The Atlantic Voyage and Black Radicalism

Abstract

Chapter 5 looks at the Atlantic crossing from the United States to Great Britain, where colored travelers shifted their protest strategies at sea. Black abolitionists made this journey between the 1830s and the 1860s, and they found that even British-owned steamship companies practiced segregation. Interestingly, however, black activists did not take on Atlantic captains and ship proprietors with the same ferocity that they had conductors back home. In part, this was because the ocean voyage, which lasted between nine and fourteen days, was too confining and dangerous to defy white vigilantes. Yet, more importantly, colored travelers also knew that desegregating Atlantic steamships was hardly the endgame. Rather, colored travelers relaxed their protest strategies while on board and remained focused on the significance of the trip itself. They wanted to reach foreign shores, connect with British abolitionists, and most of all see if the promises were true that abroad African Americans could experience true freedom of mobility, a right that eluded them at home. This is not to suggest that activists did not protest segregation on British steamships. They did, but without the physical assertiveness they adopted in the fight against the Jim Crow car. The story of Frederick Douglass’s harrowing transatlantic voyage in 1845 shows this. An analysis of early nineteenth- century shipboard culture and the British-owned Cunard steamship line illustrates how, for colored travelers, the transatlantic voyage emerged as a liminal phase between American racism and their perceptions of British and European egalitarianism.