Courting Communities

Black Female Nationalism and "Syncre-Nationalism" in the Nineteenth Century

Kathy Glass

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135524074
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Courting Communities focuses on the writing and oratory of nineteenth-century African-American women whose racial uplift projects troubled the boundaries of race, nation and gender. In particular, it reexamines the politics of gender in nationalist movements and black women's creative response within and against both state and insurgent black nationalist discourses. Courting Communities highlights the ideas and rhetorical strategies of female activists considered to be less important than the prominent male nationalists. Yet their story is significant precisely because it does not fit into the pre-established categories of nationalism and leadership bequeathed to us from the past.

Chapter One

Controversial Collectivities: Sojourner Truth’s Search for Home

A tireless activist, Sojourner Truth devoted most of her adult life to the cause of civil rights. Although she participated in predominantly white anti-slavery meetings, suffrage groups and anti-capitalist communes, none of these associations could circumscribe nor contain her broad-ranging and subversive political activities. This discussion opens with Truth in part because she appeared on the historical stage before the other black women in this book.¹ But just as important, her eclectic activism helps to demonstrate the dynamic nature of syncre-nationalist politics, revealing its potential and limitations, its strengths and weaknesses.²

What political strategies were available to black women activists in the nineteenth century? How did African-American women fashion strategies of resistance against the dominant culture? Given Truth’s inability to read and write, just how reliable is the record of her political speeches? What commonalities sustained the political community that Truth, an illiterate black woman, formed with white men and women in the nineteenth century? These are some of the questions that guide this chapter. While the women examined later in this discussion achieved a level of literacy that enabled them to participate directly in print culture, the hallmark of Benedict Anderson’s nineteenth-century imagined community, the majority of black women who did not have access to the written form of communication engaged in alternative cultural processes that enabled them to experience “community.” Truth, in particular, participated in spiritual, Utopian and political collectivities whose values resisted the racist and sexist logic excluding blacks from the national community.

This chapter argues that Truth’s activism and oratory exemplify syncre-nationalist politics. Her critique of, and consciousness about, the U.S. nation-state involves the challenging of dominant constructions of identity as well as the imbalance of power between differentiated groups. While she challenged the racism and sexism underpinning the national community, Truth was dissatisfied with inequality of all kinds. She therefore would also protest the imbalances of the capitalist system by participating in communal anti-capitalist living arrangements. At the same time, she used the podium to question the fairness of the division of labor, which benefited men and exploited women. She spoke out against the logic of white supremacy which justified racial slavery and institutionalized discrimination. Calling for equality on many fronts, Truth wove syncretic cultural threads and philosophical systems into an on-going syncre-nationalist project. Combining liberal, Christian and African worldviews in her speeches, Truth mounted a powerful challenge to the exclusive logic of the nation-state.

Born as “Isabella” in 1797 in New York, Truth was separated from her parents when she was a young girl. Sold from master to master, Truth performed both domestic and fieldwork throughout her childhood and young adult years. Marrying a man named Thomas, who was selected to be her husband by her master John Dumont, Truth bore five children between 1815 and 1826.³ Soon thereafter, Truth escaped from Dumont’s plantation with her baby, Sophia. In the fall of 1826, Truth became a free woman shortly before New York State law would have declared her so in July 1827. In 1843, to signify her self-made identity, and perhaps to reflect the primary intentions of her soul, Isabella re-named herself Sojourner Truth.⁴

Never having learned to read or write, Truth would have been situated outside of Anderson’s community of individuals, who, “connected through print, formed, in their secular, particular visible invisibility, the embryo of the nationally imagined community.”⁵ Fellowship derived from reading a newspaper, which is read only by those literate in that language, according to Anderson. The ability to read thus helped to constitute one’s identity as a national subject. Print culture did in fact play a significant role in the construction of imagined, nineteenth-century black middle-class communities. But what of those whose illiteracy prevented them from participating in print culture? How might we understand their relationship to “community”? Truth’s inability to read and write presents scholars with a dilemma since her concept of community does not rely primarily on literacy.

Importantly, Truth’s words reach scholars through the biased lens of her biographers.⁶ Not only is access to Truth in the Narrative of Sojourner Truth; A Bondswoman of Olden Time, Emancipated by the New York Legislature in the Early Part of the Present Century; With a History of Her Labors and Correspondence Drawn from Her “Book of Life” (1878) mediated by racial commentary, but transcribers also drastically altered her speeches and distorted her spoken words. The Anti-Slavery Bugle, for example, recorded Truth’s “Ar’n’t I a Woman” speech in standard English, on the day she presented it in 1851:

As for intellect, all I can say is, if woman have a pint and man a quart—why can’t she have her little pint full? You need not be afraid to give us our rights for fear we will take too much, for we can’t take more than our pint’ll hold.⁷

However, the recollection of the Akron Convention organizer, Frances Dana Gage, twelve years later, differs dramatically:

‘Den dey talks ‘bout dis ting in de head—what dis dey call it?’ ‘Intellect,’ whispered some one near. ‘Dat’s it honey. What’s dat got to do with women’s rights or niggers’ rights? If my cup won’t hold but a pint and yourn holds a quart, wouldn’t ye be mean not to let me have my little half-measure full?’⁸

These contrasting versions of Truth’s speech indicate that transcribers, motivated by personal agendas, may have been more faithful to their own expectations of how Truth should sound than they were to her actual words. According to numerous accounts, Truth’s speaking style was in fact “‘very similar to that of the unlettered white people of [New York in] her time.’”⁹ Regardless, Truth’s speeches were often recorded in southern folk dialect. Given scholars’ unavoidable distance, then, from Truth’s mode of self-expression in these instances, it is important to locate her distinct communication strategies in the records containing her words, yet to analyze critically the limitations presented by authorial bias. As Alessandro Portelli has argued, “the unacknowledged shadow of orality haunts and shakes the stability and certainty of [written] texts and institutions.”¹⁰ In the case of Truth, therefore, the components of orality often challenge and work in opposition to the texts of her amanuenses and those of nineteenth-century social institutions. These fruitful sites of contradiction open up the text to traces of African-American culture that can help us to better analyze the politics and discourses deployed by Truth.¹¹

Although she did not personally ground her experience of community in print culture as it is commonly characterized, recent studies show that Truth’s skilled negotiations of modern technologies and print capitalism represent a type of literacy situated beyond the mere ability to read and write.¹² Truth, for example, disseminated details about her lecture schedule through anti-slavery publications; she sold carefully crafted photographs of herself to audience members, and gathered signatures to secure western lands by petition for former slaves. Such acts reveal not only Truth’s understanding of but also direct participation in varieties of print culture; to reach her audience, she created photographs that could be read as texts, and used texts to participate in commerce.

Not only did Truth conduct her reform work boldly in public, thereby violating cultural proscriptions against female public speakers, but she also engaged in behavior considered eccentric and illogical.¹³ Rather than dismiss these behaviors, however, it is useful to examine them for their strategic value. Truth’s most frequently cited communication patterns include her expressions through Biblical code, African-American dances and cultural forms, and folk sayings. According to the best sources available, Truth’s parents, James and Betsey Bomfree, inculcated in their daughter not only Christian notions, but also the “Africanisms” which later surfaced in her speech patterns and behavior.¹⁴ Often, Truth incorporated clapping, singing and feet stomping into her lectures, which are hallmarks of African dance forms. Also noteworthy is Truth’s spiritual perspective that God expresses Himself both in the ideological and material realms. God reveals His presence through inner guidance, for example, as well as in the forms of the “moon and the stars.”¹⁵ Peterson indicates that such views parallel an African ideology, which makes no distinction between the material and spiritual dimensions. Convinced of the unity of all creation, this perspective conceives of God as an overarching being who organizes all life forms.

Arguably, her insistence upon using Africanisms before predominantly white audiences can be read as a gesture of resistance, rather than idiosyncratic behavior. Truth’s persistent usage of African cultural expressions suggests that she was naming herself, constructing her own identity as she spoke, in defiance of onlookers’ interpretations. It may be the case that she was articulating her distance from the whites in her midst. A marginal figure at most meetings that she attended, Truth perhaps relied upon forms of expression that produced for her a feeling of connectedness to God, or to a spiritual community privileging diverse oral expression.¹⁶ Although whites deemed incomprehensible her communication strategies, Truth may have been proclaiming her loyalty to African roots, articulating a sense of “blackness” that found no reflection in the faces of her immediate white audience. Truth, thus, was perhaps simultaneously communicating to blacks beyond her white audience, as Peterson suggests. Even though Truth spent most of her time in the presence of white benefactors and friends, she sensed that a stable “community” eluded her.

During the course of her public political life, Truth joined forces with outspoken white feminists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott and Susan B. Anthony. Prior to and during the Civil War, these activists, along with Frederick Douglass, agitated for women’s and slaves’ rights without treating the struggles as competing or antagonistic. After the Civil War, however, the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments (1868–1870) to secure the black male vote divided the abolitionist and suffragist movements.¹⁷ While Stanton and Anthony intended to acquire voting rights for privileged white women, Truth sought to extend such rights to the least protected classes of black men and women.

Despite her subversive political positions, Truth continued to affiliate with white suffrage movements throughout the postbellum period. The conflict generated by tensions between abolitionists and suffragists exposes one of the potential challenges inherent in the linking of varying oppressions. Chantal Mouffe has argued that social change can be affected by the joining of “diverse democratic struggles.”¹⁸ A newly created “subject position,” she theorizes, “would allow the common articulation … of antiracism, antisexism and anticapitalism.” While Mouffe acknowledges that such battles do not “spontaneously converge,” she suggests that through the act of strategic linkage, “the demands of each group could be articulated with those of others according to the principle of democratic equivalence.”¹⁹ Similar to identity politics, this strategy would enable subjects to negotiate a united identity behind which to struggle; each group’s struggle would carry an equal value or “equivalence” in Mouffe’s view, such that no particular interest would obscure another.

Perhaps dormant in Truth’s experience with white feminists lay an early and unsuccessful manifestation of Mouffe’s “democratic equivalences” model. Combining their struggles by the early 1860s, abolitionists and women’s rights activists had acknowledged the urgency of each other’s interests. Stanton and Anthony, for instance, established the National Women’s Loyal League in 1863 for the purpose of petitioning Congress to abolish slavery in the form of the Thirteenth Constitutional Amendment. Apparently alliance-minded suffragists formed the Equal Rights Association (ERA) in 1866, thereby linking the efforts of white women and African Americans in the fight for the franchise. In this climate of cooperation, Anthony announced that it was time to “broaden” the women’s rights platform “and make it in name what it has always been in spirit—a Human Rights platform.”²⁰ But at the same meeting, abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher proclaimed: “it is more important that women should vote than that the black man should vote.”²¹ Convinced that white women, unlike blacks, could exert a moral and civilizing influence on society by casting their votes, Beecher gave voice to a popular concern among suffragists. This divisive sentiment, combined with general arguments about black inferiority, intensified during the 1860s and culminated in Stanton and Anthony’s dissolution of the ERA in 1869.

Conducted in the context of the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, addressing citizenship and black male enfranchisement respectively, the contentious ERA debates exposed the fragility of the alliance between suffragists and abolitionists. When it appeared that black men would get the vote before white women, there was no attempt on Stanton and Anthony’s part to assign an “equivalent” value to the struggles of black men, black women and white women. No neutral “subject position” was negotiated to enable the even articulation of diverse struggles. Rather, there was a systematic effort on the part of the privileged (white women) to maintain the hierarchical power relations separating themselves from those oppressed on account of race and gender. Stanton and Anthony attempted to erase the significance of historical inequity in order to posit universal women’s rights as sufficient to protect women of all populations; at the same time, they worked to secure voting rights for privileged women whose votes would only reproduce their own protected social and economic status. Truth, on the other hand, understood the importance of the black male vote and took a supportive and “intermediate,” rather than oppositional stance on amendments specifically aimed at expanding the rights of black men.²² Although she eventually positioned herself as a suffragist beside Anthony and Stanton in 1869, Truth continued to agitate specifically for black women’s rights, despite her white counterparts’ neglect of this issue. The failure of Stanton and Anthony to adequately broaden the women’s rights platform to explicitly include black women struck a devastating blow against cross-racial women’s alliances, which many twenty-first century feminists are still endeavoring to overcome.²³

These notions of social equality deeply appealed to Truth, whose life was marked by supporting a number of “utopian” causes. Having spent much of her life in search of a home, Truth generally experienced community in a shifting and temporary form. Not hindered by separatist racial beliefs, Truth’s visionary concept of community compelled her to develop cross-racial ties with those whose religious and political convictions approximated her own. In 1833, Truth joined a religious commune presided over by Robert Matthews, who renamed himself Matthias. A self-proclaimed Jewish prophet, Matthias preached an apocalyptic message that the end of the world was imminent. Along with the other members of the Matthias commune, Truth contributed her material possessions to the cause and moved into Benjamin and Ann Folger’s 29-acre farm, on the Hudson River. The Folgers, a well-to-do couple involved in trade and real estate, legally transferred their property to Matthias in 1833, so convinced were they of his genuineness.

In theory, hierarchical relationships were outlawed in the commune, and members were to enjoy equality in Matthias’s eyes. “Father” Matthias indicated that each must work “according to physical ability,” but favoritism resulted in the disproportionate distribution of work. Tru...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One. Controversial Collectivities: Sojourner Truth’s Search for Home
• Chapter Two. Charting a Course for the Middle Class: Maria Stewart’s Advice to the Middle Sector
• Chapter Three. Bi-National Connections: Mary Ann Shadd Cary and the Afro-Canadian Community
• Chapter Four. Tending to the Roots: Anna Julia Cooper on Social Labor and Harvest Reaping
• Chapter Five. Inheriting Community: Or, Educating Iola
• Chapter Six. Conclusion: Community as Continuum
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index