Free Black Research Articles

Exquisite Slaves: Race, Clothing, and Status in Colonial Lima

Exquisite Slaves centers on clothing and its unique ability to convey an unspoken language of status. Tamara Walker argues that dress served two purposes: it was central to elite dominance and claims of superiority, while it simultaneously provided the means for enslaved men and women to challenge those dominant norms. By examining material culture, Walker examines the racialization of Blackness in colonial and republican Lima, Peru. Her work engages scholars, such as Herman Bennett, Ira Berlin, and Rebecca Earle, who study the legal use and social ramifications of clothing by enslaved people throughout the Americas. Her work, however, shifts the focus to not just the bodies that wore the clothing but also the visual representation of clothing in print culture.Walker uses legal codes, edicts, newsletters, criminal cases, notarial records, wills, and runaway ads to delve into the body politics of Lima. Walker refers to these sources as “fragments” that reveal how clothing took on meaning through “writing . . . acquiring . . . selling . . . and wearing” (pp. 12–13). The book has six chapters that are organized thematically and demonstrate clothing's importance in a society whose bedrock was social hierarchy. The first half of the book details the body politics of dress and how it empowered both slaveholders and the enslaved to break the law; the second half explores dress in print culture and the intended audience for such publications.Chapters 1–3 reveal that Black bodies were constantly disputed spaces. Chapter 1 provides a social and cultural history of Lima centered on sumptuary policies. This chapter sets the stage for a discussion of body politics and highlights the measures taken by Spaniards to break sumptuary laws and use clothing to cover and create an ideal image of Blackness. Chapters 2 and 3 delve into the enslaved population's lived experiences of quotidian activities and their access to clothing. Chapter 2 focuses on the gendered roles of enslaved men and women and their self-fashioning, and their ability to politicize their bodies by way of dress. This self-fashioning often allowed both enslaved men and women to become empowered as they looked to acquire elegance and attire to reclaim their masculinity or femininity. Chapter 3 discusses the results of enslaved and freed men and women's acquired clothing. At times, Walker argues, the procurement of certain garments blurred the strict lines of social hierarchy to such an extent that enslaved and freed men and women reclaimed their coveted bodies, transforming them from units of labor to loving individuals. Her use of wills in this chapter not only reveals the clothing bequeathed to enslaved and freed people but also highlights the intimate relationships formed between slaveholder and the enslaved and between enslaved and freed families.The second half of the book delves into print culture and the visual representations of clothing. Walker's analysis of casta paintings in chapter 4 is to be commended for reminding us that Mexico was not the only place to create casta paintings; furthermore, her method of tracing over generations the use of garments such as headcloth reveals that the goal of these paintings was to emphasize social grooming and institutionalized whitening. Chapter 5 deals with runaway ads and their descriptions of dress. It stands in stark contrast to chapter 4, in which these casta paintings extolled whiteness purity over time. In this chapter clothing is used as a marker to capture rebellious acts of Blackness. Chapter 6 delves into the republican period and the paintings of Francisco “Pancho” Fierro, which depict Black men and women in elegant wear. These paintings suggest that the new republic was egalitarian. The book's epilogue examines the newspaper El Negro to reveal that in the republican period the use of elegant dress by enslaved and free Blacks brought humiliation, instead of emulation experienced in the colonial period. As a result, Walker's book ends with the racialization of Blackness in which Blackness is affiliated with deception and is deemed deserving of discrimination and mockery.Walker's book has stitched together various fragments that remind us that Black life matters and that Black lives constantly sought ways to reclaim their humanity. However, I have one small quibble with this otherwise creative and noteworthy book: Walker's thematic approach requires a careful read for those not familiar with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Peruvian history, a transformative period characterized by the racialization of Blackness. Students and experts interested in the African diaspora, material culture, racial identity, the formation of Blackness, and gender will surely benefit from this book. If clothes truly make the man, Walker skillfully demonstrates that enslaved women and men and freed ladies and gentlemen used clothing as shields that protected and projected their bodies to become representations of who they wanted to be.

Toward a Black Ecomusicology, 1853? Listening to Enslavement with Solomon Northup

In his 1853 autobiographical narrative, Twelve Years a Slave, violinist Solomon Northup recounts his own experience of being abducted and sold into slavery for twelve years. Born as a free Black man with significant musical experience prior to enslavement, Northup offers considerable detail about his sonic (and musical) experiences, frequently situating them in a broader environmental context of slave plantations, land- and riverscapes of the American South, and their remediations in print/musical notation. In asserting a salient connection between environment, race, and sound, Northup's memoir points to possible limitations in conceptualizations of the environment that have predominated in recent ecomusicology but have tended to efface the issues of race. I sketch here a prehistory of ecomusicology that grapples directly with the sonic legacies of transatlantic slavery, underscoring how landscape might be understood not as a space of solitude or contemplation, but rather of economic exploitation and violence. Like other areas in musicology, ecomusicology has been hindered by its reliance on a “white racial frame” that tends to presume certain kinds of subjectivity and possible relationships with the environment. When considered from this perspective, Northup's account offers an important, if harrowing, reminder of the complex entanglements of environment, race, sound, economy, and violence.

Race, Ramos, and the Second Amendment Standard of Review

Gun control in the United States has a racist history. Nevertheless, federal courts and academics have invoked Southern gun restrictions enacted after the Civil War to suggest that history supports stringent regulation of the right to bear arms. We argue that courts’ reliance on these restrictions is illegitimate. Drawing on original research, we reveal how the post-war South restricted gun-ownership for racist reasons, deployed its new laws to disarm free blacks, yet allowed whites to bear arms with near impunity. We then show how modern reliance on these laws contravenes the Supreme Court’s decision in Ramos v. Louisiana, which deemed similarly tainted statutes unconstitutional. Since the Court will soon consider the validity of modern limits on concealed carry, placing Southern gun restrictions in their proper historical context matters today more than ever. While Southern gun control after the Civil War might tell us something about how the South sought to preserve white supremacy, it tells us almost nothing about the proper scope of the Second Amendment.

Upheavals in Black Thought

Upheavals in Black Thought

A Black Jurist in a Slave Society: Antonio Pereira Rebouças and the Trials of Brazilian Citizenship

A Black Jurist in a Slave Society: Antonio Pereira Rebouças and the Trials of Brazilian Citizenship

The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World

The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World

Finding Afro-Mexico: Race and Nation after the Revolution

Finding Afro-Mexico: Race and Nation after the Revolution

“We Chilluns, Long wid Her, Wuz Lak de Udder Slaves”: Free Black Families and Quasi-slavery in the Late Antebellum Era

This article shows how and why some free black families ended up living among the enslaved in the late antebellum era. Enslavers brought free people of colour into forms of informal quasi-slavery that differed little from enslavement despite their free legal status. Despite a lack of evidence, piecing together free blacks’ experiences through surviving sources reveals much about the porous boundary between slavery and freedom where enslavers manipulated marginality for financial gain. There was no sharp delineation between slavery and freedom but instead a continuum of oppression characterized by varying degrees of persecution and fragile freedoms.

Sharing Hidden Histories: The XRchaeology at Miller Grove, a Free African American Community in Southern Illinois

ABSTRACT XRchaeology at Miller Grove is a web-based collection of new media components, including digital storytelling, geographic information systems, virtual tours, three-dimensional objects, and web-based virtual reality presentations. XRchaeology contributes to revisions of traditional narratives about free African Americans and the network of escape routes referred to as the Underground Railroad (UGRR). This project focuses attention on potential African American “conductors” in the UGRR and resituates African Americans as the agents of their own freedom. XRchaeology emphasizes that freedom was achieved across a continuum shaped by social, economic, and legal biases and anti-immigration sentiments. The XRchaeology application is designed for both traditional learners and non-specialist members of the public, as the project facilitates self-directed learning and evidence-based inquiry for all interest levels.

Editorial

Editorial

Abandoning the Term "Voodoo" in Medicine.

* Abbreviation: EBM — : evidence-based medicine Spend enough time around medical practitioners here in the United States and you will definitely hear the word “voodoo.” In medicine, the term is used to denote an absence of evidence or a superstitious practice, either as an apology for one’s own medical choices in the face of limited or contentious evidence or often as a disdainful dismissal of the medical choices of others. When my medical career began in the mid-to-late 90s, the term was already in use. I suspect it had been in use for some time, but it took on particular relevance in the evidence-based medicine (EBM) era. In the EBM context, it often signifies practices that lack sufficient evidence by EBM standards.1 I suggest we abandon this use of the term “voodoo” to refer to medical practices of unsure or poor quality of evidence. The problem with the use of the term “voodoo” in this dismissive or derogatory way is that Voodoo, also written Vodou, Vodun, or Vodu, is a religion. This religion grew out of the inheritances, beliefs, and experiences of mostly West African people who were enslaved and brought to the island of Quisqueya, present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic, as well as from the dynamic experiences of their descendants as they navigated a changing world of colonial power, slavery, revolution, occupation, and dictatorship. Voodoo has direct connections to several West African and Central African religious systems and practices, including the Vodun practices of the Fon people of Benin, Togo, … Address correspondence to Nathan Luna, MD, Department of Pediatrics, Kaiser Permanente Oakland Medical Center, 3600 Broadway, Oakland, CA 94611. E-mail: nathan.luna{at}kp.org

How a Catastrophe Found the Past Hurricane Floyd and the Rise of Historical Consciousness in Princeville, North Carolina

AbstractHistory has no voice. It requires those who care enough about the past to put it into words. But to narrate the past, we must be conscious of it. This paper is an inquiry into how a small town in North Carolina found its unique history in the wake of a catastrophic hurricane. In 1885, Princeville, North Carolina became the oldest town in America charted by free Blacks. In spite of its historical significance, over time the town's storied past was silenced. By the latter half of the 20th century, the unique place of Princeville in African‐American history, indeed in United States history, was known to only a few elderly people; and they did not talk about it. The reasons a muted past begins to matter are themselves rooted in history. In 1999 Princeville was flooded by the deluge that was Hurricane Floyd. In the midst of mayhem this wordless past found a voice. In this paper we explore how a massive storm created space for the emergence of an historical consciousness among the town's residents. We also look at how the people of Princeville are leveraging their new found past to secure a safer, more predictable future.

521 The legacy of racial inequality and risk of modern-day placentally mediated adverse pregnancy outcomes

Previous studies have shown an association between geographic racial prejudice and Black-White disparities in infant mortality. We sought to evaluate if women living in areas with historically high rates of racial inequities would be at greater risk of placentally-mediated adverse outcomes in the modern day. Retrospective analysis of women carrying non-anomalous singleton or twin gestations and delivering at a University-based healthcare system, 2014-2020. Women at high-risk for spontaneous ± medically indicated PTB were included in a 1:2 ratio with randomly selected low-risk controls. Each woman’s county of residence during pregnancy was linked to historic census data: (a) % enslaved Black population in 1860 (b) % of population in 1860 that was "free" Black, and (c) % of farms Black-owned in 1925. Primary outcomes were preeclampsia (PREE), small for gestational age (SGA) <10% and <3%. Data were analyzed with chi-square, t-test, and logistic regression. 39,695 women met inclusion criteria; 7.1% had PREE, 9.1% SGA<10%, and 1.6% SGA<3%. Population characteristics are shown in Table 1. The associations between PREE, SGA <10%, and SGA <3% and historic census data were mixed, Table 1. In regression models, the aOR of PREE was higher with increasing % of enslaved Black in 1860, but was higher with increasing % of population in 1860 that was free Black. In contrast, the aORs of SGA <10% and <3% were lower with increasing % of enslaved Black in 1860 and also lower with an increasing % of population in 1860 that was free Black, but higher with an increasing % of farms Black-owned in 1925 (Table 2). The odds of PREE and SGA differ among women living in counties with historically high racial inequities, as reported 95-160 years ago. In some instances, living in a county with historically “positive” measures (e.g., Black farm ownership – economic gain) was associated with worse outcomes (higher odds of SGA), highlighting that more research is needed to understand how historical racism and discrimination impact present day outcomes.View Large Image Figure ViewerDownload Hi-res image Download (PPT)

Tough, Rugged, and Evolving Masculinity: Harry Compton, an Enslaved and Free Black Man in Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century New Jersey

This article explores the little known yet intriguing life of Harry Compton (c. 1743–c. 1814), who first comes to our attention in the 1883 narrative of the life of his famed granddaughter, Silvia Dubois. An enslaved person turned independent businessman, Compton constructed a complex and evolving concept of masculinity in the face of oppression, encouraging us to understand black masculinity in slavery and freedom as a life-long pursuit of self-empowerment and personal reinvention. His story, which occurred mostly in rural New Jersey, adds nuance to scholars’ understanding of early black masculinity as a public performance that showcased one’s power and authority, or self-worth, while also providing an important example of black masculinity as a developing process. In telling Compton’s story, the article advances a number of narrative threads pertaining to eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century New Jersey, including slavery, gender, culture and economy, and the law. An analysis of Compton allows the reader to learn a great deal about the world in which he lived and, ultimately, overcame through his dynamic masculinity performed in various public settings.

Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom and the African Colonization Movement

Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom and the African Colonization Movement

A Precarious Freedom: The 1820 Philadelphia Kidnapping Crisis

In 1820, the Pennsylvania state legislature passed the nation's first liberty law. Over the course of debating this legislation, state legislators identified specific cases of free African American kidnapping victims, whose harrowing stories conjured questions related to freedom, slavery, and geographic borders. By analyzing these Philadelphia-based cases at the street level, this paper argues that the connections between and among local, state, and national politics necessitated determining whether these victims were legally enslaved or illegally kidnapped. The kidnapping crisis in Philadelphia emerged as a result of the perpetual inability of White politicians to distinguish between fugitive slave retrieval and the kidnapping of free African Americans. Yet African Americans worked with allies, White and Black, to assert their freedom at the local, state, and national levels in a country that all too often reified their status as enslaved people, despite being free or emancipated. This intriguing and complex interracial effort forced state officials to debate the stakes of Black freedom in Pennsylvania and thus revealed the inherent tensions of living as a free African American in a slaveholding republic.

Creole Sketches

New Orleans in 1878 was the most exotic and cosmopolitan city in North America. An international port, with more than 200,000 inhabitants, it was open to French, Spanish, Mexican, South American, and West Indian cultural influences, and home to a thriving population descended from free African Americans. It was also a battleground in the fight against yellow fever (malaria) and in the political upheavals that followed the end of Reconstruction. The continued influx of Anglo-Americans and the renewed ascendancy of white supremacists threatened to overwhelm the local blend of languages, races, and cultures that enlivened the unique Creole character of the city. Writing for an English-language newspaper, Lafcadio Hearn presented the speech, charm, and humor of the Creolized natives on the other side of Canal Street, and illustrated his sketches with woodcut cartoons — the first of their kind in any Southern paper. These vignettes, published in the New Orleans Daily Item during 1878-1880, capture a traditionalist urban world and its colorful characters with a delicate and sympathetic understanding.

Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism by Ben Wright

Reviewed by: Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism by Ben Wright Sean A. Scott Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism. By Ben Wright. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. Pp. 280. Notes, index.) Slavery casts a wide shadow over U.S. history, and in this important monograph Ben Wright shows how differing emphases among religious Americans ultimately doomed initial attempts to abolish it in the early republic. Some Christians focused exclusively on spreading the gospel and [End Page 208] envisioned conversion as a necessary prerequisite that would subsequently produce broader social regeneration. Others believed that the nation itself must first be purified, specifically by eradicating the sins of slavery and racism, before the message of salvation would reach the global masses. Eventually these divergent agendas split the major Protestant denominations and foreshadowed the nation’s own sectional division. At first glance this narrative seems to retrace well covered ground, but Wright subtly reframes the historical conversation in several ways. In contrast to many studies that have explored the political motivations behind abolitionism, he demonstrates that an intellectual and ideological framework influenced many antebellum Christians to shun political activity and prioritize building denominations and creating other religious institutions that furthered their emphasis on spreading salvation. Organizations such as the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions envisioned colonization of free African Americans as the best means for evangelizing Africa; therefore, many Christians of all denominational stripes supported the American Colonization Society and decried early proponents of abolition. Furthermore, by emphasizing how a person’s ideological commitment to winning souls or purifying society motivated his or her behavior, Wright moves beyond the gradualist versus immediatist dichotomy. Several scholars have explored various applications of millennial thought in the early republic, and this study underscores how its flexibility allowed both the proponents of salvation and purification to invoke it to justify their agendas. For example, Presbyterian Robert Finley envisioned denominational cooperation and networking as a means of furthering the gospel’s spread throughout the nation and thought partnering with the American Colonization Society would extend the message globally and help bring millennial dreams closer to fruition through spiritual conversions rather than by ending the suffering of enslaved people. In contrast, free African American David Walker vehemently opposed any direct linkage between colonization and salvation, and he invoked the cleansing fire of God’s wrath to be meted out on slaveholders before any millennial peace could be realized. Finally, Wright suggests that the individualist ethos that characterized the democratization of Christianity on the frontier during the early republic has overshadowed the denominational institution building that occurred simultaneously. Ironically, the initial push for salvation at the turn of the century “tightened the bonds of American slavery” but also created religious networks that birthed the reform societies, which by the 1830s “remade the bonds of the nation” through an urgent insistence on abolition (14). By refusing to acknowledge slaveholders as legitimate emissaries of salvation and demanding a pure church and nation unstained by the sin of slavery, these abolitionist reformers alienated northern antislavery moderates who had tolerated slavery among its southern members [End Page 209] to maintain denominational unity, and by the mid-1840s that tenuous thread of sectional forbearance for the sake of spreading salvation snapped under the strain of abolitionist demands for purification. Bonds of Salvation deserves a wide reading among all students of American history, and it should especially appeal to anyone interested in the intersection of slavery and race with religion. In fact, Wright’s elucidation of the early republic’s division between conversionists and purification-ists is quite relevant today as evangelical Christians are divided over how churches and seminaries should address systemic racism. Indeed, Wright’s excellent study confirms that the tension between prioritizing individual conversions versus seeking social transformation lies at the heart of U.S. religious history. Sean A. Scott Indiana Academy for Science, Mathematics, and Humanities Copyright © 2021 The Texas State Historical Association

Breathe into Believing

This begins before 1896. This begins before Arkansas. But “this can't be right grandmother. who are our Ancestors! she said, shit gal, i don't know” (Bridgforth 2012). One of my ancestors walks toward me. She be Gertrude. Gertrude Grant. I have no pictures of her. I have no living memories of her. Yet I remember. Her. My Nana's mama, born around 1890 in the lumber town of Canfield in southern Arkansas.Canfield, Arkansas, 1896We're childrenBabies reallywhen the fires startA mob is always ready to takeour wagesRun us awayAlways ready to lynch usWhen a volley of shotsbe my lullabiesI won't live to see 36I learn about the Canfield Race War of 1896 through online searches, old newspaper clippings, doctoral dissertations. Great-Grandma Gertrude would have been around six when the rioting happened, when white laborers became jealous of Black laborers and tried to push them, beat them, burn them out of town. Free library access to census documents and land deeds tells me that Gertrude's daddy, James W. Grant, purchased eighty acres of land in Canfield on February 1, 1893, perhaps thanks to the Southern Homestead Act, which made millions of acres of land available to homesteaders, including migrating and free Negroes. James and his wife, Susie A. Lewis, raised their children on their land in Canfield. How did the riots affect them, their land, their kin, their safety, their daily lives? I ask all the questions. I was raised with the permission to ask all the questions. I ask all the questions before I'm trained in the academy to ask all the questions.

Arturo Alfonso Schomburg in the Twenty-first Century: An Introduction

Arturo Alfonso Schomburg in the Twenty-first Century:An Introduction Laura E. Helton (bio) and Rafia Zafar (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Arturo Schomburg, c. 1896. (Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NYPL Digital Collections, http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47df-8851-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99) Who was Arturo (Arthur) Alfonso Schomburg and why, as we approach the sesquicentennial of his birth, do his life and work still draw us in?1 In the 1980s, coeditor Rafia Zafar, then a graduate student, read for the first time Schomburg's canonical essay, "The Negro Digs Up His Past," a text that has long served as a touchstone statement for scholars in Black studies. His often quoted imperative from that essay, that "the American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future" (231), has rallied generations of subsequent researchers and creators. For Zafar, Schomburg was a theorist of the African diasporic archive, an intellectual whose vision made possible her own academic career. Coming to Schomburg in the early 2000s and in the wake of the archival turn, coeditor Laura E. Helton, herself an archivist, saw him as part of a cadre of bibliophiles and librarians who laid the groundwork in the early twentieth century for nearly every [End Page 1] major repository in the United States devoted to Black collections. Schomburg was not the only collector of his era, but through his famous manifesto and his namesake institution, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, his story has become synonymous with the project of Black historical recovery. Schomburg's biography, which traverses Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, New York, and Europe, intrigues scholars from many fields who claim him for overlapping but distinct intellectual pantheons. He has become an icon of the diasporic turn in African American studies and a highly visible figure in Puerto Rican studies. In recent years, he has also been the subject of a children's book, works in the popular press, a play, and a new series of US postage stamps, "Voices of the Harlem Renaissance."2 With this increased attention comes an opportunity to think more expansively about his practices. Beyond his clarion call to act "more collectively, more retrospectively" in "The Negro Digs Up His Past" (231), what was the texture of Schomburg's thought and how did his ideas shift over time? What exactly did he want a Black archive to comprise? And what does his work mean today? In this special issue of African American Review, scholars of the literary, visual, and historiographic archive take up these questions, resituating Schomburg and his legacy for the twenty-first century. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 2. Studio portrait of Arthur Alfonso Schomburg as a young child, c. 1878. (Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NYPL Digital Collections, http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/3588a080-e2fe-0133-9629-00505686a51c) [End Page 2] Born in 1874 in San Juan to a mother from St. Croix, Schomburg grew up with his maternal family in Puerto Rico and St. Thomas and was likely estranged from his father, a Puerto Rican with European roots.3 The educational milieu of his early life reflected a broad tradition of popular and working-class education in the Caribbean that included informal libraries, tabaquero-led study groups, and instructional societies, often started by and for formerly enslaved and free Blacks (Ferrer 116; Hoffnung-Garskof 14–15). Before his migration as a teenager to the US, some of Schomburg's schooling took place in youth clubs and under the guidance of Puerto Rican nationalist historian José Julian Acosta, who was an important influence on Schomburg's thinking.4 In one version of the mutable stories Schomburg conjured when asked why he became such an incurable bibliophile, he told the Pittsburgh Courier that, among the members of these clubs, there was a tendency among the whites and near-whites to point with more pride to the achievements of their white ancestors, than the blacks seemed able to do of their ancestors. Mr. Schomburg noted this and made it a point to study up...