The Colored Conventions Movement

Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century

P. Gabrielle Foreman,Jim Casey,Sarah Lynn Patterson

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781469654270
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios afroamericanos

This volume of essays is the first to focus on the Colored Conventions movement, the nineteenth century's longest campaign for Black civil rights. Well before the founding of the NAACP and other twentieth-century pillars of the civil rights movement, tens of thousands of Black leaders organized state and national conventions across North America. Over seven decades, they advocated for social justice and against slavery, protesting state-sanctioned and mob violence while demanding voting, legal, labor, and educational rights. While Black-led activism in this era is often overshadowed by the attention paid to the abolition movement, this collection centers Black activist networks, influence, and institution building. Collectively, these essays highlight the vital role of the Colored Conventions in the lives of thousands of early organizers, including many of the most famous writers, ministers, politicians, and entrepreneurs in the long history of Black activism. Contributors: Erica L. Ball, Kabria Baumgartner, Daina Ramey Berry, Joan L. Bryant, Jim Casey, Benjamin Fagan, P. Gabrielle Foreman, Eric Gardner, Andre E. Johnson, Cheryl Janifer LaRoche, Sarah Lynn Patterson, Carla L. Peterson, Jean Pfaelzer, Selena R. Sanderfer, Derrick R. Spires, Jermaine Thibodeaux, Psyche Williams-Forson, and Jewon Woo. Explore accompanying exhibits and historical records at The Colored Conventions Project website: https://coloredconventions.org/

PART 1

CRITICAL CONVENTIONS, METHODS, AND INTERVENTIONS

BLACK ORGANIZING, PRINT ADVOCACY, AND COLLECTIVE AUTHORSHIP

The Long History of the Colored Conventions Movement

P. Gabrielle Foreman

In Cincinnati’s “riot of 1829,” white anger crescendoed throughout three days as white thugs vented their outrage about rising numbers of Black residents, holding “sway in the city” as “the police were unable or unwilling to restore order.”¹ The white mob gave sharp teeth to previously unenforced racial exclusionary laws. Expressed through legal hostility and physical violence, the laws abridged “the liberties and privileges of the Free People of Colour” especially in Ohio, as the minutes of the inaugural national Black convention the next year decried, “subjecting them to a series of privations and sufferings, by denying them a right of residence, a course altogether incompatible with the principles of civil and religious liberty.”² In need of a “place of refuge” and “obliged to leave their homes,” more than 1,000 of Cincinnati’s Black residents became forced migrants in Canada after being dragged through the streets of the city then known as “the Queen of the West.”³ Outrage spread as they fled, and Black leaders from the country’s free states gathered in Philadelphia to protest and plan. That meeting would become the first of hundreds of national and state Colored Conventions held in almost every state in the United States and in Canada, from Schenectady, New York, to Sacramento, California, from Chatham, Ontario, to Cleveland, Ohio, from Little Rock, Arkansas, to New Orleans, Louisiana. In response to white violence and state apathy that ran rampant not only in the storied South but also in the North and West, from 1830 through the end of the century, Black communities in North America organized political conventions that articulated Black people’s refusal to accept their place as people who were not really, not fully, citizens even when they were said to be “free.”

Why is such a continuous history of Black organizing and protest, one that featured the most prominent writers, newspaper editors, speakers, church leaders, educators, and entrepreneurs in the canon of early African American leadership, known to so few?⁴ Self-emancipated writers and orators such as Frederick Douglass and Henry Highland Garnet attended scores of conventions over four decades. They served on committees with the wealthiest Black entrepreneurs and activists of the era—George Downing, Charles Remond, and Robert Purvis—as well as editors such as Samuel Cornish, Charles Ray, Frederick Douglass, and Mary Ann Shadd Cary. Those who would become the century’s most important Black authors—William Wells Brown, Martin Delany, and Frances E. W. Harper—for example, were speakers and committee members at multiple Colored Conventions. As young unknowns and later as wizened activists, the giants of the nineteenth century joined new generations participating in this movement, coming together to offer complex and often contested ideas about strategies and tactics. As heterogeneous as they were in their thinking, they remained unified in their demands and desires for civil and human rights. Tens of thousands participated. Many who contributed their energy, vision, and labor remain unsung and unknown. Others form the pantheon of Black “abolitionists”: the writers, clergy, editors, and entrepreneurs whom scholars study and whose stories are known. How could a movement that challenged slavery not as its most important, but as its most basic, demand, one that focused on Black voting, legal rights, and educational equality and access, remain in obscurity for so long? How could more than half a century of formal protest and strategizing to counter labor discrimination and unequal pay and to challenge anti-Black state violence and state apathy be known to so few when it speaks so directly to the issues of our own time?

This is the first edited volume to examine the Black-led Colored Conventions movement; it is the first essay collection to address the many facets of the long history of Black nineteenth-century activism, organizing, and advocacy that the Convention movement launched.⁵ The movement included activists who led churches and newspapers, those who were both nameless and well known, those whose travels took them to Canada, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe, those whose lives bridged the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and those who only became active well after the Civil War. This volume also seeks to address—or redress—the exclusion and erasure from convention proceedings of Black women who were partners in this organizing history. The volume’s editors and the project from which this book emerges embrace methodologies and conceptual frameworks that center Black women’s intellectual and infrastructure-building labor in convention organizing, even as the written proceedings and records too often marginalize and anonymize them. The scholarship in this volume does not replicate those silences.

This essay opens by outlining the genealogy and importance of a long-term and Black-led movement whose energetic organizing and activism has faded from public, if not scholarly, memory and view. It then highlights the hundreds of postbellum conventions that have received even less critical and public attention, multiday gatherings that took place across the South and Southwest when millions of formerly enslaved people were able to join the free, freed, and fugitive peers who began the movement. It goes on to pose questions about how to define these conventions in relation to space and time. Should our scholarly attention be trained on the podium and the almost exclusively male delegates and speakers who spoke at the halls and churches where they gathered, or should it pan out to include—to focus on—the participants in the pews? Should convention contours start at the doors of buildings where they “took place” or include the boardinghouses and neighborhoods where delegates and participants—including women and children—stayed? Do conventions start and end on the dates printed in the proceedings? The issues announced in the calls and also debated in coverage afterward were likewise read from pulpits and were the subjects of conversations in reading rooms and societies. Black conventions’ strategic and structured use of print (and pulpit) exponentially extended their participatory, geographic, and gendered base.

Black newspapers and convention proceedings, I argue, also offer an important paradigm of collective authorship that has been underconsidered, especially in relation to the slave narratives that often emerged from the context of organized antebellum abolition. After considering the implications of how nineteenth-century antislavery movements have both illuminated and overshadowed the Black-led Convention movement, I turn to the contemporary and collective effort to create a digital archive and public site, ColoredConventions.org, that illustrates this movement’s centrality to interdisciplinary scholarship and to Black organizing histories. This essay closes by arguing that digital-archive- and community-making efforts can be structured to mirror the collective, geographically expansive, and distributed structures and ethos of the Convention movement itself. Indeed, it proposes that Black digital projects work best when they are inclusive and collective and when they name and empower those who work on them—not only scholars but library, archivist, student, and community leaders and participants. This piece seeks to emphasize that those engaging in this work should build capacity and community and that we should acknowledge, rather than erase or sideline, the labor and leadership of the Black people and communities we choose as our subjects.

This essay makes several important arguments and interventions that complicate and challenge narratives and scholarship about nineteenth-century Black agency and Black-led activism and subjectivity, as well as about white leadership, racial heroism, and antebellum abolition. We have not yet taken full account of Black-led organizational efforts such as the Colored Conventions, even as scholars are now excavating and highlighting Black leadership within the interracial antebellum abolition movement. How does a decades-long commitment to what I call a Black “parallel politics” revise genealogies of racial activism and networks of influence and exchange? I also argue that the Convention movement is as foundational a literary and organizing model as the slave narrative has been. Convention records provide a collective (and also masculinist) articulation of Black subjectivity and the assertion of Black worth, ambition, and belonging in North America with which scholars have yet to fully grapple. If slave narratives chart individual journeys toward freedom and literacy, Colored Conventions offer a paradigm of Black being and belonging grounded not in individual rights and singular authorship but in collective writing and organizing.

When readers consider the processes, performances, and publications that conventions modeled and created, we can reframe the ways in which we understand early Black print culture, Black organizing, and Black authorship. Convention organizers—and conventions as a structure of organizing—highlight the committee alongside the singular figure: the eloquent preacher, lecturer, or editor, the exceptional author, or the heroic protagonist. Conventions provided spaces in which to hammer out (or hammer in) differences in perspective, strategy, and ideology, even as they modeled the fact that part of recognizing Black humanity was understanding complexity rather than reaching consensus and prioritizing intellectual heterogeneity over unanimity of thought. The conventions advanced collectivity as a way of militating for rights and actualizing community within a nation that consistently communicated Black lack and alien/nation. What does this model offer to thinkers, scholars, and organizers today?

Colored Conventions: Genealogies and Legacies

From their inauguration in 1830 through the decades after the Civil War, conventions spread across North America. Tens of thousands of once captive, already free, and recently freed Blacks traveled from their homes, churches, and communities to participate as official delegates or attendees. From the podium and in the pews, in the meeting halls where they met and the boardinghouses where they stayed, attendees strategized about how to secure citizenship and civil liberties. Representatives considered resolutions to advance educational and labor rights, increase voting and jury representation, and extend the reach of the Black press. They debated the utility of jobs in (the) service (sector), the power of owning one’s own land and business, and ways to best support the self-emancipated, the still enslaved, and the newly freed. They gathered and disseminated data about Black occupations, property, wealth, and institutional affiliations.

After the war, they encouraged each other in landownership, educational attainment, and government participation during the short era when they thought opportunities would last and the doors to citizenship might stay open. They gathered to gird each other as they strategized and petitioned for protection, as the dreams that Reconstruction kindled first began to smolder and then went up in flames, as those dreams began to stink and sag. They challenged so-called friends and outright foes who threatened or “offered” to expatriate them. And they denounced the American Colonization Society while also considering emigration to places—Haiti, Canada, and West Africa—where they might face less virulent forms of legal, educational, and physical violence. Earnestly, and often angrily, they questioned whether this country would—or could—ever deliver on its democratic rhetoric when it came to a people its national founders and founding documents disparaged and degraded. What options were there in the form of advocacy and emigration, they debated over and again, if that answer were no.

The organized Black response to white physical and civic violence—to the refusal to extend full citizenship rights to the United States’ Black inhabitants—begins almost eighty years before the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). “The nation’s oldest, largest and most widely recognized grassroots-based civil rights organization,” to quote its website, was founded in 1909.⁶ Even the event that precipitated the NAACP’s founding eerily echoes its predecessor’s genesis. Once more, white mob violence erupted in what is now the Midwest; nearly eight decades after the first convention met in 1830, another throng of enraged whites ran roughshod, this time in Lincoln’s Springfield, Illinois, leaving Black businesses and families in ruins and again running upward of 2,000 Black community members out of town.⁷ Though it is often understood to mark an “early” phase in Black movements for civil rights, the NAACP is an extension of well over half a century of organized state and national conventions and legal advocacy. It also builds on many of the late nineteenth-century organizations scholars now recognize as its direct predecessors: the Afro-American League (1887–93), the National Association of Colored Women (1896–present), and the Niagara Movement (1905–9). The convention movement, as historian Eddie Glaude contends, was “the first national forum for civic activity” among free Blacks in the United States and Canada.⁸ “The public and democratic debate and exchange the conventions formalized,” he asserts, “became the principal agency for black activism from 1830 up to the Civil War.”⁹ When considering the numbers of Colored Conventions and attendees in the postwar period as well, it becomes even clearer that if groups such as the Afro-American League have recently been situated as the country’s “first national civil rights organization,” Colored Conventions highlight for just how long Blacks in North America have advocated for full citizenship, articulated those appeals in print, petitions, and legal cases, and been largely ignored.¹⁰

As the United States unfurled its dominion, claim, and geographical reach throughout the nineteenth century, Black inhabitants protested the racial violence and exclusion that likewise expanded with force and fervo...