The history and contributions of African Americans in northeast Indiana have been largely overlooked. This new publication, African Americans in Fort Wayne: The First 200 Years, does not claim to be a definitive history of the topic. It does, however, recognize and honor the pioneers who have made the African-American community in Fort Wayne what it is today. Through diary excerpts, oral histories, and studies of social organizations, religion, and community, a rich, 200-year heritage is vividly depicted. The story begins in 1794, when evidence points to the first black inhabitant of Fort Wayne. The first known, free black in the area was identified in 1809. During the early part of the 1800s, Indiana state funds partially financed a movement to send Indiana blacks to Liberia. Few left, and those who remained worked diligently to make Fort Wayne their own. The fruits of their labor can be partially seen in the development of the first black church, Turner Chapel A.M.E., which was started in 1849 and has been a pillar of the community since its completion. A migration of African Americans from the south, due to industrialization, greatly increased the population from 1913 through 1927, and new churches, organizations, and opportunities were developed. Today, the black community in Fort Wayne is rightfully proud of its extensive past.
Scholars of the Underground Railroad as well as those in borderland studies will appreciate the interdisciplinary mix and unique contributions of this volume.
Martin Robinson Delany was the quintessential nineteenth century activist. He used his talents to live a full life as a physician, army officer, author, politician, journalist, abolitionist, and pioneer Black nationalist. Among his wirting The Condition Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States is often considered his seminal and most controversial work. It was first published in 1852, a time of intense conflict between proslavery and antislavery forces. Delany used The Condition, Elevation, Emigration to analyze this conflict and its probable solution. Crafting a skillful argument, he attacked slavery and the subjugation of Black people.He recorded their achievements in business, agriculture, literature, the military, and other professions. Concluding that Blacks would never be allowed to coexist with whites, Delany completed his analysis by suggesting possible locations for Black emigration.
This volume introduces a new way to study the experiences of runaway slaves by defining different “spaces of freedom” they inhabited. It also provides a groundbreaking continental view of fugitive slave migration, moving beyond the usual regional or national approaches to explore locations in Canada, the U.S. North and South, Mexico, and the Caribbean. Using newspapers, advertisements, and new demographic data, contributors show how events like the Revolutionary War and westward expansion shaped the slave experience. Contributors investigate sites of formal freedom, where slavery was abolished and refugees were legally free, to determine the extent to which fugitive slaves experienced freedom in places like Canada while still being subject to racism. In sites of semiformal freedom, as in the northern United States, fugitives’ claims to freedom were precarious because state abolition laws conflicted with federal fugitive slave laws. Contributors show how local committees strategized to interfere with the work of slave catchers to protect refugees. Sites of informal freedom were created within the slaveholding South, where runaways who felt relocating to distant destinations was too risky formed maroon communities or attempted to blend in with free black populations. These individuals procured false documents or changed their names to avoid detection and pass as free. The essays discuss slaves’ motivations for choosing these destinations, the social networks that supported their plans, what it was like to settle in their new societies, and how slave flight impacted broader debates about slavery. This volume redraws the map of escape and emancipation during this period, emphasizing the importance of place in defining the meaning and extent of freedom. Contributors: Kyle Ainsworth | Mekala Audain | Gordon S. Barker | Sylviane A. Diouf | Roy E. Finkenbine | Graham Russell Gao Hodges | Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie | Viola Franziska Müller | James David Nichols | Damian Alan Pargas | Matthew Pinsker A volume in the series Southern Dissent, edited by Stanley Harrold and Randall M. Miller
A Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the mistreatment of black Americans. In this 'precise and eloquent work' - as described in its Pulitzer Prize citation - Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history - an 'Age of Neoslavery' that thrived in the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II. Using a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, Blackmon unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude thereafter. By turns moving, sobering and shocking, this unprecedented account reveals these stories, the companies that profited the most from neoslavery, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today.
The pioneering work in the study of the role of Black Americans during Reconstruction by the most influential Black intellectual of his time. This pioneering work was the first full-length study of the role black Americans played in the crucial period after the Civil War, when the slaves had been freed and the attempt was made to reconstruct American society. Hailed at the time, Black Reconstruction in America 1860–1880 has justly been called a classic.