-articulation among African-American journalists by her efforts here in describing Cincinnati’s heritage o
Since the nineteenth century, the Ohio River has represented a great divide for African Americans. It provided a passage to freedom along the underground railroad, and during the industrial age, it was a boundary between the Jim Crow South and the urban North. The Ohio became known as the "River Jordan," symbolizing the path to the promised land. In the urban centers of Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Louisville, and Evansville, blacks faced racial hostility from outside their immediate neighborhoods as well as class, color, and cultural fragmentation among themselves. Yet despite these pressures, African Americans were able to create vibrant new communities as former agricultural workers transformed themselves into a new urban working class. Unlike most studies of black urban life, Trotter's work considers several cities and compares their economic conditions, demographic makeup, and political and cultural conditions. Beginning with the arrival of the first blacks in the Ohio Valley, Trotter traces the development of African American urban centers through the civil rights movement and the developments of recent years.
"Provides a rich prism through which to explore the social, economic, and political development of black Cincinnati. These studies offer insight into both the dynamics of racism and a community's changing responses to it." -- Peter Rachleff, author of Black Labor in Richmond
