Building An Antislavery Wall

Building an Antislavery Wall

Building an Antislavery Wall

In Building an Antislavery Wall, R. J. M. Blackett examines the efforts of black Americans in England to advance the cause of their own freedom. Speaking to enthusiastic working-class crowds in the cities and lobbying in the salons of the wealthy and aristocratic, black Americans used England as a forum to tell the world of their cruel plight in the United States, to expose what they saw as an oppressive slave society masquerading as the seat of democracy and freedom. It was their goal to create a moral cordon around the United States so that, in the words of Frederick Douglass, “wherever a slaveholder went, he might hear nothing but denunciation of slavery, that he might be looked upon as a man-stealing, cradle-robbing, woman-stripping monster, and that he might see reproof and detestation on every hand.” The American blacks who visited England between 1830 and 1860 came there for various specific reasons—some to raise funds for projects at home, some to receive the education that they had been denied by American colleges, many for refuge from slave-catchers. But every black saw himself, at least to some extent, as an emissary from his enslaved brethren in America, and he was treated as such by British society. Some—Frederick Douglass and Martin R. Delany, for example—were already famous; others, like Henry “Box” Brown and James Watkins, would gain fame through their lecturing while in England. Some of the blacks who came to England were ministers; others were doctors, journalists, and authors of slave narratives. Clearly gifted and articulate individuals, these black Americans stood as living proof of slavery’s unfairness, flesh-and-blood refutations of America’s boasted freedom. Tracing the impact of the black Americans, Blackett concludes that they were very effective spokesmen who significantly advanced the cause of the Atlantic abolitionist movement. British support had monetary as well as symbolic value, and the popularity of the blacks as lecturers gave them a special edge in both fund-raising and proselytizing. At the same time, while organized white abolitionist societies expended much of their energy on sectarian disputes, the blacks sought to bridge these differences in the hope of marshaling the full weight of British opinion in their favor. The blacks played an especially important role, Blackett finds, in discrediting the American Colonization Society—their adamant opposition made it difficult for colonizationists to convince the British that their plan was in the blacks’ best interest. Chronicling the efforts of black Americans to win international support for their struggles at home, Building an Antislavery Wall illuminates an important chapter in the history of American reform and in the emergence of an articulate black leadership in the United States.

Black Prophets of Justice

In Black Prophets of Justice, David E. Swift examines the interlocking careers and influence of six black clergymen, two of them fugitive slaves, who lived in the antebellum North and protested the racism of the time. Samuel Cornish, Theodore Wright, Charles Ray, Henry Highland Garnet, Amos Beman, and James Pennington had much in common: all were noted for their education and eloquence, all were ministers of the earliest black Presbyterian and Congregational churches, and all were activists toward social change.Preachers as well as activists, these men fought, Swift argues, for the melding of religious life and social protest that informed their own lives. As leaders of the black congregations in the primarily white Presbyterian and Congregational denominations, they bore witness to the power of God and the essential oneness and worth of all human beings. As activists, they embraced a wide variety of issues -- including abolitionism, education, fugitive classes, and the civil and political rights -- that greatly affected the lives of Afro-Americans. As editors of the first black newspapers, they unmasked the racism implicit in the movement to colonize freed slaves outside of the United States and in the segregation of black worshipers in white churches. They organized vigilance committees to help escaped slaves, and they held conventions of free blacks in New York and Connecticut that aimed to win rights for blacks through legislation. By teaching Afro-Americans about the glories of their African past and the achievements of more recent individuals of African descent, these leaders grappled with the pernicious heritage of blacks' self-doubt caused by generations of enslavement and white insistence on black inferiority.While they opened the eyes of some influential whites, these activists effected little change in the attitudes and practices of white Americans in their own time. But their contribution to the advancement of the black cause, argues Swift, was substantial. They fed black aspiration, sharpened black discontent, and harnessed both to the creation of new black institutions. Indeed, they laid the foundation for such twentieth-century movements as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.Black Prophets of Justice is a biography of six widely respected clergymen as well as an important discussion of Afro-American activism in the North before the Civil War. Well-researched and well-written, it will be of interest to American church historians, and to all those concerned with Afro-American history or with the social impact of religion in America.